By the time she caught up to him in the paraloft she was calm. But she was far from done. As they stood a few yards from each other, unzipping and hanging their gear on the hooks in the deserted space she said, “Listen, I know what you’re saying, it was a close one. But we’re fine. We could’ve continued.”
For a few moments the room echoed with the sound of zippers and boots scuffing on the smooth cement floor. Dusty saw the incredulity on Eagle’s face morph to anger. “Stop now,” he said, practically spitting out the words. “If it weren’t for me, we would’ve ended up in Slammer’s back seat. I’ve been flying for ten years and I’ve never, ever come that close to…” She knew he was trying to find words to describe the scene playing in his head. The indescribable kinetic energy of two planes flying at 350 knots slamming into each other. Metal tearing, Plexiglas shattering, bodies atomizing, fuel exploding, all in the blink of an eye. She imagined how helpless he must have felt in the back seat of the jet. No flight controls for him to use to save his bacon, just his voice and an ejection handle. He spun on his heels and walked from the room.
The images now shook her as well, her hands trembling at her side as she stood alone in the paraloft. She finally realized how close they had come. Maybe now was the time. Time to run fast and return to the earth and the horses. She could almost smell them. Then she clenched her hands together, forcibly squelching the tremors. That was the old Lexi Rhodes. That girl was gone. She was Dusty now. There was no going back.
A few minutes later Dusty entered the debriefing room. Eagle was deep into filling the grade sheet on the computer. He glanced up at her. The metal chair scratched across the floor as Dusty sat. She could have fried an egg with the anger radiating from his face. She listened to the machine gun staccato of his fingers banging away on the keyboard for a moment then she spoke, very calmly. “This could’ve happened to anyone. It’s a two-person plane. You saved us today, but tomorrow it could be me.”
Eagle stopped his typing and looked at her. “You’re right, it happens. But you’re a student. You can’t mess up like that.”
She cocked her head to the side and met his gaze. “Listen…”
He cut her off, flaring up. “This isn’t a discussion, for fuck’s sake. You’re a goddamn student. Why don’t you just shut up and act like one?” She watched impassively as he struggled to calm himself. “It’s no big deal. You get a Down. You can re-fly the mission tomorrow.” She knew most students received one Down. A few got two. Not many survived three. Down’s were like strikes in baseball; three and you were out. He turned his attention back to the keyboard.
Dusty leaned slowly forward, brushing her raven black hair over her left ear, exposing the skin of her neck glowing soft and pale. She reached across the table and took his hand. “Listen Eagle, I think there’s something we can talk about here.”
He jerked his hand away as if stung by a scorpion. “Don’t touch me. You’re so fucked, it’s not even funny.” He jumped up, his face flushed. “If there was ever a reason to boot your ass out, it’s fraternization. That’s so far against the rules, not even you can bullshit your way out.”
She leaned back, unperturbed. “Yeah. Actually, that’s what I was going to talk about. My roommate’s Mandy Parker.” Again she cocked her head, looking him straight in the eyes.
He paused, slightly taken aback. “So?”
“Who came up with your call sign? Slammer, probably. Eagle for Scout, right? I’ll bet you’re even an actual Eagle Scout. Mr.Good Guy? Incorruptible? Honest to a fault?” She leaned forward. “I wonder what your call sign would be if Mandy came up with it? She said you were quite the little demon between the sheets. What’s the opposite of Eagle Scout? Dirty Devil? DD for short? Has a nice ring. You could get a cute little tattoo. Maybe a sticker for your helmet. Oh wait, fraternization. You were saying?”
She watched him deflate slowly into the seat, face ashen. “Listen, Dusty…”
She picked absently at a hangnail. “Eagle, did you know Jenny, my dear college friend and your fiancé, invited me to your wedding?”
