Chapter 6

Given that Norma’s ideas for helping girls trapped in the dregs of the sex trade were just ideas and there were obvious preliminaries that she had to take care of, there wasn’t much that Jennlynn could do to help for a while. Besides, she was busy at Lambdatron for the next few weeks.

It wasn’t easy for her to get people at Lambdatron to start calling her Jennifer Hoffman; after all, they’d known her for over a decade as Jennlynn Swift, although the Learjet Jenn nickname had almost never been used around the place. Some things are slow to change, and she wondered if she’d ever convince everyone who worked for the company. Fortunately she’d cut back her contacts outside the company on Lambdatron business to nearly nothing in the months following the hijacking, so that simplified things a little.

Lambdatron did a lot of research work for the government – too much, Stan and others including Jennifer thought, since the oversight and security involved were often a pain in the neck that got in the way of making real progress. However with the war in the Persian Gulf obviously about to come to a boil, military-related projects took up more of the company’s attention than normal. Jennifer had been involved with some of those in the past, but again, following the hijacking, everyone including she thought it would be better if she wasn’t involved with the government projects for a while. It had been a relief for her to go back to overseeing commercial projects, which were often more challenging and usually less frustrating in the first place. With a major focus of the company going to the government projects, staff and resources on the commercial side were stretched rather thin, and everyone was putting in lots of extra hours, herself included.

Jennifer was still working at the office late one evening when her cell phone rang. There were not many people who had the number and she preferred to use land lines since she could be away from them if she wanted to be, but one of the few people who had the cell phone number was Will. Since she knew the call could be from him, she shoved her irritation at being interrupted to the side and answered it.

It was indeed Will! There hadn’t been any news of him for days, but she knew he could be busy since it was clear to everyone that the war was about to begin. “How you doin’ Miz Hoffman?” He asked.

One of the things that endeared Will to her was that he still was a Nevada cowboy at heart, and liked to talk like it. If he had to, he could talk like the university graduate he really was, although all his college had come through extension programs while he was in the Air Force. But along with his cowboy talk, he almost always called her “Miz Swift,” or “Miz Hoffman” since they’d been married. In the years that she’d known him he’d only called her “Jennlynn” a handful of times. She had yet to hear him call her “Jennifer” although he knew of the attempted name change.

“I’ve been doing all right except for worrying about you,” she said in deep relief.

“I told you there ain’t nothin’ to be worryin’ about. I guess you know the shootin’ started, but that’s hundreds of miles off. We’ve been flyin’ a lot of planes out of here, but there ain’t hardly any media around here to bother us. They’re all way up north lookin’ for where the real stories are, an’ that’s just fine with me.”

“I know,” she sighed. “It’s just that you’re there and I can’t help but worry. Now that it’s finally going, at least I know you’re one step closer to coming back.”

“I don’t guess it’s gonna be anytime real soon. I got a feelin’ that this ain’t gonna be over with in no four days like it was last time. Don’t worry about it. I’m lookin’ forward to seein’ you again about as much as I expect you’re lookin’ forward to seein’ me.”

“I just want to get up to the cabin with you so it can be just you and me for a while,” she replied. “And as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better.”

“We can probably do it for a few days, but don’t forget, when I get back I’m still gonna be stationed in Biloxi.”

“I know, but that’s better than the Persian Gulf. At least I can fly over there and be with you for a weekend now and then.” Biloxi, Mississippi was a long ways away from Phoenix, but as long as she had Skyhook it was a reasonable if expensive weekend trip. She had made it several times before he had gone to the Middle East, and it had been worth the money to her.

“I agree, it beats nothin’. At least we ought to have that for a while if this thing don’t go on too much longer. I sure miss workin’ with horses at the Robertson’s, though. I ain’t been hearin’ a lot about how they’re getting on.”

Jennifer knew a great deal about that. Will got a great deal of enjoyment in his life from training and working with horses. He was especially good with problem horses, such as ones that had been abused and were mistrustful of humans. Will’s father had once told Jennifer that her husband was as close to a “horse whisperer” as he had ever seen, and that he had a great deal of magic in reaching animals others had given up on.

On most of his overseas tours Will hadn’t had much to do with horses, but on his previous stateside tour as well as this one he’d found people off-base who were glad to have his services. He was glad to have the chance to work with the troubled horses, which is what he liked to do best. He didn’t make a great deal of money at it, but it was a lot cheaper than other things a serviceman could do off duty.

