“Who the hell is P. R. Parker?”
“An officer senior to you,” said a voice behind him.
Jones spun around, startled by the voice. It belonged to a woman. She was tall, with ash-blonde hair that flowed down to the collar of her flight suit. Another woman, shorter, with bobbed, brown hair, looked up from one of the ready room chairs. “I’m Parker,” the tall woman said. “Call sign ‘Spam.’ I take it you’re Jones.”
“Why’d you dump my gear on the deck?”
“Nothing personal. I’m senior, so I took over the locker.”
“New pilots in the squadron usually take one of the empty lockers in the back room.”
“Haven’t you heard? We don’t have to use the back room.”
Jones stood there for a moment, anger boiling up inside him. He was a wide-shouldered, muscular young man who had played linebacker at Nebraska before his Navy commissioning. If this new pilot were a man, he would give the guy ten seconds to get his gear out of the locker before he got it shoved up his ass.
But in a tiny fleaspeck of Jones’s brain, a danger signal was going off. This was the post-Tailhook Navy. He already knew too many male officers who’d been hauled up on sexism or harassment charges.
Jones shook his head and began gathering his flight gear from the corner. He headed for the door. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant. This squadron’s gonna love you.”
“That was really dumb. Why’d you do that?”
“Because,” said Spam Parker, “we have to establish our territory. We can’t let them treat us like inferiors.”
The two women were alone in the passageway outside the squadron ready room.
“You pissed that guy off,” said B.J. “He’s not gonna forget it.”
“That’s his problem. They’ll know how to deal with us from now on.”
B.J. hated confrontations. It was a bad way to meet your new squadron mates, she thought. “Maybe we oughta just keep a low profile for a while. You know, like new kids on the block.”
Spam gave B.J. a withering look. “You’re such a wimp. You always let someone else do the fighting for you. Then you come along and act like Miss Primble at a tea party.” Spam was nearly six feet tall and towered by a head over B.J. In her gray-green flight suit, wearing her clunky steel-toed flying boots, Spam looked like an Amazon warrior. “You want all these Neanderthals to like us. Well, guess what? I don’t care whether they like us or not.”
B.J. had to admit that Spam was right about one thing: She wasn’t a fighter. As far back as B.J. could remember, it was Spam Parker who waged war with the male military establishment.
B.J. remembered their Naval Academy days. In their third year at Annapolis, Spam brought a sexual harassment suit against an officer on the faculty. Though the matter was quietly settled outside the military judicial system, it put an effective end to the officer’s career.
She pulled the same thing after flight training, when B.J. and Spam found themselves in the same class in F/A-18 replacement pilot training at Oceana. Spam’s problems in the fighter weapons phase reached a point that an evaluation board was convened. Spam blamed her troubles on what she claimed was her instructor’s bias against women. After an investigation by the Judge Advocate General, the charge was dismissed, but it carried sufficient weight to get Spam past the evaluation board. She managed to complete strike fighter training and graduate to the fleet.
Whenever Spam went to war with the male establishment, B.J. tried to be invisible. It never worked. She always found herself guilty by association with Spam Parker, and thus ostracized. She knew that male pilots in fighter squadrons had a name for them: aliens.
In a closely knit community like naval aviation, it was a lonely existence. Nobody trusted aliens.
Despite B.J. Johnson’s plea to be assigned to a squadron on the opposite end of the planet from Spam Parker, the Navy had other plans. B.J. and Spam received orders to the same squadron — the VFA-36 Roadrunners, deployed aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
Spam Parker hadn’t changed.
“We have to kick ‘em in the balls,” Spam said over her shoulder as she marched away. “It’s the only way those jerks are gonna learn.”
The heels of her flight boots hammered like drum beats on the steel deck. Watching her, B.J. had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She hated being an alien.
As Maxwell walked aft, along the port passageway on the second deck, it struck him again: the smell. He had served aboard half a dozen aircraft carriers. Each of the ships had possessed its own unique below-decks smell — an evocative scent of jet fuel, sweat, paint, oil, and steel.
But the scent of the USS Ronald Reagan had something else: newness. Maxwell could sense the freshly painted bulkheads, the clean metallic shininess of the ship’s recently installed fixtures. The Reagan smelled like a freshly assembled weapon. At a hundred and five thousand tons, the Reagan was the mightiest warship the world had ever seen.
He turned down a passageway toward the hangar deck ladder. Rounding the corner, he collided with a young woman wearing a gray-green flight suit. She was exiting a door that bore large stenciled lettering: Women Officers Head.
“Excuse me, Commander,” said the woman. Her face reddened. On each shoulder were two silver bars.
Maxwell glanced at her leather name tag. “You’re Johnson? One of our new pilots. Welcome to the Roadrunners, Lieutenant. I’m Brick Maxwell, the ops officer.”
B.J. Johnson looked petrified. She shook Maxwell’s hand as if it were a pump handle. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir, I’m still running into things. I’m uh… it’s my first time aboard… you know.” Her face reddened further.
“Everyone does that. I’ve still got the scars from bashing into overheads and knee knockers on my first cruise.”
B.J. looked around the passageway. “Uh, truth is, Commander, I’m lost. I was trying to find the ladder up to the hangar deck. Isn’t there a ceremony we’re supposed to attend?”
“Follow me. I was headed there myself. By the way, B.J., we go by call signs in the squadron. You can call me Brick.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, Brick.” Still red-faced, B.J. followed Maxwell to the ladder that led to the hangar deck.
White-uniformed officers were clustered around the podium. The ship’s band, also wearing dress whites, was limbering up their instruments. In the background was a parked F/A-18, angled so that the four victory symbols were clearly visible.
The ceremony was supposed to begin at 1600 hours. Maxwell saw Admiral Mellon standing with his aide and a couple of staff officers behind the podium. The admiral wore a sour look. He looked, Maxwell thought, like a man waiting for a root canal.
Killer DeLancey and Babcock, the civilian Maxwell remembered from the mission debriefing yesterday, were huddled together. DeLancey was listening to Babcock, grinning if he had just won the lottery.
Same old DeLancey, thought Maxwell. He had found a new patron.
Watching DeLancey grin and preen made Maxwell think again about his own career. Coming back to the fleet at this late stage — he’d just been promoted to the rank of commander — was definitely not your usual career path. You were supposed to work your way up the hierarchical pyramid. After serving in several different grades at the squadron officer level, then you became a department head — operations officer, maintenance officer, administrative officer.