Return to Honor (7 page)

Yoli left the ten-note on the table and pushed his chair back. As he got up, a stranger moved to the table and smiled at the two. “Good evening.” The words came in Tagalog.

Yoli looked up with a start. “Hello! It is not often one hears the tongue of home.” The stranger was definitely a fellow countryman, but the features were strangely different. Yoli couldn’t quite place it, but the man was not a full-blooded Filipino.…

“I was just about to have a drink when I overheard you speaking: I thought you were one of my countrymen. It is an unexpected discovery. May I buy you a drink?”

“Aiah.
And my friend?” The stranger nodded. Yoli motioned for Ramis to sit back down. He held up a finger to the waitress. “Please, again.”

The stranger smiled. “If you don’t mind, I, too, have a friend that would like to join us.” He turned and motioned with his head toward the door. A dark-complexioned man came from the corner and smiled at the group as he pulled out a chair and sat. “This is my good friend, Du’Ali.”

Yoli offered a greeting, but the newcomer just nodded and smiled; this one was
not
Filipino, but he was his fellow countryman’s friend. Yoli shrugged it off. He was too polite to pry. And after all, a free drink is a free drink.

Chapter 4

2200 ZULU: MONDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you: but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

Anonymous

Edwards Air Force Base, California

“Any other questions, Major Gould?”

“Just tell me once more, this time in plain English, how much clearance I’ll have with the JATO units.”

The aeronautical engineer looked puzzled; then his eyes grew vacant, as if they were focused to infinity, and his face grew slack. Only after a moment of thought did the youngish captain speak. “Well, if your TAV was loaded to the gills, you wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hades of taking off. On the other hand, if she was completely stripped down, she’d shoot up so fast you’d probably be able to kick in the scramjets as soon as you rotated
.”

Gould
shifted his weight to his right foot and said with a slight bite, “I know that, but what if I were taking off with a
higher-than-normal load? What could I expect out of her?” He slapped a ream of paper on the briefing table. Charts and tables filled the pages. “I’ve spent the last day and a half on alert trying to figure out what this stuff means, but I can’t make heads or tails out of it. I don’t want to understand it—just tell me what I need to know.”

The aeronautical engineer looked surprised. “Oh, sure. Just a second.” The vacant look came back over the captain’s face, but this time he was reading the papers that Gould had slapped down.

Damned aero engineers, thought Gould. The air force is full of non-rated pukes—non-pilots—who think they’re God’s gift to mankind. You ask them what time it is and they tell you how to make a friggin’ watch.

Gould bristled at putting up with the aeronautical engineers that populated Edwards. He’d heard that back in the good old days—the Yeager days, that is—the pilots wouldn’t put up with this crap. The entire preflight checklist consisted of the test pilot running out to the bird, “kicking the tires, lighting the fires,” and he was airborne. None of this nonsense of having some non-rated nipple-head, whose only operational experience was going to graduate school, telling
him
what to do.

After all, it
is
the air force, isn’t it? Not the United States Engineering Corps.

The TAVs were retrofitted with JATO units and now had the capability of taking off on their own in emergencies—instead of being dropped from a 747 mothership. But up to now, all of Gould’s takeoffs with JATOs had been made with the TAV empty of any cargo. All he wanted to know was how much weight he could safely take off with. He never could get a straight answer from an engineer. If they told him just once what he needed to know, he’d be happy.

The captain pushed his glasses back to his forehead with a finger. He pointed at a sail-like diagram on the paper. “Well, if you were carrying a full complement—”

“Full complement of what?”

“Of anything—people, equipment, fuel, cows—whatever.” The captain sounded impatient. He pointed at the diagram again. “Look. If your TAV was packed with, say, just people—and
only
people—then the JATOs would barely be able to get the TAV up to three thousand feet, plus or minus fifty feet. From there, you’d have enough fuel so that if you dove at the ground, you’d gain just enough airspeed at about one hundred feet to kick in the scramjets. After the scramjets kick in, you wouldn’t need the JATO units anymore, and you could go semiballistic.”

Gould lifted an eyebrow. “One hundred feet.”

