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  “Two or three. I even did a practice boldface. Want to check my work?” Jason gave the paper to McTaggart.

  Gus reviewed it. Boldface emergency procedures had to be memorized verbatim because they were immediate actions in the cockpit. There was no time for either the student or instructor to reference his checklist for certain critical emergencies. It didn’t take McTaggart long to review the paper.

  “There are two faux pas’ in here mister. You want to review this again?” he said, sliding the paper back to Jason. Jason scanned it and found the errors. On a check ride, one error would constitute a failure for emergency procedures.

  “I guess I better be more careful.”

  “Yes, I think you better.”

  Jason glanced at the clock behind the scheduling board. “I’d better start heading toward the ops desk.” Jason walked to his locker in the hallway and stored his Dash One.

  Jason reached the TOC desk; the check pilot hadn’t shown up yet. He started to work on the preliminary paperwork and get their airplane assignment when he sensed an uneasy feeling. Something wasn’t right. He stood at the desk when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning around he saw Gus McTaggart behind him, holding a checklist in his hand.

  “You may want to take this with you today.” Gus handed Jason his T-37 checklist.

  “Thanks.” Jason’s face flushed. “I felt like something was wrong.”

  “Relax, you’re going to do fine.”

  “Thanks, Gus.” Somehow, he knew relaxing was going to be the hard part.

  JASON AND THE CHECK PILOT “stepped” to the aircraft from the life-support shack. A cold front pushed through the mid-west and the cool air whipped itself around their faces, yet Jason still managed to sweat. They searched across the ramp covered with the small T-37 trainers; no crew bus was in sight.

  “We’ll walk,” the check pilot said over the whining noise of the Tweet’s engines. “Red tails are all the way down at the end, but I don’t want to wait.”

  Jason nodded as he put on his “Mickey Mouse ears”. On the long walk to the jet, Jason silently reviewed the sequence of events he needed to accomplish to complete the sortie. Eventually, they found tail number five-two-one. The crew chief had the canopy up for them when they reached the jet. Jason placed his parachute on the ground, buckles down, and hung his helmet bag from the canopy lock on the inside of the cockpit. With his checklist, he began a quick walk-around inspection of the aircraft. Halfway through, he remembered he should have checked the aircraft’s 781 forms for any malfunction write-ups. As he walked back to his side of the jet, Jason found the check pilot closing the orange-covered notebook. The check pilot handed him the forms, then began a walk-around himself. Jason reviewed the forms and found the jet to be in good condition. Placing the forms in his seat, he started his walk-around again. He noticed that the check pilot pulled the pins from the landing gear during his walk-around, which may or may not be a bad sign. By the time he reached the other side of the aircraft, the check pilot was strapped in the aircraft. “I thought you did a walk-around already,” he said to Jason.

  “I started but stopped to go back and review the forms.” Jason spoke loudly, to overcome the noise of the jets on the ramp.

  “Okay, my bad.”

  Jason finished his walk-around, checked the pin box to ensure the three pins were there, and stuck the pitot-tube cover in there with them. He pulled on his chute, climbed in, and strapped himself in the jet. The check pilot sat ready to go with his dark visor down and oxygen connected. It took several moments for Jason to begin the checklist. He was nervous. The check pilot intimidated him, whether he meant to or not. This was all he needed after the weekend he had.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, let’s get a move on. We don’t have all day,” the evaluator said over the cockpit interphone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jason began the checklist before he had a chance to strap it to his leg. He rushed himself and did things out of sequence. As he called for taxi clearance, the crew chief held up two fingers in front of his face. Jason nodded and lowered his visor as he keyed the mic to call Vance Ground. Sweat stung his eyes as it poured down his face. The checklists on the taxi out were haphazard; not as smooth as they should have been. Jason had trouble keeping his thoughts organized. He didn’t think he missed anything, but he sensed something different. The jet reached the number one position for the Eastside runway as they awaited their turn for sequencing.