The color flashed back with a vengeance to Eagle’s cheeks. He clenched his jaw so hard Dusty thought the next sound she heard would be his teeth bouncing across the floor. “My point is, we all make mistakes. We don’t want them ruining our future, do we?” His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, his brain clearly not quite accepting the situation. She helped him along. “My sense is you don’t like me. Fair enough. We don’t all have to get along like some goddamn sorority. But I think you let that color your judgment about what happened up there. If I was someone else, maybe one of your,” she made air quotes, “boys, you would have cussed me out airborne, then finished up the mission. Lesson learned.”
She scraped the chair back and got to her feet. His mouth was clamped shut now. He’d caught up to her. “This way we can both learn and move on. No harm, no foul. Believe me, I learned from this. It will never happen again.”
“Get the fuck out of my sight,” he croaked.
Dusty reached the door. “I’ll tell Slammer there was a radar problem. See you soon. Jenny invited me over for dinner.”
Back in the air, Slammer had his hands full with Quick in the middle of their third engagement. He’d gotten the best of her on the first two, but not without increasing effort on his part. What she lacked in experience, she made up for in natural air sense and raw determination.
They flashed by each other for the second time, both maintaining about 400 knots and rating around in the horizontal plane to come at each other again, like two knights on horseback in a continuous, circling joust, whizzing by, narrowly missing, then turning across each other’s tail and galloping in opposing turns until they came head on, only to whiz by again. It was a constant grinding test of strength and will, each plane sustaining a crushing 7Gs, turn after turn. All four crew were sweating, grunting, and gasping for breath, waiting for the other pair to make a mistake while eking every bit of performance from their own machine.
Approaching the next merge he decided to redefine the fight. It was clear Quick had gleaned how to maintain her jet at maximum high-speed turning performance. Let’s see how she handled a shift in tactics. As the Rhinos flashed by each other he slammed the stick hard to the right, reversing his turn. He was hoping to catch Quick unawares and sneak inside her turn as she came around in front of him. But she recognized his ploy immediately and reefed her nose high into pure vertical. Now she was pointed toward the sky while he continued his arc, scribing a horizontal circle. He watched out the top of his canopy as her Rhino soared 1,500 feet above him. If he did nothing, she would be able to roll around and threaten him inside of ten seconds. He was duly impressed, “Damn!”
Dingle answered, “Yes, sir. And she’s pulling for a shot.”
Quick had reached the apex of her vertical climb and was pulling hard to get her nose tracking toward Slammer. She was well above him, and nicely inside his turn, but she had converted airspeed into altitude, and was thus slow and sluggish.
Slammer’s jet was just barely outside the upper limits of her radar’s raster scan as her nose began tracking down. The proper counter in this situation was for him to pull up into Quick. To jam her shot and force another merge in the vertical. He glanced at his fuel gauge. He was almost at BINGO fuel; it was time to go home. During a dogfight at full afterburner, the twin GE motors sucked gas at an alarming rate. If the fight went on for even one more minute, they would both have to declare emergencies for low fuel. Two more minutes, someone was going for a ride in the chute.
He continued his lateral vector, arcing predictably across the horizon in a 7G, 400 knot streak. Dingle’s concerned voice piped up in his ear. “Sir?”
“We’re almost out of gas. Let’s show her a little leg and see how fast she bites.” He released the slightest pressure on the stick, easing his pull by a minute fraction. As a result his plane described a slightly straighter line in the sky, nearly imperceptible to the eye.
She brought the stick into her lap, bringing her nose to bear as she fingered the trigger. “Shoot him!” Chewie yelled from the back seat.
She managed to sound professional as she squeezed the trigger, transmitting her shot. “Fox-2!” Then waited the two seconds to account for missile flight before declaring, “Kill!”
Slammer’s voice immediately came through the radio, “Copy kill. Knock it off. Slammer knock it off.”
She whooped in her mask before collecting herself and answering, “Quick knock it off.” That was it. She had won!
“Okay, Slammer’s got the lead, let’s go home.”
She screamed silently in the cockpit, pumping her fist in the air.
