“You know they were friends? They’d been squadronmates for about four years.”
“He seems to be taking it okay.”
She gulped an ice cube. “Better than me, evidently.”
“Liz, didn’t you ever lose anybody in TraCom?”
“No, not like this. A classmate of mine was killed instructing in T-34s at Whiting, but this was different.” Ostrewski shrugged again. “Ozzie, why didn’t you talk to me when Yao was killed?”
He exhaled, slowly letting the air out of his lungs. “I didn’t know what I felt, Liz. I guess … I guess I didn’t trust myself to say anything to you before I learned the details because I wondered if you had screwed up, and I was even more afraid that I had screwed up. Maybe I missed something with Yao. I just don’t know.” He rubbed her arm. “I’m sorry that I caused you any extra pain. I should have been thinking beyond myself.”
“You had your own dragons to slay.”
“How’s that?”
She smiled. “It’s a Chinese saying or something. We all have our emotional dragons to slay.” She laughed. “You were one of mine.”
Ozzie’s eyes widened in apprehension at the implication. High buffet, airspeed bleeding off. Unload, bury the nose and go to zone five ’burner. He recovered nicely. “Consider that dragon slain, Scooter.”
Ozzie walked Liz to her car and made a point of hugging her again. They kissed good night the way friends do.
Eight
Dead Eyes
There was a little delay in the pace of training after Yao’s death. As Peters predicted, Mr. Wei had declared the incident closed long before the FAA, the Air Force, or anyone else had reached the obvious conclusions: Mr. Yao had ignored the minimum recoverable altitude when using live ordnance and had tried to land the aircraft instead of ejecting while he still had control. “Consider it another lesson learned,” Wei had said. His next words bespoke his mission-oriented mind-set: “I expect you will proceed with strafing next week.”
Sitting with the other IPs in the Skyhawk Room, Robo Robbins absorbed the implication. “Did you ever notice Wei’s eyes?” he asked. “He’s got dead eyes, like a shark.”
“Be that as it may,” Peters said, “we’re now going to be dead eyes with our guns.” There were exaggerated groans at the pun. “To tell you the truth,” Peters added, “I’d just as soon wrap up the air-to-ground phase and get on to the tactics syllabus.”
Delight rubbed his beard, and asked, “Terry, are we condensing the gunnery syllabus to make up time?”
“Affirm. I talked to Rocky Rhode and held his hand long-distance. He’s concerned that the loss would delay carquals and upset Lieu and some others back in D.C. so we’re throwing in an extra simulator session with two live-fire hops instead of three.”
Peters searched the audience. “Gunner, where are you?”
Warrant Officer Jim Keizer raised a laconic hand at the back of the room. He was a tall, well-built career sailor in his late thirties. Peters continued, “Now that we’re done with bombing, your ordies can concentrate on the twenty millimeters. Then you can all go back to Kingsville and rejoin the Navy.”
“What? And lose all this per diem? Not likely, sir!” Keizer’s retort drew appreciative laughter. Ordnancemen qualified to arm and load bombs and maintain the A-4s’ cannon were a premium commodity. Like all seadogs, they knew how to turn their per diem expenses into a profit by careful shopping and gratuitous mooching.
“All right,” Peters continued. “We have three days before the first gunnery flight. Jim’s crew has done the boresighting, but we need to test the guns on the jets we’ll be using in this phase. That’s eight launches a day. We have range time tomorrow and the next day to confirm that both guns work in each bird. Everybody gets one hop to fire fifty rounds per gun. Any malfunctions, and I may exert my authority and take the extra flights myself.”
Catcalls and two paper cups pelted Hook Peters. Fending off the assault with crossed arms, he intoned, “Hey, it’s not my fault. Jane said either she gets a gunnery hop or I sleep on the couch.”
Nine
Manly Man Night
“El Cid,” began Delight, standing at the Skyhawk Bar. “Greatest six-minute sword fight ever filmed—duel to the death for possession of the whole danged city of Calajora. Single-combat warriors like Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Right Stuff.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “And Sophia Loren …”
“Fighting Seabees,” countered Robbins. “Burly construction guys who drive bulldozers and earthmovers. They level mountains for airfields while killing Japs and hardly break a sweat.”
