Shaking his head, the Major muttered, "You're on thin ice, Kinsman. Very thin ice."
"Yessir," Kinsman replied.
Pierce went back up to the flight deck and the tension cracked. Howard took Meyers and Smitty to the airlock. Kinsman puffed out a long, heartfelt breath. He felt as if he had been hanging by his fingernails from a very high cliff.
"Why'd you do that?" Colt asked him.
"Pure instinct, I guess. I figured you'd catch a lot more hell from Pierce than I would."
Frowning, Colt said, "What difference does it make? We're on the same team; he'll kick my ass out the same time he kicks yours."
Kinsman nodded. "Frank, you've memorized the book of regulations but you haven't figured out the people yet. He won't kick us out for something I've done. Not unless it's a lot more serious than this."
Colt's reply was a derisive snort.
"You could thank him," Mary suggested to Colt. "He was trying to save both our necks."
"And mine," Douglas chimed in.
"And his own, too," Colt said. "If I go, he goes."
Kinsman laughed. "You're welcome, buddy."
"Think nothing of it," Colt replied.
Kinsman looked at Mary O'Hara. He knew that she would have been in much more trouble, too, if Pierce thought she'd gone outside with Colt. But she doesn't say a word about that part of it. La belle dame sans merci. The beautiful lady who never says thank you.
It took an hour before Jill and Smitty came back in from their EVA. Howard, looking smaller and older than ever before, pointed a dirty-nailed finger at Kinsman.
"You and your buddy better get a good night's sleep. You're going to have a big day tomorrow."
But, wrapped in his nylon mesh cocoon after lights-out, floating weightlessly with his arms hanging in front of his eyes, Kinsman could not sleep. He could feel the warmth from Colt's body, bulging the sleeping bag a few centimeters above 47 him, and smell the faint trace of perfume that Mary wore, in the next bunk down. Yet it was not her scent nor Colt's troubled groaning and tossing that kept Kinsman awake. Not even the anticipation of going EVA tomorrow, for the first time.
"To hell with Jakes," he mumbled to himself. "And Pierce. All of them ... all of them . . ."
He saw in his mind's eye the crystal blue sky of the eastern Mediterranean as he new his aging F-15 on a "peace- keeping" mission. When the Soviet Union finally admitted that its reserves of fossil fuels were no longer sufficient to meet its needs, and began bidding up the price of Middle Eastern oil, the political repercussions made the oil shocks of the Seventies seem trivial.
The Red Army gobbled up Iran in an eleven-day blitz- krieg while the rest of the world watched, stunned and vacillating. The Russians took over the Iranian oil fields, or what was left of them after the fanatical Iranians gave up their doomed defense and blew up everything they could. The Arab world split apart, some openly assisting the Iranian resistance, some trying to make an accommodation with the victorious Russian Bear. The industrialized world tottered as oil prices skyrocketed and stayed high.
It took a charismatic leader to bring the Arabs together again, and he focused his leadership on the obvious goal: the destruction of Israel. With relish, the Moslem world forgot its differences and invaded the Jewish homeland for the final time. No ally came to Israel's aid, not with the Soviets threatening nuclear war over the hotline to Washington. The American government, led by a born-again former school- teacher, warned Israel against using its nuclear weapons against its invaders. To their credit, the victorious Arabs did not engage in a bloodbath. Israel simply ceased to exist, although its inhabitants continued to live in the newly consti- tuted nation of Palestine. Only the leaders of the Israeli government and about a third of the Knesset were executed. In America the government that failed to help its ally won re-election on the strength of having avoided a nuclear holocaust.
Rationing and recriminations were the order of the day in every Western capital. Travel curtailments and restrictions 48 on electricity became commonplace, and were used by gov- ernments to keep their people under control and make dissent, if not impossible, then at least more difficult than in the earlier days of easy travel and free speech.
The Greeks called for the total dissolution of NATO. The Turks made obvious moves to seize Cyprus. A new series of convulsions racked Lebanon, with Syrian-backed Shi'ites slaughtering Christians by the thousands and Syria itself —long a Soviet client—gaining new power from the Russian victory in Iran and the destruction of Israel but suffering such loss of prestige among its fellow Moslems that the assassina- tion of Syria's president came as no surprise.
Flying out of Cyprus, the handful of Air Force fighter pianes was a pitifully weak gesture, more of a public relations ploy than a military move. America was tacitly admitting that the Soviet conquest of Iran and the end of Israel were fails accomplis. Flying out of Damascus, a squadron of Soviet MiG-31's symbolized Russian determination to show Ameri- ca and the world that the Middle East was their sphere of influence now, rather than the West's.
In his half-sleep. Kinsman recalled all the feints and mock-dogfights he had gone through. It would have taken only the press of a button to destroy one of the Russian fighters. More than once somebody fired a burst of cannon fire into the empty air. More than once a missile "happened" to whoosh out of its underwing rack and trace a smoky arrow of death that came close to one of those beautiful swept-wing planes.
