“By allowing you the chance to fly with purpose again,” the man smiled, “so that you may give your son the chance to live in a new world where he can breathe again.”
Jun’s eyes began to tear. “I fly a plane loaded with bullets and bombs, tools that cannot fight what afflicts my son. I cannot fight this haze.”
“No,” chuckled the man, “it’s not the haze we fight, it is the people that let it continually escape from the stacks. The people that take money over water, oil over health, and live knowingly in arrogant deceit of those they serve. No we do not fight the haze, nature can take care of that herself once we’ve taken care of the few.”
“The few?”
“This world, this civilization, runs to serve a powerful few, not the many.”
“Such talk is dangerous here. If the government knew I was - ”
“Your government and its political system is dying and you know it. You’re aware of its struggles. Loss of control. Growing social unrest. Riots. Defections. Astounding environmental degradation. You must see it, Major Jun.”
Jun wanted to say something but instead he just whipped his head around and looked across the haze. His eyelids quivered. The tears rolling down his eyes were turning into tears of somber truths. Jun did see what the man spoke of; he saw it all to well.
“It’s all coming undone and censorship and suppression can only work for so long. The many win against the few, always. The many just have to be reminded of that. As the people waste away below this blanket of filth your government spends billions on greedy expansion over resources and territory, spreading its environmental destruction everywhere it goes. China is sick. The world is sick. We are going to make it better.”
“Who exactly is we?” asked Jun, now slowly stepping back towards the man.
“The many who dare to do what it takes too really save the world… no matter the cost. We are the true saviors of the people because we are the people.”
“You, you want me to join you?”
“Don’t be so narrow minded, Major Jun,” said the man, jumping off the balcony he was on. He landed just in front of Jun. He landed crouched once again, then slowly raised himself to be eye to eye with Jun. “It is you who want to join us.”
“How can I trust that you will really help me and my family? You are just man with a gun. I have faced many men with many guns, guns with jet engines strapped to them. I need assurances of what you speak. I don’t even know your name.”
“My name is irrelevant but the new treatment for your son’s disease that is now safely stowed away inside your nightstand is not, instructions on how to administer it included. Believe me Major, we wouldn’t have climbed seventeen stories up, in this shit hole of a city, losing a year of our lives every ten minutes we stand here, if we weren’t completely serious about our cause and about you. Now, Major, what is your answer? This,” the man motioned to the city, “or escape.”
Jun looked out at the smog just beyond the balconies railing. He listened to the car honks down below, to the airliners above, to the industry all around, to his son’s coughing inside. He listened to his heart. He was a pilot who was without reason to soar. He was a father without reason to hope. Everyone who wasn’t supposed to had failed him. The system had failed him. Jun looked at the man ready to save what was left so that he could rebuild what was lost.
“What do you want from me?” he asked with new resolve.
The man in the turtleneck nodded his head and smirked confidently. “Tonight, a training mission is to be sent into the Gobi Desert by your military at twenty-one hundred hours local time. The mission will depart from Zhangjiakou Ningyuan Airport. It will consist of a Y-20 transport and two FC-31 escorts, one of which will be yours, all fully loaded and armed.”
“What do I do from there?”
After a slight chuckle, the man leaned in to Jun’s right ear and whispered, “Disappear from this cursed world and fly into the next.”
From the kitchen Jun’s wife called out to him for help. Jun looked inside and told her he’d be right there. When he looked back, the man was gone.
CHAPTER 47: Steaks
Vinny walked into Publix. The store had just opened. He looked right, then left. Already he loved it more than any Base Tranquility dining hall. His nose seemed to take over his other four senses. Before he knew it it had led him to the deli. It was glorious.
All the meat he could ever have was just below his savoring mouth within a shrine of glass in over the top food displays. He eyed the steaks he wanted for the teams get together that night at Vega’s. They were red mountains of deliciousness that seemed to reach inside his mouth and make his saliva run like a flash flood.
