The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (33 page)

“Thanks. Take it out of the fee.”

“Already done,” the briefer said with his first genuine smile of the day.

“That was quite a ride for one great big yokel,” Linda said, the noncommittal note in her voice less convincing than it might have been. Unwinding with liberal applications of Bacardi Añejo, they’d jumped out of the shower and into bed, shivering in the relative cool of one of the season’s first cold fronts. Linda sandwiched one of Pete’s thighs between hers as they cuddled under the sheet.

“No doubt,” Pete said, his voice, too, reflecting the tension of the
Navas
Bay
mission. “They’ll want to debrief us in a whole lot more detail than they did this afternoon, but I suspect that they’ll be taking their time with-  what’s his name? Jerry.”

“I suspect you’re right, since he’s all they got for their money. He sure seemed to be upset that the others didn’t show. He acted like he wanted to swim ashore and go get ’em.”

Rolling onto his back and pulling her along with him, Pete mused, “‘The Morgans;’ he only said it once, and then it seemed like he wanted to take it back. Must’ve been a family he was helping to get out, and somehow the deal fell through.”

“Old Jerry seemed like he was used to giving orders, didn’t he? What the hell drives a guy like that, obviously American, to get involved in
Cuba? And he’s clearly not the only one; I’d guess this Morgan family’s Gringo, too. Well, whatever else he is, Jerry’s a pretty good-looking guy-  for a yokel.”

Pete chuckled appreciatively. His cock had swelled to a full erection from the constant pressure of Linda’s thigh. “Ol’ Yokel Jerry get you hot, did he?”

“Damn right he did.” Holding his cock-tip with the ends of her fingers and thumb, Linda milked it from the base with her other hand like an inverted cow teat, quickly producing a trickle of pre-cum. Catching the first of the clear flow on her fingertips, she spread it rapidly over rock-hard flesh, adding her saliva to the now-steady flow, maintaining a slickly liquid surface. Turning to position her labia above Pete’s head, she deftly devoured his cock, taking it into her mouth and part-way down her throat, muffling his groan with her labia. This is great, she thought, but I really miss doing Jack. Pete’s no slouch, but Jack feels like a county-fair-winning cucumber in your throat, and I’ll bet that I’m still the only one who’s ever taken the whole thing. Makes me wonder what that fancy old lady does with it...

Rick and his fellow DSSLs quickly integrated themselves into the 7th Special Forces community by the sheer weight of their intelligence and athletic ability. Despite the technical difficulty of there being no TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment) slot in Special Forces for Second Lieutenants, the newly-elected President’s high priority on upgrading both the quantity and quality of Special Forces units rectified this omission overnight. The DSSLs were, accordingly, distributed throughout various professional undertakings on and around Smoke Bomb Hill. Rick found himself elbow-deep in an assortment of small arms, most of which he’d never known to exist. The weapons course provided for written and practical examinations at the end of each day’s instruction.

W.H.B. Smith’s Small Arms of the World was the course’s bible, but the deepest font of available knowledge on weapons was to be found in the cranium of a certain Staff Sergeant Curtis. A weapons handler without peer, Curtis was master of positively every weapon, foreign and domestic, in the teams’ inventory. To watch his hands virtually fly over the bones of a complex piece like the 7.62mm FN FAL was a transcendental experience to Rick, who rapidly became Curtis’s apt and motivated student. “Damn, Sarge,” he said one day after coming up over a minute short of Curtis’s time to strip and reassemble an early AK-47, “how the hell did you ever get so fast at this?”

“Ah, hell, sir, you’d be as fast as me if you’d sat over in Bogeyland for six months doing nothing else. Bogeyland was the teams’ parlance for Laos, the landlocked little country between Thailand and Vietnam, where a series of teams was providing “assistance” to the troops of the Royal Lao army in their efforts to oppose both rebel Pathet Lao forces and the far better trained and equipped army of North Vietnam.

“Not much going on over there, huh?”

“Well, sir, if there had a’been, I doubt I’d be so fast slappin’ these weapons around.”

