by Dale Brown
When the coffee was finished brewing, she took a cup back out to the living room so she could work on the computer and watch the sunrise through the front picture window. The living room served double duty as a parlor and office, with a large light oak desk and two oak lateral files along one wall. A computer keyboard slid out from the center drawer, and by sliding a few papers out of the way she could see the monitor through a glass panel in the desktop. Rebecca did all her books, scheduling, her record-keeping on that computer—it contained virtually her entire life.
With a few keystrokes, Rebecca was connected to her computer at Liberty Air Service, a small air charter and fixed-base operator at Clinton County Airport, across the lake near Plattsburgh, New York. She owned the company, trained commercial pilots, and did a few cargo or passenger runs to fill in for sick or vacationing pilots—but not this week. Calling up this week’s schedule on the computer showed nothing but canceled appointments, all with the annotation HELL WEEK.
Well, Liberty Air could spare the boss for a few days, thanks to the Air Force Reserve.
The electronic mailbox link with her office in Plattsburgh had a few messages, which she briefly answered, mostly with “I’ll take care of it when I get back.” She noticed that the two late-night runs, one to Bradley International in Connecticut and the other to Pittsburgh, had made it off despite low ceilings and the threat of freezing drizzle. Furness’ small eight-plane charter fleet was still composed of all piston-powered planes—all instrument equipped and certified for flight in known icing conditions, but hardly what anyone would call an all-weather fleet. In a matter of weeks she would be looking to buy her first turboprop cargo plane, a single-engine Cessna 208B Caravan with a cargo bay, which would give Liberty Air a true medium-size all-weather cargo capability. Unfortunately, she needed it last week, or even last month. Soon her fleet would be all but weathered in.
Calling up the next thirty days’ calendar found it full of FAA inspections, check rides, meetings, deadlines, and of course the beginnings of tax season—all the things that most people put off during the holiday season were now coming due. Things were busy enough with her working six, sometimes seven days a week, but by the time she returned from Hell Week, she would have enough work to last her until spring.
Hell Week was a part of the new American military and a part of Rebecca Furness’ new life. She had left the active-duty military in early 1992, during a six-month voluntary RIF (Reduction In Forces) period, in which active-duty Air Force officers were asked to voluntarily resign their regular commissions and accept Reserve commissions before their normal enlistments were completed. The Air Force RIFed ten thousand officers in eight months in an election-year firing frenzy that created so much controversy, so much anguish, that it helped, along with an awful economy, bring down a seemingly unbeatable Republican president.
In one of his very few politically savvy moves concerning the military, the new President eventually invited those officers RIFed in 1992 to join a new program, called the Enhanced Reserve Program, which was meant to increase the capability and viability of the Reserves and National Guard while continuing steep cuts in the peacetime active-duty forces. After all, even with an eye on a huge deficit, the President knew he had to look like a true commander in chief, especially since he had evaded the draft during his own call to duty years ago.
Half of the Reserves and two-thirds of the National Guard were placed under the Standard Reserve Program, or SRP—their basic commitment was one weekend per month and two weeks per year, plus occasional meetings, training schools, and other functions. Those in high-tech specialties such as aviation were placed under the new Enhanced Reserve Program, or ERP, a sort of part-time military where members served at least fourteen days per month, including one continuous week of intensive refresher training. Members in the ERP received approximately half of their active-duty pay, but no other free benefits such as medical care, educational programs, base exchange, or commissary—it was still a cost-cutting system, so all possible benefits and incentives had been eliminated or were offered at reduced cost to members. Reserve and Air National Guard bases were either collocated with municipal airports or were drastically downsized—the base personnel, most of them Reservists, had to rely on the local economy for goods, services, and housing.
