by Edward Es
TranStar 100 is an MD 80, this interior light green, a precursor to the Boeing-brown philosophy. The Captain and First Officer look at each other, then both strain their eyes outward as the Captain banks the aircraft left, responding through a hand mic. “We’ll give it a try.” He turns to the First Officer. “You see anything?”
“I think I see something. It looks pretty far away though, no two miles.” He pulls binoculars from his flightbag, scans, then locks on, hitting the push-to-talk switch. “Yeah, there it is. It’s a 747. Looks funny, though. Must be at least ten miles from the size of it. But then again…”
Sherry presses her earpiece, looking up to Harold as she responds to the TranStar pilot. “747? It indicates less than a mile.” She listens again, and reports to Harold while looking at Steve. “He says it’s either a 747 ten miles away, or a ten-foot 747, one mile away.”
Harold looks at Steve, then back at Sherry, then at Steve. “Weren’t you supposed to be working Sherry’s sector today?”
Crumbling, Steve confesses, “Yes, I was. We traded shifts, but she decided to come in anyway,” glaring at her, “without telling me.”
Harold turns to Sherry. “Where’s that darn thing look like it’s going?”
“Utah.”
Harold grows darker, pointing at Steve’s face. “Vectorfort, I want you in my office at the end of this shift.” He turns back to Sherry. “Track that little UFO as far as you can and give me an event report.” As Harold storms away, Sherry gloats quietly. Steve shakes an imaginary, tightly clenched fist at her.
Noah 4’s interior is small by any standard. For Sam, however, it’s more a matter of wearing the jet than sitting in it. Fortunately, Tom had a seat made especially for him. Sam concentrates on a video of Looney Tune classics, sucking a Tootsie Pop, Matt drinks a beer, and Tom has a newspaper in front of his face, the flying duties left to Eddie. He punches the newspaper and throws it down.
“I swear to God, I don’t know where they come up with this lunacy.”
Matt belches. Sam cocks one eye at Tom, then returns to his cartoon. “Now what?” Matt asks.
Tom picks up the paper. “Look at this. Some pervert was caught in front of a school for hearing impaired kids talking filth in sign language, and now he’s in court with some lawyer who’s got the judge tied up in knots trying to decide whether or not signing can be ‘constitutionally considered obscene language.’ The whole world’s out on a sick coffee break.”
Matt gets up, as far as the height of the cabin will allow, his hat squashing down on his head as it presses against the ceiling. “Well, you know what they say. There is no gravity,” belching again, “the Earth sucks.” As Matt walks toward the lav, Sam looks at Tom, who stares grimly out the window.
“Hey, man, loosen up a little. I can’t remember the last time I saw you smile like you were happy. The few times you do smile it looks like... more like an upside-down frown. Look,” pointing to the TV, “it’s Red Ryder, your favorite.”
Tom looks at the screen, then away. Sam musters up a fair impression of Red Ryder. “Duh, look at me horsy, I’m a ridin’ side saddle, yeah.” No response. “Come on, Tom. Have some fun. Good, clean, stupid fun.”
Tom’s gaze continues into the minus forty-six degree air outside. “When I was a kid, every time I was about to have fun, like the most fun I’d ever had, something inside me would stop it. It was like there was only so much happiness doled out to each person when they were born, and if you used it up too fast, there’d only be sadness left. Part of me was always afraid I’d use up my happiness.”
Sam caves into the darkening conversation. “You still believe that?”
Tom stares deeper into nothing. “I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
He turns toward Sam, though the gaze remains unfocused. “I keep waiting for the sadness to run out.” He turns back out the window. “But there’s no end to it.”
Sam closes his eyes, searching. “Maybe you were right. Maybe you’ll use all the sadness up. Then there’ll be nothin’ but good times ahead.”
Tom looks back at him, the helplessness in his eyes telling his friend he finds little hope in the theory. Tom turns back to the window, staring once more into the past.
