At night under his tent, with no special accommodations afforded him, Farshad began to think of home. He wanted to return. The desire entered his dreams. It wasn’t the comfort of his bed that he envisioned, or the warmth of his house, or a good meal. It was his family’s land, specifically his garden. With the fierce winds whipping against his tent, surrounded by the sleeping heaps of rejected soldiers, he concluded that he’d seen enough. If he ever got off this rocky island, he swore to himself that he would finally go home. And he wouldn’t again make the mistake of leaving.
These dreams recurred fitfully each night, all except for this one. It was the only night that he slept the whole way through. It was also the only night that the wind shifted its course, dying down to a gentle breeze. This night he dreamed most intensely of all.
He is back in his garden, performing the routine he’d fallen into after his expulsion from the Revolutionary Guards. He writes his memoirs in the morning. He takes his walk at around noon, lunching beneath the elm tree on the far end of his property. When he finishes his meal, he leaves the scraps out for the pair of squirrels to eat. And he waits. He is conscious that he is dreaming, and he hopes that both squirrels might again appear. He thinks that this time he might restrain himself and not kill the squirrel if it bit him. Farshad waits a long while in this dream. The longer he waits, the more the landscape changes. The trees dry up, their brittle leaves falling around him. The thirsty grass turns to stubble and then to bleached rock. The rock is the same as the island’s.
The next morning, right at dawn, the wind returned. He woke up to its howl. It stretched the fabric of his tent before yanking up the stakes and sending that same tent tumbling toward the sea. Farshad lay in the dawn with nothing between him and the sky except for the wind.
“Look!” one of the conscripts cried out.
He pointed to the east, in the direction of the rising sun. Farshad squinted, making a visor of his hand.
Dozens and dozens of them.
More than he could have imagined.
Arranged like a vast migration of birds.
“They are here!” he shouted to his garrison, but the wind drowned out his voice.
Weather had been erratic, thunderstorms appearing violently and then vanishing. Wild fluctuations in temperature. Golf ball — sized hailstones fell on the deck of the Enterprise one morning. That same evening, the temperature peaked at ninety-two degrees. The onboard meteorologist surmised that this erratic weather was the result of the atmospheric fallout from Galveston and San Diego. They had struggled to find a launch window for Wedge and the nine Death Rattlers. Each time they’d be given the all-clear and migrate to their ready room for a final mission brief, a fresh weather system would appear. Complicating matters further was the fact that they didn’t need passable weather but perfect weather. The Hornets that Wedge and his crews would be flying didn’t have GPS-guided bombs. Without that technology they’d have to drop their ordnance in the old way, which meant they needed clear skies over the three target cities.
After the fourth or fifth aborted launch attempt (Wedge had lost count), he found himself alone in his stateroom, sitting at his desk, trying to pass the time. Two levels above him, he could hear the ground crews working. Each iteration of stand-up-then-stand-down cost them several hours. They couldn’t allow nine fully armed Hornets (particularly given the nature of their armament) to idle on a flight deck that was pitching through rough weather. Wedge took out his flight plan, reviewing it yet again:
*Nine aircraft launch, divided between three flights (Blue, Gold, Red)
*Arrive at release point (28°22’41”N 124°58’13”E)
*Set course and speed to target: Xiamen (Blue), Fuzhou (Gold), Shanghai (Red)
*For redundancy each aircraft armed with nuclear payload
*Only one aircraft per flight drops payload
*Return
He knew that last bullet point — despite being the shortest — was the one with the least probability of success. He could feel it in his gut. But Wedge didn’t do suicide missions; that’s what he’d told Admiral Hunt and he’d meant it. Instead of fixating on the slim probabilities of his return, he diverted his attention elsewhere….
He began a letter.
It wasn’t an if-you-are-reading-this-then-I-am-gone death letter. He’d always held those in low esteem, thinking of them as little better than suicide notes. Instead, he thought of it as a historical document. He wanted to capture his thoughts on the eve of victory. He addressed the letter to his father.
Wedge found himself writing in a sort of stream of consciousness, freed from the way he normally wrote, which was the composition of lists like the flight plan he’d just reviewed. It felt good to write in this way, a release. Although it was only him, alone in his stateroom, he wanted to bring all the world into this moment. The more he wrote, the more aware he became of his place in the universe. It was as though he could see his words being read by future generations of American schoolchildren before he’d even composed them. He could envision a child standing in front of the class, reciting portions of this note from memory in much the same way Wedge himself had recited the Gettysburg Address. This wasn’t his ego at work; he knew that he possessed no remarkable gifts of expression — a C-minus in freshman English could attest to that. Rather, Wedge knew it was the moment itself that was remarkable, a moment in which everything was on the line. Then he thought, Christ, Wedge, get a grip.
Except for a single page, he crumpled up the many sheets of paper and pitched them in his trash can. The remaining page sat on the desk in front of him. He didn’t read it over.
He didn’t want to.
What remained were his thoughts, as pure as he could harness them, to be handed to his father.
Wedge found himself unexpectedly exhausted from the writing. He was soon asleep in his chair, his head on the desk.
Time passed, perhaps an hour or more. There was a knock on his door. Wedge felt disoriented, as if maybe it had all been a dream. Perhaps he was back in his stateroom on the Bush. Before Bandar Abbas. Before his stint in captivity. Back to when he was still trying to get close to it.
There was another knock.
“What?” he growled.
“Sir, it’s time.”
“Tell them that I’m coming.”
He could hear the sound of departing steps as he sat up. Wedge gathered his things on the way to the ready room. His notebook. His sunglasses. A pack of Marlboro Reds. He planned to smoke one on his triumphant return. He also thought to bring the letter. After all, it wasn’t a death letter. There was no reason to leave it on his desk, was there?
He glanced at it skeptically.
Wedge eventually chose to leave the letter where it was. What did it matter? Whether for bad weather, or a maintenance issue, he’d likely be back in his stateroom in a few hours after yet another aborted launch. He could mail it then. Walking toward his briefing in the ready room, he took his time down the ship’s passageways, even as every other member of the crew rushed past as though in possession of some urgent piece of news. When Wedge came to an exterior hatch, he thought to take a minute to grab a breath of fresh air. What he saw caused him to hurry back inside the ship.
The day was sunny, clear, and crisp. The most beautiful flying weather he could remember.