by Weston Ochse
The co-pilot didn’t so much as even glance in his pilot’s direction as he continued his frantic conversation with Wake Island HQ.
“This is your last order. Rasheen, give me confirmation.”
With a scream of frustration, the Arab-American from Detroit dropped the microphone into his lap. He shook his head to clear away tears and fought control of his voice. “Confirmation... is granted.”
Freed nodded. “Pearson, plot bombardier’s course into computer and prepare to engage targeting matrix.”
Pearson stared down at his hands as they shook above the small keyboard. This was his moment. He had a choice. He had the power to make a difference. A statistic flashed through his mind: Shanghai has 861 regular secondary schools with 795,400 students and 76,600 teaching staff. Shanghai has 1,021 primary schools with 788,600 students and a teaching staff of 61,300. The attendance rate of school-age children is 99.99%. What got him every time was the attendance rate. 99.99 percent. Every time he remembered this fact he couldn’t help but imagine that the one tenth of one percent who didn’t go to school must surely have felt left out. And in the Xu Hui district, in the southern part of Shanghai west of the Huangpu River, primary target of the Morning Star and sister city to Irvine, California, 451,000 students were just waking for school.
“Pearson? Christ, I’m getting tired of this shit.” The sound of an automatic pistol slide stilled the cabin. When it snapped forward, shoving a nine millimeter round into the chamber, Pearson couldn’t help but jump. “Pearson. Input your code!” Freed snapped.
Pearson typed three numbers 9... 6... 4, then found that his hands no longer functioned. He tried once more to move them, then gave in to whatever biological function had overridden him. For the first time in a month he smiled.
“Pearson!”
THE B1B BOMBER was never meant to outrace the leading edge of a pressure wave. When the three other bombers in their flight released their payloads over Shanghai, they were to have added theirs to the rain of fire, turning China’s shining city into a sea of molten future. Using a mixture of high altitude, surface and earth-penetrating subsurface bursts, the concept of the B1B Assault Wing was to render maximum damage of the most permanent kind.
But the crew of the Morning Star had hesitated and waited and fought, and in the end, had never dropped their bombs. So when the first bomb exploded, they were over the target area. The top speed of a B1B Lancer is 825 miles per hour. A good mechanic can bring this up to 900. Desperation can add another 50. But when the pressure wave from multiple high altitude explosions from a cascade of B61s set for 170 megaton detonations happens while your plane is still in the impact circle, for the plane to survive it needed to go 1000 miles per hour.
“WHAT’S YOUR favorite childhood memory?”
That was a new one. Usually the wing psychiatrist asked about how Pearson felt about death and duty and loyalty and the morals of war. They had never spoken about his past. “Going to the movies with my dad on Saturdays,” he answered without even thinking.
“Why is this your favorite memory?”
“Because of how brave my father was.”
THE DEEP THRUM of Morning Star had been replaced by screaming from the metals in the engines and composite flesh of the bomber struggling to maintain speed, and the men hanging on for dear life inside. Freed and Rasheen used their combine strength as they struggled to pull the nose of the bomber five more degrees to level. The pressure wave had caught up with them and was pushing past them, the force of the thousand-mile-an-hour wind lifting their tail and threatening to push them over. One or two more degrees of lift and at the speed they were traveling and the bomber would disintegrate.
Never mind the radiation.
Never mind that they had nowhere to run.
If they couldn’t stay ahead of the pressure wave they were all doomed.
“SOUTH GEORGIA was a tough place for a black kid to grow up, even in the 1970s,” Pearson told the psychiatrist. “I hardly ever saw my dad during the week. Either he was working the cotton fields during the day, poaching gators at night, or drinking with the boys down at the pool hall. But Saturdays he’d wake up and spend the morning with mom, then take me to the matinee. It never mattered what was playing, we just liked the time together. Problem was black folks were supposed to sit in the balcony, but by the time we got there it was usually full. Most of us folks turned around and went home, but not my father. He braved the stares and the hatred and took me to a place by the front exit, then sat us down. Being in the front we never saw what people were doing behind us. We just pretended we belonged, and didn’t care about the rest.”
“Why is this important to you?”
“It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I found out that his show of pride for my benefit resulted in a beating every Saturday night. Do you realize how many beatings that was? Fifty-two Saturdays a year for ten years. And every Saturday he took me down knowing he’d get beat.”
“Why do you think he did it?”
Major Pearson grinned, placed his hands together and rocked them back and forth. Before he answered, he stared through the window of the Ellsworth Air Force Base main clinic at the Black Hills and thought how cool his dad would have thought to have an entire mountain range named after them.
“To show me that there are times when you have to do the hard thing, even when you know it’s gonna hurt.”
“CAN’T THIS fucking thing move any faster?” Colonel Freed’s back was hunched, shoulder muscles bunching visibly through the air vest webbing. He’d flipped his helmet visor down making his frown and chin the only visible parts of his face.
Rasheen struck the same pose, but instead of a frown, whispers of Islamic prayers could occasionally be heard in the chaotic cacophony of the cabin, as if the words somehow fit between the sounds of the plane breaking apart. Both of them had been pulling back on the yoke for what seemed like an hour.
