"Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman."

"In other words you're saying."

"Hold that thought."

"Hold that thought," Louis said. "Put it on the back burner."

"Exactly."

"First we bomb them."

"Then we fuck them," said the navigator.

Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn't sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight.

Long Tall Sally.

The pilot taxied to the runway and the tower cleared the plane for takeoff.

The copilot said, "Five, four, three."

The pilot had the throttles gang-barred to full-on position.

The copilot said, "One, zero, rolling."

When the plane rumbled past marker 7, for seven thousand feet of runway, the copilot said, speaking with a sense of enormous buffeted mass that caused his teeth to feel uprooted because this is nearly half a million pounds of Big Ugly Fat Fuckness laboring to lift itself over the marsh grass-the copilot said, "Committed."

And then the dark body began to loom like some apparition of the mists, long wings bending and flaps extended and wheels breaking contact and then the gear coming up and the smoky spews of trailing black alcohol and the storm-roar shaking the flats.

In the hole the navigator, Charles Wainwright Jr., called Chuckie, continued to scan the skaty-eight meters and switches and disconnects, a whole lifetime of indicators clustered in front of him and above him and to one side-the side not occupied by Louis Bakey, the radar-bombardier.

Chuckie scanned the switches and harassed his buddy, encouraging marriage to a decent woman with church affiliations.

"Don't start in with me," Louis said. "I don't need a wife. I don't need a church. You're the one who needs these things."

"I already, Louis, have had a wife."

"Who you didn't appreciate mentally."

"I had to go through my awkward phase. I was finishing out some things," Chuckie said.

The two men had been crewmates since Greenland, flying through arctic mirages and fifty-knot gales. Their current bombing runs were strangely uneventful by comparison, or a different level of reality at any rate, easier to project as a movie.

"I know what you need," Louis said. "A woman who'll be willing to accept your history of screwups. You need to unload this stuff on someone who's innocent. You want a sweet young female who was born to understand you. Like the sweet thing on the nose of this aircraft."

Louis said sweet thing in a scornful black voice. Since Louis was a scornful black, this was not surprising. Swee' thang. Not that he didn't have a spiritual side that Chuckie responded to, You only had to listen to his Stories of the early A-tests over Nevada-stories he'd told dozens of times through the years in lonely barracks in Greenland, Goose Bay and a number of remote SAC bases in the continental U.S.

"I don't think you ought to deride."

"Deride. That's nice," Louis said. "I rather deride her than ride her, tell you the truth. I believe she's too skinny for my taste. Plus she's been misnamed."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I get so tired. Educating these boys."

"What's it mean, Louis? Misnamed."

"Long Tall Sally."

"From the song of the same title."

"At least he knows that much. Heavens above."

"You think I don't know Little Richard and his Ow-ow-ow-ow?"

"This boy worth saving," Louis said. "But the point being."

"Used to hide his records from my parents. Oh baby woo baby. I was thirteen years old."

"This old Negro is touched, Chuckman. But the point I'm making is that the Long Tall Sally in the song and the Long Tall Sally they painted on our nose are not one and the same female of the species."

"Why not? Check her out. She's long, she's tall, she's got great legs and she looks to me like her name could be Sally. Woo. We're gonna have some fun tonight."

"Gonna have some fun tonight. That's exactly right," Louis said. "Only the Sally in Little Richard's number ain't gonna be seen in no car in no drive-in movie doing a little necking with a youth like yourself."

"Why not?" Chuckie said.

"Because she black and she bad."

Chuckie studied his radar scope and recomputed the aircraft's path over a couple of thousand miles of sea curve and mango atoll.

"What do you mean she black?"

"Because the song has a plot that somehow got lost in the wooing and wheeing."

"This song's been around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years maybe?"

"More or less," Louis said.

"And in all these years I'm not aware of anybody coming forth with a correction to the skin color of the title character, okay?"

On the intercom the pilot said conversationally, "I wonder if that's Manila down there. Sure looks pretty, Nav."

This was an unfunny dig at the windowless pair in the lower deck, who not only lacked a skyscape but sat facing backwards and not only sat facing backwards but would be forced to eject downwards if nicked by an enemy SAM.

Another sinister acronym designed to kill.

"Pilot, this is Nav," Chuckie said.

And he fine-tuned his scope and requested a minimal turn, aligning the plane's actual path with the track he'd plotted earlier.

Then he said, "Louis, this girl out there is good luck for us. Nearly forty missions without a major incident. Don't abuse her goodwill. She's Long Tall Sally. The one and only."

When Louis became agitated he used a staccato patter, a kind of hyperdrawl with elements of falsetto pique that he strung throughout at a master pitch.

"Song say You have any idea what the song say? This woman in an alley. Old uncle John in the alley with her. She built for speed. She got everything he need. Yes baby woo baby. Gonna have some fun tonight."

They were fifty thousand feet above the South China Sea, flying in a three-bomber formation called a cell, and there were fifteen cells in the air today, and each cell carried over three hundred bombs, and the resulting zone of destruction was known as a sandbox, and Chuckie was bizarro'd in one part of his brain by the crazy conversation he was having with old Louis even as he felt sad and hurt, in another and nearer part, by his buddy's attitude toward the girl on the nose of their aircraft.

"This song written by a black woman from Apaloosa, Mississippi. Richard add the little touches. I guarantee, brother, this Sally we're talking about ain't no skinny blond playing kissy-face in no backseat. She's an advance class of entertainment."

Sad and hurt. Chuckie's mind began to wander to Greenland, his previous posting, not a bad place to survive the breakup of a marriage. His human discontents were muted in the icy mists and the whole blowing otherworld of whiteouts and radio disruptions and unrelenting winds and total cold and objects that did not cast shadows and numerous freak readings on compasses and radar scopes and the BUFF that crashed on an ice sheet with live nukes aboard, anomalies of the eye, the mind, the systems themselves, and the experience made him sense the ghost-spume of some higher hippie consciousness. Or maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in a well-heated room in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.

Louis was conversing with the pilot in bombspeak, which must mean it was time for Chuckie to pay attention.

Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar-the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.