First Citizen (6 page)

We got a lot of flying in the final attack on Managua. The lakes north and east of the city blocked our line of advance, so we airlifted everything. You cannot appreciate the power of a CH-54 Skycrane’s dual turbines until you see it pick up an M-60A3 tank like a gull making off with a sweet bun.

When it was over, the official policy toward the city was as old as Rome. Some of the tools were new, though. They shot every tenth civilian by the numbers, man, woman, or child. They dynamited every structure left standing and sent us—even technicians and warrant officers like me—over the ground with picks and sledge hammers to knock the bricks apart and break up the concrete chunks. “Nothing bigger than your boot” was the order. Later I saw tee-shirts with that motto. We even smashed up the roads. Then they flew some of our helicopters across the city with spraying gear. They never told us what the chemical was, but the pilots had to wear moonsuits. The Apaches—helicopters, that is—flying that mission they burned in a big pile.

Today, fifty years later, in the stony field where Managua stood, not a bush, not a weed, not a blade of grass grows. Birds avoid the area. Lizards and snakes turn around and crawl away. Poisoned sand.

I do not claim to understand that war. We acted like we really hated the Sandinistas. And we had some reason to, after the radiological dusting they gave the Big Pine Eight maneuvers in Honduras. But the air was thick with hype all during the police action. The officers routinely handed out the most unbelievable atrocity stories about the Sandinistas. They came from loose-leaf binders of computer printout that looked to have been ground out in Arlington.

The brass repeated the hate phrases so routinely that all the venom was sucked out of the words. How many times can you hear “motherfuckin’ mestizo” and “spittle-lickin’ spic” without suddenly finding them warm and comfortable? The words were too literary, too alliterative, not to have been invented by some general’s press agent. And when half your troopers are already Hispanic-surnamed ...

All I know is, the mosquitos were enough reason to kill everybody and get out of there.

After demobilization, I thought of going back for the rest of that half meg. But what was there to do with it, right then, except get myself killed? Teen prostitution had just about been choked off by the Mothers and Others. And the Feds were freelancing pretty heavily in the drug traffic. Nobody protects turf harder than a bureaucrat who has stepped over the fence. The loose side was overpopulated by straight types with a mean streak, so I went over to the straight side. For a time.

My only marketable skill was piloting choppers, so I decided to sell that. The highest bidder was Petramin Oil. They started me flying the supply circuit to their Mexican rigs in the Bay of Campeche. That was good experience for the war we fought two decades later. But after only six months, Petramin Air Services switched me to Saudi Arabia to haul executive ass.

The Saudis are racists. And sexists. And about every other
ist
you can think of, except Communist. They were trying, at the time, to create a pure Sunnite-Wahabi society. Other brands of Arab were welcome to visit the Kingdom, round trip to the sacred mosques of Mecca, drop their cash and go. Other semi-acceptable peoples—Anglos, Orientals, and Mohave Indians—needed a good reason to enter, were required to set up separate accommodations in isolated cantonments, and had their exit visas pre-stamped. The rest of the Third World and certain select peoples—Jews and Iranians—had their mail returned at the border and were rudely ejected from the few consulates the Saudis maintained abroad.

The local laws were a bramble thicket with long thorns everywhere: too much amputation of hands and heads. Not the kind of place to run a stable of young girls or deal in cocaine. Boys, maybe, if they were good Arabs and said their Koran or whatever while being reamed. So I planned to live quietly, fly where they told me, and leave on June 15, 1995, like it said on my visa.

The very first run was trouble. To start with, the night before I had partied in the Petramin Compound. Our host was a ground mechanic claiming to be the only American in the Middle East who knew how to mix an authentic Long Island iced tea—and the only man in Saudi Arabia with the right booze to do it. He must have had six hundred dollars’ worth of contraband alcohol. And even then, he was using an off-brand Iranian vodka and a rum distilled in the Seychelles that had the flavor and consistency of JP-4.

The trouble with Long Island iced tea is, it does not look or taste like liquor. It tastes just like a tall, cold glass of iced tea, which is exactly what my throat wanted after five days of walking around in the hot sun getting my papers signed and my eyeballs scorched by more white plaster and concrete than they ever wanted to look at again in my life.

