by Robert Gandt
Tyrwhitt led them on a hide and seek chase through the B’aath district. Walking briskly through the crowded plaza, he took a sharp turn into a vendors’ lane, then darted between a row of crumbling low buildings. When he doubled back to the opposite end of the plaza, he spotted a rusting Trabant taxi idling in the outer lane. He jumped into the taxi and told him to drive swiftly to the Rasheed.
The two puffing Bazrum agents came trotting out a side street in time to see the Trabant pulling away. Tyrwhitt gave them a cheery wave.
By the time he arrived back at the Rasheed, he had reached a decision. This new information was too explosive, too detailed to send by encryption. He would have to fly to Bahrain.
It had taken a couple of calls on the Cyfonika. As it turned out, he had no problem getting a seat on the MEA flight, which was a 727 with over a hundred seats open. Iraq was so poor, few of its citizens could travel by air.
His editor in Sydney was agreeable to Tyrwhitt taking some rehab time. Everyone knew that Baghdad was a hardship assignment and, anyway, Tyrwhitt could justify getting out for a few days by cranking out a feature article. In Bahrain he could write something about the skirmishes between the emirate government and the Shiites who were raising hell in the streets. Old stuff, but it would cloak his real reason for being in Bahrain.
Latifiyah. If the Iraqi informant was to be believed — and Tyrwhitt was convinced of the man’s veracity — time was against them. It was urgent that he have one of his rare one-on-one debriefings with his CIA handler. The secrets of Latifiyah were ticking in his head like a time bomb.
Tyrwhitt threw his toilet kit into the suitcase. After a moment’s hesitation he removed the ankle holster and the Beretta nine-millimeter and stuffed it in the dresser drawer. For the past five years, since he’d been through the CIA school in Langley, Virginia, he had regarded the concealed pistol as life insurance. Without it he felt defenseless. He had no choice; no way could he get through Baghdad’s airport security with a firearm.
He glanced at his watch. Almost an hour remained before he had to leave for the airport. Tyrwhitt settled into the deep desk chair and tried to put everything into perspective. His meeting with Ormsby, his CIA handler, would take no longer than half a day. Bahrain would be a holiday. Short, but still a holiday from the grimness of Baghdad. It would feel peculiar not to be startled by each unusual sound, every soft footstep in a hallway. Not to lie awake wondering when the Bazrum would smash through his door and haul him away.
Bahrain was an enlightened Muslim country with a plenitude of good restaurants. Bars. Night clubs. . .
Wait. In the frenzy to gather the information about Latifiyah, he had nearly forgotten. When he last spoke with Claire, wasn’t she on assignment? Yes, of course she was. She had been infuriated that he woke her up, suggesting she join him in Baghdad.
Claire was in Bahrain.
He picked up the Cyfonika satchel and walked to the window. He extended the antenna of the satellite device and began punching in the numbers.
<>
Chuff. Chuff. Chuff.
Maxwell rounded the corner at the fantail, then started back up the starboard side. Jogging on the hangar deck involved a certain risk. You had to be wary of aircraft tie-down chains that could snag an ankle and make you a cripple. You had to dodge the tow vehicles that shuttled back and forth, darting in front of you, dragging jets around the deck.
He was on his second lap when he heard someone coming up from behind.
“Mind if I tag along, XO?” B.J. Johnson appeared beside him, matching his easy stride. She was wearing nylon warm-ups and a white head band. Maxwell noted her level, relaxed pace. B.J. was not a jogger. The kid was a serious runner.
“I’d probably just hold you up.”
“You’re doing a good eight minute mile pace,” she said. “Suits me.”
“Looks like you’ve done this before.”
“Once or twice,” she said, breathing easily. “A whole slew of ten-kay runs, and the Marine Corps marathon last fall. Three hours, twenty-five minutes. Not bad for a girl, huh?”
“Not bad at all. You beat me by five minutes.”
She smiled at that. “So?”
