by Dan Simmons
“Most of us encounter that sooner or later,” Syd whispered. “But usually not that young.”
Dar shook his head. “The fear wouldn’t go away. I had night terrors. I began wetting the bed. I was afraid to be separated from my parents, even to go to school. I was aware that not only did I have to die, but so did they. What if they died while I was away in Miss Howe’s third-grade class?”
Syd did not laugh. After a minute she said, “So you joined the Marines to find courage…to get over that fear?”
“No,” said Dar. “Not really. I graduated from high school early, finished college in three years with a degree in physics, but all the time, what I was really interested in was death and fear and control. That’s when I started studying the Spartans and their ideas about controlling fear.” He rolled over to look at her. “The Vietnam war had started…”
Syd set her palm flat on Dar’s chest. He could feel the coolness of her fingers. “And so,” she said very softly, “the U.S. Marines.”
Dar shrugged slightly. “Yeah.”
“Thinking that perhaps the Marines would still know the secret science of controlling fear.”
“Something like that,” said Dar, realizing how stupid all of this sounded.
“Did they?”
He chewed his lip a moment in thought. “No,” he said at last. “They had preserved a lot of the disciplines started by the Spartans—tried to live up to their ideals—but had lost most of the science and philosophy which lay behind and beneath the Spartan mind-set.”
“But…a sniper,” said Syd. “The only snipers I’ve met are on SWAT and FBI tactical teams, but they seem to be outcasts…”
“Always have been,” said Dar. “That’s probably why I gravitated in that direction. Whereas even Marines are taught to be part of a bigger organism, snipers work alone—or in teams of two. Everything has to be factored in: terrain, wind velocity, distance, light—everything. Nothing can be ignored.”
“I can see why you would gravitate to that,” whispered Syd. “Always thinking.”
“The guy who set up and ran my sniper school was a Marine captain named Jim Land,” said Dar. “After the war, I read something that Land wrote for a little sniper instruction manual called One Shoot—One Kill. Want to hear it?”
“Yes,” whispered Syd. “More sweet nothings, please.”
Dar smiled. “Captain Land wrote: ‘It takes a special kind of courage to be alone—to be alone with your fears, to be alone with your doubts. There is no one from whom you can draw strength, except yourself. This courage is not the often seen, superficial brand, stimulated by the flow of adrenaline. And neither is it the courage that comes from the fear that others might think you are a coward.’”
“Katalepsis,” whispered Syd. “You told me about that before.”
“Yes,” Dar said, and continued. “‘For the sniper there is no hate of the enemy, only respect of him or her as a quarry. Psychologically, the only motive that will sustain the sniper is knowing he is doing a necessary job and having the confidence that he is the best person to do it. On the battlefield, hate will destroy any man—especially a sniper. Killing for revenge will ultimately twist his mind.
“‘When you look through that scope, the first thing you see is the eyes. There is a lot of difference between shooting at a shadow, shooting at an outline, and shooting at a pair of eyes. It is amazing when you put that scope on somebody, the first thing that pops out at you is the eyes. Many men can’t do it…’”
“But you did it,” said Syd. “At Dalat. You looked into human eyes and still squeezed a trigger. And that’s been your survival secret for all these years.”
“What’s that?” said Dar.
“Control,” said Syd. “The constant pursuit of aphobia—avoiding possession at all costs.”
“Maybe,” said Dar, uncomfortable with the psychoanalysis and all his blabbing that led to it. “I haven’t always succeeded.”
“The .410 shell with the firing-pin imprint,” said Syd.
“A misfire,” agreed Dar. “That was eleven months after Barbara and the baby died. It seemed…logical…at the time.”
“And now?”
“Not so logical,” he said. He turned and took her in his arms. They kissed. Then Syd pulled her face back far enough to focus her gaze on his.
“Will you do something for me tomorrow, Dar? Something special…just for me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Will you take me soaring?”
Dar chewed his lip again. “You’ve been flying. You were up in Steve’s sailplane… You know mine only has one seat and—”
“Will you take me soaring tomorrow, Dar?”
