"You know," Tanisha said as Jennlynn leveled Skyhook out and let the speed rise to cruise, "I think I understand a little better, now. I mean, even though I knew it was fake, it seemed almost real. Like I said, I almost think I could do it if I had to, and I can see how you can find it exciting. Thank you for putting this together for us."

"No big deal," Jennlynn told her, throttling back as the airspeed needle swung past 500 mph. "Like Shirley said, that’s about as close as we could get to making it real in the time we had available. It’s still not quite the same thing, but you’d have to do it for real to tell the difference."

"I think it’s probably just as well," Tanisha sighed. "And you’ve been doing this for ten years? It seems unbelievable!"

"Ten years last May," Jennlynn nodded. "We even had a little anniversary party with a cake. It’s a little different for me now, since I don’t stand lineups very often anymore. Ever since I became a headliner, mostly I work by appointment. It’s more money, and almost guaranteed money, but it takes out a lot of the thrill. There’s a challenge to getting picked out of a lineup without cheating on the other girls and playing dirty, and it’s a real thrill when you win. I miss it."

"I don’t know how you women do it," Jon said from over their shoulders, where he was riding in the jump seat. "It would scare the hell out of me. Hell, I knew it was a setup and I was still scared to go in. I was having real second thoughts until Danny came up to me outside and said, "Hey, man, you here to party?"

"You overcame it," Jennlynn laughed. "I told Shirley to run the clock on you for real, since the two of you are about the horniest married couple with each other I’ve ever met. If she didn’t we might have been there all afternoon."

"Jon is insatiable," Tanisha laughed.

"Yeah, but she taught me to be," Jon grinned.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jennlynn could see that the two of them were holding hands. They often did, even at work – as if they needed to touch each other to make sure the other was still real, even after close to four years as a couple and a year and a half of being married.

Since not long after Jennlynn had first met them, they’d both evidenced a real curiosity about how she could work at the Redlite, what it felt like. Since the Christmas they’d shared at St. Thomas two years before, they’d been about the closest friends Jennlynn had, except for Will and Shirley. The subject had come up often, and had again this morning on the way back from China Lake in southeastern California, where an advanced systems test had gone very well. Since they were close by, Jennlynn had jokingly suggested that there was one way to find out, and was very surprised that they took her up on it.

Jennlynn and Shirley had given Tanisha a thumbnail course in the way things worked. After that they loaned her a sexy lineup outfit, and with two other girls Tanisha had stood a lineup, getting picked out of it by Jon, after almost getting picked out by another guy. The guy was a setup, the bartender and bouncer, but he gave things an exciting touch of realism. Jennlynn didn’t know the details, but from things that had been said, the hour the two of them spent in her room had to have been very intense, indeed.

Though, like Jennlynn, Jon and Tanisha did not make close friends easily; in the years she had known them they had become even more comfortable with each other. They were no longer scared of the world or of their color difference. They were confident people now, certain of their capabilities, highly regarded within the company – and not just because they were the two who yanked the Butterfly project out of the dumpster and turned it into a stellar success. Their input had led to the biggest growth – and biggest shareholder dividends – in Lambdatron history.

Everyone had given up on the Butterfly before the two showed up from Atlanta right after graduation wearing wedding rings they’d put on each other’s hands the day before. Only a few days before that, the Butterfly project had been officially cancelled by the Pentagon; Jennlynn and Stan had spent days in Washington trying to limit the damage to the company, but with only modest success. On the way back, Stan confided to her that they had one last shot in the locker, and he intended to use it: throw Jon and Tanisha at it for a few weeks, let them go back over the project with their unique combination of talents and see if there was something the rest of them had missed. They never did actually find the problem, other than the protest Mike Hanneman had made from the beginning of too much power in too small a space, but that didn’t matter.

Starting with the clean sheet of paper that everyone at Lambdatron had been reaching for since the beginning, they dug out an old, old technical paper from the early days of laser technology and came up with a way to accomplish what the Butterfly was intended to do, but using a tenth of the power, an amount that was capable of being handled in the space available. Stan, Jennlynn, and virtually every other engineer on the project had looked at the same paper before and had missed an obvious anachronism that made everyone feel incredibly stupid when it was pointed out. After a three-day marathon over a weekend, going without sleep, they’d not only designed a totally new approach to the Butterfly that they’d code named "Monarch," but had designed a preliminary test version called the "Swallowtail."