They made a half dozen circuits of the hangar deck, maintaining the eight-minute pace. “How many laps to a mile?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Twenty laps takes me forty-five minutes. What’s that? Six miles?”
“Close. How far you gonna go?”
“Six. Then I’m wiped out.” He looked at her again and said, “What’s on your mind, B.J.? You didn’t come up here to run laps with an old guy.”
She kept her eyes straight ahead. “I need somebody to talk to. Spam is no use. She’s on another frequency. To the other guys in the squadron, I’m still an alien. I thought maybe I could run something by you.”
“Sounds heavy. What’s the subject?”
“Me. I’m going to quit.”
Maxwell slowed to a halt. “If we’re gonna talk about this, I have to be able to breath. C’mon with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. A special place.”
<>
A twenty-knot wind swept over the catwalk, tousling B.J. Johnson’s hair and ruffling the collar of her flight suit. Eighty feet below they could see the bow of the Reagan slicing like a cleaver through the Gulf.
B.J. stared down at the water and said, “Back when I got my orders to flight training, I thought it was such a bright, shining opportunity. Then to get Hornets — absolutely my wildest dreams come true. It was supposed to be a great adventure.”
Maxwell knew what she meant. He could remember his own flight training days — the exhilaration of going off to Pensacola, beginning a career in naval aviation. It never left you.
“So you changed your mind?”
“About the adventure part, no. I still love flying. But the opportunity part, that stuff about the wings of gold and the camaraderie of naval aviators — it didn’t happen, Brick. It’s not happening. Not for me, not for any women aviators. It’s a lie.”
He had never heard B.J. speak so bitterly before. It gushed out in an angry burst. “Nobody said it was going to be easy,” he said.
Her eyes were filling with tears. “Damn it, don’t say that! I never wanted it to be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s just that . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“You don’t think it’s worth doing any more?”
“I don’t think I can do it anymore.” She began to lose her composure. “I don’t want be a trailblazer. I don’t want to set a damned example. I just want to go someplace where I’m accepted for what I can do.”
She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “Sorry. Fighter pilots aren’t supposed to cry, are they? They’re supposed to be like John Wayne.”
“John Wayne wasn’t a fighter pilot. He was an actor. You, on the other hand, are a real-life fighter pilot. Feel free to cry.”
Maxwell knew what she meant. B.J.’s troubles were the same every minority faced when they broke into a fraternity like naval aviation. Just because you made it through the door didn’t mean they invited you to the table.
“It’s no secret,” she said. “They really want us to fail.”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
“Those who feel threatened by us. The Undra Cheevers and Hozer Millers who cheer whenever one of us bites the dust. It’s like. . . we have no friends. No support group.”
For a while Maxwell said nothing. He knew what she said was true. Women in military aviation were isolated, without the traditional bonds that male warriors took for granted. He thought about his own nugget years. Yes, he’d had a built-in support group. Not only did he have fellow male aviators with whom he lived and trained, he had mentors. He had his father, salty and opinionated. He had Josh Dunn, his father’s best friend. He had a sequence of mentors — flight instructors, department heads, commanding officers.
For men, mentors were n
atural and necessary. For women fighter pilots like B.J. Johnson, they were nonexistent.
“Okay, let’s start one,” said Maxwell.
“Start what?”
“A support group. Consider me the founder and president of the official B.J. Johnson support group.”
B.J. looked skeptical. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Not at all. The group has just been founded. There’s only one thing you’re not allowed to do.”
“Uh-oh. What’s that?”
“Quit.”
B.J. turned and gazed out to sea. Off on the eastern horizon lay the low, mottled coastline of Iran. To the north was Iraq. Enemies everywhere.
“What would it prove? They’re still gonna hate me.”
“That’s their problem. It’s your life, not theirs.”
B.J. didn’t respond. She peered around, taking in the panoramic view. “I see why you like it up here.”
