The Mingrelian

by Ed Baldwin

  He showed his ID and orders to the gate guard at Little Rock, got a temporary pass for his truck and directions to the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters. Checking in, he had a debate with the desk clerk over Eight Ball but finally prevailed, and soon the two of them were ensconced in a comfortable room.

  ****

  With bravado he didn’t feel, Boyd approached the reception desk at the Flight Surgeon’s Office the next morning. He still remembered that officious prick flight surgeon in San Antonio.

  “You need these?” He dropped a copy of his orders on the desk.

  A senior airman rose to meet him.

  “Just checking in, Captain?”

  “Yep.”

  “OK, Captain, uh, how do you pronounce your last name? Is it Chairland?

  “SHYland,” Boyd said, used to confusion about his name.

  “Oh, sorry, Captain Chailland.”

  The airman pecked at the computer for a minute, and then said, “OK, looks like you’ve got a recent workup at the Consultation Service and a new flying waiver. You’ll need a Form 1042, a local medical clearance to get your new aeronautical orders here at Little Rock. Dr. Bridges doesn’t have any appointments. I think he can see you right now.”

  The airman stepped away from the desk and was back in a moment. “OK. Let me just get some vitals.”

  Boyd hadn’t expected such quick service. He had a dull feeling in his chest as the airman had him step up on the scale and recorded weight and height.

  “You must be in the transition class,” the airman said, nodding toward the F-16 patch on Boyd’s flight suit as he took Boyd’s blood pressure. “It starts tomorrow.” He entered the data into the computer. “OK, come on.”

  Boyd followed him down a hall past empty examination rooms to an office at the end.

  A gray-haired lieutenant colonel stood as the airman led Boyd into the office.

  “Colonel, Captain Chailland is just checking in," the airman said. “He’s in the transition class. Need to get a new 1042 signed before he can start.”

  “Hi, I’m Doc Bridges. Have a seat.”

  Bridges looked like the doctor who had delivered Boyd and took care of him all the way through school, caring for his father from his broken pelvis through his cancer and final days. Boyd had seen older doctors, but they were the generals and command surgeons who never had any contact with the average fighter jock. Boyd thought it odd to see an old guy as a squadron flight surgeon.

  “Anything new since you left Shaw last week?”

  “No, sir.”

  He continued to scroll through the record, finally coming to the aeromedical summary.

  “Oh, been to the consult service. Hmm.” He read the summary and then looked up, searching Boyd’s eyes.

  Boyd tensed. He didn’t need any more trouble from the flight surgeons.

  Doc Bridges closed the file on his computer and opened another, typed in his signature code and hit the return key.

  “OK, there’s your medical clearance.” He leaned back in his chair and casually stuck a boot out from behind his desk to rest on the trash can and pulled up his pants leg to scratch down inside his sock.

  “Chiggers,” he said. “Jimmy’s printing up your 1042. It’ll just take a minute.”

  Boyd relaxed, a major hurdle passed.

  “You got busted up pretty bad.”

  “Well, it wasn’t all at once.”

  “Got busted up pretty bad more than once?”

  Boyd nodded.

  “Classified.”

  Boyd nodded.

  “So, they sent you somewhere and you got busted up, and then they sent you somewhere else and you got busted up, and they won’t let you talk about it?’

  Boyd nodded, knot welling up in his throat.

  “Well, that’s bullshit,” Bridges said emphatically, suddenly with fire in his eyes. “Listen, son. What goes on in this office is between me and you. It’s off the record unless we agree it’s not off the record. Understand?”

  Boyd nodded dumbly.

  “You were just at Brooks 10 days ago. When did you get orders here?”

  “The day I got back to Shaw.”

  “PCS orders with a week to pack up and get here, on top of a summary end to flying fighters,” Bridges said, shaking his head. “That’s bullshit, too. Did you see a shrink at Brooks?”

  “I answered a bunch of questions, on a form.”

