Arc Light (51 page)

She went back inside, fighting a quiver that vibrated her body and made her mouth dry. “There, there, Matthew,” she said patting his back as the man-made thunder of the jet engines quickly receded and she got a bottle of breast milk out of the refrigerator. The picture of the black jets, impossibly big as they streaked by her at eye level not a quarter of a mile away, played over and over in her head.

Matthew was screaming at the top of his lungs. “There, there,” she kept repeating as she put the bottle in the microwave. She closed
the door and tapped in the time. The buttons didn't beep. She walked around to look at the television. It was dark. The whole house was dark.

They crossed the tarmac to the Delta L-1011 and began to board. As David Chandler, Lieutenant Bailey, and Master Sergeant Barnes reached the top of the stairs, a flight attendant in a gray Delta uniform dress turned and said, “Welcome aboard.”

Chandler nodded, surprised to see the woman.

“I'm Rebecca Healy, and this is Jennifer Sims.”

“David Chandler,” he said, shaking hands and introducing Barnes and Bailey. Chandler had thought for a second that maybe this was the same jet they had flown in on, but these were not the same flight attendants as before.

“Why don't you gentlemen make yourselves comfortable in first class,” Rebecca said. “The flight engineer said we've got a weight and balance problem and need to move some passengers up to the front.” She turned to Jennifer. “You want to ask if we have anyone holding our frequent flyer card?”

Jennifer started for the PA system before Rebecca had the chance to laugh at her own joke. She reached out and lightly grabbed Jennifer's arm. “No, no, just kidding. The major will get some people up here. About a dozen ought to do it,” she said, turning to Chandler, “give or take a few. The flight engineer will figure it exactly.”

“Lieutenant Bailey, why don't you get all our officers and senior NCOs up here.” Bailey took off toward the rear of the plane, taking one last look at Jennifer. She noticed and smiled at him, causing Bailey to almost collide with the wall of the coat closet.

Chandler stood in the open doorway looking down at the terminal building and beyond, to the west.
Farther away,
he thought.
I'm going farther away.

About an hour into the flight, Chandler unbuckled his seat belt, walked up to the cockpit door, and knocked.

The door opened a crack, and Chandler saw a quick smile crease the face of Gator, the flight engineer from the flight that had dropped them on Newfoundland, and then the door closed in his face.

“This joke of yours is wearing thin, Golding!” Chandler said through the closed door. “Open up!”

“Can't!” Golding said. “FAA regulations! You might have a gun! Might hijack us someplace dangerous!” Chandler could hear the snickers from the cockpit, and as he raised a closed fist the door opened.

“How'd you enjoy sunny Newfoundland, plowboy?”

Chandler looked at the rack of electronic components just inside the door that had been charred and burned before but now looked brand new. “How the hell did I end up drawing you guys again?”

“Luck o' the fuckin' Irish, Major,” Golding said. “We've been flyin' convoys. When they pulled the eight planes they routed to Gander back to Newark, we just sorta stuck together. Gator there's got this homo-sexual thing goin' on with one of the American Airlines copilots, so . . . ”

“With all due respect, Cap'n,” Gator said, “fuck you.”

“Ya see, there he goes again with his sexual harassment.”

“So you've been to Europe?” Chandler asked, and they fell silent. “What's going on?”

“Can't tell you,” Golding said. “It's a secret. You might be a Russkie spy.”

“Dammit, Golding,” Chandler said, “answer my question. Newfoundland is not exactly the hub of the telecommunications industry. I don't know what's going on. Have you seen any fighting?”

“Well, no,” Golding said in a mocking voice as he rubbed his chin, “no, we haven't. But now that you mention it, huh—don't that seem kinda strange, fellas, that we haven't seen anything untoward, this bein' World War Three an' all?”

“I'm serious, Golding.”

“And I'm serious when I tell ya that we're not supposed to talk about anything.”

“And you're going to follow that rule? You, Captain Golding, are going to let them gag you?”

Golding sat there in silent thought for a second, and then said, “Whaddaya think, fellas? Should we tell him?”