Rick Matthews, who’d bragged at every picnic they’d ever attended that he wanted to pilot a Lancer into the mouth of God with a payload that would stop time, had begun screaming ten minutes ago and couldn’t stop. He’d retched on the communications panel between the pilot and co-pilot’s seats. The smell of burning rubber and cooking vomit engulfed everyone.
Pearson sat on his stool, staring numbly at the scene. There was nothing he could do at this point. He’d done all he could. He hardly noticed the urine stain across the crotch of his jumpsuit. He was lucky it wasn’t blood, because the third time Freed had ordered him to engage the targeting matrix by using his personal code to unlock the bombardier controls, Pearson had flat refused. And like any good red-blooded American pilot who held his duty to God and country above the inconveniences of friendship, Colonel Freed pulled the trigger on his pistol. Nothing happened except the snap of the hammer on the firing pin. Sad thing. They’d been on so many training missions without live ammo, when the real thing went down, All American Dewey Freed had forgotten to properly arm himself.
Staring at Pearson with enough hatred to fuel a lifetime, Freed had cursed, jammed the empty pistol back into his holster and turned forward. He’d fumed while the control panels beeped and whined. Freed had managed to get them to the target and now they couldn’t do a thing.
Matthews and Rasheen had both looked at Pearson with a strange mix of disappointment and relief. It was at that moment that Pearson felt more like his father than he’d ever felt in the past. It was harder to do the right thing in the face of everyone not wanting you to do it, than to do the wrong thing to keep your friends. What a tragic irony that Pearson had done it at the end of the world.
Freed had tried twice more to convince Pearson to unlock his computer. The first time he’d tried to be friendly, as if Pearson were a six-year-old ready to accept a piece of candy. The second time he’d threatened to run the plane into the ground if Pearson didn’t respond.
Neither wo
rked.
Major Pearson refused to contribute to the murders of more children. He’d found that place where he pretended to hold his father’s hand and watch the scene before him as if it were one of those movies they’d gone to see on those Saturdays of his childhood.
It was all a movie and still Saturday morning before the beatings commenced.
AT THE SQUADRON BBQ in the spring before everything started to go to shit, they’d all sat around a wooden picnic table and drank beers as they watched their families play together.
Rasheen had a ten year old who dreamed of being Derrick Jeeter and playing short stop for the Yankees. He and Jimmy Freed, the colonel’s oldest of three boys, stood twenty feet apart winging fastballs back and forth, neither willing to admit that the hands in their gloves were hurting from the one-upmanship velocities they traded. Freed’s other two boys, his wife Meg and Rasheen’s wife, Amari, played croquet like a team of asylum escapees. It was obvious that no one knew the rules, other than one had to hit the balls between the hoops embedded in the ground. Matthews’s wife Sharon held their six-month-old son in her arms while he sucked on a bottle of juice. Her head rocked back and she laughed as one of Freed’s boys plucked the wicket from the earth and ran full speed at the two boys playing baseball as if they were dragons and he was a pint-sized Sir George.
The guys had talked about their kids and their families. Everyone had given Pearson a solemn moment as he mentioned to Matthews, who hadn’t heard the full story, about the wife who’d left him after the death of his daughter, who’d been born premature. The baby had lasted three days in an incubator, her tiny hands and feet almost translucent like some deep sea creature. He’d held those delicate digits for hours and hours. He’d held them when she’d died. His wife refused to name her and he hadn’t the heart. What do you call an idea, a concept, a promise of something great, when it dies even before it’s able to become what it was meant to be?
Their marriage hadn’t survived the death.
Pearson only barely.
But soon conversation had once again shifted to whose kid was going to do what great things in basketball or Pop Warner or baseball.
“Abdullah wants to play baseball. I tell him he can be the first Muslim to play professional ball. We would be very proud.” Rasheen drank deeply from his water, then smiled proudly. “I took him to the batting cage last week and he can already hit a forty mile-per-hour ball.”
Pearson patted him on the back. “That’s real good, man.”
They stared at the kids for a while, then Matthews broke the silence. “Are you sure there aren’t any Muslim baseball players?”
“Oh yes. I’m very sure,” Rasheen said. “We’ve been studying this for some time.”
“Karim Abdul-Jabbar, wasn’t he the first Muslim basketball player?” Freed pondered.
“I think so. And Mushin Muhammad was the first professional football player.”
“I remember him.” Matthews nodded as he guzzled half a beer. “He played for the Bears... and the Panthers before that.”
“I loved watching that lightweight boxer Prince Nassim,” Pearson offered. “I don’t know if he was the first or not, but his entrances were sometimes better and longer than the fights. He once flew down into the ring on a flying carpet.”
“I saw that. They did it with wires,” Freed said. “But you’re forgetting Mohammed Ali. He was the first Muslim boxer.”
“How can you forget Ali?” Matthews punched Pearson in the shoulder.
“No kidding,” Pearson had laughed. In truth, he’d always considered Ali to be an American. He’d never really thought of him as a Muslim. Sometimes nationality and religion got confusing.
