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  The colonel rubbed his chin. “It sounds as if you’ve thought this through. You can accompany one of my officers during his mandatory room inspections. These are common and shouldn’t raise any suspicion. The last thing I want is rumors flying around base about this.”

  “Understandable, Colonel,” Alonzo said.

  “I’ll have my executive officer gather the information for you. What, specifically, are you looking for?”

  “Clues, tests, whatever we can find.”

  Colonel Jensen nodded as if he understood. “When would you like to start your room search?”

  Alonzo looked the colonel squarely in the eyes. “Immediately.”

  SELLING COKES AND CANDY BARS was the last thing Jason had in mind after his successful flight. The daily assignment as the snacko sucked, but everyone had to work in the snack bar for a few hours a day. It was one of those rites of passage.

  “Conrad, congratulations are in order, I presume,” a familiar voice said. He glanced up and Gus McTaggart stood in front of him.

  “Hey, Gus. Yeah, the ride went well. Thanks for the advice. You were right—I just hadn’t been focused. I had to do a little soul searching and think about why I’m here. It paid off.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Gus said as he grabbed a Coke and a bag of pretzels. “I guess Vince lucked out.”

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “He’s stuck at Tinker. They flamed out an engine on short final and had to land. The engine fix is going to take longer than they thought, and his IP doesn’t have crew rest to fly back when they’re done.”

  “Why don’t they drive them back?”

  “Too much of a hassle, I guess. Someone would still have to drive back down there tomorrow and fly the plane back. Vince and his IP are going to stay overnight and fly back tomorrow morning.”

  SCARE FOUR-THREE HAD ESTABLISHED himself in one of the lower areas, a block altitude between seven and twelve-thousand feet. Lenny Banks was in a dream. He was supposed to be practicing maneuvers but had spent most of his time loitering around his assigned airspace. The clear blue sky enticed him, and so he decided to have fun and at least enjoy the view. Occasionally, he performed an aerobatic maneuver to break up the monotony, but he was sloppy. He did not pay attention to the proper entry parameters of airspeed, altitude, and power settings and his maneuvers were less than satisfactory.

  And he didn’t care.

  He lowered the nose of the jet and passed through ten thousand feet to pick up airspeed. At two-hundred-twenty knots, he raised the nose above the horizon and moved the stick to the left while he fed in some rudder. The aircraft rolled lazily around its longitudinal axis three-hundred-sixty degrees. Aileron rolls were his favorite maneuver. They had all the thrills of going upside down without the strain of the heavy, rapid G-forces encountered on the “over the top” maneuvers.

  Lenny leveled off and made a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn to keep himself in his area. He performed Lazy Eights along the north-south section lines of the grid-laid flatlands of Oklahoma. The climbing, one-hundred-eighty-degree turns of reversed direction should have been symmetrical turns, but Lenny’s carelessness pushed the outside of the flight envelope. He got too slow at the top and too fast at the bottom.

  These sloppy parameters went unnoticed, as his mind wandered elsewhere. He thought of what he could do next to piss off Vince. Lenny had reached a point where he no longer cared for his classmate. He’d gotten all he would from him. Even though Vince had saved his life, he could not stand the son of a bitch.

  “Screw him,” he said to no one over the cockpit interphone.

  Lenny had grown tired of the constant verbal abuse, public humiliation, and name-calling. He had enough.

  “I’ll show him. I’ll make his life miserable.”

  No one answered as he continued the sloppy maneuvers.

  Who the hell does that SOB think he is? Since their junior year in college, Lenny had helped him cheat his way through one class or another and Vice still treats him like a dirtbag. If he could turn Vince in without getting caught, he’d do it in a heartbeat. Maybe if—

  Lenny’s thoughts were interrupted when the jet shuddered.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Lenny knew stalling an aircraft was not like a stalling car. A stalled car meant the engine wouldn’t work, and it sits on the side of the road. An airplane can still fly with a failed engine, only not as well, or as far. When an airplane stalls, the air flow over the surface of the wing is disrupted, causing a loss of lift.

