Finn had watched the whole thing on CCTV in the wardroom. He stuck around for a while after the tense landing was over, listening to officers’ chatter, then came out and up to walk the gallery deck—just in time to see Biker emerge from her ready room, post debrief. He stood aside and nodded, catching a nod and nervous smile from her as she passed.
In the eight days he’d been on board, Biker had lost weight, maybe six or seven pounds. She looked gaunt. And right now she was a nervous wreck. He didn’t blame her.
About twenty feet up the passageway he stopped. Sensed that hormonal ozone again. Gathering human thunderheads.
“That was some hot-stuff show up there, Lieutenant.” A voice from down the passageway behind him.
Finn turned back just in time to see a tense exchange unfolding between Biker and Movie Star, the CO helo pilot.
“ ’Scuse me?” said Biker, her voice cracking.
“You know you’re supposed to fly those things, right? Not play hopscotch with them.”
Finn could see from her posture that Biker was caught off guard, grasping for a comeback. Not on her usual game, not at all.
“For a while there,” the guy went on, “I thought we were going to have to power up the Knighthawk and go sort through some Hornet wreckage.”
It was the kind of trash talk jet pilots took from one another all the time, but this guy wasn’t a jet pilot and his barbs weren’t banter. They were naked aggression.
And they’d found their target. The encounter lasted no more than ten seconds, but Biker was badly rattled when she walked on. Finn caught a glimpse of the smug rage playing over Movie Star’s features.
Finn turned back and saw West Texas, the tall helo pilot, striding toward him. The two locked eyes for an instant and Finn saw her fury as she passed, going after her friend.
“ ’Scuse me, sir,” she spat as she brushed by Movie Star—but it sounded a lot more like Fuck you, sir.
Movie Star raised both hands, palms forward, all innocence. Hey, just kidding around.
Finn continued on.
He’d seen this dynamic before. A pilot like Biker was there for a reason; she was on a trajectory. The no-future helo pilot wasn’t like that. Finn could read the whole story. Movie Star had planned to be a jet pilot, a top-gun guy, swinging dick of the blue skies, flying his machine like a tricked-out hog. It must piss him off mightily that a girl got the call sign “Biker.” But he hadn’t ranked high enough in flight school to get his pick of platform, so he ended up a helo pilot by default. No cool call sign, no yahoo pyrotechnics in the clouds, not for Movie Star. He was still angry about it. And taking it out on Biker.
As he walked Finn noted the usual parade of characters peopling the passageways. Grease-covered mechanics. Riggers and junior officers. A goggled flight deck handler. More pilots breaking up from debrief and heading below to midrats or off to their racks for the night. A few E-1s with their cleaning supplies, heading above or below to wash away evidence of the dying day. The city’s night population, going about their business. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Finn stopped.
He stepped back into a shallow alcove so he wouldn’t block traffic, what there was of it, and stood still for a moment.
Something didn’t fit.
In sniper school their training began not with how to shoot but how to see. They were taught how to use their peripheral vision, which was anatomically more sensitive to movement and color than the central portion of the retina. They were taught to take in massive amounts of visual information by scanning a scene from right to left, in the opposite direction they’d been taught to use all their lives, because it interrupted the normal leaps of assumption and trained the brain to absorb the raw information and take it at face value.
And they were taught the art of target detection, which hinged on the ability to quickly take in a large field of vision and spot individual elements that were out of place. A straight line or hard geometric shape within a natural landscape. A stray moving branch, an unnatural stillness in the breeze-blown grass. A person doing something they wouldn’t normally be doing.
It wasn’t just about having keen eyesight. It was about using the information from your eyes to isolate elements that didn’t quite fit into the larger picture.
Something he’d seen tonight didn’t quite fit. He was sure of it.
But what?