Night Trap. Gordon Kent

that they were there.

      “We got one wounded bird coming in,” Alan said, “eighteen miles out and wrong IFF but he’s low and slow and on his radial. Try and raise him on Common. Maybe needs gas to land.”

      Narc got the Hawkeye on comm. Alan’s guess was confirmed: northern strike lead in a wounded bird, thought he could land it, needed gas at a low altitude. Rafe nodded; after going almost underwater to down the Fantan, he figured he could give gas while taxiing, and Christine’s fuel leak didn’t worry him. They rogered up and turned southeast, headed to intercept.

      Alan was entranced with the electronic images of the raid, rapt, watching the Iranian IADS fall apart. The target EW sites and their protective SAMs went down under the strike packages and did not come back up as the strike came off target. There was a two-hundred-mile gap in the IADS. If they could get a plane that far, Alan thought, the Bahrainis could bomb Tehran now.

      “Hey, Spy, get the FLIR online. I want to know how bad off this guy is. He doesn’t have radio.”

      The FLIR is an infrared camera for watching surface targets, particularly surfaced submarines, at night. Bored S-3 crews on training hops use it to watch junior fighter jocks make fools of themselves trying to get their fuel probes into the basket at the end of the refueling hose. Now, Alan switched to it from the raid with regret. He couldn’t watch the strike and FLIR at the same time; they both came up on the same screen.

      Air-to-air refueling is an art at the best of times. Pilots try to perfect the technique against the day they really need the gas. Good aircrews practice no-comms refueling, using signals passed by flashlight and by aircraft lights. Yet, it is hard enough to maneuver a high-speed aircraft so that the attached fuel probe locks into the much slower tanker’s basket; with the plane damaged, the pilot injured, it becomes torture.

      Rafe made a good rendezvous with the wounded aircraft, an A-6 with a gash up the starboard side that went right through the cockpit.

      Narc said, “He’ll need about five thousand,” and started to work the refueling computer. “Spy, have I got a basket out there?”

      Alan got the basket dead center in the FLIR. “Bigger than life.” He was still thinking of the raid. The urgency of the A-5 attack on them, the abrupt release, had left him unfocused.

      He did not hear the change in Narc’s voice as he cut the lights and said, “Oh, shit.” Then, “He’s hit bad. Losing power.” His tone was odd, but Alan did not register it. Only later would he learn that both men in the front end had seen the injured aircraft’s side number and knew who it was.

      Rafe growled, “Soon as he’s in the basket, we’ll descend a little, give him some more airspeed, start a slowwww turn toward the boat. We’ll get him home.”

      Poor sonofabitch, he was thinking. He meant Alan, not the wounded pilot.

      Alan saw an infrared image of the A-6 pull into his field of view and realized that it was missing part of its canopy. The shock of it pulled him from his apathy, and he thought, This guy is hurt bad, and he began to function again. He was so intent then trying to figure out if the BN was still in the cockpit that seconds passed before he caught the glow of the pilot’s helmet, the head bent far forward.

      Volleyball net. A-6.

      Dad.

      The wounded bird plowed forward toward the basket but lost altitude. The probe missed, and the basket banged the A-6 windscreen. Invisible to Alan in the dark, Craw flipped on the camera attached to the FLIR.

      Alan, cold, said, “He’s losing it. He can’t hold his altitude.” The A-6’s movements had a dreamlike quality now, too slow, silent, eerily altered by the FLIR’s infrared. It seemed impossible that he was watching his father try to save himself. It seemed impossible that they were not back on the carrier, the mission over. Where was routine?

      Rafe took Christine into a shallow dive. He was sure he could still save this one, get him his gas, get them all home. Fourteen hundred feet now; he had almost a minute to get him in the basket. He crawled. Surely bad things could not happen now.

      Alan watched his father try again. In the slow dive, he came on straight and sure, but fifty feet from the basket something happened and the A-6 gave a shudder and disappeared from the screen again.

      Alan whirled the FLIR back and forth until he found the aircraft again, now off to the left and right wing high. Slowly he tracked its attempts to try another pass.

      Closer.

      Seconds passed. The A-6 got a lineup and came on.

      The probe was out. Alan’s whole will tried to force the probe into the basket. The A-6 seemed to be flying through jelly, barely responsive, lazy. Slowly, slowly, the probe drifted closer.

      Suddenly the probe was there there THERE and the basket sailed dead in front of it and it came on the last few feet and it was in.

      “He’s in!” Alan shouted, and he heard Craw call something at the same time. He tried to relax his grip on the seat. It’s okay, he thought. It’s okay. Then, as the fuel hit the wounded bird, triumph faded.

      Christine gave a shudder. They were four hundred feet off the water and the A-6 had pulled the basket right off the hose. Fuel was raining down to the dark water, falling like blood from an artery, like lost opportunities, lost hopes.

      He thought the A-6 started to fall away then, and that would always be the image that he had of it—getting smaller, dropping slowly—but he would wonder later if that was only an image in his mind, the horror of a dream where the inevitable, the terrifying, takes form.

      What Alan saw for sure, and knew he saw, knew that this really happened then, was his father raise his head and lift one hand in a gesture, half wave, half salute. Does he know it’s me? Does he know I’m here? Then the head went down and the A-6 dropped like a stone.

      An ejection seat fired, and a second later the plane hit the water.

      “He’s gone,” he heard himself say. “He’s gone.”

      He flipped back to the datalink.

      Christine was silent. Then Narc began to report the downed bird.

       6

      24 July 1990. 2123 Zulu. Florida.

      Kim Hoyt had been doing small hits of coke since lunch and she wanted a party. It was pretty much a party already—her brother and two of his friends, her father, two business guys of his who had brought the coke as a sweetener for some deal they were making—but she wanted glitter and splash with it. She wanted to dress up and she wanted to strip naked; she wanted to be admired and she wanted to flirt; she wanted to be coveted and she wanted to be competed for. She wanted to be the center of something exciting, and that said to her a party.

      Her father made deals. Mostly, his deals were in construction, condos and hotels, packaging and subcontracting, heavy in the part of the Cuban community where the money was. She admired her father. He was her model for a man: he could twist other men around each other, and he could make big money. Physically, he wasn’t much—paunchy and soft-looking, smooth, barbered—but she had already learned what a lot of young men didn’t know yet, that a middle-aged man like her father was more attractive than they were with their sunbleached hair and their muscles, because he gave off signs of power. If all you wanted was to get fucked, they were okay. “Put a sock in their mouth, they’re fine,” as she said to her friends. But she knew there was more to life than that. She knew that unless you wanted to be some overweight slob with cellulite and three kids and a mortgage, you wanted power and you wanted money.

      So Kim loved her father. Almost beyond what was allowed, but they never crossed that line.

      She lay by