Financed entirely by Lambdatron, four months later the Swallowtail worked flawlessly, and it continued to work flawlessly. The Navy had dropped the project, but with a little help from Mike Hanneman contacting some old friends, the Air Force picked it up. Lambdatron’s new Monarch division was almost a separate company, with Jon and Tanisha the chief engineers; when the division separated almost a year ago, Jennlynn had moved to another project and was only serving as a charter pilot today.

"So, Jennlynn," Tanisha asked. "Are you coming up to Flagstaff with us for Christmas?"

"Not this year," Jennlynn told them. "I’ve got other plans, for once."

"Something interesting?" Tanisha grinned. "We’ll miss you."

On the same day of the first Swallowtail test, Jon and Tanisha had been getting ready to go for a jog to unwind when there came a knocking upon their door. Jon opened it, to discover his sister Crystal, who he had not seen for years. Her appearing was all the more surprising in that they had gone to considerable lengths to keep anyone from either family from knowing their address. Surprise turned to shock when it was revealed that Jon’s mother had left his father, was getting a divorce, and had a new boyfriend in Flagstaff. The "new" boyfriend was in fact an old boyfriend, and proved to be Crystal’s real father, to everyone’s amazement but her mother’s.

It wasn’t until Jennlynn went up to Flagstaff to have Christmas with them that she discovered that she knew the "new" boyfriend – Al Buck, from Canyon Tours, who she’d run the Grand Canyon with in 1996! He was now a widower, Louise having died earlier this year. It was a large and fun Christmas, the stuff of dreams to Jennlynn, who had survived too many bordello holidays. It was marked by Tanisha singing old spirituals accompanied by a woman friend of Crystal’s who was a magician with a Celtic harp. Except for the holidays she’d spent with the Hoffmans, it was the best Christmas she’d had in a decade.

"Fairly interesting," she smiled, hoping to cover up her interest. "I’m going to be with some of Shirley’s family. Jon, till your mother came along, they’re just about all the family I had, and I don’t see them often enough."

"They’re those ranchers up in Nevada, right?" he asked.

"Yeah, Shirley’s kids and grandkids. Great grandkids now, too."

Tanisha shook her head. "Shirley is not the sort of person that comes to mind when you think the word ‘great-grandmother.’"

"I’ll admit that," Jennlynn laughed. "But, she’s got an unusual family. All of her kids either were prostitutes or married them, and all but one of her grandkids."

"What’s the matter with the one left over?" Jon grinned, shaking his head.

"He hasn’t gotten married yet," Jennlynn grinned back. She’d never mentioned Will around Lambdatron, or even to Jon and Tanisha. While he was still as close as she had to a boyfriend – and she was, as far as she knew, as close as he had to a girlfriend – there was something that kept her from doing it. Will was out of another world, one that didn’t fit into Lambdatron, or her flying, or most other things that she did, and she didn’t fit his world very well, either. It just didn’t seem right to mix the two.

The year before the previous summer, when she’d turned thirty and been feeling a little depressed about it, Will was home on leave from his tour in Saudi Arabia, before going to his next station in Okinawa. They’d taken some of the horses from the ranch and had spent ten days on a horse-packing trip in the Humboldt National Forest north of the ranch. "Forest" is not a word that easily comes to mind for anything in Nevada, although there are some nice ones, if rather small. It had been idyllic and pretty, most of it up in the Ponderosa pine country; still uncomfortably Nevada-summer warm for Jennlynn, but pleasantly cool for Will following his time along the Persian Gulf. They’d spent her birthday near a tiny mountain spring with a heck of a view off to the west, and somehow the pain of the day passed without comment. There’d been a long, long time between twenty and thirty, and a lot had happened in her life, and there was no one she’d rather have spent the milestone day with but him. He was still the only man she was truly comfortable with, just because he was as he was – but it was so strange to her, so foreign, that she couldn’t share the fact with anyone, not even Jon and Tanisha.