Freed glanced at Matthews and Pearson, then with a mischievous smile asked Rasheen, “Isn’t there a problem with Mushin Muhammad catching the football?”
Rasheen stared blankly.
“Another name for a football is a pigskin.”
Rasheen nodded, then grinned. “He uses gloves.”
There was a pause before everyone cracked up.
“FIRE DAMAGE control. What’s our status?”
“Three engines dead. The other is on its way. We have to find somewhere to put this baby down or we’re going to be human confetti on the side of a mountain.”
Four General Electric F-101-GE-102 turbofan engines with afterburners powered the B1B. They’d lost the first two after shattering Mach 3 while escaping the pressure waves from the destruction of Shanghai. The third had eaten a piece of fuselage it couldn’t digest and had flamed briefly, until fire damage control had put out the flames and shut down the engine. Now it was on fire again and most of the systems had short-circuited. Navigation was gone, GPS satellites destroyed by enemy and friendly EMP bursts alike. All that was left was target acquisition and with no one left to kill, that was a useless tool.
“Where’s fire control?”
“Lost it a hundred clicks back, Colonel.”
“Then we need to set down.” Checking the fuel gauge, “Good news is the fire will have nothing to burn soon. Bad news is we’re out of fuel. Where are we?”
“In Yunnan Province. Somewhere near the city of Dali. There’s a big lake nearby and some grassy hills. Think you can skip it, Colonel?”
Freed and Rasheen exchanged a look. Everyone in the plane had heard about skip theory, but no one had been stupid or desperate enough to try it. The idea was to hit the water on a perfect horizontal, allowing the liquid to dissipate the plane’s energy as it skipped forward. This was the exact physics a child used when hurling a flat stone across the water, except instead of a flat stone, the B1B was a 190,000-pound conglomeration of composites and metals.
Pearson unlocked his computer then prepared to drop the payload. They had forty-two B83 gravity bombs and eighteen AGM-69A short range nuclear attack missiles. If they were going down, it was going to be a belly landing and he had to release the weapons or the impact would set them off. Without arming, if he was only able to release them, they’d remain harmless... in principle.
“Major Pearson, if you feel like being an officer again, please release your weapons so we can fucking land.”
“Yes sir.”
“Now it’s ‘yes sir’,” Colonel Freed muttered.
The airframe shuddered slightly as all eighteen missiles shot away. They’d soon reverse course and travel forty miles to the rear and fall to the earth. The gravity bombs were another thing. They had to come out on their own and that would take time.
“How close are we?”
“So close I can see a fucking sampan.”
Pearson hoped the colonel was only kidding as he toggled both doors open and began to release the B83s. He imagined how it would have felt if he’d really done this same thing over the targets in Shanghai, and was glad he hadn’t. His father would have been proud.
“Brace for impact.”
Pearson reached down and tried to peel Matthews off the communications console, but the man was holding on for dear life. All the training, all the simulations, and this hardened warrior had forgotten it all. Pearson’s attention returned to his own screen. Watching as the inventory ticked to zero, Pearson shouted, “All gone.”
Then the plane hit.
And it skipped.
Then all went black as the fuselage slammed into his head.
PEARSON’S EYES snapped open.
An insect crawled in the dirt millimeters from his face, the perspective making it giant and fearsome. He blinked, his eyelashes startling the tiny beast. It paused as if fearful its time had come, then continued its journey through the forest. Only the forest was merely grass, the blades ticking his cheeks.
Pearson became aware of his breathing and with that knew the joy of survival.
I made it.
He shifted his legs and arms slightly to see if they might be hurt. O
ther than a few twinges here and there, everything seemed to be fine. The last thing he remembered was dropping the payload and the plane heading into some remote Chinese lake.
So how did he get to be lying on the ground? If he’d been thrown clear he wouldn’t have survived. Not at the speeds they were traveling. With effort, he rolled over.
The pale blue sky rained Crayola confetti, butterflies on the wing, dazzling, vibrant and alive.
Butterflies.
Orange and black wings fluttering above him like leaves reversing gravity.
Yellow and green wings winking light from the noon sun. Red and blue wings falling on wind currents too small to detect.
More colors than he’d ever seen in the wild. Butterflies fell onto his face, their legs firmly gripping his nose and lips as they flapped their fragile wings. So many that if they’d ever work in concert, they’d most assuredly pick him up and carry him away.
Maybe he hadn’t survived the crash.
Maybe this was heaven.
He’d attended a funeral once of an Arapaho Lieutenant who’d died of a heart attack during flight training. They’d used butterflies in the ceremony and allowed each person to take one from a box. They were told to whisper a secret wish to the Great Spirit, something about the deceased to make his time in the next life easier. Then towards the end of the ceremony everyone let their butterflies go. Since the butterfly can make no sound, only the Great Spirit would learn of the secret, ensuring the privacy of the wish.
But sometime during the ceremony, Pearson had closed his hand too hard. He’d tried to keep the space for the butterfly large enough for it to live without being so large it could escape, but he’d lost focus. When it was his turn to let the delicate creature fly to the heavens, he’d opened his hand and the butterfly remained, its wings cracked and broken. Color from the wings laid as dust across his palms.
