by Dale Brown
“Brandon cooks it.”
That instantly destroyed Rebecca’s appetite for good. She dropped the food back on its plate. Mace slipped a five-dollar bill under the plate and said, “Sorry about that, Rebecca. Let’s get out of here and we’ll find you some decent dinner.”
“I’m through with dinner,” Furness said, suddenly feeling queasy, “but I know a good place for coffee. Follow me.” They left the bar, got in Mace’s pickup truck, and drove down City Hall Place toward McDonough Monument and to Rebecca’s bed and breakfast.
The little hotel was right at the end of the Heritage Trail River Walk. From the main enclosed patio, they had a view of the Revolutionary War monument, the canal, and across the marina to frozen Lake Champlain. The bed and breakfast’s hosts served hot fudge sundaes and coffee on the patio in the evenings; both officers promised not to tell on each other as they accepted a small splash of Grand Marnier orange liqueur on top of the chocolate syrup.
“Nice place,” Mace said after trying his sundae.
“I stay here every chance I get,” she replied, licking chocolate and whipped cream off her spoon. “So you work for a biker-bar owner and stay in a biker flophouse. You never looked for an apartment? What were you going to do, stay at Afterburners for your entire tour?”
“Frankly, I never thought about it much,” Mace said dryly. He looked around to be sure no one else was within earshot, then said, “After our … activities … in the Persian Gulf, I’ve always considered my job in the Air Force Reserve as day-to-day.”
“Oh?” she asked, surprised.
Their eyes looked right into each other, as if both knew a secret on the other.
“The Air Force made it clear to me that they weren’t going to stand by me,” Mace said. “I made a tactical decision during the war and I got hammered for it. I consider myself extremely fortunate to still be in uniform, let alone be in command of a maintenance group. I guess I ultimately made the right decision during the war, and that at least one high-powered angel somewhere agreed and is rewarding me by letting me continue in service. I don’t expect that patronage to last forever, though, believe me. I’m not a man of delusions.”
Somehow she knew he wasn’t. They fell silent as the host poured more coffee for his guests. When he left, Furness asked, “Can you tell me about what you were doing out there during the war, Daren? I remember you weren’t on the air tasking order.”
“A lot of sorties weren’t on the ATO,” he said uneasily.
“You had no wingmen, no scheduled tanker, and a bomb load you couldn’t jettison.”
“We can’t talk about this, Rebecca.”
“Why not?”
“You know better than to ask, Major,” Mace said evenly, using her military rank to firmly punctuate his warning. He quickly added, “Besides, it’s the first clear night we’ve had in days, and the coffee is good and strong. Let’s enjoy it.” He pointed out the window toward the south. “I can even see the stars out there. That’s Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Amazing what you remember all the way back to nav school.”
“They have a telescope set up on the upstairs deck,” Furness said. She led him upstairs, then down a side hallway and out a set of French doors to a long redwood patio that had been swept clean of snow. An eight-inch reflector telescope on a motorized equatorial mount had been set up there for the guests. An instruction card on the wall told how to use the telescope and the star drive, but Mace scanned the skies briefly, released the worm-gear drive, repositioned the telescope as if he’d been using it all his life, lined it up on a bright star farther to the east across the lake, using the telescope’s small finder scope, and reengaged the drive.
“Aren’t we going to look at … what’s it called, Sirius?”
“Stars don’t look any different through a telescope—they’re too far away to see the disk,” Mace said. “But you’ll like this.”
When Furness peered through the eyepiece, she inhaled in absolute surprise. “It’s Saturn! I can see the rings … I can even see the shadow on the rings from the planet itself, and a few of Saturn’s moons! How did you know that was Saturn?”
“The weather shop still prepares briefings on which planets and bright stars are up,” Mace replied, “and I still get a weather briefing and forecast four times a day. We still calibrate the sextants on the tankers for celestial navigation, even though the tanker crews rarely use them with their GPS and inertial navigation systems—I even did a few precomps and shot the sun the other day. Once a nav, always a nav.” He pointed to the sky to the south: “There’s Orion with his belt and sword, and Drago the dragon, and Taurus the bull, and the star cluster called the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.”