"Strange family," Tanisha laughed. "But if they’re anything like Shirley, they’ve got to be pretty nice. It’s lucky you have someone like them."

"I was very lucky to find them," Jennlynn agreed. "Life would have been much more bleak the last ten years without them."

"It’d be worse for us if you hadn’t put your hand out to us, and then Jon’s sister and mother showing up." Tanisha nodded, "With you and them, it’s almost as if we’re not outcasts anymore."

* * *

Late on Friday afternoon a week and a half later, Jennlynn put Skyhook down on the runway at Antelope Valley, and as was the routine, taxied it up to the tie downs marked "Reserved for Learjet Jenn," where she buttoned the plane up for the weekend. It was good to be back. She knew she could go back into her logbook and work out how many times she’d flown up here over the years, but it didn’t matter. Her condo in Phoenix was where she lived, the same, very first place she’d gotten after going full-time at Lambdatron, but in some perverse way, this sprawling building in this ugly place was home to her now as was no other place. Home for the weekend, time to relax and have some fun.

She walked up to the back gate, used her key to enter, went in through the back entrance near the kitchen – and discovered that the lounge was packed, a lot busier than she’d expected. "Hi, Jennlynn," Shirley said to her as she walked across the lounge carrying the small suitcase she’d need for the weekend. "Good to have you back."

"Looks busy," Jennlynn smiled.

"Dern tootin’ it’s busy," Shirley laughed. "Danny’s been slinging drinks with both hands. We called Mike in early, and it’s still taking both of them to keep up. The girls are busy! We’ve got thirty-two in the house, counting you, and sometimes we get as many as three or four free for a lineup."

"Good! Nobody’s got reason to complain about not enough action. What’s the reason?"

"UNLV beat Hawaii in a preseason game," Shirley told her. "But the 317th Fighter Squadron is deploying for a year in Saudi Arabia. They start flying out Monday, right before Christmas."

"The Air Force is good at that stuff," Jennlynn nodded. She knew it all too well from some of the things that had happened with Will.

"Not a lot of women or booze to be found in Saudi," Shirley laughed. "So this is about their last chance to party."

The 317th was one of a number of units in the area that George and the Redlite Ranch had sort of adopted; members of the unit deploying or returning from deployment were given certificates offering $100 off services at the Redlite, which George made up to the girls out of the house cut. It was a loss leader, just to get the customers in the door, and since many weren’t going to have the opportunity for this sort of recreation for some months to come, the place was busy, and would likely get busier as the evening progressed.

"Am I in on the action?" she asked. "Or have I got an appointment?"

"You’ve got an appointment," Shirley told her. "In fact, you’re booked until two AM, but if it’s still rocking and no one else signs up, you could get in a lineup. The first is Max; he’s been hanging around waiting for you. He’s got four hours booked."

Jennlynn knew Max Hawkins. He was an Air Force colonel, the commander of the 317th, which flew F-117A Stealth fighters. "He must really want to party," she grinned. "But I need to have something to eat, first. Let me put this stuff down and change clothes, and I’ll hunt him up. If he’s going to be dropping three grand on his American Express card, the least I can do is buy him dinner."

It was not a small, intimate dinner; several pilots from the squadron joined the two of them around the big table. Max had a reputation as a hot pilot, but also as a good leader who wouldn’t ask anything of his men that he wouldn’t do himself. That apparently included partying at the Redlite, although Jennlynn had partied with him before, as well as worked with him out at Groom Lake on a highly classified upgrade to the Stealth’s bomb guidance system. Since Jennlynn was a pilot too, she was somewhat above the lesser run, so it was a fun time. There was plenty of talking and tall story telling involving airplanes going on.

Even though Jennlynn liked Colonel Hawkins and considered him a good leader, that didn’t mean he wasn’t as full of shit as any fighter pilot could get. The F-117A is not a dog-fighting airplane; it was originally designed as a bomber to sneak in over radar-defended targets at night without detection, and the only reason it’s considered a fighter at all was some Air Force politics when it was being designed twenty years before. Those things that make it stealthy also rob it of a great deal of agility and performance, things fighter pilots want in a fighter plane.

