The Filter Trap (2 page)

Chapter 1

Like the swirling slivers crisscrossing the shallow water of Halona Cove twenty miles east, light danced in shifting patterns on Lee’s aqua-colored duvet cover. A duo of P-40 Warhawks soared over her bed imitating the flight of real ones over the nearby ocean seventy-five years ago.

Lee’s pride to be part of the great tradition of aviation remained the only thing traditional about her. She struggled to adapt to the Air Force’s rigidity while becoming an element leader, promoted to second lieutenant in record time. The rush of sitting on 35,000 pounds of thrust provided a better outlet for her ego and ambition than the grey cubicle hell of the civilian alternative.

Light waved over Lee, interrupting her snoring. Feeling the heat, she blinked awake in surprise.

Still tired, she moaned, rolling over to check the clock by the bed.

10:35PM

Assuming she slipped and hit the AM/PM toggle on her alarm by accident, she wrangled her mobile phone from the pile of last night’s clothes on the floor.

10:36PM

She looked from the phone to the window, then balanced on the bed and pulled the drapes aside. When the broad sunlight hit her eyes she fell back under the weight of shame. At least this time she had passed out in her empty apartment, not in front of the bubbas.

Bacchus closed early last night. The last lonely Mahu, she had no one to snuggle with on Christmas Eve. She’d sidled up to her own bar instead. Her memories ended after the fourth Manhattan exhausted her olive supply. The mid-morning sun outside amplified her hangover. It felt like she’d zombied herself into bed only minutes ago.

‘Another brownout to go along with another blackout,’ she surmised. ‘The clocks must have got stuck before I got home.’

Still, it felt like four minutes of sleep, not four hours. A pilot should sure as hell know the difference; the United States Air Force didn’t trust $150 million aircraft to insomniacs. Or drunks. At least those they knew about.

‘It’s just the hangover,’ she comforted herself. ‘I hope I remembered to get some Gatorade last night. Nothing on base or the island will be open on Christmas day.’

She slipped on a white t-shirt with the letters RF stenciled on the back. Lee told anyone outside her squad her call sign stood for
Rich Fuck,
before pointing at her rusty Barracuda to deepen the sarcasm. Even her bubbas used the acronym instead of
Raptor Fairy
. She often reminded herself it could be worse. One of the washouts at Air University got stuck with
Brown Bomber
after too many tacos before attempting an Immelmann turn. He flipped fine, but the barrel roll brought the worst out of both ends.

With more women encouraged to apply for previously male-dominated combat positions, pilot fraternization became more vicious. The gloves were off by the time Lee enrolled in Air University. Surviving with flying colors became a point of pride chipped away every time she heard that call sign. With bigger guns than the rest of the bubbas and an ego to match, Lee hated being called a fairy. Unlike other call signs about what happened in the sky, it brought up unnecessary questions about her personal life that shouldn’t have anything to do with her skills in the sky.

Lee flopped down on the living room couch and turned on the TV. Instead of morning news, the picture buzzed with static. ‘Cable box probably wiggled itself free again.’ As she stood to investigate she noticed fire in her muscles. The room spun more than it should for a hangover. She made a note to look for the bottle of whatever she finished with last night, not sure yet whether to get more or avoid it.

The cable box was plugged in and blinking along just fine. Lee glanced at the ceiling, imagining the satellite on the other side had been turned by some animal.

The colonel liked to say there were no coincidences, but to have a brownout that also knocked out the cell towers, and something up on the roof—an Asian mongoose maybe—all in one night? On Christmas?

Unmistakable sirens began blaring outside. Maybe the colonel was right about coincidences. If not, the explanation could be far worse. They’d run a drill of an Indonesian Islamic terrorist attack not six months ago. It sounded preposterous at the time, but the Mad Texan always vlogged about 9/11 starting with a dry run too, didn’t he?

Lee remembered the siren didn’t mean something so different on this island in December 1941. Was it possible? No. There was no gold to sell at the end of this doomsday pitch and the Bilderbergs were not meeting in Oahu. Nature's danger explained all the morning’s oddities better than any silly conspiracy theory. If she could get some caffeine she might make better sense of it.

