ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (9 page)

Nikki had declined the navy’s offer of extended leave,
choosing instead to return to active duty where she reasoned she would be too
busy to dwell on her loss; however any ideas she had harboured about an
immediate re-assignment had proved overly optimistic.

For several days Nikki had found herself kicking her
heels in the B.O.Q at Nellis. The trouble with Bachelor Officers Quarters when
you were in transit through a base was that they were basically four walls and
a ceiling, a motel room without the TV. She had been assigned an aircraft but
lacked both a RIO and a carrier to fly it to.

For the most part she had kept to herself, and either
the vibes her mood projected or the unjustified suspicion that others regarded
her as a Jonah served to deter company. Either way, the USAF pilot’s, Marine
and Navy aviators who also awaited assignments kept their distance from the
newly promoted Lieutenant Commander who wore a face like a week’s worth of wet
Mondays.     

Two nights previously in the Officers Club, she had
been sat on her own and trying to ignore the conversation going on nearby. A
quartet of reservists were trying to out bemoan one another on the woes of
being plucked from the cockpits of 747s and finding themselves back in uniform.

From the far side of the club had come derisive
laughter and the chant of ‘bullshit’, which had pulled her away from her own
brooding thoughts. With some annoyance she had at first turned to see what the
commotion was about and then had been drawn toward the large knot of men and
women who had gone quiet again as they listened to whomever was sat in their
midst.

“I’m telling you straight, every time one of the
bastards got on my tail they overshot when I put the anchors on, and I shot
them in the arse.”

“Five bandits?” asked one of the onlookers.

“In the same fight?” another asked

“Och aye, one after the other.
Bang, bang, wallop, wallop, wallop!”

Nikki had eased through the throng and seen Sandy sat
at a table with a dozen brews in front of him and a vivacious Afro-American
honey sat on his lap. Clad in skin-tight jeans, denim shirt and cowboy boots
she was the only one in the room not in uniform and Nikki assumed the Fleet Air
Arm pilot had smuggled her on to the base.

“Hey, Sandy.”

Sandy looked at her smirking at him and rolled his
eyes, his face dropping.

“Hey, Nikki.”

Nikki addressed Sandy’s audience.

“I had the misfortune to be stuck in a life raft for several
days with this guy, and I was ready to feed myself to the sharks rather than
hear that line another time…only back then it was
two
Mig-31s, not five.”

The beers sat in front of Sandy were obviously
war beers, tokens of appreciation for his service and
warrior status, and their donors reclaimed them swiftly from a protesting
Highlander.

“Och, come on now guys…the heat of battle and all
that…”

Even the beer in his hand was snatched away 

Sandy’s audience departed, leaving him crestfallen.

“Well thank you very much indeed Nikki, and after I
shared the warmth of my Gaelic heart to keep you alive too!”

She bent to plant a peck on the top of his head.

“Your liver will thank me when you’re in your fifties,
Sandy.” She took a now vacant seat at the table and they caught up on events
since arriving at Pearl.

Sandy had discovered that the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air
Arm currently had over twenty pilots apiece waiting to fly their dwindling
inventory of Sea Harriers. So, as he was still shown as attached to the US Pacific
Fleet he had offered his services to the Navy and would be ferrying an AV-8B
out to the USS
Essex
very early the next day, via a stopover in Hawaii.

“So are you a ferry pilot or something?”

“No Nikki, I’m joining one of your VMA Harrier
squadrons. I’ll be showing US Navy aviators how the Fleet Air Arm does it.”

“VMA doesn’t mean Navy Scotty, they’re Marines.”

“Oh, grief!”
Sandy groaned.

“It’ll do you good.” Nikki had said.
“Spending all of your off duty hours running around, and around,
and around the flight deck with a pack on your back.”

Sandy looked crestfallen.

“Sounds just like our marine pilots,
wasting time by training to walk to war when they’ve got perfectly good
aircraft to carry them there at a fraction of the effort.”

She hadn’t seen or spoken Sandy since the
Hood
had
docked, so she was gratified to learn that he at least had been at Chubby’s
funeral.

Very little was said about her late RIO, she had done
all her crying aboard the
Hood
, and she had learnt that the Brits deal with the
death of a colleague in combat in a very stoical fashion. There are no group
hugs; no tears spilt into one’s beer, and in fact little outward displays of
grief. They raise a glass to toast their fallen friends’ memory and that is all
until the war is over, when the business of proper mourning begins.

Sandy’s friend had re-seated herself on a chair and
listened quietly while they talked, merely nodding a ‘hi’ to Nikki when Sandy
had introduced her as

“And this is Candy, she’s delicious.”

Not until Sandy had excused himself to visit the john
had the girl really spoken.

“So you’re Triple ‘A’ then?”

Nikki had been unsure what the she was talking about,
but if Sandy’s line shooting had included herself in his scoring then she was
going to do some facial rearranging once he got back.

“Excuse me?”

“Lt Cmdr. Nikki Pelham, four kills…Almost an Ace.”

Much relieved, she had allowed a laugh to escape.

“So Lt Cmdr. you know Sandy pretty well, huh?”

“I guess as well as you can after sharing a life raft,
a sub full of sailors and a three birth sailing boat occupied by six.”

“Okay, then at least that part of his story isn’t
total BS, but did he really disarm and capture a Chinese aviator?”

Nikki laughed again.

“Sorry but no, the guy had already surrendered to an
elderly English couple before they picked us up. There was absolutely no
hand-to-hand combat involved. The guy was just a kid really, not much different
from one of us.”