From inside the car, scenes of a Tijuana ghetto pass by through the churning dust of the streets. The travail of the poor struggling through another day is not evident on their faces, as they know no different. Though pain and suffering are often their own analgesic, this is not so for Tom and his wife, Francine, who holds their listless son in her arms. His name was Noah, a blond boy of eight, wounded by a blood transfusion at birth. The traffic, not so much of automobiles but of people and animals, makes the going slow. At last, the car pulls in front of a building that looks in comparison to its lurid surroundings like a temple, masked with whitewashed cinder block. “Clinica Popular de Tijuana” is barely legible in faded letters over the entrance. This, cruelly enough, is an outpost on the fringes of hope, a pitiful and far-off place to grasp for what few impossible odds those at home will not offer. They crawl from the car, which melds away into the street with its adornment of dirt. On Francine’s face rests the look of lifelessness that’s left when even despair has run its course and departed.
The persistent buzz of the airphone breaks the droning silence. Sam picks it up. “Yeah, Doc. He’s right here.” He extends the phone to Tom. “It’s for you.” No response. “Tom? Hey, brother.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s the Doc.”
Tom forces himself. “Thanks.” He takes the phone as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “Yeah vul, mein Doctor.”
Dr. Werner Kirshner has been compared to Einstein both in appearance and intellect. As one’s surroundings often take on one’s character, his office is in disarray, due mostly to an overabundance of technical material. Kirshner addresses the speakerphone in his Polish accent. “Tommy, my boy. Did you forget about me? I’ve been waiting for your call.”
Tom’s voice carries his mood. “I’m sorry. I’ve been… never mind. Have you got a fix on her?”
“Yes. Position is one hundred fifty miles south southwest of Mormon Mesa, ETA 1933. Will you be here in time?”
“We’re right on schedule. I got the valve from Louis. Did you get a delivery from Abex?”
Kirshner hesitates. “Listen, Thomas. It’s not such a good idea to talk. Things are getting difficult here.”
Static silence. “What’s the matter?” asks Tom.
“We’ll discuss it when you get here. Just... be careful.”
“Sure. OK.” He looks troubled as he hands the phone to Sam, who takes it without looking. Tom watches Sam’s eyebrow rise in reaction.
“What?” asks Sam.
Tom cracks his neck, always making Sam cringe. “I think I hear footsteps.”
Eddie sticks his head in the cockpit doorway. “We gotta start down. You want to do this?”
Tom gets up and starts into the cockpit, but sees Zion curled up on the Captain’s seat. “No, you two go ahead.”
Eddie pulls the thrust levers back to idle, looking over at the cat. “Well, I guess it’s just you and me.” Zion turns up to him with a peaceful blink.
The anteroom to the Oval Office is intimidating, even more so in the silence that rests between clacks of an antique grandfather clock. Activity out in the hallway is faint, overshadowed by the ponderous quiet of waiting. The smell of heavy drapes, the austerity of raised striped-velvet wallpaper, the rhythmic ticking, each accentuate every fretting moment.
Counterpoint to this ticking is the tapping of a pencil, played by Margaret, the President’s secretary, who focuses on a document on her desk. Bud sits too close to Sid on a sort of bench, a settee, nearly in formation posture with him, reminding Margaret of two overgrown boys waiting for the principal to call them. All of this is about as much
as Bud can take. Margaret imperceptibly peers over her glasses in distant disapproval. Standing next to the coffee station, pouring sugar into a mug of coffee, is a seductive woman in her early thirties with dark hair and sleek brown eyes.
An intercom buzzer shoots through Bud’s nerves and Margaret answers her line from the Oval Office. “Yes, Mr. President. It’s Meyerkamp and his assistant. He said it’s a matter of national security, only five minutes… Yes, I tried that, but he’s a little insistent… Very well, I’ll tell him.”
She hangs up the phone and turns to Sid. “The President says if you can wait until after he meets with the Ambassador from Italy, he’ll see you.”
Sid replies, “That’ll be just fine.”
Bud, in his blunt and persistently unsuccessful manner, has been giving the woman at the coffee station the eye. He motions to her, thinking she must be a secretary. “Could I get a cup of black?”
