Stephen Coonts - Combat

Gnido shrugged eloquently. “Is not being much problem. Just way it is, you know? Like cockpit instruments. In air force Flankers, all is metric. In this airplane for navy, airspeed is knots, altitude meters. Besides, pretty soon America is being all metric, like rest of world. Best for everybody, yes?”

Thaler demurred. “Igor, you’ll get an argument about that, I guarandamntee you.”

Half a dozen staffers of Advanced Training Associates lazed away the shank of the afternoon, sipping slowly and speaking rapidly. The animated atmosphere in ATA’s office spaces probably had not been seen since Williams Air Force Base became Williams Gateway Airport south of Mesa, Arizona.

Despite the beer-call military ambience, the atmosphere was post— Cold War business; a corporate foundation overlaid with a lather of friendly rivalry.

One of the partners, Zack Delight, had told an active-duty friend, “Here there be morale.” A former Marine aviator, he had retired as a reserve lieutenant colonel, flew for Delta, and now was on his second or third career, depending on how they were reckoned. Pushing sixty, he was stocky, well built, and studiously irreverent. He sat on a barstool, scratching the Vandyke beard he had cultivated to cover a scar obtained in a motorcycle “incident.” Now, with the unaccustomed beard, “Pure” Delight said he was still getting accustomed to “that mean-looking bastard glaring at me in the mirror every morning.”

Next to Delight was Robert “Robo” Robbins, a retired navy commander and former landing signal officer. Slightly younger, he wore a perpetual smile as if savoring a private joke at the expense of the world around him. Aside from their previous part-time work for ATA, both staffers shared a passion for World War I aviation. They haunted The Aerodrome web site, exchanged arcane information and esoterica, and constantly critiqued each other’s alternating chapters in an epic titled Duel over Douai .

Delight and Robbins were joined by Ozzie Ostrewski, just back from Long Beach. New to ATA, he was known as an exceptionally fine fighter pilot. Rumor and gossip swirled around Ozzie. Reportedly he had scored multiple kills as a USS Langley F-14 pilot during a classified dustup in the Indian Ocean a few years before. He steadfastly declined all efforts to elicit details, both overt and otherwise. Not even his shipmate Psycho Thaler would discuss it; he had been there as well.

“Hey, Oz,” said Delight. “Lemme buy you a drink, god damn it.” Pure and Robo traded sideways smiles. They knew Ostrewski as a nonimbiber, nonblasphemer, and devout Catholic — a rara avis in military aviation.

“And the horse you rode in on,” Ostrewski replied evenly. He was getting good at bowdlerizing. He reached over the bar and pulled a root beer from the ice chest. “Any word yet?”

“Naw,” said Robbins. He knew what Ostrewski meant. “The boss is still in the office with the new kid. But I think he’s gonna hire her.”

“Damn!” Ostrewski slammed his bottle down on the bar harder than intended. It was the direst expletive the normally composed aviator allowed himself. “That’s one reason I got out of the navy — the damn double standards and all that bu … siness.” Delight suddenly realized how upset the instructor really was.

Robbins nudged him. “C’mon, Oz, how bad can it be?”

Ozzie inhaled, held his breath, and exhaled. “Look, it’s the accumulation of all this stuff. I don’t know about you guys, but I really don’t like the idea of teaching Chinese Communists how to land on carriers, let alone go bombing and strafing with them. Add in the trouble we’re bound to have with girl aviators, and what was a dream job is going to get screwed up.”

“The world’s changing, my boy,” Robo said solicitously.

“Yeah, I know, I know … it’s just not my world anymore. Not even my same country.”

Michael Ostrewski wore his heart on his flight jacket. His friends knew he was intensely proud of his Polish heritage and its Old World values.

“Attention on deck!”

Delight, Robbins, and the others turned in their seats. Striding through the door was Terry “Hook” Peters, six-foot-three-inches of enthusiasm and what the navy called command presence. Peters saw his wife in the room and winked. Jane Peters, five-foot-five-inches of feistiness, blew a kiss at the once-gangly kid who earned an ironic call sign when he forgot to lower his tailhook for his first night carrier landing. A former Blue Angels commander, he and Jane had invested most of their savings in ATA, and now it had paid off with the Chinese training contract.

With him was a brown-eyed brunette, about five-foot-nine and 135 pounds. She glanced around, noticed Jane Peters, and gave her a shy smile. Jane had liked her immediately and told Terry Peters that Elizabeth Vespa got Jane’s vote among the four applicants for the new slot. The fact that Liz and that nice Ozzie Ostrewski were single had not escaped her attention.

“Gang,” Terry explained, “I’d like to introduce our new instructor — Liz Vespa, call sign Scooter.”

Cheers, applause, and laughter greeted Elizabeth Vespa. A few ATA staffers chuckled at the nickname. Ostrewski muttered to Robbins, “Cute.”

“Yeah, she is, kind of,” Robbins replied.

“I meant the call sign,” Ozzie said in a monotone.

Peters continued the introduction. “Liz comes to us from TraCom. She left active duty as a lieutenant commander, and the navy’s loss is our gain. She was an A-4 CarQual instructor before going to T-45s, and that’s part of the reason I selected her now that we’re progressing with the Chinese students. She’s more current on carrier qualifications than any of us, and now, having flown with her, I can say that she’s a good stick.” He turned to Vespa and grinned. “Liz, welcome aboard!”

Vespa blushed slightly at the attention. Standing with her hands behind her back, she said, “Thanks, Captain Peters.” She scanned the room, taking in the faces. “There’s no place else I’d rather be than here, flying with you guys.” More applause and laughter skittered through the room — except from the crew cut, gray-eyed instructor at the bar who met her gaze without blinking. Even from that distance, Liz Vespa could read the flight jacket patch that said OZZIE.

Peters and Delight watched the two Skyhawks accelerate as Ostrewski led Vespa in a section takeoff. Zack turned toward his partner. “You sure this is a good idea, Terry?”

Peters’s gaze never left the TA-4s. “It’s Jane’s idea. She said that when any of her third-graders didn’t get along, she put ’em at the same desk.” He shrugged. “Eventually they made up and became friends.”

Delight shook his head. “Child psychology applied to fighter pilots.” He unzipped a wry grin. “Works for me.”

Three miles over Gila Bend, Ozzie keyed his mike. “Ah, Wizard Two, let’s go in trail. Over.”

Liz smiled in anticipation. That was the agreed-upon signal. “Let’s go in trail” actually meant, “The chase is on; see if you can stay with me, cowgirl.” But privately she rankled at Ozzie’s self-confident call sign: “The Wizard of Oz.”

She double-clicked her mike button in acknowledgment.

Two seconds later Ozzie half snapped to inverted and sucked the stick into his stomach. From sixteen thousand feet, Wizard One responded in a mind-numbing split-ess, the Gs building quickly to the grayout stage. His vision grew fuzzy around the edges, narrowing to a thirty-degree cone. In several seconds he would regain full vision and swivel his head to see if he had made any money on Scooter Vespa.