6

The admiral can see you in thirty minutes, sir.”

“Thanks.” Jake Grafton cradled the phone and doodled on his legal pad. It was almost 10:30 and Smoke Judy was at his desk. He had said good morning to Jake and spent an hour on the phone, and now seemed to be busy on the computer with a report, but he hadn’t mentioned his sojourns of yesterday. Jake had toyed with the idea of questioning Judy about where he was yesterday, then decided against it. Whatever answer Judy gave, truth or lie, what would that prove? Would a he incriminate him? In what? A murder? Espionage? If Judy told the truth, what would the truth be? That he went to West Virginia yesterday—so what? And if he denied it—what then? No, Jake didn’t know enough to even ask an intelligent question.

Vice Admiral Henry, however, was in a more interesting position. His fairy tale about deflecting a murder investigation left him vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? To more questions. He would have to answer reasonable questions or…? Or?

I can’t recognize truth when I hear it, Jake mused. What the hell kind of job is this? Can I trust the admiral?

Do I have a choice? He tossed the pencil on the desk and rubbed his eyes. He knew the answer to that one. He had no choice at all. He stood and stretched. His doodles caught his eye. Airplanes. Gliders. Long wings.

In front of the breezeway between JP-1 and JP-2, he caught the shuttle bus and rode it over to the Pentagon. The chief offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted. Then he waved him in to see Henry, who was busy locking his desk and office safe.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Morning. Don’t sit. We’re going to a meeting with SECNAV.”

“Okay.” Jake had never met F. George Ludlow, but he had heard a lot about him. Scion of an old New England family—was there any other kind?—Ludlow was in his early forties, a Vietnam vet with a B.S. from Yale and a business doctorate from Harvard. He had spent ten years knocking around the gray-suit defense think tanks before being tapped as Secretary of the Navy three years ago by his father-in-law, Royce Caplinger, the Secretary of Defense. Nepotism, fumed the Senate Democrats, but they confirmed the nomination anyway: Ludlow’s credentials were as bluechip as his family connections and dividends from the family investment trusts.

“What this meeting about, sir?” Jake asked as he and the admiral walked the outer ring of the Pentagon—the E-ring—toward Ludlow’s office.

“Don’t know. When Ludlow wants you, he summons you—now.”

It was common knowledge that Ludlow had vigorous hands on the throttle and helm of the navy. He had firm ideas about what ships and weapons systems the navy needed, how they should be acquired, how they should be employed. With his insider’s knowledge of Washington and the upper reaches of the defense establishment he outargued most admirals. Those he couldn’t win over he shuffled off to sinecures or retirement. Unlike the usual dilettante who spent a year or two as a service secretary on his way to a bright political future or the vice presidency of a major defense contractor, Ludlow behaved exactly like a man whose present job was the fulfillment of a lifelong quest. If Ludlow had any other political or business ambitions, no hint of them had percolated down to Jake’s level. His saving grace, or so it appeared to the rank and file, was his strong commitment to the navy as an institution, to its people and its traditions. This was probably one of the reasons for unease at the flag level, since the admirals were unwilling to defer to anyone as keeper of the faith, the role in which they cast themselves.

The corridor in which the secretary’s office was located was decorated for the general public. Large oil portraits of naval heroes of the past were prominently displayed; Farragut, Dewey, Halsey and many others. The old admirals stared dourly at Jake and Vice Admiral Henry as they went to their appointment to discuss the navy of the future.

Ludlow’s large office was paneled in dark wood, the real thing, not veneer, Jake noticed as he took his first, curious look—and nautical memorabilia were everywhere, on the desk, the credenza, the little sitting desk. Oil paintings of famous naval scenes—also original, Jake noted—adorned the walls. The chairs were black leather. One of them was occupied by a fat gent in his mid-sixties whose skin looked as tough as the chair covering. Jake recognized him from his picture—Senator Hiram Duquesne, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Ludlow was behind his desk and didn’t rise from his chair.

“You gentlemen know the senator,” Ludlow said after Admiral Henry had introduced Jake.

Duquesne eyed Jake speculatively. “Aren’t you the pilot that strapped on El Hakim last year?”

“Yessir.”

“Sit down, gentlemen. Please.” Ludlow gestured to the chairs. Jake ended up on Henry’s left, Duquesne on the admiral’s right. Ludlow’s executive assistant sat on the sofa with a legal pad on his lap, ready to take notes.

The senator and the two naval officers faced the secretary across his massive mahogany desk strewn with paper. Ludlow had one leg draped over his chair arm, revealing hairy skin in the gap between the top of his sock and his trouser leg. In his hands he held a rifle cartridge that still contained a bullet. He worked the cartridge back and forth between his fingers as he spoke to Jake. “Senator Duquesne wanted to meet you when I informed him you would be doing the testing and evaluation of the ATA prototypes.”

“Now, as I understand it, George, you people are not going to do your usual T and E routine,” Senator Duquesne said. T and E was Test and Evaluation.

“No way to keep the lid on or meet our time goals if we did it the usual way.”

“You a test pilot?” Duquesne shot at Jake.

“No, sir.”

Ludlow’s leg came off the arm of his chair. “He’s an attack pilot,” the secretary said mildly, “one of the very best we have. He knows carrier aviation as well as anyone in uniform.”

