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  “Nope. They’re going to lease four F-16s from the California Air National Guard. How clever is that? Let’s put that on the agenda for the next department heads meeting. Maybe we can set up some kind of a pipeline so other foreign students can do that. Why don’t you get on the horn with the air national guard units west of the Mississippi to see if they’d be up for that. We can have a list.”

  “You got it,” Hayes said. He was about to leave, then turned toward Luke. “You wouldn’t mind if I just did a little checking into this guy, would you?”

  “How?”

  “My brother.”

  Luke nodded. “Good idea. Can’t have too much knowledge.”

  * * *

  Luke stood in front of the energy-charged room in his khaki flight suit. Russian pilot wings were embroidered on his nametag, with nfws and stick embroidered underneath the wings. He wore the newly designed NFWS patch on his right shoulder, with a black background and a gray F/A-18 in the foreground. Superimposed over the F/A-18 was a MiG gunsight. It was an F/A-18 caught in a MiG gunsight, a reversal of the TOPGUN patch, which has a MiG-21 caught in an American gunsight. Luke’s round patch read around the outside, nevada fighter weapons school. It was the same patch that would be handed out to graduates of his school. One patch for each graduate. It was Luke’s hope that this patch would be worn as proudly as the TOPGUN patch was worn by the few who earned it.

  The newly completed ready room was on the second deck of the hangar. It still smelled of fresh paint. All except one of the newly hired instructors were there. They were all wearing their NFWS flight suits with Russian insignia. Each had completed the ground school and at least his introductory flight in the MiG-29. Several had completed the syllabus. For the first time the squadron was intact. All but one of the pilots were aboard, and all the administrative and maintenance people were in place.

  The ready room itself was a study in aviation decor. On one wall it had silhouettes of every major fighter airplane in the world, in the same scale. Hanging underneath the silhouettes at the end of twelve-inch dowel rods were models of each fighter, built to perfection, all in the same scale.

  Luke stood at the lectern, his hands on its sides, and got everyone’s attention. “Good morning,” he said.

  They all smiled. “Good morning, Skipper,” one said loudly.

  “Do we have to call you ‘Skipper’?” another asked.

  “Absolutely. As each of you knows, this company will be run exactly as a Navy fighter squadron is run. We will have pilot duties, instructor duties, collateral duties, a chain of command, and thirty days of vacation a year. One big difference, though, is we will pay you exactly twice what your counterparts in the Navy are paid. Your pay is based on twice the published Navy pilot’s scale for the same rank. That makes it very easy to track. It should also make you want to write your congressmen to convince them that Navy pilots are underpaid. Feel free.” He smiled.

  “Are we all here?”

  “Everybody except Stamp and Lips,” Luke replied.

  “Stamp’s coming?”

  “Yep. And get this: Who knows what Stamp’s doing right now?”

  “Some air show thing?” Pug asked.

  “Yep. He’s flying a plane that has smirnoff vodka painted on the side. Anybody know what kind of plane?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Yep. A MiG-17. He and his partner own two of them. They fly them in air shows. Hot deal, but not quite like flying as a TOPGUN instructor in MiG-29s. He’ll be here next week.”

  “Is he quitting the MiG-17 thing?”

  “Nope. He’s going to do that on the weekends. He’s going to live in San Jose, where he’s based, and commute here in his MiG.”

  “What?” Sluf asked.

  “As I told most of you when you checked in, including Sluf, if you want, you can commute to work here in your own airplane. We have plenty of ramp space, and it means you can live anywhere nearby that you want to,” Luke said. “You can commute here every day if you want, in your own biplane or Learjet. Whatever you want.” He watched them nod. “So now let me get going. Welcome! Thanks for agreeing to be part of this new school. I can’t tell you how excited I am about it, and after talking to each of you, I know you are as well. It is one of the most exciting developments in fighter aviation in twenty years.