  Fortunately, Lenny recognized the shudder, and glanced at the airspeed as he moved the throttles full forward. The T-37’s airspeed slowed through ninety knots and had an attitude of thirty degrees nose high. To help the jet recover from this unusual attitude, Lenny pushed the nose over, then fed in a little rudder and aileron to get the nose down quicker.

  Suddenly, the left wing dropped to the left and the nose quickly tracked beneath the horizon, then snapped back up before it stabilized about forty degrees below the horizon. He thought he heard a pop and felt a vibration under his feet.

  Perspiration pushed from his pores as he recognized what happened. Lenny applied too much rudder and aileron in his stall recovery. He yawed the jet. Stall and yaw. He knew what he did as he saw the rapidly rising terrain below him.

  He was in a spin.

  Time was in a vacuum as Lenny watched the earth rotate beneath him. What seemed like forever lasted a matter of seconds and two revolutions of the spin before he snapped out of his daze.

  Reverting instinctively back to his spin training, he found a spot on the ground to focus on to count a full revolution. It was a simple grain elevator like thousands of others across the plains. But it was his now, and he wasn’t going to let it out of his sight.

  With the grain elevator as a reference point, he began the spin-recovery procedure. Lenny heard the engines wind down when he pulled the throttles to idle and he centered his controls to the neutral position. This done, he pulled the stick full aft. Visually, he noted the aircraft was indeed spinning to the left, he confirmed this on the turn and slip indicator, when he verified the needle displacement. He pushed in the right rudder hard, to create the “barn door” effect, and slow the aircraft down.

  With the rudder in full deflection, Lenny slammed the stick full forward with all his might. The entire sequence took a second.

  “Oh, shit.”

  The aircraft spiraled toward the earth as time stood still.

  Lenny went over the procedures in his head. Idle, neutral, aft. Spinning left, needle left, right rudder. Full forward.

  In a hypnotizing manner, the earth continued its steady rotation. Lenny checked the altimeter as he passed through nine thousand feet. He tried the recovery again. Idle, neutral, aft. Spinning left, needle left, right rudder. Full forward.

  Nothing.

  This was not right. Panic set in, and Lenny never noticed the excessive play in the fore/aft movement of the stick. He tried the procedure a third time, slowly this time, and concentrated on each specific move. The throttles were indeed in idle; the flight controls neutral. Pulling the stick aft, he again confirmed the left turn and applied right rudder. He threw the stick forward, BAM! He felt it hit the front stop. This should have broken the stall, and he should have recovered out of this spin into a level dive.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

  Lenny rechecked the altimeter. The jet passed through eight thousand feet and approached his personal ejection minimum of seven thousand feet. That would give his parachute time to open after ejection.

  Lenny reviewed the Boldface Emergency Procedures for Ejection in his mind, Handgrips-Raise, Triggers-Squeeze. Raising the handgrips armed the seat, while squeezing the trigger fired the charge that would blow the canopy and send his chair up the rails and out of the aircraft. The small hand on the altimeter wound down from eight thousand feet to seven thousand.

  Taking his hands off the controls for the first time, Lenny reached dow
n to the yellow ejection handles and grabbed both firmly. Taking a deep breath and sitting straight back in the seat, he pulled hard on the handles to arm the seat.

  The handles didn’t move.

  His first reaction was to squeeze the triggers, but without the seat armed, the triggers had no effect. The handles never seemed to stick in the simulator. After he tugged a second time with the same results, he looked down at the handles.

  As the aircraft dropped through five thousand feet, Lenny checked his handgrips and was terrified. The first thing he saw was the red ribbon draped over the edge of the seat. His eyes followed the ribbon to its end attached to the pin. The pin was in place; it locked the ejection seat handgrips and did not allow them to move.

  Time accelerated, and panic set in as the three-ton jet plunged toward earth. Lenny did the calculations in his head as he stopped tugging on the handles and reached for the pin. His hands flailed from the forces of the spinning jet and he struggled to arm his ejection seat.