Many military experts, including the very vocal members of the Joint Chiefs, feared that the United States was shooting itself in the foot by decreasing the size of the full-time military forces so much—by the end of 1994, the Reserves and Guard composed nearly 50 percent of the total U.S. military force, as opposed to only 30 percent two years earlier. The military budget as a whole was reduced—amid bloodbaths in Congress—by a full 40 percent. The cost savings were staggering. Although the direct effect on the budget after the first year was negligible, the second year the Air Force alone had realized a full 10-percent savings—over 8 billion dollars in just one year. The savings in the future were expected to go even higher, while the national debt was continuing to fall.
As long as no serious world conflicts broke out, the target was a Reserve force of 600,000 men and women, or 60 percent of the total one-million-person American military, by the end of 1996. Of a total 380,000-person Air Force in 1996, over 260,000 were expected to be Reservists or Air National Guard troops.
For the next seven days, Rebecca Furness would leave her business, leave Ed, leave her life on the “outside,” and become a soldier.
Furness logged off the computer terminal, finished the last of the coffee, and made her way upstairs to get ready to report to the base. The Enhanced Reserve Program created hardships for a lot of its members because of the amount of time it required, but Rebecca loved it—and needed it. Having Liberty Air Service was challenging, fulfilling, and gave her the time to keep flying for the U.S. Air Force, building up points for retirement—but it paid very, very poorly. Expenses and insurance costs were high, and surviving the lean winter months was always difficult, so her salary was always the first to get cut. She had made the decision to trade in a big portion of her piston fleet for a few turboprop planes to give her more of a year-round cargo and passenger capability, and that had decreased her margin even more. She needed this ERP position to keep herself afloat.
Rebecca showered, staying under the hot water a long time to shave her legs and let the sharp stream of water massage her tense shoulders—hot showers were the only luxury she could still afford. No flying was scheduled today, but just going out to Plattsburgh Air Force Base, the oldest military installation in the United States, and its very busy flight line, always made her a bit tense. After staying in the shower a few minutes longer than she really had time for, she slipped into a big fluffy bathrobe to stay warm and continued to get ready.
For the flyers like Furness, Hell Week was designed as a sort of mini-deployment, so they had to pack their standard deployment items in a big B-4 duffel bag: two flight suits, six pairs of heavyweight socks, thermal underwear, toiletries, T-shirts, and underwear. Since an arctic deployment was possible (and some U.S. non-Arctic bases, such as Plattsburgh, were sometimes cold enough to resemble Arctic bases anyway), they also brought along thick knee-high mukluks, large woolly mittens, fur caps, wool facemasks, and jacket liners. Rebecca had packed most of this stuff the night before, but she did a double-check since there would be an inspection first thing after reporting in.
After rechecking everything in the bag against a predeployment checklist, she zipped the bag up and began to get dressed. Every Hell Week started with a personal inspection, all by regulation—AFR 35-10 (uniform, personal grooming, standards of appearance), AFR 35-11 (weight standards), AFR 36-20 (drug and alcohol screening), AFR 40-41 (civil violations and records check), AFR 50-111 (emergency procedures and aircraft technical order knowledge), and ACC 20-89 (deployment and emergency aircraft dispersal). Anyone not complying with any part of those regulations would be written up in their permanent records and sent home to fix the problem, with a loss of one
day’s Reserve pay and an “incomplete” for their ERP commitment. Three “incompletes” would mean expulsion from the program.
Flight suits were the uniform of the day, and she had hers cleaned, pressed, and ready to go. Because flight suits chafed so much in the crotch (they were still not allowed to alter their flight suits), she first put on a pair of men’s long boxer shorts. They looked silly as hell, but it sure made wearing a rough baggy flight suit all day at least bearable.
“I really hate it when you wear those things,” a voice behind her said. Ed Caldwell had finally come to life. He gave her a pat on the bottom as he stalked toward the bathroom.
“When have I heard that before?” she asked. Ed didn’t reply, so she continued dressing: heavy wool socks, athletic brassiere, thermal underwear top, dog tags, then the flight suit. It was just starting to feel comfortably warm.
