“Roger, sir.” The surliness was gone from the helicopter’s voice. “Wilco.”
“Fine. Advise us of your LZ coordinates. Guard this circuit — you’ll know soon enough when we’ll want you airborne again. And stand by for additional tasking. I may want you to disembark your current stick and be available for SAR in the area.”
“Aye-aye, Admiral. We’ll guard this circuit and military air distress.”
“Roger. Out.”
Silence on the circuit again. Finally, the pilot said over ICS, “Everybody copy that?” A chorus of yes answers followed. “Good. I’ve got a local map, but I need some intell. Any input would be welcome, especially from you locals. And you, Miss Drake. Not that you’d need any encouragement.”
“Now that you mention it,” Pamela said, “I know where we could go. Refuel, too.”
“Fuel is good. You’re talking about the Macedonians, I take it?”
Pamela nodded, then realized he couldn’t see the gesture. Listening too long on the circuit had given her the feeling of being inside the middle of the battle, as though she were sitting right between the pilot and the copilot. “Yes. They’ll be monitoring military air distress, right?”
“Should be. They’ve got assets airborne, they’re going to be listening.”
“So we call them on MAD, make the arrangements.”
“You think they’ll go for it? Might be that the last they heard, the Americans were shooting at them.”
“I’m not going back to that camp,” Murphy said. “No way. I went to enough trouble just getting out of it.”
Pamela turned to him. “That was then, this is now. It’s the only place we can land, refuel, and be available for other SAR missions.”
“I say again for possible penetration,” Murphy said sarcastically. “You do realize that we’re talking about the same people that had me trussed up like a pig a few hours back?”
“Get it through your thick Marine head,” she snapped, losing all patience with him. “They’re not the enemy. You got it?”
Murphy nodded. “Oh, I’ve got it. I’m just wondering if they do.”
“You’re going where?” Batman roared. “I told you to hole up somewhere, not defect.”
“Sir, what Miss Drake says makes sense,” the helo pilot answered. “We owe the Greeks bad for what they’ve done. And if the Macedonians aren’t our allies, at least they’re the next best thing — the enemy of an enemy.”
“So you’re assuming the enemy of an enemy is a friend,” Batman answered.
“Beats the alternative. I’m losing hydraulic pressure every minute, sir. If I set this bird down somewhere, there’s every chance I can’t get her back up. Then you’ve got a SAR mission on a SAR crew and pax, and I have to tell you, I’d feel pretty foolish about that.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“It would for me.”
“That’s it,” Pamela said over ICS only, “keep him talking. He’ll calm down. Tell him I’ll blast his name over every hourly broadcast if he doesn’t.”
“Thank you, Miss Drake. Appreciate the advice, but I believe I can probably deal with Admiral Wayne on my own terms,” the pilot said.
“Fine.” Pamela slumped down against the hard cushion of the pax seat. Just like the military — you offer your help and they shit on you. After all she’d tried to do for them… after Tombstone… after…
They don’t have a lot of reason to trust you, do they? One small part of her mind interjected. Cuba, the Black Sea, Vietnam… there’ve been enough times.
That was then, she argued, infuriated. Bad enough that she had to deal with the military without having to confront her own transgressions once again.
Batman knows you.
He knows who I used to be. Back before… before I understood.
Ah, a reformed woman. Changed your ways, have you?
They didn’t need changing. I’ve always been on their side.
And were you before?
Not always, she admitted reluctantly. At least, although she’d always thought of herself as a patriotic American, perhaps a jaded, cynical — call it realistic — one, but an American nonetheless.
But on the ground, watching the reality of combat, challenged by Xerxes to reexamine her own choices and beliefs, she’d come to a new understanding of what it meant to be an American.
And what we’re required to do because of who we are. Tombstone’s starting to make more sense to you than he ever did before, isn’t he?
In that second, she understood what she’d never fully grasped before. No matter that she could recite the intricacies of foreign conflicts and the history that predated them, pronounce the names of every foreign leader and his coterie, identify the most obscure geographic regions on a map — she’d been ignorant. Even after years as a war correspondent, even after all the awards, the hoopla, the public recognition, she’d never really crawled inside the military mind. Known what it was to go out on a mission with the probability that you’d never return. Known what it was to plan those missions, knowing you were condemning the crews and ground forces almost as surely as if you’d put a gun to their heads yourself. But you sent them out anyway and learned to live with the results. Because not so long before, your superiors had faced the same hard choices, made the same agonizing decision. And in a way, executing the mission was sometimes easier than ordering others to.
“Yes, Admiral,” the pilot said, and Pamela realized she hadn’t been paying attention. “We’ll try it right now. Out. Miss Drake, were you listening?”
“Not closely — could you fill me in?” Pamela heard a new trace of humility in her voice, one she wasn’t entirely sure that she liked.
“Sure thing. Admiral wants me to try to put you in contact with the Macedonians. Tell them he’s going to come up on a frequency — hold on, I’ll write it down for you — and wants to talk. Tell them that the U.S. is withdrawing its forces from support of any Greek aggression, and that we’re standing by to enforce the no-fly zone. Against both sides. We’re going to want some time to clear this whole thing with Washington. Basically, it’s stop the problem, stop the clock. Just like in a trainer. You got that?”
“I got it. Tell me when we go to live feed. That is, when the circuit’s on. Whatever you call it.”
She heard a quiet chuckle over the ICS. “Roger. Standby—now.”
Pamela took a deep breath, and started perhaps the most important broadcast of her life with the words she’d used on so many other occasions. “Good afternoon. This is Pamela Drake, ACN correspondent, speaking to you live from…”
Batman listened to Pamela’s words echoing on the speaker. His eyes sought out Lab Rat, who was leaning against the far bulkhead with his eyes shut. Anyone who didn’t know him might have thought that he wasn’t paying attention, but Batman knew what he was doing. Lab Rat was filtering out all the distractions, focusing the entire power of his intellect on the words coming over the speaker. It was this capability for concentration, this ability to bring single-minded intensity to bear on a particular problem that made him so valuable as an intelligence officer.
And would have been deadly in an aircraft, Batman thought. As powerful as Lab Rat was as an intelligence officer, he thought that the other man might have lacked the ability to maintain his scan, to avoid being fixated on any one aspect of the problem while maintaining the overall picture and executing the mission. In the air, too much concentration was almost as deadly as too little.