He paused to take in the collection of planes positioned around the cavernous hangar floor. He could fly pretty much everything in the place and sometimes he didn’t know if it was irony that he and the machines were both too old to fly or just plain depression. But it was an honor to have done so much, because in the end, they’d been successful. There’d been no nuclear exchange during the Cold War because of men like Colonel Horace Egan, USAF Retired, and planes like these. The Greatest Generation had won World War II, but Egan’s generation had won the Cold War, and they’d gotten little recognition for it.
That was their story and they were sticking to it.
This was the museum for the Strategic Air Command, although the name had recently been changed to the Strategic Air and Space Museum, trying to posture a little less ominously to the public. Not that the museum drew any more action. The air force had even done away with SAC, merging it with TAC, Tactical Air Command, into the ACC, Air Combat Command. All those letters meant nothing to civilians, but to lose their cherished organizational designation was a deep blow to those who had served for years and lost comrades-in-arms.
Egan not only knew the numerical nomenclature of every craft, but could also rattle off the nickname and story behind each, knowing many of their secrets.
The most dominating plane in the hangar was the B-36 “Peacemaker” (the military has an odd way of naming tools of death with opposite-sounding names), the largest mass-produced propeller aircraft ever built. It was also obsolete before its first flight in 1946 as jet fighters took over the air after World War II. It is a maxim of military thinking that armies (and air forces) are always preparing to fight the last war. The B-36 faced the future as an attempt to give the United States a plane that could fly to the Soviet Union, drop the oversized atomic bomb of its time, and make it back.
It was damn nice of high command to factor in the making it back part. Actually a rarity in military planning at the strategic level.
Egan walked over to the plane and gazed up at the nose looming above him while he unconsciously rubbed one of the scars on his head. He’d gotten that one as a seventeen-year-old crewman bailing out of a B-36 en route from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, to Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth, Texas. They’d lost three of the six engines over British Columbia in a storm. Combined with severe weather and icing, they’d been forced to bail out.
After, of course, dumping their heavy load, a nuclear warhead.
The official after-action report, classified Top Secret and only recently declassified, stated that the warhead was a dummy with conventional explosives.
That was the lie from the beginning and still was to this day if one checked Wikipedia. What is true is that it was the first nuclear “incident” where a weapon was reported lost.
The report also stated that the warhead had been dumped over the ocean, with the conventional explosives detonating on impact.
That was a double lie. They’d dropped the bomb over land. And it had not exploded on impact. It had drifted down underneath its large main parachute.
The updated report still claimed that the weapon was never recovered.
That was the final lie.
Egan knew it had been recovered and he’d seen who had recovered it and to the day he died he would never speak of it to anyone because even now, so many years later, he knew if he did, someone would come, and his retirement would shift from “still breathing and telling silly war stories” to “deceased: no check need be issued anymore.”
Shaking himself out of memories, where he seemed to get lost more and more each day, he spotted the wife of the VIP standing by a B-52, the workhorse that replaced the B-36 and was still flying. Most of the B-52 bombers in the air were older than their crews.
Egan ignored that he easily could be her grandfather because getting some action wasn’t what he sought. At least that’s what he consciously told himself. But he was still a man, and he was still breathing, and hot blood still coursed through his veins, so of course it was what he sought on some level. On a deeper, visceral level, he was looking for something more mundane, which is why he volunteered at the museum (besides having no family, hating daytime TV, and having a right shoulder too damaged to play golf anymore). He wanted admiration, and that took some work at his age. He got the ritual respect given to elders, but admiration was a tougher objective. He didn’t know why her husband, the VIP, wasn’t here yet, but a pilot always took to the attack during a window of opportunity.
He’d have to tell her stories (but not about British Columbia and the nuke). Still he had plenty of others, most true, told in so many variations even he wasn’t certain anymore what the facts were. But what did it matter? The goal was to get her to understand how special he’d once been. Old pilots never die, they just have to work harder for the ego boost that used to be there for him every day, issued with the leather jacket and the crumpled cap and the silver wings, rewards for facing death every time the wheels left the ground.
He left the B-36 and headed toward the B-52 and the young woman, preparing his attack approach. He reflected that it was strange how he’d forgotten most of the missions, especially the combat bombing ones dealing death from high in the sky, but not one piece of tail that he’d ever gotten. When he was young his mind had been full of flying, but now it was full of memories of blondes and brunettes and Asians and African Americans. They had full breasts or just enough. Bodies ranging from skinny to voluptuous; blue-eyed, green-eyed, black-eyed, brown-eyed. He’d done them all. They’d been glorious, every single damn one of them, and he missed them more with each passing day.
It never occurred to him to wonder why none had ever stayed at his side.
Maybe because the next, not yet discovered one had always been potentially more glorious?
As he got closer he realized, okay, so she wasn’t so young, but definitely a trophy wife, a second one for the old businessman who made something the government liked having and thus rated the after-hours personal tour. Still, she was holding on well to her twenties in her midthirties with the dyed hair, tight body, and expensive clothing. And Botox, surgery, and whatever else women did to hold on.
Egan had his pills to hold on, in case the occasion should arise.
Lately not much had risen, but he was always hopeful and she was alone. A gentleman would not send his wife unescorted, so that was one strike against the husband. Egan had learned, from decades of experience in seducing other men’s wives, that if you could get them to three strikes, one could most likely get to first base. He paused as that twisted metaphor confused him for a few moments, then shrugged it off as he shrugged off a lot of thoughts lately.
As he came up beside her, he allowed himself to put his hand on the small of her back, one of the few perks of being old. Her very small and lovely back.
She had her hand on the ladder that led up into the belly of the beast.
“Colonel Egan.” She nodded at him.