“Roger that,” replied Howe. Few people used his old nickname, but Jerome had flown with Howe early in his career; they’d even teamed up in a Strike Eagle squadron over Iraq.
Like many call signs, “Rock” had not initially been a compliment. It came from one of his early flight instructors, who’d described his maneuvers during a flight and what they had done to the plane’s flying characteristics. Inevitably, it stuck with his mates, but had gradually become something of an honorific.
The mission boss gave him his new course heading and altitude, duplicating the leg of the Cyclops test where the problem had occurred. Howe’s shoulder spasmed; he pushed his head around slowly, trying to relieve it, mad at his body for tensing up. He hit his marks perfectly, but the knot in his shoulder had grown to the size of a boulder, and his hands were wet and jittering.
He was nervous — beyond nervous. He was having trouble breathing right.
Howe had flown over two dozen combat missions, shot down two planes and had a hand in a third, and this had never happened to him. But those engagements had been so quick, almost literally bang-bang, that he hadn’t had time to think.
Now thinking was all he could do.
“Not a peep of a problem,” said Jerome. He sounded a little disappointed.
“Yeah, roger that.”
“All right, we want to go around again. Use the synthetic view hologram this time,” said Matt Firenze, one of the scientists in the control room. He was asking Howe to switch the HUD into the synthesized view so they could run an additional suite of tests.
Howe traded some data verbally with the ground people, duping what the sensors were telling them as he pulled the big aircraft back around. One of the women on the ground somehow reminded him of his ex-wife, Carmen, with her sharp rasp. He thought of her now, her pouty frown, her cigarette hanging out of her mouth in the hotel room they’d had their honeymoon down in New Orleans.
He hadn’t thought of Carmen in quite a while. She was a bona fide nutcase, manic-depressive with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders: She had the diagnosis from not one but two different shrinks, their agreement apparently some sort of milestone of psychoanalysis.
The relationship had quickly disintegrated into a cycle of wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and great sex — followed by weird accusations, wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and even better sex. Howe had stuck it out sixteen months, but the marriage lasted that long only because he’d been overseas for much of the time.
He started to laugh, remembering her another morning sitting at their tiny kitchen table, hungover, breasts falling out of a gauzy, see-through nightshirt, arranging her tarot cards while the coffee poured through the machine next to the sink. She was beautiful in moments like that, unconsciously beautiful.
Very different from Megan.
Howe’s hands were so wet with sweat he pulled off his flight gloves, even though he habitually wore them when he flew.
He’d miss them if he had to eject. Involuntarily, his eyes hunted the yellow handle near the seat.
His marriage hadn’t thrown him off women completely. Sexwise, he’d had his share. He was far from a stud. Some guys could just walk into a bar and they’d be knee-deep in women. Howe wasn’t like that; he’d never been like that. But he had seen women since Carmen — plenty of women — gone to bed with them, made love.
No one like Megan, though. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Her breasts a little small, if you were unbiased about it, as she herself used to say.
She talked about different things. She told him about a painting by Matisse; who the hell was Matisse? he’d wondered, and had to find out so he didn’t look like a total schmuck.
What card had Carmen used to tell his fortune? King of Swords?
“Telemetry is ready on our side,” said Firenze.
Howe had to punch a two-button combination on the right side of his instrument panel to change the HUD mode and initiate the test. He checked his speed and altitude first, gave the other flight instruments a quick read — went back over them more slowly, comprehending the numbers this time — and reached for the buttons.
The King of Swords wasn’t a good fit. Too airy, she said, too flighty. Fiery. Prone to crash.
Prone to crash.
Carmen’s eyes as she said that — accusing him of betrayal.
“I see a confused future,” she said.
“We’re ready for you, Colonel,” prompted the ground controller. Howe’s fingers still hovered over the buttons. His muscles had suddenly tightened to the point it hurt to move his fingers.
Jesus, what’s happening to me?he thought.I’m freaking.
He saw Megan’s body on the bed, then pushed the buttons.
Matt Firenze watched the numbers pop onto the second screen, raw assembler code blossoming before him. The functions were being translated in the first screen, and an array of monitors to his right were actually summarizing the data and its effect (or noneffect) on the aircraft. But Matt’s job was there on the twenty-one-inch cathode ray tube. Hexadecimals — the computer used a base-16 integer number system, corresponding to the physical registers — sloshed across the screen. Firenze had preprogrammed the computer to alert him to a difference from the expected sequence: The green numbers would turn red.
Green. Green. Green.
He kept staring.
Howe’s breath physically lifted the mask off his face. His arms and legs were moving — he was still flying the plane — but his head felt as if it were beneath a heavy blanket. His tongue sat dry at the bottom of his mouth.
This was the point where she’d gone out. She’d been flying to his left; it was his left, wasn’t it? If he looked in that direction now, if he dared it, would he see her vanishing into the clouds again?
Her perfume lingered in his head.
As he regained control he’d come up there — and the plane loomed right before him.
How was that possible?
Its engines were working. Definitely working.
He’d trade places if he could. Surely he’d trade with her; let her live.
Carmen held the card out. Death: the grim reaper in a boat.
“Not death — change,” she said. “Big change, but not death in a literal sense. Psychic change. Like love.”
“Looking very good down here,” said Firenze. “Can we run over it again? Just the way you did it originally, turning the HUD back to standard setting at the right point.”
“Roger that,” Howe told them. “Coming around for take two.”
Chapter 11
When he was six, Amma Jalil had seen his mother set on fire by a Muslim madman.
He had been playing at the other end of the dirt-strewn street in the small northern India town where he lived. He happened to look down the block as the man ran into the neighbor’s house where his mother was visiting. A second later something billowed from the window; at first it seemed to be an oversized red sheet inflated by the wind. As he stared, the edges of the sheet turned yellow and climbed upward along the roof.
A figure encircled by a red robe, ran from the house. By the time he realized it was a person, she was rolling on the street. Even before he started to run toward her, he knew it was his mother. She jerked upright, then fell back like a sack of rice collapsing.
In the twenty years since that day, Amma Jalil had run the thirty meters to his mother many times in his imagination. Never had he managed to arrive in time to hear her last words or receive her blessings.