Читать книгу Night Trap - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 30

Alan Craik lived in two worlds now. Squadron intelligence officers worked in the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC), planning routine missions, massaging raw intelligence. But aircrewmen flew with their squadron. And he was both. He had to balance the two, pretend that each of these prickly groups had his first priority.

But this night was different. He had finished his work as intelligence officer—forty hours of preparation and briefing—and he could take up his work as aircrewman without apology. If he was allowed.

He had been working to prepare the operation called KNIGHTHOOD. It was the reason for the doubling of the carrier presence in the Gulf, the reason for his father’s boat’s shadowing his own. Its generalities had been planned in Washington; its specifics were completed by men like Alan on the carriers; its execution would be done by men like his father.

An Iranian radar post was to be destroyed. KNIGHTHOOD would open a hole in the Iranian IADS by exploiting low-level coastal radar gaps, which would be used by two strike groups. Iranian casualties were meant to be light—casualties were bad press, even with a secret operation—but their military would learn how porous their fortress was. Perhaps a higher level would then understand how expensive terrorism could become.

Alan’s work in CVIC gave him solid knowledge of what his own squadron would do, and he had begged his skipper and the ops officer to let him go. Christine was to be a mission tanker, fairly safe (he assured them) off the coast. He was a pretty good TACCO now, he had dared to say—ask Rafe, ask Senior Chief Craw. But they had put him off—because, he believed, he was Mick Craik’s son and they didn’t know how his father would take it.

He wanted to go more than he had ever wanted anything—more than he had wanted Kim, more than he had wanted that high school letter. He wanted the reality of it, and he knew that this want was different from the other wants, which seemed of another kind, even of another world. He wanted it, he thought, to be a man.

And, apparently, he wasn’t to have it.

He knew every plane going out that night, every piece of the complex series of raids designed to peel the onion of the Iranian IADS and leave them to face the morning with a huge breech in their defenses. And he wasn’t to be among them.

He sat with a cup of coffee before him, hurt as he thought he had never been hurt before. Around him, the level of voices was higher, somehow tighter, the ones who were going sounding too loud and too happy. A few who couldn’t wait were already fiddling with their gear.

Maybe, he thought, it’s better in the long run not to get what you want. Maybe disappointment makes you a man. Maybe the moon is made of green cheese.

“Been looking all over for you.” The voice was right above his head. A hand fell on his shoulder. His skipper’s.

Alan looked up. His heart lurched. The hand squeezed. The skipper was looking away from him, off to a group of pilots; he shouted, “Gilder, I gotta talk to you, pronto!” He turned back, looked down. Their eyes locked. “You’re going. Get into your flight gear.” The hand lifted and fell—a pat on the shoulder. And then the skipper was gone.

He was going.

Alan was only human. He longed to go back to CVIC and drop just a hint, to see the envy of the other IOs, that he was going on a real mission. Cheap thrill, he thought—but he almost did it anyway, saved from doing something tacky and small-minded and altogether satisfying because there just wasn’t time. Instead, he bolted for his stateroom and started to twist himself into his flight suit.

His roommate looked up from a magazine, said with total conviction, “Lucky fuckin’ prick!”

He already knew.

Surfer was a seasoned flyer, had taken him as a roommate instead of another pilot so as to teach him some substratum of ethics or manners that wasn’t in the books.

“I wish it was you.”

“Like hell.” Surfer rolled the magazine in his hands. “Skipper asked me, I told him he goddam better let you go.” He gestured with the magazine. “You deserve it.”

“We’ll probably go down on deck.”

“You’ll probably be the first Spy in history with a fuckin’ Air Medal you mean.” Surfer nodded with sad conviction. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Alan finally got his left foot into his boot and grabbed his helmet bag from his rack. “Don’t wait up, dear.” Surfer gave him the finger as he closed the hatch.

Mick Craik went over the details of his mission for the hundredth time while two para-riggers moved around him, squires to a knight in green armour. One part of his brain—the part that was squadron skipper—noted that Tiernan, the problem child of the rigger shop, was suddenly conscientious about his duties, made a mental note that maybe what Tiernan needed was more responsibility, not less. Another part of his mind—the NavAv part—noted that his helmet had finally been retaped; his personal coat of arms, a fluorescent orange net catching a burning plane, glowed from the LPO’s desk in the corner. The seasoned pilot in him noted that his young bombardier-navigator was having a more difficult time than usual getting his gear on. Kid was nervous.

Hell, he was nervous himself, and he was one of three people on this strike who had actually done it before. The difference was, he thought, that the boy was probably worried about intangibles: bravery, cowardice, the unknown. Craik was nervous because he didn’t like the plan: not enough gas in the air, some of it too far forward; too much contempt for the Iranians, not enough worry about blue on blues over the target.

But that wasn’t really it. What he really didn’t like was that the targets had been set in Washington. He was leader for the whole strike, but he was an arrowhead on an arrow launched by politicians. He liked a different plan, his own plan, with a different target picked out here by the people on the spot: bomb the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbas. No chance of error, and a very direct message.

He patted the BN on the shoulder, gave him a reassuring smile. “Piece of cake,” he said.

Miles away, his son ran down the main portside passageway toward the aviators’ wardroom, the eatery known locally as the Dirty Shirt. His nose told him that chocolate-chip cookies had just been baked, and he meant to get some for his crew and fill his thermos with coffee. Rafe called him “the stewardess,” but there was no barb to it; in fact, Alan believed that it was one of the things that the Spy did that made his crew think he might be a regular guy after all. He scooped twenty or so out of the cookie bucket with a practiced hand, ignored the mutters and shouts of the onlookers, and dumped them into his helmet bag. He filled his thermos (L.L. Bean, stainless, one of the few gifts from his mother that was right on target, considered so valuable by the crew that it had never been part of a practical joke) and bolted back down the passageway. He left behind a circle of indignant Tomcat RIOs, equally upset that he was flying while they sat on their asses and that he had taken two dozen cookies.

Can’t take a joke, fuck ’em, as Rafe liked to say.