But fighter pilots will be fighter pilots, and that didn’t keep them from going out and "hassling" each other as if they were flying real fighters. Jennlynn and Mike Hanneman still went out every now and then with his friend’s two Pitts S-2s and played the same game. Mike was a lot better at it, having done it for many years, and Jennlynn, no slouch herself, was hard put to best him one out of ten.

Jennlynn knew from stories told and retold that every pilot in the squadron had tangled with Colonel Hawkins at one time or another and had come away with their head in their hands. As they ate, he was bragging about it pretty good and the pilots were feeding him.

Once in a while, in a noisy crowd, chance governs that everybody stops talking at once, and all of a sudden there’s a brief, sometimes-awkward silence. Such was the case shortly before seven in the evening – for an instant, the lounge became almost silent, and into the near silence fell Jennlynn’s words, loud to overcome the noise that had been going on, and dripping with contempt, to boot: "Shit, Max, that thing is a dog and you know it. Not only can I out party your ass in bed, I could hop in my Learjet and wax your ass in the air."

The table Jennlynn and Colonel Hawkins were sitting at erupted in derisive hoots – there were a number of fighter pilots and squadron members sitting there, after all – and the crush of noise again filled the room. Against that crush of noise, Jennlynn heard Max snort, "You’re talking out your sweet little ass, Skyhooker. What do you say that tomorrow we just go out and see?"

Again the table erupted with laughter against the noise, and a rather drunken pilot across the room started a story about Colonel Hawkins whipping his fanny. Jennlynn thought that pretty well was that.

The place was jumping that night. Rather than the usual lineups, it was so busy that there was a waiting list for the next girl who became available. When Jennlynn wrapped up her two AM appointment, she rather hoped to be able to do a lineup or two, but found that someone had decided to buck the line by signing up for a thousand-dollar hour. At 3:30 the place was still rocking, but she did get into some lineups with some other rather tired ladies and did three more short parties. Finally, at six in the morning, she called it good enough and went to sleep, even though there was still some partying going on. It had been a good night, one of the better ones recently, a night of the sort that kept her coming back to the Redlite. The 317th was going to have a party to remember for a long time while they baked in the wineless and womanless deserts of Saudi Arabia.

* * *

About noon, and feeling very satisfied, Jennlynn got up, got a shower and pulled herself together. Except when she knew she was going to be standing a lineup, she no longer dressed so hot that it looked like she was about to burn up, but had decided that her age allowed her to be more elegant than trashy. She pulled on a nice conservative but sexy low-cut black jumpsuit, and headed out to the lounge for breakfast or lunch or whatever Sarah might call it. It would give her a while to socialize and maybe even do a lineup before she started in on her afternoon appointment list.

Danny looked pretty tired; she found out he’d put in nineteen straight hours behind the bar. "You had a good night, I take it," he asked as he served her coffee.

"Yeah, that was one of the better ones," she smiled. "I like fighter pilots. It takes a serious ego to throw money like that around on a government salary."

Just about that time, the gate buzzer went off twice – the signal for someone coming into the lounge, and not just there to party. Someone released the gate, and in a few seconds the front door opened – and a lot of familiar-looking men started trooping in, familiar since they were among the group from the 317th who had partied until the wee small hours that morning. Several of them walked right up to the table where Jennlynn was sitting. She smiled a beatific smile at them and said, "You guys really want to party it down before you head out to Saudi, huh?"

"More or less," a handsome-looking officer type in civilian clothes said. "Max said that if you want to play, he’ll be overhead at one."

Jennlynn shook her head. "Christ, I knew his ego was bigger than his dick, but I didn’t think it was that much bigger. How did he break loose a bird, anyway?"

"Not real sure," the guy said. "You gonna play with him?"

"After I mouthed off about it last night, I guess I’d better," Jennlynn said as she glanced at her watch and got up. "I wish the hell he’d given me the chance to at least taste some coffee, though. I can be pretty pissy until I’ve had my coffee."

"He said he didn’t know if you had UHF in the Lear; he’ll be on 123.3," the guy said.