She saw Sandy emerged from the door leading to the
head and decided to find out what relationship he had with this
snake-hips-in-denim civilian before he returned.

“So, are you and Sandy,
good
friends?”    

“We only hooked up this afternoon, but if
I see you at breakfast I’ll let you know.” Candice had added a wink for
emphasis, so on the premise that two’s company and three’s a crowd, Nikki had
left them to it and retired for an early night.

The phone in her room had woken her just after she’d
dropped off to sleep; informing her that she had a RIO, one Lt (jg) LaRue. C
and they were to be in the briefing room at 1000hrs. This was to be her last
night at Nellis AFB.

Sandy hadn’t been at breakfast in the mess hall, he
had flown out at five a.m. Nikki went easy on the coffee and ate only toast and
jelly, natural bodily functions were no respecters of long range flights and
she loathed the pee tube. Having taken the edge off her appetite, she picked up
her
small canvas bag of belongings and
headed out.

The shock of finding Candice, now in flight suit and
sipping coffee, had caused Nikki to pause half way through the briefing room
door, and check that she had in fact found the right room.

On seeing Nikki, Candice put the cup down and stood to
deliver a smart salute.

“Ma’am, Lieutenant LaRue. I have been assigned as your
Radar Intercept Officer, Ma’am.”

She had looked over at the briefing officer who had
given a wry smile, shooting his eyebrows up in confirmation that this was no
joke.

They had been briefed on their route through the air
defence zones, radio frequencies, IFF codes and the tanker plan, where Nikki
had kept an eye on her RIO, ensuring she was getting every detail down
correctly and being reassured that this girl whom she had suspected the
previous evening of being some kind of aviator groupie, seemed to have the
competence she would have hoped for. 

It had not been until after they had disconnected from
a tanker 500 miles off the West Coast and Nikki had set a course for the tanker
they would meet several hours hence that they could relax.

“So tell me lieutenant, how did that hot date go?”
There had been a few seconds before a reply had been forthcoming.

“Begging your pardon ma’am, but that friend of yours
is one sick puppy.”

It had taken her back a bit.

“Say what?”

“My momma didn’t bring me up to get butt naked with
no
cross-dresser with a shiv.” Nikki had been lost for words
until Candice had explained.

“We sneaked back to his room and he went into the
bathroom, so I got comfortable, if you know what I mean?”

Nikki had a fair idea.

“You got naked?”

“Yes’m…and then he came out the bathroom in a skirt…”

The scene, or how it must have been,
jumped into Nikki’s mind.

“A kilt.”

“Whatever ma’am, but he had some dead animal hanging
off the front of it….”

“A Sporran.”

“Okay, it looked like road kill, but if you say it was
a dead Sporran, then that’s what it was. He had a knife too, a shiv, stuck in
the top of one of his socks.”

“It’s called a Dirk, Lieutenant…Sandy was
wearing traditional Highland dress.”

“Well I don’t know why their women folks
put up with it. A man should be a man and not go dressing up in women’s
things!”     

Nikki killed the intercom and sat there with her
shoulders shaking in helpless laughter for several minutes.

When she had gotten it out of her system she’d flicked
the intercom back on.

“Hey, LaRue?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“They call you Candy or Candice?”

“I prefer Candice, Ma’am.”

“Okay, so do I, so from now on unless there’s brass or
unfamiliar company about, then I’m just Nikki, okay?”

She had decided that this RIO would do but she had
ensured the intercom was switched off before saying a final goodbye to her
previous RIO.

Across the room Candice murmured something in her
sleep that snapped Nikki out of her reflective mood and then she too closed her
eyes and slept.

RAF Gütersloh, Casualty embarkation area:

Despite the pounding head, throbbing shoulder and
broken ribs that made each breath painful, Ray Tessler felt like a fraud as he
sat amongst more seriously wounded men and women who waited for the Royal Air
Force Tri-Star air ambulance to begin loading. He reasoned it out for himself
in his head, frequently, that with broken fingers he couldn’t handle a weapon
so he would be a liability on the firing line, but having told himself that he
took one look at a seriously burned corporal from the Royal Tank Regiment,
hooked up to saline drips on a gurney nearby, and felt like a fraud all over
again.

The hospitals nearest the fighting were shedding
themselves of those already in the beds, in order to cater for those that would
soon require them. Ray was going back to the UK on a civilian aircraft pressed
into service to evacuate those wounded who didn’t need the air ambulance
facilities, but they shared the embarkation area, a large hangar that the
heaters struggled to warm.

A door opened at the back of the hangar to admit more
evacuees, and Ray saw a friendly face, that of the driver of the Warrior he’d
been in when he’d been injured.
Ray
raised an arm to wave, and immediately regretted it, but the Guardsman saw him
and made his way over, one arm heavily bandaged and limping as he went.

Ray had come to the battalion as a battlefield
replacement, vacating a desk job at RHQ to join the unit just before it was
relieved at Magdeburg, for its advance to contact towards the Soviet airborne drop
zones. The Warriors driver on the other hand, had been with the battalion for
three years and had seen every fight it had been in since the start of the
war.   

“How you doing, sir?”

“Not bad. I feel like I’ve been stuffed into a washing
machine and put through a fast spin cycle, but otherwise I’m okay…how’s
yourself
?”

“They dug a half dozen bits of metal out of me, but
apparently the grenade that did it was far enough away it’ll just leave some
interesting scars I can blag a few free beers off of in the pub back home.”