Knight's Blood

by Julianne Lee

  A frown tightened his brow and he pressed his fingers to his face to get rid of it. If she kept that up, eventually he wouldn’t give a damn how attractive she was. He stood. “Would you care for some coffee, ma’am?”

  “Might there be tea?”

  He nodded. “Certainly, ma’am.” Tea. Of course. He excused himself and went to get it. At the other end of the wardroom a few other aviators, who had just awakened and were there for breakfast, sat at a table before bowls of cereal. Jake was there, hunched over his breakfast and struggling to look like he wasn’t listening in, and Alex looked back at the reporter to decide whether she was out of earshot.

  Nope, too close. So he maintained silence. Jake was Alex’s Naval Flight Officer—”Guy In Back”—and caught Alex’s eye with a roll of his eyes at the reporter. Alex discreetly shrugged one shoulder in reply to Jake’s unasked query, and proceeded on his mission. On the way back from the counter with the coffee and tea, he swallowed as much of his coffee as he could get down without burning himself.

  Bolstered and well caffeinated by shipboard road tar, he delivered the tea, sat back in the rickety, aluminum tube chair opposite the reporter, and continued the conversation. “With all due respect, ma’am, though it’s no bother to talk with you, if this isn’t for a fluff piece and you’d rather be talking to a British pilot, why are you here?”

  “You’ve not heard about the recent find in Scotland?” She sipped her tea and didn’t grimace at it. A point in her favor.

  Alex shook his head and took another careful sip of his coffee as he watched her over the rim of his cup.

  “A few months ago there was found an F-18 under some silt at the bottom of the Firth of Clyde and nobody knows how it got there.”

  He grunted and leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “So...you’re here to find out if we’ve misplaced a plane?”

  Now she smiled, and it was a broad one. Her mouth was wide and her lips full, and her teeth were very white. Suddenly she looked too young to be a reporter. “No, actually, I’m here for background on the American navy. I’ve discussed it with your captain, and some others of your senior officers, and they told me I could talk to you as a typical F-18 pilot. Although, I expect the fact that you have the best flying record on the ship makes you rather atypical.” A note of cynicism had crept into her voice, but she smiled brightly again and the impression went away. “Also, I’m told you’re quite the spit-and-polish sort of fellow.”

  Alex turned out the toe of one brown shoe for a look, and decided it was a good job, but still nothing remarkable. “I polish my shoes, ma’am, for the same reason you brush your hair. Because it looks bad if I don’t. My father is an admiral; I was raised to be this way.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a criticism.”

  He took a long sip of coffee, then set the cup on the table and gazed blandly at her.

  Finally, she said, “Very well, your father is an admiral.” She made a note in a small spiral book on the table before her. “If I know my American accents, I’d say you sound like a Southerner. From Texas, perhaps?”

  All the Brits Alex ever met thought he was from Texas. “Nope. Born in California, and raised everywhere except Texas. My mother is from Kentucky. When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. Maybe that’s why I sound the way I do.”

  “Ah.” She made another note, and consulted something else she’d jotted on another page. “Graduated from the United States Naval Academy.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Honors?”

  “No.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a grin. “Does that mean you don’t want to talk to me now?”

  That brought another smile from her, and he liked that. Note to self: keep her laughing.

  “Why did you want to join the military?”

  “I told you. It’s what I was raised for. It’s who I am.”

  “You never considered anything else?”

  “Well, there was that cowboy thing.” Her smile made him smile, too.

  “Political ambition?”

  He shrugged. “My father is the one in the family with political sensibilities. For me, it’s a job. The pay is good, I see the world, I get shot at every once in a while. Keeps me on my toes.”

  “You’ve flown in combat?”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “Where?”

  “Kosovo.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Most notably, I made a SAM site go away.” In response to her puzzled frown he added, “Surface to Air Missile launch site.”

  “You made it ‘go away?’”

  “That’s what things do when you hit them with a missile.” He stared into his cup and waited for the next question. He knew what was coming; he could smell it.

  “How did that feel?” There it was.

  Alex sighed and looked at her. “It felt like my job.”

  “To kill people?”

  “To follow lawful orders. It’s what I do.”

  “Who you are.”

  Now he looked at her closely. Her dark blue, nearly almond-shaped eyes had softened. Widened. They had lost the look of challenge, and that had never happened before, no matter who was asking that question. It was almost as if she might be able to grasp the truth of what it was like to kill someone, and that suddenly made him uncomfortable. So he shrugged and said, “It’s what we FAGs are paid to do, ma’am.”

  That made her blink, and she stuttered for a moment while her cheeks blossomed red. Finally she said. “Perhaps my understanding of American slang is faulty.”

  “Fighter Attack Guy. I’m a Hornet driver.”

  “Oh.” She sighed and laughed, and now looked at him with new eyes. That gave him a grin, and he took another sip of coffee to hide it. She said, “Nothing lacking in you for self-confidence, is there?”

  “No.” If there were, he sure wouldn’t admit it to her.

  A moment passed as she seemed to gawk at her notes while her blush calmed, then another moment. Finally, he said, “What’s the deal with that plane they found? Somebody steal it?”

  Her voice brightened, relieved to have the interview back on track. “Don’t know. Surprisingly, it was an archaeologist who found it. They think it’s very old. As in centuries.” One vague hand waved in a gesture of approximation.

  Alex sat back and blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. As I believe you Americans say, I shit you not. By the levels of corrosion and deterioration of materials, and by the fact that it was found beneath a sunken fishing boat that had lain undisturbed for a very long time, its discoverers are estimating it to be six or seven hundred years old.”

  A short bark of a surprised laugh escaped him. “Well, then, it’s probably not one of ours. Must be one of those medieval F-18s, you know, the really early models.”

  A snicker burbled from the reporter’s nose, and another smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  “No, seriously, what do they think it is?”

  She shrugged. “I really have not the faintest. They insist it’s an American F-l8. The name of the pilot, painted on the side, has been obscured but they know he was a lieutenant. They haven’t found any of the identification plaques from it. Apparently part of it was burned, including one engine, and the other engine is missing entirely.”

  A realization made Alex’s heart sink. “Wait a minute. You’re not from one of those tabloid rag-type papers, are you?” His tone was unintentionally harsh, so he blinked and added, “Ma’am.”

  She sat up and said rather stiffly, “Not unless you consider the London Times a ‘rag.’”

  He shrugged and shook his head, puzzled. “Well, that’s just nuts. Thinking a jet fighter could be that old. Must be in really bad shape, that’s all.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I mean, that’s just nuts.”

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  >