"Danny, have Sarah hold my breakfast," Jennlynn said as she headed for the door. "I’ll have it after I kick this cocky dude’s ass."

Just then there was a roar and a "whoosh" overhead. "He’s here a little early," the guy smiled. "Let’s go outside and check this out."

The crowd of Air Force types headed for the kitchen and the back door – and so did a lot of the girls. In the air, they could see Colonel Hawkins’ black Stealth fighter circling lazily, not all that far up while Jennlynn started a careful walk around on her Learjet, untying the tie downs. One of the Air Force types had a portable radio slung from a shoulder strap; he picked up a microphone and called, "Nighthawk, this is Darkmoon, she’s gonna play. She’s doing her preflight."

"Nighthawk, roger," Hawkins’ voice came back laconically over the speaker. "I’m in no hurry."

There was getting to be a crowd out there; even though it was cold – December Nevada desert cold – several people weren’t wearing much. There were even some clients with their girls of the night, wearing nothing but hastily grabbed blankets wrapped around the both of them, watching Jennlynn finish her preflight, then open the door of the Learjet and get inside.

"Jesus," Danny heard one of the 317th guys say. "G-8 and his Battle Aces. I never thought I’d see that happen."

"What the hell is that?" someone else asked.

"Those old pulp stories they used to have back after World War One," the first guy said. "Most of them had the Red Baron flying over the Allied airstrip at dawn in his Fokker Triplane, challenging the people on the ground to a duel of champions, and there’s Jennlynn, out warming up her Spad. Who’da thunk it?"

Out at Skyhook, Jennlynn was in no hurry as she went through her pre-start checklist. She knew she was about to take the plane into a flight regime she’d never had it in before, situations where it really wasn’t intended to go – but by now, she had several years’ experience and a lot of faith in the former drug-runner. One of the things she and Mike Hanneman had never figured out was why the plane had cageable gyros that could be locked up to prevent them from being damaged at extreme angles, and now, for the first time, she locked them all up – understanding that sometime in the past, someone else had taken this plane into places in its performance envelope that Bill Lear had never intended. But deep down inside, the Lear’s heritage was not business jet but fighter jet; the original design was based on a Swiss fighter-bomber that had good promise but had never gone into series production.

But she didn’t want to hurry, mostly because she didn’t want to let Hawkins get a mental edge on her. She shook her head at her audacity, glad that no one – especially Mike Hanneman – could see, then hit the start button for the left engine. It lit off in a low roar, followed by the other one. After a minute, Jennlynn released the brakes and began to taxi toward the end of the old bomber runway, not far off.

Might as well get a little mental edge of her own, she thought. She keyed the mike button on the yoke and called, "Hey, Nighthawk, this is Skyhooker. Since you screwed me out of my morning coffee, you want to make this interesting?"

"Skyhooker, what do you have in mind?" Hawkins’ voice came back over the radio.

"How about we rerun last night, double or nothing?" That would put six thousand dollars on the deal, after spending three grand last night, maybe it was enough to give him pause.

It wasn’t. "Double the party, and you’re on, Skyhooker," Nighthawk’s voice came over the radio.

"Good enough," Jennlynn replied, realizing that he’d just upped the ante to $12,000 that he was risking against a free night in bed with her, and all he could think of was the freebie. "I can out play you in the air, and I can out party you, too."

Unknown to her at the time, things were happening out between the fence and the back of the building, and it was Danny who set it off as much as anyone. It seemed pretty one-sided to him – Jennlynn’s Learjet was older than she was, coming up on forty years old. He knew the Stealth fighter had been around for a while, but to him it was a fighter plane, not a business jet made for hauling executives and their briefcases around. On the other hand, Jennlynn seemed awful confident, and Danny figured she must know something he didn’t. What’s more, he had an awful lot of confidence in Jennlynn. He knew her well enough to know this wasn’t the kind of thing she’d do unless she thought she could get away with it. Feeling full of the moment after hearing the radio exchange between Nighthawk and Skyhooker, Danny yelled out, "All right, double or nothing on a round of drinks, too!"

