Mayday (4 page)

Sloan walked to the far end of the console and looked at the gauges. But his thoughts were on Hennings now. Hennings seemed
to be almost uninterested in the testing. Uninterested in Sloan, too, which was unusual since Sloan was certain that Hennings
was to make an oral evaluation report on him. Sloan felt that almost forgotten ensign’s paranoia creeping over him and shook
it off quickly. A seasoned officer turns everything to his advantage. He would turn Hennings’s detachment to his advantage,
if necessary.

Hennings stood suddenly and moved nearer to Sloan. He spoke in a low voice. “Commander, will the data be ready as soon as
the testing is complete? Will you need to do anything else?”

Sloan nodded. “Just a few qualitative forms.” He tapped his fingers on a stack of paperwork on the console desk. “Thirty minutes
or so.”

Hennings nodded. The room was silent except for the ambient sounds of electronics.

Randolf Hennings let his eyes wander absently over the equipment in the tight room. The functions of this equipment were not
entirely a mystery to him. He recognized some of it and guessed at what looked vaguely familiar, as a man might do who had
been asleep for a hundred years and had awakened in the twenty-first century.

When he was a younger man he had asked many questions of his shipboard technicians and officers. But as the years passed,
the meaning of those young men’s answers eluded him more each time. He was, he reminded himself, a product of another civilization.
He had been born during the Great Depression. His older brother had died of a simple foot infection. He remembered, firsthand,
a great deal about World War II, the Nazis and the Japs, listening to the bulletins as they came across the radio in their
living room. He recalled vividly the day that FDR died, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the day the Japanese surrendered, the day, as
a teenager, that he saw a television screen for the first time. He remembered the family car, a big, old, round-bodied Buick,
and how his mother had never learned to drive it. They’d come an incredibly long way in a short span of time. Many people
had chosen not to go along on that fast ride. Others had become the helmsmen and navigators. Then there were people like himself
who found they were in positions of command without understanding what those helmsmen and navigators were doing, where they
were going.

He walked over to the single porthole in the room and pushed back the blackout shade. The tranquil sea calmed his troubled
conscience. He remembered when he had finally made the decision that he would have to evaluate his men on their personal traits
and then trust their technical advice accordingly. Men, he understood. Human beings did not really change from generation
to generation. If his sixty-seven years were good for anything, it was that he had arrived at an understanding of the most
complex piece of machinery of all. He could read the hearts and souls of his fellow men; he had peered into the psyche of
Commander James Sloan, and he did not like what he saw.

Petty Officer Loomis turned around. “Commander Sloan.” He pointed to a video display screen.

Sloan walked over to the screen. He looked at the message. “Good news, Admiral.”

Hennings closed the blackout shade and turned around.

Sloan spoke as he read the data. “Our elements are in position. The F-18 is on station, and the C-130 is also in position.
We need only the release verification.” He glanced at the digital countdown clock. Five minutes.

Hennings nodded. “Fine.”

Sloan gave a final thought to the one command check he was not able to complete. If the test had not been a secret, and if
delay had not meant possible cancellation, and if cancellation had not meant potential disadvantage in a future war, and his
career weren’t in the balance, and if Hennings weren’t evaluating him with those steely gray eyes, and if it wasn’t time for
the Navy to gets its balls back, and if that damn digital clock weren’t running down . . . then, maybe, maybe he would have
waited. Four minutes.

The video screen’s display updated again, and Sloan looked at the short message. He read it first to himself, smiled, and
then read it aloud. “The C-130 has launched its target and it was last tracked as steady and on course. The target drone has
accelerated to Mach 2, and is now level at sixty-two thousand feet.” He glanced at the digital countdown. “In two minutes
and thirty seconds I can instruct Lieutenant Matos to begin tracking the target and engage it at will.”

“Would you like another drink?”

“No, I think I’ll wait.” John Berry put down his empty glass and looked up at the flight attendant. Her shoulder-length brunette
hair brushed across the top of her white blouse. She had narrow hips, a slender waist, and very little visible makeup. She
looked like one of those models from a tennis club brochure. Berry had spoken to her several times since the flight had begun.
Now that the job of serving the midmorning snack was nearly finished, she seemed to be lingering near his seat. “Not too crowded,”
Berry said, motioning around the half-empty forward section of the Straton 797.

“Not here. In the back. I’m glad I pulled first-class duty. The tourist section is full.”

“High season in Tokyo?”

“I guess. Maybe there’s a special on electronics factory tours.” She laughed at her own joke. “Are you going on business or
pleasure?”

“Both. It’s a pleasure to be away on business.” Disclosures can come out at unusual moments. Yet, for John Berry, that particular
moment wasn’t an unusual one. The young flight attendant was everything that Jennifer Berry was not. Even better, she seemed
to be none of the things that Jennifer Berry had become. “Sharon?” He pointed to the flight attendant’s name tag.

“Yes, Sharon Crandall. From San Francisco.”

“John Berry. From New York. I’m going to see Kabushi Steel in Tokyo. Then a metal-fabricating company in Nagasaki. No electronics
factories. I go twice a year. The boss sends me because I’m the tallest. The Japanese like to emphasize their differences
with the West. Short salespeople make them nervous.”

“Really?” She looked at him quizzically. She grinned. “No one ever told me that before. Are you kidding?”

