The First Billion

Gavallan's heart was racing; a lump lodged high in his throat. The stick was bucking in his hand. He jerked it to the right, but there was no response. A high-pitched buzz saw whined in his earphones. He was losing control of the aircraft.

This isn't my plane, he protested silently. I haven't trained in a Mig. A second check over his shoulder showed flames licking the wing. Immediately he hit the auxiliary extinguisher, and a gust of white puffed from beneath the wing. The flames flickered, then disappeared.

And then the world turned upside down on him. The Mig rolled over and went nose down, spinning in a slow roll.

"Jett, help us. Stop this. Oh, God… no, no!"

Gavallan looked at Cate, her eyes wide with terror, her helmet pinned to the canopy.

A voice inside him whispered, You were born to fly. So, relax and fly.

"Just a little glitch," he said, in the voice Grafton Byrnes had taught him that hot and sunny day in Alamagordo. "Not to worry."

Still inverted, he pulled back on the stick, depressed the ailerons to stop the spin, and pulled the nose through. Gently he goosed the port engine. The single turbine hummed confidently. It was working. The plane was responding to his touch. He was guiding the aircraft instead of allowing it to guide him. A well of confidence grew in his chest, warm and reassuring. It was the pilot's bravado coming back. The certainty he could do anything, if by sheer force of will alone.

And there, as he plummeted toward the earth at four hundred miles an hour, a dam burst in his mind. A clarity of thought, of memory, of action, came to him that he had not possessed for years.

Priority One. Ring One.

The words struck him like a lightning bolt.

The attack on Abu Ghurayb. Saddam's Presidential palace.

He saw himself in the cockpit of the F-117- no, damn it, he is there… the stick between his legs, the joystick to his left, the infrared display screens. He is there. Inside Darling Lil, ten thousand feet above the Iraqi desert.

He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles a switch. Bomb armed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. His finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red lights fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the pickle and the weapons bay door opens. Darling Lil shudders. He depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. He feels the aircraft jerk upward, as if freed from its moorings.

As the bomb falls, his eyes lock onto the IR screen and the delicate crosshairs positioned over the east wing of the Presidential palace. All external stimuli disappear. He is in a tunnel. At the far end rests his target. Thumb locked. The crosshairs do not move.

"Thunder three-six. Red Leader One. Copy?"

The bomb appears on the screen. A lethal black dot skimming across the ground at an impossible speed. A red light blinks. A fuel warning. Tanks low. Gavallan pays it no mind. It will wait.

"Roger Red One. Come in."

"Friendlies in the area. We have friendlies on-site. Abort run. I repeat: Abort run."

At the sound of the word "friendlies," Gavallan's finger is already moving, skewing the crosshairs away from the palace, guiding the "smart bomb" away from the American troops.

On the console, a second light blinks- yellow, urgent. It is the Allied Forces Locator warning him he has engaged friendly forces.

"Abort run! Confirm, Thunder three-six!"

But the pilot's instincts have beaten the verbal command by a second, maybe two. An eternity in the electronic world that can be translated into two hundred fifty feet of fall time.

Gavallan keeps his thumb pressed to the right, ordering the bomb to follow his instructions. But the bomb does not listen. She has been on her downward trajectory too long and it is as if she is too stubborn to alter her course.

The desert flower blossoms. The IR screen blanches. A blizzard of white noise. The palace reappears. The east wing is no more, a bonfire of angles fallen in on itself. The heat signatures have disappeared, too, replaced by the blotchy, pulsing quasars that indicate fire.