“More than that,” Alpert added, speaking for the first time as he momentarily rested a conciliatory and friendly hand on her shoulder, “from a purely pragmatic point of view, he may be our only effective chance of getting a connection into Ireland, so we need him! I don’t particularly like dealing with the IRA either, but we all have to focus on what we’re trying to do here.”
“I know what we’re trying to do, Nick,” Eileen snapped back, calming but still annoyed. “I also know we need that bastard’s help. That doesn’t mean I have to like him into the bargain.” She decided to change the subject at that moment as another thought occurred to her. “Oh, and I’ve organised to see about getting Richard Kransky re-equipped with some decent hardware tomorrow as well, so it might be an idea to have an word or two to him about what’s going on here before then: wouldn’t exactly be fair to throw him into all this without a bit of forewarning.”
“Yeah, I’m planning to do just that this afternoon,” Thorne agreed, a vaguely mischievous grin flickering across his face. “Nothing nasty or unpleasant about ‘Septics’ you have a problem with, is there…?” In Australian vernacular, ‘Septic’ or ‘Septic Tank’ were rhyming slang terms for ‘Yank’ — for an American.
“Nothing particularly wrong with Americans, no,” Eileen conceded, forced finally to smile a little herself. “The man seemed nice enough, if a little flustered when I last spoke to him.”
“And I wonder why that could be?” Thorne laughed openly for the first time, giving her a ‘once-over’ himself that was by no means completely innocent.
“You can watch yerself too, Mister!” She shot back, giving him a light punch to the shoulder and reddening in mild embarrassment over such a remark in a grinning Alpert’s presence. She and Thorne had some ‘history’, albeit many years in the past, and he could get away with both a remark and a look like under circumstances where others wouldn’t: she knew the man well enough to know that the intent was entirely humorous.
“Well try not to damage the man too much, will you…” Thorne passed a quick wink to Alpert that she failed to notice. “We don’t need a trail of broken hearts and beds left through the Twentieth Century as well as the Twenty-First!” With that he darted out of potential reach or a swung fist, knowing Donelson well enough to know damn well he’d completely crossed the line with that remark. Eileen went after him with an indignant squeal and a vengeance as Alpert rather uncharacteristically broke down into outright guffaws of laughter.
The sight of a CO who could barely run properly for laughing, being chased by a howling dervish in the shape of Eileen Donelson, would’ve had more impact on those around the base originally from the future had it not already become an infrequently common sight for one reason or another before they’d left their own time. More accustomed to long distance running than sprints, Eileen wasn’t able to quite catch her CO as he darted across the open grassland between the billets and the flight line, and Thorne wasn’t stupid enough to slow down…
Friday
July 19, 1940
Eileen’s statement regarding others of the officer group at Hindsight being too lazy to get up early enough to go for a run with her had been somewhat unfair: most of the group, in all honesty, were often up that early… although none of them were in the slightest bit interested in running as exercise, in the morning or at any other time. Thorne and Trumbull were indeed awake and dressed by 0700 that Saturday and preparing for the squadron leader’s first official flying lesson on the F-35E, although Thorne, having suffered another long and sleepless night of unsettling dreams, would in retrospect have preferred a later starting time.
As they walked near a line of slit trenches and the roof of a concrete command bunker, heading from the officers’ billets toward the flight line across open grassland, they both caught sight of Commander Donelson doing warm-up stretches alone in the distance near the control tower’s base. Even at that distance, Trumbull could see that the light shirt and shorts she appeared to be wearing were far too brief for such a lady to be wearing in his opinion.
“A little chilly for that kind of dress, wouldn’t you say?” He observed quietly, feeling the cold through the flight suit and lined jacket he wore as their breath streamed about them in clouds of condensation on that chilly morning.
“Never bothers our valiant Commander Donelson, mate,” Thorne replied, shaking his head in mock pity as if speaking sympathetically about a ‘simple’ but nevertheless well-loved relative. “Rain, hail or shine, you can guarantee that mad woman’ll be traipsing all over the bloody countryside like a marathon runner on drugs.”
“She goes running on her own, then?”
“You think anyone else is silly enough to go haring about the place after her at this time of the morning?” Thorne snorted derisively. “No thank you, paclass="underline" I like my sleep too much!”
“Well, it appears someone is ‘silly’ enough,” Trumbull pointed out as they continued on, nodding off to the left where he’d spied another figure walking past the parked aircraft toward the commander through the foggy morning.
“Who’s that?” Thorne muttered, squinting hard. “Kransky…?”
“He’s dressed for exercise by the look of him: the commander must have made a positive impression on him!”
“Jesus,” Thorne shook his head sadly. “The poor bastard…”
“How’s that…?” Trumbull asked, curious over the man’s choice of words and tone.
“Alec, I don’t mean this as an insult, but that woman can be a real cow when it comes to sucking blokes into doing things. She used to do it back in our time as well, and the silly pricks fell for it in droves…”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Trumbull admitted with a quizzical expression.
“Look, Eileen’s an attractive woman and no mistake, and men — even in my time — tend to get bedazzled by attractive women and not look beyond their physical appearance. ‘Oh dear — pretty little thing wants me to partner her for a little run — mustn’t be too hard on her…’ They don’t see the strength and capability behind those good looks, and as a result they usually end up a bloody sight worse off!”
“You think Eileen ‘tricked’ Major Kransky into running with her?”
“Oh, if I know her, I’m bloody certain of it. There’s no malice in it,” Thorne was quick to add in explanation, afraid he might be giving the wrong impression of his friend. “She doesn’t like running on her own any more than anyone else likes doing stuff by themselves…” he shrugged “…but you tell me which you’d rather: going running with a cute, ‘defenceless’ woman who thinks she can jog a bit… or take on a fit, athletic female who regularly won awards at the naval academy for long-distance running and has an overload of Twenty-First Century ‘attitude’?”