I was slurping up my third glass and smacking my lips in appreciation when the first glass took effect. Like a hypodermic full of curare while malefic spirits play tippy-tap on your skull with little silver hammers. My first coherent thought was for the glass and a half that was still in my system and waiting to pounce. If I moved fast, if I could move at all, I would get to the pad, fire up a chopper, and stick my head up among the blades as a merciful alternative to what was surely coming. I briefly considered asking someone for a gun to shoot myself with, but my mouth would not work.

The ground mechanic thought I was asking for another hit, so he handed it over and even helped me tip it back. Kind soul. It was one hungover brave that showed up at the pad on the outskirts of Riyadh the next morning, squinting at sun-blazed stones and sand with hurt-filled eyes.

I warmed up one of the new Bell Counter 101s with the blue Petramin shield on its side panels. The ship had a single turbine with a split transmission that drove two disks side-by-side and counter-rotating. The design was supposed to neutralize torque and make the ship easier to handle. Actually, it was designed merely to fascinate armchair pilots in procurement departments in Houston.

The Mixmaster, which is what the real pilots called it, flew like a spooked horse in a field full of gopher holes. And those blades meshing right over my head, with maybe the clutch on one of those trannies drifting out of sync by a half-rev or so ... I had a lot to think about while going over the console.

The copilot was a Saudi-subsidized trainee, Prince Abd el Faisal Something, a grinning, slick-skinned kid who could care less about driving a helicopter. He had papers, but I did not trust them, being written in Arabic. It was obvious from the linen and gold that he made three times the take-home I did and was sitting in the cockpit only because the Royal Family currently thought some of the poor-relation princes should be fully employed. He was holding a Louis L’Amour paperback and looking out the window. No help there.

Our passenger was late. We were expecting an executive type, listed as an associate in the Law Department, Houston office. “Granville J. Corbin” sounded silver-haired, about sixty, fighting a paunch with Saturday and Sunday tennis sets. He would be wearing a deep tan that extended to the vee at his neck and mid-thigh, where the tennis whites started. He would probably talk like a New Englander with a corncob up his nose. He would be out to inspect the oil fields because, after forty years in the business, one must—just once—see where the stuff comes out of the ground.

So when the Citation IV taxied over toward the pad and popped the hatch on a baby lawyer with more elbows than stomach, I was set up for my first surprise. He was not a bad-looking kid. Hair red-blond and curly, a strong nose, for a white man, twinkling eyes that missed very little, a grim-smiling mouth that turned up at the corners like a recurve bow. It was hard to read anything from that mouth except an honorary good will that might not go deeper than his teeth.

“Hi, are you Petramin?” he asked above the whine of the Counter’s turbine. He rested his overnighter on the lip of the port-sice passenger door.

“Right here. You Corbin?”

“Call me Jay.” He slung the bag through, climbed in, and put a hand forward between my seat and the copilot’s, above my left shoulder. It was an awkward grip to take with my right hand, being strapped in by my shoulder harness with the cyclic live between my knees, so I reached up and shook backhanded with my left. And offside handshake like that is supposed to be bad luck. I guess it was, on that trip.

He plopped into the bucket behind Faisal then, pulled the door shut, and fumbled with the lap and shoulder belts. While I was adjusting for takeoff, a woman came running from the Citation, or possibly just from that side of the runway—I did not see, being too busy staring at gauges right then. But when I looked up, staring at her was more rewarding.

She was the reason the Saudis veil their women. A heavy fall of black-black hair bounced around her shoulders. Her eyes were arched and outlined like something out of an Egyptian tomb. She had painted her mouth the bold red that goes so well with olive coloring—not the peach and pink that washes out on an Eastern woman. Very un-Saudi, she was wearing high heels that made her calves stand out and a gray wool mini-suit that made everything else stand out.

Our copilot, Faisal, seemed to share my assessment of this bobbling
houri.
Before I could move, he was out of the left-hand seat and opening the door. That was lousy protocol, as I was technically captain of the ship and we were airworthy if not actually in the air at the time. I turned toward him and was about to raise my voice to object when he put a gun barrel in my left ear.

