several times since the flight had begun. Now that the job of serving the midmorning snack was nearly finished, she seemed to be lingering near his seat. “Not too crowded,” Berry said, motioning around the half-empty forward section of the Straton 797.
“Not here. In the back. I’m glad I pulled first-class duty. The tourist section is full.”
“High season in Tokyo?”
“I guess. Maybe there’s a special on electronics factory tours.” She laughed at her own joke. “Are you going on business or pleasure?”
“Both. It’s a pleasure to be away on business.” Disclosures can come out at unusual moments. Yet, for John Berry, that particular moment wasn’t an unusual one. The young flight attendant was everything that Jennifer Berry was not. Even better, she seemed to be none of the things that Jennifer Berry had become. “Sharon?” He pointed to the flight attendant’s name tag.
“Yes, Sharon Crandall. From San Francisco.”
“John Berry. From New York. I’m going to see Kabushi Steel in Tokyo. Then a metal-fabricating company in Nagasaki. No electronics factories. I go twice a year. The boss sends me because I’m the tallest. The Japanese like to emphasize their differences with the West. Short salespeople make them nervous.”
“Really?” She looked at him quizzically. She grinned. “No one ever told me that before. Are you kidding?”
“Sure.” He hesitated. His throat was dry. Just the thought of asking this young woman to sit with him was mildly unnerving. Yet all he wanted was someone to talk to. To pass the time. To pretend for a few relaxing moments that the situation in New York didn’t exist.
Jennifer Berry’s tentacles reached even this far. Her presence stretched across a continent and over an ocean. The image of his difficult and complaining wife lay over John Berry’s thoughts. Their two teenaged children-a son and a daughter-were on his mind, too. They had grown further from him every year. The family tie had become mainly their shared name. Shared living space and shared documents. Legalities.
The rest of what was termed these days their lifestyle was, to Berry, a cruel joke. An outrageously expensive house in Oyster Bay that he had always disliked. The pretentious country club. The phony bridge group. Hollow friendships. Neighborhood gossip. The cocktails, without which all of Oyster Bay, along with the neighboring suburbs, would have committed mass suicide long ago. The futility. The silliness. The boredom. What had happened to the things he cared about? He could hardly remember the good times anymore. The all-night talks with Jennifer, and their lovemaking, before it became just another obligation. Those camping trips with the kids. The long Sunday breakfasts. The backyard baseball games. It seemed like another life. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
John Berry found himself dwelling on the past more and more. Living in the past. A 1960s song on the radio made him yearn for Dayton, Ohio, his hometown. An old movie or serial on television brought on a nostalgia so acute that his heart ached.
He looked up at the young woman standing over him. “How about having a drink with me? Never mind. I know… you’re on duty. Then how about a Coke?” Berry was speaking quickly. “I’ll tell you about Japanese businessmen. Japanese customs. Very educational. Wonderful information. Great stuff to know if you ever want to become an international corporation.”
“Sure,” she said. “Love to hear it. Just give me a few minutes to finish up. A few more trays. Ten minutes.” Sharon Crandall gathered Berry’s tray and half a dozen others. She smiled at him as she walked past on her way to the service elevator in the rear of the first-class compartment.
Berry turned and watched as she stepped inside. The narrow elevator was barely big enough for both her and the trays. In a few seconds she had disappeared behind the sliding door, on her way down to the below-decks galley beneath the first-class compartment.
John Berry sat alone for a minute and collected his scattered thoughts. He got out of his seat and stretched his arms. He looked around the spacious first-class section. Then he looked out the window at the two giant engines mounted beneath the Straton’s right wing. They could swallow the Skymaster. One gulp, he thought.
His company, Taylor Metals, owned a four-seat Cessna Twin Skymaster for the sales staff, and if Berry had any real interest left, flying was it. He supposed that flying was mixed up somehow with his other problems. If he found the earth more tolerable, he might not grab every opportunity to fly above it.