  “All negative, I assume.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Drink much?”

  “I had five Saturday night.”

  “I had seven. How about last night?”

  “None.”

  “You take anything to sleep?”

  “No.”

  “You having dreams?”

  Boyd hesitated just a moment.

  “Never mind. We’ll talk later. Got a place to stay yet?”

  “No, just check into billeting last night”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Bridges said.

  “Here’s the 1042,” the airman said, handing over the paper.

  Bridges signed it with a flourish and stamped it with his rubber stamp, then handed it to Boyd.

  “You’ll need a copy for class tomorrow. You’ll start out with classroom work, reading the flight manual, then the simulator. You won’t get into the air for a couple of weeks. Get a place to stay, unpack your stuff, then drop by here some afternoon and let’s talk. I usually fly on Thursdays. We can talk down at the flight line if you want.”

  Chapter 8: 15,000 ft. over Cotton Plant, Arkansas

  “I

  ’m throttling back on Number 1 engine,” Bud Weidman said, pulling back on the leftward throttle in the group of four on the console between them.

  Boyd felt the aircraft pull into the now idling left outboard engine. He was in the left seat two weeks into the flying portion of his transition to the C-130. He and his instructor pilot, Capt. Bud Weidman, seated in the right seat, had been doing landings and takeoffs and now were practicing some higher altitude maneuvers.

  “I want you to feel the drag. Just fly it along for a while. Feel it?”

  “Roger.”

  “Have to use some rudder to compensate.”

  “Some.”

  “It’s not dramatic. Still got three good engines and an empty aircraft. But fully loaded, at low altitude on a dark night, you might lose an engine, and you need to know how it feels.”

  Boyd thought of his friend Raybon Clive’s adventure at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan: aircraft full of ammunition, in a snowstorm, coming in on instruments at night, and takes a rocket-propelled grenade through the cockpit. Flying the C-130 in special operations is only for the elite. Boyd had been one of those swaggering fighter pilots who’d thought all other pilots were bus drivers. Not now. For the first time, he felt good about his transition to the C-130 and had a tingle of anticipation about where it might take him.

  “Now make a gradual turn, left,” Weidman said.

  “Into the dead engine?”

  “Yep. You’ve got plenty of power.”

  Boyd turned into the idling engine, feeling the drag pull the aircraft further into the turn. He used rudder to maintain his desired angle.

  “Feel it pull you into the turn? If you’re overloaded or, worst case, lose both engines on one side, turning into a dead engine could put you into a spin.”

  Boyd continued the gradual turn, now nearing 180 degrees.

  “OK, now level it out and turn back to the right.” Then, after a few minutes, “OK, now let’s review emergency procedures for an engine fire. In the simulator, you pulled the red Fire Handle. We won’t do that here. It’s a bitch to clean the fire retardant out of a perfectly good engine.”

  “OK, at the first sign of trouble I pull the engine to idle,” and he placed his right hand on the throttle for the Number 1 engine but didn’t move it. “Then, if the troubl
e persists, I would shut off fuel flow and feather the prop.”

  Boyd moved his hand to the condition lever in front of the throttle.

  “Then I would pull the fire handle if fire persisted. That shuts off fuel, feathers the prop and blows fire retardant into the engine compartment.”

  “Good.”

  They practiced fires and idling engines for another hour and then headed back toward Little Rock. They’d gotten a hundred miles east of Little Rock, almost to the Mississippi River.

  “That’s my home town down there,” Boyd said, pointing out the right side of the aircraft.

  “Blytheville?”

  “No, Kennett, Missouri, just off the end of the runway of the old Blytheville Air Force Base.”

  “Flat. Just like West Texas, where I’m from. Lubbock.”

  “Grow some cotton out there?” Boyd asked, looking back out the side window to follow the St. Francis River into the Big Lake swamp just on the state line. There’d be some ducks in there in a couple months.

