Chapter 10Four Chairs

Kate, Cruz

Kate found her gloves under Everson's flight bag. He had carried both into the wardroom without noticing, and was now holding her left glove up by the cuff as though he hoped she might explain it.

“You put them on the chair,” he said.

“I was sitting in it.”

“You'd gone.”

“To get coffee.”

Cruz moved his own bag off the fourth chair. Nguyen already had the place against the bulkhead, with the approach chart folded beside his cup. Kate took her gloves back and sat down. The coffee was still hot, which felt like a considerable achievement given how long the gloves had taken.

She hadn't poured it. It had been standing by the urn when she got there, milk and no sugar, filled to exactly the right distance from the rim, as though someone had made it and then thought better of drinking it. Ray had been going out by the other door as she came in. She'd taken the cup because it was there and it was how she liked it. Behind the counter, a very young galley hand with a tray of clean mugs had watched her pick it up, opened his mouth as if to say something, looked at the door Ray had just gone out of, and shut it again with an expression of deep confusion. Kate had assumed he was worried about the washing up. Only now, sitting down, did it occur to her to wonder whose it had been. Then Everson said something else about the gloves, and she forgot.

For a few minutes they talked about the debrief. Nguyen wanted the new range estimate before he went to bed. Everson wanted the old one sent back to whoever had supplied it, along with an invitation to make the next approach in a landing craft. Cruz asked whether the bombardment had damaged the boats.

“All eight intact,” Kate said. “Venn's report came in before we left.”

“And the people?”

“No casualties.”

Everson rubbed his hands over his face. “How?”

“You were there.”

“I was keeping the Harriers out of our way. I heard the calls. I didn't see how he did it.”

“He went in close enough to watch the guns,” Nguyen said. “Then kept going back.”

“Close enough.” Everson looked across the table. “Did you see him?”

“Once,” Kate said. “I was turning away when he went in.”

She had seen it for perhaps two seconds: a grey Hornet banking against the armour of a thing the size of a city block, so close that she'd taken it at first for a piece of the ship. Then she had rolled away to cover Cruz, and when she looked again the gun had stopped.

“Missiles against that armour,” Everson said.

“Against the guns. He wasn't trying to sink it.”

“I gathered that when it kept firing.”

Cruz reached for the chart. Nguyen unfolded it as far as the coast, and Cruz put a finger on the withdrawal lane.

“Professor was checking the boats here. One at a time. He wouldn't let Dealer close the list until the last one answered.”

“Neither would I,” Kate said.

“No. But by that point he's usually checking where Cope is.”

She looked up. Cruz kept his finger where it was.

“Or where Cope's persuaded someone to follow him,” he said.

Everson gave a short laugh. “We used to get the followers.”

“And you complained about them,” Nguyen said.

“I was right to complain. They were shooting at us.”

“They were shooting at him first.”

“Very generous of him.”

Kate drank her coffee while Cruz folded the chart back along its creases. She could remember more than one sortie ending with Joker One calling cheerfully from somewhere that obliged Queen to change course. Cope would drag an enemy fighter round the edge of their engagement, still attached and still dangerous, and ask whether anyone had a moment to help him with it. It had been maddening, and she missed it so much that for a moment she couldn't swallow.

Tonight Cruz had called a Mirage beyond Queen. By the time she'd finished turning to cover him, Dealer was reporting it destroyed.

“We didn't get much to complain about tonight,” she said.

“I'd settle for a little notice,” Everson said. “I selected one twice. Both times I was waiting for it to come round, and both times it stopped being an aircraft.”

“Don't wait next time,” Cruz said.

“For him to fire across me?”

“He didn't fire across you.”

“He could have.”

Kate set her cup down. “Did he?”

“No.”

“Did you have to break for him?”

“No.”

“Then we put the handover in the next brief. If we want him to leave us a contact, we tell him which one.”

Everson looked at Cruz. “That sounds familiar.”

“Professor said much the same when you complained about Cope.”

“Cope wouldn't shoot. This one won't stop. We're allowed to notice the difference.”

“You've noticed it,” Kate said. “Now we can do something about it.”

She thought that would be the end of it. She was wrong.

Cruz went to refill their cups. While he was away, Nguyen turned the chart over and pointed to the block where he had written up both flights' assignments.

