But in Top Gun they...

Pete stepped into the squadron briefing room, noted the outsider standing beside his squadron commander and nodded to the other pilots who were leaving the room and preparing for their sortie.

"This the reporter?" He directed the question to his commander, ignoring the outsider on purpose.

"Lieutenant Pete Mitchell, this is Jasper Ericsson, reporting for The Daily Telegraph. Do you have any other questions regarding the flight?"

Pete replied with a wave of his hand, "No, sir."

Jasper enthusiastically stuck his hand out for a handshake which Pete returned noncommittally. "Pete Mitchell? Like in 'Top Gun'? Your parents must have loved that show. I thoroughly enjoyed it myself! Do you also have a cool callsign like 'Maverick'?"

Pete was already hating this outsider even more. He had his fair share of fellow trainees, instructors, squadron mates and shipmates making fun of his name. This guy was late at the party. "Mitch Mash. That's my callsign."

Jasper's eyebrows drooped in disappointment.

"I'll let you know, Mr Reporter, that cool callsigns only appear in the movies. We don't get to choose our callsigns, and most of us don't like them either. Follow me." Pete spun round and started leading Jasper through the boat towards the flight deck.

"Alright, Mitch Mash, since we're on the topic of callsigns, can you tell me more about them? Are there really no 'Iceman's or 'Hollywood's?"

Pete sighed. He knew that he would have to entertain such silly questions from an outsider who didn't understand Navy culture when he first found out that he had been assigned a reporter observer. However, actually having to entertain his questions was harder than he had anticipated. "Ok, Scribe, callsigns can be assigned for any reason under the sun. We don't have a say on what our callsign will be and some of us will never understand why we were given such names in the first place. At least Boner knew that it had something to do with his antics during Fighter School Ball."

Jasper was initially puzzled, but quickly broke into a grin. He tried to keep pace behind Pete as the pilot ducked through the bulkheads effortlessly. "Did you just give me a callsign?" He asked breathlessly.

Pete glanced over his shoulder and asked, "What did you expect? Clark Kent?"

Pete allowed the ground crew to aid Jasper into the rear seat of the Super Hornet. His headset jack and oxygen tube got caught amongst the ladder rungs as he clambered clumsily in. Meanwhile, Pete performed his pre-flight inspection, making sure the AMRAAMs were secured, no fluids were leaking and nothing was out of place. He felt an immediate sense of coziness in the cockpit, like the warm embrace of a grandmother. As he taxied in position towards the bow catapults, he heard the roar of a Hornet being launched off the waist cat. "Oh boy, I've never been in a cat shot before!" Jasper remarked excitedly. Pete smirked and replied, "Just enjoy the ride."

The preceding aircraft launched off the cat, the jet blast deflector lowered and the ground crew rushed to their stations in preparation to launch his aircraft. Pete lowered his tow bar and followed the director's signals to line up onto the catapult shuttle. He verified the aircraft's weight that the green shirts held up on the board in front of him, followed the cat officer's instructions to apply full power and began to confirm full and free movement of his controls. "Whoa! Why are the controls moving in my cockpit?"

"Shut up and don't touch anything." Pete replied curtly, then saluted the cat officer. And then he waited. Pete never liked the wait before the cat shot. He's a naval aviator, if he wanted to do something, he always wanted to be in the thick of it. In a cat shot, the power was not in his hands and the sensation was... nerve-wracking.

Pete was off the end of the carrier deck, done with his clearing turns and had cleaned up his aircraft in a matter of seconds. He allowed the speed to build up as he maintained 500ft and waited for departure clearance to climb to his reporting altitude. Cleared up to "Angels Ten", Pete cranked the Hornet's nose up to sixty degrees and kept power to maintain 280 knots. Jasper was wheezing so loudly he could hear him over the intercom. "You alright back there, Scribe?" "Yes sir, just catching my breath. That was intense!"

Pete grinned to himself as he remembered his first cat shot and how he was a nervous wreck like Scribe was behind him.

Pete joined up with his flight leader, Vlad "Baron" Brakovic. He formed up on his lead and together they made a more leisurely climb to thirty thousand feet. It was an uneventful half hour before the airborne controller reported them in range of the target. Air Force One had been escorted by Japanese F-15s till it reached its cruising height and now they were turning back to their base. Baron's flight was to take over escort duties for two hours before being replaced by other members of the squadron. Pete swelled with pride when the Air Force pilots on board reported, "The President appreciates your company for this leg of the journey." He felt excited enough to break his icy demeanour with Scribe and asked, "He's at 11 o'clock, slightly low. Do you see him?"

There was a long pause before Jasper replied, "Uhhh, negative. How small can a 747 be? I can't seem to spot him."