The other two seemed indifferent, and Chandler just waited.

“Well, let's see.” Golding fell quiet, and the silence hung over the copilot and flight engineer as well, both of whom seemed to drift back in time as their eyes lost their focus. “We flew into Frankfurt two days ago right after a Russian cruise missile attack on the airport. It was like a scene from Dante's
Inferno.
We came in at night, and there were fires blazin' all around. The signal from the air traffic controller was weak, like the guy was holdin' a walkie-talkie or somethin', and he didn't know shit. No wind, no barometric pressure so we could set our altimeters, nothin'. He just said ‘Come on down.' ”

Golding glanced over at Frazier, the copilot. “Damn near hit a chopper comin' straight up off the deck like a bat outa hell. There weren't any runway lights, but there were crews out there workin'—patchin' up holes—so we dragged the runway once, you know, to see if it looked okay. We flew by at about a hundred feet so that's what we set our altimeter at—didn't worry about mean sea level. Gator stuck his head up here an' found a wind sock. Here we are in a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound hundred-million-dollar airplane with two hundred and fifty people in back draggin' a runway at a hundred feet like we were drivin' a Cessna.

“Anyway,” Golding continued after shaking his head in disgust, “we did a short-field landing on the good end of the runway and taxied on up pretty as you please. It was a madhouse,” he intoned slowly as if seeing it before his eyes again as he spoke. “We thought we'd have to inflate the damn slides to get the people out. They were real gung-ho types, yellin' shit out and slappin' hands like they were gonna start killin' Russkies at the baggage claim. They were hangin' from the door, droppin' down with a big hoop an' holler and then cussin' up a storm when they broke their damn ankles on the concrete. Eventually, the ground service shows up and we start deplanin' the smarter ones down the stairs. Not one minute too soon, ‘cause the whole time we were starin' right out, not more'n two hundred feet away, at a 747 and what looked to be a ‘67 lyin' there in big fat pieces all burnt to a crisp.”

All Chandler could think was,
Were they empty, or were they full?
“And this was Frankfurt?” Chandler asked. “Two days ago? But the war didn't start till today.”

“Well,” Golding said, “that's sort of a definitional thing, you know, and it looks like the Russkies were on a different page than we were ‘cause they been tearin' new assholes outa airfields all up and down Germany and England.

“Anyway,” he continued after a pause, “there was a whole huge crowd of people off to the edge of the tarmac. When we first got there, you couldn't really see 'em—they were out in the dark—but you could hear 'em. And they could see us, 'cause by the time we started deplanin', they were pushin' forward. Women and children. The MPs were strung out tryin' to hold 'em back, gettin' a little rough, but there really weren't enough of 'em. When the last of the soldiers was off, they just broke. Stormed right on up. It was awful. These were
Americans,
you understand, some Brits—vacationers mostly. The MPs just sorta disappeared, and the civilians kept comin'. Not fightin' or anything, but not givin' a shit about pushin' real hard. The kids were screamin' bloody murder.” Golding's voice trailed off as he shook his head.

“I don't know what they'd been seein',” he said with a huge sigh, “but they were wild-eyed—it was scary. The seats filled up in no time. We were at the door, sayin', ‘No, no, we're full, we can't take anybody else.' They just put their heads down—the adults—avoidin' eye contact and pushed on in like they didn't hear. Finally even the aisles were all filled up and the people on the stairs couldn't fit on. I think they would've kept on tryin', though, if it hadn't a been for another jet landin'. It was like you drew a line through the crowd—those inside the door stayed put, everybody on the other side was off to the races.

“So we were closin' the door when a soldier came runnin' up. I thought maybe he had a message or somethin'. Next thing I know and I'm starin' down the barrel of a fuckin' M-16. He says, ‘Hold on, just hold on' and looks off and says, ‘Come on, babe, it's okay', and up comes a woman with a baby. I started to tell him that we were full, but he was pretty hyper, you know. Must've been AWOL. So I just went with the flow.

