Chapter 15

Liz, it turned out, was in line for a medal. The gal who was the pilot, technically the Aircraft Commander, had survived after all. She'd been knocked unconscious, and Liz had made sure she got out as the plane went down. That was why the girl, Sue, actually Capt. Susan Edgecroft, landed came down on land and was rescued by a troop of British soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. She'd barely hit the ground before they were there to pick her up.

The delay in finding Liz was because she came down in the Persian Gulf. After she got out the plane continued circling, blazing from nose to tail, which gave Liz some burns. The plane crashed in a patch of sand on Iraqi soil.

Nobody had seen her parachute, so they searched the wreckage first. They only found one body, the refueling boom operator. Someone noticed that both ejection seats were gone, and they began to look elsewhere.

The Brits reported receiving a distress signal, one that goes off automatically when someone bails out. After two days the Navy found her. A search plane spotted the dye released automatically when a life raft deploys, and began circling, calling for a rescue helicopter.

It took a little while to do that. Some of the locals were approaching her in a boat, but a British jet "persuaded" them that this was not a good idea. I sort of shuddered at what would have happened if those boaters, from Iran, had gotten their hands on her. AS it was, a couple of jets from the aircraft carrier joined the Brits, and those boaters decided that fighter pilots are just a bit trigger happy.

The helicopter finally came over the horizon. I saw a video taken from Navy crew. Liz could be seen in her raft waving at the crew. I saw that and began to cry. She was bruised, bloody, and battered, but she looked marvelous.

Almost losing Liz made me appraise my life. I liked what I was doing. Oh, some aspects were cheap and tawdry, but on the whole it was a lot of fun, and I got well-paid for it. Was I making a difference in the world? Only in appealing to people's physical well-being (climaxes are good for the body). Did I want to do more? In what? What was there that I could turn my hand to and make a difference? Liz had joined something greater than herself, the Air Force and serving her country, our country. That wasn't the case for me.

In a way the company was much larger than me, and it shamelessly took advantage of human lust. There was a lot of money to be made in pandering to people's desire for sex. Did I want to continue doing that? I had a lot of money, and my bosses above me had tons more. Did I want to continue down that path, being a money producer for my bosses?

Liz had the education to make hard-headed decisions; I had the temperament. When we'd been together I'd been the one who urged the practical course of action while she went after the ideal. That made her perfect for the Air Force. The one time I'd let my heart rule my head he'd left me. I'd ended up here, which was certainly not what I'd expected, but that was how the dice rolled.

I went for one of those long walks on the beach (on the east side of the island), and argued with myself. This, I'd learned, was a lot more practical than "thinking". In the latter you end up with your foregone conclusions, or at least I did. Arguing it out verbally made me see all sides of an issue or problem, and that was what I needed.

By the end of the walk I was tired (I later figured I walked twelve miles on soft sand). I rejected the entire argument of "feeding the greedy bastards who owned the company". That was socialist rhetoric that presumed hitching yourself to a successful team in terms of material well-being was a BAD THING. I'd noticed that those who preached it the loudest were also incredibly well-off. Their hypocrisy made me really examine their beliefs. I was amazed at how many people didn't see that.

As for the original question, I was good at what I was doing. I was a so-so actress, with occasional flashes of skill. I was really good at picking winning show concepts and getting them to work. I'd piggybacked on successful shows, much to the increased success of those shows and my segments. I had produced full-length shows, some as celibate as anyone could want, some drenched in sex.

On the whole, people found pleasure and escape because of me. In a way I was doing things for people, and that felt good. If, for a short time, people could live outside themselves because of me, then good.

When I got back to my apartment I checked: I did not have an early call the next morning. I gave the schedule a tired smile and went to sleep. We have building-wide air-conditioning because we are in the tropics. Every apartment, though, sets their own coldness level. I like mine fairly cool at night, and that means, ironically, that in a very warm and humid place I bundle up to go to bed. I might pad around in shorts and halter during the day, but at night you'd think I was a granny in a long nightgown and socks.

The good side of that is that I can appear in that and not show much if any skin. The next morning I spent a few minutes weeding through my emails, spent a few minutes using VOIP to talk with Liz (she found my granny nighty funny, given where I was). I finally did my morning routine and went forth to face/conquer the world.

We get ideas from the internet, and Katy, Joe and I had breakfast while Joe sprang an idea he'd picked up. We would look for voyeur possibilities. Oh, not to make an entire show, but to stick in here and there as commercials.

Our island is not isolated at the ends of the Earth, it's just bypassed most of the time by tourists. One cruise line, a small one, docks in the capitol. They're an eco-cruise line, and we have a lot of ecology that we show off to people. We keep them away from our complex, but that's about it. But this means we see a lot of things that somehow don't quite make it onto US ISPs. One of them turned out to be a site devoted to catching people off-guard.

The idea couldn't be patented, only the title. It was what we did with it that was the real twist. Joe had put together a commercial that could only air on the internet, and he played the crude version of it for us. Katy and I were both uncomfortable, but we also saw the commercial possibilities. When you market something like 'Orgy Camp' you shouldn't get upset over staged voyeuristic opportunities. After all, a lot of what we did was just voyeurism.

The camera pans across the classroom, then lowers and looks up a few skirts. Some girls sat with their legs crossed. Some didn't. In the latter shots the camera focus would zoom in on the girl's panties. Then the voiceover: "For those times when you're caught unaware, consider Xxxth Lingerie."

You can spend most of your days walking around naked, and take part in sex parties both in private and in front of cameras. Your sex might be better known than the face on a $1 bill, but if you're a girl you still get uncomfortable with any view up your skirt. It's something drilled into every girl since she was out of diapers. The important thing, though, was that this ad would get noticed by every viewer.

Some ideas are just "right". This was one of them. We made a couple dozen of them. Some featured a girl putting on, or taking off, a brassiere. Some were upskirt shots staged at a store counter. A couple were in locker rooms; those featured athletic bras. One that I sympathized with, and took me back to my early photo shoots, was of a woman in a business suit coming home. She peels out of her skirt, blouse and bra, massages her breasts for a few moments, and then puts on a racier bra that was a lot more comfortable, something I knew from personal experience. The voiceover was "When you're tired of corporate conformity and you just need to kick back and wear something a little more comfortable and a lot more fun..."

The sponsors were uncomfortable at first, but ended up buying a lot of spots. Call me cynical, but sex sells, and we were guaranteed to get a lot of people staying through the commercial, not fast-forwarding through it or leaving the room. That was the idea.

Overnight Nielsen's didn't show much, but there are a lot more ways to measure viewership, and we maxed out on those. That let us raise our fees, which the sponsors gladly paid. The money rolled in, and everyone who ran those ads benefited; really a classic win-win situation.