“Release me now.” Thor kicked at the man holding his arms behind him. “Damn it, you have got no grounds to” “We can do anything we feel necessary.” The guard easily evaded Thor’s foot and jabbed him sharply in the kidneys with the muzzle of his pistol. “You are no longer in the United States, my friend, but on our soil.”
“We’re not at war!” Thor wheeled around to face Santana. Thirty-six hours of kick-floating in the warm ocean, no food, no sleep the movement made him dizzy. But he held on to consciousness, straining to look solid and steady on his feet.
Santana regarded him blandly. “Oh, indeed we are.
You’re to be tried for war crimes, sir on behalf of the nation that downed an innocent aircraft in our airspace and then violated our no-fly zone.”
“You shot those aircraft down, not us. And you damned well know it.
And as for this supposed no-fly zone, what makes you think your nation has the right to cordon off international airspace unilaterally?”
Santana shrugged. “The rest of the world believes otherwise. As for the exclusion zone, you should understand that well enough America is the first to declare one in any part of the world. Iraq and Bosnia are just the most recent examples. I suggest you cooperate fully with my friends when they ask you question sit may help to mitigate your sentence after your trial.”
Two of the men standing against the wall stepped forward. The first one slammed his fist into Thor’s gut, then brought his knee up to smash the pilot’s face as he doubled over. Thor hit the deck, bleeding.
The second stranger muttered a questioning comment to the first. Even through the pain, Thor heard enough to cause his balls to contract.
He may not have taken Spanish in school, but Latin had at least given him a familiarity with some of the root words, and what they were speaking was certainly not Spanish or any other Romance language. He stared up at the two men, now more afraid than he’d been when the first shark had brushed up against him in the warm ocean.
“And that concludes this discussion of rough sea ditching procedures. Are there any questions?” The VF-95 safety officer looked around the room inquiringly. Not an aviator twitched.
The safety officer sighed and shook his head. Not that he’d expected any. Still, it would have been nice to be certain they’d been paying attention. Deep in his heart, he knew exactly what they were thinking the same thing he thought at that age. Invincible, invulnerable no way they’d ever need to review rough weather ditching procedures, not a chance. Maybe the guy in the next seat. But not me.
He supposed it took turning thirty and putting that first oak leaf on the collar to convince a pilot that the unthinkable could happen to him.
“Okay, let’s break for chow. We’ll reconvene in the Ready Room at thirteen hundred. At that time, I’ll give the quarterly NATOPS quiz.
Those of you who are current have to take it, too,” he added quickly as the surly muttering arose from the back row. “That’s part of safety stand-down.”
He watched from the podium as the aviators filed out, some in shipboard washed cotton khakis, others in faded flight suits. He heard the comments drift toward the front of the room.
“Goddamn Marines. If they could just …”
“I don’t know why we need to …”
“And then she wrapped her legs around …”
He placed the pointer carefully on the narrow lip at the edge of the podium. Well, there was nothing that said they had to be enthusiastic about the safety stand-down.
If truth be told, he wasn’t so wild about the idea himself.
Parking the world’s finest naval aviators in a classroom all right, a Ready Room, but a classroom for this day while a pilot was missing at sea and tensions boiled to the south rankled all of them. Still, AIRPAC supposedly knew best.
With the spate of recent mishaps and incidents, he could understand a renewed emphasis on safety. But a stand down? Now, with so much unexplained in the area? He shook his head again, and scowled. The only aircraft airborne right now were the SAR helos still searching for the downed Marine pilot.
Like his fellow aviators, there was no requirement he like the safety stand-down just that he do it. He followed the last aviator out of the Ready Room and headed for chow.
“All right, what have we got?” Batman said as he strode into the conference room. “I want some answers, people.”
The admiral sat down in his usual spot halfway down the table and glared at Commander Busby, who was standing in front of the room. Lab Rat met his gaze steadily. It was always like this, admirals demanding immediate answers and definitive explanations for every scenario. In an ideal world. Intelligence would be perfect and there would be no surprises.
But this world was far from ideal. Lab Rat clicked the mouse in his hand, flashing the first slide up on the screen.
He saw the admiral shift impatiently in his seat as a topographical map of Cuba lit the front of the room. Lab Rat hastily punched the button again, cycling on to the next slide.
“Let me cut to the chase. Admiral.” Lab Rat flicked the laser pointer on and centered the small red dot over the western tip of Cuba. “We have indications that Major Hammersmith is being held here.
Additionally, I have satellite imagery that indicates the Cubans are standing up a new weapons system, probably longrange offensive land attack missiles.” Lab Rat paused, guiltily enjoying the sudden sharp intakes of breath he heard around the room.
The admiral shook his head from side to side. “You don’t fuck around when you say cut to the chase, do you?” he said, surprisingly mildly.
“Okay, Lab Rat, go ahead and start the backing and filling I know is going to come. You intelligence types never make absolute pronouncements, do you?”
Lab Rat resisted the impulse to gloat. “We do when we can. Admiral.
As of thirty minutes ago, this was the situation.” He punched the clicker again, flashing the next slide up on the screen.
It was overhead imagery, a highly detailed and accurate photograph of the area produced by one of the U.S. national assets a satellite.
Everyone in the room, even those who had seen such imagery before, leaned forward almost involuntarily. The clarity, the detail exceptional.
The photograph was in black and white. Centered in the rectangle was a man in an American flight suit surrounded by a squad of six armed Cuban army guards. They were walking toward a small cinderblock building.
The American had his face turned up toward the sky, and was being jabbed in the kidneys by the rearmost guard.
“Thor appears to have remembered his SERE lessons well,” Lab Rat said neutrally. Every pilot attended the Survival, Evasion, Rescue, and Escape course before being assigned to a carrier. “He was looking up at the sky at every opportunity. The Cubans seemed to know what he was doing, too they nailed him every time. We’ve got six good photos of his upturned cherubic little face, this one being the best of the lot.
It’s him, no doubt.”
Batman studied the photo for a moment before nodding sharply.
“Concur.
So we know he’s alive and we know they’ve got him. Now tell me about these weapons.”
“Here.” The next slide was just as detailed, but not as immediately self-evident. Lab Rat traced around three rectangular structures on the screen. “For those of you who are familiar with the short-range Soviet land attack missile systems, you’ll recognize this launcher.
It’s designed to handle either conventional or nuclear weapons. The satellite pictures picked it up first, and
