Edward Lee - Operator B

Wentz felt floored. Suddenly a whirlwind of questions rose, all bidden by his pilot’s propensities and the instincts formed over the last twenty-five years of sitting in classified cockpits. What “mission” could possibly daunt a flyer the likes of Will Farrington? What mission would cause the best pilot in the world—and in aviation history—to kill himself?

Part of Wentz found the notion unfathomable…but it also hooked him.

If Farrington couldn’t hack the mission…maybe I can, he tempted himself

But then the reality swept back down, the promises he’d made, and not just those to Joyce and Pete but those to himself.

“I can’t, sir,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

“Scared? Ain’t got the nuts?”

Wentz uttered the most irreducible chuckle. He knew what he wanted to say in response, thought about all the reasons why he shouldn’t, but then said it anyway.

“Fuck yourself, sir.”

Ashton and Smith went rigid.

Wentz tossed a shoulder. “That’s right, I just told a four-star general to fuck himself. ” He shot his gaze across the room. “You haul me away from my family with all this crypto spookshow bullshit and have the audacity to insult me with mind-game challenges that wouldn’t work on a high school kid?” Wentz pointed at General Rainier. “If you think I’m scared, if you think I ain’t got the nuts—try sitting in one of my chairs one motherfucking day, General. Try test-flying a plane with reverse-angle wings where even the goddamn designers don’t know if it’ll fly for more than fifteen seconds before falling apart. Try flying six hundred and fifty knots at an altitude of twenty feet in the dark, just to drop a single laze marker and knowing if you hit a tree or a powerline, a couple of hundred grunts are gonna die along with yourself. Try that, sir. You and your kind get carted around in an Air Force limo; you’ve probably got a master sergeant to hold your dick for you when you piss. Try pissing your pants in a ramjet when the systems light goes off, when you’ve got two choices, you can eject and drop your plane in a residential neighborhood and wipe out a block, or you can try to glide fifty miles to the water and flop a hundred million bucks in the drink when you know you’ve only got one chance in ten of surviving the impact. I did that once. So, I repeat, sir. Fuck yourself.”

Wentz had expended his rant, and probably his honorable discharge. Fuck it, he thought.

Ashton and Smith stood wide-eyed in shock. Rainier strummed his fingers on the desk.

“I don’t like to be played with,” Wentz said to the silent room. Then, to Rainier, “Go ahead and demote me to basic airman. See if I give a shit.”

“This isn’t about that,” Rainier said, unperturbed. “This isn’t about protocol or UCMJ or rank or who’s the top cat. Christ, I wish more men had the balls to talk to me like you just did. The reason you’re here isn’t about any of that Air Force bullshit.”

“What is it about then?”

“Total duty, total service to one’s country.”

Wentz ground his teeth until he could taste the metal in his fillings. “For twenty-five fuckin’ years, I’ve served my country like a waiter, and I never even asked for a tip. Remember the Gulf War, the CNN shot of the Paveway II laser-guided bomb swerving into a single window on a sixteen-story office building? That was me. I took out Iraq’s Office of Tactical Air Command, and after flying so low to make the hit, my plane got punched through by so much triple-A my wings were whistling. I couldn’t even make it back to the base at Jiddah; I had to eject over the Gulf… Two hours after Air-Sea Rescue picked me up, I was flying another sortie. So don’t tell me about duty. Don’t tell me about service… Sir.”

“I would never presume to,” Rainier’s voice grated. “We know all about your feats. We know all about the many times you’ve risked your life for your country. And that’s the reason you’re here instead of some other cocky flyboy. You’re the best. We need the best. ”

Smith stepped forward, holding classified evaluation reports. “Our performance indexes are processed through every personnel computer in the United States military, the CIA, and NASA. You were quite right. General Willard Farrington was the best pilot in the world. But now he’s gone. Which means that you are now the best pilot in the world.”

Shit, Wentz thought.

Rainier offered a minuscule smile, stroking his beardless chin. “It’s unlike any mission you could ever imagine.”

“I can’t take it,” Wentz insisted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m retiring tomorrow. I promised my ex-wife and kid.”

“Don’t you at least want to know what the mission is?”

Wentz felt his fingernails scraping his palms. “No, because if you tell me, then I’ll just be that much more tempted to take it.”

Rainier eyed Smith and Ashton, cocked a brow. “A proposition, then. I won’t tell you. Check it out for yourself.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Wentz asked.

“Fly out to Nellis, right now, with Colonel Ashton. Assess the mission. If you don’t want it, that’s fine. We’ll get someone else, and I give you my personal guarantee that you’ll be back here tomorrow by noon to attend your retirement ceremony.”

Wentz gnawed his lower lip. “Putting it that way makes it damn hard to pass up, sir.”

“All we’re asking is that you investigate the mission and its details first-hand, General,” Smith stepped back in.

“And if I don’t like it, I walk?”

“Absolutely, sir. We’ll fly you straight back to this base and you can officially retire. Beyond that, the only thing we’d ask of you is perhaps a list of other qualified candidates, men you’ve personally known who you feel might be able to assume the mission’s requirements.”

Wentz’s resolve began to bow, then it collapsed altogether. He rationalized, of course, manipulated the proposition around his promise like a sculptor covering up a flaw with a last-minute slap of clay.

He wasn’t going to accept the mission…

I’m just going to check it out. What’s the harm in that?

“All right,” Wentz agreed.

“Outstanding,” Rainier said. “Squared away.”

Wentz came to attention, saluted but Rainier just waved a lazy hand. “I told you, forget about all that. If I have to return one more salute, my goddamn arm’s going to fall off. Colonel Ashton?”

The woman moved forward, a perfumed shadow. “Get your flight gear on, General Wentz. There’s an F-15 waiting for us on Taxiway Six. On afterburners, we should be in Nevada in about fifty minutes.”

Wentz scoffed. “With me flying? Try forty.”

—

CHAPTER 6

Static crackled on the headset. “Romeo One this is Boxcars One. Request permission to…” Wentz paused. Why should he care about proper commo protocol anymore? “Request permission to open this fucker up to the max and get the fuck out of here.”

A chuckle through the static. “Permission affirmed, Boxcars One. You are clear for take-off. When you melt the runway, we’ll send you a bill.”

“Good luck making me pay, Romeo One. Adios…”

Taking off on afterburners was close to impossible—but not for Wentz. You just had to know how to jink the throttle in tandem with the azimuth. The $40,000,000 plane didn’t take off as much as it exploded off T-D Runway 4. Wentz wasn’t fifty feet off the asphalt when he pulled into a full barrel-spin and was burning upward at nearly a forty-five-degree line. They were a cockscrew soaring straight up.

Wentz watched the heavens revolve in the polycarb canopy: the world was a bright spinning top. Ashton shrieked like a cat on fire.