“What d’ya know about stealth?” the senator demanded.

“Very little, sir, but I’m learning.”

“Horse puckey! What does the navy need for an attack plane at the turn of the century? What about range, payload, survivability, maintainability? How much should the navy pay?”

“I—” Jake began, but Ludlow was also talking: “Senator, policy is my—”

Senator Duquesne raised his voice. He thundered at Ludlow. “I’ll say this again with these gentlemen present. I’m not happy about this whole thing, George. Not happy. You have a program here that you will want funded for three hundred and fifty airplanes at about fifty million each, seventeen and a half billion dollars’ worth, and you intend to make the decision on which prototype to buy based on Captain Grafton’s quick and dirty recommendation?”

“You overstate it, Senator. We—being me, CNO, Vice Admirals Henry and Dunedin—we propose to make a recommendation to SECDEF based on the needs of the navy. We will look closely at Captain Grafton’s evaluation to help us determine which of the two prototypes best meets those needs. And his evaluation will be quick but it won’t be dirty.” The senator twisted in his chair. The secretary continued, relentless. “No captain determines the needs of the navy, Senator. I do that. The President and SECDEF—”

Duquesne stopped him with an upraised palm. “Don’t lecture me, George. And don’t patronize me! Major weapons systems procurement gets shrouded in secrecy, taken out of the normal channels where Congress can look things over, and major decisions get made on the basis of one document generated by one of your junior subordinates which no one can confirm or refute. And you tell me to relax? Seventeen billion dollars for a plane that may or may not be adequately tested, that may or may not do what we’re buying it to do? Plus ten more billion for spare parts and simulators and all the rest of it. No dirt, huh? Goddamnit, Ludlow, I don’t trust you any further than I could throw a scalded cat! You’re trying to make Congress a goddamn rubber stamp!”

Ludlow leaned forward in his chair. “I never said for you to relax! You people agreed to the classification level of these black stealth projects! You people understood the problems involved and approved the administrative shortcuts! Now you—”

“I said don’t patronize me! And quit pointing that fucking bullet at me!”

Henry rose hastily and Jake followed. “Talk to you later, Mr. Secretary,” he said, and Ludlow nodded as he fired another volley at the senator.

“Jesus,” Jake muttered when they reached the hallway and the door closed behind them.

“Yeah,” the admiral agreed.

“How come Duquesne is so upset when the decision hasn’t been made?”

“That’s just it. One of the prototypes was manufactured in his home state. He’s fought hard on the Hill for stealth and he wants his plane to be chosen and the air force didn’t buy it. Now, if the navy doesn’t…Well, you get the idea.”

“Uh-huh,” Jake said as the full dimensions of his new position came into much better focus. So Henry had asked for him to run the ATA project, eh? No doubt his name had been discussed with Ludlow and the Chief of Naval Operations as well as Vice Admiral Dunedin—NAVAIR. They could praise him to the skies for his report or ease him right out of the navy. They needed a man they could dispose of if necessary. And they found me, Jake thought bitterly. A gilt-edge reputation, my ass!

In Henry’s office, Jake said calmly, “Better make sure your anti-bugging devices are on.”

The admiral did so while eyeing Jake. When he was seated, Jake said, “I took a little drive yesterday, sir. Saw a state trooper up in West Virginia named Keadle. Read an accident report.”

“So?”

“Passed one of the guys from my shop on my way back here yesterday afternoon. He was on his way to West Virginia.”

“Oh?”

“Admiral, why don’t you tell me what really happened in West Virginia after Harold Strong was killed?”

“Are you suggesting I haven’t?”

“I can’t do my job, sir, unless you play straight with me. I play straight with you, you have to play straight with me.”

Admiral Henry looked out his window a while, examined his fingernails and finally directed his gaze back to Jake. “I think you had better discuss any concerns you have with Admiral Dunedin.” He picked up a sheet of paper and began to scan it. The interview was over.

“Aye aye, sir,” Jake said, and left the room. He retrieved his hat in the outer office and caught the shuttle back to Crystal City.

As the little bus wound its way from the parking lot, Jake looked back at the Pentagon. It appeared low and massive from this perspective. Endless rows of windows. It also looked gray under this overcast.

Admiral Dunedin was in conference. Jake didn’t get in to see him until almost 3 P.M. He got right to it. “I went to West Virginia yesterday to see what I could find out about Harold Strong’s death. On the way back here I passed one of the people from my shop heading the other way.”

“Who?” said Dunedin, apparently genuinely curious.

“Smoke Judy.”

“How about that,” Dunedin muttered.

“Admiral, I’m a little baffled. Vice Admiral Henry briefed me on some of the events surrounding Strong’s death, but this morning when I mentioned this incident to him, he didn’t even ask who it was from my office that passed me. I get the distinct impression I’m being mushroomed.”

Dunedin lifted an eyebrow, then apparently thought better of it and went back to deadpan. He apparently knew about mushrooms: you kept them in the dark and fed them shit. “I guess everyone is a little baffled,” he said carefully. “Strong’s death was a tragedy. Nothing we can do about it, though.”

