by Robert Gandt
Chapter Four
Aliens
Persian Gulf
1005, Saturday, 3 May
Like a piece of meat. Delivered fresh to the fleet.
All in all, thought Lieutenant B.J. Johnson, it was a lousy way to arrive on an aircraft carrier — sitting backward, strapped down like a hunk of produce in the nearly windowless cargo compartment of a C-2A turboprop.
The C-2A was called a COD — Carrier Onboard Delivery. The COD hauled everything out to a carrier at sea that would fit into its cargo compartment — mail, food, tools, toilet paper, tires. And replacement pilots.
B.J. Johnson was a replacement F/A-18 strike fighter pilot, and coming aboard a carrier in the back of a freight hauler like the C-2A was damned undignified. And scary. It was a feeling of complete powerlessness. B.J. could hear the engines of the C-2A advancing and retarding, the throttle movements getting more abrupt, more urgent. It meant that they were approaching the ramp of the deck. The COD pilot was flying the ball. And this guy sure as hell was no smoothie. He was snatching the throttles and yanking the controls like a bear with a beach ball.
Whump! The C-2A slammed down on the deck — at least B.J. hoped it was the deck — and lurched to a halt. B.J. was thrown hard against the seat back, and appreciated for the first time why they seated passengers in the COD facing backward. It felt like they had hit a wall. A couple of seconds later, the engines were revving up again and the COD was taxiing out of the arresting wires to the forward deck.
B.J. looked over at the other replacement fighter pilot, Lieutenant Spam Parker, two seats away. The ride out to the ship had been just as hard on Spam as it was on B.J. Spam had turned a ghastly shade of white.
The aft loading door of the COD dropped open. A flood of daylight and wind and the howl of turbine engines swept into the cabin. A man wearing a flight deck cranial headset appeared in the door. He wore a yellow jersey with “VFA-36 XO” stenciled on it.
“Lt. Johnson? Lt. Parker?” He had to yell above the din of the flight deck.
“That’s us.”
“I’m Commander Davis, executive officer of Strike Fighter Squadron Thirty-six. Welcome aboard, ladies.”
<>
Brick Maxwell poured a coffee and settled back to watch the fracas.
“Goddammit, no!” DeLancey yelled. “Not in my squadron.”
“Nobody asked if we wanted them, Skipper,” said Devo Davis. “They’re here. They’ve got orders.”
DeLancey had assembled all his senior squadron officers in the ready room — Devo Davis, the executive officer; Brick Maxwell, the Operations officer; Craze Manson, the maintenance officer; Spoon Withers, the admin officer; Bat Masters, the safety officer.
DeLancey was not in a mood to listen. “How the hell am I supposed to run a fighter squadron with women in the cockpits? You were supposed to get those orders cancelled.”
“Wing staff wouldn’t hear of it,” said Davis. “The detailers wouldn’t talk about it. Women in combat squadrons are a fact of life.”
Watching the exchange, Maxwell knew that it was an argument without end. For over two centuries, ships-of-the-line had been crewed exclusively by men. But in the early 1990s, the ban on women in combat was lifted. Warships — and fighter squadrons — were deploying with complements of women, officers and enlisted. Men no longer had an exclusive franchise in the cockpits of Navy fighters.
Killer DeLancey wasn’t buying it. He gave Davis a withering look. “Fact of life, huh? Well, thanks, Commander Davis. That’s really helpful. We appreciate that little homily about the facts of life.”
Davis’s face reddened. An awkward silence fell over the ready room. Davis took the rebuke like he always did: He stared at the far bulkhead, wearing the expression of a beaten dog.
Maxwell felt the anger rise up in him. DeLancey was violating one of the oldest tenets of command: You didn’t humiliate a subordinate in front of his peers. DeLancey was famous for violating rules, and everyone in the squadron had seen him heap scorn on the executive officer. Devo was DeLancey’s favorite target.
