Papa Doc was flying with Monica again tonight, and he was driving her nuts. There was nothing to do on plane guard but keep the bird in the air and fly in endless D-loops, yet he was on her constantly, fussing and micromanaging as if this were her first time in a cockpit. By the end of the three hours, Monica’s nerves were shot.
As they set down on the ship’s port side, toward the stern, Monica noticed the SEAL on the catwalk. It was disquieting how he popped up everywhere, silently watching, observing everything.
No, not just observing. Like he was memorizing everything.
Marsupials. She’d looked it up. Born underdeveloped, with features that never quite caught up. The marsupial family included koalas, possums, and Tasmanian devils. Which, she wondered, was he?
When she stepped out of the Knighthawk and looked over toward the edge of the deck, he was gone.
Ten minutes later she was in her stateroom, undressed and lying back in her rack, talking quietly back and forth with Kris, her best friend, in the bunk below. It was past midnight and their roommate, Anne, lay fast asleep on the other bottom bunk a few yards away. The empty fourth rack, above Anne’s, had belonged to Micaela, the co-pilot on the helo that went down. It was the loudest thing in the cabin.
“So how was Papa Doc?” Kris’s hushed voice drifted up from below. It was Kris who’d coined the nickname, and she was the only soul on board who dared voice it out loud.
Monica replied with a groan.
“That good, huh?”
“Gracious as ever.”
“Turd.”
“Why does he so push my buttons?” Monica wondered aloud, not for the first time.
“Um, I don’t know,” replied Kristine, “maybe because he’s your classic male chauvinist, a fucking racist, and unreconstructed homophobe asshole?”
“Jesus, Kris! Keep your voice down!” Slanderous words spoken against a superior officer could be held as insubordination and earn grave punishment. Court-martial, even.
“I tell you I caught him staring at me a few nights ago at midrats?” Kris commented.
“Ugh. You’re kidding.”
“And not in an arrogant-CO way, either, more like a pervy-peeper way. Like when a guy’s trying to look down your blouse without looking like he’s doing it?”
“Eww. What did you do?”
“Walked over and asked him if he needed help finding anything. Like his dignity. Or his dick.”
“Kris!”
“Okay, not really. I did what any Tennessee girl would, stared back at him and batted my eyelashes till he turned red and looked away.”
“Seriously? Jesus, Kris, why would you do that!”
“Because fuck him, that’s why.”
Kris was a natural target for men’s attention, but she typically had no problem handling herself. Last few days, though, she’d been distracted. Jumpy. She’d even skipped breakfast that morning, which for her was practically unheard of.
She hid it well. The rest of the squadron saw only the top-gun swagger and Tennessee ballsiness, and they loved her for it. (A girl so gutsy she went by the call sign “Biker”!) Only Monica understood how fragile she was. She’d tried to bring it up a few times, but even as close as the two were, Kris held her feelings awfully close to her vest.
In the silence Monica felt the presence of Micaela’s empty rack. Remembering how harshly Papa Doc had treated her, how she and Kris had found her weeping in her rack on more than one occasion after an especially brutal tongue-lashing.
“Quite a show you gave out there tonight,” she said to change the subject.
Kris had made one of her signature night landings, smacking the deck like a meteor strike. Monica had flown more than a hundred missions and there’d been a few tense moments—but nothing in the Knighthawk came close to the experience of flying solo in an F/A-18, let alone landing the freaking thing. “Like setting a bucking bronco down on a postage stamp floating in a shark-infested pool…at night” was how her brother had described it.
“How you can pull that off is beyond me. I’d be terrified of crashing the damn thing.”
“It’s not the idea of crashing,” said Kris. “I mean, what the hell, we’re all gonna crash and burn at some point, right? But ejecting and ending up in the water? Ugh. I don’t know if I’d make it.”
This was something the two shared: an unmitigated aversion to the open water. Monica grew up around horses and ranches, Kris around motorcycles and urban blight. Naturally, as part of their pilot training, they’d both learned to swim at an expert level. But only Monica knew how terrified her friend was of ending up alone in the ocean.
“ ’Course you’d make it,” said Monica. “You’d just float and let your strobe flash. We’d be on you in minutes.” But she knew what Kris meant.
They went quiet again, both thinking about the downed helo crew. Ever since flight 204 went down their stateroom had felt haunted.
Hell, the whole ship had felt haunted.
It was Kris who broke the silence. “Do you feel…safe here?”
“What do you mean?” said Monica. “In the Gulf? Totally. And anyway, we’re done here. We’ll be heading home any day now.”
“No, I mean here. On the ship.”
“Shit, Kris—are you okay? Is anyone hassling you?”
“No, no, it’s— Forget it.”
She seemed almost…paranoid. Monica had caught her glancing over her shoulder a few times, as if there were someone following her.
“Hey,” she whispered. “Have you noticed that creepy SEAL skulking the passageways?” She leaned over to look down at Kris—but her friend had already dropped off. Kris fell asleep the way she landed her jet. Like a mutt taking a dump on the street.
Monica gave a quiet laugh and settled back on her pillow. Let Kris sleep; she’d earned it. Her best friend was a fierce worker, not only in the grueling business of flying her Hornet but also in her “day job” as assistant ordnance officer for her squadron. Always made Monica smile to think about that. As Maintenance O, her own job was to make sure things didn’t fall apart. Kris’s was to make sure things blew up.
Staring at the overhead, she listened to the sounds of the last cycle of flight ops playing out just yards above, nothing separating them but a few inches of steel deck plating. Their stateroom was located directly under the 3 wire, the one all the pilots aimed to catch. The massive machinery that controlled it was housed right next door, and each time another jet crashed onto the deck it made an ear-shattering whine as the cable played out, followed by a shriek as it scraped back across the deck to rewind for the next trap. Earplugs helped a little, but nothing could block out that unearthly din.
Monica closed her eyes. Another long day starting just hours from now, but she was too stirred up to sleep.
She said a prayer, for Kris, for her squadron. For Diego and Micaela and the rest of the drowned helo crew. Nothing quieted her mind.
Do you feel…safe here?
She slipped off her rack, padded to the door, and cracked it open. Looked up and down the red-lit passageway.
Empty as a ghost town.
Back to bed. Curled on her side, eyes closed, searching for sleep.
She went through her “boldface,” the emergency procedures you had to be ready to follow instantly and automatically, without stopping to check a list or search your memory banks, in the event of an emergency. Boldface if the steering quit. If a rotor blade snapped. If comms went out.
Helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened, it is about to.
She finally drifted off into strange dreams of pushing her commanding officer out of their craft and watching him drown in the black water below.