Captain Sam Marlowe, the oncoming pilot, passed Furness and said, “Trouble with your legs? Let me help you.” He gave her a wink, then reached down and ran a hand along her left leg. Marlowe, thirty-eight, with dark hair and a constant five o’clock shadow and one of two full crews on board, was rested and feeling cocky, which was always trouble.
Rebecca Furness took the word “professional” seriously. But in the time she’d spent in the Air Force, she’d learned very quickly that for all the lip-service the brass gave about nondiscrimination and harassment, the reality was, women in service faced both almost every day. Grimly, she put up with it as part of the job, but that didn’t mean she had to put up with assholes like Marlowe who thought she’d be impressed with their fly-boy swaggering. The fact that they were in wartime was all the more appalling, but not surprising, to Furness.
“Sam,” she oozed in her best, breathy voice.
“Yeah, babe?” he asked, patting her thigh.
Furness smiled, suddenly flicked her hand upwards, catching the tip of Marlowe’s nose. She twisted it hard. He yelped, his head jerked back, bumped into the flight engineer’s overhead pane, which startled his copilot, who was hand-flying the big jet, and the 590,000-pound tanker burled and shook as the copilot fought to regain control.
The boom operator, a chief master sergeant in the tail section, who had more years in the Air Force than all of the cockpit crew put together, felt the jolt, but not before his coffee went all over his flight suit. “Hey, pilot, what the hell is going on up there?”
Everyone’s attention was on the two pilots now.
“You know, Sam, it’s a shame your ego isn’t as small as your cock probably is. If it were, it would make everyone’s life on this plane a lot easier.”
The flight engineer, a senior noncommissioned officer sitting at his console behind the copilot, turned and smiled at Marlowe, who was rubbing his nose, wincing in pain. But the smile disappeared and he turned back to his instruments when he caught a disapproving glare from Furness. She exited the cockpit and shut the door behind her with an exasperated bang.
Rebecca Furness—”the Iron Maiden,” as she was known — visited the lavatory (for the first time in eight hours), then poured herself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the galley, curled up on two empty front seats in the airliner-like forward passenger cabin of the KC-10 Extender, used a wadded-up flight jacket as a pillow to rest her head, and opened a four-day-old issue of the Los Angeles Times. It was a hell of a way to go to war — comfortable seats, modern airplane, pressurized cabin, relief crews, bunk beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, a newspaper, and, most importantly, staying far from the front lines. The fighter pilots got all the glory, but they had to be shoehorned into a tiny, uncomfortable cockpit, pee into a plastic bag, and suck oxygen through a mask strapped to their face for hours at a time — and there were bad guys shooting at them out there. The “tanker war” was not as glamorous, but it had much better working conditions.
She tried to read the Times, tried to forget about the incident in the cockpit, but her mind kept drifting back to it. She was seething. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened — there had been plenty of others — and it wouldn’t be the last, but the idea of it happening in the middle of a damned war.… What would the men think if enlisted women were suddenly coming up and grabbing crotches in the middle of an operation, when their concentration needed to be totally focused on the task at hand? she wondered. The jerks. She sighed and wanted to forget about it, returning her attention to the Los Angeles Times.
She ignored the mission radio headset on the overhead console of her seat and stuck a pair of earplugs in her ears to blot out the gentle roar of aircraft noises. The two seats on which she lay were not wide enough for her to stretch out on, so she had to curl her long legs up to keep her boots from dangling into the aisle. Furness was tall, an athletic one hundred and thirty pounds, and if Marlowe could have gotten a good feel of her thigh, he undoubtedly would have found it nice and firm, a result of her almost-daily exercise regimen. She had below-shoulder-length brown hair, but no one on her crew really knew that because she always wore it pinned up and off her collar when in uniform, which was almost all the time. They did notice her dark-brown almond-shaped eyes, her strong nose and jaw, and her habit of talking rapidly and in a very officious pilot’s monotone, which was how she had acquired the boys-only nickname of the Iron Maiden. She knew about the nickname and didn’t give a damn.
Well, she conceded, that wasn’t exactly true. The moniker did bother her, but not because she was tough and professional in the cockpit, which was why most people assumed she had the name. No, she’d earned it for an entirely different reason: her steadfast refusal to date anyone on the base or in her wing. She hadn’t really thought much about the rule, until she’d heard the nickname. She wasn’t even sure why she’d made that policy for herself other than wanting to maintain distance from the men she might ultimately have to go to war with.
But her policy had generated a lot of gossip, especially after her polite but consistent refusals for dates. She’d hear the word “dyke” whispered more than once in passing. She shook her head in exasperated amusement. That was rich. If they only knew about the men she’d had in her life. Some truly wonderful guys, and none in the military. Men who could have run circles around these fly-boys in bed.
But her private life was her own. If they wanted to think she was gay, that was their problem. Another typical, arrogant male assumption. Like little boys, trying to show the girls who had the larger member. And if you didn’t want to play with it, well, you must be …
Rebecca sighed. Now that she thought about it, having just one to play with now and then wouldn’t be so bad, but her time at home was usually focused on recurrent training and simulator sessions.
Not that she really minded, of course. Flying was in her blood, and she spent most of her free time building her flight experience outside her military duties. The military was cutting back flying hours, eliminating squadrons, and closing bases, and the civilian airlines were still hiring, so she turned her attention to a future outside the Air Force. To make herself more marketable to the major airlines, she had accumulated almost a thousand hours of civilian flying time in the past six years — which was quite impressive, seeing that she was away from home for nearly five months every year — and had earned her civilian commercial and airline transport pilot licenses and instrument, flight instructor, multiengine, and even seaplane ratings.
But if life was tough for women pilots in the military, it was equally tough in the civilian world, and although American Airlines and United had practically set up recruiting offices at March Air Force Base, nobody had called her — not even the smaller regional airlines like America West or Southwest, for whom she was probably overqualified with all her multiengine heavy-jet time. Male KC-10 pilots were being actively and aggressively recruited by the airlines at March because Air Force KC-10 pilots got the world’s best heavy-jet training at no cost to the airlines. Some had letters of commitment from a major airline two years before their tour of military duty was up. The airlines were hiring, all right, but not women.