another. The harness cutting into him as the SAR copter lifted him aboard … the mustard-colored uniforms of the Oriental soldiers dragging him onto the deck of the North Korean patrol craft … One dream blended with another until Coyote no longer knew which was which.
He remembered the prison camp, the brutal guards, the beating. They had finished with him and marched him into the yard outside, and there they had prepared him for execution. Julie … he’d held on to thoughts of Julie, and with her picture in his mind he’d accepted the idea of death, but when the guards pulled their triggers the only sound had been the snicking of bolts on empty chambers. A mock execution, designed to break him down …
Coyote came fully awake with a start, disoriented, confused, soaked with sweat. It took a long moment to get his bearings, to realize he was still in Sick Bay, safe after being fished out of the Atlantic following the ordeal of the battle with the overpowering Russian forces.
“Hey, Coyote, you okay?” John-Boy asked from the next bed, sitting up and looking concerned.
“Yeah … yeah, I’m okay,” Grant replied, knowing he sounded anything but convincing. “Just … a bad dream.”
He shuddered and turned over, unwilling to face John-Boy, but equally unwilling to go back to sleep. He had dreamed much the same dream every night for six months after the end of the Wonsan fighting. He’d spent a long time getting over Korea before finally driving himself to return to the carrier and face his fears, and in the skies over the Indian Ocean he’d proven that he still had the old edge. The dreams had come back from time to time, but over the months they had finally faded away.
Now he was dreaming again. When his Tomcat had finally given up the ghost he and John-Boy had punched out, close enough to the carrier to make a recovery fairly easy. Still, the same chill waters that had dragged Jolly Greene to his death after the crash on the flight deck had nearly claimed Coyote as well, and would have had it not been for John-Boy’s help. This time help had been close at hand, but the parallels with Korea were still vivid.
Someday his luck would run out. He would fly out on a mission and never make it back. Like Greene … or Baird … or Stramaglia.
In that camp in Korea Coyote had thought he’d made his peace with death. After the mock execution, he had truly believed that he was ready to die, and that had made it easier to endure everything that had followed. But he had been given a second life, one that included not just Julie but a new daughter and the chance to start with a clean slate.
Yet he’d come back to this life, and some day it would take him for its own. He would lose everything and the two people he cared about most would have to go on without him. He wasn’t just playing with his own life, but with theirs.
That thought hurt worst of all.
“Coyote?” He rolled over again. It was Tombstone, looking haggard and drawn with a uniform that looked like it had been slept in. “They say you check out fine, Coyote. You’ll be flying again in no time.”
“Yeah?” He couldn’t muster any enthusiasm.
Magruder took a step toward him and stopped. “Hey, look, man, I wish I’d been out there with you guys. Maybe if CAG had let me go up there things would’ve been different.”
“Sure,” Grant said. “You’d be dead and he’d be alive. Hell of a trade, huh?”
After their confrontation outside CAG’s office Coyote had cooled down enough to realize that Magruder hadn’t deliberately turned his back on him, but the gulf between them was still there. Even as tired as Tombstone plainly was, Coyote could see that same wistfulness in his friend’s eyes. Magruder wanted to recapture something in the past, something he’d lost … the same thing Coyote still had but would gladly have given up in exchange for the chance to live in peace with his family. That gap between the two men could only get wider the way things were going now.
Tombstone forced a feeble smile and broke the long, awkward silence. “Hey, look, the least you can do is try to bribe me to give you a good efficiency report. I mean, what’s the good of being best buddy to your new CAG if you don’t use it, huh?”
“Damn it, Stoney, leave me alone!” Coyote exploded. “Just leave me the hell alone!”
Magruder took a step back, as if recoiling from a blow, and his face grew hard. “I would if I could,” he said harshly. “I’m sorry you seem to think I’ve suddenly become the enemy or something. I never wanted that.” He paused. “I came down here because I needed you. I was thinking about Korea, and I realized how much our friendship always meant to me, how it helped keep me sane sometimes. But even if I can’t have your friendship anymore, I still need you. We’re up against it, Will, and I need help sorting out what to tell the admiral.”
“I can’t help you with that,” Grant said quietly. He wanted to say something more, to try to explain or apologize, whatever it would take to get past the empty look in Tombstone’s eyes. But Magruder didn’t give him the chance.
“That dogfight yesterday … it was a good trap, but it didn’t work. The Russians screwed up and didn’t finish you guys off when they probably could have. I want to know why. If we end up going up against them again, I need to be able to make them screw up again and give us a chance to win. Without some kind of edge we’ll never pull it off.”
“What do you want from me?” Coyote asked. “We fought, we got our asses kicked, the cavalry showed up. That’s all I know.”
“Come on, Will. You were up there in that dogfight. In command, for all intents and purposes. I wasn’t there, and all I’ve got to go on are the reports from the Hawkeye and a few vague ideas. Why did the Russians pull those planes out?”
He shrugged, unable or unwilling to come to grips with the question himself. “Ask Batman. Or Ears.”
“God damn it, Will, I’m asking you! It’s your instincts I need. Your nose for tactics. The Hawkeye report makes it look like they pulled those planes out because our Hornets were forming up over Jeff. Was that it? Were they screening their carrier, or did they just think they didn’t need the overkill to take you guys out? Come on, you must have had some kind of feel for how they were doing. If they were screening their carrier, that means there’s at least one bastard out there who can be bluffed into pulling in his horns on cue. But if it was just a miscalculation of how much strength they needed up there …”
Grant sat up slowly, frowning, forcing himself to relive the dogfight. “They were doing pretty good,” he said. “They frightened off Tyrone and nailed Trapper. Then the Sukhois bugged out …” He hesitated. “But we’d been doing okay ourselves. If I’d been in charge I wouldn’t have sent off a third of my planes then. Not unless I had to.”
Magruder looked animated for the first time since he had appeared. “You don’t think it was just a mistake then?”
“Hell, no,” Coyote answered, trying to muster a smile but failing. “Whoever was in charge up there knew what the hell he was doing. No doubt about it. That bright boy wouldn’t just let go of a whole squadron unless some bigger boy made him. And the only reason I can see for that would be to cover their carrier.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Magruder said. “Thanks, Will … and, uh … I’m sorry. But I needed to know, and you’re still the one whose judgment I know I can trust.”
“I wish I could,” Coyote muttered. But Magruder was gone, leaving him alone with bitter thoughts.
“It still doesn’t sound good, Commander,” Tarrant said heavily. Across the table, Magruder seemed to slump. The man was plainly dead on his feet, and even though he looked freshly shaven and was dressed in a crisp new uniform, it was obvious he’d been up all night.
That made his report that much more disturbing. Tarrant knew Magruder had done his best, but he just didn’t have enough of a safety margin in his calculations to convince the admiral that they could do any good.
It was frustrating. Magruder and his Intelligence Officer had some good ideas for pinning down a large chunk of the Soviet air arm to allow an Alpha Strike to get through, but the carrier’s slender resources just wouldn’t support it. After all, the only way to draw off the Soviet air carrier involved a convincing diversion against the carrier itself, so that meant spreading American resources among at least three different missions.
“If we could just deal with Orland,” Magruder was muttering darkly. “We might manage it then …”
Tarrant shook his head. “That’s easy enough, Commander. I don’t even need your planes to take out Orland. No, the real problem is getting enough of a strike in on both the carrier and the landing ships without leaving us so
