“Orders are that you’re heading home,” Knowlington said simply.
“You can get around them, though. I know you can. You’ve got connections coming out your… ”
He stopped short of saying “ass,” which struck Skull as funny, though he didn’t laugh. “I don’t know if I have enough connections to get around that. Hell, Major, don’t you want to see your kid?”
“Yeah, I do. More than anything. But I belong here. It’s my job. You need me.”
“No one’s irreplaceable.”
“Come on, Colonel. Don’t send me home.”
“You can’t fly. What are you going to do? Saw that cast off?”
Johnson ignored the question. “There’s a lot I can do. Please. I’ve never asked you for anything.”
What the pilot didn’t say, though clearly meant, was that Knowlington owed him big time. Major Johnson had taken care of a lot of things— a hell of a lot of things— before Knowlington finally managed to control himself and put himself on the wagon.
The grand total time of which now amounted to twenty-one days, twenty hours and fifteen minutes, by his watch.
Of course, tallying it made him want a drink more than ever.
“I really think you belong with your family, Goose. You just had a kid.”
“Colonel? I want to do my job.”
Tired, surprised with a request he hadn’t expected, Knowlington searched his mind for something to say.
Johnson was nuts.
But he did owe him. And maybe the guy knew something he wasn’t saying.
He’d never pegged Johnson as a drinker or a druggy, but maybe that was what he was afraid of. Or maybe there was something with his wife. Or the kid. Some sort of personal thing that needed time or something. Knowlington had never married and he really wasn’t good at figuring that kind of thing out, except to know for some guys, a lot of guys, it was important.
But damn. The Air Force had an interest in making sure pilots who’d gone through hell got a decent reprieve.
Even if they didn’t want it?
“Colonel?”
“You know what, Major? I’m going to have to think about this. I just don’t know.”
“I do know, sir. I belong here.”
“I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow.”
The major’s face lit with an enormous smile. “Thanks.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” said Knowlington.
“I know that,” said Mongoose, but he was still smiling as he left the tent.
CHAPTER 7
Lying in his cot after volunteering to go on the mission, Doberman found it impossible to sleep. It wasn’t because he was worried about flying so far into enemy territory. He was thinking about the stupid card game.
He had nearly been dealt a dream hand, unarguably the best seven cards he had ever had with a pot fatter than he could have wished.
No, he hadn’t come close to being dealt it— he had been dealt it. He just hadn’t had a chance to play the damn thing.
The dream hand to top off the dream night. Over four hundred bucks was tucked under the mattress.
What a run. Too bad that it had been cut off.
And that was the problem. Because if things had gone on, the odds would have balanced out. He would have started to lose. That was the law of averages, the way statistics worked, the way of probabilities. You could describe it with math. Bing-bang-bam.
Unless there was something else involved, like luck. And what did Sullivan say— lucky at flying, unlucky at cards, and vice versa.
Bullshit. He didn’t believe in luck.
Except a little.
But if he had any luck, it was all bad. Luck of Job. Bullshit luck.
Doberman hadn’t believed in luck or any such superstitious bullshit until the war started. Now he did kind of believe— a little. He had to admit he had been just a little lucky to make it back the second time his plane got hit.
And the first.
The sergeant who inspected his plane called him the luckiest dead man alive.
More skill than luck was involved in getting those planes back. Way more.
Though he had found a lucky penny.
Bullshit. He had a goddamned engineering degree, for Christ sake. There was no such thing as luck.
If he hadn’t gotten the stinking card— if he hadn’t peeked at it— he’d be sleeping by now.
Did the fact that he’d been stopped from playing the hand mean anything?
Maybe he had only a certain amount of luck and couldn’t use it up playing cards. So God or Fate or the Easter Bunny had stopped him from playing it.
Right.
Or maybe his luck was running out.
There were X number of possibilities such a hand would come up; he had played Y times. He’d had a million crappy hands. The pendulum had to swing back at some point. The two curves of probability met at the axis point, bing-bang-bam, the best hand of his life. No luck involved. Only probability.
Was there another curve that had to do with flying?
If there was such a thing as luck, if he had been lucky, he’d have to admit something was going on. Fate or some other superstition which he didn’t believe in. Because if there was such a thing as luck then there would be things like omens, and then the hand might mean truly that he was screwed.
Or not. Because it was all bullshit and superstition. A man succeeded because he busted his ass. Doberman had learned that lesson from his Uncle JR, the guy who’d taught him everything important. Luck was bullshit.
There were only two kinds of pilots. Guys like A-Bomb who were somehow naturals, who just kind of fell into things somehow and made them work. Those guys could fly no matter what happened.
And then there were guys like him, who studied it like a book, worked and worked themselves until they had everything so precise you could describe their flights with mathematical models.
If one somebody like A-Bomb wanted to be superstitious, well what the hell? The guy was already so whacked out one more thing wasn’t going to make any difference. But a pilot like Doberman, a pilot who relied on being exact in everything he did— throw superstition into the equation and that pilot was in serious trouble.
There was no such thing as luck, only probability.
But Doberman just couldn’t get the stinking idea out of his head. As desperately as he needed sleep, the best he could do was play the game in his head, over and over.
CHAPTER 8
Captain Kevin Hawkins stopped and checked the geo-positioner in his hand. They were allegedly less than a quarter-mile from the abandoned stretch of concrete the Bat Cave planners had designated Fort Apache, but he couldn’t see it. Like the other members of the team, Hawkins had a set of AN/PVS-7 night vision goggles, known as NODs or night observation devices, attached to his helmet. The high-tech devices gave a dim green glow to the surrounding terrain, making it possible to see large objects several hundred yards ahead. But the Iraqi desert was real desert here, with shifting dunes and blowing sands. While they were working off satellite photos little more than thirty-six hours old, Hawkins was worried that the concrete had been swallowed whole.
He also worried that the flat surface nearly a thousand feet long was simply a mirage. The intelligence folks had not been able to come up with a plausible reason that the Iraqis would start an airport here, nearly five miles from a highway, nor had they explained why they had suddenly abandoned it.