As they scanned the night sky, Furness shivered, wrapped her arms around herself, and stepped closer to Mace. He responded by putting an arm around her. “See any more constellations?” she asked.
“Yeah. Darenoid, the frozen naviguesser. Let’s go inside.”
They went inside and headed for the stairs, but Rebecca took Mace’s hand and pulled him toward the hallway to the right. He hesitated, searching her eyes, silently asking if she was sure, relaxing his grip, offering her a chance to gracefully back away. She did not release him, and he followed her three doors down and into her room.
There was no talking, no polite conversation, no more requests or replies. As Daren locked the door, Rebecca walked over beside the bed, kicked off her boots, and, standing before him, began to unbutton his shirt. He held her cold face in his hands as she worked, rolling his eyes in mock agony as her cold fingers touched, then explored, his bare chest. His body was lean, rock-hard, and athletic, his chest was square and muscular, even his back was angular and sinewy. Guys never tailored their flight suits or fatigues, so most men’s bodies looked the same when in a military outfit—and, in fact, most Air Force men were very much alike, trim and fit, maybe toned-up if they were serious about exercise. Daren was not just fit or toned, he was built, Furness thought. Taking off his shirt, revealing his incredible body, wrapping her arms around his rounded shoulders and roaming across his fantastic chest and arms was like unwrapping a late but much-anticipated Christmas present.
Her hands wrapped around to his back, and they kissed. The kiss quickly intensified as both tasted, explored, and sought even more. Her hips briefly moved against him, an unbidden but insistent invitation, touching groin to groin for the briefest of moments. That caused a sudden shiver to shoot through him, not from the cold this time but from the pleasure, and his hands began to work the buttons of her cotton blouse. When that was removed, she waited for him to reach around to undo the fasteners of her brassiere, but instead he stepped back and allowed her to remove her brassiere herself. She used the opportunity to full advantage, doing it as slowly as her pounding heart and quickening breathing would allow, then stood before him, topless, watching his eyes roam across her body and his smile beginning to grow.
She expected the rest of it to be quick and catlike, like Ed—and she had to admit that sometimes she liked that. But Daren wasn’t going to allow it. He went slow, like a long, sybaritic poem, alternatively smothering her with kisses and grasps, then letting her relax with gentle touches and caresses. He was offering her the spectrum of lovemaking, the hard and the soft, observing which she preferred and delighting in every new discovery. She liked her kisses wet and deep, her breasts handled gently but her nipples teased and moistened into full attention, her buttocks and thighs taken in both hands and firmly massaged. As he laid her back on the thick, soft bed and got on his knees before her, he discovered she liked her womanhood treated slowly, carefully, almost reverently, like kissing a baby’s lips, until her breathing became deeper and more audible and her hands moved from the bed, to her own breasts, and then to the back of his head, urging him closer, deeper …
He finally stood before her, his well-developed chest moving up and down breathlessly as if he had run up and down stairs, and he started to undo his belt. She qui
ckly sat up, slid off the edge of the bed to her knees, unfastened his belt for him, and slid his jeans and underwear to the hardwood floor. She wrapped her hand around him, feeling its heat and its incredible hardness, then tasted him, once, twice, three times, as deeply as she could. When she released him, she knew neither of them was going to wait any longer. As Daren picked Rebecca off the floor, laid her on her back on the bed, knelt between her legs, and guided himself into her, she discovered him with absolute delight.
It was the beginning of some of the most passionate lovemaking she could remember. His strength was enormous, and he delighted in making her climax time after time until he finally succumbed himself. They made love long and slow. She had thrown out every rule she’d ever made about sleeping with her fellow military personnel, but she didn’t give a damn … until …
They heard the ring of a cellular telephone. She hadn’t even noticed it clipped to the inside of his jacket, but of course being the Maintenance Group commander, especially during an alert, it would be a required and constant companion. He withdrew from her, kissing her lips and her breasts and murmuring something softly to her, an apology or a wish, something she couldn’t quite hear. But when she looked at him again, his face had completely changed. He had completely changed. He was no longer her tender, passionate lover—he was now her superior officer, the MG of the 394th Air Battle Wing.