“Well, I could sure use a little more infor—”

“Who couldn’t? But I don’t have any information I can share with you. Sorry.” His tone made the apology a mere pleasantry. Before Jake could reply, he said, “There’s a meeting at sixteen-thirty hours in the Under Secretary of the Navy’s office on next year’s budget. We’ve got a billion dollars for ATA buried in there under carrier modernization and enhancement. You go to the meeting and represent me. If they try to cut that line item or slice it down in any way, you call me.”

“Yessir.” The admiral selected a report from his in basket and began to read. Jake left.

After he told the secretary that he was going to a meeting, he walked to the officer personnel office, where he had to wait until two other officers had finished before he could talk to the chief petty officer. “Do you have my service record in here?”

“Last four digits of your social security number, sir?”

“Oh-six-oh-seven.”

It took the chief just half a minute to pull it from the drawer.

“Chief, how about you ginning up a request for retirement for my signature?”

The chief yeoman’s eyes showed his surprise. “Okay, sir, if that’s what you want. It’s gotta be effective on the first day of a month between four and six months from now.”

Jake eyed the wall calendar. “September first. When can I sign it?”

“Monday okay?”

“See you then.”

“Any particular reason you want stated, sir?”

“The usual. Whatever you usually say.”

Dashing the four blocks to Dr. Arnold’s office after her eleven o’clock class on Friday was always a hassle for Callie. A student or two usually buttonholed her to clarify a point or comment made during class and it took several minutes to satisfy them without being rude. Then came the four-block march which crossed two avenues hub to hub with noon traffic.

She was perspiring slightly when Arnold’s receptionist nodded at her. Two minutes early. Of course, a few minutes late wouldn’t hurt, but Arnold ended the sessions precisely at ten minutes before the hour and the fee was $105 regardless. She sank onto the couch and once again tried to decide if the fifty minutes was worth the cost.

Forget the money. What are the important things to discuss during this session? She was trying to arrange her thoughts when the door opened and Dr. Arnold beckoned. He was of medium height, in his late thirties, and wore a neat brown beard. “He looks like Sigmund Freud before he got old and twisted,” Jake had grumped once. Above the beard this morning was a small, thoughtful smile.

“Good morning, Callie.” He held the door open for her.

“Hello.” She sank into the stuffed armchair across from him, the middle of the three “guest” chairs. When he used to come Jake always sat on her left, near the window, while she always used this chair. For a brief moment she wondered what Arnold made of her continued use of this chair although Jake wasn’t here.

After a few preliminary comments, she stated, “Jake went back to work this Monday,” and paused, waiting for his reaction.

Arnold prompted, “How has that gone this week?”

“He seems enthusiastic, and somewhat relieved. They have him working on a new airplane project and he hasn’t said much about it. If that’s what he’s working on. I think he’s disappointed, but it doesn’t show. He’s hiding it well.” She thought about it. “That’s unusual. He’s always been stoic at work—his colleagues have told me that he usually shows little emotion at the office—but he’s never been like that at home. I can read him very well.”

Dr. Arnold, Benny to all his patients, looked up from his notes. “Last weekend, did you threaten him?”

Callie’s head bobbed. “I suppose.” She swallowed hard and felt her eyes tearing up. She bit her lower lip. “I never did that before. Never again!” She moved to the chair near the window, Jake’s chair, and looked out. Trees just budding stood expectantly in the pale spring sun. Jake had sat here all winter and looked at the black, bare, upthrusted limbs. And now spring was finally here.

She should never have said those things, about leaving him. She could never do it. She loved him too much to even consider it. But it was so hard last fall, after she thought him dead and her life in ashes. When she heard he was still alive the euphoria swept her to heights she didn’t believe possible. The subsequent descent from rapture to reality had been torturous.

An officer from the CNO’s office had escorted her to Bethesda Naval Hospital the morning after Jake was flown back from Greece. She had expected—thinking about it now, she didn’t know just what she expected. But her hopes were so high and the officer who drove her tried gently to prepare her.

His face was still swollen and mottled, his eyes mere slits, his tongue raw from where he had chewed on it. His eyes—those piercing gray eyes that had melted her a thousand times—they lay unfocused in the shapeless mass of flesh that was his face as IVs dripped their solution into his arms. A severe concussion, the doctor said gently. Jake had taken a lot of Gs, more Gs than any man could be expected to survive. Capillaries had burst under the tremendous strain. And he was grossly dehydrated, unable to take water. Slowly Callie began to understand. Brain damage. Bleeding in the frontal lobe, where memory and personality resided. Oh, she assured herself a hundred times that he would be the same—that life would never play them a dirty, filthy trick like that, that God was in his heaven, that the man who loved her and she loved with all her soul would get well and…He had gotten well. Almost—

He’s quieter, more subdued, as if he’s someplace else…or thinking of something he can’t share.

“Do you think he has forgotten?”

The words startled her. She had been musing aloud.

“I don’t know. He says he can’t remember much about it, and that’s probably true. But he stops there and doesn’t say what he does remember.”

Arnold nodded. For three months in this office Jake had said nothing of the flight that led to his injury. “What of his decision to die?”

Callie stared at the psychologist. “You think he made that decision?”