“Professor and Coster stayed over the shore targets. They didn't follow him.”

“They had work,” Kate said.

“They had work at Deltheim too. According to Coster, he spent most of that trying to find something still flying.”

“Coster told you that?”

“He told everyone. This afternoon he showed me which battery he was going to take.”

Everson leaned over. “Did he get it?”

“The one beside the road. Professor got the first one. Ray took the position by the cranes afterward.”

“He'll be showing everyone that tomorrow.”

“He should,” Kate said. “It was firing on the boats.”

“Professor worked out the missiles when the battleship opened up,” Nguyen said. “He told you at the debrief.”

“Ray hadn't spent one until then.”

Everson looked at the chart. “Not one?”

“No.”

“Not even on the aircraft?”

“No.”

Cruz came back with the coffee and a spoon borrowed from another table. He put the spoon between Kate and Everson.

“One between you. Don't lose it.”

“He kept the whole load for the guns,” Everson told him.

“I heard.” Cruz sat down. “And used it to stop them firing.”

“Did he say that was why?” Nguyen asked.

“Professor didn't ask.”

“I'd have liked to know before he started,” Everson said. “We could have done some of it.”

“So would Professor,” Kate said. “He was busy getting the boats out.”

Nguyen folded the chart. “That's what I mean. Joker have stopped trying to catch up with him. Coster calls positions, Tasha watches the craft, Professor keeps the withdrawal clear. They've found work he isn't doing while he's busy with the barrels.”

“And when he isn't busy with the barrels,” Cruz said, “he's on our side.”

“There were aircraft on our side.”

“There were aircraft everywhere. There were aircraft on Joker's side, round the boats, out by the Harriers. He came across a mile of sky for the one near you.” Cruz picked up his cup and didn't drink from it. “Twice.”

Kate pulled the spoon toward her and stirred her coffee. “He got the Mirage you called.”

“After I called it. He was moving before I called it.” Cruz shrugged. “I was watching.”

“He covered you as well.”

“He covered me when I was next to you.”

Nobody said anything. Kate passed the spoon to Everson. He took it without looking away from her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Good.”

Nguyen, who rarely volunteered anything he hadn't already checked twice, said quietly, “It isn't Queen he's covering, Kate.”

“No,” said Kate. “I know.”

All three of them went very still.

“It's me,” she said. She said it with the calm of someone who had worked a problem through and arrived at an answer she didn't like but could defend. “Obviously. White Valley. I didn't see the MiG. He did. And he's decided on the strength of that one engagement that Queen's lead can't see what's behind her, and he's been flying round me ever since like a nanny with a pram.” She stirred her coffee. “It's insulting, frankly. I've been leading this flight for five months.”

There was a silence of a very particular quality.

Everson made a sound into his cup that might have been a cough.

“That's,” said Cruz carefully, “one reading.”

“It's the only reading. What else would it be?”

Nobody answered that. Nguyen looked at the chart. Cruz looked at the ceiling. Everson looked at Cruz with the expression of a man who has just been handed a gift so large he doesn't know where to put it down.

“I'm not accusing you of anything,” Everson said, when he could. “I just think somebody should know why a man we've had aboard for a month is flying like you're the only thing in the sky.”

“Because he thinks I can't fly, Chester. I've just explained.”

“Right.”

“And I don't know him,” Kate went on, because Everson's face was doing something she didn't care for. “Before you start. Everson said it at the briefing; now you're all looking at me like it. I don't know him. I'd never heard his voice before White Valley.” She put her hands flat on the table. “If any of you are waiting for me to remember something, you'll have a long wait. There's nothing to remember.”

“I believe you,” Cruz said, and did.

Nguyen reached into the breast pocket of his flight suit and took out a stopwatch. A small cheap one, from a navigation kit, with a scratched face. He set it on the table between the cups.

Kate looked at it. “What's that?”

“Eighty-seven seconds,” said Nguyen.

“What?”

“On patrol. How often your head turns toward Joker's sector. I started timing it at Snider's Top, because I thought I was imagining it.” He didn't look up from the chart. “Eighty-seven. Ninety-two. Eighty-nine. Ninety-one. You never miss.”

Kate stared at the stopwatch.

Then she laughed. It was a real laugh, warm and slightly exasperated, the laugh she used on her wingmen when they'd done something endearingly stupid.

