Battle Born

… with Rinc’s picture cut out of it.

He was frozen in place. It was logical that he be cut out of the picture — after all, he wasn’t dead — but they had left the pictures of the surviving crew members, and why his squadronmates had chosen that particular photo to use on the memorial wall made him uneasy. All the other pictures were individual shots, even in cases where multiple crew members had been lost. It was as if he were worse than dead — he was excluded, ousted. They had made a point of eliminating him, as if to remind him that he had survived an accident that he had no right to survive.

Rinc hadn’t yet selected a seat, but Martina made the choice for him by bringing his cola and a bowl of pretzels over to a booth. She picked the one farthest from the door to the back room. He looked at the closed door, then at Martina. Her expression answered all his questions: yes, some members of Aces High were back there; yes, the commander, Rebecca Furness, was there — and no, he wasn’t welcome.

“Don’t worry about it none, Rodeo,” she said in her raspy, cigarette-scratched voice. “Give ’em time. They’ll take you back.”

“Time is the one thing I don’t think I have, Marty,” Rinc said.

“You don’t worry about nuthin’ ’cept your check ride tomorrow,” she told him. She had the flying schedule pinned down as well as if she were on the operations distribution list. “You jes’ show ’em what you got. You ain’t a member of Aces High ’cause they let you in the back. You a member because you got what it takes.”

She noticed Rinc glancing over toward the Snake Eyes board again. “Fergit ‘bout dat too, Rodeo.” But she didn’t offer to take it down. She couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. The Snakes Eyes wall was like a shrine. However hurtful or even vindictive a posting, no one, not even Martina, could mess with it.

“Did that asshole Long Dong put that up there?”

“Long Dong’s sho’ enough an asshole. Don’t let him git under your skin none.” He noticed she didn’t actually answer him. “You listen good, boy,” she said, pointing a sausagelike finger at him. “You hold your head up like a man and don’t never be ashamed of anything anyone ever says about you — even if it’s a damned lie. You remember that.” And then she left him alone.

Rinc got out his flight manuals, charts, and target study notes and tried looking them over, but the words and pictures blurred before his eyes. He left all of it on the table — Martina would see to it that no one touched it — grabbed his glass, went outside, and climbed up the freshly painted wood steps that led to the roof. There he put on his sunglasses and sat down on a metal bench. The sky was ice-blue. The air was cold, but the sun felt warm. There were clouds piling up over Mount Rose to the west, and the Sierra Nevada mountaintops above eight thousand feet still wore a thin blanket of snow.

The winds were calm, so the tower was using the northbound runways. As he watched, two B-1B bombers pulled out of their parking spots and taxied to runway 34 left, a Reno Air Boeing 727 following them. It was easy to visualize the passengers straining to look out the windows as they taxied past the Air National Guard ramp and catching a glimpse of the sleek, deadly warplanes. At the end of the taxiway, the Bones turned right onto the “hammerhead,” a section of the taxiway with a high steel wall on the runway side, to make way for the commercial flight to pass. The warplanes were soon followed by the SOF, or supervisor of flying, an experienced pilot whose task was to do a “last chance inspection,” a drive around the B-1s to check that all streamers were removed and the planes were ready for takeoff.

The steel revetment wall in the hammerhead was supposedly there to protect commercial flights in case any weapons accidentally dropped on the runway and exploded. These days, almost all B-1 missions carried practice bombs, either small “beer can” bombs or concrete-filled bomb casings. But because it was only a replacement unit, Reno had no stockpiles of real weapons. All the weapons they might be called upon to use were stored at the weapons depot near Naval Air Station Fallon, and would be delivered to the base by rail. The steel wall was only window-dressing any-way — a two-thousand-pound Mark 84 would take out any aircraft and almost anything else above ground within a half mile of the blast.

