The Top Gun's Return

The darkness around him filled with images, the same well-loved faces that had kept him sane and clinging to life for so long. Well-remembered voices spoke to him, as they had so many times before. He concentrated on the faces and felt his head clear and his breathing quiet. Drawing on reserves of strength he'd forgotten he had, he drew himself slowly erect, and his chest filled and his shoulders lifted.

'Wait! There's another one!' The unseen companion's voice came again, trembling with emotion. 'You can't leave him-'

'Another one-in here? What, you mean, another American? '

'Yeah, he's-'

'That's impossible. We weren't briefed-'

'Look, I'm not leaving him behind.'

Someone swore impatiently. 'You sure? Where is he? In here?' The same voice rose to a shout. 'Hey, buddy, can you hear me? If you can hear me-'

'Yeah, I hear you.' It felt odd to him to be talking so loudly, but he thought his voice sounded okay. Calm. Normal. Not even shaking. Much.

More swearing-startled this time. 'I'll be damned-uh…okay, buddy, listen, we're gonna get you outa there. I want you to take cover, you understand? I'm gonna blow the door.'

'Ready when you are.'

He pressed himself into the corner of his cell to one side of the door and covered his head with his arms. The explosion that came then seemed almost an anticlimax, and in its aftermath he turned and drew himself once more erect.

For some reason he'd expected light, but in the rectangle where the door had been there was only the thin gray of starlight and the flickering glow from burning bombsites leaking through the high, narrow windows of the ancient fortress. His rescuers were darker shapes, anonymous and alien in their gear, like something out of science fiction.

'Are you guys SEALS?' he asked. For some reason he knew they would be.

'That's right. Who the hell are you?'

Realizing they'd be able to see him with their night-vision goggles, he gave them the best salute he could. 'Lt. Tristan Bauer, United States Navy.'

There was a stunned silence. Then one of the shapes said, 'You're Navy?' just as another said, 'That's not possible.'

That one, the nonbeliever, pushed past his comrade and into the cell, cradling his weapon across his chest as if he needed the comfort of it. 'Lt. Bauer's dead. My brother served with him on the Teddy Roosevelt. He was shot down in '95. That's…' His voice wavered. 'Jeez, that'd be eight years.'

Tris grinned, stretching muscles he hadn't used in a very long time. 'Yeah, so, what the hell took you guys so long?'

Early April, New York City, USA

Jessie and her sister, Joy Lynn, were arguing about where to have lunch, as usual.

'Not Thai again, please,' Jessie said with a shudder as she lengthened her stride in a vain attempt to keep up with her older and considerably shorter sister. Joy Lynn had been a New Yorker for going on ten years, since before her second divorce became final, and had evidently forgotten that GRITS, as in, Girls Raised in the South, never walk if they can help it.

'And don't even think about suggesting Indian,' she warned as the suggestive tinkle of temple bells floated from a nearby doorway. 'Last time you took me to an Indian restaurant I had to go find a hotdog vendor afterward just to put my stomach right. Whatever happened to good old American?' It was a rhetorical question, asked plaintively of the weeping sky, and had less to do with her food preferences than it did the serious second thoughts she was having about visiting her New-York-dwelling sister in the springtime when the air back home in Georgia was warm and sweet and the countryside aflame with azaleas. 'What's wrong with KFC?' she whined, hugging her borrowed raincoat close across her chest. 'Bojangles with cole slaw an' biscuits?'

Unperturbed, Joy Lynn said, 'Don't be such a hick,' as she whipped her trilling cell phone out of a raincoat pocket. She glanced at the caller ID, said, 'Huh,' in a wondering way and put the phone to her ear. 'Hey, Momma, what's up?'

'Momma!' Jessie exclaimed. 'Why would she be callin'?'

Joy Lynn's pace had slowed. She flicked a glance sideways at Jessie and said, 'Uh-huh.'

Jessie's belly quivered. 'She wantin' me?' An alarm had gone off in her head. Sammi June.

'Uh-huh,' said Joy Lynn again, but not to her, holding up a silencing finger. Then she said, 'Okay. Hold on a sec-' She grabbed Jessie by the sleeve of the raincoat and hauled her through a warm doorway that smelled strongly of garlic.

'It's Italian, for God's sake,' she hissed at Jessie, who was muttering, 'But-but-' and dragging back against the tow. Jessie had nothing against Italian, but butterflies were flopping earnestly in her belly now, and she no longer had any interest whatsoever in eating.

It's Sammi June-oh God, it must be. Why else would Momma be calling me unless something awful's happened to Sammi June?

Numb with foreboding, she let Joy Lynn haul her to a table next to a heavily textured wall that was painted dark green with spiderwebs of white plaster showing through. Her sister tugged a chair out with a thump, pushed Jessie down on it, then wedged herself into the one opposite. 'Okay, she's sittin' down,' she said into the phone, breathless and pink in the cheeks. She went silent, listening. Then breathed, 'Oh, my Lord.'

Something's happened to Sammi June, was the only thought in Jessie's head. She had begun to tremble uncontrollably. Panic washed over her; she couldn't breathe. No. I can't bear it. I can't. I can't.

She'd felt like this only one other time in her life. That day came back to her so vividly now…Dan Rather's voice on the television, the screech of the screen door…her mother saying, 'Jessie, you need to come in here.' The crunch of tires on gravel, the dark-blue sedan, and two tall men coming toward her across a polka-dot lawn. The way the world had gone silent. The way she'd held out her hands to keep those men from coming on up the steps, the same way she was holding out her hands right now, as if she could push away that phone Joy Lynn was trying to give to her. As if by keeping it away she could keep herself from ever having to hear the words Momma was about to say to her. As if by not hearing them she could make them not be true.

'Sammi June-' The words burst from her, exploding like a sneeze past the icy fear, the trembling.

'No, hon', it's not Sammi June.' Joy Lynn's voice was gentle, and so was her hand as she took Jessie's and held on to it. Her fingers felt warm, wrapped around Jessie's icy ones. 'Sammi June's fine. Everybody's just fine.'

Then what…? Dazed, Jess could only give her head an uncomprehending shake.

'Jessie, honey, you need to take this.' Joy Lynn pressed the cell phone into Jessie's hand and folded her stiff fingers around it. 'Momma's got somethin' to tell you. It's okay,' she added when Jessie just went on looking at her, dumb and frozen with anguish. Trying her best to smile though there were tears in her eyes, she said, 'It's okay, I promise.'

Drained and shell-shocked, still trembling, Jessie lifted the phone to her ear. 'Momma? What is it? What's wrong?'

'Nothing's wrong, honey.' But Momma's voice sounded way too calm, the way it only did when she was about to deliver some painful news. It had sounded like that, Jessie remembered, when she'd told Sammi June and J.J. the old hounddog, General, had been bitten by a copperhead and had to be put to sleep. 'But…this is gonna be hard to hear.'

Jessie's heart was beating so fast she wondered if there was something seriously wrong with it. She pressed a hand against her chest to hold it still and whispered, 'Okay.'

'Jessie…honey.' There was a single high musical note of laughter or perhaps a sob. 'Honey, it's Tristan. They found him. In Baghdad. Oh, sweet child. He's alive.'

April, Landstuhl, Germany

Jessica Ann Starr couldn't remember a time when she hadn't loved Tristan Bauer, so it always came as something of a shock to her to realize he'd actually been present in her life for so few of her thirty-six years. Now,