Martina — no one knew her last name — was out front behind the bar as usual. She virtually came with the place, and she was most definitely in command here. Martina weighed more than 260 pounds and could have just as easily been the bouncer. Rumor had it that pilots paid off big bar tabs by sneaking Martina onboard their planes. She supposedly had over a hundred hours in the RF-4 Phantom, although it seemed impossible she could ever have squeezed herself into the seat.
“Hey, Rodeo,” she said, greeting Seaver as if she had just seen him the day before. She poured him a large glass of diet cola. Martina knew the flying schedule just as well as the crews did, and she always knew when a guy was within twelve hours of a sortie and would stop serving him alcohol. Woe to any flier who tried to argue with her.
Rinc was looking the place over, drinking in the welcome atmosphere. There was no air-conditioning, and it was stuffy and musty-smelling, but it still felt cozy, much like his dad’s old ham radio room in the basement of their house when he was a kid.
His eyes were drawn to the back of the bar and the “Snake Eyes” board. Fifty-three years of photos of dead members of Aces High were pinned up there — and yes, he saw they had added the pictures of his dead crewmates to the array. In fact, it was a crew photo, their Fairchild Trophy shot taken in front of their plane…
… with Rinc’s picture cut out of it.
He was frozen in place. It was logical that he be cut out of the picture — after all, he wasn’t dead — but they had left the pictures of the surviving crew members, and why his squadronmates had chosen that particular photo to use on the memorial wall made him uneasy. All the other pictures were individual shots, even in cases where multiple crew members had been lost. It was as if he were worse than dead — he was excluded, ousted. They had made a point of eliminating him, as if to remind him that he had survived an accident that he had no right to survive.
Rinc hadn’t yet selected a seat, but Martina made the choice for him by bringing his cola and a bowl of pretzels over to a booth. She picked the one farthest from the door to the back room. He looked at the closed door, then at Martina. Her expression answered all his questions: yes, some members of Aces High were back there; yes, the commander, Rebecca Furness, was there — and no, he wasn’t welcome.
“Don’t worry about it none, Rodeo,” she said in her raspy, cigarette-scratched voice. “Give ’em time. They’ll take you back.”
“Time is the one thing I don’t think I have, Marty,” Rinc said.
“You don’t worry about nuthin’ ’cept your check ride tomorrow,” she told him. She had the flying schedule pinned down as well as if she were on the operations distribution list. “You jes’ show ’em what you got. You ain’t a member of Aces High ’cause they let you in the back. You a member because you got what it takes.”
She noticed Rinc glancing over toward the Snake Eyes board again. “Fergit ‘bout dat too, Rodeo.” But she didn’t offer to take it down. She couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. The Snakes Eyes wall was like a shrine. However hurtful or even vindictive a posting, no one, not even Martina, could mess with it.
“Did that asshole Long Dong put that up there?”
“Long Dong’s sho’ enough an asshole. Don’t let him git under your skin none.” He noticed she didn’t actually answer him. “You listen good, boy,” she said, pointing a sausagelike finger at him. “You hold your head up like a man and don’t never be ashamed of anything anyone ever says about you — even if it’s a damned lie. You remember that.” And then she left him alone.
Rinc got out his flight manuals, charts, and target study notes and tried looking them over, but the words and pictures blurred before his eyes. He left all of it on the table — Martina would see to it that no one touched it — grabbed his glass, went outside, and climbed up the freshly painted wood steps that led to the roof. There he put on his sunglasses and sat down on a metal bench. The sky was ice-blue. The air was cold, but the sun felt warm. There were clouds piling up over Mount Rose to the west, and the Sierra Nevada mountaintops above eight thousand feet still wore a thin blanket of snow.
The winds were calm, so the tower was using the northbound runways. As he watched, two B-1B bombers pulled out of their parking spots and taxied to runway 34 left, a Reno Air Boeing 727 following them. It was easy to visualize the passengers straining to look out the windows as they taxied past the Air National Guard ramp and catching a glimpse of the sleek, deadly warplanes. At the end of the taxiway, the Bones turned right onto the “hammerhead,” a section of the taxiway with a high steel wall on the runway side, to make way for the commercial flight to pass. The warplanes were soon followed by the SOF, or supervisor of flying, an experienced pilot whose task was to do a “last chance inspection,” a drive around the B-1s to check that all streamers were removed and the planes were ready for takeoff.
The steel revetment wall in the hammerhead was supposedly there to protect commercial flights in case any weapons accidentally dropped on the runway and exploded. These days, almost all B-1 missions carried practice bombs, either small “beer can” bombs or concrete-filled bomb casings. But because it was only a replacement unit, Reno had no stockpiles of real weapons. All the weapons they might be called upon to use were stored at the weapons depot near Naval Air Station Fallon, and would be delivered to the base by rail. The steel wall was only window-dressing any-way — a two-thousand-pound Mark 84 would take out any aircraft and almost anything else above ground within a half mile of the blast.
A few minutes later, after the commercial flight had departed, the first Bone taxied into position and ran its engines up to full afterburner takeoff power. Watching a B-1B Lancer on its takeoff roll was just as thrilling to him now as it had been the first time he saw one more than ten years ago. The bomber looked huge on its long, spindly legs with its wings fully extended, but when the pilot pushed those throttles up to full afterburner, it leaped down the runway like a cheetah.
The noise was not too bad — loud, like the old Boeing 727 that had taken off just before it, but not irritating. But when the afterburners were plugged in, the sound was deafening, a low, piercing harmonic rumbling that you could feel in the middle of your chest from two miles away. Surprisingly, there were few noise complaints. When they took off to the north, the Bones flew within a half mile of the Reno Hilton and right over John Ascuaga’s Nugget Hotel and Casino, and they must certainly rattle the windows in those hotel towers! But Rinc had often seen hundreds of people gather outside the casinos to watch the Bones launch, especially during the rare nighttime launches when the bombers’ afterburner plumes stretched a hundred feet across the sky. It was like a mini air show several times a week. The Bones were part of the city’s attractions, like the glittering neon lights, the brothels, and the National Bowling Center. Eerie, a little ominous, yet curiously welcome. Nonetheless, takeoffs and landings between nine P.M. and seven A.M. were allowed only on weekends and only using military power, which produced about the same amount of noise as a commercial airliner.
Rinc must have been temporarily deafened after the Bone blasted off because he never heard her approach on the rooftop.
“Hello, Rodeo.”
He turned, startled. There before him was Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Furness.
He got to his feet, but as he stepped toward her, he sensed her body stiffening. “Rebecca, I… It’s good to see you,” he stammered.
Her eyes hardened, her jaw was set taut — and then she rushed into his arms. “Damn you to hell, Rinc,” she whispered, pulling him tightly to her and kissing him hard and hungrily. Tasting her lips, Rinc felt like a man on the verge of drowning who had just taken a deep gulp of sweet, fresh air.