With a growl he spun around, muttering, “Follow me.”
Walking helped take the edge off Dana’s nervousness. The late-April morning was clear and the winds were calm, the meteorologist at the weather desk had told her. Griff had frowned when he’d taken her to the weather station to get the forecast. A well-prepared student, Dana had pulled the slip of paper from her flight log, handed it to him and repeated the information on it. Griff’s gray eyes flashed with grudging admiration laced with anger. Dana curbed a smile. She had spent the week learning flight routine from Maggie and Molly. Plus, she’d spent ten-to-twelve hours a day studying the textbooks, cramming every conceivable bit of information into her head so that it would be at her disposal, should Griff require it. And every evening, when her friends returned from the station, they would sit in the kitchen with the trainer mock-up and each spend at least an hour going through different flight procedures, burning them into their brains until the moves became second nature. In the cockpit they wouldn’t have to stop and think; they would simply respond.
Griff stood openmouthed as Dana flawlessly performed the walk-around inspection of his trainer. She missed nothing. Nothing! The crew chief, Aviation Machinist Mate Parker, handed her the discrepancy log, and she noted and signed it off, giving him a warm smile of thanks. Griff bridled. Dana’s smile had been genuine, and he found himself wondering if she’d ever bestow one on him. Her blue eyes were intense and focused. But the moment Parker came up with the log, her business facade melted. In its place were her dancing blue eyes and a smile that could melt the hardest of hearts. Even his.
As Dana turned toward Griff, she saw him scowling at her. Automatically, she became all business again.
“Ground inspection completed, sir.” At every other trainer on the flight line, the same procedure was going on between IP and student. Voices were low and strained. Dana felt the tension and tried to keep her shoulders relaxed, her voice unruffled. Griff looked positively beside himself; like a mad dog wanting to bite someone, but unable to decide whom. She knew he hadn’t expected her to move through the routine without a hitch. But she had. Now came the next test: the cockpit.
“Climb in the first cockpit, Coulter.”
The first seat located behind the prop of the plane was hers. Dana placed her flight log in a leg pocket, pressing the Velcro closed to keep it there. Her heart raced with excitement and nervousness as she climbed on board. To her dismay, her legs were too short to reach the rudder pedals. She felt Griff next to her, and she automatically lifted her chin.
“Just another reason why women shouldn’t fly. You’re so damned small, you can’t even reach the controls.”
“I’m sure this seat’s adjustable.” Dana forced herself to remember where the lever was to move it forward.
Their hands met and collided.
Dana jerked hers back. He glowered at her, growling, “Move forward.”
Her hand tingling from his strong, firm touch, Dana tried to rise above her physical reactions to Griff. It was impossible. Once the seat was repositioned, her feet rested comfortably against the rudders. Griff leaned against the fuselage, beginning to explain the cockpit panel, the controls, levers and various other instruments. She sat, nodding from time to time, valiantly trying to ignore his male energy, that tightly wound sensation that inevitably tugged at her concentration.
At the ocean a week ago, Dana had been wildly aware of Griff’s unavoidable magnetism. She might be poorly experienced in relationships, but Dana knew she was powerfully drawn to Griff as a man. It was the most illogical thing in the world. This man wanted to end her flight career before it even began. He had no personal interest in her—but try to tell that to her heart.
For the next hour, Griff droned on in a bored voice about everything Dana should know about escape procedures from the trainer, should something go wrong and they had to bail out. Ordinarily, he was excited about taking on a new student. With Dana, it was hell to keep his hands off her and his reactions to her to himself, instead of hungrily staring at her like a starved wolf looking for a mate. It was the most miserable hour of his life.
As Griff leaned over, he could smell her sweet fragrance, a whiff of some light, flowery perfume. Although Dana wore absolutely no makeup, she didn’t need any in his opinion. The urge to thread his fingers through her thick, ebony hair was very real. Disgruntled by his reactions, he heard the anger reflected in his voice. If Dana was bothered by it, she didn’t show it.
