after every landing. But they can miss a hairline fracture, especially if a man is thinking about his wife or his debts or his future. Or maybe in this case it was Christine, trying something new.
Anyway, they had lost their hook.
On the flight deck, men in blue jerseys were clearing away the broken hook. Others in red jerseys stood by—the crash crew.
The LSO announced the hooksnap to a stunned audience of four and said that the barrier was being rigged. Asked for their gas status: eight hundred pounds.
Alan, for once, was unworried. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. His father had told him tales of landing crippled aircraft into the “barrier,” which Alan, as a kid, had seen as a giant volleyball net raised across the deck to catch wounded planes. His father used to say he had done it so often they called him “Net” at the club. He said it was the easiest landing in the world.
And, after all, you have no choice. There is no other way to put a hookless aircraft down on a flight deck—not one that keeps the pieces together.
Senior Chief Craw seemed more worried about the smoking computer tape. He unclipped his harness and lunged for the tunnel behind their seats, wrestled with the box and swung it open. The smell got worse. Alan, now concerned for Craw because he was unstrapped and the break might come at any time, grabbed his thermos and, without thinking, poured cold coffee over the fire.
The smell changed from burned electrics to burned coffee.
The plane banked. Craw slammed against his seat and then slipped into it. The plane banked again.
“Make ready!” Rafe growled.
Senior Chief Craw was clumsy getting his straps clipped. The aircraft turned hard, and Craw winced. Alan realized that the man’s hands were burned.
Alan reached up under his own safety toggles and pulled the clips. Free from the waist up, he leaned across the aisle and pushed the Senior Chief back in his seat, then moved the man’s hands away from the straps. Surprisingly, getting the prongs into the clips turned out to be easier on somebody else.
“Here we go!” Rafe said.
Alan slammed back into his seat and reached over his shoulder for his harness straps. They weren’t there. Of course not; he was leaning back on them.
“Ejection positions!” Narc snapped.
He forced himself to move slowly: lean forward, reach up and over your shoulder. Get one. Flip it out into position and pat around for the other. Find it. Lean back. Don’t think about ejecting. Clip one restraint. No problem. Clip the other. Regain your landing posture and brace. Only now do you have time to think, If we’d had to eject while the straps were off, I’d be dead.
And then, he realized that he didn’t feel airsick. He felt fine. His mind was strangely, eerily clear. He felt ready for—was that Death, just down there ahead of them? No, it couldn’t be. He felt ready, then, for whatever came next. It was liberating, not having to think.
He wanted to tell Rafe not to worry; that Rafe would catch the barrier just fine. He wanted to tell his father that he, his son, would be okay in the Navy; give him some slack. Yes, he had needed to experience this. He felt good.
“Good lineup.”
“Four hundred pounds fuel.”
“You’re left.”
“Good lineup.”
“Power.”
“Nose up—nose up—POWER!”
Thirty thousand pounds of airframe hurtled into the net stretched above the wire and the wire strained and the tail rose and the whole mass skidded down the deck to the limit of the wire’s extension and the tail slapped down with a final crack, and alpha golf 707 came to a dead stop.
Christine was home.
She snarled. She still had enough fuel to bitch with.
Rafehausen had put her down with as little damage as could be hoped for. Christine would fly again, even though most barrier survivors are scrap from the moment the net is pulled off.
The LSO had sweated through the calls and brought this bird home. Now, he drawled to the waiting ship:
“Beautiful landing, American flyboy. Welcome aboard USS Franklin D. Roosevelt—your home away from home.”
It was the first hint Alan had that they were on the wrong boat.
He understood perfectly when Rafe’s shaking voice whispered over the intercom, “Nobody say a fucking word to me. Not a fucking word!”
Alan was not feeling too well himself. The coolness of moments before had vanished, leaving, not airsickness, but real nausea. He had been wrong: Death had been waiting on the boat, grinning at Christine as she roared by, throwing sparks like a welder’s torch. Catch you next time, Death had signaled. Or the time after. Or sometime.
Reality check.
Alan breathed in the stinking air and tried to focus on something else. The wrong boat. That meant—his father’s boat. He had just landed on his father’s carrier. That brought him to. He felt the old reaction—welcomed it as relief from the aftershock of the close call—the old shortness of breath and slight dread. Perhaps it was simply expecting too much of every meeting, or perhaps it was fearing that too much was expected of him. Always, always when he was preparing to meet his father in all those years they had lived apart, there had been this reaction.
So he sat in the net-wrapped plane, numbly watching figures in red and orange as they hustled to clear the flight deck for incoming CAP craft, scuttling around Christine like ants servicing the queen.
He loved his father. He feared his father. Where was the balance between those things?
And Alan Craik, thinking only of himself and his father, did not guess, could not guess, that a man who would change his life was out there among the hurrying red jerseys.
0719 Zulu. Brussels.
In a stall of a men’s room in the Brussels airport, the small man stood over the toilet, a cigarette lighter in one hand and the white card in the other. Most days of his adult life, he had gone through this little ceremony, burning the day’s notes to himself, a secret act of defiance and a terrible act of hubris—”wanting to be caught,” the psychologists (whom he despised) would have said. They would have been quite wrong. No part of him, physical or mental, wanted to be caught. The very idea made him smile.
He looked down the list. Two minus signs. He was sorry to have lost them; he would have much preferred those signs to be pluses. The minus signs were like defeats. But they would not discourage him. Depression came more easily with fatigue; he knew himself that well. Still—He flicked the lighter and touched the flame to the corner of the card. As the flame spread toward his fingers he watched Bonner’s name and his question mark disappear, then dropped the burning paper to the water and flushed.
