chin.
“There’s a verse in the Bible,” Callie said, her chin quivering. ” “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
“Ahal If only you believed that!”
“I do,” she said, trying to convince herself, and turned back to the window. Other husbands went off to work every morning, they had regular jobs, they came home nights and weekends and life was safe and sane. Of course, people die in car wrecks and you read about airliner crashes. But those things don’t happen to people like me!
Why couldn’t Jake have found a safe, sane, regular job, with an office and a company car and a nice, predictable future? Damn him, she had waited all these years for the sword to drop. Those memorial services whenever someone was killed — she always went with Jake to those. The widow, the kids, the condolences, the or- gan music. But it wouldn’t happen to Jake — oh no! He’s a good pilot, real good, the other men say, too good to ever smear himself all over some farmer’s potato field, too good to ever leave her sitting alone in the chapel with the organ wheezing and some fat preacher spouting platitudes and everyone filing past and muttering well- meaning nonsense. Damn you, Jake. Damn you!
Arnold passed her a Kleenex and she used it on her eyes. He held out the box and she took several and blew her nose.
“Next week, perhaps we can talk about that little girl you want to adopt?”
Calhe nodded and tried to arrange her face.
“Thank you for coming today.” He smiled gravely. She rose and he held the door for her, then eased it shut as she paused at the receptionist’s desk to write a check.
He opened her file and made some notes. After a glance at his watch, he picked up his phone and dialed. On the third ring a man answered. One word: “Yes.”
“She was here today,” Arnold said without preliminaries. “He’s going to be working on a new airplane project, she says.” He con- tinued, reading from his notes.
It wasn’t until the A-6 was taxiing toward the duty runway for takeoff that the incongruity of the whole situation struck Toad Tarkington. The plane thumped and wheezed and swayed like a drunken dowager as it rolled over the expansion joints in the con- crete. He had been so busy with the computer and Inertial Naviga- tion System while they sat in the chocks that he had had no time to look around and become accustomed to this new cockpit. Now as he took it all in a wry grin twisted his Ups under his oxygen mask.
Rita Moravia sat in the pilot’s seat on his left in the side-by-side cockpit. Her seat was slightly higher than his and several inches further forward, but due to her size her head was on the same level as his. Not an inch of her skin was exposed. Her helmet, green visor and oxygen mask encased her head, and her body and arms were sheathed in a green flight suit, gloves, steel-toed black boots. Over all this she wore a G suit, torso harness and survival vest, to which was attached an inflatable life vest. Toad wore exactly the same outfit, but the thought that the beautiful Rita Moravia was hidden somewhere under the flight gear in the pilot’s seat struck him as amusing. One would never even know she was a woman except for the sound of her voice on the intercom system, the ICS. “Takeoff checklist,” she said crisply, her voice all business.
Toad read the items one by one and she gave the response to each after checking the appropriate switch or lever or gauge as the plane rolled along. The taxiway seemed like a little highway going nowhere in particular; the concrete runways on the right were hidden by the grassy swell of a low hill. To the left was a gravel road, and paralleling that the beach, where die Puget Sound waves lapped at the land. The water in the sound appeared glassy today. Above them was blue sky, a pleasant change from the clouds that had moved restlessly from west to east since Toad and Rita arrived on the island. Even Mother Nature was cooperating. The back- ground noise of the two idling engines, a not unpleasant drone, murmured of latent power. They promised flight Toad breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. He had been on the ground too long.
Clearance copied and read back, Toad asked the tower for clear- ance to take off. It was readily granted. The traffic pattern was momentarily empty. Rita Moravia rolled the A-6 onto the runway and braked to a stop. With her left hand she advanced the throttles to the stops as Toad flipped the IFF to transmit. The IFF encoded the plane’s radar blip on all air control radars.
The engines wound up slowly at first, then quickened to a full- throated roar that was loud even in the cockpit The nose of the machine dipped as the thrust compressed the nose-gear oleo, al- most as if the plane were crouching, gathering strength for its leap into die sky. Moravia waggled the stick gently, testing the controls one more time, while she waited for the engine temperatures to peak. Outside the plane. Toad knew, the roar of the two engines could be heard for several miles. No doubt the flight crewmen on the ramps near the hangars were pausing, listening as the roar reached them, their attention momentarily captured by the bird announcing its readiness for flight. Finally satisfied, Rita Moravia released the brakes.
The nose oleo rebounded and the A-6 began to roll, gathering speed, faster and faster and faster. The needle on the airspeed indi- cator came off the peg … 80 … 100… faster and faster as the wheels thumped and the machine swayed gently over the un- even concrete… 130… 140… the nose came off the ground and Moravia stopped the stick’s rearward movement with a gentle nudge.
As the broad, swept wings bit into the air the main wheels left the ground and the thumps and bumps ceased.
Moravia slapped the gear handle up and, passing 170 knots. raised the flaps and slats. Climbing and accelerating, the Intruder shot over the little town of Oak Harbor bellowing its song. Upward they flew, upward, into the smooth gentle sky.
He was flying again. It seemed — somehow it was strange and bit- tersweet all at once. He hadn’t thought about his last flight in months, but now as the engines moaned and the plane swam through the air, memories of his last flight with Jake Grafton in an F-14 over the Med flooded over Toad Tarkington. There was fear in those memories. He fought to push them out of his mind as he twiddled the knobs to optimize the radar presentation and checked the computer readouts. He glanced outside. The peaks of the Cas- cade Mountains were sliding by beneath the plane. The steep crags were gray in those places where the clouds and snow didn’t hide their naked slopes.
Rita Moravia had the Intruder level at Flight Level 230—23,000 feet Toad concentrated on the equipment on the panel in front of him. As he tried desperately to remember all that his instructor had told him, he sneaked a glance at Moravia. She sat in her seat calmly scanning the sky and the instrument panel. She had en- gaged the autopilot and was watching it fly the plane. Now she adjusted the bug on the HSI, the rotating compass ring. She had the Yakima TACAN dialed in. Now she toggled the switch that moved her seat up a millimeter and stretched lazily. “Nice plane, huh?” she said when her left hand once more came to rest on the throttles, where her ICS button was.
Toad fumbled with his ICS button, which he keyed with his left foot. “Yeah. Fucking super.”
“How’s the system?”
“Looks okay to me, as if I knew.”
“Found Yakima yet?”
He ignored the question as he studied the radar. The city was still seventy miles away according to tne TACAN. There it was on the radar, right under the cursor cross hairs, just a blob of solid return amid a whole scopeful of return from hills and ridges and houses and barns.
Yeah, Toad, you better figure out how to find a city in all this mess or this little flight is gonna be a disaster. The whole essence of the bombardier’s art was interpreting this jumble of return on the radar scope. And Jake Grafton and those other A-6 perverts de- manded he pick it up in just a week! Well, he’d show them! If those attack weenies can figure out this shit in eight months, a week will be about right for the old Horny Toad. After all, this worn-out flying dump truck…
Moravia was asking Seattle Center if they could proceed direct to the start of the low-level route. Toad cycled the steering to that point and examined the radar carefully. Thank God the guys at VA-128 had picked a town on the Columbia River to start the route. Even a blind fighter RIO — Radar Intercept Officer — could find that. Or should be able to find it with the aid of the radarscope photographs that were included in the navigation package for this route. He arranged the stack of photographs on his kneeboard and compared the first one to the live presentation on the radar scope. Yep!
They had passed the third checkpoint on the navigation route and were somewhere in central Oregon flying at 360 knots true, 335 indicated, 500 feet above the ground, when Toad’s savage mood began to improve. He was
