Free Night Flight by Lindsay McKenna Page A

desk?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s in a particularly virulent mood this morning.”
    Chuckling, Sam handed a cup of coffee to Curt, took one for himself and then ambled over to her desk. “That’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
    “That’s all right,” Merrill said, sitting down at his desk. “Holt nailed Stang’s tail to the ground.”
    Lauren’s thin brows rose. She glanced over at Holt, who leaned over her shoulder and studied the prints. “Oh?”
    “Yeah, so far the score’s in my favor.”
    “Let’s tally it up at the end of the day,” Lauren warned dryly. “Stang’s usually ahead by that time.”
    A careless grin crossed Holt’s face as he studied the proposed new landing gear assembly on the F-15. “If he stays out of your gun sights, Port. Only then does he win. Otherwise, you shoot him down.”
    “Well,” Lauren muttered, pulling her computer keyboard closer, punching in some numbers and, studying the monitor intently, “I’m in a bad mood today, so he’d better watch his mouth or he’ll crash and burn so fast it will make even his seasoned head spin.”
    “Ohhh,” Merrill hooted with delight. “I hope Stang is stupid enough to walk through the door. When Lauren is ‘on,’ she’s ready to go Mach 3 with her hair on fire.”
    Laughing, Lauren shook her head. “You’re both crazy.”
    “But you love us anyway,” Sam murmured, sipping the scaldingly hot coffee.
    “I’d never admit it.” Frowning, she put some more numbers in the computer, unhappy with the readout. “Damn…”
    Sam studied the numbers on the monitor, and then the blueprint under her elbows. “Problems?”
    “Yes…and no. I’m working with the McDonnell design engineers over at Palmdale to reinforce the landing gear assembly on number 71290. After Stang cracked the frame on the left gear two weeks ago, we’re trying to figure how it occurred and then ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
    Sam nodded. The F-15 was the hottest fighter the Air Force owned. It was a single-seater, although two had been specifically rigged with a second seat for the flight engineer during the ongoing test flights. There were three Air Force flight engineers working on the Agile Eagle project, and he considered Lauren the best. So did General Dalton, the head of testing. “That gear assembly cracked because Stang dropped the bird to the deck in order to make that fifteen-hundred-foot landing limit.”
    Hell, Stang had stalled the bird. The F-15 had literally fell from an altitude of thirty feet, like a rock dropping out of the sky, and slammed into the end of the runway. During the inspection, Lauren, who rode with Stang on that test, was the first to discover the crack. Stang had bitched that she had it in for him; an immature response, but Holt didn’t expect much else from the golden boy here at Ops. Stang knew he was number one, and it was obvious to him. He had one hell of a powerful sponsor—no matter whether he flew good one day and lousy the next, he could do no wrong.
    Tapping the monitor, Lauren remarked, “Holt, you took your test pilot training with the navy.”
    “That’s right.” Sometimes, the services swapped pilots and put them through the other’s test pilot school. Holt had been fortunate enough to be chosen to go to Patuxent River, Maryland, and take the U.S. Navy equivalent to the Air Force test pilot school. Only there, Holt had to learn how to land and take off from the heaving deck of a carrier; something no other Air Force pilot had experience doing. That was one of the reasons he’d been chosen for the Agile Eagle project; creating a bird capable of short takeoffs and landings, just like a naval aircraft. The Air Force chief of staff had decided that during a wartime situation, most runways would be bombed, making the F-15 incapable of taking off because of the craters. So now, they were redesigning the bird for a much shorter takeoff so it could get into the air and fight.
    “Tell me, did Stang land it