“Loc,” she said. “I'm Queen lead. I watch the sky. That's the whole job.”

“You watch one bit of it.”

“I watch the most valuable aircraft on this ship.” She pushed the stopwatch back across the table toward him with one finger. “He's a squadron asset. He's the reason we got eight boats home. Of course I keep an eye on where he is. It's professional.”

Nguyen picked up the stopwatch and put it back in his pocket without another word. Cruz had put his hand over his eyes. Everson had gone a strange colour from holding something in.

“It's professional,” said Kate again, a little more firmly, to the table in general.

“Yes, Lead,” said all three of them.

Kate looked down at the chart. She would put a note on it: a handover line, a calling convention, a box marked Queen with a boundary drawn round it in pencil, so that Joker One could see in black and white exactly where Queen ended and his opinion of Queen's lead was not required. It would help with Cruz turning through someone's path. It would help, she was sure, with all of it.

“I'll speak to Professor,” she said. “About the handover.”

“That's all I'm asking,” Cruz said.

It wasn't, and they both knew it. He let her have it anyway.

“Tasha sounded better,” Cruz said after a while.

Kate looked at him. “On the approach?”

“On the way back. Counting boats. She made Venn repeat Seven's position.”

“She'd lost him behind the spray,” Nguyen said.

“And got him back, and went straight on to Eight.” Cruz turned his cup on the table. “She used to apologize for asking.”

Everson started to say something, thought better of it, and reached for the spoon. Cruz slid it out of reach.

“You can finish that sentence.”

“I wasn't going to say anything about her shooting.”

“Good.”

“I was going to say she was useful.”

“She was useful before.”

“Yes, Victor. I know.” Everson sat back. “I was going to say I'd rather have someone counting those boats than three more of us trying to put a missile into a battleship. We didn't need another aircraft down there. We needed to know whether everyone was out.”

Cruz pushed the spoon back toward him.

“Thank you,” Everson said. “Very gracious.”

“Don't make me regret it.”

“And then the Frogfoot,” Nguyen said.

Kate had heard it: Coster's call, Tasha breaking, the gunfire crossing behind her before anyone else had turned.

“Coster got the call out first,” Everson said. “Before Dealer. Before Professor. He must have been watching her the whole time.”

“He's her wingman,” Kate said.

“He's her wingman,” Everson agreed, in a tone Kate didn't care for. “And afterward. Did you hear him afterward?”

Cruz put down his cup. Nguyen became very interested in the chart.

“Tasha, you all right?” Everson said, in a fair imitation of Coster trying to sound like a flight lead. “I said, no hit. Right. Good.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Good. He said it like she'd handed him a medal.”

“Chester,” Kate said.

“I'm only reporting what was on the net.”

“Half the fleet was on the net.”

“Then half the fleet knows,” Everson said, delighted.

Nguyen looked up from the chart. “Does she know?”

They considered that. Kate thought of Tasha at Snider's Top, correcting Coster's account of the Flankers while he sat there and let her, which Kate had never seen him allow anyone else to do. She thought of Coster, who could tell you the B-side of every record Purple Magic had ever made and had not, in four months, noticed that Tasha asked for the same one every time.

“No,” she said. “Neither of them.” She shook her head, fond and baffled. “Honestly. You'd think two people who fly that close together would notice.”

Nguyen's hand drifted toward the pocket with the stopwatch in it, and stopped. Cruz kicked Everson under the table before Everson could open his mouth, and kept his foot there.

“Should we tell them?” Nguyen asked.

“Absolutely not,” said Cruz.

“Absolutely not,” said Kate, at the same moment.

Everson looked wounded. “I wasn't going to tell them.”

“You were going to hint,” Cruz said. “At breakfast. Loudly.”

“I'm a subtle man.”

“You did an impression of him just now.”

“For you. Not for them.” Everson retrieved the spoon while Cruz was laughing. “Somebody on this ship ought to be having a nice time.”

Kate laughed too, and found she meant it, and felt a little of the weight go off the table. It was easier to talk about two people who didn't know what they were doing than about one who seemed to know exactly what he was doing and wouldn't say.

Nguyen put his empty cup aside.

“There's one more thing I don't like,” he said. “About the Frogfoot.”

Kate waited.