  “We have six weeks to get ready for the first class. The demand from international Navies and Air Forces is enormous. We’ve received calls, letters, e-mails, faxes from all over the world asking for space in a class. Brian Hayes, our intel officer, whom many of you know . . .” He pointed. Hayes was sitting at the duty officer’s desk, and raised his hand. “Brian is also our acting admin officer. He’s the one in charge of school quotas, student enrollment, clearances, and the like. Ever since the Nevada Fighter Weapons School Web site went active, he’s been getting thousands of hits a day. Word is out.

  “Another thing that has surprised me is the demand within U.S. forces. TOPGUN’s tough to get into. But an awful lot of pilots want to go, and an awful lot of squadron commanders want their pilots to go. We all know that. And since they changed the setup at TOPGUN, where squadrons don’t send their pilots through until they’ve completed their squadron tour, the squadrons don’t get any immediate benefit from sending anyone through the school. Well, here we’re going back to the old model, where squadrons send a pilot or two in a given year, and they return to their squadrons to teach the other pilots what they’ve learned. What I didn’t anticipate, at least not at the demand we’re seeing, was that the DOD would spring for the money to send them.”

  He went to a slide in his PowerPoint presentation. It was a picture of their MiG-29s sitting outside the hangar with their new angular, choppy desert camouflage and the black star markings. “One thing driving the demand, frankly, is the fact that we fly MiG-29s. Everyone wants to fly against a MiG-29. Some of you may recall back in 1999 when the German Air Force brought six MiG-29s over to Red Flag, at Nellis. They were the prettiest girls at the dance. Everybody wanted to know everything they did, how they did it, their specifications, their maneuvering diagrams—everything. Demand has, if anything, increased since 1999. In six weeks we start meeting that demand.”

  “You think we can actually be ready in six weeks?” Sluf asked. Sluf had joined them from the Forest Service. After his tour as a TOPGUN instructor, instead of flying for the airlines he’d gotten a job flying tanker planes to fight forest fires.

  “Sluf, I really appreciate your participation in this meeting. As a reward”—Luke smiled—“I’d like you to be in charge of facilities. Hangars, foreign object damage walk-downs, roads—all that good stuff.”

  Sluf put his head back and rolled his eyes. His black hair reflected the light because of the hair gel he always wore. He laughed. “I get it. The first dissent is met with the assignment of a shitty little job?”

  “Welcome to the Navy,” Luke replied.

  “This isn’t supposed to be the Navy!” Sluf protested.

  “No, seriously, I really appreciate you volunteering for that difficult job. As to your question, we will be ready. We’re going to have to work eighteen-hour days six days a week. We’ll take Sundays off because I think it’s smart to rest. When September first comes around, we’ll have sixteen fully trained instructors, a syllabus in place, the airspace reserved, and we’ll be ready to go.

  “We’ll take two weeks off before the second class, which, I am proud to report, is also full. We expect to fill up every class for the whole year before January one.”

  Pug, one of the instructors who’d been flying 767s for Delta three weeks before, was troubled. “This whole thing turns on keeping these MiGs flying. What do you know about MAPS? Can they pull this off?”

  Luke looked at Vlad, who was sitting in the back listening to every word. “Vlad, why don’t you talk about maintenance for a minute? Most of you have met him, but this is Vladimir Petkov, a former Russian MiG-29 instructor who now works for MAPS.”


  “What’s his call sign?” Sluf asked.

  Ted Bradley—Rain—jumped on that idea. “How about Commie?” He laughed.

  Vlad did not laugh. He was angry. “I was not Communist. I was against Communist. To be called that would be insulting.”

  “All the more reason,” Rain replied, looking around for support.

  Luke was uncomfortable. He didn’t want a rift. “We may follow a lot of Navy traditions here, but call signs that insult people will not be one of them,” he said to Rain, who looked chastised. “How about we call him Vlad? That okay with you?” he asked.

  “Vlad is good.”

  “Good. Come up here and talk about the maintenance.”