  In three minutes, they were cleared for takeoff. Jason completed the checks and smoothly added power while he held the brakes. When the engines checked okay, he released the brakes.

  No sooner had the jet began to roll, the check pilot intervened. “Abort, abort, abort.”

  Jason jerked the throttles back to idle and kept the aircraft tracking down the center of the runway. His eyes quickly scanned the instruments to find any malfunction he might have missed. He saw none. The check pilot informed Eastside over the radio there was no emergency, and they would taxi back for another takeoff.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, I have the aircraft. Do you know why we aborted that takeoff?”

  “No, sir. The engines are good. There were no abnormal lights.”

  “True statement, Lieutenant, but you may want to remove your seat pin before this next takeoff.”

  Jason glimpsed down. His seat pin, which locked the ejection levers into position, was still in place. If he’d tried to use the handles to eject from the aircraft, they would not extend up. That meant, he could not squeeze the triggers and the seat would not eject. An immediate feeling of doom came over him like a dark thundercloud.

  “WE GOT HIM,” CURT SAID as he burst through the doorway.

  Alonzo looked up from his desk at his out-of-breath associate. “Our computer boy? We got him?” Alonzo wanted to verify they were on the same wavelength.

  “You’re damn straight we did. I didn’t think he would try so soon, but he did. Saturday morning our boy decided to be a funny man again and logged on. He’s got skills. Our guy traveled through several different relays before he accessed the mainframe. SCRAMBLETEK smeared his tracks most of the way.”

  “Well, who is he? Did you get a direct trace?”

  Davis sat in the vinyl chair next to Alonzo’s desk and shook his head. “No, not totally,” he said holding up the computer printout in his hand, “but we are close. Oklahoma. More specifically, Vance Air Force Base. Didn’t you get the e-mail?”

  “No. Haven’t looked at them yet.” Alonzo placed his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. “Vance would fit the profile. Anything more specific?”

  “No,” Davis responded with a feverish headshake. “Another thirty seconds and I would have nailed the little bugger to the specific phone outlet in whatever room. He was able to download and log offline before my program could break through.”

  Alonzo stared at the ceiling for a minute. “Did you talk to anyone at the squadron about what he took yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  He reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a list of the tests for UPT students. It covered standard academic tests for all phases of training for the T-37, T-38, and the T-1. It also contained the Master Question File (MQF) for each airplane. The MQF contained hundreds of questions and allowed the stan/eval officer from each flight to develop his own quiz each week by pulling questions from the file. He took the computer printout from Davis and compared the two lists. The top of the computer printout listed the downloaded tests. The list was identical to the one Alonzo held in his hand. The next two pages told the tale of the hacker’s route into the mainframe and followed the electronic route back to Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma. Alonzo smiled at his partner’s cleverness.

  “I can’t believe we got this lucky,” Curt said. “Sometimes these investigations can take months, even years. This one has been up for a few days.” He struggled to contain his excitement. “It’s my fault for coming in late today. I was taking care o
f things around the office, putting out fires. The usual Monday morning crap. I decided to drop by the squadron and check out the system, and POW! Baby, we got a location! It shouldn’t be hard to track him down now. You should have gotten an e-mail.”

  Alonzo finally opened his e-mail account and quickly found it. “Is it possible this location is a decoy? Perhaps he is located at another base. Tinker? Maybe even here at Randolph?”

  “No way.” Curt shook his head. “This guy is at Vance. I’m sure of it. That’s what my program is designed to do . . . weed out the decoys. SCRAMBLETEK employs three to four decoys, dependent upon modem speed and memory size. These decoys are input by the user and activate automatically every time the program is turned on. I’ve heard rumblings on the ‘Net of the possibility of doubling that capacity, but I haven’t seen it practiced yet. This guy just had the basic system. Damn, if I only had more time.”

  “Yeah, your thirty seconds would’ve made my life a lot easier.”

  “Sorry, Alonzo. You didn’t want to live forever, did you?”