“How quickly I expected him to deal with it.”

None of them answered at once. At the next table someone was arguing about whether the galley was still serving anything. A sailor went to find out, taking two cups and somebody else's plate with him.

“We were all watching the boats,” Everson said.

“We were,” Nguyen agreed. “And next time he might be watching something else.”

He didn't look at Kate when he said it. Nobody did. She found that worse.

She opened the chart again, found the block of assignments and added a note under Queen's, then another at the withdrawal lane.

“We'll put it in the brief,” she said. “He can cover us. We still cover each other.”

Cruz leaned over to read what she'd written. “And Joker?”

“Joker too.”

“Professor won't argue.”

“I'd like him to, if he thinks we've missed something.”

“He will,” Cruz said. “He used to bring a book to the wardroom. I think he hoped we'd leave him alone.”

“How did that go?” Nguyen asked.

“We didn't.”

Everson grinned. “We were improving his education.”

Kate folded the chart and picked up her gloves. The note was there in pencil. It would make the next brief tidier, and that was all it would do.

“Then you can continue at breakfast,” she said. “Ask them to sit with us.”

“All four?” Everson asked.

“All four.”

“Ray as well.”

She heard the question under it. “He's one of the four, Chester.”

“And Tasha and Coster can sit together,” Everson said. “Purely for operational reasons.”

“You will say nothing.”

“Not a word.”

Cruz stood with the cups. “I'll ask Professor. He's been down seeing Cope.”

“Ask what time Cope's allowed visitors,” Kate said. “We can go afterward.”

Everson gathered his bag and checked under it for anything else he might have acquired. Nguyen took the chart when Kate offered it and promised to bring the corrected range sheet in the morning.

At the door, Cruz turned back.

“Should I tell them to bring anything?”

“Themselves,” Kate said. “And you can return the spoon.”

When they had gone she sat a while longer with the last of the coffee. She tried to remember the voice on the radio at White Valley, the first time, before he'd caught himself. K— It hadn't sounded like a man who had needed fewer syllables. It had sounded like a man who'd said her name a great many times before.

That was impossible. It was also, she decided, extremely irritating, and she was not going to lie awake over a man who thought she couldn't see a MiG. She finished her coffee and went to bed, and lay awake.

Cruz had the spoon in his pocket and every intention of returning it, and had got as far as the ladder when Coster came up it two rungs at a time.

“Have you seen D.D.?”

“Not since the debrief.”

“He's got Theve.” Coster had a flat case under his arm, the kind Dutch kept the camera cards in, and the look of a man who'd been given permission by somebody not entirely entitled to give it. “Dutch says the second card's off the rig. My battery's on it.”

“Your battery,” Everson said, arriving behind Cruz with Nguyen.

“The one by the road. Ray goes past it on the way to the cranes.” Coster shifted the case. “You can see it go up. Well. You can see where it went up.”

“Are you telling us,” Nguyen said, “that you're in the Wings' home movies?”

“In the background.”

Everson looked at Cruz. Cruz looked at the case. He had been going to ask Professor about breakfast, and he had meant it quite sincerely.

“Is D.D. going to let you show it?”

“He let Purple Magic.”

“Purple Magic were guests.”

“So are you, if you come,” Coster said, and went off down the passageway as though that settled it. It turned out that it did.

D.D. worked out of a compartment behind the communications spaces that had once held a photocopier and still smelled faintly of one. He had fitted it with a desk, two monitors and a shelf of camera cards labelled in small upright capitals with dates and nothing else. He stood when he saw how many of them there were.

“Ah,” he said.

“They want to see my battery,” Coster said.

“I'm sure they do.” D.D. looked at the three Queen pilots like a man counting chairs he didn't have. “It stays in this room. All of it. The XO hasn't cleared a frame of Theve yet.”

“Understood,” said Cruz.

“Lieutenant Everson?”

“Why does everyone look at me?”

“Because you're the one who'll talk about it,” Nguyen said.

D.D. sighed and put the card in.

Cruz had expected gun-camera film, the grainy kind they'd shown at the school to illustrate what not to do. It wasn't like that. The picture was wide and clear and perfectly steady, and the steadiness turned out to be the worst of it. The camera was fixed to the aircraft, so the aircraft never moved. The world did. Theve came up out of the dark at the bottom of the frame and swung across it like a record on a turntable, the waterfront lights tipping over and righting themselves, cloud tearing past close enough to touch. Through all of it the canopy bow sat quite still across the top of the picture, with the green edge of the head-up display glowing in one corner.

