The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

Did this reveal, he wondered, yet another previously undetected dark and unpleasant facet of his character?

He took another look at Sue-Ellen Chambers’s deceptively innocent face, and turned around.

‘‘We’d better be going,’’ he said.

3

On the half-hour flight from Mobile back to NAS Pensacola, Ed Bitter was unhappily aware that the engine trouble he had had at The Plantation by now had come to the attention of the brass, who were likely to find out that he had violated regulations by doing acrobatics under five thousand feet.

But it had not been a crash landing, so he felt sure he could get away with having the incident officially determined to be an ‘‘unscheduled, precautionary landing,’’ rather than an ‘‘emergency landing.’’ Unscheduled, precautionary landings occurred all the time, the precaution generally having to do with an airsick student, or a piss call for an instructor who had forgotten to take a leak before taking off.

So he would probably be officially off the hook. Where they landed was then going to be the real problem, since the students, Ford and Czernik, were likely to rush back to the student BOQ to regale their fellows with the fascinating tale of landing at a private airstrip, near a mansion that, no shit, belongs to Mr. Bitter’s family.

So he would have to explain the situation to them, and ask them as a personal courtesy not to tell the story. He probably still couldn’t keep it all completely quiet, but he probably could kee

p it from being a sensation. If he could talk to them about it the right way.

Fortunately, there was a ritual after this particular exercise, which would give him the opportunity to talk to the students. On the satisfactory completion of their last training flight in primary training, Ensign Paul Ford and Ensign Thomas Czernik had stopped being ‘‘Mr. Ford’’ and ‘‘Mr. Czernik’’ to their instructors and became fellow officers, who could be addressed by their first names and permitted to drink with the instructor pilots as social equals.

It was in a sense more of a rite of passage than either their first solo flight had been (about a fifth of all students who made their solo flight were subsequently busted out of primary for inaptitude) or the official awarding of wings in the parade on Friday would be.

‘‘Dick,’’ Ed Bitter suggested as the two instructors and the two students turned in their parachutes to Flight Equipment, ‘‘why don’t you take Paul and Tom over to the club and buy them a couple of beers, until I can fill out my reports and get there?’’

‘‘I think you’d better lie about your altitude when the engine quit,’’ Dick Canidy said. ‘‘We’ll back you up, if they ask.’’

Czernik and Ford nodded willingness.

That was embarrassing. Officers were expected to be wholly truthful. But Canidy was right. Unless he lied, he was going to be in trouble.

‘‘Thank you,’’ he said barely audibly, and then forced himself to smile.

The officers’ mess served a two-quart pitcher of draft beer for thirty-five cents. Canidy and the two students had just started on their second pitcher—enough beer to give Paul Ford courage to raise the question of what had happened to the Kaydet—when a Marine orderly appeared in the room. Canidy glanced up and then ignored him. He could think of no possible reason that a Marine orderly who ran errands for admirals would be interested in him.

But the orderly, after the bartender identified him, headed directly for Canidy’s table.

‘‘Mr. Canidy?’’ the orderly asked crisply.

‘‘Yes,’’ Canidy said.

‘‘The admiral’s compliments, sir,’’ the orderly snapped. ‘‘The admiral regrets the intrusion. The admiral will be pleased to receive Mr. Canidy at Mr. Canidy’s convenience. ’’

‘‘You sure you have the right Canidy, son?’’ Canidy asked.

‘‘The admiral’s car and driver are outside, if Mr. Canidy would care to make use of them to make his call upon the admiral, sir.’’

Canidy was wholly confused. He had seen the admiral (there were several flag officers at Pensacola, but only one ‘‘the admiral,’’ the base commander) only twice in his life, once when his aviator’s wings were pinned on him, and once again when the admiral had given the new draft of instructor pilots a five-minute ritual pep talk before they had begun their training.

He could think of nothing he had done, good or bad, to merit the admiral’s attention. Lieutenant junior grade instructor pilots in primary training came to the admiral’s attention only when they killed a student, or vice versa.

He stood up and looked down at Ford and Czernik.

‘‘Gentlemen,’’ he said, mockingly solemn, ‘‘you will have to excuse me. The admiral requests my professional judgment on a subject of vital importance to the Navy, and, indeed, the nation!’’

Ford and Czernik smiled. Bitter looked at the Marine orderly. The Marine orderly was not amused. He marched out of the beer bar, and Canidy followed him out to the admiral’s car, a two-year-old Chrysler driven by a natty young sailor who held the door open for Canidy and then closed it after him.

Canidy decided the whole thing was going to turn out to be a hilarious case of mistaken identity. There was probably a Commander Canidy on the base somewhere, or maybe even a Captain Canidy (who probably spelled his name Kennedy), and the admiral had asked for him with his false teeth out, and the aide had misunderstood him.

The car drove under the portico of the admiral’s residence and stopped. The Marine orderly leaped out of the front seat and raced around the front of the car to open the door for Canidy.