The glow from Philadelphia lingered long after we had left her city limits. I had left the shower and collapsed on my bed, out the minute my head hit the pillows. I never heard Mike take his shower, order breakfast from room service or get into bed himself. All I remember was him waking me up hours later even though it felt as if it were only a few minutes later.
“C’mon. You need to eat and get dressed. Your hair looks like you pruned it with hedge clippers and glued it back on with super glue. And your eyes look like you’re stoned.” He laughed at me and I threw the pillow at him. He caught it before it hit anything.
“What time is it?” I growled. I was so not a morning person.
“5 a.m.” I groaned and buried myself under the covers mumbling dire curses and tortures.
“What?” He dragged the blankets off me.
“I said I forgot to take out the contacts. Didn’t have anything to put them in and they made my eyes red.”
“Will it hurt your eyes?”
“No. Not for a day or so.” I sat up slowly, reaching for my clothes which I’d thrown at the bottom of my bed. They were now neatly folded. I’d gone to sleep in my underwear and it was cold when I got out from under the sheets to head for the bathroom. I raised my temp and Mike exclaimed.
“What did you just do?”
I stopped. “Why?”
“Your whole body just glowed red for a second---almost as if you were on fire but under the skin!”
“Yeah?” I did it again and stared down at myself. When I saw what he’d seen, I giggled. My dick glowed like a neon porn movie straining against my briefs because I needed to take a leak big time.
“Brings new meaning to the word ‘fireballs’, doesn’t it?” I called from the bathroom. Ahh, nothing like the first piss of the day. I washed my hands, face and brushed my teeth with those little sample bottles of complimentary toiletries that hotels gave you.
Dressed, clean and empty, I perused the breakfast he’d ordered. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and pancakes. Real maple syrup. Coffee, cream and OJ. Biscuits and gravy. Orange slices on the plates, real linen napkins folded into those crazy fan shapes. Bagels with smoked salmon, cream cheese. Philadelphia of course.
The coffee was rich and delightful. I saw the slip and turned it over. Breakfast cost almost a hundred bucks. My eyes widened but he didn’t seem fazed by the amount. Of course, he came from a wealthy family. Then, I laughed at myself. I had stolen $48 billion. What was a $100 compared to that?
I ate. Everything. When we were done, nothing remained on the tray except for our dishes and a twenty-dollar tip for the room service waiter.
“We stopping in NYC?” That was the next big city on the route home but he shook his head.
“Change of plans.” He handed me his IPhone and I read the text. K to P4 R taken.
“Oh.”
“What does it mean? P4 was RT 17 in Jersey, right? Exit 17.”
“Yes, I know.” I thought furiously and then nodded. “We have to go to Foxboro instead.”
“Foxboro? My dad keeps a plane there.”
“Yes.”
“Can you fly? A jet?”
“Yes.” I ran through the steps in my head and nodded firmly. “Yes, I can. I can fly a Lear.”
We left ten minutes later heading for the small city of Foxboro, PA which was only an hour outside of Philly. It had a small regional airport from which you could access Logan, O’Hare, Reagan and Kennedy. Even fly straight to Montreal or Toronto.
When we pulled onto the tarmac of the terminal, a hulking man in a chauffeur’s suit was standing next to a Mercedes limo. Not lounging against the fenders but ram-rod straight as if at attention. He came over the instant that Mike stopped the bike and the two hugged, slapped each other and did that complicated hand thing.
“Lake, this is my Sergeant, Jinx Blackspell. We served together.”
He was dark-skinned with snapping black eyes; a bulky two-hundred pounds on a 5’10” frame with muscles like a quarter horse and a neck like Conan. He moved fluidly and not like a muscle bound jock whose thighs rubbed together.
I dismounted and shook his hand but he dragged me into a bear-hug where I protested that I couldn’t breathe. He let go and shook my hand. His was as big as a basketball and as leathery as one. He was left-handed, too. “Hey, little bro. You saved my man, here. It’s nice to meet you, Lakan Strongbow,” he said in Siouan. My eyes widened in delight.
“You’re Sioux?”
“Ogallala. A distant cousin of Little Bear. Otseno Pete says hello.” His eyes twinkled. “No thanks for his pick-up truck, though. The Fibbies impounded it.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Everyone out there okay?” He nodded and the ‘except for Rachel’ was left unsaid. “You taking the Spyder back?”
“Yeah. Mr. Faraday’s regular chauffeur drove me out here so I could ride it home. He knows how Mike feels about this bike.”
He took Mike’s chaps, leather jacket, and helmet. He already had on boots that could pass as Mike’s as he exchanged them for his own uniform in the back of the limo while Mike and I watched. Once dressed in the leather biker’s gear, it was hard to tell the difference between the two former military men. They gripped each other once more and then both limo and bike rolled out of the airport.
The Lear sat out on the runway already serviced with the base manager waiting. “Fueled, vetted and ready to go, Mr. Faraday, sir,” he reported. “Is your pilot with you? Or are you flying?”
“Don’t be silly,” he grunted. “I was Marines, not Air Force. My buddy here is flying.”
The manager’s mouth dropped. I smiled cheerily and climbed up the short set of steps as he protested, following us inside the cockpit. It rapidly became crowded. I went through the pre-flight checklist. Started the engines and readied the plane for take-off as the radio crackled to life with instructions from the tower for runway and wind conditions.
“Unless you’re planning on a trip to Calabash, I suggest that you de-plane, Joe,” I called him by the name on his uniform shirt.
“You know how to fly this jet?”