“I’ll take seven of these please,” he said, pointing the counter attendant to his prizes.
The captain was going to love them. Miles of bike riding and missing classes had already been well worth it. Vinny hadn’t had meat like this in months. The vegetarian lifestyle forced upon him by UNIRO was too much for him to handle anymore. He…
“Excuse me?”
Vinny shot his head around when he heard the soft, bubbly voice. Standing next to him was a beautiful woman, about his age. She had olive skin, brown eyes behind sleek black glasses that matched her straight black hair. She was wearing a blue tank top and gray yoga pants. Most attractive to him though was the fact that she was taller than his short stature. Vinny immediately thought not to stare and locked onto her eyes.
“Um, yes ma’am,” he said, perking up his stance.
“Do you work for UNIRO?” she asked kindly.
“Um, yes,” Vinny said confidently, nearly fainting at the sight of her smile. “Yes, I do indeed work for UNIRO. Rescue Officer Vinny Mckay. How may I rescue you today?”
Vinny bowed a little and extended his arm playfully. The woman looked at his white uniform and beret. She chuckled.
“Wow, I’ve always wanted to meet someone from UNIRO,” she said. “My sister wants to work for them. Tell me, have you rescued anyone yet? How many lives have you saved?”
“Um, none yet actually, ma’am. Our first mission isn’t for several more months. We’re currently going through some brutal training to prepare ourselves mentally, and physically.”
Vinny leaned on the glass counter trying to flex his left bicep. He hoped she could see it through his uniform.
“Oh that’s okay. You have already saved countless lives,” the woman said with praise.
“Umm, I have?” Vinny asked with some confusion. He just told her he hadn’t started missions yet.
“Yes you have! Isn’t everyone that works for UNIRO a vegetarian? You people don’t eat meat. In doing so you have saved countless animal lives across the world. As a vegetarian myself I admire that so much, you have no idea. People so often forget animals are just as important as we humans, but you guys don’t. You really do save everyone.”
Oh boy, thought Vinny. He had to roll with it. This girl was too hot to let go. That dangerous bike ride down the interstate was becoming more worth it every second.
“Oh yes, of course. We’re all vegetarians, some even vegans. We at UNIRO rescue everything. I haven’t eaten meat for years since joining. Hey, I’d love to tell you more about UNIRO over dinner... a vegetarian dinner of course. On the island somewhere perhaps, eh? Or even on base?”
“Oh really,” said the woman with joy. “You’d let me come onto your base?”
“For you, yes.”
Suddenly over the loudspeaker came, “Mckay. Vinny Mckay. Your seven sixteen ounce steaks are ready. Vinny Mckay.”
Vinny shuddered in embarrassed fright. The counter attendant plopped his seven steaks next to his leaning elbow all wrapped up and ready to go. The woman’s smiling expression turned to anger and obvious betrayal.
“Listen… Uh, listen…” he stuttered. “These are for a friend. I -”
The woman nodded with disgust and began walking away.
“Hey, wait! Wait!” cried Vinny.
With a whip of her hair the woman turned around. She pointed back and forth between them and said, “You can’t rescue this asshole.”
“I hate myself sometimes,” sighed Vinny.
CHAPTER 48: The Ends Of The World Are Melting
“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is in an unstoppable retreat,” Dr. Olin stated. “This will lead to its eventual collapse. There is nothing we can do. UNIRO is working with various Antarctic science stations to monitor and try and slow this retreat with one of our geoengineering projects. As basic as it sounds, we are attempting to cover large areas of glaciers in white protective thermal coverings that will slow surface melting by reflecting sunlight back into space. Thousands of square miles are already covered, with thousands more to come. It is a method well tested in Greenland and the Alps but those are not continents and they can do nothing to protect the glaciers underside that are being melted away from warming seas.”