She had just zipped the flight suit up when Ed, still naked despite the near-freezing temperatures, emerged from the bathroom. This time he stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her, burying his stubbly cheeks into the back of her neck to give her a nuzzly kiss. “Mmmm, you feel so good, even in that flight suit.”
Rebecca smiled, arched her neck back a bit, and gave him a light kiss on his stubbly cheek. She had been seeing Ed Caldwell for a little over two years, and exclusively for the last year.
Like other lovers and boyfriends before him, Ed had nothing to do with the military or the Reserves. After Rebecca had joined the Reserves, she decided to maintain her no-date policy regarding her fellow officers. Yes, a whisper still passed her ear now and then, questioning her preferences, but far less than when she’d been on active duty. People in the “real world,” it seemed to her, were far more tolerant, far less judgmental, than some of the active-duty boys. After all, Reservists had other lives, had to work daily with people of every variation and lifestyle, religion and color … a far broader range than what you’d find in active duty. When she thought about it, the Reservists had to be a bit more … politically correct. Pull some of the stuff in civilian life that the fly-boys tried in the armed forces, and a corporation would kick them out so fast their heads would spin. “Tailhook,” she was convinced, would never have happened at a private-industry convention.
Ed’s large hands roamed up and down her flight suit while she was trying to finish zipping it up. “I’m freezing, Becky, you gotta warm me up.”
“You are?” she teased. “You’re walking around butt-naked and it’s only forty or fifty degrees up here. Why not go down and stand by the stove while I finish dressing?”
He slipped the flight suit off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. He tried to take off the thermal underwear top and undo the clasps of her athletic brassiere, then decided not to wait. He dropped her thermal underwear bottoms, then grasped her by her still-covered breasts, smothering her with kisses, licking the side of her neck slowly, nibbling on her ear …
“Ed, c’mon, it’s getting late.” This was an almost monthly ritual between the two of them. Ed usually waited until she was almost completely dressed in her flight uniform, then he’d playfully try to seduce her. Sometimes it worked.
“Oh, God,” she murmured. “Ed, please … I’ve only got twenty minutes to catch the ferry. If … I’m … late.”
Ed, big and strong and completely awake, was working his magical touch all over her, making it increasingly harder for her to resist. The only thing she could say about him, she aggravatingly mused, was that he knew how to make her most hardened resolve and resistance crumble.
“Ed …”
He wasn’t listening.
“Oh, what the hell …” she moaned. “But hurry!”
When they were finished, she had to really hustle.
“I’ll call you tonight, Ed,” she said as she rushed out the door. No reply—he was already sound asleep again. She grabbed her winter-weight flying jacket, watch cap, and wool-lined leather gloves, poured one more cup of coffee, and headed out the door as fast as she could to make the six-twenty ferry.
Thankfully the engine-block heater and trickle battery charger had done their jobs. Her eight-year-old Chevy Blazer four-by-four started right up, and she put it into four-wheel-drive immediately after leaving the garage. The snowplows had not yet been down her lakeside street, so a four-wheel-drive was a necessity. A half mile of four-wheeling on Hyde Log Cabin Road got her to Highway 2 south, where she could feel the crunch of the road salt under her all-terrain tires and put the truck back into two-wheel drive. Four miles south on Highway 2, right on Highway 314, and five miles to the ferry landing. Furness knew the sights of a snowy morning on Grand Isle were beautiful, but she had no time to notice them—the ferry was due to leave at any moment, and she could not be late.
She wasn’t. The deck crews were just beginning to hop on board and raise the ramp when she showed her commuter pass, and they stopped when they saw her familiar truck speeding down the road. A few minutes later they were pulling away from shore and crunching through the thin layer of ice on Lake Champlain for the twelve-minute trek on their way to the Cumberland Head landing on the New York State side.