Under the radio calls, very faintly, they could hear him breathing.

“There,” Coster said. “Wait. There.”

A flash among the dark trees above the road, low in the frame, gone almost before Cruz found it.

“That's a smudge,” Everson said.

“That's my smudge.”

“It's a very good smudge,” said Nguyen, and Coster looked so pleased that Cruz let it stand.

Then the Mirages came in over the boats, and nobody said anything about smudges for a while.

The first one slid into the picture from the left. The frame didn't chase it. It drifted to the middle of the screen as though somebody were pulling it there on a string, the picture shivered with the gun, and the Mirage came apart where it sat. The frame was already turning away before the pieces began to fall. The second went the same way, from a different angle, at a different range, and Cruz realised he had been waiting for a correction. There wasn't one. There hadn't been one on the first either.

It was beautiful. Cruz hadn't expected that. He had expected it to be impressive, the way the stories were impressive, and it was, but that wasn't the word that came. There was no flourish in it anywhere, no roll that wasn't needed, nothing done for show, and somehow that made it worse: every line was so clean it looked inevitable, as though the sky had been shaped for it in advance. He had been flying for eleven years. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and he was watching a man die in the middle of it.

“Again,” Everson said.

D.D. ran it back without being asked twice. He had the air of a man who'd done a lot of running back.

“He isn't aiming at it,” Cruz said.

“Everybody leads a target.”

“He's not leading it. He's waiting for it.” Cruz watched the Mirage drift into the middle of the frame again, obliging, as though it had an appointment there. “He puts the nose somewhere, and it goes there.”

Nguyen had found the time counter in the corner of the screen and was watching that instead of the picture. Cruz had flown with him long enough to know what that meant: Nguyen was frightened and had decided to be frightened accurately.

“Can you go to the withdrawal?” Nguyen asked.

D.D. went to the withdrawal.

The battleship filled the screen. Cruz had seen it from two miles off and thought it big. From over Ray's shoulder it wasn't big. It was a place. There were lights moving on it, and stairs, and a barrel the length of a street turning slowly toward the water, and the Hornet was banking so close to the upper hull that Cruz could see rivet lines in the armour go past. He heard Everson draw a breath through his teeth. The breathing on the cockpit microphone didn't change at all.

“Back,” Nguyen said. “Before this. When Venn turned.”

D.D. found it. The frame was pointing inland, over the dark marsh beyond the city, at nothing. There was nothing to see. Cruz looked for a light, a movement, anything at all.

“Craft Two. Left. Now.”

The picture held on the dark. One second. Two. Nguyen's lips were moving. Three. Four.

A white flash bloomed on the horizon in the exact centre of the frame.

“Four seconds,” Nguyen said. “He called it four seconds before they fired.”

“He saw something,” Everson said. “A light. A crew on a gun deck. Something.”

“At that range? In the dark?”

“Then how—”

Nobody answered him. D.D. stopped the picture on the flash and left it there, a white blot in the middle of the screen with the canopy bow above it.

“I've watched that eleven times,” D.D. said. He didn't seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. “I've timed it with a stopwatch. I keep thinking I'll find what he was looking at.”

After that it was Everson who asked for White Valley. D.D. hesitated, and Coster said, “Purple Magic saw it,” as though that were an argument, and D.D. put in another card.

Cruz had flown that fight. He knew where everyone had been. He hadn't known where Ray had been looking, and now he did.

The frame kept coming back to one aircraft. It lost her in a turn and swung back, searching, across the snow and the ridge and a burning Intruder that went past at the edge of the picture almost by accident, until it found her again: a Hornet with a crown on its tail, small and far off, turning hard. Kills happened at the edges. The frame went back to her. Cruz saw himself go by once, a grey shape at the bottom of the screen, and understood that he was in the picture only because he had been flying next to her.

“Oh,” said Nguyen softly.

The MiG slid into the frame behind her, and the frame was already on it.

On the cockpit microphone, the breathing stopped.

“K—Kate, break right.”

