LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

“I coach my daughter’s soccer team. All girls. They taught me a lot about aviators. I began to see aviators completely differently once I learned to look at them as a girls’ soccer team.”

      Alan thought he was supposed to laugh, did, felt like a traitor to his mates, and said, “Girls?”

      “Yeah. Think about it. Lots of nervous laughter. Very cliquey. Full of insecurity. Always clustering around the most popular girl—that is, the guy with the most clout with the skipper, or the best landing grades. Love gossip. Get in corners and giggle together. Share secrets a lot—snicker, snicker. Try it. It might make you worry less about being an 10.”

      He was, Alan thought, a disappointed man who had found a little fantasy to cover his own failure. Granted, being a Jewish 10 would be even harder than being Alan Craik; and he guessed that Peretz came across to flyers as a weird nerd, to boot. Still, the idea of his squadron as a cabal of prepubescent girls had its appeal. He changed the subject by saying, “How do I get back to my ship?”

      “You don’t. Not till we hit the first liberty port. They’re cutting orders for you to stay here with me until then.” He saw Alan’s stricken face. “This is important! You’re going to do a lieutenant’s job—learn the joint-ops template and brief it on your boat. You brief the squadron commanders, air wing, ship’s captain, the works. I would have had to pull somebody over here from your boat, otherwise.”

      Alan thought of the flying hours missed. That, he realized, was precisely what Peretz had so gently read him out for—thinking more of the flying than his real job.

      “Sounds good.” Did he mean that?

      He found his father in his squadron’s ready room. His father grabbed him, held on to his arm to keep him from escaping while he explained something to two other officers. They moved into the passage, and then his father continued to carry on brief exchanges with passing men while he talked to Alan. His father seemed to know everybody, so that every few words he was interrupting himself with, “Hey, Jack,” “George, how’re they hanging this morning?” “Smoker, good to see you—” His eyes flicked constantly away from Alan, up and down the passage, as if he were a politician looking for constituents. Perhaps he was; being a squadron commander has its political side.

      “So,” he said, “you get some sleep? Hiya, Gomer.”

      “I was wiped.”

      “Bill. I hear you’re going to be here a few days. Kincaid, I want a report on Florio’s mother—if it’s cancer, give him compassionate. Yeah, today. You meet B ernie Peretz?”

      “Yeah, I—”

      “Hey, Deek, stand by, man, I need to talk to you. What’ja think?”

      “I liked him.”

      “You did. Hey, Mac. Yeah, Bernie’s an okay guy. Uh—he’s getting out, you know.” His father said that in a faint tone of warning, meaning—what? That he shouldn’t take Peretz too seriously? Shouldn’t use him as a model?

      “Why’s he getting out?”

      “Passed over for commander. Phil, you guys stank yesterday. This isn’t the Mongolian Navy we ‘re running here. We care, get me? He didn’t make the cut. Bernie’s okay, but—he likes to stay home with the kids and the dog. He’s good at what he does, though—learn what you can from him. Word to the wise: do good on this one, it’s all money in the bank. You do these briefings, your name gets around—it’s all part of the profession.”

      “You always used to tell me that doing my best was all that mattered.”

      Why had he said that? Already, he had put that prickly hedge between them. Let him say whatever he wants, an inner voice cautioned. But too late.

      “Doing your best and having other people know it. You gotta be practical, kiddo. Something you’re not very good at—they don’t teach it in the ivory tower, right?”

      Don’t rise to it, the inner voice said. This is as hard for him as for you. It was the old opposition. Style. Culture.

      His father said, “Anyway, we’ll have a look at Naples together, okay?”

      “Palma.”

      “Your boat’s going to Palma; we’re making liberty at Naples. You’re on this boat, kid.”

      “Oh, God! Dad, Kim’s meeting me at Palma!”

      “Kim? The redhead with the big gazumbahs I met at Shakey’s with you?”

      And he lost it. “Goddamit, Dad—!”

      “Oh, sorry—I meant to say, ‘the young lady with the enormous intellect.’ Snake—Jackson, hey—”

      He yanked his arm away. “Dad, Kim and I are practically engaged!”

      His father gave him a strange look. His eyes stopped flicking up and down the passage. He took plenty of time, perhaps thinking of something and then deciding to say something else. “Like father, like son, huh?”

      “You said it; I didn’t.” His father’s record with women was abysmal: he had been married twice, both failures, the first to Alan’s mother, the second to a fleshy woman named Thelma who had had huge breasts and the brain of an ant, although she had been smart enough to get out after eight months. Alan almost said, When I get married, I mean to stay that way, but he bit the words off. Instead, forcing himself to be calmer, he said, “You’re talking about somebody you don’t know anything about,” and his cheeks flamed.

      His father made a face. “Sorry, she looked like Son of Thelma to me. Give me her address, I’ll get a message to her you’ll be in Naples.” Again, he looked at Alan strangely. “I think there’s a lot I don’t know about you all of a sudden.”

      1311 Zulu. Langley, Virginia.

      George Shreed heaved himself off his metal canes and into his chair, propping the canes against the desk, supported on a decorative turning that was faintly worn from years of such use. His shock of gray hair stood up on his head, rather startling, almost as if he had had it styled that way, looking not unlike the Nobel winner Samuel Beckett. He lit a cigarette and turned to the morning book—pages of already digested and analyzed intelligence, winnowed, prioritized, emphasized, and most of it crap, he thought. He flipped pages. One item caught his eye; unthinkingly, he put a little tick next to it. Moscow. Massacre in office building. At least thirty dead in military-style attack. Probable organized cime but target not clear. Spetsnaz-style execution of aged security guard. Unconfirmed dummy company. He looked back a page, then ahead, jumped to the Russian and area forecast section and again did not find what he wanted. “Sally!” he said harshly, pressing down a button. “We had a Not Seen on Yuri Efremov a couple days ago, Moscow. Get some details.” He returned to his briefing book.

      1323 Zulu. Moscow.

      The stink of fire and chemicals lay in the damp air even after the fire was out. A police detective, hands plunged into the pockets of his cheap ski jacket, stared gloomily at the building’s doorway as another body bag came down.

      “Thirty-one,” the cop next to him said.

      “How do you know it’s thirty-one? You’ve put the pieces together, have you?”

      “Thirty-one bags.”

      “Imbecile.” He crossed the wet street and pushed through the firemen. As an investigation, this was going to be a joke. What the firemen hadn’t bitched up, the bomb squad had. They’d be a week just working out how many dead they had.

      “Hey, sir, that’s where they found the old man.” A plainclothes cop he knew pointed toward the floor near the far wall. “Back of the head, close range—typical stuff.”

      Typical,

Скачать книгу