He wasn’t on the phone long, and he was reaching for his pants and shirt. “What is it?” Furness asked him.
“They figured out what they’re going to do with us,” Mace said, hurriedly dressing. “We’re deploying. To Turkey. Recon and Wild Weasel operations. There’s a staff meeting in ten minutes. I’ve got my utility uniform in the truck; I’ll have to change out there,” he told her. He put his jacket and boots on, paused, then came back to Furness and hugged her, closely and deeply. They parted, kissed just as deeply, and embraced again.
“I’ll see you … on the flight line,” Mace said hesitantly as he pulled himself away. She could read his thoughts: he wanted to say thank you, to say all sorts of things that lovers say to each other after parting. But his expression, his anxious smile, told her all she needed to know.
“My gear is packed,” she said. She was dressed and ready in no time. “I’ll drive in with you. They’re going to need crews to fly those things out of here.”
His smile returned, and he nodded. She was, he realized with a great deal of pride, a flyer first and foremost.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Kayseri Air Base, Turkey, Several Hours Later
The entire Ukrainian Air Force was parked on the west ramp of Kayseri Air Base in central Turkey. Colonel Pavlo Tychina shook his head in absolute disbelief. Kayseri was a rather large base, one of the largest Western military bases between Germany and Hawaii, so it would make sense for even a large number of planes to be lost there, but the entire Ukrainian Air Force fit in just eight aircraft parking rows. At L’vov Air Base in Ukrayina, just the MiG-23s at that one base filled twelve rows. This wasn’t an Air Force, he told himself, this was a recreational-aircraft fly-in. But, thank God, Panchenko had spirited spare parts, missiles, tech orders, and charts to Turkey over the past few months.
Now, this was all they had.
Tychina was at the controls of the last MiG-23 fighter plane out of the Ukraine. General Panchenko had led the formation of survivors to Turkey, and Tychina, flying one of the few Ukrayinan planes that carried any weaponry, was bringing up the rear to cover their retreat. He had been allowed to arm his MiG with the standard GSh-23 gun on the centerline gun station, with only one hundred rounds of ammunition—any plane with a cannon was allowed to carry one hundred rounds of ammunition for self-defense—and he was allowed to carry two R-60 short-range heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on the outer pylons. It was not very much protection for anyone, but at the very least it would allow him to engage any enemy planes and hold them off long enough for the others to plug in the afterburners and get away. He also carried one eight-hundred-liter fuel tank on the center pylon.
He was on a high, wide downwind pattern, parallel to the long northernmost active runway of the large Turkish military complex. He was carefully aligning himself with a Turkish F-16 fighter flying about a kilometer ahead of him, matching every altitude and speed change. Tychina knew that if he strayed too far from his escort his brethren—one F-16 directly astern, another high and out of sight somewhere behind him—would attack. His Sirena-3 radar warning receiver was lit up with threats, and had been well before he crossed the Black Sea into Turkish airspace. Fighter tracking radar, surveillance radar, a NATO Patriot surface-to-air missile system tracking radar—they were all locked on. The Ukrayinans might have been cordially invited into Turkey by the host country and by the NATO alliance, but no one was taking any chances here …
… including Tychina, who was constantly rehearsing the sequence of events he’d need to accomplish to turn this approach into an attack. Hit the F-16 in front of him with guns, drop chaff and flares, hit the guy to the right with missiles or guns, then drop to the deck and run like hell until he flamed out over Iraq or Syria—go east and south instead of north and west. He wondered if the Americans or NATO would pull some kind of dirty trick, create a trap. He shook his head: in war anything was possible.
“Ukrainian MiG, Kayseri tower,” the heavily accented voice said on the radio in English, interrupting Tychina’s grim thoughts. “Winds zero-eight-five at ten knots, runway zero-niner, check wheels down, cleared to land.”
