“Copy, Devil Flight. You are in contact with Vulcan Three. Stand by.”
“Hell of an apology,” said A-Bomb.
“Devil One, I can hear you! I can hear you!” said the downed pilot. He was shouting, and added two or three sentences in indecipherable French.
“Relax Vulcan,” Knowlington told him. “Can you give me your status?”
“Merci, merci. Je ne comprends pas.”
“What?” asked Knowlington.
“De rien,” answered A-Bomb. “Nous sommes ‘Hog drivers’.”
“Ah, cochon! Le Hog.”
“Le Hog,” agreed A-Bomb.
“Magnifique.”
“What I’m talkin’ about,” agreed O’Rourke. “Comment allez-vous?”
“Je suis perdu.”
“Nah, you’re not lost. We got your butt,” said A-Bomb, adding words that seemed roughly the equivalent in French.
“You speak French, A-Bomb?” said Knowlington after his wingman and the downed pilot exchanged several more sentences.
“Got to,” said A-Bomb. “You never know when you’re going to find yourself in Paris, hunting down a cafe grande.”
“Devil Leader, we have an SAR asset en route, call sign Leander Seven. Request you contact him directly.”
“Devil One copies. We have one downed pilot, tells us he’s in reasonable shape. No enemy units at this time. My wingman speaks French and is talking to him. Feed him the questions.”
“Coyote.”
“Man, I love it when they’re humble,” said A-Bomb.
“Just run through the authentication,” said Knowlington, dialing into the search and rescue helicopter’s frequency.
CHAPTER 34
Doberman eased the Hog toward the director lights on the KC-135, sliding toward the refueling boom. The tanker had edged over the border and they were running well ahead of schedule. There was no need to rush, but he couldn’t help it — he wanted to tank and get the hell back north.
Check that. He wanted to see BJ back on the tarmac at Home Drome, walking around like a newborn colt, a little embarrassed when A-Bomb slapped him on the back. A-Bomb would say something like, “Fuckin’ A, Kid,” and Dixon would turn red. Kid was so pure he didn’t even curse.
Fuckin’ A.
That was what he wanted.
And to do that, he had to get his ass back north.
Taking out Saddam in his pretend Red Cross car wouldn’t be bad either. The job was tasked to a pair of F-111 sharpshooters, Earth Pigs that wouldn’t even be leaving their base for at least another hour.
Red Crescent. Whatever.
He wouldn’t mind taking that shot himself.
The tanker twitched right. Doberman pushed on, nudging his rudder pedal gently to stay with it. The boomer in the tail of the Boeing was watching, ready to aim his long straw into the fueling port in the A-10’s nose.
The lights on the big tanker told him he was there.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Doberman said to himself as the nozzle clunked in and the fuel began to flow.
CHAPTER 35
Air Force Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen was a cliché: the tough-girl tomboy playing hard-ass to make it a man’s world. She was the junkyard dog scraping with all the other dogs just to prove how tough she was.
She was tough. She’d been raised in the worst part of Philadelphia in, as it happened, a junkyard. Or as her uncle called it, “The crème-dalla-crème of the salvation industry.”
‘Dalla’ was supposed to be “de la,” but no one corrected her uncle, who though only five-eight could tear a car door off its hinges without breaking a sweat. Few people corrected his niece, either; there was almost never a need to. Rosen had a real talent for fixing things, and the Air Force had given her not just the training but the discipline she needed to put her skills and intellect to work.
Like her uncle and the cousin she’d been raised with, Rosen had a reputation for cracking people who got out of line — her personnel records put it more delicately, if in greater detail. Barely five-two and about a hundred and ten pounds, Rosen used every volatile ounce of her body to fight; she’d learned to wrestle pinning junkyard mutts as a ten-year-old and had yet to find a tougher opponent.
It was also true that her clothes and skin smelled more like JP-4 than Calvin Klein’s Obsession. And while she wasn’t ugly by any stretch, it had to be said that she wasn’t particularly pretty, either. In fatigues and with her cropped hair pulled back, she could look almost severe.
On the other hand, there was more to Rosen than the cliché, more than the tough kid who wrestled dogs and could fix just about any part, electronic or mechanical, on anything that moved. There was, for instance, a young woman who had discovered poetry during a bullshit college program she’d signed up for to shake off some of the boredom of downtime in the mid-eighties.
Sitting in a large auditorium with a hundred other students, most of them several years younger, Becky Rosen had heard poetry for the first time. Maybe not literally, but certainly figuratively. On the first day of class the professor stood in front of the podium and wheezed through a poem by Walt Whitman declaring America’s greatness, and then one by Emily Dickinson contemplating the nature of death and duty. Rosen found herself fascinated, so fascinated that she ended up taking enough courses to get a BA — and at the time of her assignment to the Gulf was in fact only a few credits from a master’s.
Not that she planned to use the degrees for anything. They were an excuse to read, entertainment better than movies — activities almost as engrossing as single-handedly overhauling an entire A-10A herself. From the day of that first class, she had spent at least ten minutes every night reading.
But tonight, sitting in her quarters in Tent City at the heart of the Home Drome, Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen couldn’t find anything to read, or at least nothing that sparked. Not Whitman, not Hemingway, not Jones, not the volume of Joyce she’d promised herself she’d slug through. Not even Dickinson.
She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Lieutenant Dixon, lying dead on the ground near a cave that housed Iraqi chemical weapons.
William Dixon. BJ. KIA. RIP.
God, this is morbid, she thought to herself finally. She sat up and pulled out her small notebook from under the bed. She had been trying for the past few days to start a journal, vaguely thinking she might write a book about the Gulf when she got home — maybe get a million-dollar book contract and buy her own fixed base operation when she got home.
Or a junkyard. Hey, you went with what you knew.
She’d barely filled two pages so far with a few notes on the people she served with. She looked at her scrawl, barely readable even by her, then turned to a fresh page, starting to describe Tent City.
A well-ordered chaos of temporary quarters, theoretically intended for low-class enlisted types but housing even hoity-toity officers due to a severe shortage of facilities and poor political prowess on the part of muckety-mucks many echelons above.
Or not.