“I know. I’m sorry.” Jackson eased off. “It’s just that it’s so easy to needle you on this — I mean, what are friends for? You done good, Jack. We’re proud of you. But for Christ’s sake, be careful, okay? This hero shit gets people killed.”
“I hear you.”
“Is it true about Cathy?” Robby asked.
“Yep. The doc confirmed it the same day they took the cast off.”
“Way to go, pop! I’d say that calls for another — a light one.” Robby held his cup out, and Jack poured. “Looks like the bottle’s about had it, too.”
“It’s my turn to buy the next one, isn’t it?”
“It’s been so long, I don’t remember,” Robby admitted. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
“So they have you back in airplanes?”
“Next Monday they’ll let me back in a Tomcat,” Jackson replied. “And come summer, it’s back to the work they pay me for.”
“You got orders?”
“Yeah, you’re looking at the prospective XO of VF-41.” Robby held his cup up in the air.
The executive officer of Fighter Squadron 41, Ryan translated. “That’s all right, Rob!”
“Yeah, it’s not bad, considering I’ve been a black shoe for the past seven months.”
“Right out on carriers?”
“No, we’ll be on the beach for a while, down at Oceana, Virginia. The squadron’s deployed now on Nimitz. When the boat comes back for refit, the fighters stay on the beach for refresher training. Then we’ll probably redeploy on Kennedy. They’re reshuffling the squadron assignments. Jack, it’ll be good to strap that fighter back on! I’ve been here too long.”
“We’re gonna miss you and Sissy.”
“Hey, we don’t leave till summer — they’re making me finish out the school year — and Virginia Beach isn’t all that far away. Come on down and visit, for crying out loud. You don’t have to fly. Jack. You can drive,” Jackson pointed out.
“Well, you’ll probably be around for the new kid.”
“Good.” Jackson finished off his drink.
“Are you and Sissy going anywhere for Christmas?”
“Not that I know of. I can’t, really; most of the holidays I’m gonna be flying down at Pax.”
“Okay, come on over to our place for dinner — three-ish.”
“Cathy’s family isn’t –”
“No,” Ryan said as he tucked everything back where it belonged. Robby shook his head.
“Some folks just don’t catch on,” the pilot observed.
“Well, you know how it is. I don’t worship at the temple of the Almighty Dollar anymore.”
“But you managed to do a job on the collection basket.”
Jack grinned. “Yeah, you might say that.”
“That reminds me. There’s a little outfit outside Boston that’s gonna hit it big.”
“Oh?” Jack’s ears perked up.
“It’s called Holoware, Ltd., I think. They came up with new software for the computers on fighter planes — really good stuff, cuts a third off the processing time, generates intercept solutions like magic. It’s set up on the simulator down at Pax, and the Navy’s going to buy it real soon.”
“Who knows?”
Jackson laughed as he got his things. “The company doesn’t know yet. Captain Stevens down at Pax just got the word from the guys out at Topgun. Bill May out there — I used to fly with Bill — ran the stuff for the first time a month ago, and he liked it so much that he almost got the Pentagon boys to cut through all the bullshit and just buy the stuff. It got hung up, but DCNO-Air is on it now, and they say Admiral Rendall is really hot for it. Thirty more days, and that little company is going to get a Christmas present. A little late,” Robby said, “but it’ll fill one big stocking. Just for the hell of it, I checked the paper this morning, and sure enough, they’re listed on the American Exchange. You might want to check it out.”
“What about you?”
The pilot shook his head. “I don’t play the market, but you still fool around there, right?”
“A little. Is this classified or anything?” Jack asked.
“Not that I know of. The classified part is how the software is written, and they got a real good classification system on that — nobody understands it. Maybe Skip Tyler could figure it out, but I never will. You have to be a nuc to think in ones and zeros. Pilots don’t think digital. We’re analog.” Jackson chuckled. “Gotta run. Sissy’s got a recital tonight.”
” ‘Night, Rob.”
“Low and slow, Jack.” Robby closed the door behind him. Jack leaned back in his chair for a moment. He smiled to himself, then rose and packed some papers into his briefcase.
“Yeah,” he said to himself. “Just to show him that I still know how.”
Ryan got his coat on and left the building, walking downhill past the Preble Memorial. His car was parked on Decatur Road. Jack drove a five-year-old VW Rabbit. It was a very practical car for the narrow streets of Annapolis, and he refused to have a Porsche like his wife used for commuting back and forth to Baltimore. It was dumb, he’d told Cathy about a thousand times, for two people to have three cars. A Rabbit for him, a 911 for her, and a station wagon for the family. Dumb. Cathy’s suggestion that he should sell the Rabbit and drive the wagon was, of course, unacceptable. The little gas engine fired up at once. It sounded too noisy. He’d have to check the muffler. Jack pulled out, turning right, as always, onto Maryland Avenue through Gate Three in the grimly undecorous perimeter wall that surrounded the Academy. A Marine guard saluted him on the way out. Ryan was surprised by that — they’d never done it before.
Driving wasn’t easy. When he shifted, Ryan twisted his left hand inside the sling to grab the wheel while his right hand worked the gearshift. The rush-hour traffic didn’t help. Several thousand state workers were disgorging themselves from various government buildings, and the crowded streets gave Ryan plenty of opportunity to stop and restart from first gear. His Rabbit had five, plus reverse, and by the time he got to the Central Avenue light he was asking himself why he hadn’t gotten the Rabbit with an automatic. Fuel efficiency was the answer — is this worth an extra two miles per gallon”. Ryan laughed at himself as he headed east toward the Chesapeake Bay, then right onto Falcon’s Nest Road.
There was rarely any traffic back here. Falcon’s Nest Road came to a dead end not too far down from Ryan’s place, and on the other side of the road were several farms, also dormant at the beginning of winter. The stubby remains of cornstalks lay in rows on the brown, hard fields. He turned left into his driveway. Ryan had thirty acres on Peregrine Cliff. His nearest neighbor, an engineer named Art Palmer, was half a mile away through heavily wooded slopes and across a murky stream. The cliffs on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay were nearly fifty feet high where Jack lived — those farther south got a little higher, but not much — and made of crumbly sandstone. They were a paleontologist’s delight. Every so often a team from a local college or museum would scour at the base and find fossilized shark teeth that had once belonged to a creature as large as a midget submarine, along with the bones of even more unlikely creatures that had lived here a hundred million years earlier.
The bad news was that the cliffs were prone to erosion. His house was built a hundred feet back from the edge, and his daughter was under strict orders — twice enforced with a spanking — not to go anywhere near the edge. In an attempt to protect the cliff face, the state environmental-protection people had persuaded Ryan and his neighbors to plant kudzu, a prolific weed from the American South. The weed had thoroughly stabilized the cliff face, but it was now attacking the trees near the cliff, and Jack periodically had to go after them with a weed-eater to save the trees from being smothered. But that wasn’t a problem this time of year.
Ryan’s lot was half open and half wooded. The part near the road had once been fanned, though not easily, as the ground was not flat enough to drive a tractor across it safely. As he approached his house, the trees began, some gnarled old oaks, and other deciduous trees whose leaves were gone now, leaving skeletal branches to reach out into the thin, cold air. As he approached the carport, he saw that Cathy was already home, her Porsche and the family wagon parked in the carport. He had to leave his Rabbit in the open.
“Daddy!” Sally yanked open the door and ran out without her jacket to meet her father.
“It’s too cold out here,” Jack told his daughter.