Gomez continued, “The reports of an alliance between Iran and Afghanistan were only rumors. The Kurds are back at it, fighting both Iraq and Iran.” He sped over the rest of the world, ending on the Soviet Bloc. He called up the Warsaw Pact’s OB by type, strength, and location. “No major changes other than the normal seasonal ones. Just that glitch about the Fourth Regiment Floggers. Any questions?” Gomez asked.
“Thank you, Colonel Gomez, no questions,” he replied, stiff as a board.
“See you next time around,” Gomez said, rising from the captain’s chair and disappearing down the stairs onto the main floor.
Blevins leaned over the main console, peering at the situation boards. He noticed that Gomez was still on the main floor talking to Captain Sara Marshall. They were engaged in an intense conversation and Blevins hoped that the colonel was reprimanding her for the length of her skirt, which was always shorter than the regulations allowed, revealing her shapely legs. Blevins wished he could make the junior officers see the relationship between meeting the Air Force’s regulations on dress and appearance and doing the job right. Too often, he’d seen shoddy job performances and sloppy appearances go hand in hand. If her sudden laughter meant anything, Gomez was not talking hemlines.
Frustrated, he turned his attention to the boards and called up NATO’s Order of Battle, placing it opposite the Warsaw Pact’s. Nothing had changed since his last shift. Although the display was exactly as he expected, he still found it frightening. He doubted that any politician could survive an election if the American public could see and understand those numbers the way he did. Blevins was echoing an article of faith held by the generals on the Watch Center’s battle staff.
The state of depression that had curdled the colonel’s existence returned to dominate his thoughts.
Something had to happen if he was to shine.
He clicked over possible scenarios in his mind, and what he would do in each.
If something didn’t happen soon, he would never make general.
“What I need is a ghost writer for these damn things,” Fairly muttered, disgusted with himself. Normally he would write an efficiency report in fifteen minutes. The squadron commander glared at the blank Officer Effectiveness Report (OER), AF Form 77, and willed the words to appear on the OER. Nothing happened. He carefully printed Jack’s full name in the appropriate space in neat block letters. No other words came to him.
He tried to find the right phrases by staring at Jack, then Thunder. Both were slumped in the two most comfortable chairs in the alert shack. Jack was thumbing through an old Playboy magazine while Thunder was reading a book on the Civil War. Fairly threw down his pencil. “Jack, let’s go into the kitchen. I need to talk to you.”
Jack immediately followed the older man into the small kitchen, pausing to shoot a glance at Thunder, who arched one of his bushy eyebrows in reply.
“I guess this is why the boss pulled alert,” Jack mumbled, calculating there was bad news waiting for him. He followed Fairly into the small kitchen and closed the door behind him.
“Sit down and relax, Jack. We need to talk about your career.” Relief flowed over Jack; he had been certain that Ambassador Pearson had sent down the word to crush him. The lieutenant colonel was going through the motions of doing annual career counseling of junior officers as the regulations required. Fairly was doing “square filling,” Jack decided.
“Jack, I’m worried about you. You’re one of the best pilots in the wing. But you’re all balls and no forehead once you crawl out of the cockpit. Get your act together. Try to remember that the Air Force wants you to act like a responsible officer on the ground. Because if you don’t… ”
“Excuse me, Colonel, with all due respect, isn’t our job, like they say, to ‘fly and fight’ and not worry about playing Mickey Mouse games on the ground?”
“Listen, you and I both know there’s no fighting in a peacetime Air Force. We’re trainers. Training to fight. That’s the glitch. You’ll probably never see combat in your entire career. Or if you do, you’ll be in a command position. You’ve got to learn to use good judgment and be responsible in all your actions. I’ve teamed you with the best WSO in the wing, maybe the Air Force. Thunder is going to make general because he is good, very good. And not because he is black. Right now he’s serving time as a technician, just like you. As soon as I can, I’m going to move him up to headquarters where he can get more experience in making decisions and get out of the cockpit.
“If there’s a war, he’ll be ready. But for now I’ve entrusted him to you. For some strange reason he likes flying with you and wants to stay in your pit. Now it’s your job to keep him alive and not drag him into trouble with you. That’s what leadership for a lieutenant is all about. Think about what I’ve said and what you want to do in this Air Force.”
Jack returned to the trailer’s lounge, shaking his head. He flopped back into the chair next to Thunder. “Career counseling, no biggy,” he muttered. Thunder visibly relaxed. Jack felt a rising itch of frustration as he recalled his commander’s words. He didn’t like the implications behind what Fairly had said. All he wanted to do was to fly fighters and avoid all the rest of the Mickey Mouse that Fairly was telling him was so important. To him, the Air Force started and ended in the cockpit, and he was not merely a “technician” his job was what the Air Force was all about. And he didn’t like the idea of losing Thunder as his backseater.
The reality of the Air Force was much different than he had imagined as a fourteen-year-old ninth grader in Phoenix, Arizona. He could always remember seeing jets from nearby Luke Air Force Base maneuver around the cloudless sky, catching his imagination and drawing him out of his everyday world. And then one day in the ninth grade he knew he was going to fly fighters. After that, everything he did had one purpose, to get an appointment to the Air Force Academy. He took all the science and math courses his high school had to offer and went out for sports every semester. An Air Force Academy liaison officer had told him making Eagle Scout would help him in the fiercely competitive selective process and he had dutifully worked on getting the required twenty-one merit badges. He suffered a slight distraction when he discovered girls and sex. Had he been less attractive, a girl might have persuaded him that marriage was preferable to the celibacy offered by the Academy. However, he soon discovered that lack of female companionship would never be a problem.
What bothered him now was that the service was asking more from him than being the best fighter jock that ever strapped on a Phantom.
The flight deck of the C-130 Hercules was quiet. But with everything that had happened in the last three hours, Dave Belfort couldn’t find the rest he needed. The navigator was sitting in the copilot’s position jotting down notes in the small notebook he always carried in his navigator’s bag. He glanced at Toni D’Angelo, who was sleeping. Belfort was relieved that the co-pilot had been able to catnap for a few minutes. He looked at the crew bunk at the rear of the flight deck to check on Sid Luna’s condition. The loadmaster, Leonard McCray, was bent over the inert pilot, wearing his headset.
“How’s Sid doing?” he asked the master sergeant over the interphone.
“The bleeding is just oozing. He’s conscious,” McCray answered. The slight improvement in the pilot’s condition helped to buoy Belfort’s sagging spirits.