In fact, Turk had so much fun putting the aircraft through its basic paces that he felt almost disappointed when it was time to land. The only consolation was that another Hog was sitting on the tarmac near the hangar waiting for him.
“All your controls solid, Captain?” asked Ginella, who walked over to the plane as he descended the ladder.
“They were kick-ass,” he told her, hopping down.
“Good. Don’t break this next one. They had a little trouble with the indicators on the starboard engine,” she added, her voice instantly serious. “Be gentle, all right? We don’t want to give the SAR people too much work this afternoon.”
“Gentle is my middle name,” he told her.
“I’ll bet you say that to all the women,” bellowed Beast, who walked over from behind the plane.
“Play nice now,” said Ginella. “Captain Mako, Beast is going to check out Shooter Four while you’re in Six. Don’t let him trip you up.”
“I’ll try to stay out of his way,” said Turk.
A few hours later Turk tested the engines on the ramp, his brakes set to hold him in place. If there had been an actual problem with the jet, there was no sign of it now. The instruments said the power plants were smooth and ready, and his gut agreed.
With Beast following in his trail, Turk took the aircraft skyward. All of the indicators were pegged at showroom stats, systems as green as green could be.
When they reached their testing area, Turk took a long circle around his airspace. He told Beast to stand by, then spooled the starboard engine down. The Hog didn’t entirely welcome flying on one engine, but she complied, reacting like a calm, indulgent workhorse. The plane jumped a bit when he brought the engine back on line, but there was no drama, no emergency. Nor did anything untoward happen when he flew on only the starboard motor.
“I think we’re good,” he told Beast.
“Hey yeah, roger that,” replied the other pilot. “How do you like the Hog?”
“It’s nice. I like it a lot.”
“As good as that little go-cart you fly?”
“The Tigershark is a special plane,” said Turk.
Beast laughed. “Fly with us enough and you’ll think the Hog is, too.”
“Shooter Four, Shooter Six, be advised you have two aircraft heading toward Box Area Three,” said the controller, alerting them to an approaching flight. “Call sign is Provence.”
A few seconds later Provence leader checked in. The planes were a pair of Rafale C multirole fighters. The Frenchmen had just arrived in Sicily.
“What are you up to, Provence leader?” asked Beast.
“Just getting some flight time and checking our systems,” responded the flight leader.
Turk saw the two planes approaching from the southwest. The Rafales were delta-wing fighters, developed by France in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally conceived as air superiority fighters, they had retained those genes as they matured to handle a variety of other roles. While the aircraft might not match American F–22s, they were nonetheless extremely capable dogfighters. In fact, in a close-range knife fight against a Raptor, the smart money would be on the Frenchmen; much smaller than the F–22, they could turn tighter and fly extremely slow: a little appreciated value in an old-fashioned fur ball.
Of course, any Raptor pilot worth his salt would have shot them down at beyond-visual range, but where was the fun in that?
“You boys looking for a little practice?” asked Beast.
“Pardon? Excusez?” said the French leader. “What is it you are asking?”
“Let’s see what you can do,” said Beast. He pushed his throttle and pointed the nose of the A–10E upward, in effect daring the Rafale to follow.
An “ordinary” Hog would have more than a little difficulty going nose up in the sky, but the enhanced power plants in Shooter Four brought her into a ninety degree climb almost instantly. Turk watched as the Rafales swung over to follow. Though caught a little flat-footed—a challenge from the ungainly Hogs must have been the last thing they expected—the two French fighters soon began to catch up, angling toward the A–10’s path. Then, just as it looked as if they would complete an intercept and put themselves in a position to wax Beast’s fanny, the Hog fell off hard to the right, diving down toward the purple-blue of the ocean.
Again the Frenchmen were caught off-guard. By the time they started to react, cutting off the climb and circling to the east, Beast had recovered and was looping underneath them.
From where Turk was flying, it was hard for him to see if Beast ended up on one of the Frenchman’s tails, but Beast’s laughter over the radio sure made it seem as if he had.
“Ya gotta watch out,” he told the Frenchman. “This is not your daddy’s Warthog.”
Turk turned his plane toward the others, waiting as the Rafales broke away. There was no way Beast could keep up, and so he didn’t, climbing merrily and then circling back to the south as they spun away.
The two French fighters regrouped at the north end of the box they had been given to fly in, then banked back toward the Warthog in a coordinated attack. The truth was, a radar missile at this range would have meant the end of the Hog and its guffawing pilot, but that wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of the encounter. As the Rafales moved in, they separated nicely, one high, one low, one to the east and one to the west, basically positioning themselves to cover anything Beast tried to do.
But that left the trailing wingman vulnerable to Turk, assuming he could accelerate quickly enough to make an attack. A “stock” A–10A couldn’t have managed it, but with the uprated engines, the refurbished Warthog had just enough giddy-up to pull it off. Turk jammed his throttle and pointed the A–10E’s nose at the Rafale’s tail, pulling close enough to have spit a dozen pellets of depleted uranium into the Frenchman’s backside before Provence Two realized where he was.
The Armée de l’Air pilot’s first reaction was to try to turn—he was hoping to throw the Warthog in front of him, essentially turning the tables. But the Hog was at least as good at slow-speed flying as the Rafale was, and Turk was able to dial back his gas just enough to stay behind the other plane. Only when the Rafale put the pedal to the metal and accelerated was he able to shake his sticky antagonist.
Beast was having a bit of difficulty shaking the other pilot, who wisely kept just enough distance to shadow the Hog without getting too close. The front canards on the Rafale—small winglets that added greatly to its maneuverability—worked overtime as the French flight leader remained figuratively on Beast’s shoulder. The two planes’ speed dropped down toward 100 knots—extremely slow, even for the straight-winged Hog. Still, the French-built fighter was able to hang in the air, a tribute both to the man at the stick and the gentlemen who had designed her.
Turk cut in their direction, making sure to clear over them by several thousand feet. A few touches on his trigger and the Frenchman would have had his pain buttered.
“OK, OK,” said the French flight leader. “Knock it off.”
“You owe us drinks,” laughed Beast.
The Frenchmen were good sports, promising that they would pay off at their earliest opportunity. They also added that they would have beaten the two Americans in anything approaching a fair fight.
“That’s your first mistake,” said Beast. “Never, ever fight fair.”
Ginella was waiting for them at their parking area when they returned.
She was not happy.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” she said to Beast as he stepped onto the tarmac. “Where do you think you were, kindergarten? That action was dangerous and unauthorized. It was completely against regulations and, damn it, common sense!”
“I, uh—”
“Don’t speak,” she snapped. She turned to Turk. “And you—you! You’re a test pilot. An engineer.”