Chapter 8Another Morning

Baxter

Tasha had been waiting for a gap in Coster's account of Belta. When Cruz asked him about the cruiser's defences, she leaned across the corner of the table toward Kate.

“He called you Kate.”

Kate looked up from her coffee. “Who?”

“Ray. At White Valley, when the MiG was behind you.”

“I remember.”

“He doesn't even use our names.”

“He uses yours,” Baxter said.

“When you tell him to check where I am. That's different.” Tasha turned back to Kate. “He started saying something else first.”

Kate set her cup down. “It's nothing. He needed me to turn.”

“He said it was fewer syllables.”

“Then he can save them somewhere else. I told him to use the call sign.”

Baxter had heard that too. He had also heard the short silence before Ray answered her, and the way she'd said his name after they landed, as though she were testing whether it was the right shape for him.

“Did you know him before?” Tasha asked.

“No.”

“You're sure?”

“I'd remember.” Kate reached for the cake plate. “Are you having that?”

Tasha pushed it across, and Kate divided the last piece between them. She did it carefully, with the edge of her fork, and then went on doing it after the job was finished, squaring off a corner that didn't need squaring, pressing the crumbs into a neat line along the rim of the plate. Baxter had watched her brief eight aircraft through a night approach without a wasted word. He had never seen her fidget.

She noticed him noticing, and put the fork down.

“He's very irritating,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Your lead. I don't know how you stand it. He doesn't talk, he doesn't sit with anyone, he won't use a call sign properly, and he flies round Queen as if we're a school trip.” She picked the fork up again. “It's good cake.”

Baxter, who had heard a great many people describe a great many things as irritating, and had learned to listen for the ones they couldn't stop describing, said nothing at all.

“It is.”

“Pike should promise it more often.”

“I'll suggest it.”

Across the table Coster had progressed from what he had seen at Belta to what he would have done if he'd been allowed to get as far as firing. Cruz was listening with his head tipped to one side. Tasha had turned back toward them in time to tell Coster that he was describing the wrong ship.

“It was the second escort.”

“It was the one with the crane.”

“They both had cranes. The second one had the crane that fell over.”

Coster considered this. “Fine. The one with the crane that fell over.”

Everson had been watching them over his cup with an expression of growing and unholy interest.

“How long have you two been married?” he asked.

Tasha looked at him blankly. “What?”

“You heard.”

“We fly together,” Coster said. “She's my wingman. I'm hers. That's how it works, Chester. You've got one.”

“Mine doesn't correct my ships.”

“Maybe yours should,” said Tasha, and turned back to Coster to establish the colour of the crane.

Everson looked at Cruz. Cruz shook his head very slightly. Everson opened his mouth, and Cruz shook it again, and Everson closed it and drank his coffee with the air of a man who had been robbed of something he was owed. Kate, beside Baxter, had laughed harder at married than anyone at the table, a real laugh, delighted, with her hand over her mouth.

“Oh, leave them alone, Chester,” she said, when she could. “They can't help it. Honestly. Some people just can't see what's in front of their noses.” And she shook her head at the two of them with enormous fondness and complete, untroubled certainty, and went back to her cake.

Cruz looked at Baxter across the table. Baxter looked at his coffee. Neither of them trusted himself to do anything else.

Baxter left them to it when a sailor from the communications office came to find him. The doctor aboard Endurance had asked him to call when he had a moment.

He carried the spare slice as far as the mess door, then went back for a cover. Tasha watched him fit it over the plate.

“Tell him we saved it.”

“I will.”

“And that it's good.”

“He can find that out.”

She followed him as far as the door, out of Queen's hearing, and stopped there with her hand on the frame. Back at the table Kate was saying something to Cruz with her fork.

“He doesn't look at her,” Tasha said.

“I'd noticed.”

“No, I mean—” She frowned, trying to get it right. “When my grandfather died, my grandmother kept his letters in a biscuit tin. She never read them. She said she couldn't. But she always knew where that tin was, in every room of the house. If you moved it to dust, she knew before you'd put it down.” She looked at the covered plate in his hands. “That's how he doesn't look at her.”