Demonstrating how to put the helmet with the double visor on, Griff climbed into the rear cockpit, divided from the front one by a panel. As he settled into his seat and strapped in, his gaze automatically swept the controls and instruments. He had an identical set of controls so he could take over in case a student froze or couldn’t respond to an inflight emergency. They were ready to fly.
For Dana, it was a thrilling moment when she pressed the button and the prop began to whirl sluggishly in front of her. In a moment, the prop caught, and the engine roared to life. The entire plane shook and trembled around her. A smile pulled at her mouth as she sat absorbing the sensation, her heart racing with incredible happiness. This was what she had been waiting for all her life: to fly! It was true, the water was her friend. But the air would be her lover. The moments of discovery were sweet. Then Griff’s growling voice came over the headset in her helmet, and bitterness coated her initial reaction.
Dana wanted badly to show Griff she could take his instructions and do it right. She taxied the plane to the end of the airstrip, learning how to converse with the tower and give the appropriate responses to the controller. The silence over her headset was ominous; she could almost feel Griff ready to pounce on her, waiting for her to make the smallest error.
“I’ll take this bird up,” he told her. “You just put your hand on the throttle and the other on the stick and follow through with me. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Dana wrapped her gloved hands lightly around the proper controls, her heart accelerating as Griff eased the throttle forward, the plane’s engine deepening with power. It shook like a shackled eagle wanting to take off. Her gaze swept the instruments, left to right. Everything looked fine. Dana was anxious to take off, to feel the plane lift from the earth. It was her duty to look in all directions, making sure no other student pilot was in their takeoff pattern. Sometimes, Griff grimly informed her, students screwed up, flying through the designated flight patterns.
“Call the tower and request takeoff, Coulter.”
Excitedly, Dana pressed the button on the stick that would link her with the controller. She tried to keep her voice businesslike, hoping her thrill over flying wouldn’t show. In moments, she got permission.
“Release rudders,” Griff ordered her.
Dana eased up on the rudders, which also acted as the brakes. The trainer lunged forward, speeding down the gray concrete runway. Her breath caught as she became lost in the sensations of tires spinning against the surface, the shaking and shuddering going on around her, and the smell of engine heat entering the cockpit. Dials and gauges jumped to life, their hands waving like wheat in a field. The instant Griff pulled back the stick, the plane leaped skyward—and Dana’s stomach grew alarmingly queasy.
Panicky, Dana spotted the plastic-lined “burp bags” that were installed in the cockpit. Her eyes rounded as Griff took the plane up to fifteen-hundred feet and out of the flight pattern to find some clear airspace above the gulf. Although it was early morning and the air was supposed to be calm, the trainer bumped along, continuously hitting small air pockets. With each bump, Dana’s stomach became more upset.
“Are you listening to me, Coulter?” Griff snapped. He’d ordered her to take the controls and she hadn’t. He heard a very familiar sound through the headset. She was airsick! His mouth flattening, Griff gripped the controls.
“Dammit, Coulter, throw up and get it over with! Stow the burp bag and grab these controls!”
Gasping, Dana rubbed her watering e
yes, distraught. Airsick! She was desperately airsick! How could that be? Oh, God, she hadn’t counted on this. Hadn’t her body always responded beautifully to anything she’d ever asked of it? The trainer hit a large air pocket and dropped a good twenty feet before Griff steadied it back to smooth, even flight.
“I—I’m going to be sick again,” Dana rasped, reaching for a second bag with shaking hands. In moments, the rest of her small breakfast had come up.
Cursing, Griff hissed, “This just proves my point, Coulter: Women can’t take flying. You’re weak. You’re weak and you can’t handle a little morning-air turbulence. What makes you think you can handle a jet or four-engine turboprop in severe turbulence? The men in your crew are in your hands. Their lives are on the line while you’re heaving out your guts because you can’t take it! Just what the hell kind of pilot would you be? One that gets her crew killed!”