  “Good morning,” Vlad said awkwardly. His hair was plastered to his head, and those in the two front rows could smell him. They curled up their noses and looked at each other, wondering how someone who was such a hygienic wreck could know much about anything. “I’m Vladimir Petkov. We have six of the MiGs ready to go now. The other two will be finished within two weeks, and of course the two-seater has been ready. The ones that are flying are holding up good. The desert air is good for them, and everything is on schedule. They are durable airplanes, but we will certainly have failures. We expect eighty-five percent flying at any given time, and enough spare parts to have a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour turnaround for any airplane the breaks down. I do not think we will have a problem.”

  “Thanks,” Luke said as Vlad returned to his seat. “I have given each of you two notebooks. The first is the instructor’s manual with a syllabus. That’s what we will be doing between now and the first day of class. Some of you have been here and have completed a good part of that syllabus. The rest of you need to catch up and make sure that you finish it before classes start. The pilots who finish the syllabus first will act as instructors for the remainder of the syllabus for the others. It will be a large team effort, but I’m sure we can do it.

  “We will be going from basic familiarization of the MiG-29 to NATOPS sign-off—which of course stands for Nevada Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization.” He smiled, referring to the Navy NATOPS that everyone knew about, the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization. “The reason we’re doing things the old Navy way is, even though we hated some of the Navy ways, we’re all familiar with them and we know what works.

  “The second book that you have is the proposed student syllabus for our first class through the Nevada Fighter Weapons School. It is, as you can see, based on the TOPGUN syllabus. We’ve made some modifications. There isn’t much air-to-ground work. Our objective here is to teach not strike warfare but air-to-air combat. We will do a little air-to-ground, but that’s not our focus.”

  Luke looked around at the excited faces. “A couple of other things. As the squadron progresses, we expect to be able to do some road shows. If MAPS can support us, we’ll be prepared to take our MiGs overseas. It’s something that very few others have been able to do, but if we can arrange for the appropriate tanking—which will also require us to modify our airplanes—we can work anywhere in the world.”

  “We can start our own war!” Sluf said. “Shit hot!”

  “Good old Sluf. You know, you should have stayed with the forest service. At least that way all you’re going to kill are a few trees. Always there with a good idea.” Luke continued, “We’ve got a lot to do, a lot to talk about, and we’re going to be doing most of it for the first time. There will be some bumps in the road, I guarantee you. But give me some room to maneuver and we’ll figure out whatever needs to be figured out. Let’s get this school under way.”

  10

  The intense bearded man walked quietly off the Qantas flight from Sydney into the terminal at San Francisco International Airport. To someone watching him closely, he looked uncomfortable in his Western clothes. He was careful not to look around for law enforcement people or immigration officials who might examine his passport and other documents too carefully. He had nothing to hide. No contraband, no weapons, nothing that would give him away. Just false documents. Once through immigration, he would have no problems. He knew that the others with him were in the same position. They were all on different flights from different countries with passports from different origins. They would all arrive within four hours of each other.

  He gathered his suitcases, full of secondhand clothes he had never seen before yesterday, and put them on the rolling SmarteCarte to stand in line for the customs and immigration stations.

  He walked to the “Nothing to Declare” line and was waved through without comment. He maneuvered his SmarteCarte to the INS station and stood behind the yellow line in the “Non­U.S. Citizen” line. Finally the person in front of him was done, and the INS agent looked at him as he approached. The agent extended his hand. “Passport,” he demanded.

  The bearded man, perhaps thirty years old, handed it to him, trying to look completely unconcerned.

  “Final destination?”

  “Mountain View,” the man replied.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Family. My sister lives there.”

  The INS agent ran the Bangladeshi passport through a scanner and looked carefully at the photograph and the paper. There was something about the man’s eyes that bothered him. “What’s her name?”

  He hesitated. He hadn’t expected that question. “We call her Shiri.”

  “Is she a permanent resident of the United States?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she employed?”

  “Yes. She is a computer programmer.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I am a mathematician.”

  “How long do you plan on staying?”

  “Four days.”

  “Do you have a return ticket?”

