Though as long as it’d been since he last jumped, he’d probably wind up cratering the mesquite.
The TF-104 halted in the middle of the taxiway. An American, carefully donning his saucer hat as he stepped out of the back door of the car, waved to Kelly and shouted something not quite audible. The man’s upturned face looked anxious in the aircraft’s clearance lights.
Kelly started to get out and was pulled up short by the feed of his oxygen mask. He unhooked it and swung himself out of the cockpit. He felt as if someone had conducted a search and destroy mission in his sinuses. He could not find the last of the miniature toeholds in the aircraft’s polished skin. Grimacing, the veteran let himself drop. The officer who had just gotten out of the car gave a squawk when Kelly sprawled at his feet, but there was no harm done.
“Mr. Kelly,” said the officer, gripping the veteran by both forearms and lifting, “we have a flight waiting for you. They’ve just been cleared.”
Kelly wasn’t in any shape to object to the manhandling. He ended it the quickest, simplest way by entering the car as if it were a burrow and he a fox going to ground. The greeting officer, another captain, hesitated a moment before he ran around to the far door. The driver, watching them in the mirror, had the car rolling even before the door closed.
“Where am I cleared to this time?” Kelly asked, enunciating carefully. He straightened himself in the seat as precisely as if he were a diplomat arriving at a major conference. He wasn’t so wrecked that he couldn’t act for a few minutes like the VIP these people had been led to expect. He didn’t know of any reason why he had to put on a front, but it was cheaper to do so than to learn later that he should have.
“Sir, I really don’t have that information,” the captain replied. “From, ah – from rumor, I’m not sure that the flight crew does. This flight was originally headed for Rome, but that’s maybe been changed along with the – the cargo.”
They were speeding toward one of the C-141’s, whose white-painted upper surfaces drew a palette of colors from the rising sun and made the gray lower curves almost disappear. The wings, mounted high so that the main spar did not cut the cabin in half, now drooped under the weight of four big turbofans, but in flight they would flex upward as they lifted the huge mass of the aircraft and cargo.
Kelly was thoroughly familiar with C-141’s, the logistics workhorse of the Lebanon Involvement. They were aluminum cylinders which hauled cargo very well and very efficiently, so this one was of particular interest to him only because he was apparently making the next stage of his journey on it.
The scene on the pad was a great deal more unusual.
Separated from the aircraft by thirty yards and what looked like a platoon of Air Police was a huge clot of civilians, women and children. The driver had to swing wide around them in order to approach the plane’s lowered tail ramp. As he did so, a number of civilians darted from the larger group and blocked the vehicle’s path.
The driver swore softly and slammed the transmission into reverse.
A woman struggled up to Kelly’s window. Her rage-distorted face might have been cute under other circumstances, and the amazing puffiness of her torso was surely because she was wearing at least six outfits on top of one another. A child of perhaps three, similarly overdressed, tugged at the tail of the long cloth coat on top; and because she held an infant in her left arm, she had to drop her suitcase in order to hammer on the window while she screamed, “You bastard! You’ve got to let Dawn and Jeffie aboard! What kind of – ”
An airman wearing a helmet instead of a cap caught the woman from behind by wrist and shoulder, dragging her back as the car reversed in a quick arc. More grim-faced police spread themselves in a loose barricade against the would-be refugees while the driver accelerated toward the ramp.