“Yes,” said Dar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“U IS FOR UPDRAFT”
FIRST, THERE WAS the silence.
The high-performance, two-person Twin Astir glided through the air as silently and purposefully as a red-tailed hawk soaring and lifting on unseen thermals. The only external sound was the soft rush of air over the metal-and-canvas skin of the craft, and since their airspeed was low, that was hardly any sound at all. When they had passed eight thousand feet of altitude, Dar had had them both put on their oxygen masks—he had leaned forward to check that Syd’s was working properly—and because of the masks, they did not speak. Only the soft hiss of oxygen acted as undertone to the movement of air outside.
Second, there was the sunlight.
It was a brilliant day, blue sky, only a few stacked lenticular clouds over the lee slopes of the high peaks, visibility otherwise unlimited. Sunlight prismed on the clean canopy which gave them a 360-degree view from twelve thousand feet. To the west, beyond the ridges and mountains and deep-running faults, gleamed the Pacific. To the south and east burned the brightness of high desert and the Salton Sea. Easily visible to the north was the smog bank held in by the hills east of Los Angeles, and the great red expanse of the Baja flowed south beyond the smog banks over Tijuana and Ensenada.
Third, there was the closeness.
If it had not been for his five-point harness straps, Dar could have leaned forward over the low rear instrument console and wrapped both of his arms around Syd. Dar could smell the shampoo that he’d lathered into Syd’s hair that morning. He remembered the water and shampoo running down over her shoulders and breasts when he had rinsed her hair, squeezing the water out, the soap bubbles glinting on her breasts and nipples in the morning sunlight…
Dar shook his head and concentrated on flying the aircraft.
When they had arrived at Warner Springs gliderport that morning, Steve had been surprised but happy to loan Dar his Twin Astir—he would not accept a rental fee—and Ken had been surprised to see Darwin Minor there with a woman.
Dar had done a long preflight inspection of the high-performance two-seater, and then he and Syd had gone over the parachute procedures for the third time.
“Steve didn’t make me wear a parachute,” said Syd.
“I know,” said Dar. “But if you fly with me, you wear one of these.”
His older parachute had been freshly repacked and now he had cinched and tightened and adjusted until it fit Syd perfectly. The morning grew later and hotter as Dar went over and over the instructions on kicking free of the plane and pulling the rip cord, controlling the risers, spilling air from the chute to change direction, bending knees on landing, and other anxiety-producing details.
Finally Syd had said, “Have you ever bailed out of a glider?”
“Never,” said Dar.
“Have you ever used a parachute?”
“Just once, about ten years ago,” said Dar. “Just a regular sky dive to make sure I could do it if I had to.”
“And?”
“It scared the everlasting shit out of me,” Dar said truthfully, and then began going through the instructions again.
They had argued briefly about Syd bringing along her Sig semiautomatic and the magazine clips on her belt. Dar pointed out that
there was no need for handguns in a sailplane trip and that the holster, weapon, and three leather-wrapped extra magazines would just get in the way of the parachute harness and restraint belts. Syd had pointed out that she was a law officer and it was her legal duty to have the weapon with her at all times. Dar gave up that argument, warning her that the weapons would become a literal pain in the ass half an hour into the flight.
He had brought the oxygen because of Ken and Steve’s enthusiasm over the day’s prospects of wave soaring—a glider’s most dramatic means of gaining real altitude—and it took several more minutes for him to instruct Syd on how to stow the small oxygen canister and use hand signals to communicate when the mask prevented conversation.
“One important item,” Dar had said as Ken’s towplane began pulling them west into the breeze. “If we go to oxygen, don’t throw up in the mask.”
“What do I do if I get sick?”
“There’s a little bag tucked into the right side of your seat there. Take the mask off, throw up in the bag, put the mask back on.”
“Wonderful,” Syd had said as the Twin Astir lifted off. “You’re really making me look forward to this flight.”