“You know he did.” Arnold’s eyes held her. “He decided to ram the transport. The odds of surviving such a collision were very small. Jake knew that. He’s a professional military aviator; he had to know the probably outcome of a ramming.” The doctor’s shoulders moved ever so slightly. “He was willing to die to kill his enemies.”

After a moment Callie nodded.

“You must come to grips with that. It was a profound moment in his life, one he apparently doesn’t wish to dwell on or try to remember. The complex human being that he is, that’s how he chooses to live with it. Now you must come to grips with his decision and you must learn to live with it.”

“Don’t many men in combat come to that moment?”

“I think not.” Benny tugged at his beard. “The literature—it’s hard to say. Most men—I suspect—most men facing a situation that may cause their death who do go forward probably do so without thought. The situation draws them onward, the situation and their training and their own private concept of manhood. But in that cockpit—Jake evaluated the danger and saw no other alternative and decided to go forward. Willingly. To accept the inevitable consequences, one of which would be his death.” He continued to worry the strands of hair on his chin.

“There’s a verse in the Bible,” Callie said, her chin quivering. “‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

“Aha! If only you believed that!”

“I do,” she said, trying to convince herself, and turned back to the window. Other husbands went off to work every morning, they had regular jobs, they came home nights and weekends and life was safe and sane. Of course, people die in car wrecks and you read about airliner crashes. But those things don’t happen to people like me!

Why couldn’t Jake have found a safe, sane, regular job, with an office and a company car and a nice, predictable future? Damn him, she had waited all these years for the sword to drop. Those memorial services whenever someone was killed—she always went with Jake to those. The widow, the kids, the condolences, the organ music. But it wouldn’t happen to Jake—oh no! He’s a good pilot, real good, the other men say, too good to ever smear himself all over some farmer’s potato field, too good to ever leave her sitting alone in the chapel with the organ wheezing and some fat preacher spouting platitudes and everyone filing past and muttering well-meaning nonsense. Damn you, Jake. Damn you!

Arnold passed her a Kleenex and she used it on her eyes. He held out the box and she took several and blew her nose.

“Next week, perhaps we can talk about that little girl you want to adopt?”

Callie nodded and tried to arrange her face.

“Thank you for coming today.” He smiled gravely. She rose and he held the door for her, then eased it shut as she paused at the receptionist’s desk to write a check.

He opened her file and made some notes. After a glance at his watch, he picked up his phone and dialed. On the third ring a man answered. One word: “Yes.”

“She was here today,” Arnold said without preliminaries. “He’s going to be working on a new airplane project, she says.” He continued, reading from his notes.

It wasn’t until the A-6 was taxiing toward the duty runway for takeoff that the incongruity of the whole situation struck Toad Tarkington. The plane thumped and wheezed and swayed like a drunken dowager as it rolled over the expansion joints in the concrete. He had been so busy with the computer and Inertial Navigation System while they sat in the chocks that he had had no time to look around and become accustomed to this new cockpit. Now as he took it all in a wry grin twisted his lips under his oxygen mask. Rita Moravia sat in the pilot’s seat on his left in the side-by-side cockpit. Her seat was slightly higher than his and several inches further forward, but due to her size her head was on the same level as his. Not an inch of her skin was exposed. Her helmet, green visor and oxygen mask encased her head, and her body and arms were sheathed in a green flight suit, gloves, steel-toed black boots. Over all this she wore a G suit, torso harness and survival vest, to which was attachéed an inflatable life vest. Toad wore exactly the same outfit, but the thought that the beautiful Rita Moravia was hidden somewhere under the flight gear in the pilot’s seat struck him as amusing. One would never even know she was a woman except for the sound of her voice on the intercom system, the ICS. “Takeoff checklist,” she said crisply, her voice all business.

Toad read the items one by one and she gave the response to each after checking the appropriate switch or lever or gauge as the plane rolled along. The taxiway seemed like a little highway going nowhere in particular; the concrete runways on the right were hidden by the grassy swell of a low hill. To the left was a gravel road, and paralleling that the beach, where the Puget Sound waves lapped at the land. The water in the sound appeared glassy today. Above them was blue sky, a pleasant change from the clouds that had moved restlessly from west to east since Toad and Rita arrived on the island. Even Mother Nature was cooperating. The background noise of the two idling engines, a not unpleasant drone, murmured of latent power. They promised flight. Toad breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. He had been on the ground too long.

Clearance copied and read back, Toad asked the tower for clearance to take off. It was readily granted. The traffic pattern was momentarily empty. Rita Moravia rolled the A-6 onto the runway and braked to a stop. With her left hand she advanced the throttles to the stops as Toad flipped the IFF to transmit. The IFF encoded the plane’s radar blip on all air control radars.

The engines wound up slowly at first, then quickened to a full-throated roar that was loud even in the cockpit. The nose of the machine dipped as the thrust compressed the nose-gear oleo, almost as if the plane were crouching, gathering strength for its leap into the sky. Moravia waggled the stick gently, testing the controls one more time, while she waited for the engine temperatures to peak. Outside the plane, Toad knew, the roar of the two engines could be heard for several miles. No doubt the flight crewmen on the ramps near the hangars were pausing, listening as the roar reached them, their attention momentarily captured by the bird announcing its readiness for flight. Finally satisfied, Rita Moravia released the brakes.