  “You’re a funny man,” Alonzo said, and tossed the computer printout back at Davis. “Get out of here before I tell the boss I need a second man on the road with me, and he needs to be a computer expert.”

  “No problem, it’s all part of the job.” Davis relaxed. “Well, what’s next?”

  Alonzo stood and grabbed his briefcase. “I go to Enid, Oklahoma.”

  25

  September 4, 1995

  * * *

  JASON SAT ON HIS COUCH and stared at the blank television screen, tapping a pencil on his forehead. Rain fell steadily outside, and a deep puddle began to gather under the windowsill of the dorm room. The weather tended to change rapidly in the plains. There was a saying in Enid, “If you didn’t like the weather, stick around ten minutes, it’ll change.” The weather changed dramatically over the past two hours. The early morning blue skies sagged a deep and heavy deep gray.

  The checkride ended three hours ago. It had been a disastrous day. If something could have gone wrong, it did. Jason managed to recover from his earlier mistake of not pulling his ejection seat pins. His aerobatics in the MOA turned out sloppy and his time in the traffic pattern was rough and slow. On a check ride, however, one mistake was enough and the failure to remove his pins was a safety of flight issue. Unfortunately for Jason, that was unsatisfactory.

  The debrief for the sortie lasted only an hour, the check pilot made sure he asked the required questions to test Jason’s general knowledge. When he debriefed Jason on the ride, he also downgraded Jason to a fair on his cloverleaf and his single-engine landing. The cloverleaf was an aerobatic maneuver; a succession of four identical over-the-top maneuvers. This maneuver is done four times in the same direction and the jet should be pointed in the original direction it started. Jason’s ended up thirty degrees left of his original heading. Jason’s single-engine landing was firm, but only five knots fast, which was acceptable. He recalled landing the B-25 in England with no engines. He’d been told back then, that any landing you could walk away from was a good one. Not in UPT, apparently. The impression Jason got; the check pilot needed more meat for the write up to explain the busted check ride. Those two downgrades made the write up look more legitimate.

  Peculiar, Jason thought, how the instructors in UPT had learned to cover themselves. He had watched how they made write-ups for unsatisfactory sorties. The experienced ones only wrote up what they needed to accomplish the job. The inexperienced ones wrote-up everything they could find. He was glad his check pilot was experienced; the write-up might have been bloodier.

  Gus was right. I wasn’t focused.

  Jason’s stomach growled. He unzipped his sweat-stained flight suit to his navel and walked to the cabinet. After he grabbed the half-empty bag of chips, he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the picante sauce. He spied the Coors Light longneck sitting on the top shelf. A beer would be nice, but beer is what got him in this predicament. He opted for the Diet Coke instead and moved with his bounty back to his space on the couch. After a few seconds of channel surfing, he settled on a rerun of Cheers and began to eat his chips. Five minutes into the show, someone knocked on the door.

  “It’s unlocked,” he yelled.

  The door opened, and Matt, Lenny, and Gus barreled through the door. Matt and Gus tracked in traces of mud when they walked to the couch. Lenny went straight to the fridge. He pulled out the beer Jason had contemplated earlier and shook the rain from his head.

  “Hey, we heard the bad news buddy,” Gus said, “you doing all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I just didn’t feel like talking when I got back. I ran into my instructor on the way back from debrief and explained the ride to him. He looked at me like I was an idiot.”

  “What did he nail you for?” Matt asked.

  “I had a sloppy ride,” Jason said. “I was downgraded from good to fair on my clover leaf and my single engine landing. I got an unsat for ground ops.”

  “Ground ops? What the hell did you do?” Gus was incredulous. Rarely did a student to bust their check ride for ground ops, but it did happen.

  Jason explained the seat pin situation.

  “Why’d he downgrade you for the other stuff?” Matt said. He sat next to Jason and attacked his chips and salsa.

  “It wasn’t a bad ride . . .” Jason stopped his attempt to justify his mediocre performance and thought for a moment. “It wasn’t a good ride either. I guess he could have hammered me for several maneuvers that sucked. I never busted the area boundaries or anything like that.”