  “Yes.”

  The agent held out his hand for it.

  The man pulled the ticket out of his shoulder bag and handed it to the agent.

  The agent examined it carefully, looked at the man again, hesitated, and stamped his passport. “Welcome to the United States,” he said, smiling as he handed the man his passport.

  * * *

  The ice blue MiG-17 flew gracefully over the runway at Tonopah and snapped into a left-hand break. Luke and the other pilots standing on the flight line watched carefully, noting whether the MiG pilot was losing altitude, whether he was maintaining a constant angle of bank, and whether he had to correct his turn before rolling level on his downwind leg. He made no corrections. He leveled his wings in a perfect downwind position and lowered his landing gear. The blue jet was being flown with tremendous precision.

  It was a beautiful airplane. It most closely resembled the American F-86 Super Sabre from the Korean War. It had made quite a name for itself flying against Americans in Vietnam. It had a T-tail and swept wings with the single jet intake in the mouth of the airplane giving it a sports car look, with a bubble canopy sitting on top of the sleek, clean exterior.

  Everyone on the ground immediately wanted to fly it. The MAPS mechanics, half of whom were Russian, looked on with unfettered joy at one of their favorite airplanes.

  The MiG-17—the Farmer, as it had been called by NATO for the last forty years—landed perfectly and turned off the runway. It taxied quickly to the flight line.

  Paul Stamper had checked in to the school a week before and had finally brought his own MiG. Stamp opened the canopy and scrambled down the ladder that one of the MAPS mechanics put next to his jet. He was wearing a custom-made blue flight suit and a metallic blue helmet. It was his MiG, his own fighter, and he was prouder of it than of anything he’d ever owned. The pilots walked over, gathered around the jet, and studied it as he walked toward them. Stamp called out, “Greetings, earthlings. I have come in peace.”

  “Blow me,” Thud said, eyeing the MiG enviously. “Stamp, how the hell’d you get this ride?”

  “Bought it.”

  Vlad stared at the MiG with the look of someone who
knew more about it than every other pilot there, including Stamp. He was almost speechless. He spoke with astonishment, “You can own MiG planes in U.S.? Anybody?”

  Stamp nodded. “If it’s defanged. Can’t have guns and shit.”

  “But we could put those back on with ease,” Vlad said, smiling, looking around at the Russian mechanics who were studying the plane with a glazed look.

  “Yeah.” Stamp laughed. “Second Amendment! The right to bear arms! I need my damned airborne thirty-millimeter gun in my MiG for home defense! Shit, Vlad! Why didn’t I think of that?” He laughed again. “Actually, Vlad,” Stamp said, “I was thinking of asking you guys if you could take over the maintenance. The guys I have doing it in San Jose are good, but if you can do it cheaper or better . . .”

  “Could I fly it?” Vlad asked, his voice full of hope.

  “Got any hours?”

  “Five hundred. All my early time was in MiG-17s, as you call them.”

  “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

  Vlad was amazed at the life this pilot had carved out for himself. “We can make deal. I will put together proposal. MAPS can get all the parts for MiG-17. We can keep it in top condition. And I will take part payment in flight hours for me. I would like that. Maybe I can show you some things.”

  “So, Stamp, what do you do with this thing?” Sluf asked.

  “Flight of two MiGs, formation go, high-speed passes, Cuban eights—all kinds of cool stuff the crowds like, but mostly it’s just the uniqueness of seeing two MiGs streaking through the sky, burners going. There’s something forbidden about it.” Stamp took off his gloves and put them inside his helmet.

  “What’s up with the vodka?” Thud asked, pointing to smirnoff written in large script on the side of the airplane.

  “They’re the ones who make all this possible. They pay for the whole show, plus whatever fees we get out of it. But with my new job, here at the greatest place to fly in the entire free world, I can use the profits of the air show gig to commute in my MiG and live off my new salary. And Captain Luke here,” he said, pointing to Luke, “says I’m okay to do the air show thing on the weekends.”