“The thing was,” Golding's voice faltered just for a second, “well, they said good-bye. And she sorta, sorta”—the words caught in his throat—“begged him to go too, and he says, ‘Oh, baby, ya know I can't,' and he kisses 'em, her and the baby. The little girl was still in her jammies. Musta been in a big hurry. Then he was off, ran clear outa sight, off into the dark.”

“How'd you take off with all those people?” Chandler asked.

“Well, the baggage compartment was empty, plus we were light on fuel, almost too light. We'd used up a bunch 'cause we were afraid to turn off the engines—might not've gotten a generator to turn 'em back over. But ole Gator here crunched the numbers and said we could pro'bly do it, so we taxied way out into the grass so we could get a runnin' start on the short runway and off we went. Scattered them German engineers workin' on that runway perty good, but we were off the ground with, oh, twenty or thirty feet to spare. She flew like a pregnant whale.”

“The weight was all too far forward, ya see,” the copilot explained. “Just barely made Heathrow. Fuel was shit.”

“I don't get it,” Chandler said. “Why were they all so hot to get outa Germany? I mean, it's not like the States were much safer.”

The copilot and Gator both looked at Golding, who shifted uncomfortably in his leather seat. “Look,” Golding continued. “They tol' us not to talk about
any
of this shit, not one bit. But they
especially
tol' us not to talk about what I'm gonna tell you now, so don't you go blabbin' it around, 'cause they're
damned
serious about it, okay?” He paused. “You know all those civilians we brought out? Well, we bring 'em back to England, and that's as far as they get.
Quarantined. Now, that's all I know. You tell me, Mr. U-S Army, what the hell does that tell you? Huh?”

Biological warfare,
that's what it told Chandler.
My God,
he thought, understanding immediately the reason for all the secrecy.
How many would get on this plane if they knew or suspected?
he wondered. Getting killed or maimed by bullets or high explosives was one thing, but germ warfare . . .

“We're quarantined too, technically,” Golding said. “They detox the airplane on the ground in England, bomb it in this sealed-up hangar. They quarantine us physically when we fly back into the States. These bastards look like they're dressed up to go to the
moon
when they bring us our food. Hell, Major, welcome to the World of the Damned. You're one of
us
now.”

Jesus,
Chandler thought.
But they've gotta be mistaken.
“Has anybody gotten sick?”

“Nope,” the copilot answered. “Not that I've heard.”

“Maybe they've got some sorta timed-release bug,” Golding said. “Or maybe it just screws up your sex drive.”

“Then it ain't worth a shit,” Gator cracked.

They all laughed.
Gallows humor,
Chandler thought. They had obviously had lots of time to talk it over, to put pet theories in play. They had also had time to adjust. He put the worry aside for the moment.

When he returned to his seat, Rebecca was walking down the aisle serving.

“Care for some coffee, Major?”

“No, thanks,” he said as his face contorted in a big yawn. He was tired, and he decided he ought to sleep.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked. “I mean”—she glanced at the cockpit—“I saw you talking.”
“I know what you know,” she means,
Chandler thought.
“I'm one of the Damned too.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm okay, thanks.”

“You sure you still want to go through with this?” she said and laughed.

Chandler grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like it's a bit late to change my mind. But you—you and the rest of the crew? I don't get it. What are you doing here?”

“Well, when they requisitioned the aircraft, they posted a notice at the supervisors' offices at DFW that asked for volunteers. It was before the war, and . . . well, we just wanted to help out. You know.”

Chandler knew, but it still seemed special somehow.

Bailey's overly loud laugh caught Chandler's attention. Both he and Rebecca looked back at the galley. Chandler couldn't see Jennifer,
but it was clear that Bailey was talking to her, compiling the make-work report on the food service plan that Chandler had devised to get the overzealous young lieutenant out of his hair. Bailey lifted his eyes only rarely from the piece of paper on which he was writing.

“What about her?” Chandler asked. He had noticed Rebecca spending a lot of time showing Jennifer the ropes. “This looks like her first flight over.”