DeLancey had gone too far. Maxwell thumped his coffee cup on the desk, causing everyone’s eyes to swing to his end of the table. “Devo is right,” he said. “Hear him out, skipper. You don’t have any choice.”
DeLancey swung his attention to Maxwell, peering at him like he’d just discovered a new specimen of insect. “You — are telling me — that I have no choice?”
Maxwell locked gazes with DeLancey. “They’re part of the squadron. Just like Devo said. Like it or not, we have to live with it.”
“How do you propose we live with it, Commander Maxwell?”
“Treat them just like any other new pilot. No favoritism, no bias. No double standard.”
DeLancey gave him the same withering look he used on Davis. “Oh, by all means,” he said in a mocking voice. “Let’s make sure our women warriors get treated properly.” He gazed around at all the senior officers. “Listen up, all of you. You’re gonna give those two split tails the toughest assignments on the flight schedule — weather, night, whatever comes up. Give them every chance to prove that they have no business in a combat squadron. After they’ve screwed up bad enough, I can ship their asses back to the beach. Everybody copy that?”
The other officers nodded, glancing from Maxwell to DeLancey. They all copied.
<>
Lieutenant Leroi Jones couldn’t believe it. His equipment — helmet, torso harness, G-suit, navigation bag, all his goddamn flight gear! — was in a pile in the corner of the ready room. In his locker at the back of the ready room was another set of flight gear. The name card on the locker bore another pilot’s name: Lt. P. R. Parker.
“Who the hell is P. R. Parker?”
“An officer senior to you,” said a voice behind him.
Jones spun around, startled by the voice. It belonged to a woman. She was tall, with ash-blonde hair that flowed down to the collar of her flight suit. Another woman, shorter, with bobbed, brown hair, looked up from one of the ready room chairs. “I’m Parker,” the tall woman said. “Call sign ‘Spam.’ I take it you’re Jones.”
“Why’d you dump my gear on the deck?”
“Nothing personal. I’m senior, so I took over the locker.”
“New pilots in the squadron usually take one of the empty lockers in the back room.”
“Haven’t you heard? We don’t have to use the back room.”
Jones stood there for a moment, anger boiling up inside him. He was a wide-shouldered, muscular young man who had played linebacker at Nebraska before his Navy commissioning. If this new pilot were a man, he would give the guy ten seconds to get his gear out of the locker before he got it shoved up his ass.
But in a tiny fleaspeck of Jones’s brain, a danger signal was going off. This was the post-Tailhook Navy. He already knew too many male officers who’d been hauled up on sexism or harassment charges.
Jones shook his head and began gathering his flight gear from the corner. He headed for the door. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant. This squadron’s gonna love you.”
<>
“That was really dumb. Why’d you do that?”
“Because,” said Spam Parker, “we have to establish our territory. We can’t let them treat us like inferiors.”
The two women were alone in the passageway outside the squadron ready room.
“You pissed that guy off,” said B.J. “He’s not gonna forget it.”
“That’s his problem. They’ll know how to deal with us from now on.”
B.J. hated confrontations. It was a bad way to meet your new squadron mates, she thought. “Maybe we oughta just keep a low profile for a while. You know, like new kids on the block.”
Spam gave B.J. a withering look. “You’re such a wimp. You always let someone else do the fighting for you. Then you come along and act like Miss Primble at a tea party.” Spam was nearly six feet tall and towered by a head over B.J. In her gray-green flight suit, wearing her c
lunky steel-toed flying boots, Spam looked like an Amazon warrior. “You want all these Neanderthals to like us. Well, guess what? I don’t care whether they like us or not.”
B.J. had to admit that Spam was right about one thing: She wasn’t a fighter. As far back as B.J. could remember, it was Spam Parker who waged war with the male military establishment.
B.J. remembered their Naval Academy days. In their third year at Annapolis, Spam brought a sexual harassment suit against an officer on the faculty. Though the matter was quietly settled outside the military judicial system, it put an effective end to the officer’s career.