That set off a round of side bets. In the next couple minutes, most of the girls picked out one of the Air Force guys and made a "double or nothing" bet on some really exotic – and expensive – services, no three hundred dollar half and halfs, not this time. Considering that Nighthawk and Skyhooker had twelve thousand dollars riding on the deal themselves, there was a good fifty thousand dollars in money or services laid on the table in the next five minutes, every one of the airmen siding with their mentor, Max Hawkins.

Jennlynn swung Skyhook around in a full circle to see where the black F-117A was – up a couple thousand feet, heading toward her, and fairly close. A plan of action sprang to mind. Without a second thought she shoved the twin throttles up, and felt the engines spool up in a blast of noise to launch the white business jet down the crumbling old bomber runway. In only a few seconds she eased back on the Learjet’s yoke to rotate and get in the air, then raised the landing gear. But instead of climbing out at the normal steep angle, she kept the plane low, only fifty feet up or so, as the engines quickly pushed the speed past the normal speed limits for under ten thousand feet. She glanced upward, to notice Nighthawk was still heading toward her, then eased back on the yoke. The CJ-610s roared with a sound that shook the earth around those watching from the ground. The nose pointed higher and higher – then beyond vertical, as she put the plane into a vertical half-loop, ending up flying upside down and going the opposite direction, but now going the same direction as the F-117A, and following behind it. She then rolled her jet upright and took out after him with a big acceleration advantage.

"Shit," the guy with the radio said down on the ground. "An Immelmann, right off the deck – and in a Lear! That didn’t take long." He reached for the microphone – to find his hand covered by the big hand of an over-six-foot black prostitute named Mallory, who came equipped with a solid build, a black belt, and a mean expression.

"Naughty, naughty," she said with an evil grin. "Let’s keep this fair now, shall we?"

"But . . . " the guy said.

"You want to find yourself going double or nothing on a domme game? You be good or Momma spank," she snorted as the F-117 started a steep turn toward the building – but they could see that the Learjet was in an even steeper turn, catching up fast.

As the two planes roared by overhead, less than a thousand feet up, the Learjet had closed up tight to the fighter. "I’m all over your ass, Nighthawk," Jennlynn radioed.

Amazingly enough, they stayed more or less in sight, as the black F-117A twisted and turned, trying to get the old white Learjet off his tail, but Skyhooker wasn’t giving him an inch. Not surprising, at least to Jennlynn, the Learjet was more powerful, and had more acceleration than the F-117A. She actually had to back off on the throttles to keep from overrunning him. Nighthawk went high, then went low, and then twisted and turned, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to shake her. "Still all over your ass," she called a couple minutes later.

"All right, I give," he said finally, the resignation evident in his voice. "You like to redouble on whether you can shake me?"

"Nothing I’d like better," Skyhooker’s voice came back over the radio. "Hold still for a second." Max quit twisting and turning, trying to shake her, and leveled the wings. Jennlynn opened the throttles on the Learjet, and soon swept around and past him, then throttled back again. They weren’t far from the runway and the watching crowd in back of the Redlite Ranch as she radioed, "OK, Nighthawk, do your best."

Knowing now that she had a major advantage, Jennlynn wasn’t about to let it go. Still going under relatively moderate throttle, she pulled the nose of the Learjet high, and close behind, Nighthawk followed. She twisted the plane a little to look behind as best she could – she had a wider viewing angle from the Lear than he had from the Stealth fighter anyway – and when she judged the time was right, she chopped the throttles, keeping the nose high.

The F-117A is at best a poor flying beast, and the only reason it can fly at all is that it has a pretty good computer in it to moderate some of the actions of the pilot. It particularly does not like to fool around close to stall speed, where a wing gives up flying and starts to drop like a rock. Max could see what Jennlynn was up to – he had been around air hassles many more times than she had – and cut power himself to match her trick. But, the computer didn’t like it, and sensing that they were near stall speed, overrode him and opened the throttle instead. Max barely had time to say "Shit!" before his fighter swept past the business jet, and Jennlynn was on his tail again.

"All over your ass again," she called to Nighthawk. "Did I make my point, or what?"

"Yeah, Skyhooker," they heard Hawkins reply with a resignation that was clear, even over the radio – and $24,000 poorer in the credit card.

