The Bazrum, of course, already suspected him. But in Tyrwhitt’s opinion, that was not bad. In a way it was good, because it meant that they were giving him no special attention. The paranoia of the Iraqis had reached such a level that they suspected every foreigner in Baghdad was a spy. Even Baxter, who loved to pose as some sort of undercover agent, had been dragged into an interrogation room and held overnight. He was released the next morning, thoroughly terrified by the Bazrum.
Tyrwhitt extended the antenna of the Cyfonika and positioned it in the open window. He knew that observers in the building across the street from the hotel, or in the street below, would detect the antenna. That was okay. They would also intercept and translate the censored dispatch that Tyrwhitt had been authorized to send to his editor in Sydney. The dispatch consisted of a press release from the office of Deputy Premier Tariq Aziz declaring, once again, that due to last week’s aggression by American warplanes inside sovereign Iraqi air space, Iraq would henceforth shoot down any and all intruding foreign aircraft.
Ho-hum, thought Tyrwhitt. More of Aziz’s standard chest-thumping response to every encounter in the disputed No Fly Zone. And he could count on sympathetic foreign correspondents like Chris Tyrwhitt to accommodate the beleaguered Iraqis by passing their message of defiance to the rest of the world.
But there was more. What the Bazrum would not intercept — or at least Tyrwhitt fervently hoped they wouldn’t — was the encrypted message within the news dispatch. Unlike the news about Aziz’s press release, which would be passed by satellite to Sydney, the encrypted message was intended for a different audience. It would be received by an umbrella-shaped antenna atop a gray, slab-sided building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Within the bowels of the nondescript building specialists of the United States Central Intelligence Agency would decrypt this latest and most urgent report from their agent in Baghdad.
Chapter Four
Aliens
Like a piece of meat. Delivered fresh to the fleet.
All in all, thought Lieutenant B.J. Johnson, it was a lousy way to arrive on an aircraft carrier — sitting backward, strapped down like a hunk of produce in the nearly windowless cargo compartment of a C-2A turboprop.
The C-2A was called a COD — Carrier Onboard Delivery. The COD hauled everything out to a carrier at sea that would fit into its cargo compartment — mail, food, tools, toilet paper, tires. And replacement pilots.
B.J. Johnson was a replacement F/A-18 strike fighter pilot, and coming aboard a carrier in the back of a freight hauler like the C-2A was damned undignified. And scary. It was a feeling of complete powerlessness. B.J. could hear the engines of the C-2A advancing and retarding, the throttle movements getting more abrupt, more urgent. It meant that they were approaching the ramp of the deck. The COD pilot was flying the ball. And this guy sure as hell was no smoothie. He was snatching the throttles and yanking the controls like a bear with a beach ball.
Whump! The C-2A slammed down on the deck — at least B.J. hoped it was the deck — and lurched to a halt. B.J. was thrown hard against the seat back, and appreciated for the first time why they seated passengers in the COD facing backward. It felt like they had hit a wall. A couple of seconds later, the engines were revving up again and the COD was taxiing out of the arresting wires to the forward deck.
B.J. looked over at the other replacement fighter pilot, Lieutenant Spam Parker, two seats away. The ride out to the ship had been just as hard on Spam as it was on B.J. Spam had turned a ghastly shade of white.
The aft loading door of the COD dropped open. A flood of daylight and wind and the howl of turbine engines swept into the cabin. A man wearing a flight deck cranial headset appeared in the door. He wore a yellow jersey with “VFA-36 XO” stenciled on it.
“Lt. Johnson? Lt. Parker?” He had to yell above the din of the flight deck.
“That’s us.”
“I’m Commander Davis, executive officer of Strike Fighter Squadron Thirty-six. Welcome aboard, ladies.”
Brick Maxwell poured a coffee and settled back to watch the fracas.
“Goddammit, no!” DeLancey yelled. “Not in my squadron.”
“Nobody asked if we wanted them, Skipper,” said Devo Davis. “They’re here. They’ve got orders.”
DeLancey had assembled all his senior squadron officers in the ready room — Devo Davis, the executive officer; Brick Maxwell, the Operations officer; Craze Manson, the maintenance officer; Spoon Withers, the admin officer; Bat Masters, the safety officer.
DeLancey was not in a mood to listen. “How the hell am I supposed to run a fighter squadron with women in the cockpits? You were supposed to get those orders cancelled.”
“Wing staff wouldn’t hear of it,” said Davis. “The detailers wouldn’t talk about it. Women in combat squadrons are a fact of life.”
Watching the exchange, Maxwell knew that it was an argument without end. For over two centuries, ships-of-the-line had been crewed exclusively by men. But in the early 1990s, the ban on women in combat was lifted. Warships — and fighter squadrons — were deploying with complements of women, officers and enlisted. Men no longer had an exclusive franchise in the cockpits of Navy fighters.
Killer DeLancey wasn’t buying it. He gave Davis a withering look. “Fact of life, huh? Well, thanks, Commander Davis. That’s really helpful. We appreciate that little homily about the facts of life.”
Davis’s face reddened. An awkward silence fell over the ready room. Davis took the rebuke like he always did: He stared at the far bulkhead, wearing the expression of a beaten dog.
Maxwell felt the anger rise up in him. DeLancey was violating one of the oldest tenets of command: You didn’t humiliate a subordinate in front of his peers. DeLancey was famous for violating rules, and everyone in the squadron had seen him heap scorn on the executive officer. Devo was DeLancey’s favorite target.
DeLancey had gone too far. Maxwell thumped his coffee cup on the desk, causing everyone’s eyes to swing to his end of the table. “Devo is right,” he said. “Hear him out, skipper. You don’t have any choice.”
DeLancey swung his attention to Maxwell, peering at him like he’d just discovered a new specimen of insect. “You — are telling me — that I have no choice?”
Maxwell locked gazes with DeLancey. “They’re part of the squadron. Just like Devo said. Like it or not, we have to live with it.”
“How do you propose we live with it, Commander Maxwell?”
“Treat them just like any other new pilot. No favoritism, no bias. No double standard.”
DeLancey gave him the same withering look he used on Davis. “Oh, by all means,” he said in a mocking voice. “Let’s make sure our women warriors get treated properly.” He gazed around at all the senior officers. “Listen up, all of you. You’re gonna give those two split tails the toughest assignments on the flight schedule — weather, night, whatever comes up. Give them every chance to prove that they have no business in a combat squadron. After they’ve screwed up bad enough, I can ship their asses back to the beach. Everybody copy that?”
The other officers nodded, glancing from Maxwell to DeLancey. They all copied.
Lieutenant Leroi Jones couldn’t believe it. His equipment — helmet, torso harness, G-suit, navigation bag, all his goddamn flight gear! — was in a pile in the corner of the ready room. In his locker at the back of the ready room was another set of flight gear. The name card on the locker bore another pilot’s name: Lt. P. R. Parker.