The entire Taiwan and Singapore air force training contingents had quietly decamped two weeks earlier, on the pretense of mobilization orders. There were no ritualistic drunken farewell parties this time. They just quickly got on commercial flights and left a considerable quantity of household goods behind in their haste.
The parking area for the 56th Med was less than half full, mostly with cars belonging to dental patients waiting to get some work done while any dental services were still available. Finally, closer to the hangars and flight line, he drove by the operational group’s buildings. He counted only five cars and SUVs there. “Sweet Jesus,” Doyle muttered to himself. “Where did everyone go?” Doyle had heard that there were desertions, but since he was no longer in a flightline squadron, he hadn’t realized the extent of the problem. He surmised that once the mess halls ran out of their limited food supplies and the MREs kept on hand for short-term contingencies were gone, airmen started deserting in droves. And from what he had heard, when they went, they took a lot of equipment, fuel, and nearly every scrap of food on base with them.
Doyle pulled his car off to the side of the road and pulled out a thermos of cafe con leche and his lunch, two leftover baleadas-Honduran-style burritos-and an apple. He started munching absently, hardly noticing the taste. He was playing the Passion, Grace, & Fire CD with John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia, and Al Di Meola. But since he was so absorbed with worrying about his homeschooled daughter, Linda, he didn’t pay much attention to the music. He turned on the car radio and punched the pre-set for KNST 790 AM. The news announcer was repeating an FAA order that all commercial airline flights in the United States had just been temporarily suspended because there was unrest in so many American cities, and in several instances planes had been hit by gunfire as they made takeoffs and landings.
Ian shouted, “No!” and slammed his fist on the dashboard.
Linda was on her annual six-week-long Grandmom and Grandpop trip, staying with Ian’s parents in Plymouth, Michigan, an upscale suburb of Detroit. Linda was eleven years old and this was the first year that she had made the trip alone, escorted on the flight by an airline stewardess. After making the trip for several years in a row, accompanying their daughter, Blanca decided to stay home and relax and do some oil painting and pastels. “She’s old enough to fly up there herself,” Blanca had told Ian. “There’s no connecting flight. It’s a direct shot from Phoenix Sky Harbor to Detroit.”
When class was over, Ian drove home to Buckeye, a thirty-five-minute commute from the base. It was originally a farming town, but it had gradually become a commuter bedroom and retirement community. The housing developments were an odd mix of 1950s and 1960s one-story houses with composition roofs, interspersed with neo-southwestern developments of earth-tone stucco three-thousand-square-foot McMansions built in the 1990s and in the decade of the aughts, just after the turn of the century. Interspersed between these developments, there were still many fields, mostly cultivated with cotton and alfalfa. There were also a couple of large dairy farms that produced milk and cream for Glendale and Phoenix.
The rent in Buckeye was just half what it would have been in Glendale. They also had benefited from a lower crime rate and much less smog. Ian had picked their house because it had an extra deep garage that had room for his hobby airplane, a Laron Star Streak, which was normally kept in its trailer with the wings removed.
The night before, Ian had had a lengthy discussion with Blanca. They were horribly worried about their daughter.
“I think that on Saturday I should fly up to Detroit personally to get her.”
“But, Ian, all of the flights are cancelled.”
“No, I mean a cross-country, in a D-model Viper. They’re two-seaters. I can zip up there to get her and be back all in a day-that is, if my dad drives her down to meet me at the airport.”
Blanca frowned and shook her head, but Ian continued in rapid fire: “Wayne County Airport is too big and it’s close to Toledo, so that’s too risky. The Canton-Plymouth airport is only two miles out of town, but it’s only a 2,500-foot strip. I’m sure you remember, an F-16 officially needs 8,000 feet, but it’s actually under 4,000 in a pinch. I suppose that’s a little hard on the brakes. Like my F-16 Transition instructor used to say: ‘If it’s a short strip, then pop the ’chute and stand on those brakes, boy!’ So I checked on the Internet last night: the Detroit Lakes-Wething strip is 4,500 feet. I could do that easily in good weather.”
“Are you crazy, Ian? You’ve got sixteen years in. Just four years to go until you qualify for retirement. You steal a plane-”
“Borrow a plane,” Ian interrupted.
“-you’ll get court-martialed.”
“I’ll just log it as a cross-country,” Ian argued.
“You put a civilian passenger in a fighter, it’s a court-martial offense. You file a false flight plan, its at least an Article 15, maybe a court-martial. You make an unauthorized landing on a civilian strip of insufficient length, also probably a court-martial. Some busybody writes down the tail number with an ‘LF’ prefix, and the finger is pointing right at you. No way! You cannot play ‘You Bet Your Bars’ when you’ve got sixteen years in. Es imposible.” After a pause she added, “That’s muy loco!”
Doyle meekly dipped his head to his chest. He said, “Look, I also thought about flying the Star Streak up there, but that would take at least six hops each way: there’s only two seats. It would be a six-day round trip for one of us. I can’t get that much leave on short notice.”
“I agree, the Star Streak is out. With that many hops, I don’t know where for sure you’d get avgas. You could get stranded in the middle of nowhere with no fuel.”
Blanca went on: “We just have to wait until the riots die down in Detroit, and wait until they start up the commercial flights again, or you take a couple of days leave, and one of us-or maybe both-drives up there and back.”
Ian frowned. “Do you know how many cities we’d have to drive through to get to Plymouth? The rioting is too unpredictable. We’d have to zigzag up there. And how will we get gas to get that far and back?”
Blanca hugged him, and said, “Look, this is just a temporary thing. Your parents, they live in a very safe neighborhood. The riots and lootings, they are just in Detroit, not any further. We wait until things calm down. If need be, we dip into our savings and we pay a charter pilot from one of the General-A strips in Michigan to fly her down here. If things keep going like they’re going, the money will be nada in another month, so we might as well spend it. Let’s just wait a few days. You can’t take any leave until after you are done with your fruta class, anyway.”
“Okay. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and the stupid course ends on Friday. But here’s another idea: How about we rent a Cessna 172 or maybe a Beech Bonanza from the Glendale airport? We fly out at oh-dark-early on Saturday, we take turns on the yoke, with the other one napping, and in about four hops we fly straight to the Canton-Plymouth airport. Then we do a four- or five-hour RON and we get back here either late Sunday or early Monday. After all, I still have my civilian ticket. Your ASEL just lapsed, but who’ll be looking if we rent the plane in my name?”
Blanca smiled. “With El Infierno, renting a plane will be expensive, but hey, renting a General Aviation plane’s the perfect solution. In the morning I’ll call around and find a plane. I’ll work out all the refueling stops at little country airports-you know, private FBOs-I can call ahead or do e-mails and make sure which ones still got avgas to sell. This can work, Ian! We’ll get Linda back home.”