"He's just ahead of my drop tanks from my point of view right now, so I guess your view of him is obscured by now. At least he's flying a predictable path. It's a lot harder in a dogfight against a small, agile fighter."

Pete started a 5G descending reversal turn to line up off Air Force One's right wing. Scribe started saying something when he started the turn, but fell silent, most probably focusing on preventing G-LOC. As Pete rolled out and positioned himself off the big jet, it appeared larger and larger and Jasper finally replied, "I can see it now."

"Tell me about dogfights, sir. You say you have to track the enemy fighter visually? They must be so hard to spot! I had the impression from Top Gun that targets look big and up close."

Pete gave a sarcastic snort. "Yes, targets look like tiny specks even when dogfighting. Sometimes we lose sight of them amongst the clouds, momentarily. The only way they look as big as Top Gun wants moviegoers to believe is when we're about to collide into them."

"No way! You mean the cool 4G inverted dive scene was impossible?"

"Pretty much the first thing we learned in jet training. There's no way a pilot can survive a negative 4G dive. Also, their aircraft were flying level, not in a dive. Finally, the F-14's tail fin itself is longer than the distance between the 2 canopies as portrayed in the movie."

Pete chatted with Jasper for quite a bit during an otherwise uneventful escort session. At times the ignorant reporter vexed his nerves, at other times, he seemed very willing to listen and very enthusiastic to learn. Pete felt a pang of disappointment when Jasper kept up a line of questions about why he's not in Top Gun, whether he will be getting too old to have a chance to enter such a course and when he will have to hang up his fighter wings.

With two new fighters replacing them as escorts, Baron and Mitch Mash started heading back to the aircraft carrier. They descended to a lower flight level to refuel from another F-18. "Trick or treat! 2500 pounds, please." After a few frustrating moments wrestling with the floating basket, Pete managed to dock his refueling probe into it and began taking on fuel. Jasper asked why he had said trick or treat, so he explained, "Cos I knocked on his door expecting goodies."

Pete descended towards the carrier, flew the left circuit pattern and was established on finals with gear, flap and hook down. He called the ball and turned his focus entirely on it. While carrier landings always filled him with an anxiety, an anticipation, the emotions always faded away against the needs of the moment. Whenever Pete started down the glideslope, flying with reference to the "meatball", his four limbs seemed to move with a life of their own. He would kick the rudder to induce a slight sideslip to keep up with the lateral motion of the angled flight deck. His throttle would be constantly moving, making the two jet engines whistle with growing and fading intensity. He would continuously move the stick to maintain the correct angle of attack for the approach and to line up with the centreline.

This time, Pete was slightly slow to correct at the start, allowing his aircraft to drop below the glideslope, but Pete never let the small mistakes bog him down. "Trap, 2 wire. Red deck." Pete followed the director's signals to a parking spot and shut down his aircraft.

After climbing out of the cockpit, Pete pulled Jasper off the heat and noise of the flight deck. In the relative quiet indoors, Pete said, "I hope you enjoyed your flight, Scribe. Now go write us a good story for our guys in uniform."

Jasper mirrored Pete's smile and threw a mock salute. "Yes sir."

Escape from Nahnia

Ben's head spun around him as the guards lowered him onto a chair. He felt weak, limp. The guards pushed the chair against a table and Ben took the chance to slump as comfortably as he could over hard, flat surface. He smiled to himself as he allowed his body to relax, even though he felt that he was being watched.

A figure across the table clicked on the table lamp, throwing light into the dark room. Ben's retinas burned despite his best efforts to scrunch his eyes close. His headache grew worse, a deep throbbing that seemed to increase in tempo before slowly fading away. He couldn't tell if it had really gone or that it was his body's way of saying that it had adjusted to the light. He cranked an eye open just a bit to acknowledge the figure at the other side.

"State your name, please." The figure spoke in deliberate tones.

Ben's throat was parched, he croaked a monosyllabic word that sounded roughly like his name. He noticed the figure cocking his head to one side, signalling Ben to something. He saw a glass of water, half empty, within an arm's reach. He emptied the half glass in a gulp.

The figure didn't allow Ben the time to enjoy the sensation of fluids cooling off the burning in his throat. He asked again, "Your name."

"Ben Goh," he replied. His lips curled into a smile as his thoughts wandered. "My friends called me Benji. Ben-G."

"What was your last memory?"

"I was held in a prison. Or a mental institution? How long was I inside?" Ben was surprised how quickly the words blurted out, when he was nursing a heavy head and a stiff tongue just moments ago. The thought that the half empty glass was water was actually a truth drug did occur to him, but he could never hold his concentration on that train of thought.

"What did you remember about the place, Ben?"

