The 344-mile route Dutch Holland had laid out on his charts took us east of the restricted airspace surrounding the Marine Corps helicopter base at Miramar, then northwest, straight into the Owens Valley of eastern California. We’d first have to request permission to cut across Edwards Air Force Base, where Chuck Yeager in 1947 had broken the sound barrier, and where America’s original astronaut corps demonstrated the Right Stuff before conquering space. Unless Edwards was test-flying some new super secret aircraft, chances were good that air traffic control would give us permission to overfly the base. Holland had calculated our projected time en route accordingly at two hours and forty-five minutes. That allowed us a fuel reserve of about an hour.
What he hadn’t counted on was the Air Force saying no to flying over Edwards. Or to the winds picking up.
We were forced to turn northeast and cut across the high desert, halfway to Las Vegas, then north, then west again. By the time we penetrated the mouth of the Owens Valley and banked north once again, the gauges were showing less than a quarter-tank of fuel in either wing. Our ground speed had fallen to less than seventy miles-an-hour, while the unsettled air pushed the Cherokee around like a leaf on a millpond.
“We’ll need to make a fuel stop,” I said.
Holland leaned over to his right, our shoulders touching, raised his glasses and squinted at the gas gauges on the instrument panel in front of me.
“Damn wind,” he said. “That’s not what they forecast.”
“Weather forecasting is nothing more than fortune-telling with a few random numbers tossed in.”
“You got that right.”
Twin ridgelines towered on either side of the plane like fortress turrets, the Sierra Nevada on our left and the White-Inyo Mountains to our right. Many peaks were still topped with snow, even in June. The charts showed there was a small public airfield located on the valley floor about seven miles ahead of us with a single north — south runway. Holland wanted to keep going, but I persisted. Airplane fuel gauges can be notoriously inaccurate. Who’s to say we weren’t already flying on fumes?
“I know my plane,” the old man said.
“And I know you’re not legally allowed to fly without a certified flight instructor on board, Dutch, which, according to the FAA, I am. I’m sorry to pull rank, but that makes me pilot-in-command, and I say we put down before we have no choice.”
Holland looked over at the mountains to our left, then down toward the ground, a mile below us. The area was starting to look familiar to him. Al Demaerschalk’s cabin and dirt airstrip, he said, were just up the way, probably no more than ten or twelve miles.
I was starting to worry about committing aviation’s cardinal sin — running out of gas.
“Let’s say we do find the cabin and land on Al’s strip,” I said. “By the time we take off, we may not have enough gas to get to someplace where we can refuel. We’d be stuck, unless Al could drive us somewhere. And we don’t even know if he’s there.”
Holland rubbed his eyes. “Fuel’s gonna be cheaper up toward Bishop,” he said. “I say we land there, then go find Al’s cabin. But you’re the CFI. If you think we should put down, fine by me.”
He held up both hands like he was surrendering the airplane to me. I took the controls and started looking for a runway on which to land.
Looking back, maybe I should have listened to him.
Fourteen
There was no gas at the Fair Vista Airport. There was no nothing. Just a couple of boarded-up, weather-beaten, World War II-era hangars, and a crumbling tarmac with milkweeds growing out of the cracks. A mangy-looking pit bull with swollen teats barked at me as I stepped off the wing, before racing off toward an empty two-lane highway that paralleled the runway, about fifty meters to the west.
Holland climbed down stiffly out of the airplane behind me.
“Where’s the gas pumps?”
“There are none.”
“Then why did we land here, Mr. Certified Flight Instructor?”
Good question.
He shook his head and started walking toward the rear of the nearest hangar.
“Where’re you going, Dutch?”
“The little boy’s room.”
We both knew what he meant. There was no public washroom at the Fair Vista Airport. But when you’re male and you’re outdoors, well…
A parching wind whistled out of the north. The place reminded me of the mountainous region east of Kabul, only without the charm. I’d flown into Afghanistan frequently with the government, the last time to visit the Taliban’s leading manufacturer of quality suicide vests. We found him doing business behind a mud hut, hunched over an antique foot-powered sewing machine in a rusting steel Conex shipping container that doubled as his workshop. Eight vests laden with explosives were stacked neatly on the floor behind him. Our translator asked him his name. When he confirmed that he was the man we were looking for, we shot him. Two of his teenaged sons heard our muffled gunshots from their mud hut and came running, one armed with a Russian-made Makarov pistol, the other with a sword. We shot them, too. Then we shot a Taliban courier off his Honda trail bike as he rode in, presumably to fetch the new vests. We radioed for exfil, helicoptered back to Bagram, and got hammered on Wild Turkey, courtesy of a one-star from Joint Special Operations Command who said he couldn’t believe that a couple of go-to guys had done in a day what all of his operators had been unable to achieve in a year.
A drunk member of my team told me that night that Echevarria, who assigned our missions, had been bedding my wife while sending me overseas, sometimes for weeks at a time. Granted, I’d given her every reason to find comfort in the arms of another man; nobody would ever pin a merit badge on me for marital fidelity while I was away — and even when I was home, I admit I was a distant presence emotionally, my head still in the field. All I had left to share with her were jittery nerves and lingering, combat-induced anger. But still…
I stopped drinking after that.
The sound of an approaching car derricked me from Memory Lane. I turned to see a faded gold Oldsmobile Cutlass lurch off the highway and onto the tarmac, toward the plane, streaming a thin contrail of oily smoke. The driver was about twenty-five, shirtless and skinny.
“How goes it?” He waved pleasantly as the car pulled up beside me. A pair of dice showing snake eyes was tattooed on his left deltoid. He was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses.
“Just living the dream.”
“Saw you land,” he said, shoving his transmission into park and stepping out. “We don’t get too many planes coming in here. Usually they just keep right on flying up the valley, all the way to Mammoth. Why land here unless you got engine trouble or something, right?”
“We were running low on gas.”
“Well, there’s no gas here, that’s for sure.” He was missing two lower front teeth.
Tell me something I don’t know.
He gestured with his thumb to a young woman slouched in the front passenger seat of his car, smoking a Marlboro red.
“Yeah, me and her, we live down the road, ’bout a mile thatta way.”
She was as scrawny as he was. Her hair was long and unwashed and zigzagged down the middle. Nasty-looking skin blemishes ravaged what had once been a pretty face. If the Crystal Meth Manufacturing Association of California was looking for poster kids, these two were it.
“Nice airplane,” he said, gazing at the Cherokee. “How much you think something like this sells for?”
“Hard to say. A lot depends on the radios, how much time there is on the engine.”
He glided his hand along the wing. “Yeah, I was gonna be a pilot once. I don’t know, man. Life, ya know?”