“You wanted to know the limits of the envelope, didn’t you?” He put down the paper, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “You know, Major, I’d never try it myself. You’d be pushing the TAV to the max, and with the ground effect at that altitude, I’m really not sure if the scramjets could handle it.” He put his glasses back on and smiled.

Gould swept up the papers on the briefing table. He smiled back, just sweetly enough to look sarcastic. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Captain. I’ll remember you said that when I’m saving your butt. You engineers are going to be an endangered species if you let a little problem like scramjet capability worry you.”

The captain dropped his smile and turned slightly red. “Good
day
,
Major.”

As he turned to leave, Gould made a quiet kissing sound after him. “Good day, Captain.” Couldn’t these non-rated guys take themselves a little less seriously? He gathered up the material and made his way back to the alert facility.

Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.

Colonel Joseph McGirney tapped the checklist on the back of the seat and whistled to himself. The flight line at Andrews was just visible through the cockpit. The taxiway and concrete apron were in front of him, as were the guards and barricades that separated the base from the governmental fleet of planes. Most people mistook this plane for
the
Air Force One when, in fact, any of the 777s on the concrete bearing the United States seal could serve as the President’s official transport.

But it was for this plane that the President had a special affection. The “Enchilada Air Force’s flagship,” serial number 0014, was the President’s favorite. Montoya had even had a special ceramic vat installed on board ought-ought-one-four to cook everything from Indian bread to fried ice cream. Chimayo blankets, turquoise stones embedded in the ashtrays, and paintings of yuccas and impossibly blue canyon skies decorated the interior. Inside, it was a piece of the President’s home.

Even the specially scrambled phone ironically reminded the President of Los Alamos, the weapons hamlet not thirty miles away from Santa Fe that had birthed the first atomic bomb: In the infinitesimal chance of a nuclear attack, the phone would connect him directly to the National Emergency Command Center and the STRATCOM generals charged with deploying and launching nuclear weapons.

McGirney whistled to himself and turned from the cockpit. The plane checked out fine. Once it was certified airworthy, the Secret Service would make a final sweep of the plane and seal it up until time for the Russian trip, two days from now. International flights required a little more planning than the intracountry jaunts he’d been handling lately. He looked forward to the flight; there was a woman he wanted to look up once he hit Ramstein. Her husband and he were best friends, and when her husband happened to be gone on TDY, he and his best friend’s wife didn’t do too badly either.

As McGirney stepped from the cockpit into the cabin he nodded at the stewards just arriving. “Gentlemen.”

“Good afternoon, Colonel. How are you today?”

McGirney glanced at the name tag. Yoli Aquinaldo—one of the Filipino stewards. And Ramis Sicat, the other, was also Filipino. Damn, these beaks were good.…bend over backward for you, and as friendly as can be. He had a sudden memory of R and R at the Manila Intercontinental.…a young, brown-skinned dancer … she could smoke a cigarette in the damnedest way.…

“Afternoon, Mr. Aquinaldo, Mr. Sicat. I’m fine. Are you gentlemen going on the flight?”

“Oh, no, sir. We are only the backup crew; we have to double-check what the primary stewards have done. We will just freshen up a bit before they bolt the plane up.”

“Fine.” McGirney slapped Aquinaldo on the shoulder. “Too bad you couldn’t make this trip; it’s going to be a dandy. See you men later.”

“Yes, sir.” As he left he heard faint sounds of Tagalog drift from the hatch. McGirney started to get up for the trip. He made plans to take his wife out tonight, buy her a nice dinner, and the day after tomorrow the fifty-mile rule would go into effect: fifty miles from home and
nobody
is married. He was humming as he saluted the guard standing by the barricades.

Camp Pendleton, California

“I wish you’d spend more time with the children.”

“Uh?”

Maureen Krandel paused before repeating herself. “I said, I wish you’d spend more time with the children.”

Bill Krandel put down the pamphlet he was reading and looked at his wife. She was dressed in her nightclothes—in the short baby-doll nightie he liked—but he hadn’t noticed her joining him in bed. He rolled onto his side and pulled off his reading glasses. “I spend time with them, hon. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about coming to see Julie’s ballet recital, or visiting Justin’s school with me. You can’t just keep bouncing them on your knee and sending them off; you’ve got to get more involved in their lives.”

