Top Gun by T. E. Cruise

Author:T. E. Cruise
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780446567091
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-25T14:00:00+00:00

(Two)

“What’s the matter. Air Force?” Gil Brody, the Sea Bear’s air officer sarcastically asked Robbie Greene. Brody was a trim, muscular man in his forties, with thick black eyebrows, dark hair gone silver at the temples, and a salt-and-pepper mustache. On his open-neck shirt collar he wore a naval commander’s oak leaves.

Brody leaned back in his swivel chair behind his gray metal desk. “You look like a man who’s got his pecker caught in the catapult.”

It was a little after seven on Tuesday night. The latest on the Mayaguez was that USAF warplanes were on the scene and drawing heavy machine-gun fire from the Cambodian patrol boats. So far no airplanes had been hit. Upon the President’s orders, the Air Force planes had refrained from firing back at the Cambodians.

At seven o’clock, Greene had been notified that the air boss had a few minutes free in which to see him, and so Greene had come charging into Brody’s office, which was small and windowless, like most everything else on this carrier. A poster taped to the wall behind Brody’s desk showed a snowcapped mountain in Japan. Surrounding the poster were plaques Brody had won in various martial arts tournaments. More awards and trophies for placing in various martial-arts competitions filled several bracket shelves. Brody was known to be a martial-arts fanatic. He’d spent a year studying in Japan, and in his spare time ran classes on board the Sea Bear. Greene, wanting to pursue the martial-arts studies he’d begun at Wright-Patterson AFB, had taken some of Brody’s classes for a while, but then he’d dropped out.

“Speak up. Air Force!” Brody was demanding. “What’s on your mind?”

Greene didn’t know how to begin. He’d come in here like gangbusters, his heart pounding and his pulse racing, thinking he was all charged up to make his case. Trouble was, Greene had spent the past sixteen hours rehearsing his piece. Now that he was actually in Brody’s office, he found himself gone stale, with all of his pretty speeches gone out of his head.

Brody took a pack of Marlboros from out of his shirt pocket and lit one with a banged-up-looking Zippo. “Past day and a half, I’ve been up to my ass with meetings concerning how we might have to put the hurt on the Cambodians,” he muttered.

Greene nodded. Brody and his people were the supreme traffic cops for all the activity on the carrier’s flight deck. During aircraft launches and recoveries, it was Brody and his gang who occupied Pri-Fly, or Primary Flight Control, a glassed-in balcony just beneath the carrier’s bridge. Everyone—CCATC air controllers, LSO officers and staff, catapult crews, deck supervisors, and aircraft handlers (responsible for maneuvering the airplanes about the crowded deck)—answered to the air boss. From what Greene had been told, even the carrier’s skipper made it a point to quietly occupy himself with steering his boat when the air boss was doing his thing.

“Finally, I get a little breather from all those meetings,” Brody muttered. “But then, I find out that you got some sort of bone to pick with me.

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