Dark Wing

by Richard Herman

  “It’s simple enough,” Leonard told her. “Teacher burnout. Happens all the time.”

  The warning light sparked. During her short tenure as exec, Waters had processed other requests from pilots to go full-time. In half the cases, the pilot was looking for a way to escape from the emotional wreckage of a failed marriage or career. If the problems were too traumatic, the previous commander would disapprove the request and pass the word to Frank Hester to keep an eye on the pilot’s flying. Flying a fighter, even one as slow and forgiving as the Warthog, demanded the best from a pilot. Accident investigation files were full of cases in which the pilot had killed himself because of the weight of emotional baggage.

  “Are you having marital problems?” she asked. She hastily added, “The commander will want to know.”

  “I’ll be glad to discuss this in private with him,” Leonard replied.

  Personal problems, Waters concluded. “Perhaps that would be best,” she said. “I’ll get you on his schedule.” She scanned Pontowski’s appointment calendar. “Can you be here at fourteen-thirty hours today?” He nodded and left.

  After Leonard had left, she called Hester for his recommendation. The ops officer’s reply was a terse, “Leonard’s been having some personal problems lately. Nothing serious … it’s only temporary … he’ll get over it.” She typed a cover memo with his remarks and sent it into Pontowski’s office.

  At fourteen-thirty hours sharp, Leonard reported to Pontowski with a snappy salute. The lieutenant colonel waved him to a chair and quizzed him briefly about his request. Leonard thought the interview was going well and started to relax. “What problems need fixing?” Pontowski asked.

  Leonard had been expecting that one. “There are a few maintenance problems on the ramp, mostly with B Flight. Probably because we’re starting to phase down. A good line chief could fix that one in a heartbeat.” He paused, thinking. Maintenance was not his bailiwick. “We still need to sort some bugs out of LASTE. Mostly software glitches.” The last modification on the A- l Os had been a new computer weapons delivery system called LASTE, low-altitude safety and targeting enhancement. LASTE was a relatively cheap modification at one hundred thousand dollars a copy and had great potential.

  Then Pontowski hit him with a question right off the wall. “As a flight lead, how do you feel about women flying Warthogs?”

  “Oh … ah …” he stammered, “you mean Skeeter.”

  First Lieutenant Denise “Skeeter” Ashton was the first woman pilot assigned to the 303rd. What do I tell him? Leonard thought. Like most fighter pilots, Leonard harbored deep-seated feelings about women flying in combat. He didn’t like it. “Skeeter’s got a ways to go,” he finally said.

  “How does she compare to other lieutenants with the same amount of flying experience?”

  Leonard hedged his answer. “I’d say about average, maybe slightly above.” He couldn’t bring himself to admit that Skeeter Ashton was an excellent pilot.

  “I signed off next week’s flying schedule. You’re slated to lead a four-shipper to the gunnery range next Saturday.”

  Leonard brightened at the mention of flying. “Great! I was hoping to sneak on the schedule.”

  “Ashton’s the deputy lead,” Pontowski told him, watcning the pilot’s face for a reaction.

  Disappointment registered on Leonard’s face. “Well, she is a fully qualified lead,” Leonard answered. The basic fighter unit is a pair of aircraft called an element, which is made up of a flight lead and a wingman. A four-ship formation is made up of two elements. The deputy lead flies as number three in the formation and takes command of the formation if the leader has to abort. “No,” Leonard conceded, “that won’t be a problem.”

  “So she can hack it?”

  “She has so far.”

  Pontowski checked his watch. It was time for his first meeting with the pilots. “I’m going to put your request on hold until I get my feet on the ground.” He stood up. “Time to meet the troops.” He led the way to the squadron lounge.

  “Room. Ten-hut,” Sara Waters called when he entered. The pilots were all there, standing at attention in front of chairs neatly arranged in rows in front of a podium.