Sweat rolled down into Dana’s narrowed eyes. Miserably, she tucked the second bag away, gripping the controls. “I’ve got the controls,” she rasped. Griff’s anger was like hot needles in her already pulverized emotions. It was impossible to respond to his litany of anger, because now she had to fly the plane. Her stomach rolled warningly. She couldn’t get sick a third time! Griff’s voice droned in her ears.
“Get those wings level, Coulter, and keep them that way. You have twenty-five feet of altitude variance. The moment you go above or below that, I’ll be all over you. The port wing’s down. Get it up!”
Instantly, Dana corrected. But she overcorrected. The trainer was highly responsive. It tipped starboard.
“Dammit, Coulter! Level out!”
Her stomach queasy, panicking because she couldn’t seem to do anything right, Dana fought the plane for the next two hours.
Wrung out, her flight suit wet with perspiration, Dana suffered the ultimate disgrace: Griff had to land the plane because she had become completely uncoordinated in the cockpit. To add to her misery and embarrassment, she’d thrown up three more times. Worse, Dana was starting to realize she couldn’t keep her feelings under control where Griff was concerned. Terror, more powerful than she’d ever experienced, deluged her. There was no safe place to hide from him. Emotionally, she’d be exposed and completely vulnerable to every attack he launched at her.
Pushing back the canopy, Dana began to unharness herself with shaking hands. She felt Griff’s ominous presence before she saw him. His shadow loomed across her cockpit. Tucking her lower lip between her teeth, Dana refused-to look at him.
“You’re weak, Coulter,” he ground out, glaring down at her. “And for your sake, you’d better not have messed up Parker’s cockpit. My crew chief doesn’t clean up after squeamish students. You ever miss the burp bag, you’ll be out here scrubbing that instrument panel, not him. Got that?”
“Y-yes, sir.” The harness released, and Dana felt like crawling into a hole. All six bags were neatly stowed around her seat. There was no pride in having to carry them back to the ready room, either. She’d failed—completely.
“Climb out of there.”
Griff stood back on the tarmac and watched Dana leave the trainer. He saw dark rings of sweat beneath her armpits. Her face was waxen, her eyes dark with misery. When her lower lip trembled, Griff had to stop himself from walking over and helping her out of the plane. She was weak and trembling. A huge part of him felt like hell for yelling at her. Airsickness was not uncommon among students. The movement of the plane was something most people, with time, adjusted to. A few didn’t. He watched as Dana straightened and, miraculously, found a deep well of strength somewhere within her to throw back her shoulders and lift her chin.
“You’re off to a lousy start, Coulter,” he said as she walked up to him. “You couldn’t keep the wings level, and you kept losing altitude. Not only that, you were incapable of landing the aircraft.” Blackly, Griff wrote the grade down at the bottom of the paper and scribbled his name on the bottom line. “Here,” he directed. “Take a look. If you’ve got a problem with the grade, we hash it out here and now. Once you’ve seen it and signed your name, that’s it. If you disagree with my grade and don’t sign it, it’s an automatic Board. There you’ll be given an opportunity to tell three of your peers why you felt you didn’t warrant the grade I’ve given you. If you sign this, I send it up to the Ops office. Your grade will be posted that day on the bulletin board. Questions?”
Dana’s gaze flew to the bottom line. He’d given her a 2.0, the lowest possible grade just this side of failing. A 1.9 would mean an automatic Board, anyway. She knew to disagree with the grade would be foolish. Gulping, having expected a 1.9 because of her constant mistakes, Dana shakily took the clipboard and signed her name next to Griff’s. “No,” she whispered. “No questions.” She was surprised and grateful he’d given her a 2.0 under the circumstances.
Griff gave her a hard look. “Be here at 0700 Wednesday morning, Coulter. And for your sake, you’d better go over all the mistakes you made in the air this morning and have them straightened out by then. You screw up like this again, and I’ll give you a 1.9 so fast your head will spin.”
She saw triumph in his eyes just before he swung around and left her standing alone on the ramp. Dana stood in abject misery. Part of her breathed a sigh of relief. At least Griff hadn’t given her a 1.9 on her very first flight. There was no mistake he’d give it to her next time. Rubbing her sweaty brow, Dana settled the garrison cap on her head and picked up her helmet and burp bags. She walked back to the ready room on unsteady legs.