Ben's brain suddenly came alive with images, sounds, faces. Memories were suddenly unlocked and playing in front of his eyes. Ben felt himself being driven mad by the sensations of his memories and quickly, desperately, grabbed one particular image and focused on it. As the other memories faded out of focus, Ben felt his coherence come to him.

"The food was horrible. We were given chicken spare parts, chopped up beyond recognition. Duck meat always had feathers left on it. All the pork we were provided was fatty and oily. Oil! That's what coated everything that was served there. We'd see the same oily vegetables everyday."

"What else did you see everyday that didn't change?"

Ben felt that the interrogation was trying to lead him to saying something, but that damn truth serum was making it hard for Ben to formulate questions to ask in return. In fact, his mind would focus on the answers for each question the interrogator gave.

"We all had rooms, or cells. The whole building had cells that looked exactly the same. We couldn't do anything everyday. We'd stare at the walls that looked exactly the same all day, everyday. Hmm, I remember seeing a clock in the dining room. But it always showed the same time. It was probably broken."

The figure slid something across the table. Ben recognised his wristwatch wrapped neatly in a ziploc bag. Except it couldn't have been his watch. "Is this a trick? It looks exactly like my watch, it even has my name engraved on the back. But my watch stopped on the day I was brought in to the prison. It showed one thirty in my entire stay there. I was cursing my bad luck to have my watch stop on the first day entering prison. Why is this watch working again?"

"Do you remember who headed the facility you were in?"

Ben's thoughts immediately shifted from the questions about his watch to a particular face: "Superintendent Paul."

"We called him Super Paul. We obviously couldn't drink alcohol in the prison and there were signs everywhere reminding us that alcohol was not allowed on premises. However, we would see him drink merrily in his room. It's like he's deliberately taunting us. I also remember that he's obsessed about cost cutting. We used to get newspapers, but he stopped them. Some of the guards complained that their lack of inventory was hurting the experiment, but he brushed them off and said cost cutting was more important."

Another face appeared in Ben's mind. The chubby cheeks and neatly combed moustache was unmistakable.

"Super Paul was aided by his lackey Warden Kim Jong Phil. This character always gave empty promises and false hopes. I was told that I would only spend 44 weeks in, but 14 months later he was still promising 44 weeks! He promised me that the 'Golf project' was my ticket to get out, for 3 months he said it would be ready in the next week or so. The last I heard, the 'Gold project' never took off. 2 weeks ago, he told me I was to be released, but it turned out to be a hoax as well."

Talking about Kim Jong Phil, Ben's memories suddenly clicked into place. Phil was the last piece of the puzzle in Ben's mind. A spark lit in his eyes and he slowly lifted his head and looked directly towards the glaring table lamp. The words that he had just recited fell in order. Experiment. Time stopped. Psychological effects. Wanting out. 

The interrogator nudged Ben along with a few key words. "Do you remember signing up for the Nahnia project? You've just returned to the real world."

The Nahnia project was meant to observe candidates as they were put through an alternate reality. Based on Einstein's theory of relativity, time is not a constant. When a unit amount of time was observed in 2 different places that travelled at different speeds across space, both time pieces would show different results. Nahnia created a place, an alternate reality, where time stopped entirely relative to the rest of the world. The project was meant to study the psychological effects on humans held in such a place. Ben had signed up as a test subject but did not anticipate the boredom of being trapped in a prison cell the entire day. He wanted out, but release required a final psychological profiling that kept being delayed for months.

Ben's mind could finally coherently string a question, which he promptly asked, "Where am I? What is this place?"

The interrogator did not skimp on detail, perhaps because he knew such detail was safe to reveal.

"You finally made it through the psychological profiling. However, to keep the details of the Nahnia project from leaking to our competitors' hands, we kept you at this holding facility while your memories of the test were wiped out. The drugs left you feeling weak, nauseous and dehydrated. Welcome back to the real world. You make take your watch, it's working again."

Ben was led out to a waiting area, where he immediately spotted his girlfriend. She had a worried look as she waited silently for him to be brought out. Ben noticed that she no longer looked like the youthful student she was when she accompanied him to Nahnia's in-processing lab. She was dressed in a blazer with matching pencil skirt and wore high heels.

She greeted him with a kiss, to which Ben responded sheepishly, "Hey, dear."

"How's school been, dear?"

She looked offended. "Dear, the year is 2012. In our time apart, I've graduated and have stared working. I'm no longer the school girl you dated before Nahnia."

A pang of regret shot through Ben's heart. He had been so eager to depart for Nahnia that he had ignored the effect his decision would have on the people around him. Ben looked at the working watch he had on his wrist and overcame the regret with positive thoughts. "Don't worry dear, we still have a lot of time. I won't leave you again."