Dr. Olin put up a satellite image of the icy land. It was so unlike any other piece of land on the planet, alien and remote. It was the last place with virgin habitats, filled with landscapes most had never seen. Protected by a series of international treaties collectively known as the Antarctic Treaty System signed in 1961, it was a relic, a treasure that could not be used for anything but scientific research and tourism.
It was a one of a kind continental laboratory. Resources could not be taken from under it, for which there are many, and no militaries could claim or test weapons on it. But from beyond its gray and white horizons was the encroachment of humans, their reach to big. Ice shelves that had held on for decades longer than the Arctic’s were finally feeling this reach, even in a place that had seen Earth's coldest recorded temperature, -136 degrees Fahrenheit.
In an ironic twist of cause and effect, the place that saw the lowest human population would have the greatest effect on those that had the highest, thousands of miles away in places that probably forgot there was even a continent down there. From its elephant trunk peninsula in the northernmost part of the continent to the smooth South Pole, to even the atmosphere above it, the area was changing. It was evident on the satellite image on the whiteboard.
Prevailing over the white ice were color enhanced areas of red and blue, red showing areas of melting and blue showing of gain. Large expanses of the continents western shoreline were black in color, like lesions from a plague, surrounded by areas of dark reds and rusty whites that translated to tens of thousands of square miles of melting. In the east were patches of red at the coast, with dustings of blue inland. Antarctica was still fighting climate change in its heartland but the west was enough. Dr. Olin rubbed his forehead as he explained.
“The ESA’s Cryostat-2 satellite shows us with these maps that Antarctic ice loss is exponential now, losing over 160 billion tons of ice each year. The discovery of this massive ice loss in the last decade, primarily in the west, has forced scientist to revise their sea level predictions and it's not looking good. Ice melt from this alone will raise sea levels over ten feet, putting millions of hectares of land at risk in Asia, the Middle East, and North America, most of that land being precious farmland that will become unusable either because of saltwater contamination or direct inundation. Whole population centers will have to be moved inland and a new refugee crisis will emerge for those countries that are not prepared.”
“Crap,” William mumbled, rubbing his left cheek.
“In Alaska, we find an example of this already in the form of Kivalina, a small village of just over 400 people that was located on a barrier island on the west cost of Alaska. The US Army Corp of Engineers built a temporary seawall around the village in an effort to save it. This wall failed two years ago. The village lays abandoned now, its buildings falling into the sea with every new storm that passes.”
Pictures of major cities started appearing as Dr. Olin started pacing back and forth.
“Miami. London. Bangkok. Boston. Rio. New York. Shanghai. All of them face the fate of Kivalina in the decades to come. You see, because of warming ocean waters these glaciers that exit into the sea are literally being thinned from the bottom up and becoming lighter in weight. The lighter something is the higher it floats, like a grounded boat being refloated. Water is going further and further inland under the glaciers where they meet the sea as they lighten and their grounding line, the place where they naturally melt, is being moved inland with it. This makes the glaciers smaller and melt faster. NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an ongoing project that monitors this loss from the air and UNIRO will be joining that operation for the first time this year. I cannot stress enough to you all how serious of a problem this is. Unchecked, we will lose our current geographic coastline by the end of the century. UNIRO must slow this melting or this very base could be unusable. And, within a few centuries the entire…”
“Captain, sir,” Seong whispered, sitting next to William.
“Yeah?” William whispered back, keeping his eyes forward.
“I-I-I was wondering if you had your-your investigation interview yet?”
“No. Have you?”
“Yes. This mor-morning.”
“How did it go? You acted like I didn’t tell you guys anything like I said to right?”
“Ye-Yes, sir. Hernandez was ver-ver-very nice. He told me they found drugs in Samir’s body that they assumed cau-cau-caused him to jump.”
William looked directly at Seong and loudly said, “Drugs?”