Although they talked for perhaps half an hour, there really wasn’t much news to exchange since they talked with each other frequently; cell phone coverage where Will was temporarily stationed appeared to be just about as good as it was in Phoenix. Jennifer had already given him an outline of what Norma had in mind, and he thought it was a good idea although he could see that it needed more work. Mostly they just reconfirmed that they loved each other, missed each other, and wanted to be back together. It was with real reluctance that they brought the call to an end.

As she clicked the phone off, Jennifer thought once again about the problems they faced with him being in the Air Force. He was stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, and it had been a good thing all the way around since that was where she had landed the hijacked airliner. Since he was the Public Information NCO there, he’d been able to blunt some of the hassles she’d had with the press, and it had contributed to their being together more than they had been before the incident. He had been the one to arrange her escape from the jaws of the press following the incident, and there was no way of telling what might have happened if he hadn’t intervened.

The problem was that, although Will was on temporary duty in the Persian Gulf, that duty came out of his time on a stateside tour which normally lasted three years. It seemed likely that his next permanent station would be overseas again, as it had been in the past – and there was a very good chance it could be back in the Persian Gulf again where she couldn’t expect to see him very often. Failing that, the Air Force had plenty of other faraway places they could wind up sticking him.

Will’s next chance to get out of the Air Force would be in early 2005, but if he stayed in the service he could expect to be looking at a permanent change of station, or PCS as it was often called in the service, about the same time. With her job at Lambdatron, it was obvious that she couldn’t follow him to some faraway station even if she could accompany him, and that was a problem that was going to come up between them in the future.

Jennifer had hopes of talking him into getting out when his enlistment was up, but she didn’t want to push him on it very hard. One of the things that had kept them apart over the years was all the money she had. Will had his pride – one of the things she liked about him – and he was living on his Air Force salary and what little he made training horses. He was using what of it he could to purchase shares in the Bar H Bar from some of his relatives who would eventually join him in inheriting the place.

She could have purchased it for him easily, but he didn’t want to take her money and that was that. He had once explained that he didn’t want her to think of him as her pimp. He surely wasn’t her pimp, but she respected his pride. One of the main reasons she’d hung up the spike heels and was determined to keep them on the hook was to make that point clear to him, but it was something she hadn’t told anyone but him.

What was more, if he hung on in the Air Force for another ten years he would be eligible to retire and draw a pension. They both felt it would be handy if for some reason they were to break up and he were to do what he really intended, which was to go back to the Bar H Bar and be a Nevada cowboy again. It was really all he’d ever wanted to do in the first place.

Men and their pride, she thought sarcastically. It wasn’t a problem yet but it clearly was going to be one in the future, and trying to figure out an angle to solve it kept her awake until late that evening.

Jennifer was yawning in her office the next morning, despite a liberal coffee intake. She really wasn’t working very efficiently, and was glad when noon came around and she could head down to the employee lunchroom for some sweet food and more coffee to perk her up.

There was a seat empty at a table occupied by Stan and her best friends, Jon and Tanisha Chladek. She hadn’t seen much of Jon and Tanisha recently, but she knew they’d been wrapped up in some big secret project she wasn’t privy to. She joined them and noticed that the three all had big smiles on their faces. “You guys look happy today,” Jennifer said as she sat down.

“Oh, pretty good,” Stan replied, and the smugness on his face was obvious. “Something worked right for once.”

“Yeah, it’s always good when something works like you hoped it would,” Jon added, equally smugly.

Jennifer knew better to ask what they were all so happy and smug about, since there was a lot of classified work going on around Lambdatron; discussing it over lunch in the lunchroom was not allowed. But in spite of everything Jennifer thought she had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

Several years before, under her supervision, Jon and Tanisha had invented a device code-named “Swallowtail,” which used huge bursts of microwave energy to knock out electronics at a distance. Even in the first tests it had been effective at a range of several miles and they had never bothered to find the limits of the prototype. Jennifer had been involved with the project for a while afterward until she had been shifted to other things, but she knew that there had been research and experimentation toward both larger and smaller versions of the invention.

In recent months she had heard mention around the company once or twice of a device code-named “Lunamoth.” She didn’t officially know what that was all about, but had reasoned that a luna moth, while not a butterfly, looked like a really big one. She’d even done a little calculation one slow afternoon and had worked out that the Swallowtail could be scaled up a long way, although the capacitor bank needed for it would be enormous and recharging it quickly would really suck up the juice. On top of that, there were news reports that morning that the Air Force had had little problem getting through the Iraqi air defenses around Baghdad. Two and two might not always add up to four, but this time Jennifer was pretty sure they did.