Berry turned toward the rear of the first-class cabin. He saw that the lavatories were vacant. He looked at his wristwatch. He had time to wash up and comb his hair before Sharon returned.
On his way to the rear of the cabin, Berry glanced out the window again. He marveled at the enormous size and power of the giant airliner’s engines. He marveled, too, at the solitude of space. What he failed to notice was that they were not alone. He did not see the tiny dot against the horizon that was rapidly approaching the Straton airliner.
Lieutenant Peter Matos held the F-18’s control stick with his right hand. He inched the power levers slightly forward. The two General Electric engines spooled up to a higher setting. Matos continued to fly his Navy fighter in wide, lazy circles at 54,000 feet. He held the craft’s airspeed constant at slightly less than Mach 1. He was loitering, flying nondescript patterns inside a chunk of international airspace known to his country’s military as Operations Area R-23. He was waiting for a call from Home. It was overdue and he was just beginning to wonder about it when his earphones crackled with the beginning of a message. It was the voice of Petty Officer Kyle Loomis, whom Matos vaguely knew.
“Navy three-four-seven, this is Homeplate, over.”
Matos pressed a button on the top of his control stick. “Roger, Homeplate. Three-four-seven. Go ahead, over.” He began another turn through the tranquil Pacific sky.
The voice of the electronics mate in Room E-334 carried loud and clear. “The target has been released. We estimate an initial in-range penetration of your operational area within two minutes. Operation status is now changed to Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey. I say again, Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey.”
“Roger, Homeplate. I read Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey.” Matos released the transmit button and simultaneously pulled back on the control stick. Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey. Fire-at-will. He would never see the target, the hit, or the destruction except on his radar, yet the predator’s stimuli were there and his heart beat faster. The F-18 tightened its turn, and Matos felt the increase in G forces as he accelerated around the remainder of the circle he had been flying. He leveled the fighter on a northeasterly heading and spooled up the engines again. He felt like a knight charging into the field to do battle.
Peter Matos, like most military men who were not born in the continental United States, was more loyal, more patriotic, more enthusiastic than the native-born Americans. He had noticed this right from the beginning. Wherever the flags of the American military had flown-Germany, Guam, the Canal Zone, the Philippines-young men had rallied to those flags. There was also the Cuban officer subculture, the Mexicans, the Canadians, and others who saw the American armed forces as more than a military organization, more than a necessary expense, or just an organization you sent your tax money to, but never your sons. To men like Pedro Matos, who came out of the most abject poverty that his homeland, Puerto Rico, had to offer, the military was home, family, friends, life itself.
Matos worked hard at his duties, studied his manuals, watched what he said, never bucked the chain of command, expressed opinions only when asked, and carried out all orders with enthusiasm and without hesitation. Outwardly, he was sure he was getting it all right, but inwardly, he prayed to San Geronimo that he wouldn’t be passed over for promotion. One pass-over could mean the end of his military career, especially in a peacetime Navy.
Loomis’s voice jarred him out of his reverie. “Navy three-four-seven, do you have target acquisition?”
Matos glanced down at his radar screen. “Negative, Homeplate.”
“Roger, Navy. Keep us informed.”
“Will do.” Matos kept an eye on the radar screen as he let his mind drift back to the larger problems. Matos was certain that the results of this test would determine how the rest of his life would run. The test was secret. That much he was told. It was also illegal. That much he had figured out for himself. What he could not figure out was why they had chosen him to fire this missile.
The new AIM-63X Phoenix missiles rode on the belly mounts of his F-18. For this test, the missiles were fitted with dummy warheads of stainless steel and titanium, and the target was a supersonic military drone launched several hundred miles away by a Navy C-130 Hercules turboprop. Except for those facts, thought Matos, he could have been aiming a pair of live missiles at an attacking Tupolev bomber or a Chinese MiG-21. Of course, both Russia and China were friends of the United States at the moment-but like most military people, Matos knew
