Edward Lee - Operator B

“There is no other recourse, sir,” Ashton said.

“I know.”

“So you’re going to do it, right?”

Wentz nodded. “Yes.”

“Your wife and your son will be personally notified—”

“Some cover story, I suppose. The old empty casket.”

“Yes. They’ll be told that you were killed in a test crash.”

It was only darkness now that filled his mind, and blazing regrets. “Joyce and I are still technically divorced. I need to make sure she gets everything, and all of my SOM pay.”

“JAG will take care of all that, sir.”

Wentz lowered his face into his hands, tears suddenly slipping from his eyes.

“I’ll be back later to show you to your quarters, General,” Ashton said. Then she quietly left the room.

««—»»

The next day, the banquet room of the Thornsen Center stood crowded with Air Force personnel in their Class-A’s, their wives, their children. The base commander and several other generals milled about impatiently. The entire auditorium seemed like a congregation with no purpose. Something stiff and uncomfortable throbbed through the air.

Civilian caterers in white hats traded pinched looks behind tables stacked with refreshments and steam tables.

Above the stage, where the retirement presentation was to be held, hung a long sign which read CONGRATULATIONS, JACK WENTZ!

“This is so fucked up I can’t believe it,” 1st Sergeant Caudill muttered.

“I hear ya, Top,” Sergeant Cole agreed. He glanced at his watch. “He’s more than an hour late for his own retirement. I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I—shit, there’s his wife.” Top, with considerable reluctance, approached Mrs. Joyce Wentz and her son, who seemed to be wending their way toward the exit door.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Wentz,” Top offered. “Maybe he got the day wrong or something. I can’t believe he’d miss this.”

“I can. We’re leaving now, Sergeant.”

“Well, wait, ma’am. Maybe he just got tied up, maybe he just—”

“Goodbye, Sergeant.”

Mrs. Wentz turned, holding her son’s hand.

“He’s not coming, is he, Mom?”

“No, Pete. I’m sorry. Let’s go home now.”

Top watched them both leave the auditorium. He glanced at his watch again and grimaced, edging back to where Cole stood.

“All this time I thought he was a great guy,” Top remarked.

“Some great guy. Looks like he dumped his own retirement party and skated on his wife and kid.”

“How do you like that?” Caudill said. “Wentz turned out to be an A-one prick.”

««—»»

“I’m a freak now,” the words grated a day later.

It was Wentz who’d uttered them, propped up in the hospital bed of Area S-4’s medical unit. The surgery had taken almost ten hours, and now he lay in a pain-killer fog.

He held up his two braced and bandaged hands—hands with only three fingers each.

“I’m a monster…”

When the door clicked open and Ashton entered, Wentz quickly slipped his hands beneath the bed sheets.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed about, sir. What you’ve done is heroic.”

Wentz glanced away. “Leave me alone, will you?”

“The healing and recovery process will only take a few weeks. After that a week of physical therapy. Then, when you’re…comfortable with, uh—”

“With my new hands? My ruined, scarred, hideous hands?”

“—you’ll alternately train on the OEV and participate in some EVA simulations, some simple training blocks on field demolitions. etc. Believe it or not, General, the worst part is over.”

Wentz boomed, “Yeah? Tell that to my wife and kid! I’ll never see them again! My wife’ll hate me! My kid’ll grow up thinking I’m a lying piece of garbage who didn’t love him! Now get out!”

Ashton sullenly left the room.

—

CHAPTER 10

For the next month, about the only sound Wentz remained cognizant of was the tick of the clock. Time.

Time was life.

His quarters, his office, every briefing room and every training cove—there was a general issue Air Force clock on the wall, ticking.

The tick of the clock sounded like dripping blood.

Every night when he slept, the commitment he’d made dug his heart out. He knew he was doing the only thing he could do, but there was no solace in that, not at night when he was alone. He dreamed of teaching Pete how to drive the new dirt bike, he dreamed of Pete’s high school graduation, sending him off to the prom, sending him off to college, and all of the other things he, Wentz, would never really see.

He dreamed of making love to Joyce…

All lost, all ashes.

And then he’d waken, in darkness. He’d bring his hands to his clenched face, but the hands only had three fingers on each. And then he’d hear it.

He’d hear the only thing in the world that never changed: the tick of the clock.

tick tick tick

drip drip drip

S-4 had a psychiatrist and occupational therapist. Both Ashton and “Jones” urged him to see them—“to adjust to the necessary period of mental and physical refraction,” Jones had said—but Wentz said “Fuck that shit. I don’t need any damn shrinks. I’m a U.S. Air Force Senior Test, I’m not a nut.”

He knew what he’d done, he knew what level his duty had taken him to (and he knew why). So Wentz did what he always had.

He did his job.

He spent a week on Unisys flight simulators, programmed for the OEV. It was cake. Two more days training with demolition-block material, fuses, detcord, blasting caps and primers. Eight hours a day for a week bobbing in a cylindrical water tank for zero-gravity familiarization, then several sessions in the cargo hold of a C-131 nose-diving from 40,000 feet to 5,000 feet (the latter was fun, the former…not so fun). Another cake-walk was the MMU training. An MMU (for Manned Mobility Unit) was NASA’s latest, state-of-the-art “space suit”—over $10,000,000 per suit.

Wentz dug it.

Days lapsed as they always had in the past, a new joyride, a new thrill. Duty, yes, but the adrenalin always made it better. At forty-five years old, Wentz scored higher on the spirometer, the MMPA, the MMU field test, and the technical diagnostic batteries than most of the country’s active astronauts.

“Looks like you’re ready, General,” one of the training tests told him.

“You think?” Wentz had answered. “It might look like it, but this ain’t a lug-wrench in my pants, son.”

No, even a day after the surgery, Wentz never doubted himself. He was going to this job like he’d done every job in his career.

The best job.

His “shit” was “square.”

And on the day before his first live test flight of the OEV, unfazed by the deformity of his hands, General Jack Wentz looked straight in the mirror with a leveled eye and said: “Hardcore. I’m fuckin’ there.”

Yes, that was how the days went. He was the best pilot in the world, and they were great days.

The only thing that bothered him were the nights. When he’d dream and later wake up to the sound of dripping blood…

««—»»

Wentz sat strapped in to the operator’s seat, a modified job by Hughes Aircraft. He wore a visorless helmet and standard Air Force jumpsuit. Ashton wore the same, sitting beside him.

They felt the modest vibration as the platform elevator lifted them up thirteen nuke-proof levels through this underground complex.

When Ashton glanced at his bare, three-fingered hands, he moved them away.

“Don’t be self-conscious, sir. It could debilitate you, it could degrade your performance.”

“I’m not gonna fuck up your goddamn UFO,” he snapped back. He looked at her with a sly grin. “I’m gonna fly this thing better than Farrington ever dreamed.”