The nose oleo rebounded and the A-6 began to roll, gathering speed, faster and faster and faster. The needle on the airspeed indicator came off the peg…80…100…faster and faster as the wheels thumped and the machine swayed gently over the uneven concrete…130…140…the nose came off the ground and Moravia stopped the stick’s rearward movement with a gentle nudge.

As the broad, swept wings bit into the air the main wheels left the ground and the thumps and bumps ceased.

Moravia slapped the gear handle up and, passing 170 knots, raised the flaps and slats. Climbing and accelerating, the Intruder shot over the little town of Oak Harbor bellowing its song. Upward they flew, upward, into the smooth gentle sky.

He was flying again. It seemed—somehow it was strange and bittersweet all at once. He hadn’t thought about his last flight in months, but now as the engines moaned and the plane swam through the air, memories of his last flight with Jake Grafton in an F-14 over the Med flooded over Toad Tarkington. There was fear in those memories. He fought to push them out of his mind as he twiddled the knobs to optimize the radar presentation and checked the computer readouts. He glanced outside. The peaks of the Cascade Mountains were sliding by beneath the plane. The steep crags were gray in those places where the clouds and snow didn’t hide their naked slopes.

Rita Moravia had the Intruder level at Flight Level 230—23,000 feet. Toad concentrated on the equipment on the panel in front of him. As he tried desperately to remember all that his instructor had told him, he sneaked a glance at Moravia. She sat in her seat calmly scanning the sky and the instrument panel. She had engaged the autopilot and was watching it fly the plane. Now she adjusted the bug on the HSI, the rotating compass ring. She had the Yakima TACAN dialed in. Now she toggled the switch that moved her seat up a millimeter and stretched lazily. “Nice plane, huh?” she said when her left hand once more came to rest on the throttles, where her ICS button was.

Toad fumbled with his ICS button, which he keyed with his left foot. “Yeah. Fucking super.”

“How’s the system?”

“Looks okay to me, as if I knew.”

“Found Yakima yet?”

He ignored the question as he studied the radar. The city was still seventy miles away according to the TACAN. There it was on the radar, right under the cursor cross hairs, just a blob of solid return amid a whole scopeful of return from hills and ridges and houses and barns.

Yeah, Toad, you better figure out how to find a city in all this mess or this little flight is gonna be a disaster. The whole essence of the bombardier’s art was interpreting this jumble of return on the radar scope. And Jake Grafton and those other A-6 perverts demanded he pick it up in just a week! Well, he’d show them! If those attack weenies can figure out this shit in eight months, a week will be about right for the old Horny Toad. After all, this worn-out flying dump truck—

Moravia was asking Seattle Center if they could proceed direct to the start of the low-level route. Toad cycled the steering to that point and examined the radar carefully. Thank God the guys at VA-128 had picked a town on the Columbia River to start the route. Even a blind fighter RIO—Radar Intercept Officer—could find that. Or should be able to find it with the aid of the radarscope photographs that were included in the navigation package for this route. He arranged the stack of photographs on his kneeboard and compared the first one to the live presentation on the radar scope. Yep!

They had passed the third checkpoint on the navigation route and were somewhere in central Oregon flying at 360 knots true, 335 indicated, 500 feet above the ground, when Toad’s savage mood began to improve. He was identifying the checkpoints without difficulty, no doubt because they were ridiculously prominent features in the landscape ahead, but he was finding them. The system seemed to be working as advertised and the INS was tight, tight as a virgin’s…

For the first time he became aware of Moravia’s smooth, confident touch on the controls. She flew the plane with a skill that belied her inexperience. Toad watched her handle the plane. The stick barely moved as the plane rose and fell to follow the ground contour and her thumb flicked the trim button automatically. She was good. The airspeed needle seemed glued to the 335-knot tic on the dial. “You’re a pretty good pilot,” he said on the ICS.

“Just navigate,” she replied, not even glancing at him.

Another casual slap in the chops. Goddamn women! He placed his face against the black hood that shielded the radar scope and studiously ignored her.

The plane approached the Columbia River again from the south down a long, jagged canyon that ran almost straight north out of central Oregon. Stealing glances from the radar, out the right side of the airplane Toad saw a harsh, arid landscape of cliffs and stone pillars, spectacular monuments to the power of wind and water and the vastness of time. The almost vertical rock surfaces produced crisp, sharp images on the radar screen. He examined the infrared display. The infrared images were from a sensor mounted on a turret on the bottom of the aircraft’s nose, immediately in front of the nose-gear door. The sides of the rock toward the sun looked almost white on the IR scope, which was mounted above the radar scope and was also shielded from extraneous light by the black flexible hood projecting from the instrument panel.

The navigation checkpoint to enter the navy’s target range at Boardman, Oregon, was a grain silo and barn on top of a cliff near the lower reaches of this canyon. The cursors—cross hairs positioned by the computer on the radar screen—rested near a prominent blip. Toad turned up the magnification on the infrared as he moved the cursors to the blip. Yep. That was the barn all right.

Over the barn he cycled the steering to the initial point for the run-in to the target and called the range on radio.

“November Julie 832, you’re cleared in.”

