worked the radio and monitored the instruments. The aircraft spent most of its time on autopilot, of course, but Jackson, right seat or not, was determined to be the command pilot on the flight, and you couldn’t very well say no to him. As a result, the captain would sit in the back and the colonel would be in the left seat, but jerking off. What the hell, the latter thought, the Vice President told good stories, and was a fairly competent stick for a Navy puke.
“Clear right,” Jackson said, a few minutes later.
“Clear left,” the pilot replied, confirming the fact from the plane-walker in front of the Gulfstream.
“Starting One,” Jackson said next, followed thirty seconds later by “Starting Two.”
The ribbon gauges came up nicely. “Looking good, sir,” the USAF lieutenant colonel reported. The G had Rolls-Royce Spey engines, the same that had once been used on the U.K. versions of the F-4 Phantom fighter, but somewhat more reliable.
“Tower, this is Air Force Two, ready to taxi.”
“Air Force Two, Tower, cleared to taxiway three.”
“Roger, Tower AF-Two taxiing via three.” Jackson slipped the brakes and let the aircraft move, its fighter engines barely above idle, but guzzling a huge quantity of fuel for all that. On a carrier, Jackson thought, you had plane handlers in yellow shirts to point you around. Here you had to go according to the map/diagram—clipped to the center of the yoke—to the proper place, all the while looking around to make sure some idiot in a Cessna 172 didn’t stray into your path like a stray car in the supermarket parking lot. Finally, they reached the end of the runway, and turned to face down it.
“Tower, this is Spade requesting permission to take off.” It just sort of came out on its own.
A laughing reply: “This ain’t the Enterprise, Air Force Two, and we don’t have cat shots here, but you are cleared to depart, sir.”
You could hear the grin in the reply: “Roger, Tower, AF-TWO is rolling.”
“Your call sign was really ‘Spade’?” the assigned command pilot asked as the VC-20B started rolling.
“Got hung on by my first CO, back when I was a new nugget. And it kinda stuck.” The Vice President shook his head. “Jesus, that seems like a long time ago.”
“V-One, sir,” the Air Force officer said next, followed by “V-R.”
At velocity-rotation, Jackson eased back on the yoke, bringing the aircraft off the ground and into the air. The colonel retracted the landing gear on command, while Jackson flipped the wheel half an inch left and right, rocking the wings a little as he always did to make sure the aircraft was willing to do what he told it. It was, and inside of three minutes, the G was on autopilot, programmed to turn, climb, and level out at thirty-nine thousand feet.
“Boring, isn’t it?”
“Just another word for safe, sir,” the USAF officer replied.
Fucking trash-hauler, Jackson thought. No fighter pilot would say something like that out loud. Since when was flying supposed to be ... well, Robby had to admit to himself, he always buckled his seat belt before starting his car, and never did anything reckless, even with a fighter plane. But it offended him that this aircraft, like almost all of the new ones, did so much of the work that he’d been trained to do himself. It would even land itself ... well, the Navy had such systems aboard its carrier aircraft, but no proper naval aviator ever used it unless ordered to, something Robert Jefferson Jackson had always managed to avoid. This trip would go into his logbook as time in command, but it really wasn’t. Instead it was a microchip in command, and his real function was to be there to take proper action in case something broke. But nothing ever did. Even the damned engines. Once turbojets had lasted a mere nine or ten hours before having to be replaced. Now there were Spey engines on the G fleet that had twelve thousand hours. There was one out there with over thirty thousand that Rolls-Royce wanted back, offering a free brand-new replacement because its engineers wanted to tear that one apart to learn what they’d done so right, but the owner, perversely and predictably, refused to part with it. The rest of the Gulfstream airframe was about that reliable, and the electronics were utterly state-of-the-art, Jackson knew, looking down at the color display from the weather-radar. It was a clear and friendly black at the moment, showing what