She nods, then, smiling, pours him a cup and hands it to him. Margaret addresses her. “The President will see you now, Miss Larotta.” Miss Larotta walks toward the Oval Office door, graciously rocking her hips. The door opens and two Presidential arms reach out for a warm embrace. Miss Larotta leans into a kiss on the cheek and, doing so, lifts one foot off the carpet. Bud and Sid watch breathlessly as she slips in, closing the door behind her.
Sid gasps, “Holy smoke. She’s the ambassador?”
“I always did like Italian food,” Bud says, frowning. Sid’s briefcase beeps and the sound of a miniature printer buzzes like a two-pound bumblebee. “Do we have to drag that damn thing around with us everywhere?” Bud complains as he looks at the briefcase.
Sid considers part of his duties for the Bureau to keep Bud respectfully irritated. “New director’s policy. He’s high tech.”
“Why don’t we just hang signs around our necks sayin’ we’re feds?” Sid opens the briefcase and Bud winces at the even louder sound of the tiny printer grinding away. After a moment it stops and Sid tears off a small sheet, handing it to Bud, who tries to read it at various distances from his face, then gives it back. “That’s just great. What they need is little agents,” gesturing with his thumb and forefinger, “this big to read the blasted things.”
Agent Knowles reads the dispatch. “It’s from Western. Something about the FAA reporting an aircraft heading in the direction of Utah.”
“Why’d they send it here?”
“Seems coincidental with our boy Holmes going in the same direction at the same time. Some crazy stuff about an object of ‘unknown type and size.’”
Bud’s irritation meter moves through yellow and up into the red. “Well, what the hell is that freak up to now? Just might nudge this super yuppie toward our point of view.”
The Holmes private airstrip was scratched out of a gently sloping plateau on a remote corner of the estate. Tom purchased thousands of acres southeast of Rockville, Utah, some of which belonged to the remnants of a Paiute tribe whose bloodlines ran up through fading generations to reach Francine, and thus his son. This he had done during the period when it seemed like owning anything and everything that touched his boy’s life felt in some way like a muddled revenge against that lost life.
The cliffs of Zion Canyon rise up in the distance, layered in hues of off-whites and yellows, illuminated by a noon Sun filtered through rippled cirrus. Two pinpoint shimmering lights in the western sky transform into the Citation as it lands and taxis directly into a hangar, the only structure on the private airport. The engines whine down, the doors unfold, and Tom emerges carrying the briefcase. He hands it to a ramp boy as he walks outside in a hurry. Tom approaches a cart stacked with pieces of electronic gear and hooks on an earpiece and mic.
“Hey, Doc, you copy?”
After a moment of static, the Doctor responds. “Go ahead.”
“I show seven DME and autocoupled. You concur?”
“I do. Are you coming down here? I need to talk to you.”
“Give me a couple of hours. I’ll be there”
Kirshner’s tone tightens, his mood accentuated by the phase shift in the transmission. “We need to talk.”
Sam and Matt walk up behind Tom. “How we doin’?” Matt asks, as if he cared.
“A few more minutes.”
“Tell you what,” Matt says, shaking his head, “sell that thing, I’ll put it down on a small ranch. Make it a big ranch.” Sam, more in touch with Tom’s moods than Matt, glares at him. Matt ignores the drop it look in his eyes. “Like they say, he who dies with the most toys…” Sam hangs his head in disbelief as Tom looks into Matt’s eyes. Matt starts to apologize, but Tom reads his regret and turns away. Sam shoves Matt and yells silently at the top of his lungs as Matt steps backward, stops, then walks away kicking dirt.
Sam struggles for words. “Hey, I don’t know what—”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my problem, not his.” He looks down the runway. “Did you draw up the papers I asked?”
“They should be ready by morning. You want to tell me what this is all about?” Tom pushes a switch on his panel, feigning distraction, and a light appears on the horizon. “As if I didn’t know. You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?” Tom continues with his remote control. “It’s impressive, the way you maintain cover on all this, but you’ve got to realize one thing. There’s a grapevine of people who care about you. We all bend the rules to make sure you’re all right.”
