Wickland seemed to shrivel up just then. He sat upright in his ejection seat, seemingly oblivious to all the new air defense warnings popping up on their threat display. Tanaka looked over at him, and after a few moments realized that the guy was just plain scared. Tanaka, a twenty- one-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force and retired lieutenant colonel, with over five thousand hours in about nine different tactical fighter and bomber aircraft, instantly felt sorry for him. Combat was just another phase of flight for Tanaka. The simulators they flew back at Sky Masters Inc.’s headquarters in Blytheville were a hundred times more hectic and every bit as realistic as the real thing— Tanaka thought it was excellent preparation for these operational missions, so much so that he felt ultraprepared for almost every Megafortress flight. He never realized that the other, less experienced guys might not think that way. Wickland was an engineer, a designer, not a combat aircrewman.

“Listen, Gonzo,” Tanaka said, “I’m sorry. I know you’re scared....”

“I’m not scared.”

“Okay. That’s fine. I just want you to do your job—”

“I’m going to do my job, George.”

“Good. I know you will. Just think of this as just another sim ride. We’re wringing out a new weapon code, that’s all, nothing to it.”

But as soon as Tanaka uttered those words, he knew they didn’t ring true.

“I’m sorry, Greg,” Tanaka went on. “We’re not in the sim. We’re not wringing out a new software program. This is the real thing. The missile that we fail to defeat or we don’t see will kill us, not just crash the IPL or freeze the sim. I know you didn’t sign up with the company to go to war. And I know you agreed to do this mission on the ground—but now we’re in the air, and we’re surrounded by about nine hostile SAM systems that will shoot us out of the sky the instant they get a lock on us, and you’re having second thoughts.” He paused, looking at Wickland, who said nothing. “Am I right?”

“Zero...”

“It’s okay, Gonzo,” Tanaka said. “We use these call signs and dress up in cool flight suits and pretend we’re Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards in Top Gun, but the truth is hammering us in die head right now—that we’re in deep shit, that we could die any second up here; and if we do, no one will know what the hell we’re doing up here. We’ll be dead, and that’s all.” Wickland remained silent, but he turned to his aircraft commander, his chest inflating and deflating as if he was having trouble breathing all of a sudden.

“Gonzo, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Tanaka said. “This is the general’s fight, not ours. We’re the crew members aboard this plane, but we’re not sworn to fight and die for whoever the company is doing all this for. We signed a contract to fly planes for Sky Masters Inc., not get our asses shot at by a thousand Libyan SAMs. So if you want to break out of here, we will.”