Nightmare looked like he was about to say something else, but at that moment an A-6 Intruder taxied past the line of Tomcats, rolling slowly toward the number one catapult. The roar of its engines was deafening, and the wash from its exhaust battered at Tomboy's face, slapping at her flight suit and forcing her to turn away. Nightmare quickly pulled his helmet on and waited until the A-6 reached the cat shuttle and the noise abated somewhat.
Suddenly, he seemed to relax. 'Okay, Chief. Forget it. C'mon, Tomboy.'
'Where we going, Nightmare?'
'Ops. Maybe we can use Stoney's bird.'
Together, they turned and strode aft toward the island.
Lieutenant Commander Bruce 'Willis' Payne was uncomfortably aware of the woman seated next to him. In an A-6 Intruder, the pilot sits on the left, with the bombardier/navigator in the narrow seat to his right and slightly below and behind his position. According to All the World's Aircraft, the heart of the A-6 was the AN/ASQ-133 IBM computer which controlled the aircraft's Norden AN/APQ-154 multimode radar, but any Intruder driver with more than an hour of flight time logged would insist that the real heart was his B/N, squeezed in eyeball-to-eyeball with the radar scope projecting aft from the console. But damn!…
Payne's B/N so far this cruise had been Lieutenant Thelma Kandinsky, 'Sunshine' to her shipmates. She was pretty and pert and Payne loved imagining what she'd be like in bed, but he still couldn't accept her as expert enough to find her way through that maze of indicators and electronics in her face, no matter what Tombstone Magruder might think. The tail-chewing he'd received a couple of days before still burned… and rankled.
'Damn it, Payne,' Tombstone had bellowed into his face. 'These women are our shipmates and they're here to stay! They can do the job as well as any man, maybe better, you read me, mister? They've already had to work ten times harder than any man aboard just to get where they are now, and if I hear you're giving any one of 'em a bad time I am personally going to have you keel-hauled… and on an aircraft carrier that's one hell of a damned serious threat!'
Fuck. Women had their uses, but they didn't belong aboard ship or flying combat aircraft. Oh, sure, he'd heard all the technical shit about how they could take more Gs than men, how their endurance was higher, how they could handle multiple tasks better than men could. Willis didn't believe that bullshit for a minute. The fact of it was the Washington REMFs were out to screw the little people, again, all in the name of progress.
Payne gave the array of flight instruments in front of him a final check.
What the hell was Washington playing at anyway? It seemed fitting, somehow, that the venerable A-6 was on the way out, just as all this new crap was coming on-line.
He loved the A-6. America's premier strike aircraft was coming up on forty years of service. Butt-ugly, blunt end up front, eel-skinny tail aft, with the permanently fixed refueling probe stuck on the nose like a rearing snake. The Navy had hoped to replace the Intruder with the ultra-stealthy A-12 Avenger in the 1990s, but the Secretary of Defense had scrapped the project when budget overruns had reached scandal proportions. Later, during the Clinton Administration, proponents of a streamlined military had actually suggested that, since the Air Force had bombers, there was no need for bomb-carrying aircraft in the Navy.
And there was real shit-for-brains thinking. Strike aircraft ? the Intruder and the half-bomber, half-fighter Hornet ? were the sole reason for even having aircraft carriers in the first place. Jefferson's Intruders were her big guns; her Tomcats were nothing more than armed protection for the carrier group and for her strike planes. Do away with Navy bombers and there was no reason for carriers.
So far, the Navy had managed to hold off the reconstructionists, at least to that extent. Until someone came up with a replacement for the A-12, though, Intruders and Hornets would be carrying the Navy's strike-mission load. Like the A-7 Corsair before it, though, already phased out save for reserve squadrons ashore, the A-6 had about reached the end of its operational life. Pretty soon, there'd be only the F/A-18s left to carry the war to the enemy's home ground, and Payne remained convinced that Hornets were neither fish nor fowl, half-breeds that did neither job well. How could they? Even with their twenty-first-century cockpits, one man was just kept too damned busy flying the aircraft to handle all the radar-intercept and bombing work as well with any kind of efficiency.
Man, the Navy should've stuck with upgraded Intruders.
And all-male combat crews.
And screw the damned politicians.
He'd heard scuttlebutt that Sunshine had been trying to get another partner, and that suited Willis just fine. He had to admit that, so far at least, Sunshine seemed to know her shit. But now they were about to launch into combat, and her life and his would be riding on how well she performed her duties as B/N. Hell, they wouldn't even be able to find the target if she couldn't untangle that gee-whiz video-game imagery on her screen into solid coordinates and vectors.
Besides, she was a goody-two-shoes bitch. When he tried to be friendly, she acted like he was coming on to her. Once, he'd stepped aside to let her enter a compartment first and she'd given him a look to freeze a snowman's balls. And then there was the smoking incident. Willis had once been a heavy smoker. He'd been cutting back a lot lately, but he always carried an extra pack still in the cellophane tucked away in the shoulder pocket of his flight suit. The first time he'd offered Sunshine a smoke, though, just trying to be friendly, she'd looked up at him like he'd just crawled out from under a rock.
'Filthy habit,' she'd said. 'Get those things out of my face.'
The pace accelerated as they completed their final pre-flights. He glanced over at her as she completed the last of her BIT checks, the built-in test batteries that verified the A-6's radar and computer systems were operational.
Screw her. If she wouldn't even try to be friendly…
'System's hot,' she said. 'Ready to roll.'
'Roger.' A green light was showing from the island as a safety officer gave a last thumbs-up. Willis was all professional now as he looked out the cockpit to where the deck officer was standing ready, and gave a crisp salute.
The officer returned the salute, touched the deck, and Jefferson's catapult hurled Willis and Sunshine into the sky.
Seaman Apprentice David James White had been aboard the Jefferson for less than six weeks. His entire Navy career thus far had Spanned less than four months, for he'd reported aboard straight out of boot camp at NTC Great Lakes, with only a ten-days leave in between to say good-bye to his mom and to his girlfriend Judy back in his home town of Ridgely, Ohio.
He wasn't sure yet whether he liked the Navy. At eighteen, the largest social group he'd ever been a part of was his high school, and he still felt utterly lost among the miles of gray-painted passageways, the noisy horde of strange faces filling a vessel that had been described to him as being as large as an eighty-story building lying on its side. There were six thousand people aboard the Jefferson; that was twice the population of Ridgely, far more than he could possibly expect to meet and get to know personally if he stayed aboard for a full two years of sea duty. He wasn't aware of them so much as a vast crowd as he was aware of them as strange faces. The only time he saw lots of men all at once was during a flight deck FOD walk-down, but it seemed as though he would never get to really know anyone.
Upon reporting aboard, White had been assigned to the deck division.
After three weeks of 'P school' orientation, where he'd learned the basics of flight deck theory and been given a course in first aid, he'd been given a slot with the blue shirts, the chock and chain men who secured parked aircraft to keep them from rolling. He'd started making friends… and his initiation into the Ancient and Sacred Order of the Blue Noses a few days ago had opened up a whole new world to him. Only now was he beginning to see himself, not as a stranger in this bizarre and alien world, but as part of something larger than himself.
It had been a good feeling.
Then had come the battle on Friday, and moments of stark terror. And after that had come the word that some kid named Pellet had hung himself. Oh, God, how could things like that happen? What had he gotten himself