Rita let the plane drift up to 1,500 feet above the ground. They had left the cliffs and canyons behind them and flew now over almost flat, gently rolling terrain that was used for dry-land farming. Following a printed checklist on his kneeboard, Toad set the switches in the cockpit for bombing. Six blue twenty-five-pound Mark 76 practice bombs hung on a rack under the right wing, Station Four. Each of these little bombs contained a smoke charge that would mark the spot of impact. The A-6 crossed the initial point, the IP, and Rita swung it toward the target ten miles east.

The target lay on the south side of the Columbia River in flat, dry, treeless country. The run-in line was marked by a dirt road on the ground, but neither Toad nor Rita paid any attention. During the minute and forty seconds it took the Intruder to traverse the ten miles from the IP to the target, Toad was absorbed in getting the cursors precisely on the radar reflector that marked the target bull’s-eye, checking the computer and inertial readouts, using the infrared for visual ID, locking up the target with the laser ranger-designator, then checking the information the computer received to make sure it was valid. Finally he put the system into attack.

Even though the practice bombs lacked laser seekers, the laser in the nose turret would give the computer more precise range and angular information than the radar could. Rita was equally busy flying the plane and centering the steering commands on the Analog Display Indicator, the ADI, immediately in front of her.

The infrared and laser stayed locked to the radar reflector on the little tower that constituted the target bull’s-eye even after bomb release as the nose turret rotated. In the cockpit Toad watched the picture on the infrared display change as the plane passed over the target. He was looking at an inverted picture of the tower when he saw the puff of smoke near the base sent up by the practice bomb. An excellent hit.

On the downwind leg Toad raised his helmet visor and swabbed his face with his gloved hands. This was work. The plane was headed west parallel to the Columbia River. Rita scanned the sky for light aircraft.

“832, your hit twenty-five feet at six o’clock.”

“Roger.” Toad made a note on his kneeboard. “On the next run,” he said to Rita, “let’s do 500 knots.”

“Okay.”

At the increased speed Toad had only about sixty-five seconds from the IP to bomb release, so he had to work faster. The plane bounced in the warm afternoon thermals. In wartime the plane would race in toward its target at full throttle. The air could be full of flak and enemy radar signals probing the darkness to lock them up for a missile shot. Today over this Oregon prairie under a brilliant sun, Toad could visualize how it would be. Sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eyes as he manipulated the switches and knobs of the equipment. He got the bomb off but he was struggling. He would need a lot of practice to gain real proficiency, and today the equipment was working perfectly, no one was shooting.

“A thousand feet this time, as fast as she’ll go.”

“Roger,” Rita said.

As fast as she’ll go turned out to be 512 knots indicated. On the next run they came in at five hundred feet, then four hundred, then three.

On the downwind leg before their last run, Toad flipped the radar switch from transmit to standby. The picture disappeared from the scope. A stealth bomber that beaconed its position with radar emissions would have a short life and fiery end. The infrared was passive, emitting nothing.

As they crossed the IP inbound, Toad found the infrared was still on the bull’s-eye tower. With the help of the inertial, the computer had kept the cursors there and the infrared was slaved to the cursors. He turned the laser on early and stepped the computer into attack.

Yes, it could be done, and with practice, done well. Moisture in the air would degrade the IR, of course, but you couldn’t have everything.

As they crossed the Columbia climbing northwest, the spotting tower gave them a call. “We didn’t spot your last hit. Maybe the smoke charge didn’t go off.”

Toad checked the computer readouts. Rita had been eleven mils off on steering at the moment of weapon release. Toad couldn’t resist. He informed her of that fact. She said nothing. “Still,” Toad added magnanimously, “an okay job.” He was feeling rather pleased with himself.

“For a woman.”

“I didn’t say that, Miss Thin Skin. I said an okay job.”

“Look at the ordnance panel, ace.” Toad did so. He had inadvertently selected Station Three instead of Station Four for the last bomb run. The practice bombs were on Station Four, and the last bomb was undoubtedly still there. Station Three—the belly station —had been empty, thank God! Oh damn. And good ol’ Rita had sat there and watched him do it and hadn’t squeaked a word! “Call Center and get our clearance back to Whidbey,” she said now, her voice deadpan.

Toad reached for the radio panel.

Terry Franklin was watching television when he heard the telephone ring. He listened for the second ring, but it didn’t come. He sat staring at the TV screen, no longer hearing the words or seeing the picture.

His wife had taken the kids to the mall. She had left only a half hour ago. How long would she be?

He was trying to decide just how much time he had when the phone rang again. He felt his muscles tense. Only one ring.

He turned off the TV and got his coat from the closet. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the old Datsun. They were there. He snapped off the living-room lights and peered between the curtains at the street. No one out there.

Ring, pause, ring, pause, ring…

Three rings. The drop on G Street. He would have to hurry to beat Lucy and the kids home. He remembered to lock the door behind him.

Matilda Jackson was sixty-seven years old and she was fed up. Five years ago she retired from the law firm where she had worked as a clerk-typist for twenty-six years. Seventeen months ago she had made the last payment on her mortgage. The house wasn’t much— a run-down row house in a run-down neighborhood—but by God it was hers. And it was all she could afford on her social security income and the $93.57 she got every month from the law firm’s pension plan.