In the second before he ordered my eyes front I caught, through the side-plex of the cockpit, a last glimpse of the girl. She was still running but had pulled a stubby weapon out of her suit jacket and now held it in a professional double-handed grip. It had to be a big weapon—looked like an Ingram MAC-10 or an Uzi automatic pistol—to seem that huge at a distance of fifteen feet or so. Something with punch, anyway. I realized that her silhouette had been too good to be true.

“Clear with Air Control and take off,” she said as she scrambled through the doorway and pushed past the baby lawyer, Corbin. “Fly east-southeast, one-twenty degrees.”

“But our flight plan says north.”

“We have
changed
your flight plan. You will take us to Juwara. In the Sultanate of Oman.” Her English was perfect, lilting and accentless. The weapon she held was really some kind of derringer sawed from the action of a double-barreled shotgun. It would mess up the cockpit badly if she fired it.

But I knew the map. “Juwara is over eight hundred miles from here,” I said carefully. “That is beyond the operational range of this helicopter. There is nothing to the southeast within our range, except the Rub’ al Khali. The Great Sandy Desert.”

“Fly!” She glanced at Faisal. “You will pilot us, or we will fly ourselves.”

I shrugged, picked up the collective, and twisted on the throttle. It was going to be a long flight into nowhere.

Chapter 4

Granville James Corbin: Seeds of Vendetta

By the time I graduated from high school, life in the mock-adobe just outside the Asilomar center was getting pretty raggedy.

That summer, Mother was admitted to the Drylands Farm, a kind of resort up north in the Napa Valley. She referred to her stay as “a rest.” Father called it “dehydration.” Drylands catered to nonviolent alcoholics and drug abusers.

Mother wrote to me faithfully, once a week to start with, mostly about the fog in the hills, the afternoon heat, and the prospects for the wine, uh, grape harvest. Over the years, she faded into a husky voice that whispered from slightly scented letters scrawled in thin blue ink. For some reason, she had a fixation on caterpillars and the birds that ate them. She rarely wrote about butterflies.

That August, as I packed to leave for the University of California at Berkeley, my father was reassigned to the Pacific—Indonesia or Malaysia. Oil at eight dollars a barrel, down from forty-two a year earlier, had knocked the Oil Patch on its tailbone. Petramin was no better off than anyone else. Father’s staff had been cut back to just one man, him, so he was off to taste the drilling mud in Sumatra or wherever.

During the preparations for departure, he sold the mock-adobe right out from under Mother and me. He would be gone for three years, Father said, and to save the high cost of transoceanic air fare, he planned to take his leaves in Sydney and Hong Kong. So he, too, turned into paper for me: a checkbook and a handful of polaroid snaps, some of them decorated with strange, dusky women.

Berkeley may once have been the western world’s center of dissent and anti-fascist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But by the time I arrived, the careerists and academics were back in control. The Associated Students were again selling book covers illustrated with a winking, grinning humanoid California Bear. The political shouters at Sather Gate were replaced by skateboarders and falafel stands. The coffee houses of South Side, with their beansprout crépes and guerrilla theater, gave way to the nouveau-cuisine delicatessens of North Side’s gourmet ghetto, serving open-face sandwiches of prosciutto and fig jam on seven-grain bread. Radical action was out. Gelato was in.

It was at Berkeley that I first crossed paths with Gordon Pollock.

He was a beautiful young man, tall and well-muscled, with a headful of curly brown hair and with heavy, sleepy eyelids over smoky hazel eyes that missed nothing. He was an athlete, an aesthete, a scholar, a natural attraction. People pooled around him. In three years, he would be class president, associate editor of the campus paper,
The Daily Californian,
and captain of the gymnastics team.

His father was something in the current Washington Administration, a dollar-a-year man who floated between the Department of Energy and the defense industry. He later became ambassador to Egypt and died in the Matruh massacre that took out Hosni Mubarak and half his general staff.

The younger Pollock and I first shared a class in my freshman year, a survey course in astronomy which satisfied a pesky science requirement in my pre-law curriculum. One sweet spring afternoon, in a roomful of restless young bodies, I heard his high, slightly mocking voice drift down from the rows of seats behind me.