Syd had not shown any signs of sickness during the flight. In fact, she’d shown only exhilaration as they were towed west toward the mountains into the so-called foehn gap—a whirling rotor of upward-spiraling air—between the stack of lenticulars and the mountains, and released on the upwind side of it. Dar had soared them around and back, working the rotor like a ski-slope lift, flying across the invisible elevator of lift in repeated sweeps.
He had been careful to point out that even on a beautiful, clear day such as this, there might be a lot of turbulence upon entering the rotor. “Are the wings supposed to do that?” she had asked over her shoulder, looking dubiously as the Twin Astir seemed to be imitating a snow goose trying to get airborne.
“Absolutely,” said Dar. “If they don’t flex like that, they break. Much better to flex.”
Having mapped the wave front through successive approximation, Dar flew through the turbulence of the outer waves again and found the true center of lift. After that, the ride was silky and soundless and breathtaking.
“My God,” Syd had cried. “It’s like we’re in an elevator.”
“We are,” said Dar.
“It doesn’t seem like we’re moving at all in relation to the ground, the mountain,” said Syd.
“We aren’t right now,” agreed Dar. “The wind’s strong enough to give us great lift right now, but our ground speed is zero. I’ll have to make another turn and pass in a minute or we’ll be blown back toward those lenticulars and lose the rotor…but for now, we’re in perfect balance.”
Syd had answered by putting her hand back over her seat and Dar’s low console. He hesitated only a second before reaching out and holding it, squeezing it.
At eight thousand feet he had them dutifully go to oxygen, just to be cautious.
They continued the smooth soar and climb, circling to the right, then hanging on the lift like a hawk balanced on an invisible pillar of a thermal, watching the sky get bluer and the horizon grow.
Dar held a mental three-dimensional map of the controlled and uncontrolled airspaces in this part of California, ranging from Class A to Class G, and he knew that they were well within an “E” space. This meant they were within controlled airspace but nowhere near a control tower, flying on visual flight rules. They could fly up to a ceiling of 18,000 feet above mean sea level, which was where the jet routes and commercial lanes began. He leveled the sailplane by flying out of the rotor at 14,500 MSL and widened their circles while increasing their airspeed to keep altitude.
Dar had Syd take the front stick and control the aircraft for a while, showing her how to take slow turns without stalling or losing too much altitude.
Syd loosened her mask and asked, “Can we do some acrobatics?”
Dar frowned but lowered his mask again, feeling the bite of cold in the air. “Do you mean aerobatics?”
“Whatever,” said Syd. “Steve told me that you can do loops, rolls, all sorts of things in this special kind of glider.”
“I don’t think you’d like those,” said Dar.
“Yes, I would!” said Syd.
“Put your mask back on,” said Dar. “You’re getting hypoxic, I think.” But he added, “And hang on…but not to the stick. Keep your feet away from the pedals.”
They were still in the lift zone, crabbing fairly dramatically as Dar kept the Twin Astir’s nose to the breeze, and now he put the nose down to gain some airspeed. Without shouting another warning through his mask, he used the ailerons to put the sailplane through a snap roll, while simultaneously using the rudder and elevators to keep the Twin Astir’s nose aimed at a point just above the horizon. The sailplane recovered perfectly, aimed exactly where it had been headed.
“Wow!” shouted Syd. “Again!”
Dar shook his head. But then, aware that he was showing off (for a girl, he thought), he banked right, dropped the nose below the horizon line to gain some airspeed, applied continuous up elevator while fine-tuning the aileron and rudder, and put the Twin Astir through a 360-degree barrel roll while flying a descending helix around their invisible horizontal axis. The sky and earth traded places, once, twice, three, four times.
Dar leveled off, checking his real altitude, glancing at control surfaces, and fiddling with the MacCready Speed Ring bezel around the variometer to estimate his best transit time to the next thermal.
“More!” shouted Syd.