“What do you mean, sending them off? I try to pay attention to them whenever I can.”

“I don’t want you to try, I’d like you to
do
.”

Krandel said, “I’m just so damned busy with this job, I can’t afford to go traipsing off with them every time they have a recital or something.”

“They don’t have recitals every day. It’s not too much to ask.”

“I’m getting paid for this job, you know—not for watching the kids. Besides, what does it matter if I’m not at every little thing they do? They don’t notice.”

Maureen was silent for a very long time. Krandel reached over and held her chin with his hand. Her face was soft. Tiny crow’s feet had just started to frame her eyes. How long was it since he’d really looked at her? “Look, I’m sorry—but I told you I took a second wife with the corps when I graduated from Annapolis. Tell you what. I promise to spend some time with the kids this weekend. We’ll go to the beach and make a picnic out of it, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, only nodded. Krandel patted her bottom and went back to his reading.

Edwards Air Force Base, California

“This is worse than Strategic Air Command ever was. Back in the old days, at least those mofos had friggin’ conjugal visits. And now that they’ve gutted the bomber force, STRATCOM crews don’t even pull alert anymore, unlike us. And to top it off, they never had to put up with a one-week-in-three rotation. My pecker will fall off from inactivity if this keeps up.”

“Stow it, Gould. Do you want Delores to hear you?”

“That wouldn’t be such a damned bad idea. I could go for a little you-know-what right about now.” Gould peeked around the corner and grinned, lowering his voice. “In fact, that sounds pretty damned nice. I’d even use the pool table if you guys would promise to leave us alone. You know what they say: It’s what made the preacher dance and the choir sing—” Gould was interrupted as Delores walked briskly into the ready room. Her orange flight suit seemed to glow as she entered.

The room grew quiet. A cough punctuated the silence, causing Delores to swing her eyes away from the Notams she was reading to the three TAV pilots sprawled on the alert shack furniture. An unwatched late-night movie played quietly in the background on the large screen TV.

“Don’t stop on my account, boys.”

Gould put his hands behind his head. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Delores. You might say there was just a, uh, pregnant pause in the conversation. Yes, sir … a pregnant pause. Wouldn’t you say, Jim?”

The TAV pilot shook his head in disgust. “Right, Gould. Anything you say.” The pilot stood and strode toward the exit. He directed his remarks to the third pilot. “How about a set of one-on-one crud? We could play it on the pool table, if it’s free.”

“Gotcha.” The two pilots left for the back room, leaving Gould and Delores alone. They sat in awkward silence for a moment before Delores spoke.

“Okay, hotshot. What gives? What was that all about?”

Gould spread his hands. “Nothin’—honest. Just slingin’ the stuff, that’s all.”

“I’ll bet.” She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head. “Jeez, Bob. Can’t you grow up? We’ve been here two days, and we have another five days to go cooped up in this pen. Try to keep your glands from popping all over the place, would you?”

“I can’t help it if I’m a likable guy.”

She snorted. “Well I tell you what, you’re coming off like a jerk.” She moved to the cold drink machine in the corner and punched the button on the dispenser, and a fruit juice popped out. Peeling off the top, she sipped through a tiny straw that came with the box.

She rummaged through a stack of old
National Geographic
and
Airmen
magazines. “So this is what it’s like to pull alert.”

“I warned you it would be so exciting you wouldn’t be able to wait for the next time.”

“And I’ll probably be lucky enough to draw it with you again, no doubt.”

Gould straightened. “Hey, I’m not the flight scheduler. If you’ve got a gripe, see Colonel Zabrewski. He’s the one who rotates the pilots. There are sixteen other TAV drivers you can get hooked up with if you’ve got a complaint.”

“All right, all right. Settle down, hotshot.” Delores took another sip of juice and walked over to the couch where Gould was sprawled. She hesitated, then sat on the armrest. Gould remained on the couch, keeping silent.

Silence persisted for seconds longer, then: “Look … Bob.”

“Uh.”