  “Forgetting those pins will get you every time,” Gus said. “You kind of tied his hands. Did you talk to the flight commander yet?”

  “Yeah. I talked to him before I came home. He asked the standard questions. What did I do wrong? What was the check pilot’s attitude? Were there any external factors affecting me? To which I said ‘Yes’ and gave him a brief synopsis of my weekend.

  “He said I would fly a practice ride before my re-check ride.” If he didn’t pass that ride, he might find himself out of the program. It was a grim thought. The consequences of failing the re-check were something seldom talked about at pilot training.

  “That’s a bunch of bull, Jason.” All heads turned to Lenny, it was the first comment he made since entering the room.

  “What the hell do you mean?” As the SRO, Gus acted as mother hen over all his flight members and his protective nature was obvious.

  “I mean its bullcrap,” Lenny said. “Busting someone for something like that. I mean, the guy could have hinted in some way that your pins were still in.”

  “That’s not his job Lenny,” Matt said.

  Lenny gawked at Matt with contempt as he moved into the room in front of the television. “Okay, it’s not his job, but it is still bullcrap.”

  “It’s safety of flight,” Gus surmised, as the other heads nodded in agreement. “If those pins were in his seat in the air and he had to eject out of the aircraft, he couldn’t do it.”

  “Well, I still say its bullcrap. I’ve left my seat pin in before and my IP told me my pin was still in my seat.”

  “Yeah, Lenny well that’s great . . . but it doesn’t happen on your check ride,” Jason said.

  “So, when is the practice ride?” Gus said, trying to end the negative mood of the conversation and point Jason to a more positive direction.

  Before Jason could answer, another loud knock occurred at the door.

  As Lenny reached for the handle, the door swung open. Kathy Delgato stood in the doorway and peered into the room. She wore a chestnut brown barn jacket, a plaid shirt tucked into her blue jeans, and cowboy boots. Her hair and clothes were soaked from the rain.

  “Did I interrupt something?”

  “No ma’am,” Matt said, “we were all just leaving. Let’s go fellas.”

  Kathy stepped into the kitchen and his classmates slipped past her out of the room in a hail of good-byes and farewells.
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  When they left, Kathy turned to Jason, water pooling at her feet. “Do you mind if I come in? I need to talk to you.” The seriousness in her voice apparent. Kathy took off her wet jacket and set it on the counter in the kitchen.

  “You might as well, everything else today has gone bad, I see no reason to stop now.” He switched off the television.

  “Why, what’s wrong?” She closed the door behind her.

  “I busted my contact checkride today.”

  Kathy moved across the room and sat next to him. “Are you going to be okay?” She brushed the wet hair away from her face.

  “I’m fine. I’ve just had a bad weekend that is evolving into a bad week.”

  “My weekend wasn’t so great either.” She sat back against the sofa and folded her arms.

  They sat in silence for several moments, the only sound, the rain that fell outside. Jason wasn’t sure what to say to her. Although he was glad she came, he was curious about who she was with Saturday night. He hated himself for letting the situation bother him. His goal was to learn to fly. That’s why he was here.

  “She was here, wasn’t she?” Kathy broke the silence.

  Jason turned to face her. “Who?” Although he knew who she meant.

  “Don’t who me Jason Conrad. You know who. Your damn ex-wife, the gorgeous blonde model. She was here, and you were with her.”

  Jason wondered how she knew, and then surrendered to the fact that Enid was a small town. “She’s gone now, and nothing happened.”

  “You were with her Saturday night.”

  Jason noticed the tears well in her eyes.

  “Okay look, here’s what happened. After we left the club Friday night and you brought me home, I passed out. “

  “Yeah, you did,” she said as a tear slid down her cheek.

  “Yeah, I did.” Hopefully this would not be too difficult to explain. Bethany’s appearance wasn’t his idea. He only reacted to the situation. “Well the next morning I’m passed out on my bed and I hear someone pounding on my door.”