"I’ll be waiting, as soon as you get your ass back down there," Skyhooker said with almost a sneer.

"It’s going to take three hours to drop this thing off and drive back over here," Nighthawk protested.

"I’ve got a hold harmless for Groom," she said. "Call up and get me cleared in, and I’ll pick you up."

"All right," he said. "Give me a second."

"Skyhooker, this is Dreamland," they heard immediately. "We’ve been following this, and you’re cleared in."

"Be right there, Dreamers," she replied with a grin. "Nighthawk, take it easy and I’ll catch up with you in a second."

Feeling very victorious – as she had every right to feel under the circumstances – she broke off from her position behind the Stealth fighter, dropped Skyhook’s nose and turned toward the airstrip and the Redlite Ranch. She roared down the airstrip, the CJ-610s shaking the earth, only a couple hundred feet up, and rolled the Learjet on its side, then over entirely upside down, then on its other side, before righting herself in a nicely executed four-point victory roll, the first ever recorded in a Learjet. Feeling full of herself, and pretty sure that the crowd she could see out behind the building was monitoring the radio traffic, she keyed the mike again and called, "Boys and girls, you just heard the roar of a ’67 Learjet running full bore!"

"Hey girls!" George called to the throng as they watched the Learjet pull back up and climb to join the Stealth fighter. "All those side bets. House cut is only on the base rate, not the bets. Now give these guys something to remember when they’re sitting in Saudi and don’t even have Playboy magazine to jerk off with."

If any of them looked up amidst the cheering, they would have seen the white Learjet pull up into close formation with the black Stealth fighter as they headed north to the secret air base. "Hey Max," she snickered over the radio. "You ever watch any westerns when you were a kid?"

"Yeah, sure," he said glumly, starting to realize the implications of what happened, and they reached well beyond the big hole he’d blown in his American Express card.

"The good girls fly white planes, but to make it up to you, tonight I’m going to be the baddest girl you ever imagined."

They weren’t at Groom Lake long. Max was able to get the F-117A into a hangar quickly, and he didn’t even change out of his flight gear before he got into the right seat of the Learjet with her. It was a quick flight back to the Redlite Ranch. Jennlynn shut the Learjet down, then she and Max tied it down and went inside to discover that there was a party rolling pretty good.

Most of the crowd had put off conventional partying – at least as the term was used at the Redlite Ranch – to await the return of the conquering heroine and her vanquished rival. A couple of Air Force officers were battering away at the rarely-used piano, coming up with a badly mangled takeoff of Snoopy and the Red Baron, ragging Max and turning the incident into a legend: "Then all at once, a hero appeared, a gorgeous hooker with a little white Lear . . . " A good sport, Colonel Hawkins motioned for silence, and said rather loudly, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the honorary top gun of the 317th Fighter Squadron: Learjet Jennlynn Swift, the fastest woman in the state of Nevada!"

"Yeah, right," Jennlynn laughed. "Now where the hell is my damn coffee?"

* * *

They kept a pretty good stock of liquor on the shelves and in the back room, but it was running low by the time the evening started to wind down in the wee small hours. It was a night so wild it put Friday to shame, and after a while it was hard to say who did what and to whom and for how long and for how much.

Around noon the next day, Jennlynn appeared at the door to the lounge, dressed for her flight back to Phoenix and looking bright and chipper after a very long afternoon and a longer night. The place was almost empty. George was sitting in the bar, languidly drinking a cup of coffee with Danny and Sarah, the only person in the building without a hangover because she was the only one in the building who didn’t drink; even Jennlynn had had a couple that evening.

"That was the wildest night ever," she heard George say. "I always wondered what a Roman orgy was like. I guess I don’t have to wonder anymore. Did you get to the Jacuzzi room out back?"

"No," Danny shook his head. "Hell, I was serving booze with both hands and wishing I had a third, I never got the chance. I heard it was going pretty good, though."

"I stuck my head in for a couple minutes once, just to see," George shook his head. "The rest of the night I was stamping credit card slips. There was some serious partying going on, some hellacious numbers. I think every bed in this joint is still either filled with hookers or Air Force or both, and I know there were some Air Force women back there partying. Jeez, they could have shot an X-rated recruiting film around here last night, and every red blooded man and a lot of the women in the country would want to be getting on the blue suit."