Baxter didn't answer at once. He had spent three weeks being unnerved by Ray in a great many ways, some of which he could have listed for Santos in order. It had not once occurred to him to be sorry for him.

Nor, if he was honest, had he needed Tasha to tell him what she had just told him. He'd had the word since White Valley, and had been declining to use it the way he'd decline to mark a student's answer wrong before he was sure. He was sure. The man was in love with Kate Evans. It was absurd, and impossible, and it was the only thing Baxter had seen in three weeks that explained nearly everything else.

Not everything. Love didn't account for the counting, or the circuits over Stalwart, or asking Jenkins twice who had checked Baxter's aircraft. That was the other thing, the thing Tasha had seen on the deck at Deltheim: somewhere, very likely in one of the postings with its name blacked out, Ray had lost people. Baxter would have bet his pension on it. And he had come out of it having made the kind of promise people make at gravesides, and was keeping it with every aircraft he had. Kate was simply the part of the promise he couldn't hide.

“He's only been here three weeks, Tasha.”

“I know,” she said. “That's the part I don't understand.” And she went back to the table to tell Coster he had the crane wrong again.

The communications officer gave him a small office and put the call through. He sat with the cake on a filing cabinet beside him. Santos answered after a delay, apologising because she had been washing her hands.

“You're back?”

“All four. Queen too.”

“And the cake?”

“Coster has taken charge of it.”

“I'll tell the XO her arrangements were appreciated.” Paper moved at her end. “How was the flight?”

“Did Pike give you the report?”

“She gave me the result. I'd like yours.”

Baxter looked at the closed door. “We met the Sharks.”

“I heard.”

“They were friends. Are friends, I suppose. I don't know what tense to use.”

“Who?”

“Webb leads them. I've flown with him. Gone fishing with him. He was talking about the fishing while we were coming in.”

“Trying to persuade you to turn back?”

“He'd already reported us. He said it was too late to let us through.” Baxter rested his elbow on the desk. “I thought if I kept him talking, he might find a reason to do it anyway.”

“Did he?”

“No. There were six MiGs behind them. Ray took those first.”

“And the Sharks?”

“I asked him to keep his fire away from the cockpits.”

She let him describe the first Eagle: the damage to its engine, the room left for Webb to climb, the canopy coming away. He found he could give her the order of the four ejections more easily than the order of the ships at Belta.

“All four got out,” he finished. “Tasha and Coster counted them too. Dealer passed the positions.”

“Have you heard whether they've been picked up?”

“Not yet.”

“Then ask for the report when it comes in.”

“I have.” He moved the receiver to his other hand. “I wanted you to know. After what I brought you about White Valley.”

“I'm glad you did.”

“He didn't take them apart to see what they could do. He put them out of the fight and let them go.”

“Was it a more difficult engagement?”

“For me.”

“I meant for him.”

“Webb's good. So are the others. They were still firing after the first Eagle went down. Ray had to stay clear of them, keep us clear, and hit something on each aircraft that would make the man get out without killing him. In a turning fight. Four times.” He heard his own voice and stopped. “I don't know anyone else who could have done it. I don't know anyone else who'd have tried.”

“Did you have to ask twice?”

“No.”

“Did he answer?”

“Clicks. The usual. But he did what I asked.”

Someone came to Santos's door. She asked them to leave a folder on her desk and came back to the phone.

“Do you think he'd have done it if you hadn't asked?”

“I don't know.”

“Would you have asked if you hadn't known them?”

He looked down at the desk. There was a telephone directory under his forearm, open at a page of local extensions.

“No,” he said. “Probably not.”

“All right.”

“It isn't an order I could give every time we meet a fighter. I know that.”

“You gave it this time.”

“And he could do it. That's what I keep coming back to. It wasn't luck that four men got out.” He turned the directory away from him. “I've been trying to put that next to the Hornet at White Valley.”

“You don't have to make one account replace the other.”

“I'd rather like it to.”

“I know.”

He leaned back. Through the wall he could hear the communications officer asking someone to repeat a number.

“Can you tell me anything?”

“About my appointment with him?”

“Yes.”

“No, Professor. What do you need to know?”

“Whether I can rely on him.”

“Pike has his clearance and the arrangements for his next appointment. I can tell her what she needs to put him on the roster. I can't give you a guarantee about every decision he'll make.”

