This Given Sky Read Online Free Page B

he’d thumb to loose death and destruction.
    He flashed on the lone photograph taped above his bunk in the cramped trailer he shared with three other pilots, a picture Thel’s dad shot that high school graduation summer when they were walking across the grass outside her house, Steve on Jake’s right, Thel on his left: the posse . She’d cut her hair. He’d wanted to ask why , tell her she looked great with long hair. But he never had.
    In that photo taped above his bunk, Thel’s brown hair cupped her face almost like the haircut worn by Diane, a real estate agent from his squadron’s home base in Myrtle Beach, Florida. Jake kept photos of Diane locked in an aluminum box under his bunk, along with pictures of his folks, photos of flight school buddies, pictures he took while flying his Warthog over Kuwait’s tan desert dotted with burning oil wells.
    Diane sent him photos even though he’d told her the war was why there were no promises between them. Photos of her at work “so you can be part of my day.” And two smiling portraits suitable for a wall or his jet’s cockpit. Plus four color self-portraits taken from a tripod: naked Diane sprawled on her bed; her naked, standing facing her bedroom’s full length mirror as she looked over her shoulder and grinned; her facing the camera wearing only one of his blue shirts unbuttoned and open to her heavy breasts, narrow waist and beckoning come here with a curled finger; her crouched naked on the bed, smiling at the camera with parted lips.
    Don’t think about that! The bullet-resistant canopy sealed Jake in the Warthog cockpit. He ran the pre-flight sequence, fired up the engines, radio-checked with his commander on this two-plane mission. Lucky Steve .
    “Luger 7, this is Luger 5,” radioed his C.O. from the Warthog taxing down the runway in front of Jake’s bird. “We are Go . Launching!”
    Jake’s plane rocked with the desert air swirl from the C.O.’s takeoff and he remembered being home on leave, seeing Thel with hair swaying down to her shoulders.
    “Luger 7—launching!” Jake rocketed up into darkness.
    Twenty-one minutes to Bad Guy Land.
    To that night’s twenty-mile-by-twenty-mile Kill Box.
    They flew over a desert flatter and emptier than the prairie back home. Radio chatter filled the helmet encasing his head like a turtle shell. Oxygenated air flowed into his face mask as he settled into the familiar home of his air-conditioned cockpit. His right hand wrestled with the joystick between his legs. Warthog jocks joke that between steering the A-10 and jerking off, their right wrists double in size. Jake felt the plane soar through the ocean of night air.
    “Luger 7, we are in the zone.”
    “Roger that,” radioed Jake.
    She told Steve yes . Great guy, nobody better, better than me. Bet Thel’s yes smile crinkled her blue eyes with a curl of soft lips.
    “Luger 7, do you read possibles?”
    Jake checked all his detection screens—radar, infrared, heat. Scanned the black flatness below the indigo skyline. “Negative.”
    Changed the direction he flew every eight to ten seconds.
    Man, could Thel make a science project out of this! She could have gone that way, been a star. Or the poetry. She’d look at this night full of flying cans and have the perfect killer line.
    They want to kill me with anti-aircraft fire.
    With those damn surface-to-air missiles.
    Mounted on trucks. Dug into the sand. Won’t read them until they turn their radar on and, if they’re fast, if my warning buzzer is two seconds slow . . . .
    His C.O. radioed: “Luger 7, contact two miles out, APC maybe.”
    The bad guys on the ground don’t know we’re here .
    “Luger 7 cover. Luger 5, initiating attack run.”
    147 seconds later, Jake’s radio crackled: “Rifle!”
    The C.O. announcing he’d fired a Maverick missile.
    Jake checked the missile track on radar, looked out the cockpit.
    Orange flame mushroomed on the faraway ground.
    “Hit confirmed!” radioed Jake.