  “Oh, yeah. Lots of cotton.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How’s the dove hunting up there?”

  “Best in the country,” Boyd said, remembering hot, dusty Septembers and flocks of little gray birds.

  “Not better than West Texas.”

  “We’ll see. Got your gun with you at Little Rock?”

  “Yeah. You got a place to hunt?”

  “The season opens next Saturday,” Boyd said. “We’ll hunt from dawn until about 9, then play 18 holes of golf, then hunt from 6 till dark, then again Sunday morning, and then have a big dove feed Sunday afternoon. Want to come along?”

  Chapter 9: Lankaran, Azerbaijan

  V

  usal Aliyev cut his lights as he crossed the railroad tracks and coasted to a stop by a power pole with a three-phase transformer. He stepped out and leaned against his truck, smelling the sea smell coming in from the Caspian Sea just beyond the brush along the rail line. He waited, remembering when he was a boy and that sea smell had included a strong petroleum element, but that was before the Russians left and Azerbaijan had cleaned up the offshore platforms. A light flashed briefly ahead and to his right. He walked toward it.

  “Salam.” A voice in the night directed his attention to a small building across the tracks.

  “Ey,” Vusal said, taking care not to trip.

  Baksheesh, the petty bribery of public officials, is an accepted practice in Central Asia. Vusal hooked up non-metered lines to the electric grid all the time, but this one needed three-phase power. At first he’d declined, but his boss had suggested that he talk with the man again. That meant the bribe went higher than just himself, and the amount was a great deal of money, so he agreed, with several stipulations.

  He was the head lineman for the power department in nearby Lankaran, and he’d seen the results of botched jobs: electrocutions, fires, explosions. He didn’t need any of that. He’d insisted that he see what they were hooking up and check all the connections himself. If it were done right, and he seriously doubted it would be, he would climb the pole and connect it to the power grid. This was no small deal, because he’d have to cut power for 15 minutes to everything south of Lankaran to the Iranian border. Somebody was bound to complain. He was on first call this night and had a cover story prepared.

  “It’s here,” the voice said in Azeri.

  Vusal approached, and they stepped into a small corrugated metal building and closed the door. It looked abandoned, but Vusal could smell petroleum, hot metal and solder; oilfield smells he remembered from childhood. A light came on.

  The building had been a pump house on the Tabriz to Baku oil pipeline built during the time when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union. Vusal knew there had been a 0.5-meter pipeline paralleling the railroad, but it was long ago shut down. Now he was looking at a brand new Chinese-made oilfield pump, as big as a small car, partially buried in a concrete casement that had once housed a rusted old Russian made pump. It was welded into the roughly 18-inch-diameter pipe, and it had been done right.

  “Oh,” Vusal said, as the impact of what this meant sunk in.

  “Yes,” the man said, smiling.

  Vusal climbed down into the casement and examined the connection. It was a sophisticated four-wire connection with all new copper wire of adequate size. He followed the wire to a conduit at the side of the building. Stepping outside he could see the conduit had been buried.

  “Over here,” the man said. He walked to the side of the tracks and flicked the light on the conduit as it snaked between the ties to come out on the other side. It was buried all the way to the pole.

  “I was up at Kargalan yesterday,” the man said casually as they walked toward the pole.

  “My son lives there,” Vusal said without thinking.

  “Yes,” the man said.

  Vusal’s heart leaped to his throat.

  “Little Vusala and her sister Samira were playing in the yard. Such lovely girls.”

  “You know my son?”

  “We’ve not met.” The man paused, they were at the pole. “Well, here we are. Is everything to your satisfaction?”

  “Yes,” Vusal said, beginning to shake.

  “Vusal, relax. I’m going to give you a great deal of money tonight. We are friends, are we not?”

  “Yes, of course,” Vusal said.