Chewie’s approval over the intercom was much louder. “Nice work, Quick!”
Back on the flight line Slammer walked from his jet with Dingle by his side, replaying the highpoints of the engagements in his head. Quick and Chewie joined them and the four crew shuffled toward the hangar, their sweat-drenched harnesses flapping unzipped and helmets swinging in their hands, like football players walking off the field after a great win.
Quick walked next to him, practically skipping, her iciness at least temporarily forgotten. She flew her free hand in between them recreating particular moments and he couldn’t help but smile. Who wouldn’t when faced with such enthusiasm? Something about her emanated a happiness, a contagious intense joy. Like a bouncy little puppy. But no, that sounded silly and dismissive. In the best way possible, she possessed no filter at that moment. The competition and adrenaline, the raw fun of the experience, leaked from every pore in her body broadcasting to all nearby. As they walked he took in her smiling exuberance, sweaty face, golden hair spiked at odd angles, her blue eyes dancing along with her words.
She stopped abruptly. “Hey.”
He stopped next to her, puzzled. “Hey what?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
He laughed. “No, Ace of Base. I tuned you out a few steps back. But here’s the deal. This wasn’t a graded syllabus flight, but there’s always a learning point.” She perked up, clearly eager to relive the dogfights. He started walking again and she matched him. “You fly a great plane, but don’t allow yourself to be satisfied with that. I can tell you love the fights, but every second you stay engaged increases your risk of getting nailed. When a bandit gives you an opening like I did…”
She reached out a hand to his arm, a twinkle in her eye. “Did you just say ‘gives you’?”
And there it was, right there. She was having fun, but missing the bigger picture. “Watch your fat head, Quick. Or I’m likely to stick a pin in it.” He forced a smile but thought, this was her weakness. “Listen up. Be more aggressive when it’s time to put missiles on foreheads. Every Gomer’s got a buddy waiting to pop you if you get caught up in a furball. Turn, shoot, kill, bug out. Don’t take the time to admire yourself in the mirror or you will end up a headline in a newspaper.”
She looked at him, a little furrow on her brow, obviously playing his words against the memory of the fight. She nodded without responding and he could tell she was chewing on what he said.
He stopped, letting the WSOs catch up while she kept walking. Chewie leaned over, grinned, and whispered in his ear, “Way to get shot by a girl, tough guy.”
Slammer returned the smile and slapped his buddy hard on the back. “Least I was driving. Now let’s go find out what happened to Dusty.”
Dusty drove through the darkened neighborhood. It was a new development with only a few houses widely spaced, which suited her just fine. She took the last turn into a cul-de-sac where a lone house stood at the end with a light blazing in the kitchen. She barely tapped the brakes as the garage door magically rolled up to receive her car.
JT’s place was a two-story colonial with a brick façade a few miles south of the base, an affordable parcel not too close to the beach. She knew JT thought it was a great property because the back of his lot abutted a wilderness preserve. But for her it was ideal for a different reason; it was out of the orbit of the regular base traffic. Every so often after they finished studying, she would join him under the stars on the back deck for a beer. They would watch the distant afterburner comets climbing into the sky toward the east, the faint rumble of the motors barely audible over the crickets and toads.
Now she sat next to him at the broad kitchen table, with flight manuals and papers scattered about them. The furnishings were new but not fancy. The counters were not marble or even granite, but some imitation stone. The appliances were clad in silvery metal, but it wasn’t stainless, it was aluminum. She felt a twinge of guilt for noticing, but she couldn’t help it. It was part of who she was to notice these things.
She looked over at JT, leafing through a manual picking out the next set of questions to fire at her. She would never tell him to his face but he was a great teacher. Patient when necessary, but stern and unrelenting. He would drill her on the procedures over and over until she could recite them under fire.
She returned to scribbling in her notebook when she heard him give a small cough. He was so predictable. He only cleared his throat when he felt the need to discuss something personal, something other than the Rhino. “Dusty. I want to ask you something.”
