CARRIER 2: VIPER STRIKE By Keith Douglass

She didn’t answer for a long moment. “Made It? Back in that

warehouse.

When they were questioning you. Was that why you told them you’d talk?”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn’t help feeling that Bayerly must have been reacting on some

level to what was happening to her, comparing it with what had happened

to Sharyl Fitzroy. But he looked so shaken now. Maybe it was best not

to dig too deeply.

“Never mind,” she said. “Made It?” She pressed herself closer. “Hold

me?”

Gently, almost reluctantly, he put his arm around her shoulders.

She’d thought they were going to stay there at the rebel camp all day,

but less than an hour later, uniformed men arrived in jeeps and began

shouting orders. Soldiers kicked out fires, others gathered weapons.

And then Pamela and Bayerly were again on their way north.

1012 hours, 20 January

Fantail, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

Tombstone leaned against the guardrail and looked out to sea. The wake

foamed out beneath his feet, spreading astern all the way to the

horizon. The sky overhead was a clear and piercing blue, but there was

still a dirty, oily tang to the air, the smell of burned rubber,

plastic, and paint. He had the fantail to himself. The entire crew, it

seemed, had turned to in the cleanup, making Jefferson shipshape again

after the attack and fire. He could hear the thump and bang of repair

crews working in the hangar bay, the sounds echoing down the open

machine shop passageway at his back.

His debriefing, the preliminary part of it anyway, was over. It had

been routine and automatic, a recounting of what had happened at the

hotel, and afterwards, at the Kiong Toey warehouse. Made It Bayerly’s

betrayal had been duly recorded. And it was a betrayal … whether the

information which had led to the attack on Jefferson had come from him

or from the three sailors butchered by Hsiao earlier. At the very

least, Bayerly had provided Hsiao with the confirmation he’d needed, and

quite possibly he’d provided details the sailors could not have known.

They were going to nail Made It if they ever found the guy again. Nail

him … and why? He’d tried to stop them from hurting Pamela. The

thought of what might be happening to the two of them at that moment

made him shudder.

It felt as though he’d just reached a new low. He’d abandoned Pamela

and Bayerly. And while he’d run in order to warn the carrier, the fact

was that he’d run … leaving Pamela and a brother aviator behind.

Hardly the behavior expected of a hero.

Slowly, he reached up and unzipped the breast pocket of his flight suit,

where a small lump of metal pressed against his chest. He pulled out

the medal which he had retrieved from its case in his cabin only minutes

earlier.

The Navy Cross. It lay in his palm, catching the afternoon sun, the

blue and white ribbon bright and clean in the light. His fingers closed

over it.

He was no hero. Tombstone knew that, knew it to his very bones, and all

of the medals, all of the television interviews on Earth would not make

things different. Heroes were men like his father who had laid their

lives on the line trying to drop a bridge in downtown Hanoi.

Tombstone remembered his feelings during the Wonsan op. Half the time

he’d been too busy to think, riding on pure training and instinct, and

the rest of the time he’d been scared to death. Landing a damaged

Tomcat on the carrier with his RIO wounded in the backseat … hell,

what else could he have done?

He looked at the medal again. If it hadn’t been for the hero nonsense,

maybe none of this would have happened. Tombstone would have been

flying the recon out of U Feng, not Batman. It would have been him in

the jungle … and maybe Pamela would never have been involved.

He opened his fingers and looked at the medal again. Almost … almost

he cocked his arm to hurl the bit of metal and cloth out into the pale

blue wake.