She pulled the same thing after flight training, when B.J. and Spam found themselves in the same class in F/A-18 replacement pilot training at Oceana. Spam’s problems in the fighter weapons phase reached a point that an evaluation board was convened. Spam blamed her troubles on what she claimed was her instructor’s bias against women. After an investigation by the Judge Advocate General, the charge was dismissed, but it carried sufficient weight to get Spam past the evaluation board. She managed to complete strike fighter training and graduate to the fleet.
Whenever Spam went to war with the male establishment, B.J. tried to be invisible. It never worked. She always found herself guilty by association with Spam Parker, and thus ostracized. She knew that male pilots in fighter squadrons had a name for them: aliens.
In a closely knit community like naval aviation, it was a lonely existence. Nobody trusted aliens.
Despite B.J. Johnson’s plea to be assigned to a squadron on the opposite end of the planet from Spam Parker, the Navy had other plans. B.J. and Spam received orders to the same squadron — the VFA-36 Roadrunners, deployed aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
Spam Parker hadn’t changed.
“We have to kick ‘em in the balls,” Spam said over her shoulder as she marched away. “It’s the only way those jerks are gonna learn.”
The heels of her flight boots hammered like drum beats on the steel deck. Watching her, B.J. had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She hated being an alien.
<>
As Maxwell walked aft, along the port passageway on the second deck, it struck him again: the smell. He had served aboard half a dozen aircraft carriers. Each of the ships had possessed its own unique below-decks smell — an evocative scent of jet fuel, sweat, paint, oil, and steel.
But the scent of the USS Ronald Reagan had something else: newness. Maxwell could sense the freshly painted bulkheads, the clean metallic shininess of the ship’s recently installed fixtures. The Reagan smelled like a freshly assembled weapon. At a hundred and five thousand tons, the Reagan was the mightiest warship the world had ever seen.
He turned down a passageway toward the hangar deck ladder. Rounding the corner, he collided with a young woman wearing a gray-green flight suit. She was exiting a door that bore large stenciled lettering: Women Officers Head.
“Excuse me, Commander,” said the woman. Her face reddened. On each shoulder were two silver bars.
Maxwell glanced at her leather name tag. “You’re Johnson? One of our new pilots. Welcome to the Roadrunners, Lieutenant. I’m Brick Maxwell, the ops officer.”
B.J. Johnson looked petrified. She shook Maxwell’s hand as if it were a pump handle. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir, I’m still running into things. I’m uh. . . it’s my first time aboard. . . you know.” Her face reddened further.
“Everyone does that. I’ve still got the scars from bashing into overheads and knee knockers on my first cruise.”
B.J. looked around the passageway. “Uh, truth is, Commander, I’m lost. I was trying to find the ladder up to the hangar deck. Isn’t there a ceremony we’re supposed to attend?”
“Follow me. I was headed there myself. By the way, B.J., we go by call signs in the squadron. You can call me Brick.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, Brick.” Still red-faced, B.J. followed Maxwell to the ladder that led to the hangar deck.
White-uniformed officers were clustered around the podium. The ship’s band, also wearing dress whites, was limbering up their instruments. In the background was a parked F/A-18, angled so that the four victory symbols were clearly visible.
The ceremony was supposed to begin at 1600 hours. Maxwell saw Admiral Mellon standing with his aide and a couple of staff officers behind the podium. The admiral wore a sour look. He looked, Maxwell thought, like a man waiting for a root canal.
Killer DeLancey and Babcock, the civilian Maxwell remembered from the mission debriefing yesterday, were huddled together. DeLancey was listening to Babcock, grinning if he had just won the lottery.
Same old DeLancey, thought Maxwell. He had found a new patron.
Watching DeLancey grin and preen made Maxwell think again about his own career. Coming back to the fleet at this late stage — he’d just been promoted to the rank of commander — was definitely not your usual career path. You were supposed to work your way up the hierarchical pyramid. After serving in several different grades at the squadron officer level, then you became a department head — operations officer, maintenance officer, administrative officer.