  There was a coil of wire at the base of the pole. He returned to his truck and got his spiked lineman’s boots and tools and returned to the pole. He attached the wire to the base, climbed the pole, flipped the breaker, attached the new wire to the power grid and turned the power back on. It took a bit longer than 15 minutes because his hands were shaking. He attached the wire to the rail side of the pole, away from the road and picked up the scraps of wire and insulation.

  “Good friend, here’s the money we agreed upon, and some more for your fine family,” the man said, handing Vusal the equivalent of a year’s wages.

  Vusal felt a little better. They turned to walk back to the truck.

  The man put his arm around Vusol’s shoulder and leaned in to speak very softly.

  “If anyone should discover that oil is traveling through that pipeline, I will throw Vusala and Samira off the Maiden’s Tower in Baku.”

  Chapter 10: Little Rock Air Force Base

  “G

  uilt,” Doc Bridges said, returning to the table with two longnecks.

  “Guilt?” Boyd took one of the longnecks and looked into Bridges’ eyes. They were sitting in the Officer’s Bar at the all-ranks club. They’d been flying all that Thursday afternoon, Boyd in the left seat taking instruction from Bud Weidman, and Bridges in the jump seat behind, observing.

  “It doesn’t come right at you,” Bridges said. “Rather, it hides, and you get those anxiety symptoms you told me about – sweaty palms, nausea, dizzy spells.”

  “I get those, all right. But, why guilt? I’m proud of what I’ve done.”

  “Did you kill anyone?”

  Boyd nodded.

  “Any fighter pilot who’s seen combat has dropped some bombs, but he's usually pretty far removed from what happens to those on the receiving end. We don’t see too much Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in fighter pilots.”

  “Yeah, I dropped some bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Boyd said. “Doesn’t bother me at all.”

  “But, did you kill anyone up close and personal?”

  Boyd nodded.

  “Those classified missions …”

  Boyd nodded.

  “More than one?”

  Boyd nodded again.

  “I’ve seen the list of your injuries,” Bridges said. “You must have come pretty close to death yourself.”

  “This close,” Boyd said, holding thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. “Over and over again. But, I’m glad about that, not guilty.”

  “Some not so lucky?”

  The faces of Webb Collins, A
ngela Kelly and Col. Ferreira were there in an instant, as vivid as if they were standing there in the bar with him. Boyd’s heart began to pound. He looked at Bridges but said nothing.

  “Guilt,” the doctor said.

  “Then there are the dreams.”

  “Vivid recollections of what happened to you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Boyd said emphatically and told Bridges about breaking the table at the Rhoades’ house in Kennett.

  “Flashbacks are, as best we can understand, the brain replaying intense experiences in an attempt to somehow normalize them,” Bridges said. “I’m sure the VA funds all kinds of research on flashbacks, but, well, all you can do is ask people questions. That doesn’t tell you why, just what.”

  “It isn’t just in dreams,” Boyd said, looking down at his beer, still untouched.

  “Loud noises?”

  “Couple of weeks ago, I was dove hunting up in Missouri with Bud Weidman. We were standing at the edge of a cornfield. I was watching for doves coming across the corn behind us, and he was looking to the front. He got a snap shot at one coming down the edge of the field, a sudden shot I wasn’t prepared for.”

  “And?”

  “I got a flash, just a momentary flash, of the time I got shot. Then I puked up my breakfast.”

  Chapter 11: The Mission

  “W

  ho do you know in Washington?” Bud Weidman asked angrily as Boyd came through the door of the mission planning section of flight operations.

  “Hardly anyone,” Boyd said defensively.

  “Come in here,” Weidman snapped, stepping into a planning room and closing the door.

  Boyd followed, feeling the long arm of Maj. Gen. Bob Ferguson snake around his shoulder. This would be his next mission. It would be above Top Secret. Weidman would probably not be involved. He steeled himself with his best effort at a dumb look. The deep funk he’d been living under since losing his flying status in front-line fighters was gone in an instant. He felt alive again.