Nikki had declined the navy’s offer of extended leave, choosing instead to return to active duty where she reasoned she would be too busy to dwell on her loss; however any ideas she had harboured about an immediate re-assignment had proved overly optimistic.
For several days Nikki had found herself kicking her heels in the B.O.Q at Nellis. The trouble with Bachelor Officers Quarters when you were in transit through a base was that they were basically four walls and a ceiling, a motel room without the TV. She had been assigned an aircraft but lacked both a RIO and a carrier to fly it to.
For the most part she had kept to herself, and either the vibes her mood projected or the unjustified suspicion that others regarded her as a Jonah served to deter company. Either way, the USAF pilot’s, Marine and Navy aviators who also awaited assignments kept their distance from the newly promoted Lieutenant Commander who wore a face like a week’s worth of wet Mondays.
Two nights previously in the Officers Club, she had been sat on her own and trying to ignore the conversation going on nearby. A quartet of reservists were trying to out bemoan one another on the woes of being plucked from the cockpits of 747s and finding themselves back in uniform.
From the far side of the club had come derisive laughter and the chant of ‘bullshit’, which had pulled her away from her own brooding thoughts. With some annoyance she had at first turned to see what the commotion was about and then had been drawn toward the large knot of men and women who had gone quiet again as they listened to whomever was sat in their midst.
“I’m telling you straight, every time one of the bastards got on my tail they overshot when I put the anchors on, and I shot them in the arse.”
“Five bandits?” asked one of the onlookers.
“In the same fight?” another asked
“Och aye, one after the other. Bang, bang, wallop, wallop, wallop!”
Nikki had eased through the throng and seen Sandy sat at a table with a dozen brews in front of him and a vivacious Afro-American honey sat on his lap. Clad in skin-tight jeans, denim shirt and cowboy boots she was the only one in the room not in uniform and Nikki assumed the Fleet Air Arm pilot had smuggled her on to the base.
“Hey, Sandy.”
Sandy looked at her smirking at him and rolled his eyes, his face dropping.
“Hey, Nikki.”
Nikki addressed Sandy’s audience.
“I had the misfortune to be stuck in a life raft for several days with this guy, and I was ready to feed myself to the sharks rather than hear that line another time…only back then it was two Mig-31s, not five.”
The beers sat in front of Sandy were obviously war beers, tokens of appreciation for his service and warrior status, and their donors reclaimed them swiftly from a protesting Highlander.
“Och, come on now guys…the heat of battle and all that…”
Even the beer in his hand was snatched away
Sandy’s audience departed, leaving him crestfallen.
“Well thank you very much indeed Nikki, and after I shared the warmth of my Gaelic heart to keep you alive too!”
She bent to plant a peck on the top of his head.
“Your liver will thank me when you’re in your fifties, Sandy.” She took a now vacant seat at the table and they caught up on events since arriving at Pearl.
Sandy had discovered that the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm currently had over twenty pilots apiece waiting to fly their dwindling inventory of Sea Harriers. So, as he was still shown as attached to the US Pacific Fleet he had offered his services to the Navy and would be ferrying an AV-8B out to the USS Essex very early the next day, via a stopover in Hawaii.
“So are you a ferry pilot or something?”
“No Nikki, I’m joining one of your VMA Harrier squadrons. I’ll be showing US Navy aviators how the Fleet Air Arm does it.”
“VMA doesn’t mean Navy Scotty, they’re Marines.”
“Oh, grief!” Sandy groaned.
“It’ll do you good.” Nikki had said. “Spending all of your off duty hours running around, and around, and around the flight deck with a pack on your back.”
Sandy looked crestfallen.
“Sounds just like our marine pilots, wasting time by training to walk to war when they’ve got perfectly good aircraft to carry them there at a fraction of the effort.”
She hadn’t seen or spoken Sandy since the Hood had docked, so she was gratified to learn that he at least had been at Chubby’s funeral.
Very little was said about her late RIO, she had done all her crying aboard the Hood, and she had learnt that the Brits deal with the death of a colleague in combat in a very stoical fashion. There are no group hugs; no tears spilt into one’s beer, and in fact little outward displays of grief. They raise a glass to toast their fallen friends’ memory and that is all until the war is over, when the business of proper mourning begins.
Sandy’s friend had re-seated herself on a chair and listened quietly while they talked, merely nodding a ‘hi’ to Nikki when Sandy had introduced her as
“And this is Candy, she’s delicious.”
Not until Sandy had excused himself to visit the john had the girl really spoken.
“So you’re Triple ‘A’ then?”
Nikki had been unsure what the she was talking about, but if Sandy’s line shooting had included herself in his scoring then she was going to do some facial rearranging once he got back.
“Excuse me?”
“Lt Cmdr. Nikki Pelham, four kills…Almost an Ace.”
Much relieved, she had allowed a laugh to escape.
“So Lt Cmdr. you know Sandy pretty well, huh?”
“I guess as well as you can after sharing a life raft, a sub full of sailors and a three birth sailing boat occupied by six.”
“Okay, then at least that part of his story isn’t total BS, but did he really disarm and capture a Chinese aviator?”
Nikki laughed again.
“Sorry but no, the guy had already surrendered to an elderly English couple before they picked us up. There was absolutely no hand-to-hand combat involved. The guy was just a kid really, not much different from one of us.”
She saw Sandy emerged from the door leading to the head and decided to find out what relationship he had with this snake-hips-in-denim civilian before he returned.
“So, are you and Sandy, good friends?”
“We only hooked up this afternoon, but if I see you at breakfast I’ll let you know.” Candice had added a wink for emphasis, so on the premise that two’s company and three’s a crowd, Nikki had left them to it and retired for an early night.
The phone in her room had woken her just after she’d dropped off to sleep; informing her that she had a RIO, one Lt (jg) LaRue. C and they were to be in the briefing room at 1000hrs. This was to be her last night at Nellis AFB.
Sandy hadn’t been at breakfast in the mess hall, he had flown out at five a.m. Nikki went easy on the coffee and ate only toast and jelly, natural bodily functions were no respecters of long range flights and she loathed the pee tube. Having taken the edge off her appetite, she picked up her small canvas bag of belongings and headed out.
The shock of finding Candice, now in flight suit and sipping coffee, had caused Nikki to pause half way through the briefing room door, and check that she had in fact found the right room.
On seeing Nikki, Candice put the cup down and stood to deliver a smart salute.
“Ma’am, Lieutenant LaRue. I have been assigned as your Radar Intercept Officer, Ma’am.”