Plodding to the fridge Lee tried to reason: a storm must have come through while she slept, knocking out her satellite dish, cell towers, and causing the brownout that messed up all the clocks. An animal, spooked by the storm or blown by it, bumped her satellite dish.

That siren had to mean the storm wasn’t over, though the clear sky outside suggested otherwise. Maybe they were in the eye. If so, the storm must be massive. She remembered watching TV news about Hurricane Katrina in parochial school, the nuns postulating on the reason for the ferocity of God’s anger. The daily debauchery present in New Orleans, not unlike that of ancient Sodom, was an easy scapegoat.

Katrina’s eye, which an impressionable young Lee Green came to think of as God’s himself, had been larger than the island of Oahu. She’d lived through a few rough storms since moving from the lower forty-eight, but nothing like that. Nothing like this one must be. It was hard to explain to her flyover state father what Pacific storms were like. It was hard explaining a lot of things to him. Especially things he didn’t want to hear. From her
or
Mother Superior.

Explaining how Lee slept through a Katrina-sized storm, her belly full of manhattans or not, would perplex anyone. Maybe the siren and the early morning gale were unrelated. Perhaps the siren beckoned the few soldiers left on base to clean up on another unfruitful tsunami watch. It made more sense than terrorists. They wouldn’t attack on Christmas, the base would be empty, and unlike in 1941, the entire fleet never docked at any one base at a time. Nature, however, didn’t take holidays off. Santa filled his bags with sand instead of toys, and put the Air Force in charge of handing them out to the lucky families with beachfront property.

Lee pined for the lives of her fellow soldiers who weren’t estranged from their families and would spend the day sleeping in somewhere far away from any sirens or sand. She lumbered back to the bedroom to grab her camos and pull her pants on before raiding her fridge for iced coffee and Gatorade. A long day lay ahead even though she felt like last night never ended.

Sun beat ferociously on the hood, but the ocean breeze whistled from window to window inside Lee’s decrepit Plymouth. That and the iced coffee kept her from melting into the cracked leather seats as she turned the slow corners at Hickam AFB on her way to the tsunami drill assembly.

An egret slammed into her A-pillar and fluttered inside, jolting Lee awake far better than her coffee. Floppy orange legs and white feathers tussled in her lap as she swerved and braked. An ornithologist might have noted that the egret had been traveling in the wrong direction at the wrong time, but Lee only loved birds with afterburners. She flipped the writhing confusion out her window and crept back onto the road, sipping more coffee in fear that she’d imagined the whole thing in a still-drunken stupor. Another coincidence today to add to a long list that she struggled to make sense of.

Lee gripped the wheel with both hands and steeled herself, using honed mental focus to sober up. If she could pull multiple Gs upside down in the sky and stay awake, she could deal with a few lingering manhattans, a sputtering old muscle car, and a stray bird.

Lee found a parking spot next to LARS’ ratty old Camry in front of the assembly building. Beside it Banana’s flamboyant yellow Ford Raptor, probably purchased more for irony than anything else, melted into the asphalt. Lee wondered if Nana knew what recursive meant. She didn’t see SIMI’s Jeep, but he always arrived last on that element. The cars for the other elements under Lee’s command wouldn’t show up at all; they were with their families, scattered across the heartland. Colonel Franks, not known for lateness or subtlety, pulled up next to Lee in his candy-apple-red Corvette.

Lee saluted the colonel. “Tsunami watch, sir?”

“Yes, Lieutenant Green, but it’s a little more complex today.”

“It’ll be a bitch without the rest of the element, not to mention your squad. But, we’ve run this exercise a thousand times. I could do it in my sleep.”

“From the look of you, I’d guess that’s your plan, Lieutenant. Make sure you leave the feathers in your French pillow and your French language at home next time.”

The colonel’s voice hit a strange note at the end of his sentence.

