Excerpts:

By

Captain Wahren Morast was flying lead in a formation of F-29s, a major change from his F-15 assignment. The funny looking forward swept wings were loaded with six Durandals, six Mavericks, eight Sidewinders, and an external fuel tank under his fuselage. The diamond formation looked a lot like geese flying south for the winter. Ten minutes to target.

This sortie started as the result of an air raid on the N.A.S. ENTERPRISE. Those Damn Japs! Wahren thought. Well, they were going to learn!

Wahren moved his stick and put the extremely maneuverable F-29 into a tight turn. He dropped to fifty feet and leveled his plane out. He hoped to be able to elude the Japs' high-tech radar. He armed his Durandals and prepared for action.

The base never knew what hit them. The first two anti-runway Durandals struck true and put a fifty-foot crater in two spots on the runway. An alarm klaxon went off and Triple-A heated their guns up.

Wahren smiled to himself. He did a half loop that turned his stomach as he comes at the second of the three runways. Two more Durandals gracefully dropped from their pylons, opened their parachutes and drifted towards their target. When only a few feet from the ground a rocket fired and drove the bomb deep into the ground. A few seconds later it exploded and put another large crater into the runway. The second Durandal did the same..only twenty feet from its target--Wahren missed.

On his third run, both Durandals hit their target but only one exploded. The dud left one large hole in the middle of the runway. Maybe the timer was off sync Wahren thinks. Then he went after his final objective. No time to brood over a bomb that didn't explode.

Wahren armed his Mavericks and flew towards the tower. The air-to-surface missile fired a laser that bounced off its target and flew back to the Maverick. Wahren pulled the trigger and the Maverick flew towards the tower. The tall polygram shaped tower exploded into several splintering pieces. The F-29 flew through the dissipating wreckage, and into a defensive field. Triple-A fired all around the aircraft. One shell flew true and sank into the nose of the F-29 just in front of the cockpit. The F-29 objected immediately.

"Holy Shit!" Wahren exclaimed as the flight computer coughed its last moments of life. Wahren pulled up on the stick and pushed the throttle to full. It was a full minute before the computer finally died. Wahren began to panic, remembering his lessons at the Academy. It is impossible to fly an F-29 without computer control Wahren remembered his instructor's nasal voice. He leveled the plane out and tries to get a grasp on the situation.

The F-29 was shaking violently. Wahren reduced throttle to help stabilize the plane. He touched a red button on his UHF panel and sent his mayday and status to ENTERPRISE.

"Fuck!!" Came the surprised reply, "You're flying without a computer?"

"Affirmative." Wahren confirmed, "I'm at your three-two-two. I need you to turn that bitch for fucking."

"Will comply, repeat, will comply. You have clearance for......"

Wahren banged the receiver as it went dead. The plane was slowly dying. He needed to land and land quick. He dropped his external to help stabilize the aircraft. He had one option. He had to land in emergency deck. He was without a hook so he was sure to hit a barricade. Two miles out. The F-29 turned to a one-winged C-5 as she began to shake violently. He was flying too low for he was flying in ENTERPRISE's exhaust. He pulled on the stick and was jolted up as the exhaust caught his wings. His radar exploded and several shards of fragment sink into Wahren's warm chest. Blood poured down his front as he closed on the slowly-moving ENTERPRISE.

Just before he hit the deck he pushed his emergency button. He had made his approach low so the airbrake would pull the plane up when it was used. The brake flew open and the landing gear shot down just a second from the deck. Unfortunately, the nose went up but the tail stayed down and the rear landing gear were torn from their protective sockets with nerve wracking snaps and crunches. Now he waited for the barricade.

The barricade was done electronically and hydraulically. If the plane came in at a weird angle or missed the arrestor cable, it shot up. The F-29 dragged across the cable and the tripped the mechanism that told the barricade he had landed safely even if he was at the wrong angle. In other words, the barricade didn't shoot up.

The crippled plane was slowing but still accelerated towards the back wall. Wahren pulled in the nose gear, hoping to increase friction. The nose fell hard to the deck and slowed even more, yet he still accelerated towards the back wall. Wahren braced for impact.

The nose flew through the wall, tearing off the canopy. Wahren ducked his helmeted head as he stopped on the other side.

He jumped out of his plane and realized where he was. He climbed the ladder located in the middle of the room up to CIC. The Captain was waiting for him.

Wahren comes to attention in front of his CO. Blood was dripping out of his clothes from the wound in his chest. His uniform was charred from the radio explosion. When his CO gaped at Wahren’s appearance, he wondered how one could live through what had just happened.

"Mission successful, Sir." Wahren reported.

"Aye, good work Capt. Dismissed."

Wahren gave a smart salute and walked towards his quarters.

