Tombstone walked into the Vipers’ ready room, exchanging greetings with the other aviators already there. Most of VF-95’s pilots and RIOS were there, standing about in small groups or already sitting in the rows of chairs facing a large TV screen mounted on the far bulkhead. Those scheduled for patrol within the next few hours wore their flight suits.
The others were more comfortably attired in their khakis.
Looking around the room, he spotted Batman and his rear-seater, Lieutenant Ken “Malibu” Blake, standing in one corner underneath the PLAT monitor, deep in a heated debate. He hesitated a moment, then walked over to join them.
“Ho, Stoney!” Batman said. “Help me straighten out this guy.”
“Hopeless,” Tombstone said. “You should’ve known that when you married him.”
“Yeah, I know, but where there’s life, there’s hope, even for the brain-dead. This guy’s trying to tell me that the Russians aren’t a threat anymore.”
Malibu took a sip from a can of soda. He was, in his own words, a Coke-aholic who needed a can of the stuff to get jump-started in the morning. “Seems to me they’re having enough trouble just holding this commonwealth together without trying to project their air-and seapower all over the world,” he said.
“He’s got a point there, Batman,” Tombstone said. “When was the last time we got buzzed by a Bear?”
“Just before Korea, but that’s beside the point. The Iron Curtain was lifted for a while, but it fell again with a thud when things started going sour inside their borders, and now who knows what will happen?”
“Which means they’re too busy to bother with us or the Indian Ocean,” Malibu insisted. “Look at the record, man! They gave Cam Ranh back to the Vietnamese. Yemen decided it didn’t want Soviet ships at Socotra.
They’re not even on particularly good terms with the Indians anymore. If this keeps up, they’re not going to have any overseas bases at all. I don’t think they’re going to be bothering us much from now on.”
“Yeah? Wake up and take a look at this.” Batman turned and slapped a map that was tacked up to a bulletin board on the nearby bulkhead. It was a full-color, 1:41500,000-scale map showing most of the Indian Ocean from Malaysia to Somalia. The Indian subcontinent jabbed southward like a huge, blunt dagger. A black line started at Diego Garcia far south of the dagger’s tip and extended north along the western coast of India before cutting sharply to the west. Dates written in along the way traced the battle group’s progress over the past week. Jefferson’s current position was marked, two hundred miles south of the Indian-Pakistan border.
Six hundred miles southwest of Turban Station, off of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, another line had been roughed in, this time in red.
It showed the day-by-day recorded positions of the (former) Soviet Indian Ocean Squadron, SOVINDRON. A week before, those ships had been moving slowly south down the Red Sea. Now they had rounded the corner at the Gulf of Aden and were steaming all-out toward the Pakistan coast.
Batman tapped the squadron’s last charted position. “Trouble projecting their seapower? You can say that when they have a fair-sized task force just six hundred miles over the horizon? Man, I’d call that some kind of major power projection!”
“Trying to assert Commonwealth power?” Malibu crumpled the empty aluminum can and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Or they’re looking after their people here, like we are. Mark my words, guys. We’ll be out looking for work if this keeps up!”
“What do you say to that, Stoney?” Batman asked. “Ready for a job with United?”
The joke stung. Tombstone managed to keep the easy smile on his face.
“Not just yet,” he said. “Not if they won’t let me pull an inverted dive in a 727.”
They laughed as he slumped into a seat. For him, the question was dead serious.
His eyes went to the lieutenant j.g. working on the squadron’s greenie board. Every ready room had one, a large chart with the names of all of the aviators in the squadron, and squares colored in with magic markers where his performance for the past month was recorded. A green square meant the LSO had graded his trap as “OK,” the highest praise possible for an excellent pass or for timely corrections of minor deviations.
Yellow was for “fair.” No color meant “no grade,” meaning the trap had been dangerous to people and planes on the deck. Red with a C stood for “Cut,” a landing so unsafe it could have resulted in disaster. The squares were divided into two or three sections for multiple passes, with a “B” signifying a bolter, or missed trap, and a “W” a wave-off. A small black triangle up in one corner meant the trap had been made at night.
The VF-95 Vipers were a good squadron, green and yellow marks predominating, with a few white patches and no reds. Their overall record was not as good as that of either VFA-161 or VFA-173. The intense competitions between squadrons — recorded on a huge greenie board for the entire Air Wing in a passageway outside Pri-Fly — were nearly always taken by those squadrons, for the nimble F/A-18 Hornet was a lot easier to plant neatly on the number-three arrestor wire than the massive Tomcat.
But the Vipers were good, and Tombstone was fiercely proud to be one of them.
It would hurt to leave them.
He reached into the breast pocket of his khakis, pulled out the last letter from Pamela, and began rereading it.
You’d think a TV news anchor would know everything that’s going on, she’d written. It seems like I’m hearing just enough to know how hairy things are getting over there. Everything coming into the network here points to a major war breaking out between Pakistan and India before the end of the month.
She’d certainly guessed right about that. Tombstone looked up, his eyes going to the PLAT monitor. An A-6 Intruder was descending toward the roof. He watched it touch steel, seeming to flatten itself to the deck, then rebounding slightly, nose down as the arrestor wire dragged it to a halt. Good trap.
He looked back at the letter, his eyes shifting down the page to what she’d written later on. I worry so about you, my darling Matt. Maybe this isn’t the best time to bring it up, but I have to admit that I’ve been thinking about us, about our future, an awful lot in the past weeks. Have you thought much about what our life together will be like?
ACN will be sending me out on special assignments every so often, and I’ll be tied down in Washington the rest of the time. And you?
Assignments at naval air stations all over the country, interspersed with nine-month deployments at sea.
We’ve talked about getting married quite a lot during our last few letters. I love you, Matt, but I think the time has come to take a hard and decidedly unromantic look at our careers and our futures.
Leave it to Pamela to be practical about all this, Tombstone thought. He turned the page to a smudged and oft-read paragraph just before the end.
You wouldn’t have to give up flying. A friend of mine at the FAA told me the other day that the airlines are crying for experienced pilots, and that Navy aviators are prime candidates. Scheduling our time together might still be a problem, but at least we would have schedules, and not be apart for so long at a time.
I love you more now than when I was with you last in Bangkok. I want to marry you. But we have to face reality. As long as you stay in the Navy, I don’t see how we can have much of a life together.
“About time for the show, sir.”
Startled, Tombstone looked up and found himself staring into the pudgy features of Master Chief Julius Fleming, the Avionics Technician assigned to the squadron. “Oh, right.” Hastily he stuffed Pamela’s letter back into his flight suit, then glanced around at the other men in the squadron taking their seats. “Put it on, Chief.”