“Well, congratulations,” she smiled knowingly. “You guys deserve to win one once in a while.”

“Yeah, it feels pretty good,” Tanisha smiled, just about as smug as everyone else but showing it more with her bright white teeth against the backdrop of her very dark skin.

Jon and Tanisha were something of an unusual couple around Lambdatron, and not because he was Scandinavian white in spite of the middle European last name, while Tanisha was just about as black as a woman of West African descent could be. They were unusual because they were very close, so close that it had been charged around Lambdatron that they read each other’s minds on occasion, especially when they were thinking about engineering problems. Both of them denied the charge, and just said that they usually managed to think in pretty much the same channels so that sometimes there wasn’t a lot of talking needed to share a point. Despite hugely different backgrounds they were both geniuses of the same kind, and the common wisdom around Lambdatron was that the two of them working together was the equivalent of four or five other people working independently.

Back when they’d first come to Lambdatron they’d been pretty leery of what people thought about them because of their color difference. Jennifer had taken them under her wing, pointing out to them that everyone knew about her trips to the Redlite and she wasn’t put down for it. “I fought the tolerance battle around here years ago, and I won it,” she told them. That had slowly matured into the only deep personal friendship other than Will that Jennifer had had for years.

“I don’t think we ought to talk much more about it, especially here,” Stan pointed out.

“Well, yeah,” Jon agreed. “But you have to admit it feels good. Tanisha and I think we’d better pick up a few loose ends and then go home and celebrate for a while, especially since Nanci is in class this afternoon.”

“Right, we have to take advantage of the opportunity while we have it, and it won’t bother Barbie much. If we time it right she’ll sleep through most of it.”

“Don’t you get enough of that?” Stan snickered.

“No,” both Jon and Tanisha replied in unison, and then broke out in laughter.

Jennifer knew what that was all about, and Stan did, too. While the couple didn’t make a big deal about the details, it was obvious to everyone who knew them that they were the horniest couple with each other that anyone knew of. Both Jennifer and Will had pretty strong sex drives and sometimes when they’d gotten together in the past they’d come close to wearing each other out, but Jennifer suspected that Jon and Tanisha got way more sex than most people and enjoyed every minute of it.

Jennifer knew that among other things, the two enjoyed role-playing their sex games to keep their sex lives fresh and exciting, because she’d once been pulled into the fringes of one of their games. One time they’d been flying back from a Swallowtail field test in Skyhook when they happened to be near the Redlite, which was at its slowest time of the day and the week. Both Jon and Tanisha had expressed some interest in the past about what Jennlynn did there, and feeling happy and frisky they decided to make a quick visit so they could get a little taste of it.

Jennlynn took Tanisha back to her room – she had one permanently, unlike many of the other girls, because Learjet Jenn was a headliner at the place – and fitted out Tanisha with some “work clothes.” The fit wasn’t real good, since Tanisha was shorter and quite a bit more buxom, but they found something that would work. The outfit made Tanisha look about as hot to trot as she normally was with Jon.

While they waited for Jon to show up, Jennlynn decided to add a little bit of spice to the scene to make things more interesting for both of them. She got the bartender, who Tanisha and Jon hadn’t met, to take off his apron, put on a light jacket, and come in the front door at the same time as Jon. Tanisha and a couple of the regular girls did the normal lineup routine, with Tanisha introducing herself with the work name of “Tonia.” As he had been told, the bartender hit on Tonia pretty hard to go out back with him, and she had been so embarrassed that she’d almost turned white – or at least, a slightly lighter brown – before one of the regular girls diverted him and took him out back. In this case just back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

“I didn’t know what to think when he hit on me,” Tanisha reported afterwards. “I was beginning to think I’d have to go out back with him right in front of Jon.”

Tonia wound up going back to Jennlynn’s room with Jon as intended, and from what anyone could make out they went at it hot and heavy. So much so that Shirley had to call them on the house phone three different times to tell them that the hour Jon had paid for was up – and he actually had paid for it just to add to the realism.

It hadn’t been the real thing, but as a role-play it was as close to it as they could manage given the short time to set it up. Apparently it hadn’t been the last time they’d role-played hooker and client, either; one time Tanisha had made the offhand comment that it got pretty cold and scary standing out on a street corner dressed for business while she waited for Jon to come by and pick her up. Another time she’d commented that while she could never dream of doing the real thing, it was a lot of fun to play at it now and then.

