She was halfway into her burger and fries and beginning to regret ever ordering them when she saw Brandon shaking hands with one of his employees. When the man turned around, she recognized Lieutenant Colonel Daren Mace, the Maintenance Group commander for the 394th Air Battle Wing. “Colonel?”
Mace turned around. He appeared to be annoyed that someone called him by his rank in this place — or perhaps annoyed that he was recognized — then pleased that it was her. Brandon handed what appeared to be a big fold of cash to him, which Mace refused. Brandon stuck the cash in Mace’s shirt pocket and slapped Mace’s chest, a friendly but definitive — and no doubt painful — warning that Brandon was not in the mood to argue. Mace then shook hands with the barkeep, moved to the other side of the bar, and sat next to Furness.
“What was that all about, Colonel?” Furness asked, popping a french fry in her mouth.
“ ‘Daren’ in here, okay, Rebecca? We had a deaclass="underline" maintenance work on his taps and condenser units, and a little electrical work, in exchange for room and board. Now he—”
“You were staying here? At the bar?”
“He’s got a nice couple of rooms on the second floor,” Mace said. “He lives on the fourth floor. He’s got rooms on the third floor, but I didn’t ask what goes on there.”
She laughed. “Knowing this place, I can guess.”
“Yeah,” Mace agreed. “Anyway, Brandon insisted on paying me for my work anyway. He may be a gangster, but he’s a decent gangster.”
“Well, at least his reputation — and the Harleys outside — keep the college kids and tourists out,” Furness said, “which means more room for crewdogs. How long have you been staying here?”
“A few weeks, right after Air War College, when I found out I was coming to Plattsburgh,” Mace replied, reaching across the bar and pouring himself a glass of Pepsi from the bar gun. “I came in here for a beer and for a phone book and ended up getting a job and a place to stay.”
“What are you doing here now? Aren’t you supposed to be at the base?”
“I’ve been at the base for the past two days straight,” Mace replied wearily. “I told them I need a break. Besides, I had to get this one last job done for Brandon. I’ve got a feeling there won’t be many breaks after tonight.”
“On your night off from fixing airplanes you fix beer taps? Incredible.”
“I guess I’m just an incredible guy,” he deadpanned. “But I just quit. I’m going to miss this place. This was a kind of Bohemian place to work, sort of Greenwich Village. Everything was pretty nice”—he waited until she was going to take another bite of the burger, then added—”except for the food.”
She stopped in midbite and asked, “What’s wrong with the food?”
“Brandon cooks it.”
That instantly destroyed Rebecca’s appetite for good. She dropped the food back on its plate. Mace slipped a five-dollar bill under the plate and said, “Sorry about that, Rebecca. Let’s get out of here and we’ll find you some decent dinner.”
“I’m through with dinner,” Furness said, suddenly feeling queasy, “but I know a good place for coffee. Follow me.” They left the bar, got in Mace’s pickup truck, and drove down City Hall Place toward McDonough Monument and to Rebecca’s bed and breakfast.
The little hotel was right at the end of the Heritage Trail River Walk. From the main enclosed patio, they had a view of the Revolutionary War monument, the canal, and across the marina to frozen Lake Champlain. The bed and breakfast’s hosts served hot fudge sundaes and coffee on the patio in the evenings; both officers promised not to tell on each other as they accepted a small splash of Grand Marnier orange liqueur on top of the chocolate syrup.
“Nice place,” Mace said after trying his sundae.
“I stay here every chance I get,” she replied, licking chocolate and whipped cream off her spoon. “So you work for a biker-bar owner and stay in a biker flophouse. You never looked for an apartment? What were you going to do, stay at Afterburners for your entire tour?”
“Frankly, I never thought about it much,” Mace said dryly. He looked around to be sure no one else was within earshot, then said, “After our … activities … in the Persian Gulf, I’ve always considered my job in the Air Force Reserve as day-to-day.”
“Oh?” she asked, surprised.
Their eyes looked right into each other, as if both knew a secret on the other.
“The Air Force made it clear to me that they weren’t going to stand by me,” Mace said. “I made a tactical decision during the war and I got hammered for it. I consider myself extremely fortunate to still be in uniform, let alone be in command of a maintenance group. I guess I ultimately made the right decision during the war, and that at least one high-powered angel somewhere agreed and is rewarding me by letting me continue in service. I don’t expect that patronage to last forever, though, believe me. I’m not a man of delusions.”
Somehow she knew he wasn’t. They fell silent as the host poured more coffee for his guests. When he left, Furness asked, “Can you tell me about what you were doing out there during the war, Daren? I remember you weren’t on the air tasking order.”
“A lot of sorties weren’t on the ATO,” he said uneasily.
“You had no wingmen, no scheduled tanker, and a bomb load you couldn’t jettison.”
“We can’t talk about this, Rebecca.”
“Why not?”
“You know better than to ask, Major,” Mace said evenly, using her military rank to firmly punctuate his warning. He quickly added, “Besides, it’s the first clear night we’ve had in days, and the coffee is good and strong. Let’s enjoy it.” He pointed out the window toward the south. “I can even see the stars out there. That’s Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Amazing what you remember all the way back to nav school.”
“They have a telescope set up on the upstairs deck,” Furness said. She led him upstairs, then down a side hallway and out a set of French doors to a long redwood patio that had been swept clean of snow. An eight-inch reflector telescope on a motorized equatorial mount had been set up there for the guests. An instruction card on the wall told how to use the telescope and the star drive, but Mace scanned the skies briefly, released the worm-gear drive, repositioned the telescope as if he’d been using it all his life, lined it up on a bright star farther to the east across the lake, using the telescope’s small finder scope, and reengaged the drive.
“Aren’t we going to look at … what’s it called, Sirius?”
“Stars don’t look any different through a telescope — they’re too far away to see the disk,” Mace said. “But you’ll like this.”
When Furness peered through the eyepiece, she inhaled in absolute surprise. “It’s Saturn! I can see the rings … I can even see the shadow on the rings from the planet itself, and a few of Saturn’s moons! How did you know that was Saturn?”
“The weather shop still prepares briefings on which planets and bright stars are up,” Mace replied, “and I still get a weather briefing and forecast four times a day. We still calibrate the sextants on the tankers for celestial navigation, even though the tanker crews rarely use them with their GPS and inertial navigation systems — I even did a few precomps and shot the sun the other day. Once a nav, always a nav.” He pointed to the sky to the south: “There’s Orion with his belt and sword, and Drago the dragon, and Taurus the bull, and the star cluster called the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.”