WOW! I remember writing this! Boy, did I suck back then! I'm a much better writer now a days. (The problem with all my work is I never revise it. I do something that sounds cool, then it sits, rough and unrevised. So, it seems like it always sucks, at least to me anyway.)

In ninth grade, we had an English teacher (Seabolt?) {Seabrook--BK} who made everyone do 'journal' time or something like that where you got graded on the number of pages you wrote. It was totally GAY, cause everyone would write really big and messy (read: Brian) and I always had tiny print. (I didn’t write. I tried to print whenever possible. Like it mattered, but I seem to remember teachers FORCING people to write...hrm....) Anyway, I started doing this story I believe from a journal ( maybe not, it was a while ago, but about that time) and Brian and I had a 'discussion' about past and present tense.

The present tense really bugged me (still does!) and I refused, cause no real author used it. He proved me wrong (the shit that he reads, ug) and so I decided to give it a shot on this piece. You can tell cause I jump out of past and present tense all though the thing. I still can't do that present tense crap. I think Brian does it to be different more than anything.

The Enterprise was COOL! I remember our first drawings of that thing. (Early High school was boring!) It was immense! Living in our fantasy world, we figured that the thing could fly, despite the fact that I doubt it would ever get off the ground with current technology. However, it’s a grand idea!

Looking back, I did little to no research on the story. I have no idea how big a crater a Durendel makes, or how near impossible it would be to fly a Fly-By-Wire plane without the computer. (Those things are designed to be unstable in flight so they are nimble.) Hell, I even seriously doubt the computer is stuck in the nose! (And if it is, its probably housed by some mega shielding.) And Wahren bashed the receiver? Where, exactly, is that? He probably bashed some unsuspecting and probably dead MFD, and it probably deserved it, but hey. I was in 9th grade.

All in all, the piece is cool. I could go back and revise it, and add everything I've learned. So much happens before the story to set it up, but all that crap goes on in my head (usually) and thus never gets expressed!

This was written during a time when Brian and I had immense patriotic feelings (still do) and we let it blind us to almost EVERYTHING else. That's not, necessarily, a bad thing (forgive the spelling), but it made us ignorant of a lot of things. We needed an enemy, and the Japanese/Russians seemed to be the most likely target! (Cold war, and foreign competition were predominant in the headlines of the time. HELLO BORIS!) It’s pretty ironic that the Russians are one of our best friends now (hell, we gave them McDonalds and Levis!) and that Japanese products (Anime, Cameras, small electronics) are considered some of the best in the world. I remember a time I wouldn't be caught dead with a Japanese product, but now all my electronics (TV, stereo/theatre stuff, monitor) is from Sony. About the only thing electronic that's American that I own is my computer processor, mouse, and keyboard (the US is still king in the computing field. I don't think Japan has even tried to compete, and the things that are foreign (motherboards mostly) are from Taiwan!

So, that's where we stood. Its a blast from the past, even if I think that it is horrible! (I love the action in it!) Its a great look at some early beginnings to the ETF stories.

This is Jye’s work, so I’ll be brief. I love this chapter, if we can call it that. Both Jye and I have gotten so much more expressive as writers that 2 1/2 pages doesn’t seem like more than a sidebar anymore, but this piece clearly sets up the character of Wahren. He is ALWAYS a Captain, and probably always will be, no matter what I might try. It shows our advanced thinking on military weaponry, and, at the same time, our call to aviation’s past, with having a flying aircraft carrier. They used to exist. They were called airships. Ours, ENTERPRISE was worked out to the infinite degree by Jye and I when we were setting up the Eagle stories, even so far as to scale drawings.

I’ve always said Mrs. Seabrook had no idea what she was doing when she pissed Jye and I off enough to start writing things on our own, but I wonder. Would things have gotten this far if she hadn’t had such (seemingly, at the time) loopy ideas on things? Or were we just bound and determined to do our own damn thing anyway? Yeah, probably that last part.

This was one of the first scenes ever written for the Eagle Saga, back in 1990. Jye and I had yet to come to an agreement on what tense the book was going to be written in, and, at this point, Jye was more comfortable working with past tense. NOTHING is changed from Jye’s original hand-written chapter here, except I ran a spell checker over it, to correct Jye’s original mistakes (I typed word for word what he wrote. If ya don’t believe me, go to the members section and see the scan of the second page of the chapter) and my mistakes while typing (have a bad habit of putting "th" for "the", ect.) This chapter, in this precise form, has not seen the light of day since the late nineties, and has never been typed up before.

P.S. Did y’all see where Jye said "I could go back and revise it, and add everything I've learned"? Two questions....wouldn’t you LOVE to see THAT version? And....exactly how much more HAS he learned? He writes mostly fantasy stuff these days (something I’m guilty of, as well) and I wonder what his military fiction would look like. Everybody e-mail him and get him to do it!!! You can reach him through [email protected] . BRK 10Feb03