"Yeah," Danny agreed. "That was one to remember, all right."

"Darn right," George smiled. "Good God, Jennlynn thinks she’s got a reputation, hell, now it’s way more than that. We’re talking legend."

"Oh, it’s not that bad," she spoke up as she headed for the coffee pot.

"Ye Gods, Jennlynn," George said, looking at her. "Are you human, or what? I mean, after a night like that."

"You know what they say," she smiled. "If you’re gonna fly like the eagles, and all that."

"That settles it," George snorted. "I’ve heard all that shit about having aliens out at Area 51; you have to be one of them. No human being could be as bright and chipper as you are after a night like that. Did Max survive the experience?"

"Yeah, he’s OK, I think," she smiled as she set down her coffee cup and joined them. "He kinda faded on me after a while, so I went out and partied in the Jacuzzi room for a bit, then went back in and crashed with him, so I actually caved in a little early. He’s still sleeping it off."

"I won’t necessarily go as far as alien," Danny shook his head. "But Jennlynn, you have got to be the most astonishing woman I’ve ever heard of, let alone met. Jesus, that was a jet fighter, and you made it look like an eagle against a turkey. How in hell did you do that?"

"It was really pretty easy," she smiled. "Like I said, I get a little pissy if I don’t have my coffee."

"I’d say that was a little pissy, all right," George nodded. "But I’d like to know how in the hell you managed that, too, and how you thought you could get away with it in the first place."

Jennlynn glanced around the room; there were still only the four of them in there. "It isn’t so much a case of how the hell I could do it than it is how the hell he could be so dumb," she shook her head. "Like I said, fighter pilots have egos bigger than their dicks, and most of them think they have pretty big ones, although most of the girls here would say they’re no bigger than average. But they have to have big egos or they wouldn’t be fighter pilots; it’s part of the job description. They have to be able to think they can hop into whatever bucket of bolts happens to be sitting around and kick the crap out of anything in the sky."

Danny frowned. "A business jet against a jet fighter?"

Jennlynn shook her head. "Danny, the Lear is roughly the equivalent, performance wise, of a Korean War era fighter, but isn’t quite as agile and can’t take the G-loading. And, Max is pretty good, anyway. If he’d been in any other jet fighter built clear back to the end of World War II, he’d have had my ass, but I knew that or I wouldn’t have taken him up on it in the first place," she smiled.

"You’re saying that Max knew this?" George nodded.

"Of course he knows it," Jennlynn snorted. "Hell, he has to or he wouldn’t be flying one in the first place. The thing is that Max is a dogfighter fighter pilot at heart, and frankly he’s a damn good one. But he has that big fighter-jock ego, so he had to believe that in spite of everything, he could wax a hooker flying a Learjet. Well, this hooker does know how to fly her Learjet, knows it’s capabilities, has played around with aerobatics a bit, and she knows a lot about the weak points of the F-117A, we don’t need to go into why. If his ego hadn’t gotten in the way, he would have realized it, too. In fact, I think he did. That’s why he showed up overhead before he was supposed to be here, to try and intimidate me. But, I don’t intimidate worth a damn, especially before I’ve had my morning coffee."

"That’s going to add to your reputation when it gets around," George smiled.

"It’s already started," Jennlynn smiled. "I think maybe I got my message across."

"Message?" Danny asked.

"Damn right," Jennlynn said. "Danny, you understand it in your gut from working here, and so does George, but those Air Force types didn’t exactly get it until yesterday. Danny, I’m a woman and I’m a prostitute, like most of the women in this building. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be as good as or better than anyone else in the world at the other things we may do. By God, even though I am what I am, I can still play ball in their yard and kick their ass in the process. Max needed to learn that, some of those Air Force people needed to learn that." She let out a sigh, and continued. "And a lot of the women in here need to be reminded of it once in a while, too."

"I am woman, hear me roar," George smiled.

"Damn right," Jennlynn laughed. "And we’re pretty damn good at that part about spreadin’ our lovin’ arms across the land, too."

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