“Okay, The Vikings. You can’t get no more manly than they were. Sail the Atlantic in an open longship, then go raping and pillaging—real Manly Man stuff. And remember Ernest Borgnine? Ragnar’s feasting hall where they swill mead from horns and throw battle-axes at each other and ravish the serving wenches …” Delight grinned hugely. “Come to think of it, kinda reminds me of Animal Night at Miramar …”
Robbins nearly choked on his drink, rerunning the long-gone Friday frivolity at Fighter Town USA. He thought fast. “Taras Bulba. Those cossacks were really Manly Men—jumped their horses over a huge ravine to prove who was right or wrong.” He struck an heroic pose and emulated Yul Brynner. “‘I am Taras Bulba, colonel of the Don Cossacks. Put your faith in your sword, and your sword in the Pole!’” He glanced across the room at Ostrewski. “Oops, sorry, Oz. No offense.”
Ozzie, conversing with Vespa and Thaler, flipped him off without looking back.
“Conan the Barbarian.” Delight flashed a gotcha smile, confident he could not be topped.
“Beeeeep,” went Robbins. “You lose. Conan doesn’t count ’cause he isn’t real.”
Terry Peters entered the lounge with Jane on his arm. He turned to his wife. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “They’re at it again.”
She looked around. “At what again?”
“Richthofen and Brown over there. They play a game called Manly Man Night. One starts by naming a movie and the other has to respond with an equally macho flick until one of them runs out of titles. I think Zack just lost.”
Delight saw the Peterses enter the lounge and joined them at a table. “Hi, guys. You’re just in time—the party’s rolling.”
Jane regarded the former Marine, a suspicious pout on her face. “Things never change around here. The monthly Friday night gathering and poor Carol’s over there with the rest of the aviation widows.” She glanced at the far corner where Carol Delight sat in animated conversation with Kiersten Thaler, Marie Robbins, and some other ATA wives.
Delight waved a placating hand. “Hey, it’s an old-married-person trick. You spend the whole evening talking to everybody else so you have something to say to your spouse during the drive home.” He looked back and forth between Terry and Jane Peters. Keeping a straight face, he added, “Didn’t you know that?”
Jane patted his cheek. “That’s all right, dear. I’m sure you have a comfortable couch somewhere.” She joined the other ladies, knowing that her husband wanted to speak to their partner.
Peters motioned Delight into a corner. “Zack, I got a call from Congressman Ottmann this afternoon. He wants to meet me for a faceto-face with one of his people day after tomorrow. I should be back Monday night.”
Delight nodded. “Sure. You taking the red-eye to Dulles?”
“No, I’m hopping Southwest to Wichita.” He looked around to ensure no one overheard. “Look, if anybody asks—and don’t volunteer it—I’m looking at a twin Cessna at the factory. Ottmann stressed that we keep this as low-key as possible. I don’t know exactly why, but that’s how he wants it.”
“Okay.” Delight thought for a moment. “You figure it has something to do with the Chinese?”
“I don’t know what else. Anyway, I’ll get back ASAP.”
Delight punched Peters’s arm. “Okay, pard. You got it.” He returned to the bar, where Robbins was still holding forth.
Liz
Vespa, intrigued by the arcane male ritual under way, edged closer to Delight and Robbins. Zack offered her the ice bucket. “Hey, Scooter. You need a refill?”
“No, I just wonder how you tell which movie is most manly.”
Delight’s warning receiver began twitching. He knew that Liz Vespa could kid a kidder. “Well … it’s, like, a Guy Thing.”
“Sort of common consent,” added Robbins. His perennial grin seemed to indicate that girls would not understand.
“You want to know what Manly is?” Vespa did not await an answer. “I’ll give you Manly. It’s PMS … actually, it’s flying with PMS.”
Robbins braced himself. Here it comes. The Girl Speech.
“Imagine feeling bloated from all the water you’re retaining. Then add a migraine headache, plus nausea. Then throw in stomach cramps—the kind that make you just want to curl up and go to sleep.” She leveled her gaze at both men. “Now, with all that, imagine making an instrument approach in rough air, at night.” Privately, Delight recalled when he had felt that way.
