“Vlad the Impaler was a legend. Ted Bundy.”
Refusing to buy into the act of indifference he was staging, she persisted. “Jake’s a liar? You didn’t fly into the worst of the shit?”
“Stories get exaggerated. They take on a life of their own.”
“True. But they have some substance.”
“Believe as much or as little as you want to.”
“I believe you could fly for anybody. So why do you fly for Dash-It-All and the like?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. But there’s little prestige.”
“Screw prestige. I like my kind of flying.”
“Why?”
“Because most of the time, I can fly alone.”
“Why do you prefer that?”
He bent down closer to her so she wouldn’t miss his point. “I don’t have to talk to anybody.”
“About what happened over there?”
“Over where?”
She just looked at him, and she outlasted him.
He rubbed the back of his neck and tilted his head from side to side, popping the vertebrae. But that didn’t relieve the strain. Still vexed, he opened the mini bar, took out a beer, and carried it over to an easy chair near the window. He looked outside and swore softly, indicating to her that the police car was still there.
He plopped down, yanked the pull tab, took a drink from the can. “You want to hear a nice bedtime story? Too bad. This ain’t it.”
She sat up and raised her knees, wrapping her arms around them.
He began with an air of boredom. “This is the story about the pilot of a C-12. Know what that is?”
“Obviously an airplane.”
“Military version of a King Air. They’re used for personnel and cargo transport, troop support, rescue, surveillance. They serve variable purposes, depending on which branch of the military is using them, and what for. A C-12 can be the food truck. An ambulance. Sometimes a hearse.”
He studied the can of beer in his hand, took a drink from it. “Anyway, that particular day, two C-12s were to fly a squadron of fighter pilots, plus their commanding officer, and some support personnel, out of Bagram. They’d been there for a couple of days, attending a briefing on where some badass Taliban who needed taking out were hiding up in the Nuristan province. We were flying them back to their base.
“Wasn’t the worst of shit by any means. Duck soup, really. Scheduled to take off at sixteen hundred, but as happens in military life, the commander’s meeting ran long, things got pushed back, so I thought I’d get some sleep while we were waiting.
“Next thing I know, the other pilot was waking me up, saying the planes were on the tarmac, they’d been put through preflight, and a lot of traffic was coming in, so the tower was telling us to get the lead out. I grabbed my gear. ‘I’ll be there soon as I take a leak.’
“He said, ‘They assigned me to the first ship in line. That new bird.’ He told me the squadron and commanding officer were already aboard. ‘You get the economy flight, Mallett.’ The second plane was older, not as tricked out. It was hauling light cargo and the support personnel. He gave me a mock salute on his way out. ‘You snooze, you lose.’”
Brynn’s throat began to tighten. She folded her hands together and placed them against her lips.
He drained the beer and set the can with deliberate care on the table at his elbow. “A sidebar here. You know how you can buy the same brand of blue jeans, same size, same style, but each pair will fit just a little different from the others until you work them in?
“Planes are the same. Aircraft can be identical. Same model, same configuration, cockpit panel, all the same. But each plane has its quirks. I’d flown that new plane a dozen times or more. I’d turned in a squawk list to the—” He paused when he saw her puzzlement. “Oh. Squawk list. A list of those quirks I mentioned.
“Mechanics hadn’t gotten around to checking them out, and the other pilot hadn’t seen the squawk list. He’d also never flown with the copilot, which isn’t necessary, but it helps to have some hours with the other flyer in the cockpit.”
“I climbed into the captain’s seat of the second craft. Copilot saluted me. More smack talk about me flying the VW instead of the Rolls. The two planes taxied. The first one took off.”
He hesitated. Took several breaths. “Soon as it got airborne at full takeoff power, I realized that he was having control problems. One of the items on my list was that new plane’s yoke. It was sticky. You had to pull back on it firmly but smoothly. Then you’d be fine.”
He was miming the motions, pulling both fists toward his chest.
“The pilot didn’t know that, so when he felt that minuscule amount of resistance, he panicked and overcompensated, pulled back hard. I was yelling at him through my headset, ‘Too much! Too much!’ But he nosed up too fast, too steep, went practically vertical and stalled. He couldn’t correct it.”
Tears were stinging Brynn’s eyes, but she blinked them back without moving, not wanting to distract him from finishing.
“What was really weird?” he said. “It was so damn graceful, the way it arced over before going into the nose dive. It was like watching an Olympiad in slow motion.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Tanks were full, of course. The fireball was spectacular.” He sat forward and put his elbows on his knees, digging his thumbs into his eye sockets.
Brynn didn’t say anything for a time, then, “If you had been flying it, could you have corrected it?”
He lowered his hands. “That’s the point of the story, Brynn. If I’d been flying it, there would have been nothing to correct. Thirteen people died because I nodded off.” He looked at his palms as though seeing blood on them. “I knew all those pilots. They were great guys. The best of the best. Such a fucking waste.”
“You think the least you could have done was to die with them?”
He raised his head and looked at her with vehemence.
“That’s is, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “That’s the issue. You didn’t die that day.”
“I beat the odds.”
Nodding slowly, she said, “But if you fly long enough, often enough, in conditions that are risky enough, the odds will begin to stack against you until eventually…”
“My number will come up.”
Even having guessed that was his mind-set, she made a mournful sound of dismay. “You want to die?”
“Not die,” he said, “just…just not have to live with this anymore.”
She searched his haunted eyes. How could she respond in a way that would reverse his thinking, reset his reasoning, relieve his guilt, or console him to some extent, any extent? Nothing came to mind. “I don’t think anyone, except yourself, can help you with this, Rye.”
“I didn’t ask for anyone’s help. I don’t want anyone’s help.”
“You would rather suffer alone.”
“And not have to talk about it.”
“That must be awfully hurtful to people who care about you.”
“It is.”
“Is that why you’ve shut yourself off from your family?”
He stood up and turned his back to her. “From everybody.”
From her, certainly. His lovemaking had been passionate. He’d whispered stirring things she had taken as sincere because he hadn’t said them to woo her. She had already been wooed. But the instant the intimacy had shifted from the physical to the emotional, he had detached himself.
She wanted to go to him now, hold him close, and tell him how she hated that he suffered this continuous anguish. But knowing that her attempted comforting would be rebuffed, she stayed where she was.
At the window, he said, “No change. He’s still there, and it’s still pouring. What do you want to do?”
She looked at the clock. It was almost one-thirty. “Honestly, now that I’ve been prone, I don’t think I could endure the drive. I would be a danger to myself and anyone else on the road. I would arrive at five-thirty or thereabouts. Would it be fair to the Griffins to barge in at that hour and hit them with all this?”