Chapter 6
What the after-action record did not note was that the pilot who flew that mission had three cracked ribs, a grade-two concussion, a field dressing on her left side that Decker had applied in the cockpit during engine startup, no base badge, and no official authorization to be on a flight line she had accessed on foot across six miles of open desert after walking away from a vehicle wreck that had sent two other passengers to the aid station.
What it also did not note, because after-action records are not the place for such things, was that when I taxied 802 back to Pad Nine two hours and seventeen minutes later and climbed down the ladder with considerably less grace than I had climbed up it, Sergeant Vance was standing at the edge of the pad. Not because he was required to be there. Because he had chosen to be.
He stood at attention when I reached the bottom of the ladder.
"Ma'am," he said.
I stopped.
"I apologize for the handling on the flight line. I did not know who you were."
I looked at him for a moment. He was still young and still serious and the adrenaline was long gone from his face, replaced by the specific expression of a person who has spent two hours sitting with the knowledge of what almost happened because of a judgment call they made in twelve seconds of incomplete information.
"You did your job," I said. "You were wrong about the situation, but you were doing your job."
He held my eyes. "Yes, ma'am. But I put hands on a superior officer on a live flight line."
"You put hands on what looked like an unauthorized civilian next to a loaded aircraft. There's a difference." I paused. "How long have you been at Kandahar?"
"Eleven weeks, ma'am."
I nodded. "Eleven weeks from now, you'll know every pilot on this line by sight. You'll know the crew chiefs by voice. You'll know which birds are tasked before the klaxon sounds. And you'll have a version of today that you carry into every situation that's ever confused you again." I looked at him steadily. "That's not nothing, Sergeant. That's the job teaching you something it couldn't teach you in a classroom."
He didn't have an answer for that. He didn't need one.
May you like
Decker appeared at my left shoulder with the kind of timing that suggested he had been listening from a deliberate distance. He handed me a water bottle and said nothing because Decker communicated through timing and water bottles and the absence of unnecessary words.
I drank half of it standing on Pad Nine while the sun dropped its angle and the desert went the color of copper and the tarmac ticked as it began to cool.