“Better than the man who designed it. In fact, I could re-design and make it unable to crash,” I said staring at him confidently. He nodded once and presently, we heard the airlock close and pressurize.
The tower gave us permission to depart and I lifted the bird into the air without a wobble or hitch. The plane flew as sweetly as a dream, her controls almost as easy to use as my quipp. Actually, the quipp had more functions than the Lear console and was quirkier.
I set it on auto-pilot following the direction beacons towards Providence before dropping below the radar and changing direction for Colorado.
I left the cockpit to join Mike in the lounge. He was asleep on one of the seats pushed back as far as it would go and snoring gently. I went to the bar and found it was stocked with beer, champagne, wines and soda along with ice, and sandwiches dated twenty minutes before we’d arrived at the airport.
I took a mesquite smoked turkey on sourdough with smoked gouda, sprouts and dill pickles and an ice-cold Pepsi. When I popped the tab, it hissed and little bubbles of CO2 splattered my hand.
Setting the food down on the table, I parked myself in the seat opposite Mike. “You make me a sandwich?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“Didn’t know you were awake. You were snoring. What do you want?” I got up and checked the fridge. “Ham/Swiss? Olive loaf, meatloaf or an Italian?”
“I do not snore. Olive loaf. Beer.”
“Do too.” I set the sandwich on a chinette plate and popped the cap on the beer. Sam Adams Winter Ale. He took them from me and brought his seat up.
“Who’s flying the plane?”
“Charlie.”
“Charlie?” He took an enormous bite and chewed quietly. Washed it down with half the bottle.
“Auto-pilot. We’re off flight plan and below the radar.”
“I take it we’re not heading for Providence?”
“Nope. Colorado. Private airstrip belonging to a friend. From there, we’ll fly to Canada. All of us.”
“All of us?”
“Everybody that’s helped me and is on Chase’s list. We need to disappear until every mention of us is gone. I have a worm erasing us from the data but that doesn’t remove any hard copies they may have. Written reports and notes.”
I ate a bite. Tasty. The Pepsi cleared my sinuses. “We’ll land in a couple of hours.”
I heard the radio crackle and went forward to listen to a weather bulletin about a storm brewing up over Kansas and three other states. It was massive. Potential wall clouds, tornados, vicious downdrafts, and hail with a ceiling of 50,000 feet.
“Shit,” I said softly. It was too high to fly above and too large to go around. Too dangerous to fly through but I had no choice. If I deviated from my path and went higher, I would pop out on someone’s radar. A plane that wasn’t supposed to be there. The Lear had an electronic transponder that identified her call number and was also visible on her tail.
“What’s wrong, Lake?” He came forward and stared at the sleek console of the jet; especially the co-pilot’s controls as they followed my movements. It looked weird as the stick moved without anyone behind it.
“Storm. A big one. Dangerous thunderstorms. We can’t fly above it or go any higher. We can’t fly where we’re at, it’s too dangerous this low with downdrafts.”
“So fly around it,” he suggested.
“Can’t. I have to climb the mountain peaks and radar would pick us up. Any unauthorized plane over certain restricted areas would trigger a terrorist alert. The Air Force would shoot us down.”
“Can we head back?”
“No. We don’t have enough fuel to reach Providence and anywhere else would trigger some pointed questions. Like what are we doing going in the wrong direction from our filed flight plan?”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“Pray. Keep going and hope we don’t hit a downdraft or the ground or trigger radar.” I spent the next three hours flying the plane by the seat of my pants and when we met the brunt of the storm, it was hell on earth.
I fought to keep the Lear level at 400 feet and if she hadn’t had an exquisite range contour radar heads up display, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to keep her from hitting the ground. Green rain, blue lightning, and hail made vision through the windows virtually indecipherable and every shudder of thunder vibrated along the wings into the body of the jet.
I swore I could feel electricity lift my hair even though I knew the jet was grounded. Ball lightning rolled off the wings and golf ball sized hail made me jump as it banged against the cockpit’s glass.
Through it all, Mike sat quietly in the co-pilot’s seat holding his beer which had surely gone flat. “I didn’t make it home alive from Iraq to die in a plane crash,” he said softly. That was when I heard the pinging of a locator beam as the electronics in the cockpit caught it.
“What is that?”
“That is the fifty mile out beacon telling me that I’m heading for the landing strip. We should be able to land within the next half hour unless the storm is as bad on the ground and they shut the airport down.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Head for another airport where we can land and hope we have enough fuel to reach it. Pray that we don’t have to answer any questions,” I said.
Even with a beacon, it was still hairy bringing the Lear jet down. It wasn’t until I was lined up with the runway that I saw the lights. Every one of them was burning with halogen intensity. The rain was pounding the ground and I could see it shift direction as the wind veered chaotically.
The tower told me the conditions and warned that all traffic was being grounded or diverted to other airports. There had already been several crashes at Denver and Pagosa Springs.
I told them that we had no choice, I was running low on fuel and nerve. The air traffic controller told me to come in at a slight angle on R14, the wind was coming from the south and would be behind me.
The wheels dropped and the airspeed slowed as the undercarriage deployed, picking up more drag. The plane shuddered and I felt the sweat springing out on my face and armpits. I wiped my face off on my sleeve, not moving my hands off the stick. I was scared but tried to hide it.
“You can do this, Lakan,” Mike said with utter confidence.
I landed the jet with a delicate bump and taxied to the waiting hangar. As the engines died, I laid my head on the yoke and breathed harshly through my nose with audible intensity.
Mike asked, “so, how long have you been a pilot?”
I looked at him with grim humor. “Since this morning. This is the first time I’ve flown a plane.” He stared at me in horror.