The picture shook with the gun. The MiG came apart behind Queen One, who was already breaking, and the frame stayed on her through the whole roll, all the way round, until she came out of it level and whole. Only then did the breathing start again, and it was the only time in all of it that Cruz heard it unsteady.

Cruz knew that sound. He had made it himself, his first year on Kate's wing, the day a SAM came up under her and he watched it all the way into her flares. He'd breathed exactly like that afterward, into his mask, where he'd thought nobody could hear. It wasn't the sound of a man watching somebody. It was the sound of a man who had been afraid for them, purely and helplessly afraid, and had just been let off.

He found he would rather it had been the other thing. He knew what to do about a man who frightened him. He had no idea what to do about one who was frightened for her.

“Joker One. Kate?”

A pause on the recording.

“Fewer syllables.”

The transmit tone ended. The radio went quiet. And on the cockpit microphone, which he must have known was there and had forgotten, a voice said very quietly, to no one at all, “Kate.”

Just that. Not a call. Not loud enough to be one. It was the way a man says a name in an empty room to remind himself what it sounds like.

D.D. reached out and turned the volume down, which was the only time Cruz ever saw him embarrassed by his own footage.

None of them laughed.

“Is there more?” Everson said eventually. His voice had gone odd. “The Hornet. The one he played with.”

“No,” said D.D.

It was the first time Cruz had heard him refuse anything.

“The XO's seen that one,” D.D. said. “Doctor Santos has seen that one. That one stays on the shelf.”

“Why?”

D.D. didn't answer. Coster had been quiet since White Valley. He was looking at the shelf of cards.

“Show them,” he said. “They should know what he's like. All of it.”

D.D. looked at him for a long moment, then found the card.

It was different, which was the problem. Cruz couldn't have said how, at first; it was beautiful too, but the others had been beautiful the way a blade is, and this was something else. The dark Hornet turned against the sun and the frame turned with it, unhurried, almost lazy, the world wheeling slowly round the canopy bow. The gun touched a wingtip and stopped. The frame drifted wide, let the enemy go, and came round again like someone strolling back to a conversation. Cruz had been in a great many fights and had never seen one flown like that. It looked like a man dancing.

On the second pass, as the dark Hornet lost the other wingtip, there was a sound on the cockpit microphone. It was short and low. It might have been a cough. It might have been a breath let out through the nose in the way a man might breathe out at a good joke.

“Go back,” Nguyen said.

“No,” said D.D., and stopped it.

He took the card out and put it back on the shelf, in its place between the others, and squared it with one finger.

“I've listened to it enough times,” he said, “to know that I don't know what it is.”

For a while nobody moved. The monitor showed a blue screen. Somewhere aft, a pump came on.

“He got Webb out,” Coster said. “All four of them. Bax asked, and he did it. One engine, one tail, one wingtip. He got the boats out. He got Tasha out from under that Frogfoot before I'd finished the call.” He didn't sound defensive. He sounded as though he were reading items off a list he'd been keeping for some time. “That's in there too.”

“I know,” said Everson.

“You fly next to that,” Nguyen said. “Every day.”

“Every day.”

“Doesn't it—”

“Yes,” Coster said. “And then he gets Tasha out from under a Frogfoot, and it doesn't.”

D.D. thanked them for coming in the tone of a man who wished they hadn't, and reminded them that none of it left the room. Coster picked up his case. At the door he stopped.

“You didn't see my battery properly,” he said. “The second time. You were watching the Mirages.”

“Show me tomorrow,” Cruz said, and Coster nodded and went off toward Joker's berthing, a little faster than walking.

The three of them went the other way. Nobody suggested finding Professor.

“We don't tell her,” Nguyen said at the foot of the ladder.

Everson stopped. “Tell her which part?”

“Any of it.”

Cruz thought about Kate at the wardroom table with her hands flat in front of her, saying I don't know him to the three people who had never once had reason to doubt her. She'd meant it. He'd watched her mean it. And on a card on D.D.'s shelf there was a man who had held his breath through her whole roll and only let it go when she came out level. Whatever that was, it wasn't theirs to hand her across a wardroom table.

“No,” he said. “We don't.”

Everson, for once in his life, didn't argue.

On the way back Cruz found the table the spoon had come from and put it back where it belonged. She had asked him to. It was the only thing that night he had known how to put right.