“Hm. Well, just the same, hope I get a chance to check it out. Six months, huh?”

“Longest, buggiest six months of my life, sir.”

“I’m sure, Sarge, but I want to check it out just the same. I’d like to walk into The Cage right now.”

The Cage was a compound located in the center of The Hill, with barracks buildings, and mess hall and an orderly room, circumscribed by concentric fences of 10-foot-high barbed wire. Every couple of weeks the otherwise-empty buildings would fill up with troops, with MPs patrolling between the fences 24 hours a day. Spotlights bathed the entire area at night, and for as long as the buildings were occupied, no one would be seen entering or leaving the compound. A number of days later, covered trucks would back up to one of the gates, troops would board them under cover of darkness and The Cage would be empty again, its most recent inhabitants having departed on a mission elsewhere in the world.

Rick’s time in The Cage hadn’t yet arrived, but an opportunity to sharpen up his hand-to-hand combat skills was just around the corner. At a Saturday company formation, a rare thing in itself, the Sergeant Major announced that Company Stakes would be conducted that day. Rick had never heard the term, but gathered that, from the uproarious reception in the formation that it was a pretty good thing. That was before he heard the word “pit.”  The last man in the pit, the Sergeant Major said, would get a three-day pass. Everyone who participated would get free beer, for as long as it lasted.

From where he stood, Rick could see a number of kegs arrayed around what looked from his perspective like a slit in the ground, but which must be, he figured, the pit. The last word from the Sergeant Major was that those who didn’t feel like playing could proceed directly to the Orderly Room and “Pick up a transfer to Division.”  There was no way, Rick figured, that the Sergeant Major could deliver that statement as a joke with such an incredibly straight face. If he was that good, hell, he’d be in
Hollywood.

On the heels of the Sergeant Major’s announcement, somebody standing behind Rick yelled, “Into the pit!”  From Rick’s position in the formation, there was nothing optional about joining his comrades there. In what can only be fairly called a stampede, he and the rest of the company shoved/ran/stumbled/dived into a circular pit of mud about 30 feet across and 6 feet deep. Once they were in, the Sergeant Major directed their attention to Major Fredericks, the company commander. The major advised the hundred men in his command that maiming and murder are not options in this frolic, but that a three-day pass was a three-day pass.

With that, the Sergeant Major blew one long burst on his whistle, and immediately bodies were flying through the air, which was now blue with profanity. This game, Rick realized, had no rules and a single outcome. Looking around, he instinctively chose to buddy up with someone. Over to his left, a stocky sort of about 5-10 seemed to have come up with a workable formula: knock ’em out, then throw ’em out. Where he needed help was after the one-two punch had dropped an individual, the Puncher being at the mercy of attackers while he got the punchee to the edge of the hole and pushed him up and out. “Get ’im out,” Rick advised the Puncher. “I’ll watch your back.”

Their combination of talent, and that of others who had adopted similar tactics, thinned the hole’s population by two-thirds in less than 15 minutes. Then someone, not Rick, had the “more is better” idea, and created a four-man team to begin separating the two-man teams and ejecting one at a time. Disdaining this tactic, which was a mistake, Rick and the Puncher held their own for a while, but one of the four-man teams had recruited a giant, who was big enough and strong enough to begin simply throwing people out of the hole, now that he had room to maneuver. Rick’s turn came soon after he saw what was going on. As he and the Puncher took on two at a time, the giant picked him up from behind, wrapping his arms around Rick and, with a spinning half-turn, sending him airborne over the edge, conveniently near a keg. He sat up to see the smiling, grimy face of Staff Sergeant Curtis, hand outstretched with the most welcome 16 ounces of brew that Rick had ever seen. “Not bad, sir, but why did you stay in there so long? I thought officers were smart.”

To this observation, Rick had no immediate response.

