Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

“Damn.”

“It’s either her or me, if you want the plane back tonight. Otherwise, there’s no guarantees.”

“Tell her I’ll cut her fucking tongue out if there’s another incident like General Smith.”

“You know, she wasn’t totally unjustified — “

Knowlington’s eyebrows ended the conversation.

“You keep your F-ing mouth shut the whole flight, you keep it shut at the base, you come back here and you report to me. You got it?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Rebecca Rosen told Clyston twenty minutes later, as she stood waiting for the C-130 crew to finish loading their gear.

“They’ll throw you the F off the plane if you act up. And at the base — you say nothing. F nothing. It’s a special ops base. They’ll bury you in the sand, we’ll never find a body.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don’t yeah-yeah me, Rosen.” Clyston shook his head, and once again considered going out to Al Jouf himself.

“Look, Sergeant, I’m not a total asshole.” She stuck her nose up in the air like she was a stinking English princess. Five foot-two, a hundred and ten pounds when wet, and she thought she was a stinking Amazon. “I just don’t suffer fools gladly.”

Clyston rolled his eyes. “Your problem is that you never met another member of the Air Force who you don’t think is a fool.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool, Sergeant,” Rosen told him.

“Get the F out of here, Rosen. I want to see that airplane in my hangar by 1800. It has a date with Saddam tomorrow. You got it?”

“I’ll have it here if I have to fly it myself.”

Clyston would bet money she would. Better than most pilots.

Colonel Knowlington glanced at his watch. It was nearly ten a.m.

Where the hell had the time gone? He hadn’t done a damn thing all morning.

Not true. But he hadn’t done anything useful. He’d become one of those red-tape idiots he used to rail against.

Hell, that had happened long ago.

Knowlington slid his notes about the next day’s ATO into the drawer and locked it. Standing, he centered his pad on the desktop, then went to the four-drawer file cabinet and made sure it too was locked. The uncluttered order of the room reassured him somehow, the blank walls a comfortable contrast to the thoughts that jumbled and raced through his mind.

Down the hall, Cineplex was still filled to overflowing. Most if not all of the people watching CNN knew more about what had happened than all of the broadcasters and studio analysts put together; still, there was an undeniable fascination to the reports, especially the video of Baghdad being bombed.

Walking toward the chaplain’s tent, the colonel wondered about the coverage. Would it provoke sympathy for Iraq? Did Saddam now look like the victim?

Vietnam had been like that. You couldn’t blame everything on the media, sure, but they had to shoulder a shitload.

The worst stuff, maybe. People applauding — applauding! — when a pilot was captured.

Knowlington had argued with his two sisters only once about the war. He’d known it would be useless before he even opened his mouth. Something — booze probably, but maybe his love for them, too — made him try.

No way. They knew the truth — they had seen it on TV and in the papers.

Colonel Knowlington found the chaplain’s tent. There were a few people standing around a coffee machine at the back. He walked over silently, nodded to an officer from one of the transport units he knew vaguely. Nice guy. Young. Most of the other people who came to these meetings were enlisted. There were no ranks here.

Today was a busy day, and there wasn’t likely to be a crowd. The colonel had barely filled his cup when the informal leader of the group, known as “Stores,” cleared his throat near the small wooden podium at the front of the tent.

“We ought to try and keep things quick today, since there’s a lot going on,” said the man, who was a logistics sergeant. The others began sifting among the chairs, everyone sitting near the front, but not in the front row itself. No one was next to anyone else. “We’ll just be ad hoc for the next few days; catch as catch can, etcetera. Anyone who has to leave, you know, ought to go when they have to. Okay — anyone have anything to say?”

Knowlington glanced around. When no one else spoke, he rose slowly to his feet.

“My name is Michael and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober now thirteen days, going on fourteen. I thought it would be easier here, but it turns out its probably a bit worse. Too much Listerine.”

Everybody laughed.

In theory, every A-10A had been stamped from the same sheet metal. The parts were completely interchangeable; weapons, performance, characteristics precisely the same. The bare-bones design and facilitated production lines were supposed to churn out the Air Force equivalent of a model T, available in any color, as long as it was muted green. Unlike most other military jets, there weren’t even different versions or model numbers to complicate matters. An OA-10A was just an A-10A on a target-spotting mission. The only thing different was the mix of bullets in its gun.

In reality, each Hog had its own quirks and characteristics. The one Doberman was driving, for instance, seemed to pull slightly to its left, a bit like a motor boat with a loose rudder. In fact, the characteristic was so noticeable on takeoff that the pilot triple-checked his flap setting and instruments. Eventually, he decided the problem was with the engines, even though the gauges said the two GEs were operating in precise unison.

His stomach said screw the gauges. One fan had just a little more bite than the other, a little more aggressive spinning around its axle. No amount of fine-tuning the throttle evened it out, either. The solution was all in the stick and rudder, all in Doberman’s attitude as he flew. He tensed his muscles a different way to fly Dixon’s plane; that’s what it came down to.

Another thing — the ACES-2 ejector seat felt different. Totally impossible, but absolutely true. Kid’s fanny must’ve bent it special.

Doberman noticed the rear end of A-Bomb’s plane had risen a bit high in his windshield; he tilted his nose up a tad more to correct. They were flying a loose trail formation north, climbing to twenty thousand as they ran over the berm marking the border between Saudi Arabia and its aggressive neighbor. A number of tanks were waiting to get their turrets blown off about a hundred miles away.

Luckiest dead man alive, huh? What the hell did Jimbo mean by that?

A quarter inch one way or another.

Yeah, right. A quarter of an inch one way or another and the damn shell would have missed completely.

Doberman snorted into his oxygen mask. He’d been unlucky as hell ever since he got here, and not just at poker.

Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing hit Dixon’s plane, nothing, and he’d flown through the same shit Doberman had. Now that was luck.

Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out of him. Some guys were like that. Luck magnets.

A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing. That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never blew tires. Never.

It wasn’t luck that had kept the plane from becoming a pile of junk that afternoon.

It was kick-ass piloting.

Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a grizzled old sergeant who had been there when Orville and Wilbur traded in their bicycles, it was luck.

To Doberman, it was skill.

And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited about that.