  Round and round the jet turned, accelerating close to the structural limitation of the aircraft. To eject at this airspeed would break most of the bones in his body from the windblast. And at this altitude, it was questionable whether his chute could open in time to give him a swing or two under a full canopy.

  Fumbling to remove the pin, Lenny glimpsed outside at the earth filling his windscreen. When students flew solo in the T-37, the instructors used to joke with them that “when you are solo, no one can hear you scream.”

  Lenny Banks screamed anyway.

  30

  September 6, 1995

  * * *

  THE SPEAKER CRACKLED AND SHATTERED the silence in the squadron.

  “Attention in the building. Attention in the building. T-37 operations are Stand-down for the day. I repeat, T-37 operations are Stand-down for the day.”

  Jason looked up from his duties behind the snacko desk. Stand-down meant all flying stopped. That was odd—it was clear skies with no wind. They should launch every solo in the building.

  “All personnel are instructed to return to their flight rooms for accountability.”

  That too, was strange. Jason moved closer to the VHF radio set up in the snack bar for students to listen to other students talk on the radio. Intended to be a learning tool, it was often used for harassment by their peers. He turned up the volume for Eastside’s frequency.

  “Bison Four-Two, you are cleared to land.”

  “Bison Four-Two, Gear down, full stop, cleared to land.”

  “Scare Four-Zero, VFR entry.”

  “Eastside, Bison Five-Zero. What’s the idea behind the recall? I’m full of fuel.”

  “Bison Five-Zero, SOF directed recall. Keep channel clear. Winds calm, altimeter three zero one two.”

  “Scare Three-Two, inside initial, five hundred pounds.”

  “Bison Four-Five, in the break, breaking out for Scare on initial.”

  The pattern was a zoo. They tried to get all the aircraft on the ground and fast. The local traffic pattern filled up rapidly and the aircraft started to interfere with one another.

  “Bison Five-Zero, perch point breaking out.”

  “On the break out, use caution. There are two of you.”

  “Scare Four-Seven, Echo.”

  The chatter continued nonstop on the radios; something out there had gone wrong. Two students from another class entered the empty snack bar, one talked excitedly to the other, “I’m telling you, it’s a plane crash . . . it has to be. I heard the duty officer talking to the SOF asking him if they had a plane to go search for him.”

  Jason dashed to the counter, he pulled out his in-flight guide and dialed in the frequency for the MOA controller.

  “That’s a roger, MOA. Bison Four-Niner has a tally on the target.”

  “Bison Four-Niner, cleared surface to ten-thousand. Maneuver as necessary.”

  “Bison Four-Niner, leaving ten-thousand for one-thousand.”

  Search and Rescue plane, Jason thought to himself. Holy cow, this is wild. Two minutes passed before the next radio call came over. By this time, a small crowd developed in the snack bar, all searching for the same thing: information.

  “Bison Four-Niner, leaving one-thousand for five-hundred.”

  The chatter built in the room between radio calls, louder and louder each time. But every time the pilot keyed the mike, the room fell silent.

  “MOA, Bison Four-Niner. I have the plane in sight. Location is the zero-two-niner radial at thirty DME.”

  “Copy. Zero-two-niner at three-zero DME.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Bison Four-Niner, do you see a chute?”

  A chute, Jason thought. A chute meant one person, which at this base meant solo student.

  “Negative. I see no chute or movement near the aircraft. I’m starting an expanding square. I’ll be bingo in two-zero minutes.”

  Jason left the snack bar and headed for the ops desk. It resembled a madhouse. Every instructor with any kind of authority waited for information on the crash. The duty officer behind the desk talked on the phone while he monitored Eastside’s frequency. As aircraft entered the pattern, he placed a dot by their name. As they landed, he placed another dot.

  As he scanned the board, Jason found all but two aircraft either entered the pattern or landed. One was Bison Four-Niner, the aircraft that searched around the wreckage. The other was Scare Four-Three, Lenny Banks.