21 December 1960

Dear “Still an O-1,”

The President and Congress of the
United States, in their combined wisdom, yesterday elevated me to the dizzying height of
First Lieutenant,
United States
Army Reserve. Actually, it only took the signature of my CO, but sheesh! I can hardly stand to look at those nasty old brown bars that formerly sullied my shoulders. You’ll see what I mean soon enough, my boy, when your number comes up.

I’m planning to run down and see the folks over Christmas. What’s your dance card looking like for the holidays?

As ever

Your Superior Officer (but who’s counting?)

24 December 1960

Your Excellency,

Silver bars to go with your silver tongue! I did what I could to mimic your technique, and having endeared myself to a cute little gate agent in Dallas, am writing to you from the commodious drop-down table of a first-class seat on an American Airlines 707. Yes, my boy, I’ll be living with these gold bars for a little while yet, but they now have some company on my chest! Yep, somewhere along about the time your letter was headed in my direction, the Commanding Officer of Naval Auxiliary Air Station Kingsville, Texas was pinning the Wings of a Naval Aviator on my convexer-then-usual chest.

Nope, not a relative, pussy-packer or other well-wisher in sight for one of the larger moments in my life. Seems as though the command wanted to clean out as much student pilot backlog as possible before the holidays. Among other things, that meant no multi-engine carrier qualification for those of us, like me, who are headed for duty with land-based squadrons (in my case, a hurricane recon outfit in
Puerto Rico, which ought to be pretty interesting). That cut nearly a month out of the training cycle, so neither my mom nor my dad nor Clare (in
Phoenix
getting over a pneumonia attack), who’ll probably miss being here the most, could switch their schedules around to make it. Hell, even the way-more-than-presentable blonde I’ve been seeing lately turned me down, afraid that her husband, a local homicide dick (and Mexican!), might see the official pinning-on picture. Not an attractive prospect, so I elected to be accompanied by a monster hangover instead, which the good Captain was kind enough to ignore.

Thus made official, I packed my bags and bummed a ride out of NAAS on a reserve squadron’s R4D (DC-3) to Dallas and the accommodating gate agent. Stewardii on the flight aren’t bad, either, but based in DAL. Think I’ll just head to Mom’s, rest up for a day or so of Christmastide and check in with the Bishop girls. Sorry you’ll miss that! Anyway, even with wings, there’s more training ahead for me. I check in to the Airborne Early Warning Aircraft Training Unit,
Patuxent River,
Maryland
on 9 January for 16 weeks of checkout on the Willie Victor (WV-2), a Lockheed Constellation with big radar antennae grafted on its belly and back. Then, on to Airborne Storm Reconnaissance Squadron THREE. Well, at least it’s in
Puerto Rico...

Tell your folks Merry Christmas; I’ll give you a call, say day after tomorrow. No sense trying to get through the holiday tangle.

Congrats again, 1LT.

Winged Victory

23 HOTFOOT

The soggy mid-afternoon heat shot through the aircraft’s fuselage as if a massive hose had been poked through the forward cabin door, audible exclamations from various passengers underscoring its impact. The Lockheed Constellation, an Air Force Military Air Transport Service C-121, landed at Ramey Air Force Base with all of its aft-facing seats occupied by active-duty personnel, reservists, dependents, civil servants, government contract employees and military retirees on Latin-American junkets.

Bidding his seatmates, a thoroughly-pregnant young lady and an Airman First Class, farewell, Jack joined the line that shuffled toward the after passenger door. Other Airmen were hard at work disgorging the plane’s baggage compartments. Waiting for his bags to appear on the tarmac, Jack scanned the immediate area for any sign of ground transportation. His destination, Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, was roughly a hundred miles due east of Ramey, and one of the MATS personnel at Charleston Air Force Base had told him that the Air Force ran shuttle service between Ramey and San Juan. He had no information, however, about Navy transportation between the capital and Roosevelt Roads. Not seeing anyone in the immediate area with the ubiquitous symbol of authority, a clipboard, Jack grabbed his bags and headed toward what he assumed was the base operations building. As he approached it, he saw a sign above the door identifying it as the Passenger Terminal.