“I wasn't asking for one.”

“What would an answer change?”

He began to say that it would change a great deal, then stopped. He would still go out with Ray at the next briefing. Tasha would still be beside him, and Coster would still be asking how much work Joker One meant to leave them.

“I'd like to know what to watch for.”

“Keep telling him when something concerns you. You did at White Valley, and you did today. Don't save it for when we talk afterward.”

“I told him to finish the Hornet.”

“Yes. You told me.”

“He finished it his own way.”

“And today he listened.”

Baxter rubbed a mark on the desktop with his thumb. “Very literally.”

“Is that what troubled you about the Eagles?”

“No. Nothing troubled me about the Eagles once I saw the chutes.”

“Then you can tell him that as well.”

Santos asked about the rest of the sortie. Baxter gave her Anderson, the tunnel, Belta, and the alarm at the end, when Queen's recovered tankers had nearly sent them all back up.

“Ray was rolling before the tower had finished asking,” he said. “Back toward the runway, canopy coming down. They told him to hold and he didn't. Then Queen One came on and said the contacts were tankers, and he stopped dead.” He thought about it. “He didn't shut down, though. He sat there with his engines running until Queen were on the ground.”

There was a short silence on the line.

“All of Queen?” Santos asked.

“Until the last one landed.”

“Which one was last?”

He had to think. “Kate. Queen One.”

“I see,” Santos said, and he heard her pen move, and then stop.

“Is that significant?”

“It's a fact you've given me. I'm writing it down.” Her voice didn't change. “Go on.”

He went on. He was explaining what the base liaison had said about fuel when she interrupted.

“You've missed something.”

“What?”

“The fighter that came after you.”

“Pike told you?”

“She mentioned it. You didn't.”

“A Gripen. I didn't see him until he'd fired.”

“How close?”

“Close enough.”

“Baxter.”

He took his hand off the desk. “Outside the canopy. I saw the rounds. He stayed with me when I broke, and I was too low to do much except keep turning.”

“Did you call for help?”

“Tasha called him out. I was busy.”

“And Ray?”

“Two missiles. Nearly together. I thought they were coming for me at first.” He paused. “I never saw him get there. I was looking everywhere, and I never saw him get there.”

“Did you say anything to him afterward?”

“I told him I was clear.”

“Was that all?”

“Yes.”

She left a silence long enough for him to hear how that sounded, then asked whether he'd thanked him.

“No. Not yet.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No damage to the aircraft. Nothing hit me.”

“That wasn't quite what I asked.”

He flexed his shoulder, which had been stiff since he'd climbed out. “A bit sore. Nothing I haven't had before.”

“There's a doctor at the base. See them if it doesn't ease.”

“I will.”

“And how are you otherwise?”

Baxter looked at the cake on the cabinet. “I've just had coffee with both flights. Everyone's back. Four men I thought we might have to kill are still alive, as far as I know. I'm doing rather well.”

“Good. I'm glad. You can also have had a bad few minutes.”

“It wasn't minutes.”

“Long enough, then.”

He laughed a little, without quite meaning to. “It seemed it.”

“Have you eaten anything besides cake?”

“Not since we got back.”

“Try something with less icing. Then get some rest before you start on tomorrow's problems.”

“I've still got today's.”

“Which?”

“Thanking my lead, apparently.”

“That one will keep until you've had lunch.”

He didn't go straight back across the apron.

He meant to. He came out of the communications office with the covered plate in his hand and turned toward the shelters, and then found that he had turned the other way instead, down the line of huts behind the operations building, toward the one at the end with a small wooden cross over the door that somebody had made out of two pieces of packing case.

Baxter was not a churchgoer. He had been one as a boy, in the way that boys in Theve were, because his mother went. He had stopped at university, without any particular crisis, the way you stop wearing a coat in spring. He couldn't have said what he was doing at the door of a Nissen hut chapel at Snider's Top with a slice of cake in his hand, except that he had been carrying something since Anderson and had not yet found anywhere to put it down.

The chapel was empty except for the chaplain.

