“Did you enjoy your vacation, boy?” Lieutenant Commander Robert Jefferson Jackson was leaning against the door frame.
“It had a few interesting moments, Robby. The sun over — or under — the yardarm yet?”
“Damn straight!” Jackson set his white cap on top of Ryan’s filing cabinet and collapsed unceremoniously into the leather chair opposite his friend’s desk.
Ryan closed the file folder on his draft exam and shoved it into a desk drawer. One of the personal touches in his office was a small refrigerator. He opened it and took out a two-liter bottle of 7-Up, along with an empty bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale, then removed a bottle of Irish whiskey from his desk. Robby got two cups from the table by the door and handed them to Jack. Ryan mixed two drinks to the approximate color of ginger ale. It was against Academy policy to have liquor in one’s office — a stance Ryan found curious, given the naval orientation of the institution — but drinking “ginger ale” was a winked-upon subterfuge. Besides, everyone recognized that the Officer and Faculty Club was only a minute’s walk away. Jack handed one drink over and replaced everything but the empty ginger ale bottle.
“Welcome home, pal!” Robby held his drink up.
“Nice to be back.” The two men clicked their cups together.
“Glad you made it, Jack. You kind of worried us. How’s the arm?” Jackson gestured with his cup.
“Better than it was. You oughta see the cast I started out with. They took it off at Hopkins last Friday. I learned one thing today, though, driving a stick shift through Annapolis with one arm is a bitch.”
“I’ll bet,” Robby chuckled. “Damn if you ain’t crazy, boy.”
Ryan nodded agreement. He’d met Jackson the previous March at a faculty tea. Robby wore the gold wings of a naval aviator. He’d been assigned to the nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, Maryland, as an instructor in the test pilot school until a faulty relay had unexpectedly blasted him clear of the Buckeye jet trainer he’d been flying one fine, clear morning. Unprepared for the event, he’d broken his leg badly. The injury had been serious enough to take him off flight status for six months, and the Navy had assigned him to temporary duty as an instructor in Annapolis, where he was currently in the engineering department. It was an assignment which Jackson regarded as one step above pulling oars in a galley.
Jackson was shorter than Ryan, and much darker. He was the fourth son of a Baptist preacher in southern Alabama. When they’d first met, the officer was still in a cast, and Jackson had asked Ryan if he might want to try his hand at kendo. It was something that Ryan had never tried, the Japanese fencing sport in which bamboo staves are used in place of samurai swords. Ryan had used pugil sticks in the Marines and figured it wouldn’t be too different. He’d accepted the invitation, thinking that his longer reach would be a decisive advantage, particularly on top of Jackson’s reduced mobility. It hadn’t occurred to him that Jackson would first have asked a brother officer for a kendo match. In fact, Ryan later learned, he had. He’d also learned by then that Robby had the blinding quickness and killer instinct of a rattlesnake. By the time the bruises had faded, they were fast friends.
For his part, Ryan had introduced the pilot to the smoky flavor of good Irish whiskey, and they’d evolved the tradition of an afternoon drink or two in the privacy of Jack’s office.
“Any news on campus?” Ryan asked.
“Still teachin’ the boys and girls,” Jackson said comfortably.
“And you’ve started to like it?”
“Not exactly. The leg’s finally back in battery, though. I’ve been spending my weekends down at Pax River to prove I still know how to fly. You know, you made one hell of a flap hereabouts.”
“When I was shot?”
“Yeah, I was in with the Superintendent when the call came in. The ‘soop’ put it on speaker, and we got this FBI-guy askin’ if we got a nut-case teacher in London playing cops and robbers. I said, sure, I know the jerk, but they wanted somebody in the History Department to back me up — mainly they wanted the name of your travel agent, I suppose. Anyway, everybody was out to lunch, and I had to track Professor Billings down in the O-Club, and the superintendent did some runnin’ around, too. You almost ruined the boss’s last golf day with the Governor.”