“Out here at night, especially in a storm, you feel infinitesimally small. It puts your problems in perspective.”
“Is that how you felt in outer space? Infinitesimally small?”
“Yeah, if you can call a two-hundred-fifty-mile-high orbit ‘outer space.’”
She looked dreamily off into the distance. “I once thought I wanted to do that.”
“You still can. You could be an astronaut, B.J.”
She shook her head. “This is hard enough, just proving that I can fly the Hornet. Then I would have to somehow get into test pilot school, go through the same bullshit again. Proving myself. Then NASA. I can’t be a trailblazer anymore.”
Maxwell felt a shock run through him. He stared at her. “What did you say?”
She looked at him peculiarly. “Trailblazer?”
Maxwell turned his face out to the open sea. His mind was racing back in time. “That’s what she called herself,” he mumbled into the wind.
“She? You mean. . .”
“Deb.” Maxwell gripped the rail with both hands. “She always called herself a trailblazer.”
“Deb was your wife, wasn’t she?” B.J. said gently. “I heard what happened. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m over that.”
“She was an astronaut too, wasn’t she?”
“Almost. She was training for her first shuttle flight.”
B.J. waited a moment. “Is that why you quit?”
Maxwell didn’t answer right away. He had locked those memories in a dark compartment of his psyche, not to be shared. “It was more complicated than that.”
“ . You resigned from the astronaut program.”
“Yeah, I resigned.”
She folded her arms over her chest and faced him. “No disrespect, sir, but doesn’t it seem a little. . . condradictory, you giving me a pep talk about not quitting?”
The ship was heeling to port. As the Reagan’s course altered to the south, the glare of the afternoon sun spilled over them. Maxwell pulled his sunglasses from the sleeve pocket of his flight suit and put them on. “You’re not me, and this isn’t the space shuttle we’re talking about. You’re already a fighter pilot, and you have to have a better reason for throwing away your career than because the guys don’t like you.”
She sighed and looked out over the rail again. The sun was low over the Saudi coastline. “What was she like? Your wife, I mean.”
“Smart. Good looking. Gutsy.”
“What would she say about what I’m doing now?
He looked at her questioningly. “What are you doing?”
“Being a trailblazer. Like her.”
He nodded. “She’d say don’t quit.”
<>
Outside her room, the late afternoon sun had settled below the rim of the high rise buildings across from the hotel. As she listened to the man’s voice on the other end of the line, she felt a rush of emotion. She was surprised that Chris Tyrwhitt still had the power to rouse her.
“How did you know I was in Bahrain?” said Claire.
“Lucky guess.”
“Are you still trying to get me to Baghdad? Forget it. I’m not coming.”
“You don’t have to. I’m coming to you.”
A silence followed while Claire digested the news. She could hear him breathing on the phone. It sounded eery, as if his voice was being channeled through outer space.
“I’m very busy,” she said finally. “The divorce is still in process and we shouldn’t —”
“We have to talk, Claire. Really. I need to see you.”
“It won’t change anything. Too much has happened.”
“I don’t care what’s happened. I’ll make it up to you. You don’t have to believe me, just give me a chance. Can’t we at least have a drink, maybe dinner together?”
She hesitated. She wished he didn’t have this effect on her. Damn him, he was a masterful charmer, which was why she had fallen for him the first time around. She had learned her lesson. Once with Chris Tyrwhitt was enough, thank you.
But what the hell, he could be good company. He made her laugh, made her feel wanted, made her feel sexy. Which, of course, was the dangerous thing about Chris Tyrwhitt.
Don’t see him, she told herself. You’re finished with Chris Tyrwhitt.
“Okay,” she heard herself saying. “We can meet for a drink.”
Chapter Seventeen
Bahrain
Manama, Bahrain
0930, Friday, 23 May
A mini-tornado of dust swirled beneath the CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter as it alighted on the embassy landing pad. The khaki-clad naval officers trotted away from the helo in single file, clutching bags and hanging onto their caps. Each was running in the hunched-over position that fixed-wing pilots always took when they were forced to walk beneath the whop-whopping blades of a rotary-wing aircraft.