Maxwell had skipped all that. While his contemporaries were serving in sea-going squadrons, he had gone to a cushy flight test job. And then to an even cushier astronaut billet. Now he was back in the fleet as a squadron operations officer, the third senior job in the squadron, and it was no secret that many of his fellow officers thought he hadn’t paid his dues. To them he would always be a carpetbagger.
Maxwell and B.J. took their places with the squadron officers. B.J. slipped into the back row. Maxwell stood with the senior officers, next to Devo Davis. He noticed that Davis looked red-eyed and haggard.
“You okay? You look like you’ve been on a three day bender.”
“Wish I had. This damned insomnia problem. Haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for a week.”
On signal from a flag staff officer at the podium, the band swung into “Under the Double Eagle.” As they hit the last passage, Whitney Babcock, wearing a fresh set of starched khakis, strutted to the podium. He glanced around, making sure the television crew was in place.
“With a singular act of valor, our own Commander John DeLancey has shown the world what the men and women of the United States Navy are made of. He has proven that Americans will not be daunted by acts of enemy aggression. In the finest traditions of the naval service, this fearless warrior confronted the enemy aircraft. . .”
Maxwell’s mind wandered. He found himself thinking about the Iraqi pilot DeLancey had shot. Who was he? Was the guy really hostile, or just inept? Did he have a family? Hopes, dreams, aspirations?
Did he deserve to die?
It occurred to Maxwell that these weren’t the thoughts you were supposed to have after combat. Not if you were a warrior. Maybe he wasn’t, he thought. At least not like DeLancey.
Babcock droned on for ten minutes. He compared DeLancey to John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and Butch O’Hare. Finally the moment came. He summoned DeLancey to the podium. “On behalf of the Secretary of the Navy, I confer upon you our nation’s third highest award, the Silver Star.”
Maxwell heard Davis groaning softly. He glanced over at him. Davis looked white. “You okay, Devo?”
“No. I’m gonna puke.” Davis abruptly stepped back and shuffled over to the below-decks ladder.
<>
Claire Phillips surveyed the scene around her as she positioned her camera crew. A throng of curious sailors had clustered around the brilliantly lighted ten-foot square set. A pair of Super Hornet fighters were parked in the background. Seated in the middle of the set, grinning and flashing a toothy smile, was Commander DeLancey, the subject of her special shipboard interview. The session would be taped and broadcast to millions of television viewers.
Claire was still perplexed about the young woman who had stopped her in the passageway. She was a pilot, judging by the flight suit and leather patch with the wings. The woman was tall, maybe six feet or more. Her name
tag read “Spam.”
“Ask him how he intends to treat women pilots in his squadron,” the young woman said.
The reporter’s instinct in Claire came out. “Why? Is there something going on we need to know about?”
The woman’s eyes flashed. “Sexism, that’s what’s going on. Despite all the crap they’re telling you, not a damned thing has changed since Tailhook.”
Claire nodded. This could turn into something. “Look, Lieutenant, this would make a great interview if you would —”
“No interview. I’ve still got a career to worry about.” She turned to leave. “Just ask the question. You might be surprised.”
Claire watched the young officer walk away. What a strange woman, she thought. Marching down the passageway with those long hammering strides. She looked less like a pilot than like a gladiator going to battle.
The camera crew was ready for the shoot. Claire took her seat on the stool in front of the Navy commander. Looking into the camera, she saw the red-lighted cue from her set director.
She began the interview with some easy questions about the action over Iraq. DeLancey surprised her. Most of her military subjects turned into monosyllabic lumps when they first peered into that big glass-eyed television camera. But not this guy. He was coming back with quick, glib answers, girnning, preening like a peacock.
Enough, she thought. Time for the hot button stuff.
She looked at him. “What did it feel like,” she asked in a hushed voice, “to kill another man?”
She knew it was a loaded question. But, hell, that was her job. Claire hadn’t earned her reputation for being a tough reporter by asking pussycat questions. It was her style to get to the gut issues. That was why her contract with the network had just been renewed at twice the old guarantee.
