Return to Honor Read Online Free

at the hips—tight around the buttocks, but sagging around the waist, not complimenting her at all.
    Gould shook his head slightly, thinking to himself, I’ve seen worse. Delores perplexed him. Not only was she one of the few women at Edwards that he had failed to get to bed, but she was a superb pilot. It just didn’t seem right: Hot pilots have to be hot in bed, but from all indications, she was not playing the game at all. He tried to take her out a couple of times in the month she’d been there, but she’d let him know in no uncertain terms that they were playing by her rules.
    As a flight examiner, he was in a position to force her hand—flunk her on a check ride in one of the TAV’s—but he was better than that. He didn’t need to fall back on some hooked-up position of flight examiner to get what he wanted. And if she was going to play the game that way—well, he thought, we’ll just see, Miss Delores Beckman—you may be a red-hot pilot, but you’re not going to mess with my head. No ma’am. I’ll play your game and win.
    Gould yanked the checklist out of a zipped top pocket and strode around the front of the TAV. He checked off items as he came to them, ensuring the craft had not sustained damage from its semi ballistic flight.
    He was at the next-to-last item on the checklist when he heard an approaching vehicle. He hastily looked over a pitot tube and the VUHF antenna before scrambling under the TAV’s fuselage to greet two staff cars, a SMART maintenance truck, and a bus that served as the crew van.
    A chubby colonel, his blue short-sleeved uniform shirt untucked in the back and a paunch bulging over his belt, nodded a greeting to Gould. “How ya doing, Major?”
    “Fine, sir.” Gould straightened slightly and halfway forced a salute.
    Colonel Mathin ignored the salute and walked around the TAV, staring up at the scorched fuselage. The craft still emanated heat from its reentry, but it had quickly cooled in the dry air. He patted the low-slung vessel and turned to Gould. “We’re taking her off flight status until we can get her completely checked out. I don’t want any of the other birds to go up until we find the glitch you reported. Which flight controls were you having trouble with?”
    Delores appeared behind Gould and held out a notepad. The colonel grunted a greeting to Delores, ripped the top form off the pad, and studied it. He spoke to no one in particular: “Pitch thrusters.” Then, looking up at Gould, he said, “I would have thought you had trouble with the new JATO units we installed. There hasn’t been any trouble with the pitch thrusters since we upgraded them last year. What happened?”
    “Well, it wasn’t me, sir—I was the examiner on the flight. Major Beckman was AC. She noticed the sluggish response once we were entering the atmosphere.” He turned to Delores. “Do you want to fill him in?”
    “That’s right, Colonel. We were rounding the top, about one-fifty clicks up, when I couldn’t get a nose-down attitude.”
    Colonel Mathin looked at her from the corner of his eye. “That’s serious. Why didn’t you declare an emergency?”
    “Didn’t have time. I rotated the TAV using the roll thrusters, tweaked the yaws to get us pointing to the right—which was actually “down” by that time—then rolled us around again with the thrusters to get the right attitude.”
    The colonel raised his brows. Gould smiled, wiping the grin from his face as the colonel looked his way. Colonel Mathin said to Gould, “Well, are you going to override her and declare an emergency, Major, or what?”
    Gould thought for a minute. “How long will the TAVs be in the shop, Colonel?”
    “For an emergency, we’ll have to ground the fleet. No telling how long we’d have to keep them there. But if you don’t override her by declaring an emergency, we can only ground this bird until the problem is fixed. Then it’s free to fly again, even if every TAV in the inventory has the