“Yes, Ukrayinan MiG, landing now, thank you,” Tychina replied in broken English on the international emergency frequency. Well, if this was a trap, he was too late—NATO had all the surviving attack planes on their base, including the last one. He was committed. If NATO screwed them now, the world could kiss off Ukrayina for good. He flipped the gear-extension lever down, relieving pressure on the hydraulic gear-retraction system which allowed the gear to free-fall, then reached down to the emergency pneumatic gear downlock pressurization handle on the bulkhead near his right leg and began pumping it, which provided backup pressurization for the gear safety downlocks. He continued to pump until all four green gear-down lights came on—the fourth green light signaled that the large ventral fin near the tail feathers had folded up into its landing position—then extended trailing- and leading-edge flaps and set up for the landing.
Turning final, he could see the pristine deserts and low hills of eastern Turkey spread out before him in an incredible panorama, unspoiled even by the extensive oil fields and refineries south and east of the base near the city. Dominating the landscape was Erciyes Dagi, a large volcanic mountain just ten miles south of the city, its sheer walls rising three thousand meters in just a few kilometers, forming almost a spire reaching over four thousand meters above sea level. Kayseri was an industrial megalopolis in the middle of the high desert, but unlike Russian or Ukrainian industrial centers, Kayseri was shiny, freshly painted, almost beautiful. Not a speck of smoke, only a few puffs of white steam or thin smoke. Where was the smog? he wondered. The area north of the volcano was surrounded by farms tended by circular irrigation systems hundreds of meters in diameter, which in the spring would allow crops to flourish in this very inhospitable region. Everything seemed so clean, so impossibly beautiful, that it put L’vov, Odessa, and even the polluted but beautiful Crimea to shame.
As soon as the dual nose gear wheels touched the grooved runway and Tychina extended the four petal speedbrakes and upper wing spoilers, several armored personnel carriers roared onto the runway. As Tychina coasted toward the end, he looked up in his rearview periscope and saw two huge fire trucks and several more APCs converging on him. “Ukrainian MiG, make the first right turn you can and remain on this frequency. Acknowledge.”
“I acknowledge, to turn right, yes I will,” Tychina repeated in his best English. The armored personnel carriers ahead of him had formed a corral that clearly outlined the proper taxiway. As soon as he was clear of the main runw
ay, the armored vehicles closed in and he was ordered to stop and shut down engines.
A Turkish army officer stepped up beside his cockpit, signaling him to open the canopy. As he did so, several armed soldiers took up positions around his plane, but he was happy to see that all of them held their rifles at port arms with the actions open—nonthreatening. After Tychina swung open the heavy canopy, the officer made a hand signal to tell him to keep his hands on the canopy bow, in plain sight. Tychina stood on his ejection seat and did as he was told. Technicians put safety pins in his R-60 missiles, and he could hear them installing some sort of shield around the gun ports and a jack under the fuel tank, presumably as safety measures. Finally, a ladder was placed alongside his plane and he was asked to step down.
Tychina was met at the base of the boarding ladder by a tall, slender Turkish security officer, wearing high calf-length riding boots, his uniform blouse festooned with ribbons and badges, armed with a pearl-handled American .45-caliber automatic pistol in a black leather holster, and smoking a thin cigar—very dangerous around a MiG-23 with weapons aboard. He was flanked by two security guards, both carrying M-16 rifles with M-203 grenade launchers attached. It was very ostentatious firepower for one plane and one pilot, Tychina thought, and he wondered if General Panchenko and the rest of his surviving air force got the same display.
“The next time you disobey my orders and do not follow my escort planes as directed,” the officer said in pidgin Russian, without identifying himself or offering any sort of greeting, “I will shoot you and your Russian piece-of-shit aircraft from the sky. Is that clear?”
Tychina did not reply right away. He stood at attention just a half meter before the Turkish officer, who was several centimeters taller than the Ukrainian pilot, then removed his flying helmet and tucked it into the crook of his left arm. Tychina was wearing a white flameproof hood with cutouts for his eyes and mouth, which got him a few surprised glances at the unusual headgear. Then, with a flourish, Tychina stripped off the mask, transferred the mask to his left hand, and saluted the Turkish officer with his right hand. “Colonel of Aviation Pavlo Tychina, Fifth Air Army, Air Force of the Republic of Ukrayina, reporting as ordered, sir.”