Night Trap - Gordon Kent

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though most barrier survivors are scrap from the moment the net is pulled off.

      The LSO had sweated through the calls and brought this bird home. Now, he drawled to the waiting ship:

      “Beautiful landing, American flyboy. Welcome aboard USS Franklin D. Roosevelt—your home away from home.”

      It was the first hint Alan had that they were on the wrong boat.

      He understood perfectly when Rafe’s shaking voice whispered over the intercom, “Nobody say a fucking word to me. Not a fucking word!”

      Alan was not feeling too well himself. The coolness of moments before had vanished, leaving, not airsickness, but real nausea. He had been wrong: Death had been waiting on the boat, grinning at Christine as she roared by, throwing sparks like a welder’s torch. Catch you next time, Death had signaled. Or the time after. Or sometime.

      Reality check.

      Alan breathed in the stinking air and tried to focus on something else. The wrong boat. That meant—his father’s boat. He had just landed on his father’s carrier. That brought him to. He felt the old reaction—welcomed it as relief from the aftershock of the close call—the old shortness of breath and slight dread. Perhaps it was simply expecting too much of every meeting, or perhaps it was fearing that too much was expected of him. Always, always when he was preparing to meet his father in all those years they had lived apart, there had been this reaction.

      So he sat in the net-wrapped plane, numbly watching figures in red and orange as they hustled to clear the flight deck for incoming CAP craft, scuttling around Christine like ants servicing the queen.

      He loved his father. He feared his father. Where was the balance between those things?

      And Alan Craik, thinking only of himself and his father, did not guess, could not guess, that a man who would change his life was out there among the hurrying red jerseys.

       3

      0719 Zulu. Brussels.

      In a stall of a men’s room in the Brussels airport, the small man stood over the toilet, a cigarette lighter in one hand and the white card in the other. Most days of his adult life, he had gone through this little ceremony, burning the day’s notes to himself, a secret act of defiance and a terrible act of hubris—”wanting to be caught,” the psychologists (whom he despised) would have said. They would have been quite wrong. No part of him, physical or mental, wanted to be caught. The very idea made him smile.

      He looked down the list. Two minus signs. He was sorry to have lost them; he would have much preferred those signs to be pluses. The minus signs were like defeats. But they would not discourage him. Depression came more easily with fatigue; he knew himself that well. Still—He flicked the lighter and touched the flame to the corner of the card. As the flame spread toward his fingers he watched Bonner’s name and his question mark disappear, then dropped the burning paper to the water and flushed.

      He wished that the question surrounding Bonner could be so easily disposed of. Bonner, to his profound regret, was out of his reach just then.

      He pulled himself up and marched to a ticket counter and bought a seat on a flight to Naples.

      0723 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

      Alan stepped down to the flight deck and wavered, rubber-legged. He made himself cross toward the catwalk as if he felt cool and strong, not wanting anybody to see his weakness. Craw came behind him. Alan had already lost track of Rafe and Narc; when had they got out of the plane? He took his helmet off—the plain helmet of a beginner, without nickname or logo. You had to earn the boastful, joking graphics that aircrew lavished on their helmets. He had no idea what he would use, if he was ever allowed. He could imagine what Rafe would choose for him—a winged asshole?

      He was cold, but the fine, stinging spray of rain was a relief, the clean sea air a tonic after the aircraft. Moving at twenty knots, the carrier made a wind that seemed to blow him clean.

      He turned, looked past the senior chief at Christine. She was already being moved to an elevator, one wing folded, her tires blown. Irrationally, he felt at that moment an uncomplicated affection for her.

      Craw’s hand touched his shoulder. Alan jumped. “I appreciate what you did there, sir. Helping me.”

      “I-uh—hey. How’re your hands?”

      Craw held up palms shiny with burn ointment. “I got more grease on me than a slider.”

      And they both laughed. They laughed because it was funny just then, laughed because they had survived and were alive to see another fireball rise over the Atlantic.

      And Craw said, “You goin’ to do all right, sir.”

      They grinned at each other across the divide that separates officer from enlisted, despite age, experience, knowledge of life and death.

      “We gawt to clear outta here,” the senior chief said. “Aircraft incoming.”

      They walked together down the nonskid catwalk toward the ready room, the debrief, the awful meatballs that sailors call “sliders,” supposedly so greasy that one will slide the length of a table with a minimal shove; toward this floating world of maleness, this tangle of stresses, traditions, affections, hidden feelings; walked toward it in a momentary but perfect companionship. At the door to the light lock, they hesitated, and Alan opened the door because he thought Craw’s burned hands wouldn’t let him do it. They exchanged a look, and Craw was gone.

      Alan, the shock of the landing fading, realized that he had never felt so content.

      And ready to meet his father. Somewhere on board, probably tomorrow.

      He stepped through into the darkness of the light lock. The far door was just closing on Craw’s heels, the wedge of light folding to nothing. Alan, blind from the glare of the deck, was aware only of a bulk nearby before he was wrapped in an embrace.

      “Welcome aboard, kiddo.”

      “Dad.” He returned the embrace, glad of it, glad of the darkness that hid their embarrassment.

      “You okay?”

      “I’m fine.”

      “My SDO woke me up. How’d you like the net? Fun, huh?”

      They moved into the passage, Alan squinting at the brightness, chattering too fast. “I’ve got to do the debrief. You know, the new guy gets the dumb job? You look great, Dad. Yeah, what a ride—”

      “I’ll walk along.”

      His father was a commander, CO of an attack squadron of A-6s. He would be hard-pressed for sleep, but he had sacrificed it for these minutes in the dark hours of a morning to be with his son. He could not say so. He could only do it, make his being there stand in for any expression of emotion.

      They had last seen each other three weeks before at the O club. That had been different. This, Alan realized, was the first time in an operational environment. It was a little like the moments with Craw—looking across a divide with new eyes, getting something new back. Yet they chatted of trivia. Everything was hidden.

      Until, at the debrief door, his father grasped his shoulders. “Proud of you,” he said—and abruptly turned away.

      On the flight deck, silence marked the end of the twelve-cycle flight day. The glare was turned off, and only disembodied blue flashlights pierced the dark, darting about as if searching for something—as if, perhaps, they sensed the traitor whose existence was not yet known, like hounds looking for a scent. They moved in silence, only the wind generated by the Roosevelt’s twenty-plus knots sounding where earlier jet engines had shattered the night.

      Thirty-six inches below the

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