Vespa was warming up. “Now, after you’ve fought off vertigo in an instrument descent, aggravated by your headache and nausea, consider this. You feel that same way during an air-combat hop, pulling four or five Gs and doing that twice a day for a week.”
Liz drained the last of her vodka tonic and set the glass on the bar with a decisive clunk. “Gentlemen, I’m here to tell you: only Manly Men can fly with PMS.”
The men watched her walk away, too astonished for a reply.
Robbins found his voice first. “Wow! What got into her?”
Delight turned to Thaler, who joined his friends at the bar. “Hey, Psycho. What were you guys talking about with Liz?”
“Well, Ozzie said that he and Maria are getting engaged.” Thaler cocked his head in curiosity. “Why do you ask?”
Ten
Almost Human
Mr. Wei Chinglao sat across the desk from Terry Peters and played the game. Producing a pack of cigarettes, he politely asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?” In the months he had been working with ATA, he hardly could have missed the “No smoking” signs, let alone Robbins’s handlettered “Oxygen in use” beside the WW II LSO paddles on his wall.
Hook Peters had quit smoking three decades before, between Vietnam deployments. He had told his wingman, “If I’m ever about to get captured, you’ll have to shoot me. I’d tell the gooks anything after two days without a smoke.”
Now, Peters regarded Wei’s request. He knows I don’t smoke; he knows there’s no smoking in the building. If I turn him down, he probably thinks I’ll feel I owe him something. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Wei, I’m allergic to tobacco smoke. That’s one of the reasons we post the signs in our spaces here.”
Wei nodded. “Ah, yes. Please excuse me.” He put the Camels back in his shirt pocket. Americans: such a peculiar race. Well, not even a race, he told himself, as mongrelized as they had become. Asia’s homogeneous populations had blessedly escaped most of those problems. And such concerns over trivia! The cartoon animal used to advertise Wei’s favorite cigarettes had been virtually banned by the U.S. government. All things considered, America was a mishmash of contradictions: constant meddling in the affairs of other nations but unwilling to control its own borders; puritan ethics constantly exposed to public hypocrisy; a vicious civil war fought to free the slaves, the descendants of whom still suffer in economic servitude; a constitution proclaiming supremacy of the individual but steadily eroded by the power of the state. If not for its technological genius, Wei was convinced that America never could have come to world prominence.
“I am preparing a report for Mr. Lieu at the embassy,” the program manager explained. “Now that our pilots are nearing the end of their carrier-landing training, I am required to provide a preliminary assessment of their progress.”
Peters turned in his chair toward the “howgozit” chart on the wall. Each PRC flier’s name and grades were neatly inked in for each phase of the program. Where a pilot had failed the course was an abrupt, final red X indicating that he had departed. Two, Peters thought ruefully, had departed this life.
“Well, sir, the figures are right there for you. Overall, I think your pilots have done pretty well.” He turned back to Wei. “Actually, I was surprised that we didn’t lose more pilots or planes before now. The weapons and especially the aerial-tactics refresher programs had the greatest potential for losses, but Yao’s incident was the only one directly involved in our training program.” He did not need to add that the first loss had involved wake turbulence from a Boeing 757 landing at Williams.
Wei’s dark eyes scanned the chart, evidently reading the small, neat letters from fifteen feet. “Mr. Yao brought disaster upon himself, Mr. Peters. My report made that clear.” The normal brisk tone of his voice softened perceptibly. “I trust that you know we hold your firm completely innocent in that event.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, I have been following the field-landing practice as much as possible, and I believe most of our pilots are doing reasonably well. But how many might not achieve your own standards before going to the ship?”
“I was discussing that with Mr. Robbins. We noted four pilots who were inconsistent in the simulated carrier-landing pattern. Two of them have improved this week; the others remain erratic.”
“And they are?”
“Mr. Zhang and Mr. Hu.”
“I mean, Mr. Peters, who are the four?”
