Like the other aircraft, he began to climb at seven miles ahead of the ship. Unlike the others, he set out to the west, on his own.
Mongo climbed at a shallow angle, the blue surface slowly falling away as he concentrated on setting up his cockpit up for the mission. He soon passed 20,000 feet — and had almost another 20,000 feet to go.
Passing 30,000 feet, he was well above the white buildup columns that cast shadows on the surface below. To his right, and about 50 miles north, a storm with an anvil-topped cloud sat over an open patch of ocean. Far to the south, at a distance he guessed was over the South American landmass, he saw other towering cumulus thunderstorms with more anvil-tops. His radar detected contacts on the surface, four total, and he commanded his FLIR sensor to lock on them one at a time. The binocular power of the sensor helped him identify them as merchants: two containerships, a tanker, and one car carrier that resembled a floating rectangular box. Mongo guessed the car carrier to be coming up from the Panama Canal.
He still had over 100 miles to go.
At 36,000 feet, Mongo leveled off but stayed underneath the contrail altitude of an airliner about 15 miles ahead of his nose. He glanced over his shoulder to see if he was “marking” himself and, as he had planned, saw no contrail behind him. Good, he thought and watched the airliner on his FLIR. The silhouette looked like a Boeing widebody, and the closest he got to the aircraft was three miles as it crossed right-to-left in front of him.
Mongo wasn’t worried about being detected by the airliner, and out here in international airspace, it was unlikely anyone was watching either one of them. Big sky, little airplane. The white contrails the aircraft engines generated were long, and with nothing better to do, Mongo wondered where the flight had originated. He guessed Dallas, as good a guess as any. As the airliner gradually receded to the south, Mongo figured it to be a 767, and, by the paint job, he could identify the U.S. flag airline.
While Commander Wilson and his wingman Macho were returning home to Mother after their training flight, Mongo was just beginning his. After 30 minutes airborne and over 200 miles from the carrier, Mongo retarded the throttles and entered into a shallow descent. Fuel management around the ship — and especially in an FA-18—was critical, and Mongo would need to refuel in-flight before he recovered in two hours. But this was risky. He had to complete his mission with just enough reserve fuel to find the big wing Air Force tanker near