“Damned near ruined my day, too.”
“Was it like they said in the papers?”
“Probably. The Brit papers got it pretty straight.”
Jackson nodded as he tapped the cigar on Ryan’s ashtray. “You’re lucky you didn’t come home parcel post, boy,” he said.
“Don’t you start, Robby. One more guy tells me I’m a hero, and I’ll flatten him –”
“Hero? Hell, no! If all you honkies were that dumb, my ancestors would have imported yours.” The pilot shook his head emphatically. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you, that hand-to-hand stuff is dangerous””
“If you’d been there, I bet you’d have done the same –”
“No chance! God Almighty, is there anything dumber than a Marine? This hand-to-hand stuff, Jeez, you get blood on your clothes, mess up the shine on your shoes. No way, boy! When I do my killin’, it’ll be with cannon shells and missiles — you know, the civilized way.” Jackson grinned. “The safe way.”
“Not like flying an airplane that decides to blast you loose without warning you first,” Ryan scoffed.
“I dinged my leg some, sure, but when I got my Tomcat strapped to my back. I’m hummin’ along at six hundred-plus knots. Anybody who wants to put a bullet in me, fella, he can do it, but he’s gonna have to work at it.”
Ryan shook his head. He was hearing a safety lecture from someone who just happened to be in the most dangerous business there was — a carrier aviator and a test pilot.
“How’s Cathy and Sally?” Robby asked, more seriously. “We meant to come over Sunday, but we had to drive up to Philadelphia on short notice.”
“It was kinda tough on them, but they came through all right.”
“You got a family to worry about. Jack,” Jackson pointed out. “Leave that rescue stuff to the professionals.” The funny thing about Robby, Jack knew, was his caution. For all the down-home bantering about his life as a fighter pilot, Jackson never took a risk he didn’t have to. He’d known pilots who had. Many were dead. There was not a single man wearing those gold wings who had not lost a friend, and Jack wondered how deeply that had affected Jackson over the years. Of one thing he was sure, though Robby was in a dangerous business, like all successful gamblers he thought things over before he moved his chips. Wherever his body went, his mind had already gone.
“It’s all over, Rob. It’s all behind me, and there won’t be a next time.”
“We’ll put a big roger on that. Who else am I gonna drink with? So how’d you like it over there?”
“I didn’t see very much, but Cathy had a great time, all things considered. I think she saw every castle in the country — plus the new friends we made.”
“That must have been right interesting,” Robby chuckled. The flyer stubbed out his cigar. They were cheap, crooked, evil-smelling little things, and Jack figured that Jackson puffed on them only as part of the Image of the Fighter Pilot. “Not hard to understand why they took a liking to you.”
“They took a liking to Sally, too. They got her started riding horses,” Jack added sourly.
“Oh, yeah? So what are they like?”
“You’d like ’em,” Ryan assured him.
Jackson smiled. “Yeah, I imagine I would. The Prince used to drive Phantoms, so he must be a right guy, and his dad’s supposed to know his way around a cockpit, too. I hear you took the Concorde back. How’d you like it?”
“I meant to ask you about that. How come it was so noisy? I mean, if you’re doing mach-2-plus, why isn’t all the noise behind you?”
Jackson shook his head sadly. “What’s the airplane made out of?”
“Aluminum, I suppose.”
“You suppose the speed of sound is faster in metal than it is in air, maybe?” Jackson asked.
“Oh. The sound travels through the body of the airplane.”
“Sure, engine noise, noise from the fuel pumps, various other things.”
“Okay.” Ryan filed that away.
“You didn’t like it, did you?” Robby was amused at his friend’s attitude toward flying.
“Why does everybody pick on me for that?” Ryan asked the ceiling.
“Because it’s so funny. Jack. You’re the last person in the world who’s afraid to fly.”
“Hey, Rob, I do it, okay? I get aboard, and strap in, and do it.”