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family with brains—and weapons.<br />
I kept these guys around a few days while we worked out their flight plan and<br />
clearances to leave one Arab country and go into another. This would normally<br />
take about twenty-four hours, but I managed to cram it into three days. Hey, I had<br />
to be thorough, right Right. They weren’t in any hurry, because no one—and I<br />
mean no one—liked Saudi Arabia. I called it the Great Hijacking.<br />
THE VIPER BROKE LEFT OVER THE RUNWAY NUMBERS AND pulled into a hard, six-G<br />
turn. Grunting against gravity, I closed my eyes and grabbed the “towel rack” that<br />
ran along the canopy in the back of the two-seat F-16D.<br />
Every squadron had a few of these jets, and they were used for various types of<br />
“dual” training. That is, missions or events that had to be done with an instructor<br />
pilot physically in the same jet. Americans avoided them whenever possible, but<br />
the Egyptians used them a good deal—a relic of their Soviet training. I was always<br />
being thrown in the back for some sort of near-death experience that called for<br />
instruction.<br />
I hated flying in the damn thing.<br />
“WHUMP . . . WHUMP . . . WHUMP.”<br />
What the . . . my eyes popped open as the landing gear thunked down and the<br />
Egyptian rolled wings level. For a moment, I was speechless and the jet slowed as<br />
the guy up front prepared to turn to final.<br />
“Hamad . . . wha . . . why did you put the gear down”<br />
“Sir”<br />
“Why is the gear down”<br />
“For to land, sir.”<br />
I rubbed my face and took a deep breath. You never rolled into a six-G break<br />
turn and put the wheels down—it was a wonderful way to rip hydraulic lines and<br />
gear doors off the aircraft. Because of this, there was a strict airspeed limit of 300<br />
knots.<br />
So Hamad waffled through the final turn, scaring us both.<br />
“Go around,” I directed, and he obediently raised the gear, added power, and<br />
off we went. Rather than stay in the pattern, we took the long way back to a tenmile<br />
final, so we could talk a bit. Turned out, Hamad had flown MiG-21s and they<br />
always put the gear down in the break turn. This was okay, because a MiG-21<br />
couldn’t pull six Gs, and it took about a minute for the crappy Russian hydraulics<br />
to get the wheels down anyway. In a patois of French, Arabic, and English, we
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