The house had been something when she and Charlie bought it in 1958, and Charlie had been a good worker inside and outside, keeping everything painted and nice and the sidewalk swept. But he had died of diabetes—had it really been sixteen years ago?— after they amputated his feet and his liver got bad.

Poor Charlie, thank God he can’t see this neighborhood now, it’d break his heart. Everything gone to rack and ruin, trash everywhere, and those kids selling dope in the house right across the street, the house where ol’ lady Melvin, the preacher’s widow, used to live. Some old man from New Orleans was in there now: she didn’t know his name.

Mrs. Jackson heard a car stop outside and peered through the window. Four young men dressed fit to kill stood on the sidewalk looking around. Mrs. Jackson reached for her camera, an ancient Brownie, but she had loaded it with some of that new film the man at the drugstore said would take pictures without a flash. When she got the camera ready and pointed through the gap in the drapes she could see only two men. The other two must have gone inside.

Damn those cops anyway.

She had told those detectives that Melvin’s was a crack house and nothing had happened. They weren’t going to pay much attention to a fat old black lady, no way. She had seen that in their hard eyes as they looked up and down the street at the boarded-up windows and the trash and that worthless, shiftless Arnold Spivey sitting on Wilson’s stoop drinking from a bottle in a paper bag.

She was going to get pictures. They would have to do something if she had pictures. And if they didn’t do anything, she would send the photos to that neighborhood watch group or maybe even the newspapers. Leaving old people to watch their neighborhood rot and the dope peddlers take over—they would have to do something about pictures.

She snapped the camera at the two men on the sidewalk, slick loose-jointed dudes with sports coats and pimp hats with wide brims and flashy hatbands. The license plate of that big car would be in both photos.

Here comes someone. A white man, walking bold as brass after dark in a neighborhood as black as printer’s ink, a neighborhood where the kids would rip off your arm to get your Timex watch. She squinted. Late fifties or early sixties, chunky, wearing a full-length raincoat and a little trilby hat. Oh yes, he went by earlier this evening, just walking and looking. She hadn’t paid much attention then, but here he is, back again. She pointed the camera and clicked the shutter. The two dudes on the opposite sidewalk by the big car were watching him, but he was ignoring them.

Now what did he just do? Stuffed something in that hollow iron fence post as he walked by.

Why did he do that? My God, the street is full of trash; why didn’t he just throw it down like everyone else does?

The two men who had gone into the crack house came out and they and their compatriots piled in the car and left, laughing and peeling rubber. Mrs. Jackson got more photos of them, then busied herself in the kitchen making tea since the street seemed quiet now.

She was sipping tea in the darkened living room and looking through the curtain gap when a haggard black woman in dilapidated blue jeans and a torn sweatshirt staggered around the corner and along the sidewalk to the crack house. She struggled up the steps to the stoop. The door opened before she even knocked. Mrs. Jackson didn’t bother taking her picture; she was one of the regulars, a crack addict who Mrs. Jackson suspected didn’t have long to live. Mrs. Blue next door had said her name was Mandy and she had heard she was doing tricks under the Southeast Freeway.

Nobody gave a damn. About Mandy or Mrs. Jackson or Mrs. Blue or any of them. Just a bunch of poor niggers down in the sewer.

Wonder what that white man stuffed in that fence post? Something to do with that crack house, no doubt. Maybe he’s a judge or police on the take. Not getting enough. Maybe it’s money, a payoff for someone.

Well, we’ll just see. We’ve got some rights too.

She pulled her sweater around her shoulders and got her cane. Her arthritis was bothering her pretty badly but there was no help for it. She unbolted the door and lowered herself down the steps. As she approached the hollow iron post two houses down she glanced around guiltily. Her frustration was fast evaporating into fear. No one looking. Quick! She reached into the post. Only a crushed cigarette pack. Disappointed, she felt around in the hollow cavity. There was nothing else. With the cigarette pack in her pocket, she slowly made her way back to her house, steeling herself to look straight ahead. Oh God, why had she done this?

She locked and bolted her doors and sat at the kitchen table examining her find. Writing on the back, block letters. Numbers and such. Code of some sort. Payoffs, most likely. We’ll see what the police make of all this. Not that they’d ever tell an old black woman what it’s all about. No matter, if they’d just close that crack house, that’d be something.

But should she go to the police? They’ve been told about that crack house and they’ve done nothing. What if the police have been paid off? What if they tell the dopers about her?

Mrs. Jackson had lived too long in the ghetto not to know the dangers associated with interfering in someone else’s illegal enterprise. As she stared at the cigarette pack she realized she had crossed that invisible line between officious nuisance and enemy. And she knew exactly what happened to enemies of dope dealers. They died. Fast and bloody. Those four punks on the sidewalk in their fancy clothes would smile as they cut off her ears, nose and tongue, then her arms.

She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the darkness, trying to think. What should she do? My God, what had she done?

Mrs. Jackson was still sitting in the darkness of her kitchen thirty minutes later when Terry Franklin walked past the front of her house toward the hollow post. He had parked the car three blocks away. Normally he was very circumspect and drove around for at least an hour to make sure that he had lost any possible tails, but tonight he was in a hurry. He had to get home before Lucy and the kids got back from the mall. So he had driven straight from Annandale to G Street.