Father Tóth had come ashore with the air group, the way he went everywhere the air group went, on the grounds, he said, that God was unlikely to stay aboard a carrier when all the interesting sinners had gone ashore. He was a thin, grey, stooped man with reading glasses on a cord and the faint careful vowels of somewhere a long way east of Theve. He was sitting at a folding table at the front of the hut, under a window, writing a letter. He looked up when Baxter came in and took off his glasses, and didn't seem surprised.

“Commander Baxter.”

“Father.” Baxter stood just inside the door. “I'm not sure why I'm here.”

“Nobody ever is.” Tóth gestured at the rows of folding chairs. “Sit anywhere. They're all equally uncomfortable. That's the Army's contribution to theology.”

Baxter sat in the back row. He put the covered plate on the chair beside him. Tóth didn't get up, and didn't come closer. He folded his glasses and waited, in the way Santos waited, and yet not in the same way at all.

“We met the Sharks this morning,” Baxter said.

“I heard. Four parachutes.”

“Four parachutes.” Baxter looked at the plate. “Webb leads them. I've known him six years. We used to fish off the end of the pier at Newfield on Sunday mornings, when we were posted there. I showed him how to rig a line. He told me this morning he's still using it. And this morning, when they turned to meet us, I asked my lead to keep his fire away from the cockpits. And he did. All four of them.” He stopped. “I've just been telling Doctor Santos how grateful I am.”

“And are you?”

“Yes.”

Tóth waited.

“Then we went on to Anderson,” said Baxter.

He told it badly. He hadn't put it into words before, and it came out in pieces. The cruiser at her berth with smoke rising behind her bridge. Men on the quay, too many, all trying to use one gangway, and an officer on the intercept shouting for it to be cleared, and another voice saying they couldn't move it. A ship settling against the dock with her mooring lines parting one after another, the last one whipping back across the water. At Belta, a burning ship that had almost got away, and a boat alongside it, and men climbing down a ladder over the stern. He had watched the boat until Dealer called the fleet neutralised. He didn't know whether it had got clear. He hadn't looked again.

“Webb is alive,” Baxter said, “because six years ago I showed him how to tie a knot. And the men on that gangway didn't know anybody on this ship. Nobody asked for them. I didn't even think of it.” He looked at his hands. “Doctor Santos asked me whether I'd have asked my lead to spare the Sharks if I hadn't known them. I said probably not. I said it as if it were a fair answer.”

“Isn't it?”

“It's an honest answer. It isn't fair.” Baxter heard his voice rise and brought it down again. “Same war. Same morning. Same aircraft. Four men in the water with their chutes open and two hundred on a quay with no one to ask, and the only difference between them was whether one of them had ever been fishing with me.”

The chapel was very quiet. Somewhere outside, an engine was running up on the line.

Tóth turned his glasses over in his fingers.

“I'm not going to tell you it was all right,” he said at last. “You'd know I was lying, and you'd be right.”

“Thank you.”

“And I'm not going to tell you it was your fault either. You didn't send the Fifth Fleet to Anderson.” He set the glasses down on the letter. “What I'll tell you is what I've seen on four ships in two wars, Commander, which is that mercy always goes to the faces we can see. It always has. A man will walk through fire for his friend and step over a stranger in the street on the way home, and both of those things will be true of him on the same day.” He looked at Baxter steadily. “It isn't fair. It's only human. The work of a whole life, if you want my professional opinion, is learning to see more faces. That's all. Not fewer friends. More faces.”

Baxter didn't say anything.

“You saw some of them today,” said Tóth. “The ones on the quay. You're here, with a slice of cake going stale, because you saw them. A great many men in your position would have flown home and eaten the cake.” He paused. “That's a start.”

“It doesn't help them.”

“No,” Tóth agreed. “It helps the next ones.”

Baxter sat with that for a while. Tóth let him. He picked up his pen and went back to his letter, as if Baxter were no more unusual a fixture in the back row than the folding chairs. He wrote slowly, in a small upright hand, and Baxter understood after a moment, from the way he paused between lines, that he was writing to a family.

“Can I ask you something, Father?”

“You can ask.”