In the small locker room reserved for women students, Dana got out of her smelly flight suit, took a scaldingly hot shower and changed into her light blue jacket-and-skirt uniform. Low black pumps were the last to be put on. Dana listlessly combed her black hair. Avoiding looking in the mirror, Dana went back to her locker to pick up her books and mentally tried to prepare herself for the 1100 class. Griff was also her meteorology instructor. Just thinking about the flight made her stomach upset again. Always before, flying had been her answer, her ultimate escape from the pain of her earthbound life. Dana had counted on flying as a means of having control over her life—not having someone else jerk her strings as if she were a puppet, as her father had. Her love of flying was overwhelming. Somehow, she would persevere. She had to.
Arriving at the admin building where all the classrooms were located, Dana met her friends, and they sat together.
“You look like death warmed-over,” Maggie commented worriedly. “How’d it go?”
“I screwed up on the flight. I got airsick six times.”
“Oh, no!” Molly whispered, and watched the door in case the instructor arrived a few minutes early. Talking once the teacher was in the room could mean demerits. “What happened?”
In a low voice, Dana told them everything.
“That rotten bastard!” Maggie grated fiercely. “Just who does he think he is? Yelling at you constantly in the cockpit isn’t going to give you flight confidence! It’s designed to destroy you, Dana.”
“Point well made,” Dana said hollowly. She took a deep, ragged breath and stared at the blackboard. The lecture podium would soon be Griff’s domain—again. “Somehow… somehow, I’ve got to get a hold of my emotions. And this airsickness—I can’t believe it! I never expected it! Never! How long does it last?”
Both women shrugged.
Molly added sympathetically, “Maybe it will go away in a week or two, Dana.”
“But you two don’t have it.”
“No,” Maggie said archly. “But neither of us have a screamer sitting in the cockpit behind us, either.”
Dana hung her head. Was her airsickness a nervous response to the fact that Griff wanted to fail her? Clenching the pen in her fingers, she desperately wanted to escape to the ocean to swim, to release her fear and anxiety in the soothing water. Classes didn’t end until 1500. By 1600 she would be on that beach, back in the arms of her mother—it was the only place she could turn for comfort when things went bad
. And things were even worse than Dana could ever have imagined.
***
Griff needed to be alone. He parked his Corvette at the far end of Hunter’s Beach, hoping no one would be there. If only Toby were here to talk to him. He needed to unload his guilt about Dana. Toby would understand why he’d reacted the way he had in the cockpit with her this morning.
Dana… The name riffled softly through him, and he lifted his chin to stare across the moody, choppy sea. The wind was up, the waves reaching two or three feet in height. They mirrored the chaos he felt inside. Dammit! Why had he rubbed her face in the fact she’d gotten airsick? My God! Most students would have called it quits if they’d gotten ill six times in a row. But Dana hadn’t. She’d doggedly gripped the controls and flown that trainer. And for a first time at the stick, Griff grudgingly admitted as he ambled down the dunes to the beach below, Dana had flown damn well under some hellish circumstances.
Had she gotten sick because she’d been tied in knots knowing he was going to try to fail her? Guiltily, Griff shoved his hands into his pockets “Damn you, Carol,” he whispered. “Damn you for being weak.”
Dana hadn’t been weak. She’d been anything but that. Griff couldn’t ever recall a student rallying as she had, despite her physical debility. It hurt to think he’d cruelly goaded her, called her weak when, really, she hadn’t been at all.
“Damn…” Griff halted, running his fingers through his hair. Inside, he felt dirty and uneasy. Dana didn’t deserve this. He saw by the defiance in her dark cobalt eyes after the flight that she wasn’t a quitter. She should have received a better grade. She’d had at least a 2.1 coming. His mouth compressed, Griff continued to walk listlessly, his shoulders slumped under the load he’d brought on himself.
No Quarter Given (SSE 667) Page 7