A few minutes later, after the commercial flight had departed, the first Bone taxied into position and ran its engines up to full afterburner takeoff power. Watching a B-1B Lancer on its takeoff roll was just as thrilling to him now as it had been the first time he saw one more than ten years ago. The bomber looked huge on its long, spindly legs with its wings fully extended, but when the pilot pushed those throttles up to full afterburner, it leaped down the runway like a cheetah.

The noise was not too bad — loud, like the old Boeing 727 that had taken off just before it, but not irritating. But when the afterburners were plugged in, the sound was deafening, a low, piercing harmonic rumbling that you could feel in the middle of your chest from two miles away. Surprisingly, there were few noise complaints. When they took off to the north, the Bones flew within a half mile of the Reno Hilton and right over John Ascuaga’s Nugget Hotel and Casino, and they must certainly rattle the windows in those hotel towers! But Rinc had often seen hundreds of people gather outside the casinos to watch the Bones launch, especially during the rare nighttime launches when the bombers’ afterburner plumes stretched a hundred feet across the sky. It was like a mini air show several times a week. The Bones were part of the city’s attractions, like the glittering neon lights, the brothels, and the National Bowling Center. Eerie, a little ominous, yet curiously welcome. Nonetheless, takeoffs and landings between nine P.M. and seven A.M. were allowed only on weekends and only using military power, which produced about the same amount of noise as a commercial airliner.

Rinc must have been temporarily deafened after the Bone blasted off because he never heard her approach on the rooftop.

“Hello, Rodeo.”

He turned, startled. There before him was Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Furness.

He got to his feet, but as he stepped toward her, he sensed her body stiffening. “Rebecca, I… It’s good to see you,” he stammered.

Her eyes hardened, her jaw was set taut — and then she rushed into his arms. “Damn you to hell, Rinc,” she whispered, pulling him tightly to her and kissing him hard and hungrily. Tasting her lips, Rinc felt like a man on the verge of drowning who had just taken a deep gulp of sweet, fresh air.

They kissed for a few lingering moments. He sat down on the bench and tried to pull her next to him, but she remained standing. “I’ve missed you so much,” he said.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked him, the hurt evident in her voice. “Why didn’t you call to tell me you got back on flying status?”

“I was going to that night,” Rinc said. “But the way you acted in the sim — I thought it was too early, maybe not right…”

“You’re a real jerk sometimes, Rinc,” Rebecca said angrily. “I love you. I care about you. You can’t just cut me out like that. I’ve hardly heard from you at all since you got out of the hospital. You’ve never returned my calls, never called me…”

“I tried.”

“Trying doesn’t help. It hurts too much. And then to see you in the sim, duplicating the crash — that was worse. You were well enough to hunt for a different cause for the crash, but not well enough to want to see me. I decided the best I could do was let Long Dong chew on your butt for a while.”

Her words sliced into Rinc’s very soul. “Oh God, Beck, I am so sorry,” he cried. “If I could, I’d trade my life for all of them. You know that, don’t you?”

“Dammit, Seaver, don’t you understand?” she said hotly. “No one wants you to trade your life for anyone on your dead crew. No one wants to see you dead — that’s the last thing anyone wants. Especially me. We want you to be one of us again. It’s you that has this chip on his shoulder. What you don’t seem to get is that we’re all hurting… dammit, I’m hurting. I want you back. I want you with me, the way it was before.”

“The way it was before?” Rinc interjected. “What was so great about that? Sneaking around? Not allowed even to come near each other in public for fear someone might see us? Nothing but a series of one-nighters…”

“Look, Rinc,” she answered. “You know this was the way it had to be. We talked it out when we first fell in love — that we’d rather have each other part-time than not at all. I am your squadron commander and your superior officer. If anyone in this unit learned we were sleeping together, I’d lose my job and you’d lose all credibility. There wasn’t any possibility of a normal relationship. There still isn’t — not until and unless we both decide, together, that we’re willing to make a serious career change — either you leave the Guard, or I do. But you know all this — my God, we’ve hashed it out over and over. What’s the point of bringing it up again? We’re stuck with the decision