Eventually the marshalling truck led the US Navy aircraft toward a track of temporary roadway panels to the open rear of a camouflaged netting hangar that faced back towards the runway.
Nikki Pelham shut down the engines prior to reaching the threshold before the ‘hangars’ interior, coasting inside and braking to a halt between blast walls created by old shipping containers filled with earth.
Filtered torchlight was the only illumination to assist her down from the cockpit, and she stretched and groaned at almost eight thousand miles worth of stiffness in her back and joints.
“So where’s the welcoming committee of hunky Aussie surfers?”
Nikki turned to smile at her RIO.
Lt (jg) Candice LaRue hailed from Alabama and this was her first time outside the States, having only graduated as a Radar Intercept Officer four days earlier.
Nikki and Candice had been paired off at Nellis AFB where the Boneyard airframes were being delivered following refurbishment and upgrades to weapons, navigation and avionics systems. The parking ramps at Nellis had been crammed with early model F-14, 15 and 16s, rubbing wingtips with dozens of previously retired A-10 Thunderbolts, A-6 Intruders, AV-8B Harriers and venerable B-17s, the ‘Buffs’, known affectionately to the crews as the Big Ugly Fuckers.
Here at RAAF Pearce, some nine thousand five hundred miles from Nellis, a dark shape with an Australian accent bid them collect their gear and step aside as other dark shapes with American accents closed in on their aircraft and began the business of preparing it for flight once more. The external fuel tanks were removed, leaving the aircraft ‘clean’ until the armourers arrived but the internal fuel tanks were refilled.
All they had carried had been three hundred rounds of 20mm cannon ammunition for their rotary barrelled Vulcan.
Being curious, they had a little wander around and found a bunch of other USN F-14s, which had already been armed up. None of those aircraft were Ds; four were model Bs, including Nikki’s, whilst the remainder were even older ‘A’ models with Pratt & Whitney turbo fans that produced less thrust than their own General Electric power plants. Beyond the F-14s they found the first Australian airframes, in the form of an RAAF Hawk with war shots on its hardpoint’s, and a pair of venerable Aussie F111C bombers that were fully bombed up for anti-shipping strikes.
The F111Cs were forty or so years old but upgraded and certainly not looking their years. Australia had supposedly phased them out and replaced them with F/A-18s, but this pair certainly had somehow avoided being buried ignominiously in landfill sites with the rest of Australia’s F111 fleet.
“Wow, ‘Varks…I thought these were all scrapped?” said Nikki.
A voice from the shadows made them jump.
“A consortium wanted them for air displays; one to fly and one for spares…but the end user certificates were a problem so we kept them mothballed while they sort it out in the courts.”
Beneath the port wing they made out two shapes on camp beds. One was snoring softly whilst the other arose.
“Gerry Rich.” He said, and right on queue the runway flights came on, illuminating rugged and tanned features along with a broad, raffish smile.
“Flight Lieutenant Gerry Rich, and twenty five percent of the newly reformed 15 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force at your service…oh, and we call them ‘Pigs’, not Aardvarks’.” He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the snoring form. “That’s Macca, he’s me ‘Wizzo’, and he’s from over your way originally.”
“Oh really, where’s that then?” asked Nikki.
“Alberta.”
“That’s Canada, not the USA.” laughed Candice.
“Can you drive to the US from Alberta in a single day and without getting yer feet wet?” he queried.
“Sure, but…”
“Around here we’d class that as being next door neighbours.”
Candice laughed in a way that told Nikki she was batting her eyelids furiously.
“Does that Mick Dundee style ever get you anywhere?” Nikki asked.
He smiled at Candice but he positively beamed at her pilot.
“Shaving with a Bowie knife right about now would have been hazardous.”
Behind them a squeal of tyres and the roar of four Allison turboprops changing pitch to reverse signalled the flare path dimming to barely visible and then extinguishing as the Hercules finished its roll out.
“Lieutenant Commander Pelham, VFA 154, USS Nimitz.” Nikki said by way of introduction, very formally and not leaving an opening for him to be otherwise.
“Lieutenant Candice La Rue, but you can call me Candy if you want.” another voice wishfully added.
“Have you got a first name to go with that, Lieutenant Commander?”
“She’ll tell you that it’s Ma’am, but she’ll answer to Nikki.” said Candice.
The taxiing aircraft, a Royal New Zealand Air Force C130 drowned out what Nikki said to her RIO as it past and she firmly steered her away by the arm and back toward their Tomcat.
“You got to admit he’s cute?”
“Nah.” Said Nikki “Too much twisted steel and sex appeal.” But she looked back anyway.
When the ground crew were done they all crowded into the back of a truck for the journey to the base cookhouse, and this was open for business 24/7 according to the ground crews.
Australian steak and eggs tastes pretty much the same as American steak and eggs but the fries were called ‘chips’, not that it mattered as neither aviator had eaten since somewhere over the mid Pacific and then the sandwiches had been curling up at the edges in the hot sun that shone through the Perspex.
It wasn’t until the plates were empty that Nikki found her eyes drooping.
There were no comfortable barracks for the two tired aviators, and they were shown through a side door and along a short pathway to a small building, guided through the darkness by an armed RAAF corporal with a small torch. They were the only female crew there and as such shared a room which held nothing more than two canvas camp beds, plus pillows and blankets.
“Keep your flight gear handy, if you hear a siren it’s an air raid warning and also the order to scramble…reveille is at 0600 and breakfast is at 0630 at the building two down from here. The Dunny’s at the end of the hall…g’night.”
Once the door had been closed they had looked at one another and shrugged. Candice rolled into the blankets upon one of the camp beds and fell asleep almost immediately, but Nikki lay staring at the ceiling for a while.
When Nikki had arrived at Nellis she had been feeling pretty low, and not without cause. A weeks’ worth of tears and utter disbelief at losing her family in such a shocking manner was not nearly enough time to mourn and come to terms with it.
She had other commitments too and these kept her from wallowing in self-pity at the bottom of a bottle.
Arlington National Cemetery was too close to the Washington fall-out zone and had been closed until some future intensive clean up could be undertaken, so Chubby’s funeral had taken place at his hometown near Detroit.
Someone had tipped off the press that she would be present, so she had spared his family, and herself, the embarrassment by telling the cab driver to continue on past the cemetery and the assembled circus outside. She had telephoned her apologies to Chubby’s parents from the airport before catching a flight to her own hometown where she had avoided the media by laying a wreath on her father’s grave at night. There was not, as yet, any final resting place for her mother or younger brother whose bodies had yet to be recovered and identified.
The navy public relations department would dearly have loved to have paraded Nikki to the media as the female warrior who had downed four confirmed enemy aircraft and survived the destruction of the John F Kennedy battle group, but the circumstances surrounding the death of her father had made that impossible, even had she been willing.