“How would that help?”
“Well, it would probably take every extra plane they’ve got, and it might not cause a whole lot of damage, but as sensitive as the air supply pipeline has to be right now, I’d say we’d draw a lot of their Frontal Aviation units away from the navy. That would also probably block them if they’d planned on an end run out of Oslo.”
“Hmph.” Magruder was still frowning. “Narrows the odds some, but not enough. I’ve got one and a half interceptor squadrons, two Hornet squadrons I can use as fighters or bombers but not both at the same time, and one squadron of Intruders that are bombers only. With that we have to make a dent in their attack force and still cover the Jeff.” Suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue, he looked away. “Hell, I don’t know the answer. I don’t think CAG could’ve covered all these bases.”
The damnable thing was that it was almost possible. If he was willing to take some risks, he could probably put together an attack that would have a shot at crippling the enemy amphib forces, but if he made one wrong step the results would make the loss of the Gridley look like a minor lapse in judgment. There were just too many variables … and Magruder wasn’t sure he could face the tough decisions that would have to be made.
If he attacked and failed, a lot of good pilots could follow Stramaglia and the others … and the Jeff herself could come under attack again. Thousands of American lives were potentially at risk.
And if he did nothing, it would be thousands of Norwegians who might die, and at the end of that road lay the ultimate victory of the Russian war in Scandinavia, with all the potential for future trouble that carried with it.
As a squadron commander, back in North Korea, Magruder had first been forced to face up to his responsibility for the life-and-death decisions that went with command. He could still remember the torment of losing Coyote when his plane went down in that first dogfight off of Wonsan. It was a lesson every leader of men learned sooner or later.
But time and rank didn’t make that lesson any less painful. As a squadron commander he’d been directly responsible for twenty or thirty lives at best, though often his own personal actions had reached far beyond that immediate circle. Now he was responsible for hundreds of lives directly, and the fate of many more could also be affected by his decisions.
“Look, Art,” he said at last. “We can’t do anything else for now. Why don’t you pack it in and get some sleep. We’ll get together and go over whatever OZ gets in later on. Okay?”
Lee looked at him with a worried expression. “You going to be all right, Commander?” he asked. “Seems like all this is hitting you pretty hard.”
“I know what I’m supposed to do, Art,” Magruder said slowly. “I just have to find out if I’ve still got the guts to do it or not. And it’s something I can only work out on my own.”
As Lee left, Magruder’s thoughts went back to North Korea. Back then issues of right and wrong, action or inaction, had all seemed so clear-cut. Now they didn’t seem so easy to resolve.
Yet that was exactly what he had to do.
Fatigue and numbing cold … gray skies and an angry gray sea … those were Coyote’s world. A part of him thought he was trapped in a dream, in the old familiar nightmare, but another part insisted that it was all too real.
The water had been icy, sucking the warmth right out of him as he struggled into the life raft and fought to control his panic. He needed a cool head to stay alive, a cool head and his survival training.
Coyote remembered cradling his RIO to him, seeing the striped helmet hanging at an impossible angle, knowing that the man was dead yet unwilling to accept it. But no … John-Boy had helped him into the raft out there in the rolling waters of the Atlantic, had helped him later when he couldn’t get his hands to work to attach the harness so that the SAR copter could hoist him aboard.
Two dreams, then … that was it. His RIO had died in the waters off North Korea, but John-Boy had lived through it to help him when he needed it. Through the fog of a half-dream other memories played against one another. The harness cutting into him as the SAR copter lifted him aboard … the mustard-colored uniforms of the Oriental soldiers dragging him onto the deck of the North Korean patrol craft … One dream blended with another until Coyote no longer knew which was which.
He remembered the prison camp, the brutal guards, the beating. They had finished with him and marched him into the yard outside, and there they had prepared him for execution. Julie … he’d held on to thoughts of Julie, and with her picture in his mind he’d accepted the idea of death, but when the guards pulled their triggers the only sound had been the snicking of bolts on empty chambers. A mock execution, designed to break him down …
Coyote came fully awake with a start, disoriented, confused, soaked with sweat. It took a long moment to get his bearings, to realize he was still in Sick Bay, safe after being fished out of the Atlantic following the ordeal of the battle with the overpowering Russian forces.
“Hey, Coyote, you okay?” John-Boy asked from the next bed, sitting up and looking concerned.
“Yeah … yeah, I’m okay,” Grant replied, knowing he sounded anything but convincing. “Just … a bad dream.”
He shuddered and turned over, unwilling to face John-Boy, but equally unwilling to go back to sleep. He had dreamed much the same dream every night for six months after the end of the Wonsan fighting. He’d spent a long time getting over Korea before finally driving himself to return to the carrier and face his fears, and in the skies over the Indian Ocean he’d proven that he still had the old edge. The dreams had come back from time to time, but over the months they had finally faded away.
Now he was dreaming again. When his Tomcat had finally given up the ghost he and John-Boy had punched out, close enough to the carrier to make a recovery fairly easy. Still, the same chill waters that had dragged Jolly Greene to his death after the crash on the flight deck had nearly claimed Coyote as well, and would have had it not been for John-Boy’s help. This time help had been close at hand, but the parallels with Korea were still vivid.
Someday his luck would run out. He would fly out on a mission and never make it back. Like Greene … or Baird … or Stramaglia.
In that camp in Korea Coyote had thought he’d made his peace with death. After the mock execution, he had truly believed that he was ready to die, and that had made it easier to endure everything that had followed. But he had been given a second life, one that included not just Julie but a new daughter and the chance to start with a clean slate.
Yet he’d come back to this life, and some day it would take him for its own. He would lose everything and the two people he cared about most would have to go on without him. He wasn’t just playing with his own life, but with theirs.
That thought hurt worst of all.
“Coyote?” He rolled over again. It was Tombstone, looking haggard and drawn with a uniform that looked like it had been slept in. “They say you check out fine, Coyote. You’ll be flying again in no time.”
“Yeah?” He couldn’t muster any enthusiasm.
Magruder took a step toward him and stopped. “Hey, look, man, I wish I’d been out there with you guys. Maybe if CAG had let me go up there things would’ve been different.”
“Sure,” Grant said. “You’d be dead and he’d be alive. Hell of a trade, huh?”
After their confrontation outside CAG’s office Coyote had cooled down enough to realize that Magruder hadn’t deliberately turned his back on him, but the gulf between them was still there. Even as tired as Tombstone plainly was, Coyote could see that same wistfulness in his friend’s eyes. Magruder wanted to recapture something in the past, something he’d lost … the same thing Coyote still had but would gladly have given up in exchange for the chance to live in peace with his family. That gap between the two men could only get wider the way things were going now.