The Republic F-84F Thunderstreak was an American single-engined, swept-wing fighter-bomber introduced in 1954. Powerplant: 1 x Wright J-65-W-3 turbojet. Top speed: 695 mph at sea level. Crew: 1. Capable of delivering one Mark 7 nuclear weapon with the inclusion of the Low-Altitude Bomb System (LABS).

The 77th Fighter-Bomber Squadron (“The Jackals”) burned over Central Europe, heading to targets on the Polish-German border. Sunlight reflected off the mirrored metal of their speeding silver fighters, the green landscape bathed them half in emerald. They kept a tight formation, down lower than 200 feet. Soviet radars were generating an electromagnetic ceiling leading to the initial point, a trap for anything flying higher than the ground clutter. Higher than 200 feet and the Soviet radars would pick them up. Higher meant that the 23-millimeter guns could automatically track the Thunderstreaks, better than a person could. Higher meant death.

Jack Beck flew the Number 3 ship. His breath and sweat made his oxygen mask stink. The engine roared. Trim on the flaps was off, making his plane pull left. No time to fix it. He tilted the stick to compensate. This was what he had trained for. The nuclear device strapped to the belly of his plane needed to be delivered. The gyroscopes had already been configured for the toss bombing maneuver.

 The hills streaked by. The clouds were gray. Unguided, manually aimed gunfire erupted around them. A fleet of jets was approaching the border; hundreds of bombs. The war was on. 

He kept his eye half out the windscreen, half on the altitude reading. He watched the other airplanes in his formation, keeping close to them but far enough away that he could maneuver if something went wrong. Dozens of feet, tops.

And it did. Yellow tracers emerged horizontally from a hill to the right. The gunners couldn’t have picked them up on radar; must be using old iron sights. Tracers smashed into Number 5. His fuel tanks took the hit. They exploded. The force of the explosion blasted his plane into little silver pieces that fluttered like confetti. Number 7 was close behind Number 5. Too close. He pulled up to dodge the debris. Too high. Radar guided guns locked on and fired from four different directions at once. They shredded his right wing. He spiraled around wildly. The engine flamed out and sent the plane careening into the ground. No chute.

Beck ignored it. Two MiGs dived out of the sky, way too fast for Beck to identify them like they had trained him to do with playing cards. The silver interceptors launched an unguided rocket storm at the lead element. Two Thunderstreaks disintegrated under the barrage. The Soviet pilots pulled up. One sailed over the formation. The other couldn’t make the maneuver and slammed right into the ground at the speed of sound.

The cloud of debris loomed ahead. There was no way for Beck to dodge it. Into the black and metal and fuel fumes. Beck’s plane shook. The engine ingested smoke and started losing power. Airspeed decreased. A line of fire emerged ahead of him and started sweeping back to his crippled plane. The plane bled lift and nosed down towards the floor. He flipped a series of switches automatically, desperately. The engine coughed, relit, and smashed him back into the seat with a burst of thrust. He dived under the sweep of the tracer shells. They got Number 8 instead; blew his tail off. Beck didn’t see it, but the ejection seat worked. Number 8 rocketed up and into the air. Then the parachute broke.

And there! The target over the hill—a long white research facility. The anti-air was as thick as a hailstorm. Glowing trails of missiles climbed towards the high-altitude bombers. 

Initial point. Flick LABS switch. Transfer control to autopilot. Trajectory engaged. Pulling up. Beck wasn’t in the loop anymore; the plane's primitive electronic thoughts—electrical switches and gyroscopic tracking—were. Good thing; the high-speed climb was draining the blood from his head.

The Thunderstreak rocketed into the sky shaking, the nuclear bomb arming mechanisms engaging, the timer that would trigger the uranium chain reaction starting. At the predetermined flight conditions, with the airplane starting to loop back around, the hardpoint released, lofting the nuclear device into a sharp parabolic arc. Beck began regaining consciousness as the curve flattened out. He started wrestling his plane into a roll to complete the Immelmann maneuver. Just like an airshow. Just like the Thunderbirds. 

The nuclear bomb was descending now, its simple bomb logic counting down the decreasing altitude while Beck pushed his throttle full forward to get enough speed to get away from the weapon he had released which was getting closer to the ground and preparing to light off its nuclear load but he didn’t have a timer inside of his cockpit so he didn’t know how long the bomb had been in flight, but he kept flying on until the streaking green of a German forest gave way to sudden pure white illumination that filled his cockpit with a nuclear FLASH.