“Oh.” Peters was taken aback; he knew that Robbins was inclined to give the first pair “a look at the boat.” He referred back to the list. “Mr. Chao and Mr. Wong. But I should note that Mr. Robbins believes they are making satisfactory progress.”
Wei scribbled a note, then looked up. “Even if Chao and Wong do not complete the course, we regard this as an acceptable completion rate.” He almost smiled. “You have done well.”
Peters was surprised; outright praise from Wei Chinglao was unprecedented. “Well, thank you, sir. Of course, we won’t know the actual results until after the qualification period aboard the Santa Cruz.” He opened his mouth, then thought better of it.
“Yes?” Wei prompted.
No point kidding this guy. “To tell you the truth, sir, I’m surprised and impressed with how well your group has done here. They’ve done quite a lot better than most of us expected.”
Wei leaned back—an unaccustomed, almost relaxed, posture. “Mr. Peters, now I will tell you the absolute truth. These pilots are the product of a screening process completely unprecedented in our military history. Not only did we require exceptional pilots by our standards, but exceptional individuals. The language study alone eliminated several of our most experienced aviators.”
“Well, yes, sir. We knew that this group …”
“Excuse me, Mr. Peters. In all candor, your Navy was told as little as possible about these men. It was considered necessary as a security measure at the time.” He looked down, as if composing his thoughts. “When my government accepted your government’s ah, suggestions as to our internal affairs, there was much resentment. But it was judged worthwhile because of the greater access to American trade and programs such as this.”
Peters sat silently, astonished at Wei’s candor.
“Now, there is a reason for our pilots’ success here,” Wei continued. “You know that most of our aviators only fly about one hundred hours a year—roughly half of what most Americans do. But once we selected our people for this program, they were given that extra hundred hours, much of it under Russian instruction. Therefore, some of our people flew far less than one hundred hours. Additionally, the prospective carrier fliers were exempted from most political requirements. Each year the army is mobilized to help bring in the crops when necessary, but none of these men did so.” He paused, looking directly into Peters’s eyes. “You realize what that meant?”
Peters waved a hand. “Certainly, sir. It meant they were expected to succeed here.”
“Precisely. And thanks to your staff, the large majority have done so.” Wei stood up, preparing to leave. Peters leapt to his feet as well, ruefully thinking that he had mistaken the man’s intentions with the cigarette gambit.
“One final thing, Mr. Peters. You must suspect that I have some aviation background. Therefore, I wish to ask one thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“At a convenient time, may I ask the favor of making a carrier landing in the backseat of your Skyhawk?”
Peters did not even try to conceal his pleasure. He extended a hand, which Wei solemnly grasped. “It’s a deal, sir.”
Wei bowed slightly and walked out the door as Delight looked in. “Any problems, Hook?”
Peters shook his head. “Just that I’m afraid Wei is starting to act human.” He looked at his friend. “And that scares me.”
Eleven
Things Unsaid
From seven thousand five hundred feet on a crystalline night, the Phoenix Valley was a splash of multihued color from millions of lights strewn across the black carpet of the Sonoran Desert.
Returning to Williams Gateway after a series of instrument approaches to Sky Harbor, Hawk Six descended through the night sky, running lights strobing from wingtips and fuselage. In the front seat, Liz Vespa concentrated on her approach plate. She knew that she had done well on the instrument-check ride, though not quite as well as she would have liked for this particular check airman. Ozzie Ostrewski rode in the back, keeping notes for the debriefing.
Northwest of the field, Ozzie unexpectedly waggled the stick. “I got it, Liz.”
Vespa raised her hands, speaking into the hot mike. “You have it.” She wondered if she had missed something, committed a mental error.
“Let’s take a look out desert way,” Ozzie offered. “I always like to see the desert at night, away from the lights.”
“Okay,” she replied. Something’s on his mind, she told herself as the TA-4J banked more to the east. Ozzie’s usually all business once he’s strapped into the jet.
The Skyhawk settled on course 090, south of the Superstition Freeway. Apache Junction and then Gold Canyon slid past the port wingtip before her scan returned to the cockpit, where her practiced gaze registered normal indications in the red night lighting.
Combat Page 74