“My lead.” Baxter didn't know how to put it. “He didn't hesitate at Anderson. Not once. He took the cruiser, and the escorts, and the air cover, and he didn't—” He stopped. “He spared four men because I asked him to. And then he went straight on to the next thing as if the two were the same job. I don't know what he thinks about it. I don't know if he thinks about it at all.”

Tóth didn't look up from the letter.

“There's a young man who comes in here sometimes,” he said. “Aboard Endurance, mostly, late, after taps. He came in here last night, the night before you flew. He sits in the back row, where you're sitting. He doesn't kneel. He doesn't speak to me, and I don't speak to him. He stays about an hour and then he goes.” The pen moved on. “I've sat with a good many men in a good many back rows, Commander. Usually you can tell what they've come to put down. Grief has a shape. So does guilt. So does fear.”

“And him?”

Tóth stopped writing.

“I had the impression,” he said slowly, “that he was counting.”

Baxter sat very still.

“I don't know what,” said Tóth. “I didn't ask. I've no business asking. But it took him the whole hour, whatever it was, and when he got up to go he looked like a man who'd come to the end of a column and found it was the same length it always is.” He picked the pen up again. “Whether he thinks about it, I couldn't tell you. I'd be very surprised if he thinks about anything else.”

Baxter looked at the covered plate on the chair beside him. He thought of a man at the end of a runway with his engines still running, waiting for a flight to come home. Of two missiles nearly together, at a Gripen he hadn't seen.

He stood up.

“Thank you, Father.”

“I didn't do anything.” Tóth didn't look up. “You can come back, you know. It's very quiet in here. Almost nobody comes.” He turned a page. “And Commander. Take him the cake. Whatever else he's counting, it'll do him no harm to have it.”

Baxter picked up the plate, and went out into the cold.

Ray wasn't at the aircraft when Baxter went back across the apron. Jenkins was, bent over a panel with a ground crewman holding a lamp for him. He looked up when Baxter asked.

“Went to check the next roster. Anything wrong?”

“No.”

“You sure? He's asked twice about your aircraft.”

“What about it?”

“Whether we found anything after that Gripen had a go. I told him they'd checked yours. He came back and asked who'd done it.” Jenkins put the tool in his hand back in its case. “So I found the man for him. Then he asked about Tasha's. Then Coster's. Then he stood over by the shelters for a while looking at Queen's, which aren't mine to answer for, and I told him so.” Jenkins frowned at the case. “Funny thing. Day he came aboard, he asked me what we put in the seat survival kits. I told him. Day after, he asked if we could double the water. Every seat, not just his.”

“Can we?”

“Did it. Took the stores officer a week to forgive me.” Jenkins shut the case. “He asked about Queen's kits too. Twice. Queen One's first.”

Baxter looked toward the operations building.

“Thanks.”

“Tell him mine's still here if he wants one to worry about.”

He found Ray outside the briefing room, reading the board. It wasn't until he came up beside him that Baxter saw what was behind it: a window onto the mess, and through it, at the near end, the long table where both flights were still sitting. Cruz was gesturing with a fork. Tasha was laughing at something. Kate had her chin on her hand. The empty chair with the clean plate in front of it was in plain view.

Ray had been standing here, Baxter realised, the whole time they'd been eating. Close enough to see her laugh, and on the wrong side of the glass.

Ray turned before Baxter reached him and looked at the covered plate.

“Tasha saved you some cake.”

Ray took it when Baxter held it out. “Thank you.”

“Thank her, when you see her. I owe you one.”

“For what?”

“The Gripen, to begin with.”

“You were clear?”

“Yes. The aircraft's been checked. So have I, as far as Jenkins can manage without a medical degree.”

Ray glanced toward the apron, then back at him.

“And Webb,” Baxter said. “All four of them. Thank you for listening.”

“You asked.”

“I did. It mattered to me.”

Ray lowered his eyes to the plate. Baxter let him keep them there. He hadn't come to make him explain anything with people walking past to the briefing room.

“We're getting lunch,” he said. “Come along if you're finished.”

Ray looked at the board again. There was nothing new on it that Baxter could see.

“Jenkins is still working.”

“He knows where the mess is. He'll come when he's ready.”

For a moment Baxter expected him to go back across the apron. Then Ray stepped away from the board, holding Tasha's cake level in both hands, and came with him.