LITMIR.BIZ

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He longed to go back to CVIC and drop just a hint, to see the envy of the other IOs, that he was going on a real mission. Cheap thrill, he thought—but he almost did it anyway, saved from doing something tacky and small-minded and altogether satisfying because there just wasn’t time. Instead, he bolted for his stateroom and started to twist himself into his flight suit.

      His roommate looked up from a magazine, said with total conviction, “Lucky fuckin’ prick!”

      He already knew.

      Surfer was a seasoned flyer, had taken him as a roommate instead of another pilot so as to teach him some substratum of ethics or manners that wasn’t in the books.

      “I wish it was you.”

      “Like hell.” Surfer rolled the magazine in his hands. “Skipper asked me, I told him he goddam better let you go.” He gestured with the magazine. “You deserve it.”

      “We’ll probably go down on deck.”

      “You’ll probably be the first Spy in history with a fuckin’ Air Medal you mean.” Surfer nodded with sad conviction. “Get the fuck out of here.”

      Alan finally got his left foot into his boot and grabbed his helmet bag from his rack. “Don’t wait up, dear.” Surfer gave him the finger as he closed the hatch.

      Mick Craik went over the details of his mission for the hundredth time while two para-riggers moved around him, squires to a knight in green armour. One part of his brain—the part that was squadron skipper—noted that Tiernan, the problem child of the rigger shop, was suddenly conscientious about his duties, made a mental note that maybe what Tiernan needed was more responsibility, not less. Another part of his mind—the NavAv part—noted that his helmet had finally been retaped; his personal coat of arms, a fluorescent orange net catching a burning plane, glowed from the LPO’s desk in the corner. The seasoned pilot in him noted that his young bombardier-navigator was having a more difficult time than usual getting his gear on. Kid was nervous.

      Hell, he was nervous himself, and he was one of three people on this strike who had actually done it before. The difference was, he thought, that the boy was probably worried about intangibles: bravery, cowardice, the unknown. Craik was nervous because he didn’t like the plan: not enough gas in the air, some of it too far forward; too much contempt for the Iranians, not enough worry about blue on blues over the target.

      But that wasn’t really it. What he really didn’t like was that the targets had been set in Washington. He was leader for the whole strike, but he was an arrowhead on an arrow launched by politicians. He liked a different plan, his own plan, with a different target picked out here by the people on the spot: bomb the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbas. No chance of error, and a very direct message.

      He patted the BN on the shoulder, gave him a reassuring smile. “Piece of cake,” he said.

      Miles away, his son ran down the main portside passageway toward the aviators’ wardroom, the eatery known locally as the Dirty Shirt. His nose told him that chocolate-chip cookies had just been baked, and he meant to get some for his crew and fill his thermos with coffee. Rafe called him “the stewardess,” but there was no barb to it; in fact, Alan believed that it was one of the things that the Spy did that made his crew think he might be a regular guy after all. He scooped twenty or so out of the cookie bucket with a practiced hand, ignored the mutters and shouts of the onlookers, and dumped them into his helmet bag. He filled his thermos (L.L. Bean, stainless, one of the few gifts from his mother that was right on target, considered so valuable by the crew that it had never been part of a practical joke) and bolted back down the passageway. He left behind a circle of indignant Tomcat RIOs, equally upset that he was flying while they sat on their asses and that he had taken two dozen cookies.

      Can’t take a joke, fuck ’em, as Rafe liked to say.

      2120 Zulu. The Iranian Coast.

      It was dark along the Iranian coast. The noncom they called Franci was not a very willing soldier, but he was an able one. In fact, he made the decisions at his SAM battery, although the orders were given by an officer who had less real knowledge but a more reliable history.

      Now, Franci was chewing his moustache and smoking. They had been ordered up to full alert every night for two weeks—missiles on the rails, radar warm and ready. The imams apparently believed the American demons were coming. Franci supposed they were—he had lived in America, knew the almost casual belief in exercising power. The reverence for the gunslinger, he thought.

      So he sat in the command trailer and waited.

      The box had arrived five nights before. It had been bolted on the main radar dish. The zealot who had brought it had said that it would see the infidels as they crossed into Iranian air space. This was a story for children, in Franci’s view; six years at the University of Buffalo, from which he had been forced home by threats to his family, convinced him that the box must somehow turn the dish into a (probably inefficient) passive detector. The zealot had sworn that when the blue-green light went on in the command van, the Americans would be coming.

      And so they would be, Franci mused.

      He had also seen the Revolutionary Guards bring in a missile launcher of their own, now standing well clear of the SAM battery. As usual, it looked like industrial scrap held together with string. The RGs loved toys, he thought—no, “Correction,” as his American friends used to say, all Iranians loved toys—look at the outboard boats mounted with machine guns, the taxi-mounted rocket launchers. Gadgets for a preindustrial theocracy.

      The missile, when he had been allowed to glance at it uncovered, had looked to him like an ancient I-Hawk with the front end tarted up. The electrical engineer in him had cringed. It had looked like trouble to him. Big Trouble. Things meant to go bang were always big trouble for somebody unless they were properly designed and engineered.

      So he had approached his own officer about it, although coming at the matter circumspectly, after the fashion of a stray dog approaching a kindly voice—sideways and ready for a kick.

      “Ha, Rasi, and how is your wife?” he had said.

      “She is well, soldier of the servants of God. Soldier, I am not to be addressed by name by you with, ah, hmm, them here.” He had nodded toward the shrouded missile, as if it represented the Revolutionary Guards in all their power. And their narrow-mindedness.

      “Rasi, may your name be blessed,” Franci had said, not able entirely to suppress irony, “friend of all soldiers, I abase myself,” and he had started to kneel, causing the officer to wince and urge him to his feet. Enough was enough, obviously.

      However, they had got to the real subject. “These Revolutionary Guards,” Franci had said. He had nodded toward the missile. “The Hour is almost upon us, and their creation is, um, in the sun.”

      “What? Hour? What hour?”

      Franci had got excited. He could deal with idiots only so long. “The Hour! Are you incapable? The Hour when our camouflage is supposed to be up! When everything must be covered! When—!” He had swallowed, flapped his arms up and down and slapped his sides. Then, more calmly, “When Tehran tell us we must be invisible to the eyes the Americans have put in the heavens to circle the earth.”

      “You go far beyond yourself to shout at me. This is not proper. I will note it. Somewhere.” The officer had pulled at his open collar as if he wished for a more formal, more dignified uniform. “The Guard take care of themselves. Maybe they have their own camouflage. We do not tell them what to do. They are the Guard!”

      Franci suspected they were shepherds who couldn’t read a word of the Koran, but he didn’t dare say so. Instead, he had said with the measured slowness of a man talking to a child, “They will give us away. They will give away the missile we are not supposed to see. They will get us all killed.”

      “It is the will of God.”

      Franci had sighed. He had

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