Coyote grinned and shook his head. “You always did have a bad attitude, Stoney. Head hard as a rock. Not exactly good for the career track, but-“
“Screw the career track,” Tombstone said. “If they take this job away from me, maybe I can go back to flying airplanes!”
“Now you’re talking!”
CHAPTER 10
“Mind if I join you, Skipper?”
Batman Wayne looked up. It was Brewer Conway, his XO, standing beside The table with a tray in her hands. He hesitated a moment before replying, torn between a need for sympathetic company and a dread of having to go through another round of questions about the helicopter incident. Finally he shrugged. “It’s a free country. Drag up a seat.”
Brewer sat down across from him, looked at his plate, then looked at her own, making a face. Gingerly, she lifted one corner of her hamburger bun and peered uncertainly at the meat inside. “Well,” she said, “at least I know now why they call these things ‘sliders.’ There’s enough grease in here to clog every artery on board this bucket.”
“Hey, all the comforts of life ashore. You know how many fast-food burgers you have to eat to get the same cholesterol spike of one of these babies?”
“I’d hate to think.” She set the bun aside and began blotting at the meat with her napkin.
“Just drown it in ketchup. You’ll never taste the difference.”
“You mean I’ll never know what hit me.” She dropped the wadded-up napkin on her tray, then helped herself to the ketchup bottle. “Hey, Batman?”
“Yeah?”
“How long you think this deployment’s going to last?”
“What, our Black Sea cruise? Beats the hell out of me.”
“I mean, they cut our rotation Stateside pretty short. I was wondering if we’d be out for a full six-month deployment, or if they might rotate us back early.”
“You’re asking the wrong guy, Brewer. Nobody ever tells me a damned thing.”
“Nimitz was supposed to take this assignment, wasn’t she?”
“That’s the scuttlebutt,” he said. “That’s the way it goes, though. Too many commitments, too few carriers. Maybe the Nimitz’ll relieve us after that mess in Africa gets resolved. On the other hand, maybe by then there’ll be some new crisis and we’ll be stuck here for months.”
“You are cheerful today.”
“Yeah, well. Two bolters, a ‘fair’ for my recovery, and I get to paint a little silhouette of an American helicopter on the side of my plane. Kind of hard to top that, right?”
“Hey, the day’s just half over.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Conway was silent for a long moment, eating her hamburger and looking thoughtful.
“Okay, Commander,” he said. “Out with it.”
“Out with what?”
“You’ve got something churning between your ears, and it looks serious.
Want to talk?”
“Well…”
“Look, it can’t make my day any worse than it already is. Go ahead. Hit me.”
She sighed, then nodded. “Okay. Skipper, I think we’ve got a problem with the squadron, and I don’t know how to handle it.”
“Let me guess. You heard about Nightmare and Big D.”
She nodded. “That’s part of it. But a lot of the guys have been sidestepping me, not just those two. I can’t do my job if nobody will accept me.”
“I know.” Wayne frowned. He had seen this situation coming for a long time, another of the petty frustrations that were making it hard for him to get a handle on the squadron commander’s job. “Look, Brewer, you know every man in the Vipers respects you and the rest of the… women.” He stumbled over the word. It was so damned hard to choose words carefully to avoid giving unintended offense. You could refer to “guys” or even “boys” without a second thought, but never to “gals” or “girls.” Even after months serving together, the men and women of the Air Wing were finding it hard to keep the gender wars from flaring up over the most trivial excuses. “The Kola fight proved you’ve got what it takes to be aviators. But you’ve got to understand what it’s like for some of these guys. They’ve never had to deal with a female Exec before.”
“I didn’t ask for the job,” Brewer said.
“No, but you got it, courtesy of Directive 626. You get extra points for being a woman with combat experience, so you get pushed ahead of men of comparable rank. Nightmare Marinaro has been in the Vipers almost as long as I have. He flew with us in Korea and India and all those ops off Norway. And Dallas Sheridan has a lot more time in rank, even though his combat duty was limited to Norway and Russia.” He paused, then pushed on. “Look, you asked me, so I’m going to be blunt. Either one of them deserved a shot at the XO slot more than you. Hell, Malibu deserved it even more. He’s just not making a big thing out of it. But they are. Those two guys are ambitious. They know a shot at Exec will lead to bigger and better things down the road.”
“And if Malibu had it?”
Batman shrugged. “They’d both know he earned it,” he told her.
“And I didn’t.”
“Look, Brewer, this isn’t some male chauvinist thing. They don’t resent you because you’re a woman. Not anymore. You’re a naval aviator, one of the-” He stopped. He’d almost said “guys.” He took a deep breath and started over. “What I mean is, you’re an aviator like the rest of us. What they don’t like is the idea of someone getting special treatment that makes the work they’ve done all these years count for nothing. If you were a man and you were given a leg up because you were a minority, they’d feel the same way.” He shrugged. “So if Big D and Nightmare are a little sullen, can you really blame them?”
She looked away. “I guess not. But what about the others? Lieutenant Davis went behind my back to see you last week. So did Whitman. I didn’t take the Exec job away from them. They weren’t even in the running.”
Batman rubbed his forehead, his eyes closed. “Some of the men have trouble dealing with a female Exec,” he said at last. Before she could protest, he held up his hand. “Think about it, Brewer. One of the main jobs of the XO is to deal with the people problems in the squadron. All kinds of problems ? professional, personal, you name it. It isn’t easy for a guy to come to a woman and tell her that he’s, oh, having marital problems back home, say. Or… listen. Would you expect any of those guys to come talk to you because they’re worried about what kind of diseases they might have picked up when they were on liberty? There’s lots of stuff men don’t want to tell a woman, especially an attractive one, and even more especially one they have to work with in close quarters every day.”
“Male ego,” she said with a frown.
“Call it what you want, Brewer,” he told her. “But you can’t just dismiss it. Think about the personal things you wouldn’t have wanted to come to me with when I was the Exec. I know you and the other women held back a lot of complaints when you first came aboard. The harassment. Personal stuff that, well, people thought wasn’t any of my business. Remember Lobo and Striker?”
She nodded, her eyes sad. Christine “Lobo” Hanson and Steve Strickland ? Striker ? had developed an intense personal relationship in the first few weeks of the deployment. Lobo had been shot down over the Kola Peninsula and captured. Strickland had refused a recall order and circled the crash site, trying to provide covering fire, until his plane was shot down. Unlike Lobo, he hadn’t survived the crash.