She was in no mood. She was so close to the end, so close to getting the hell out of training. There were a couple of months of Air-to-Air, then the crucible of Carrier Qualification to complete, and then she was gone. She’d move on to the Fleet. “What is it?”
She watched him shift his weight uncomfortably. “The way you’re going about this, I’m worried…”
“What?” she feigned.
He gave her a look of genuine concern that made her stomach sour. “What happened with Eagle out there today?”
She looked down, writing again in her book. “Nothing. Radar problems.”
“Dusty, I saw him in the ready room. I’ve never seen him so pissed off.” She flipped the page and continued her writing. She could hear the exasperation in his voice. “You’re not helping yourself out. You need to re-fly a couple of hops.”
That was it. Enough. Time to nip this shit right in the bud. She put her finger on his lips, silencing him. “Listen, when I was twelve I found my father in the bathroom. He’d swallowed the business end of a .38 revolver.” JT grimaced. “He taught me all about frailty. About weakness.” She dropped her hand to his jaw, grasping it tightly. “I know my limits. You’ve said yourself you’ve never had a student as good as me. You told me I knew more than any other student you’d seen.” Then she moved his jaw back and forth to the measured cadence of her words. “Were you bullshitting me?”
He removed her hand and held it, but she pulled away. “No. Hell, you know more than most Fleet pilots. It’s just your air sense. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You could just stand to get in the air a few more times. Get more experience.”
She pushed her finger hard onto his lips, shushing him again. “Listen JT, if I was dangerous, you wouldn’t fly with me, right?”
He nodded. “You do fine with me, Dusty. But I won’t be there forever. I won’t be there in the Fleet.”
She leaned on her elbows, chewing on the end of her pen, trying to figure a way to explain. “There were a lot of people in Manhattan who thought they knew what was best for me. The thing with my dad taught me, forced me, to listen to myself.”
He shook his head. “Dusty, Eagle’s a professional. I’m a professional. We see hundreds of students.”
“You mean to tell me there’s no favorites? No pets?” He looked down.
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br /> She pressed on. “I’m nobody’s favorite, except maybe yours. I’ve got two strikes; I’m a girl, and I’m prickly. If there’s a fifty-fifty decision, guess which side I’m going to fall on. Eagle’s a fucking hypocrite. And you assholes all cover up for him. You think I’m going to let him judge me?”
JT opened his mouth to speak but she continued, “If I was one of his boys, things would have turned out differently, right? So fuck him. I’m not going to let him kick me out just because he doesn’t like my shit.”
“Dusty…”
“I know what I’m doing.” She silenced him with a chaste kiss and turned back to her notebook.
She listened to his chair scrape back from the table. He walked away, clearly exasperated. She chanced a glance and saw him standing in front of the TV in the living room with his arms folded tight, frustration all over his face. Well, too bad for him.
“The governments of China and Vietnam have each aggressively laid claim to the oil in the Spratly Island chain,” the reporter was saying. JT used the remote to boost the volume.
“Something wrong?” she asked. She didn’t want to hurt him, not really.
He turned to her. “Not yet.”
In the background the reporter moved to the next hot topic. “Meanwhile, investigations are continuing in the mysterious plane crash that killed the brother of the Sultan of Brunei…”
Chapter 14
10 April
Scarborough Shoal, South China Sea
The commando surfaced at arm’s length from the fantail, listening as the waves slapped gently against the hull. He unlatched his rebreather, letting it slip from his back toward the ocean floor, and floated, bobbing like a cork in the inky sea as he marked the rounds of the young sailors on watch, first the one circling from the right, then the second from the left. After a few minutes he was confident the pattern was routine. Silent as a ghost he made his way onto the BRP Gregorio del Pilar. The Philippine Navy frigate swung gently from her anchor in the light breeze under a black moonless night. Not even the stars peeked through the thin cloud layer.
Lions of the Sky Page 14