Of all the Gulf emirates, Maxwell liked Bahrain the most. The prosperous little archipelago was separated by a single causeway from the great Saudi peninsula. Though the same family — the Al-Khalifas — had ruled it for over two centuries, the emirate had received a heavy dose of westernization during a century of British occupation.
Maxwell dropped his bag at the edge of the concrete helo pad and gazed around. Bahrain looked just as he remembered. He could still see vestiges of the British colonial past in the architecture, in the way shops and stores were set back from the street. Bahrain was the most liberal and westernized of the Gulf states, and that was reason enough to be glad they were here.
All fifteen designated strike leaders, as well as every squadron commanding officer from the Reagan’s air wing had been summoned to the briefing. For the strike leaders, it didn’t matter what the reason was. It was a weekend off the ship.
Because the U.S. military’s Bachelor Officer Quarters in Bahrain was too small to accommodate the attendees to the strike conference, the Reagan contingent would stay at the Holiday Inn. A bus was waiting at the edge of the helo pad to transport them to the hotel.
As the bus lurched out of the embassy compound, CAG Boyce yelled to back of the bus. “Check into your rooms, then show up for beer call at seventeen-hundred.” He jammed a cigar in his mouth. “I mean everyone. No excuses.”
The bus wound through the narrow side street, then onto the main thoroughfare of downtown Manama, the capital of Bahrain. The Navy pilots stared at the clean, well-kept buildings, the recently paved streets, the neatness of the city. They passed Sheikh’s beach, which was one of the few places in the Middle East where you could see women in bikinis.
They drove past a residential complex where, in one block, stood four identical houses. One of the Tomcat pilots knew the story. “Some rich local guy has four wives. According to the Koran, a man can have multiple wives, but he has to treat them equally. So the poor schmuck had to build a house for each one.”
The Holiday Inn was a sprawling two-story building. It had a richly carpeted lobby, ornamented with brass and marble, and it was staffed by a brigade of what they called TCNs — Third Countr
y Nationals — mostly Pakistanis and Filipinos, who were in perpetual motion delivering messages, fetching cocktails, emptying ashtrays.
The pilots stood in the lobby and gazed around. After the steel-encased dreariness of a Navy warship, the hotel looked like an imperial palace. It also possessed the most vital of accoutrements — a long, brass-railed bar extending just off the lobby. Through a glass-paneled door they could see the other essential component — a swimming pool and poolside bar where, if fortune should smile on them, they would encounter flight attendants in transit or a cluster of female tourists.
Directly across the street stood another palace, the Gulf Hotel, where it had been confirmed that a contingent of GAGs were staying. Bahrain was an even happier hunting ground than Dubai.
Maxwell was the last to check in. The desk clerk handed him the room key and said, “Message for you, Commander Maxwell. It came an hour ago.”
On his way up the elevator he read the pink note sheet.
Dearest Sam,
Miss you terribly. Please keep dinner open. I’m across the street in the Gulf Hotel, room 238. Call ASAP.”
Kisses, hugs, everything else,
Claire
<>
Maxwell’s room was spacious, with sliding doors that opened on a sunny verandah with a table and patio chairs. He went to the phone and punched up the number for the Gulf Hotel.
“Room 238, please.”
No answer.
After he’d unpacked his duffel bag and hung up his uniform, he put on his swimming trunks and went down to the pool. Most of the Reagan strike leaders were already there. DeLancey and Manson were at the poolside bar making moves on a couple of bikini-clad European women.
Maxwell swam half a dozen laps, then flopped in a lounge chair and let the sun dry him off. After several minutes, he went to the bar and picked up the phone. He tried the Gulf Hotel again. While the phone rang he waved at DeLancey, who was eyeing him from across the bar.