Saucer by Stephen Coonts

Saucer by Stephen Coonts

Author:Stephen Coonts [Coonts, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9780786266029
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2001-12-31T13:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER TWELVE

First Lieutenant Raymond Stockert never forgot that morning. For the remainder of his life he would marvel at the combination of luck and fate that put him over central Missouri in an F-16 at the precise moment that a flying saucer came rocketing up from beneath him, missing his plane by a scant hundred yards.

It had been one of those mornings. The military had gone to Defense Condition One, DEFCON ONE—war alert—during the wee hours. Raymond had been awakened at home and ordered to report to his National Guard squadron ready to fly.

The evening before he had been watching the great saucer scare on television, along with every other sentient creature on the North American continent, but he didn’t connect this alert to the scare until he got to the squadron.

The skipper was in a rare mood. “Okay, guys. Here is how it is: Washington has ordered all the planes armed. Each of you will be assigned a sector to patrol. You will take off, patrol your sector until fuel requires you to return or you are relieved on station.”

“And?” someone asked incredulously. None of the pilots believed this spiel. This was a gag, of course, but what a gag! For this they had forfeited a night’s sleep?

“And,” said the skipper, “if you see a flying saucer, shoot it down.”

His pilots gaped at the colonel as if he had lost his mind.

“Honestly, those are the orders. Shoot flying saucers on sight. That said, I don’t want any of you clowns shooting at anything but flying saucers. Anyone who shoots at an airliner had better not come back.”

So instead of counting pills behind the pharmacy counter of the supermarket where he labored five days a week, fifty weeks a year, this morning Raymond Stockert was in the cockpit of an F-16 over central Missouri, ready to fire the first shot in the war of the worlds. This was his second patrol this morning. And, by all that’s holy, here directly in front of him going straight up like a giant bottle rocket was a real, genuine, honest-to-God flying saucer.

Raymond flipped on the master armament switch as he pulled the nose of his fighter into the vertical and slammed the throttle forward into afterburner. Amazingly—the luck of some people!—the saucer was only ten degrees or so off the axis of the airplane. He used both hands on the stick to wrestle the nose toward it.

Sure enough, the first wingtip Sidewinder locked on the saucer’s exhaust plume and Raymond heard a tone in his ears.

He squeezed off the heat seeker. The missile shot forward in a gout of fire and smoke. The second Sidewinder locked on too, and Raymond thought, In for a nickel, in for a dollar, and fired it.

With both missiles chasing the saucer into the morning sky, Raymond Stockert sat watching until his fighter ran out of airspeed. He was going through forty-two thousand feet at that time, so he rolled onto his left wing and let the nose come down.



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