He had two hours left before taking off. A letter from his sister, as always, was full of nice wishes, home news and greetings from his mother and their neighbours. There was his mother’s standard postscript asking him to be careful because her heart won’t stand it, otherwise… She wrote that so often that it might be copied or used as a header of each page.
Lieutenant Harry Hawking opened the second email. It was from Carol. It was full of «tender kisses», laughter, memories, and a short story about a friend of hers, who got married and the groom ran away from the wedding and now everyone made fun of her. There was an emoticon and short note in the brackets: «Got it?» At the end Carol wrote she hoped he would have returned by the next Super Bowl: «You had known in advance that your favorite Seahawks would lose our Patriots and therefore you had not asked your General to let you be here for the final game. If you were here, I would be happy to see your face. We might have fun together. Six months have passed, you could have dropped at me for a day at least. By the way, Tom Brady’s got 4,551 successful passes and 143 interceptions. Besides, he’s got already two children as well. And he looks pretty good,» she joked.
Harry wrote back to her and added at the end: «Next time you see Tom Brady, tell him what you’d like to be a ball. Let him make the 4,552-nd good pass, and I will catch you here. I hope you will reach me as fast as all his passes did.»
His teammate, Nick, came into the cabin. Spotting Carol’s photo, he smiled and pretended looking the other way.
«Well, are you through emailing? He asked after a while, when Harry stopped typing on the keyboard.»
«Yes, what happened? Do you want to offer me whiskey?» smiled Harry.
«As usual, you’re kidding, but no, not now. A meeting has just been called as I guess they have some news. As I understand it, Intelligence never sleeps.»
«Ah, I see. Clear. They’ll probably talk about the Russians again – you know, be careful, no overlapping, no intersecting. The usual nonsense.»
«No, it seems more serious. Russia proposed to create a joint rescue team,» said Nick in a cheerful tone.
«What?» Harry did not even realize at first. «What team? Rescue? Whom?»
«Allegedly, the pilots and those guys, they mean, some intelligent agents, who may by chance get into the terrorists’ territory.»
«Did they all go crazy? Let them „ride their iron cows“ as long as they are allowed.»
«They are. They have a couple of good jets, though. I’ve seen them,» Nick folded his arms, made a serious face, and looked out the porthole.
«To hell with them! Why do we need them? Who should we rescue? They might have had a jet shot down?»
«No, they might not have, I guess. You take care of yourself, though, just in case!» his partner friendly patted his shoulder and portrayed a faint smile. Harry remembered quite well the case with Captain Simon, who had not returned from his flight and the press had been informed that the plane had crashed when landing on the aircraft carrier. Nick and his flight were flying then just above Simon and had to see everything. It happened at night and no one started digging deeper, though in fact Simon crashed over Aleppo when making a sharp turn over the territory of the rebels. The guys said it looked like he went into a turn that was too steep and lost control at low altitude. Later Nick told Harry that he had seen the dome in the place where Simon had been downed, but his tracker did not work and rebels reported that the plane was burned falling on their fuel storage facility. Nick hoped that Simon had survived although no one group had reported it.