‘He knows I’m still drunk,’ Lee worried. ‘Maybe I won’t get a next time; UCMJ article 112
—drunk on duty—a guaranteed court martial! I’ll set a new Air Force record: the fastest to get promoted and discharged in the same year.
’

“My apologies, sir.” She flicked off an egret feather stuck to her shoulder. “I’ll remember to be more conscious of the impact of my personal activities on my duties, sir!”

“Aw hell, Fairy, I didn’t mean it that way.” He put one hand on her shoulder, a rare and unusual show of compassion from the square-jawed old pilot, and nudged her toward the door. “I know it’s Christmas and your family ain’t around.” He wiped his brow with the other hand as they walked into the building together. “The reason you’re so tired, that you feel like it’s still Christmas Eve, is because . . . it is!”

The assembly building held regular classrooms once, before being hollowed out into a series of empty squares resting beside a long corridor. The septuagenarian bullet holes in the facade elucidated why this building had remained largely unaltered for generations. A marker for the terror of war now served as a marker on the map; a meeting point to assemble soldiers for undesirable duty. The historical impact served as a quiet reminder to quell any complaints; better to be throwing sandbags in the sun than fishing dead bodies out of the harbor.

The colonel opened the third door on the left and motioned for Lee to enter first. “I want to crack SIMI’s knuckles for being late to the party,” he said, waiting in the hall.

“Shit, the cavalry’s here,” said LARS as Lee entered the room.

“Time for less tea-bagging and more sandbagging.” Nana looked at Lee and slapped LARS’ arm. “Ami’right?”

“Do you even know what tea-bagging is?” LARS replied under her breath, trying to avoid Lee’s eyes as she pulled a chair off of the stack at the back of the room.

“Fairy don’t have the balls to give me a good comeback,” Nana boasted.

LARS chuckled. “Only part of that’s true.”

The door snapped open. SIMI sauntered in and stood behind the others, bristling from a brief admonishment.

“You can take a seat, SIMI,” Franks told him, strolling into the room.

“Thank you, sir,” SIMI said, retrieving a chair from the back.

“Living up to your call sign, SIMI?” LARS chided him.

“Yes, he is,” the colonel answered for him. “Too bad I’m not a
Major
, because if SIMI hadn’t seen combat I’d change his call sign to SICI.”

“Cuz he’s got sick skills in the sky, sir?” Nana asked.

“No, dummy. S. I.
C
. I. Stop Ignoring
Colonel
’s Instructions.”

The other three stifled laughter.

“I still don’t understand how you can claim combat duty for flying in a no-fly zone,” Nana said.

“Enough,” the colonel cautioned. “SIMI escorting a lost Russian out of the Syrian no-fly zone is a hell of a lot closer to actual combat than the rest of
you
have ever seen. Tease him all you want, but he’s earned the right to keep his call sign safe from my meddling.”

“What instructions from your major did you ignore anyway?” LARS asked.

“Sir?” SIMI looked to the colonel for support.

“Since it didn’t happen on my watch, SIMI doesn’t have to tell you the whole story,” the colonel said. “But, as call sign origins go, it’s pretty benign. At least compared to your drunken condom demonstration on YouTube,
Ba-Nana
.”

Nana winced, that certainly wasn’t the story he told women in bars about his call sign.

“Oh, ready to shut that trap now, Lieutenant?” The Colonel turned to SIMI. “Tell em, son. I got heavy orders for y’all today. I need you to fly as one unit up there, one family. You know all
their
call sign origins, it’s only fair.”

“Sharing is caring, SIMI.” LARS prodded. “I need to know you’ve got my back while we’re out there pitching sandbags to-wait . . . Colonel, did you say ‘up’ there?”

“I did. Maybe for the last time.”

The normally jovial LARS and Nana sobered up. “Shit. SIMI, you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Nana said.

SIMI sighed. “The instruction I so famously ignored was my major’s directions for checking my pressure suit. On a training exercise in an F-14 it inflated and compressed my breathing, knocking me out.”