  CAPTAIN RALPH HARRISON FOCUSED his attention on the numerous planes that swarmed overhead. “It sure is a mess up there. I wonder what’s going on.” Harrison showed up ten minutes before Alonzo. After a quick introduction and in-brief by Alonzo, the two drove to the student dormitories.

  “I appreciate you coming so soon, Captain Harrison,” he said as they stepped out of the car. “It’s imperative we locate whoever is doing this as quickly as possible.” Alonzo towered over the smaller captain. He reviewed the room numbers and names as he walked to the edge of the sidewalk where Harrison stood.

  “How do you know which rooms to check?” Harrison asked.

  “It’s pretty simple, really. The first tests stolen were T-37 tests. Whoever took them stole them in order. So, our first assumption is the thief is a T-37 student currently in the program. The timeframe for this match one class, but just to be sure, we’ll spread our search wider to all T-37 classes.”

  “What if you come up empty?”

  “We’ll expand the search in different directions. The tests were stolen from here. We traced it that far. Since the hack came from on base, that eliminates any of the married students except for the ones in base housing. If we have to, we can check them out also, but it will be difficult.”

  Harrison shrugged his shoulders as they entered the first room. The search began.

  THE AFTERNOON DRAGGED ON AS INFORMATION crept in about the crash. Rumors flew back and forth; no one could say for sure what happened. The 71st Flying Training Wing Safety Officers drove to the crash site with the firetrucks as soon as the coordinates had been given over the radio.

  Jason sat alone in his room, and reviewed his Dash One, Section Three, Emergency Procedures. News of the crash troubled him, not because he flew the same airplane, but that he lost a classmate and friend. It would be several days before they would know what caused the crash. The rumor mill began, running the spectrum from poor airmanship to suicide. Hopefully, the accident investigation board would reveal something else as the cause. The situation was ironic. Lenny was one of the better flyers in the class. If he experienced an emergency, surely, he would have done the right thing to solve it. A knock on the door brought him back to the here and now.

  “Hi, Gus,” he said as he opened the door. “Come on in.”

  “Hey, buddy,” the class SRO grimly replied, “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Go ahead.” The two moved into the other room and sat down.

  “I’ve got a million things to do tonight. The flight commander wanted me to find one of
you guys to collect Lenny’s personal possessions for shipment back home to his family.”

  Jason said nothing as his SRO continued. “I would do this myself, but I’ve got to help the chaplain coordinate the funeral service. Anyway, I would get Vince because they were such good friends, but he’s still stuck in Oklahoma City. I figured you were the next best choice.”

  Jason gazed in the distance for a moment, then turned to his SRO. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  “Great, we’ll be stand-down tomorrow, as well, and I wouldn’t count on flying anytime soon. If the investigation turns up a mechanical failure, they’ll probably ground the entire fleet until they do an inspection on each aircraft.”

  “Swell,” Jason said, as he gazed at the floor.

  “Hey, are you okay with all this, Conrad?”

  Jason paused. “No, I’m not okay with it,” he said. It was a time when those who fly, look inward and contemplate their own mortality. “I-I just don’t understand why . . .”

  Gus nodded. The first time a friend died was rough. The same thing for combat. Every flier went through it . . . another rite of passage.

  “Yeah, well, here’s the key.” Gus placed it on the kitchen counter. “Thanks again, I’ve got to blast.”

  Jason stared at the key. “No problem, Gus. See you tomorrow.”

  He slipped the key in his pocket, put on his shoes, and buttoned up his shirt. This was going to be a long night.

  LENNY WAS A SLOB. His room looked like a disaster area. Clothes piled in various heaps. Study materials stacked on the floor and desk. Unbelievable. What the hell has this guy been doing for the past three weeks? Jason pulled Lenny’s luggage from the closet. He gathered the clothes of his dead friend. After about a half hour, all Lenny’s clothes were packed. The quiet in the room bothered Jason.