  He gave Waters a sideways look, a sign of his disapproval. It wasn’t what he wanted. He stood to one side of the podium and leaned on it, trying to create an easy and relaxed atmosphere. Most of the pilots were in their mid-thirties and could have been fresh out of a Kiwanis or Rotary club meeting. According to their files, about half were pilots with commercial airlines and commuted from as far away as Las Vegas, Nevada, to fly with the 303rd. The other half were a melange of lawyers, stockbrokers, and engineers, with one pig farmer mixed in.

  He had no problem finding Skeeter Ashton. She was the college girl sitting in the third row. Her dark-brown hair was pulled back into a French braid, accentuating her pleasant but plain face. Her neck muscles revealed the effects of constant exercise, a necessity for fighting the g force a fighter generated when it maneuvered. A neat and trim young woman, he decided. Nothing spectacular.

  After talking for a few minutes, he could sense an invisible wall between him and the pilots. “Okay, I know most of you are convinced that we’re on the way to the scrap heap, another casualty of the peace dividend.”

  “Shit happens, sir,” came from one of the pilots in the last row. It was the break he had been waiting for. In any fighter squadron with good morale, there was a constant and easygoing flow of barbed comments, ironic quips, and deft character assassinations.

  “Yeah, it does,” Pontowski conceded. “But things have a way of changing, and we’re not dead yet. So until we turn out the lights, we’re going to make shit happen.” Did he sense a crack in the wall? He gestured toward the bar at the far end of the lounge. “Time for some beer,” he said, bringing the meeting to a close.

  The room rapidly emptied, leaving him alone with Waters. The wall was rigidly in place. “This isn’t what I wanted, Captain,” he said, looking at the chairs.

  Waters looked at her new commander. She wanted to support him and be a good executive officer. But so much stood in the way. The shadow of political influence tinged his appointment as commander. She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, to let him prove himself. Yet he was the only survivor of the midair collision that had claimed Jack Locke’s life. Jack Locke, she thought, remembering. Muddy had passed the torch of command to him at Ras Assanya. Not the formal, ordered, rank-conscious assumption of command that the Air Force held dear, but the moral imperative of leadership that demands a true leader be one with his men and still able to inspire them to willingly follow him into the crucible of combat. Even knowing it could be at the cost of their own lives. Few men, very few, had that ability. Muddy Waters and Jack Locke had it. Now Pontowski was aspiring to it.

  Much against her will, she relented. “Sir, Major Hester told me that he’d take care of the details.”

  “I didn’t expect this,” Shoshana said. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs that led to the main dining room on the second floor of the Officers’ Club and waited for Pontowski to join her. “I never would have guessed.” The Officers’ Club was luxurious in the extreme.

  “Stealth bombers are wonderful things,” Pontowski told her. “The club got a major facelift when the Air Force decided to base the B-2 here.” Waters had told him that the club was the best place to eat on a Saturday night and Pontowski had called Shoshana to ask her to join him for dinner. She had jumped at the chance to escape their temporary quarters when Waters had arranged for a babysitter for Little Matt. “I asked Major Hester and Captain Waters to join us,” he explained. He hoped that Shoshana didn’t notice the quiet place they occupied in the crowd of reservists streaming into the club. Most had changed into casual clothes but he could see a smattering of uniforms.

  “Your Captain Waters is most efficient,” Shoshana said. “I’m looking forward to meeting her.” She studied the formal portraits that lined the wall.


  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Waters said as she joined them. “I had a last-minute phone call from Major Hester. He sends his regrets that he won’t be able to join us.”

  Shoshana turned and froze. Like the club, Waters was unexpected. She had let her hair down and changed into tight blue jeans and cowboy boots. The loose, bulky-knit sweater that hung to her hips hinted at the Lgure underneath. Shoshana felt matronly in her simple print dress, and her spirits sank as Pontowski went through the introductions. They climbed the stairs to the dining room.

  After dinner, Pontowski decided to call it an early evening, since Sunday would be a full day. “Tired?” he asked once they were in the van.

  “A little,” Shoshana answered. Silence. “They’re avoiding you.”

  “I got that too,” he admitted. “The few people that did talk to us seemed more interested in Waters.”