The snack bar on board the Plattsburgh Ferry, which normally served an excellent egg sandwich in the morning, was closed because of the cold, so Rebecca had to stay in the truck, drink cold coffee, and gnaw on a piece of beef jerky she had left in the glove compartment for snowbound emergencies. Enjoying the ferry ride from the inside of her truck, looking out into the black, sooty interior of the ferry, at least gave her a few quiet minutes to think.
She was still feeling that warm postsex satisfaction that went through her after being with Ed, but as fond as she was of him, as wonderful as their sex life could be, she really wished her relationship had remained on a professional level with him. Caldwell was a Burlington banker whom she had met while investigating financing sources for her proposed fleet of turbine-powered planes. Their meetings at the bank had changed to meetings over lunch, then dinner, then Lake Placid … finally, to her place. He was, by most women’s standards, a real catch. Good-looking, professionally turned-out without coming across as stiff, athletic, and occasionally, when the time really called for it, sensitive.
A bit, anyway.
Ed still had a long way to go in really understanding women. Sometimes she felt he simply indulged her in her passion of flying. He did get her a bank loan of one million dollars for her first fully equipped Cessna Caravan turboprop, after she had to sell three piston Cessnas and collateralize Liberty Air Service to the hilt. But he did come through. But sometimes she couldn’t help but feel Ed thought of her company as an expensive diversion from doing things like staying in the kitchen and making babies. She sighed. Even in the 1990s, some men—Ed included—would prefer women to stay out of the workplace, stay out of business in what they felt was a man’s world. God knows they would never, ever admit it. But they felt it. She knew they did.
As she gazed out of her truck as it made the crossing by ferry, Rebecca visually drank in the beautiful early-morning surroundings and realized that as content as she should be, something was missing in her life.
What it was, she did not know.
As the ferry moved across the water, she thought back to what had happened to her during the past few years … little did she know during those opening days of Desert Storm that her time on that KC-10 Extender, the Air Force’s supertanker, were numbered. Thinking about it now, she still resented the chain of events that led her back to Plattsburgh and this new military-civilian career. Although the recent months had been some of the most fulfilling in her Air Force career, Desert Storm—specifically that incident with the FB-111 bomber—had badly tarnished her reputation. She never knew exactly what was going on that day with that navigator named Daren, but whatever it was had been big: the FB-111 incident had been classified to the highest levels in the Pentagon, and the rumors about her only intensified: Furness was a maverick, a lone wolf. A woman who didn’t follow Standard Operatin
g Procedures. A woman who put her crew and plane in danger unnecessarily. Yes, Sam Marlowe, the prick, had filed the report he’d threatened to do that day. After that, no one wanted to hire someone like that. In the ensuing RIFs, she lost her assignment at March Air Force Base, then lost her regular active-duty commission, then was turned away from all the major airlines.
So she did two things: one, she decided to start the company, Liberty Air Service, and two, something she had never done before—she called on her uncle, Senator Stuart A. Furness.
It was in his Washington, D.C., office, and for the first time in her life she asked him for a favor.
“I have the skills, I have the training, I have the credential, I have the experience,” she remembered telling her uncle. “But I’m getting doors slammed in my face everywhere. I either accept the lowest level of step-pay or go somewhere else. Is there anything you can do?”
The senator from Vermont was tall and wiry, with a lean angular face and short, bushy white hair. Cataract surgery forced him to wear thick glasses, which he removed in anyone’s presence, even his niece’s. He was always impeccably dressed and carried himself with grace and authority at all times. The photos on his wall told of a man with powerful international connections, both in business and politics. It was sometimes hard for Rebecca to believe this man was a close relative.
But despite his obvious power and command, Stuart Furness was uncomfortable discussing the subject of sex discrimination with his young niece. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to fidget, but he was doing a bit of it as he addressed his niece: “Flying is a man’s game, Rebecca,” he had said. “Why not let them handle it? You’re young, and pretty, smart, well-spoken, and a war veteran.”