The block appeared empty. No, there was someone sitting in a doorway, across the street. Some black guy with a brown bag. A wino. No sweat. What a shitty neighborhood! He had never understood why the Russians had picked a drop in a run-down black neighborhood, but since he hadn’t talked to them after he had found the described drops, he had had no opportunity to ask.

It would be just his luck to get mugged down here some night.

He walked at a regular pace toward the post, not too fast and not too slow. Just a man who knows where he’s going. He would just reach in while barely breaking stride, get the cigarette pack and keep on walking, right on around the block and back to his car. Piece of cake.

He slowed his pace as he reached into the post.

It was empty!

Dumbfounded, he stopped and looked in. There was just enough light coming from the streetlight up on the corner and the windows of the houses to see into the hole. It was about four inches deep. Empty!

He walked on. What had happened? This had never happened before. What in hell was going on?

He turned and walked back to the post. He looked in again. The hole was still empty. He looked around on the sidewalk and the grass behind the fence for anything that might be an empty cigarette pack.

Nothing!

It must be here, somewhere, and he just wasn’t seeing it.

He was living one of those cold-sweat gibbering nightmares where you are stuck in quicksand and going to die and the rope is forever just inches out of reach. Finally he realized the cigarette pack truly wasn’t there.

Maybe he was being set up. Maybe the FBI was going to grab him.

Franklin looked around wildly, trying to see who was watching. Just blank windows. The wino—still there, sucking from his bottle. He reached into the hole again, trying to understand. Someone had gotten it. God, it must be the FBI. They must be on to him. Even now, they’re watching from somewhere, ready to pounce. Prison—he would go to prison. The wino—an agent—watching and laughing and ready to arrest him.

Terry Franklin panicked.

He ran for the car, a staggering hell-bent gallop down the sidewalk as he tried to look in every direction for the agents closing in. To arrest him.

He careened into a garbage can and it fell over with a loud clang and the lid flew off and garbage went everywhere. He kept running. At the intersection a car slammed on its brakes to the screeching of tires, barely missing him. He bounced off a parked car but he didn’t slow.

He almost broke the key getting it into the door lock. The engine ground mercilessly and refused to start.

He smacked his head against the steering wheel in rage and frustration. He tried the ignition again as he scanned the sidewalks, searching for the agents that must be coming.

The engine caught. Franklin slammed the shift lever into drive and mashed on the accelerator.

Bang! Into the car ahead. Holy…! Reverse. Then forward, out of the parking space.

Cranking the wheel over at the corner, he slewed around with tires squalling and stomped on the gas.

Toad Tarkington stared glumly at the remains of a beer in the glass in front of him. Across the table Rita Moravia was chattering away with the peckerhead attack pilot who had spent the last three days initiating her into the mysteries of the A-6. Beside Toad sat the bombardier who had been coaching him, ol’ Henry Jenks. Both these mental giants were hanging on every word from Moravia’s gorgeous lips. There she sat, smiling and joking and behaving like a real live normal woman-type female, as she never did around him, damn her! And these two attack weenies were eating it with a spoon!

The pilot, Toad decided, had a rather high opinion of himself. He looked and acted like a lifelong miser who has just decided to spend a quarter on a piece of pussy that he knows will be worth two dollars. His smile widened every time Moravia glanced into his little pig eyes. If he wasn’t careful his face would crack.

This BN, Jenks, wasn’t any better. He obviously hadn’t had a good piece of ass since his junior year of high school. Jenks was telling a funny to the pilot as he watched Rita’s reaction out of the corner of his eyes. “Do you know a fighter puke’s definition of foreplay?” After the obligatory negative from his listeners, Jenks continued. “Six hours of begging.” Rita joined in the ha-ha-has.

Watching these two cheap masturbators in action was a thirsty business. The waitress caught Toad’s hi sign and came over. “Four double tequilas, neat,” Toad said, and looked around to see if there were any other orders. The attack weenies were still drooling down Moravia’s cleavage as she told an anecdote about something or other. “That’s it,” he told the waitress, who regarded him incredulously.

“Four?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She shrugged and turned away.

The club was still crowded with the remnants of the Friday-night Happy Hour gang. The married guys had left some time back and a bunch of reservists were drifting in. Altogether forty or fifty people, ten or twelve of them women, three of whom were still in uniform. Canned rock music blared from loudspeakers that Toad didn’t see. Only one couple was dancing.

When the waitress brought the drinks she sat them in the center of the table. Jenks looked at the drinks with raised eyebrows. “I’ll have another beer,” he said. “Perrier with a twist,” Moravia chirped. “Diet Coke,” intoned the lecher beside her.

Toad drank one of the tequilas in two gulps. The liquor burned all the way down. Ah baby!

Another song started on the loudspeakers, a fast number. Toad tossed off a second drink, then climbed up on his chair. He straightened and filled his lungs with air. “Hey, fat girl,” he roared.

Every eye in the place turned his way. Toad picked the nearest female and leaped toward her with a shout: “Let’s dance!” Behind him his chair flew over with a crash.

And oh, that woman could dance.