Jennifer actually envied them a little for that – it was something that she and Will couldn’t do since they were both too well aware of the realities, but it was fun to think about.

In an effort to stay away from classified things that they couldn’t talk about, the conversation drifted to other topics. They included the latest update from Will and the latest report on the possible espionage charges against the reporter who had invaded a classified area at the company the year before. The reporter involved was currently in the Persian Gulf, at least as far as Stan knew, and therefore out of reach of a federal warrant although it would have probably been a good idea for her sake to stay there.

They also talked about the fact that Tanisha was pregnant again, although only a couple of months along; though their daughter Barbie had come as something of a surprise, the couple had decided that they wanted to keep the spacing of their children close. They were turning into doting parents, and Jennifer couldn’t help but wonder what kind of a crimp the kids were going to put into their sex lives when they got a little bit older. As parents, would they be as open and proactive about their kids learning about sex as Norma had been with her kids? It was a good question, and it begged the question of whether she and Will would be the same way if they ever had kids. That was still open for discussion, although Jennifer knew she was getting to be old enough that it wasn’t something that could be put off forever.

“You know, Jennifer,” Tanisha said as they were finishing up lunch, “We ought to have you over again sometime. It’s not going to be long before Nanci is in the Grand Canyon again and we’ll be back to eating tray meals or takeout.”

“It’s something to think about,” Jennifer replied. While Jon and Tanisha were people of many talents, cooking was not one of them. For years they’d mostly eaten the same kind of thing as she did. Things had changed the previous fall – Jon’s younger sister had moved in with them to help keep an eye on the house and the baby in her spare time while she went to school at Black Mesa College not far away. In the summer she was a boatman on the Colorado River, and while she was not exactly a gourmet-level chef she was at least a competent cook.

Jennifer had mixed emotions about the idea. She liked Nanci, she really did. She was a bright and cheerful person, and religious to the point of being pre-seminary at Black Mesa. She was a strong and independent individual, and she had to be to be a boatman in the Grand Canyon.

But she was also the “friend of a friend” who had barely survived the streets of Chicago that Jennifer had told Shirley and Norma about.

The story hadn’t come out easily. Nanci didn’t like to talk about the experience and was justifiably ashamed of it; as far as Jennifer knew Jon and Tanisha only had the barest outline of what had happened and none of the details. But one afternoon when Jennifer had stopped by the house to drop off some paperwork, she’d found Jon and Tanisha were gone somewhere doing something, perhaps role-playing; Jennifer wouldn’t have put it past them. Nanci was watching over Jon and Tanisha’s seven-month-old daughter Barbara, or Barbie as everyone called her. Nanci had been at least a little in the mood to talk about what had happened to her, and she had probably only opened up about it because she assumed that Jennifer had a good idea of what she had gone through. They could talk to each other as something approaching equals.

It had gotten pretty teary for both of them. Jennifer had known about the dark side, of course, but she’d never personally heard the stories in that kind of detail, and the stories had been horrendous. They included drugs up through heroin, beatings, torture, and slavery, as well as being forced to work the streets and being literally sold from pimp to pimp – and then Nanci’s friend’s suicide, and her own near attempt at it before luckily making her escape.

It had been a very sobering experience, and had led Jennifer’s attention down paths she had not contemplated. Nanci had asked Jennifer not to let Jon and Tanisha know anything of what she’d told her, and Jennifer had of course complied. However, it was going to be hard to keep a straight face and off of the topic at dinner with the three of them and Barbie, especially with what Jennifer and Norma had been discussing off and on for the past month.

“You ought to come over,” Jon said. “I’ve been in the mood for stuffed pork chops on the grill, and Nanci does real good with them. Let me tell you, back when she was in high school it was a struggle for her to make an edible peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“Yeah, let’s do it sometime,” Jennifer conceded, resolving that she would just have to keep her mouth shut and avoid the topics she’d been thinking about so much. But then, the thought crossed her mind that if it were possible she’d like to get Nanci together with Norma. If nothing else, Nanci would make a case study that her new friend could add to her dissertation. What’s more, a girl like her might have some fresh ideas about the feasibility of the whole thing.

Nanci would have to be approached carefully and gently – that much Jennifer was sure of – and it would have to be at a time when Jon and Tanisha weren’t around. It might take months, what with Nanci heading back to the Grand Canyon for the summer in the near future, but it might be worth the effort.

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