“You, Emerson,” called Dr. Olin, hearing William’s outburst. “Something more important than the flooding of world?” he asked.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Dr. Olin mumbled something to himself and then kept lecturing.
William smacked Seong in the side. “That was your fault.”
CHAPTER 49: Game Night
Vega had the same container unit William had so it was a tight fit to have fourteen people and a dog over but they managed. Some sat in the bedroom, some in the kitchen, and some in the sitting room. Vinny was cooking the steaks in the oven that he had purchased off base to complete his steak and eggs dinner for the squadron. “I prefer my protein red, not cricket brown,” he often said.
William was very happy to be having a real steak for dinner as well.
“Those steaks ready, Mckay?” he called out to the kitchen.
“Not yet, sir. Still putting the rock salts on! Can't get to medium without the sodium, sir.”
“Spoken like a true cook,” said Heather, who was helping him.
“It might go a little faster if Shampoo wasn’t taking up half the kitchen and staring at me,” grumbled Vinny. “Miller can you take Shampoo somewhere else, please?”
In the sitting room was a game of Rummikub; a Jewish game Vega had played every day as a child. Herself, Simba, Mario, and Abeo were all playing. William, Amanda, Dao, and DJ were watching from the hallway, as the room was too narrow for all of them to fit in at once. Seong, Gaspard, Sergey, and Paul were in the bedroom watching a movie.
“So, the tiles have to be in numerical order or different colors or what Mini-boss? These tiny tiles hurt my head with their complexity.”
“Both,” Vega showed. “You need three tiles in numerical order and three tiles of the same number, each with a different color. Once you have that then you can go down.”
“Go down… where?” asked Simba.
“You put them on the table Mambiri. But they all must add up to fifty, first. That's the way I play.”
“Oh, Bossman, we have to do math. What kind of party is this? Where are the drinks?”
Mario picked up one of the tiles and asked, “What is with the tiles with the faces?”
“Those are the jokers. They can stand in for any tile. They are worth a lot of points,” explained Vega. “Don’t get caught with one when someone finishes.”
“Okay…”
Abeo was having no trouble. “You guys are going to lose. I win a lot with games like this.”
Mario put down his tile
and blew his hair from his face. He was bored. “What? Little number games? We should go to the beach down in Coco or inland to Orlando. Get some drinks, dance a little, or party in the clubs. Ho sentito che le ragazze sono bellissime.”
“Don't you have a girlfriend back home?” William grinned.
“Did you understand me sir?” Mario asked with embarrassment. “I didn’t know you understo - ”
“I don’t,” laughed William. “I just guessed.”
Amanda shook her head. “You're a dog, Niccolo. You’re a slobbering Neapolitan Mastiff.”
“If I’m a dog, then I’m at least better than yours because I actually find people on rescue missions. And I’m no Mastiff. My body type is clearly suited to the slender and agile Italian Greyhound.”
Everyone let out a laugh.
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you may wanna check yourself on that one.”
Mario looked at William. “Hey, sir, speaking of women, I saw you checking out Captain Veeder yesterday. Those firefighting suits make her look good don't they?”
“No Niccolo, the only thing I’m checking out are those steaks.” William was so hungry. The smell coming from the kitchen was marvelous to his nose. “Mckay, the steaks?”
“In the oven, sir! If it comes out bad it's not my fault. Blame this convection oven crap. The proper place to do this is on a grill. I may have been good at putting fires out but I’m even better at starting them.”
“It's been months since I had one, Mckay. You better make them good!”
“Always try, sir.”
“Is this tile a nine or six, Mini-boss?” Simba asked Vega, twisting the tile in his hand.
“A nine, Mambiri…”
“Right, okay. Ohhh, boy, this game is going to kill me. It's so weird.”
Heather overhead the conversation and came into the room from the kitchen. “I’ll tell you what was weird, my investigation interview. The base commander was there and so was ISAF’s head guy, Hernandez. That’s his name right?”
The End of the Beginning Page 28