Dar brought the nose up until the glider lost lift at its angle of attack and they stalled. The effect was roughly the same as stepping into an empty elevator shaft. The nose dropped and the Twin Astir plunged directly toward the earth, now some ten thousand feet below them. It was as if someone had cut the strings that held them aloft and the elegant sailplane had turned into so much dead metal and useless fabric, falling like an aluminum coffin dropped out of a cargo plane.
Syd screamed and Dar felt guilty for a minute until he recognized the scream as one of pure joy rather than terror. He loosened his mask and said, “You’ll have to save us from this.”
“How?”
“Push the stick forward.”
“Forward?” cried Syd through her mask. “Not back?”
“Most assuredly not back,” said Dar. “Forward. Gently at first.”
Syd pushed the stick forward, the wing surfaces began finding lift, and slowly, under Dar’s guidance, she pulled them out of the stall until the variometer told them that they were no longer losing altitude.
“This stupid stunt is called a wing-over,” said Dar. He took the controls, told Syd to hang on, and then pulled the nose to an impossible steep-pitch attitude. Their speed dropped precipitously. Just before they reached true stall speed, Dar applied full rudder to the yaw, slewed the Twin Astir around 180 degrees, pointed the nose almost straight down to pick up airspeed, and finally brought the plane to its normal, sedate glide attitude.
“Again!” said Syd.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Dar. He removed his mask and shut off the regulator. “All this horsing around has got us down to eight thousand feet. You can take your mask off and shut off the O-two.”
Syd did, but said, “Let’s loop.”
“You wouldn’t like a loop,” said Dar, knowing perfectly well that she would love it.
“Please.”
Before Dar could respond, a white Bell Ranger helicopter roared up to within fifty feet of them on their starboard side and leveled off at their same altitude.
“Idiot!” Dar began, and then silenced himself as he saw that the rear doors were missing and that a man in a dark suit was crouching in the opening. Then a muzzle flashed, and bullets struck the sailplane just behind the cockpit.
Dar had listened to countless cockpit voice recorders—the fifteen-minute loop tape in the orange so-called “black box”—and in the vast majority of fatal a
ir crashes, the pilot’s or co-pilot’s final words were “Shit!” or some other choice epithet. Dar knew from the tone that the obscenities were not outcries against imminent death, but a professional’s final exclamation of outrage and frustration at his or her own stupidity—at getting into the problem or not being able to solve it. At killing everyone aboard.
“Shit,” Dar said as he put the nose down and rolled the glider hard left, losing altitude as he rolled. He leveled off several hundred feet below the chopper, but the helicopter flew ahead and buzzed around a full 180 degrees, roaring back within fifty feet of the Twin Astir, the man in the back firing as the aircraft passed. Dar had hit the air brakes and now the Twin Astir stalled—simply dropped—and the bullets passed just over the cockpit.
Syd had managed to extricate her 9mm Sig-Sauer from the straps and harnesses and was trying to get it in the tiny sliding portal that worked as a wind vent. “Goddammit!” she said as the helicopter zoomed past them and whirled around to attack from the rear. “That guy in the back has an AK-47!” she shouted.
Syd slid the right vent panel open. “I can’t aim from these stupid little vents without unstrapping!”
“Don’t unstrap!” said Dar. He was desperately trying to think, to find an advantage. What advantage does a high-performance sailplane have over a two-hundred-mile-per-hour helicopter? The glider could perform a loop and no helicopter could…Big damned deal, thought Dar. The Twin Astir could do a nice slow-motion loop while the Bell Ranger flew circles around it, shooting it to bits.
Anything else?
Well, thought Dar, we can fly one hell of a lot slower than they can.
They can hover, dipshit.
The Bell Ranger was coming past on their left side again. Dar could see that there were only two occupants—the pilot on the right side in front, and the man in the suit with, yes, an AK-47 assault rifle, in the back with both doors removed. The man appeared to have some sort of safety strap attached and he slid easily along the rear bench from one open door of the chopper to the other.
Dar waited until the last possible second, dived for speed, and looped the Twin Astir as they entered the turbulence of the foehn gap rotor of vertical air.
