“No.”
She pronounced it correctly but Stoke was damned if he could tell much difference from the way he said it and the way she said it. German was such a weird-ass language anyway. No matter what you said in German it sounded like you were going to rip someone’s throat out. Ich liebe dich. Translation: I love you. Sounds like: I’d like to eat your nuts for supper.
“Let’s go say hello to Frau Wienerwald,” Stoke said. This was the woman who ran the baron’s phony gasthaus and from what he could gather from Jet, she was the kind of innkeeper who ate any small children who got lost in the woods.
“Winterwald,” Jet said. “Trust me, she won’t think it’s funny if you get it wrong. She’s the official gatekeeper to Schatzi-World.”
“This whole damn country feels like Disneyland,” Stoke said.
“It isn’t,” Jet said.
Chapter Thirty-two
The Indian Ocean
HAWKE HAD HAD HIS FIGHTER PILOT’S BREAKFAST—TWO ASPIRIN, a cup of coffee, and a puke—and headed for his airplane. Engines spooling up. Green jackets, purple jackets, yellow jackets, the color-coded crewmen ranging over the broad flight deck. The swarm of F/A18 Super Hornets, just arrived from the Nimitz, loaded and lethal, still, looking prematurely antiquated by the presence of the sleek, sculpted, single-seat F-35 in their hive.
And, too, there were the young aviators gawking lovingly at his plane. Kids who never ever wanted to do a damn thing in this world but fly airplanes. See if they had the stuff, ace.
Turn inside the other guy, turn your damn plane inside out if you had to, pulling nine or ten g’s and close as billy-be-damned to a suicidal red-out, all the blood rushing from your brain to your extremities. Get on some faceless boy’s six, unleash a Sidewinder and blow his punk ass out of the sky.
Yeah. Rain death and destruction down on invisible strangers and then fly home to a warm bunk on a big boat with a few thousand other guys. Get drunk and fight with your fists and sleep it off in the brig. Shed friends, shed wives, shed family. Even shed a few tears maybe when it was all over, when even the great shooting match in the sky was finally over.
All for what, hotshot? Hawke thought.
Honor? Danger? Death? Glory?
Who the hell knew?
It was a stupid question, anyway, Hawke told himself as he reached forward to adjust his suddenly squawking radio. Because the only pilots who would ever really know the one, true answer were dead.
“That really you down there, Hawkeye?” Alex heard a familiar voice say in his headset.
“Roger, sir, it’s me all right,” Hawke replied, tightening his harness. Girding my loins, he thought, and smiled.
“Well, I’ll be damned, it shore as hell is him! Look at this, boys, Captain Hawke’s flying himself a real bona- fide airplane this time!”
It was the Lincoln’s new air boss. A crusty old bird named Joe Daly. Lately arrived from the Kennedy, where the American jocks called him the Iron Duke. Hawke recognized Daly’s droll twang from his own brief sojourn aboard the American carrier Big John. Alex had caused a bit of consternation on board when he’d landed his little seaplane on the carrier three years ago. This was at a critical moment during what he’d come to call his personal Cuban crisis. Irritation was more like it. For some reason, he and the Iron Duke just hadn’t clicked. Checking his fuel, he heard a crackle in his phones and the Duke was back.
“Last time I saw you, Hawkeye, you were flying that little toy airplane of yours. Built it yourself out of tinfoil and rubber bands. Took you four or five passes to get that dang Tinkertoy down on my deck. What’d you call that thing?”
“Kittyhawke, sir. Finest airplane in the sky.”
“You’re bleeping nuts, boy. Get your ass off my deck.”
Hawke laughed. He followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle of cat number 1. Flaps and slats to takeoff, he merely sat and watched. A green-jacketed crewman instantly knelt on the deck and attached the towbar connecting his nose gear to the shuttle in the slot. Get ready for the cat-shot.
“It was actually only two passes, as I recall, sir,” Hawke said, craning his head around for one last look at the Lincoln. “Third time’s the charm. I see you got yourself a new boat.”
“Yeah, well, the cream rises to the top in this man’s navy, Hawkeye. You sure you know how to fly that damn thing?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.” Hawke noticed that the hand on the control stick was shaking a bit. Adrenaline. Had to be. C’mon, boys, hook me up. He wasn’t scared of the monster, he told himself. He was just excited about what a carrier launch would be like in this thing. Right. He was just shaking a little because he was ready to light the candle.
C’mon, Momma, now light the candle ’cause you know your poppa is too hot to handle…
“Okay, Hawkeye, you are number two for launch,” the Iron Duke said in his phones. “You, uh, you might want to let that Super Hornet there in front of you get airborne before you push any unfamiliar buttons. Sound good to you?”
“Aye, aye, sir, sounds good to me,” Hawke said, grinning from ear to ear. Single seat. Single engine. Supersonic.
Nowhere to go but up.
But there was a problem with the aircraft in front of him. Hawke forced himself to sit tight in his cockpit and wait for the tugs to pull the disabled fighter off the cat and put him in its place. The process seemed to take from here to eternity.
“Hawkeye, you are number one to go,” the Iron Duke said after a few long minutes.
“Roger. Number one to go. Onward and upward, sir.”
The jet blast deflector rose up from the deck behind him.
His hand went to the throttles. Oil pressure and hydraulics okay. He waggled the stick and checked the movement of the horizontal stabilizers. He could see the “shooter,” the catapult officer down in the little domed control pod that protruded just above the deck. He was getting the cat ready. Clouds of white steam were rising from the slot beneath Hawke’s airplane.
The shooter was monitoring the pressure building up in the cat cylinders. The combined pent-up force of the steam behind the catapult shuttle and the enormous thrust of his Rolls-Royce–built engine was about to hurl him into the sky. It was definitely time to fly.
Hawke wound it up, gave the salute, and waited for the launch.
One heartbeat, two heartbeats later, he felt the thunk as the shooter eased the shuttle into position with the hydraulic piston. He shoved the throttle forward and the big engine came up nicely: rpm, exhaust gas temp, fuel flow. Looks good. The cat fired. The big plane shuddered like some living thing and started to go.
Then…nothing.
He was moving down the deck all right, but there was no acceleration. Christ! He pulled the power and stood on the brakes. Somehow, he had to shut it down. Where the hell was that bloody computer when he really needed it? It was supposed to anticipate his every need. Surely it must have seen this nightmare coming!
Two seconds later, his heart pounding, he found himself teetering over the leading edge of the flight deck. The air boss was saying something very calm and soothing in his earphones but the big fighter was rocking right on the edge with every deep rolling wave, every sickening movement of the ship. He reached over to blow the canopy. He had to get the hell out, now, while he was still alive. Too late to eject? Maybe not, if—
“Stay in the cockpit, Hawkeye,” the air boss said, as if reading his thoughts. “We are going to hitch you to a tug—we, uh—”
