His nearly three weeks of wandering in Eritrea with Jenna Munrough had been like a bad dream, punctuated by experiences like that night at the well when they shot the two men, and the two desperate days of being chased by the local militia. When they had reached that Doctors Without Borders compound at the end of their wanderings, they had finally learned why the American helicopters never came.
After the calamity over Dhuladhiya Island, in which eleven American aircraft were shot down attacking the sovereign nation of Eritrea, the United Nations had pulled the plug on the operation and the United States was given forty-eight hours to withdraw its forces.
The fears that the Joint Task Force base at Atbara would be overrun were finally realized, but by that time only a few dozen Americans remained. They never made it home.
Troy Loensch had made it home.
The Doctors Without Borders people had gotten him and Jenna across the border into Djibouti, where the American embassy had arranged for a flight back to the United States.
As Troy climbed into his mother's Chevy Equinox, he thought about how strange it was to no longer be strapping himself into an aircraft. During his two years overseas, he had rarely driven a car, spending much more time in the air than on a highway. In Sudan, he hadn't driven at all. After four days back home he was only just reacclimating himself to Los Angeles traffic.
He didn't know whether he would ever be back in a cockpit.
So much had happened while he was on the run in Eritrea that he felt like Rip Van Winkle. When he and Jenna landed at Dulles Airport, they were met by Air Force personnel who whisked them to a military hospital to be checked out, rehydrated, and treated for dysentery. They expected to be promptly shipped back to the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency and the 55th Wing, but instead they were given a thirty-day leave and told that their next assignments were not yet known.
As they began to catch up on the news from their lost weeks, they discovered that in the wake of the Dhuladhiya disaster, Congress had passed legislation terminating overseas peacekeeping operations by the American military.
As Troy and Jenna were being checked out of the hospital after two days, they were each handed a packet offering them a bonus for accepting an early discharge. The termination legislation carried a steep decrease in the Pentagon budget, and the Air Force had decided to stay ahead of the curve and to reduce manpower wherever possible.
"How'd it go with Cassie?" Barbara Loensch called from the kitchen when she heard her son slam the front door of the family's Northridge bungalow.
"Oh, all right… we decided to call it quits," Troy answered. He thought about telling his mother the whole story, but decided it was pointless.
"Quits? That's too bad… I thought she was, y'know, a nice girl."
"Oh yeah, she's a nice girl," Troy said, pretending that he meant it. "But y'know, it's just not gonna work out. We're completely different people than we were back in college."
"Yeah, I suppose… sometimes I think that your father and I are completely different people than we were back then."
"You and Dad?"
"So, have you decided whether you're going to take that offer from the Air Force?" Barbara said, changing the subject.
"I dunno." Troy shrugged, grabbing a can of Hyper-X energy drink from the fridge. "They gave me a month to decide. The money's good if I take the discharge."
"Why would they pay to get rid of a good pilot like you?"
"They just have a whole lot less to do in the world now."
"What will happen in those places like over in Africa where you were?"
"They'll just fall apart," Troy said sadly. "Like what happened in Sudan. The Al-Qinamah just swarmed into that base where I had been. Killed a bunch of people. That was after we lost so many pilots that night when I got shot down."
"That was terrible," Barbara said. "Terrible that it had to happen like that."
"It was like getting stabbed in the back," Troy said angrily, slamming the remainder of his energy drink. "They gave the Joint Task Force the authorization to bomb those arms boats, but the State Department, some dude that was at the meeting, decided to try to do some diplomatic intervention and bad guys got wind ofit. They had two days to set a trap… and we got trapped."
"I can sure understand you not wanting to go back," Troy's mother said sympathetically.
"On top of that, they want to pay me not to go back," Troy said. "That's a pretty sweet deal… I just don't know what I'm gonna do next."
Chapter 17
"First day on the job, huh?" Yolanda Rodriguez said as she put on her mascara. "Like, I bet you're pretty excited, huh?"
"Yeah, it'll be pretty weird having to be somewhere after not having to be anywhere for a few months," Troy said, reaching for his jeans. "But I've been screwing around for long enough; it's time to get back to work and earn some cash."
"Hey, screwing around?" Yolanda giggled. "Is that what you call us?"
"Hey Yo, y'know what I mean," Troy pleaded. They both knew what he meant, and they both knew that their relationship really amounted to little more than screwing around. They had hooked up after Cassie dumped Troy. Yolanda engineered a "chance" meeting and turned on the charm, and their first night together was sufficiently memorable for there to be a second, a third, and so on. But they both knew it was just a lot of fun and little more.
"Hope you got a day off pretty soon, though," Yolanda said. "Sure missed you not drinkin' Corona and shots with us last night."
"You know I couldn't do that, especially on my first day," Troy said.
She understood. The job that Troy had taken was with Golden West Courier, piloting one of their Beech-craft Bonanzas between Burbank Airport and points throughout California and Nevada. Company rules prohibited alcohol consumption by pilots for twenty-four hours before wheels-up.
"So you gonna get your own place then, huh?" Yolanda said, slithering into a tight, teal-colored skirt.
"Yeah. First paycheck," Troy confirmed. "Gotta get out of that house."
"Must be weird watching your own parents split up, huh?"
"It's unreal."
"So your dad, he's got something going on the side?"
"No, it's not like that… least I don't think so…. don't want to think so anyway. I think they're just tired of each other."
An hour after watching Yolanda drive away in her coffee-colored Sebring, Troy was in the cockpit of a Golden West Bonanza going through his final check for takeoff. At last, cleared for Runway 26, he cranked up the Continental E-185 and let its 205 horses lift him into the sky over the San Fernando Valley.
Climbing out over the San Gabriel Mountains, headed north toward his stops in Bakersfield and Fresno, Troy felt the elation of once more being in the air. The Bonanza was about as far from an F-16 as you could get and still be in an airplane, but that didn't matter. He was flying.
Just as Troy's life was starting to come together, his parents' lives were coming apart. When Office Tech downsized, the longtime employees with the biggest salaries were the first to go. Carl's being out of work put further strain on an already strained marriage. Barbara went up to visit her recently widowed sister in San Luis Obispo for a couple of weeks. That was a month ago.
Troy had started spending most nights at Yolanda's, but he was looking forward to getting off on his own permanently.
Watching the trees of the Angeles National Forest slip past beneath his wings, Troy was reminded of how desolate Sudan and Eritrea had been. He was glad to be out of that place, but he found himself missing Hal Coughlin and Jenna Munrough. After all that the three of them had been through in the early part of their knowing one another, a bond had finally formed. Now it had been broken.