Tom turns slowly to meet with Sam’s eyes. Though most of his urges to reach out remain prisoner, a rare moment of vulnerability flickers in his gaze. He’s grateful for his friend’s concern, yet unable to respond. “I need you on the outside. To take care of things. The less you know, the better off you are.”
“Sounds like a line from a B movie.”
“You got something against B movies?”
“I love B movies.”
Tom lands the Noah 3 with a few strokes of a joystick, watching it flare inches above the ground and touch down with tiny puffs of blue smoke from sixteen miniature aircraft tires. He taxis the model toward them and as it moves swiftly past, Sam watches, then turns back.
“It’s just too damn hard to figure you. Most people, when they spin around in life, we all spin around sometimes, they just... come to a stop. You, you just keep spinning faster, you keep feedin’ it. It’s a waste, Tom. It’s not what he would’ve wanted.” Tom revolves toward him with a burning stare that turns inward. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have,” Sam says as Tom looks away again.
Tom sinks farther in. “You think I’m not overwhelmed by what he would have wanted? It’s everywhere. It’s in the wind, it’s in the sky. It’s in everything I see, and feel, and hear. It’s deafening, trust me.”
Sam looks up, trying to dispel the wrenching emotion. The pain he feels for his friend always revives his own loss; Sam was Noah’s godfather. “Look, I wouldn’t even begin to say I know how you feel. Even if I did, what good would it do? The whole world’s deafened by the sound of suffering.”
Tom has his back to him and Sam walks up and covers Tom’s ears. “But let me tell you something. There’s another sound, even louder. It drowns out everything else. It’s sweet music, Tommy.” Sam turns him around, holding him at arm’s length. “It’s the song of victory.” Tom looks at him as Sam presses. “Can’t you hear it? Isn’t that Noah singin’ it right now?”
It startles Tom to hear his boy’s name, the sound of it alone a razor-sharp dagger. He looks up at the big man’s face, closes the briefcase, and the two walk silently toward the hangar.
As Tom and Sam approach, Eddie connects a scale-size radio-controlled tug to the tow bar already hooked to Noah 3’s nose wheel. Matt watches as Eddie opens the cockpit hatch and retrieves the black box, handing it to Tom. With the hatch shut, the Noah 3 is slowly tugged into the hangar, dwarfed by a Boeing 727 sitting spotlessly with its landing gear doors ope
n. Tom turns to Sam. “You goin’ running with me?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Sam asks, cringing. Tom’s smile answers. “Well then, I guess I’m goin’ running with you.”
“Good. Tomorrow morning, usual place.” He pats Sam on the back and walks away. Sam turns to Matt for sympathy, but Matt responds by clutching his chest, then laughs as he follows Tom.
Bud paces, locomotive puffing on a cigar in the hallway outside the anteroom. The doors open behind him and he turns to encounter Miss Larotta standing, staring at him, her long brown hair cascading across bare shoulders. She hands him her empty coffee mug, walks provocatively to a drinking fountain, and bends over with precise aim, taking a long, long drink. After straightening up, Miss Larotta walks away without a look back, leaving Bud to commence throwing his cigar butt on the ground until he remembers where he is. He finds an ashtray on an 18th century end table before entering the anteroom.
Sid stands as Bud glares at Margaret in expectation. “The President will see you now,” she says, starting to rise, but Bud bolts ahead and enters on his own.
President Stamp, like his former law student Herlihy, is the youngest man in history to hold his office. He looks up as Bud lurches in, then stops, his gross entrance stunted by the place itself. Sid walks respectfully up to the desk as Jonathan stands. Tall and strikingly handsome, he’s certainly a match for Bud despite their age difference and long relationship. He shakes Sid’s hand.
“Mr. President,” says Sid.
The President nods, then shakes Bud’s hand. Wasting no time, Bud slams another thick folder on the desk. “I’m here about Holmes.”
“I know. I just talked to Herlihy.”
Bud is hardly surprised. “News travels fast around here.”
“Especially bad news. Do you realize this is only the second time in my administration I’ve let somebody in here without an appointment.”