  “Can you blame them?” He could hear the tone in her voice that warned him not to discuss the matter. He had learned from hard experience when to shut up. But Shoshana wouldn’t let it go. “Those jeans.”

  He smiled. “You’ve got a few pair just like them, if I remember right.”

  “I’m going to burn them,” she promised. “All of them.”

  “Why? You look great in—”

  “I’m too old to wear crotch-cutters,” she interrupted. “What do you mean? Waters has got ten years on you.” She hit him on the shoulder. Hard. “You’re just like all

  the others. You were all undressing her.”

  “Come on,” he protested.

  “What do you mean, ‘Come on’? Tell me you haven’t looked at her. Do you have any idea of what she’s done to the hormone count on Whiteman?”

  Pontowski knew better than to answer.

  Shoshana disappeared into the bedroom when they reached their temporary quarters in guest housing. Pontowski sank onto the couch and rubbed his forehead. Women! he thought. A few moments later, Shoshana walked out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing a tight pair of jeans and a short tank top that bared her midriff. She sat on his lap, nuzzled his ear, and deliberately wiggled and twisted until she felt him grow hard. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

  “You had better be,” she answered, a deep throaty promise in every word.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sunday, January 14

  Canton, China

  “Sit down,” Zou Rong ordered. He motioned Kamigami away from the ramp that led from Canton’s train station to the parking lot and pointed to a spot near a noodle vendor’s cart. Kamigami’s size was drawing too many stares and he hoped they would be less conspicuous sitting down. He told his driver to buy some food from the vendor for the American and the two Chinese waited patiently while Kamigami shoveled food into his mouth.

  Zou Rong used the time to run his mental abacus, calculating the contribution Kamigami could make to his cause. Behind Zou’s boyish facade lay the heart of a born rebel with the ambition of a Napoleon. He wanted power. But equally, he wanted to free his people from the yoke of the oppressive and corrupt government that ruled China from Beijing.

  Sensing the discontent of the people of southern China, he had adopted the name Zou Rong, in honor of the young student who had written the short book The Revolutionary Army in 1903. The original Zou Rong had urged the Chinese to seize their own destiny, unite, and struggle together in a new army. For his audacity in challenging the status quo, the Manchus had thrown him in jail, where he died a year later at the age of nineteen.

  Now the new Zou Rong was organizing a rebellion, tapping the discontent, disobedience, disorder, chaos, and even barbarism that boiled beneath the calm surface of China. The nucleus of his rebel government was taking shape at Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Province, 325 miles to the west. But he needed a general to lead his army, someone of near-mythical stature to give leadership to his soldiers. It had to be someone, preferably a foreigner, he could cast into oblivion when he needed to tame the same soldiers who had made his rebellion a success.

  He was certain he had found that man in Victor Kamigami.

  But the big American had not committed and Zou could not waste much more time convincing him. He slid the counters of his mental abacus, first adding, then subtracting the effect of all he had shown Kamigami. Zou’s instincts warned him that he, born of a different culture, did not see the world the way Kamigami did. Still, he was coming to understand this quiet man. But would he be able to understand other Americans? He had little experience with foreigners and wished he had studied or traveled in other countries. Perhaps that was why he was drawn to Kamigami, a feeling his soldiers would also share.

  Zou’s one big asset, that he had freed Kamigami from his Hanoi cell, had been offset at the border, when the Vietnamese border guards had decided their travel papers and exit permits were not in order. The hard look the lieutenant in charge had shot at Zou was ample warning, at least for Zou, that the Vietnamese had decided not to support his rebellion and were going to play another game in which he was the prize.

  After making a phone call, the lieutenant had apologized profusely, begged their forgiveness for not letting them pass into China, and asked if they would please return to the headquarters building a mile back from the border to straighten out the confusion. One of the guards was told to escort them, since it was night. But the guard had telegraphed the same warning to Kamigami when he held his battered AK-47 at the ready. Kamigami had walked quietly outside with his head bent, a sign of surrender and subservience to the Vietnamese.

