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.