“Sure.” He hesitated. His throat was dry. Just the thought of asking this young woman to sit with him was mildly unnerving.
Yet all he wanted was someone to talk to. To pass the time. To pretend for a few relaxing moments that the situation in New
York didn’t exist.

Jennifer Berry’s tentacles reached even this far. Her presence stretched across a continent and over an ocean. The image of
his difficult and complaining wife lay over John Berry’s thoughts. Their two teenaged children—a son and a daughter— were
on his mind, too. They had grown further from him every year. The family tie had become mainly their shared name. Shared living
space and shared documents. Legalities.

The rest of what was termed these days their lifestyle was, to Berry, a cruel joke. An outrageously expensive house in Oyster
Bay that he had always disliked. The pretentious country club. The phony bridge group. Hollow friendships. Neighborhood gossip.
The cocktails, without which all of Oyster Bay, along with the neighboring suburbs, would have committed mass suicide long
ago. The futility. The silliness. The boredom. What had happened to the things he cared about? He could hardly remember the
good times anymore. The all-night talks with Jennifer, and their lovemaking, before it became just another obligation. Those
camping trips with the kids. The long Sunday breakfasts. The backyard baseball games. It seemed like another life. It seemed
like a lifetime ago.

John Berry found himself dwelling on the past more and more. Living in the past. A 1960s song on the radio made him yearn
for Dayton, Ohio, his hometown. An old movie or serial on television brought on a nostalgia so acute that his heart ached.

He looked up at the young woman standing over him. “How about having a drink with me? Never mind. I know . . . you’re on duty.
Then how about a Coke?” Berry was speaking quickly. “I’ll tell you about Japanese businessmen. Japanese customs. Very educational.
Wonderful information. Great stuff to know if you ever want to become an international corporation.”

“Sure,” she said. “Love to hear it. Just give me a few minutes to finish up. A few more trays. Ten minutes.” Sharon Crandall
gathered Berry’s tray and half a dozen others. She smiled at him as she walked past on her way to the service elevator in
the rear of the first class compartment.

Berry turned and watched as she stepped inside. The narrow elevator was barely big enough for both her and the trays. In a
few seconds she had disappeared behind the sliding door, on her way down to the below-decks galley beneath the first-class
compartment.

John Berry sat alone for a minute and collected his scattered thoughts. He got out of his seat and stretched his arms. He
looked around the spacious first-class section. Then he looked out the window at the two giant engines mounted beneath the
Straton’s right wing.
They could swallow the Skymaster. One gulp
, he thought.

His company, Taylor Metals, owned a four-seat Cessna Twin Skymaster for the sales staff, and if Berry had any real interest
left, flying was it. He supposed that flying was mixed up somehow with his other problems. If he found the earth more tolerable,
he might not grab every opportunity to fly above it.

Berry turned toward the rear of the first-class cabin. He saw that the lavatories were vacant. He looked at his wristwatch.
He had time to wash up and comb his hair before Sharon returned.

On his way to the rear of the cabin, Berry glanced out the window again. He marveled at the enormous size and power of the
giant airliner’s engines. He marveled, too, at the solitude of space. What he failed to notice was that they were not alone.
He did not see the tiny dot against the horizon that was rapidly approaching the Straton airliner.

Lieutenant Peter Matos held the F-18’s control stick with his right hand. He inched the power levers slightly forward. The
two General Electric engines spooled up to a higher setting. Matos continued to fly his Navy fighter in wide, lazy circles
at 54,000 feet. He held the craft’s airspeed constant at slightly less than Mach 1. He was loitering, flying nondescript patterns
inside a chunk of international airspace known to his country’s military as Operations Area R-23. He was waiting for a call
from Home. It was overdue and he was just beginning to wonder about it when his earphones crackled with the beginning of a
message. It was the voice of Petty Officer Kyle Loomis, whom Matos vaguely knew.

“Navy three-four-seven, this is Homeplate, over.” Matos pressed a button on the top of his control stick “Roger, Homeplate.
Three-four-seven. Go ahead, over.” He began another turn through the tranquil Pacific sky.

The voice of the electronics mate in Room E-334 carried loud and clear. “The target has been released. We estimate an initial
in-range penetration of your operational area within two minutes. Operation status is now changed to Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey.
I say again, Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey.”

“Roger, Homeplate. I read Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey.” Matos released the transmit button and simultaneously pulled back on the
control stick. Foxtrot-alpha-whiskey. Fire-at-will. He would never see the target, the hit, or the destruction except on his
radar, yet the predator’s stimuli were there and his heart beat faster. The F-18 tightened its turn, and Matos felt the increase
in G forces as he accelerated around the remainder of the circle he had been flying. He leveled the fighter on a northeasterly
heading and spooled up the engines again. He felt like a knight charging into the field to do battle.

Peter Matos, like most military men who were not born in the continental United States, was more loyal, more patriotic, more
enthusiastic than the native-born Americans. He had noticed this right from the beginning. Wherever the flags of the American
military had flown—Germany, Guam, the Canal Zone, the Philippines—young men had rallied to those flags. There was also the
Cuban officer subculture, the Mexicans, the Canadians, and others who saw the American armed forces as more than a military
organization, more than a necessary expense, or just an organization you sent your tax money to, but never your sons. To men
like Pedro Matos, who came out of the most abject poverty that his homeland, Puerto Rico, had to offer, the military was home,
family, friends, life itself.