  The darkness outside the guard shack was enough. Kamigami stumbled into the guard, and before the man could recover his balance, snatched the AK-47 out of his grasp and punched him in the throat. Kamigami then swung the stunned man around, threw an arm lock around his neck, jammed a fist against the left carotid artery and twisted. Ninety-five seconds of silence and it was over.

  Kamigami cradled the AK-47 in one arm, picked up the body with the other, and walked back into the guard shack. He dropped the body on the lieutenant’s desk and announced that their papers were in order. The lieutenant took one look at Kamigami’s face, quickly agreed, and escorted them to the Chinese barrier.

  The sums are in balance, Zou decided as Kamigami finished eating. “Why do you want to see the train station?” Zou asked.

  A steam train rattled and smoked its way into the station. “I like your trains,” Kamigami said.

  “They’re a symbol of our country,” Zou replied. “Very sturdy, hardworking, but hopelessly old-fashioned and in need of modernization.”

  “I heard many soldiers are coming in,” Kamigami said. Zou smiled at him. I didn’t tell you that, he thought, so you must understand more Cantonese than I thought. Is that a good sign? “You are interested in soldiers?” Kamigami said nothing and only gazed at the people, much i ke a tourist. Zou’s eyes narrowed as he swept the growing collection of vehicles in the parking lot. “Most of the drivers are soldiers,” he said.

  A crowd surged out of the station. Most of the men were wearing rumpled olive green cotton uniforms. “No weapons,” Kamigami muttered.

  “The People’s Liberation Army,” Zou explained, “can’t make up its mind whether it’s an expression of proper socialist principles or a modern fighting force. But these are combat soldiers. You can tell by the good boots they are wearing.”

  A squad of armed soldiers marched out of the station and cleared a path to the street. A gleaming black sedan drove up and a sharply dressed officer jumped out of the front passenger seat and snapped the rear door open. No command was given, but the soldiers visibly stiffened and came to attention. The noisy, clattering hustle that marks a Chinese city tapered away and a rare quiet fell across the crowd. “Someone big is coming,” Kamigami said.

  “Be quiet,” Zou commanded.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then less brave souls at the edge of the crowd scattered, frail leaves being chased by an invisible wind of fear. A strange sixth sense that Kamigami had only experienced in combat dre
w him to the vortex of that fear. A heavy-set man, perhaps five feet ten inches tall, was walking down the ramp leading out of the station. Kamigami guessed his age to be in the late forties or early fifties. His uniform was immaculately tailored and freshly pressed, showing no signs of travel. Thick, wire-rimmed glasses gave him an owl-like stare as he slowly looked left, then right. For a fraction of a second, he focused on Kamigami before moving on—a predator looking for more valuable prey. He descended the steps and disappeared into the waiting sedan.

  On cue, the noise was back, as if the entire crowd had taken a collective deep breath. “Who was the general?” Kamigami asked.

  “Kang Xun,” Zou answered. “Did you feel the fear?”

  “I saw it,” Kamigami replied.

  “But you didn’t feel it?” Zou was incredulous.

  “No. I didn’t feel fear.”

  “Ah,” Zou probed, certain that Kamigami was masking his own fear. “What did you feel?”

  Kamigami didn’t answer and only looked at the soldiers still moving through the crowded station. He turned and looked at Zou, his fax impassive. “I felt sorry for you.” He stood up. “I need to see more.”

  The four men sprawled on the grass in the small playground near Canton’s Baiyun Airport. To all appearances, they were taking xiuxi, the time-honored afternoon nap. But on this particular day, they were working. “Have you seen any cargo planes?” Kamigami asked.

  Zou translated the question for the teenager whose team watched the airport. After listening to his reply, Zou explained that every plane that had landed in the past five days had been carrying passengers and that not a single military or cargo aircraft had been seen.

  “Ask about truck traffic,” Kamigami said. Zou again repeated the process. This time the old man answered.

  “Less than a hundred military trucks have been counted,” Zou said. “They even checked suspicious trucks to see if they were hauling supplies for the PLA.” Zou gave a snort of laughter. “They were smugglers. Black market. Mostly cigarettes—Marlboros.”