Chapter 1
It was an early Monday afternoon in mid-March and the Fitness Forever gym in Roseville, California was only lightly populated. There were a few muscle-bound males pumping iron on the machines or the free weights, a few people of varying ages utilizing the treadmills or the stationary bicycles. Behind the front counter, two clerks sat bored—one reading a magazine, the other talking on her cell phone to someone. The air was thick, humid, and smelled strongly of the disinfectant that was sprayed on the machines. From the ceiling of the main workout area, dozens of televisions played silently, some tuned to news programs, some tuned to sport channels, some tuned to the Fitness Forever corporate programming, which consisted mostly of music videos. From the overhead speakers the music that went with the videos blared.
In one corner of the workout area, thirty-eight year old Ken Patterson was utilizing a stair-climbing machine. He was wearing a pair of blue sweat pants and a gray cotton shirt. The shirt showed large sweat stains on the chest and back. His brown hair, cut militarily short and just starting to show the first speckles of gray around the temples, was damp with perspiration as well. His face was flushed red, his brown eyes staring fixated on the countdown timer of the machine. He had two minutes and twelve seconds to go. The machine was set for seventy-two steps per minute and had started its cycle at twenty minutes. He had climbed the equivalent of forty-three floors now and was going forward on sheer will power at this point. His breath heaved in and out of his lungs and his hands gripped the rails firmly. The pulse readout on the display told him his heart was beating one hundred and sixty-three times a minute.
On the stair climber to his immediate left, his wife, Meghan was in about the same shape. She had on a pair of black spandex shorts and a long white t-shirt transparent enough to show the black sports bra beneath it. Her shirt was damp and sweaty. Her long auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail that flipped up and down with each step she took. Since she was four years younger than Ken, her heart was fairing a little better. It was only kicking along at one hundred and fifty-two beats a minute.
"Two more minutes," Ken panted at her encouragingly.
"Yeah," she grunted back, without the energy to say further.
They climbed on, both of them watching the time display. Each second seemed to take a minute or more, each step caused a deep burning in their thighs and calves, each breath brought sharp, stabbing pains to their sides. And then finally, it was over. The countdown timer reached zero. The machines let out a serious of warning beeps to let them know they were about to stop and then came to a halt. Both of them just stood there for a few moments, trying to catch their breath.
"God," said Meghan. "That was brutal."
"Yeah," Ken agreed, picking up his towel and wiping his forehead. "Maybe we shouldn't have upped the workout quite that much." Today was the first day of a plan to increase both the time and intensity of their normal workout. Instead of running for a mile and a half on the treadmill at a twelve minute mile and then spending twelve minutes on the stair climber at sixty steps a minute, they'd gone two miles at a ten minute mile pace and twenty minutes at seventy-two steps.
"I don't know," Meghan said, stretching her left leg to keep it from cramping up on her. "Anything that hurts that bad has to be good for you, doesn't it?"
"As long as you can walk the next day," he said.
"Walking is overrated," she said. "Come on. Let's go cool down."
"Right," he said.
They wiped down their machines with paper towels sprayed with disinfectant and then made their way over to the treadmills again. They climbed aboard adjacent machines and set them for a serene two point five miles per hour. This was their favorite part of the workout — the cool down, when they let their hearts, lungs, and muscles ease back into a normal workload.
Despite the fact that they came to the gym at least twice a week and sometimes as many as four times, both of them hated the place with a passion. They did not come here for the endorphin high or to train for marathons or to socialize with other gym rats. They both hated every second of every workout and dreaded their trips to the gym the way other people dreaded cleaning the bathroom or a trip to the dentist. The reason they came and pushed themselves to the brink was to keep their aging bodies in something like shape and to stave off health problems that both were genetically prone to.
Meghan had the obesity gene resting just beneath the surface. Her mother, her father, one of her brothers and both of her sisters were all pushing three hundred pounds. Meghan had discovered early in her life that if she didn't exercise vigorously and regularly, her weight would quickly get out of control even if she ate like a bird. As she got older, this propensity seemed to get worse. If she let up on the gym for even four weeks she would pack on no less than ten pounds and her butt would swell up like someone had pulled the pin on a life raft. The aesthetics of the weight gain was only a minor factor, however. Along with the extra pounds, the members of her immediate family tended to develop heart problems to go along with them. Her father had already suffered two heart attacks and had undergone bypass surgery once. Her mother suffered from coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. Both sisters and the brother had been told that if they didn't get their cholesterol levels down they wouldn't make it another ten years.
For Ken it was diabetes and hypertension. Both his father and his mother had developed diabetes before their fortieth birthdays and both were now entirely dependent on insulin injections to keep them alive. Ken had already been told by his doctor that he was "pre-diabetic" and that if he didn't keep himself in shape he would likely have to start taking oral diabetes medicines within a year or so just to keep his blood sugar under control. This was something that Ken could not allow. It was more than just a matter of health but of livelihood as well. Ken was a commercial pilot who flew cargo aircraft for a living. A diagnosis of diabetes requiring medication to control it would automatically disqualify him from holding the Class 2 medical certificate he needed to keep his job.
"So what's for dinner today?" Meghan asked when she'd regained enough breath for a normal conversation. It was Ken's day to cook the meal they referred to as dinner in their household. Meghan, a copy editor for the Sacramento Register newspaper, had to be to work by 3:00 PM so dinner would be served at 2:00 PM.
"Well, I was thinking some sort of fish," Ken said as if pondering it.
Meghan shook her head and rolled her eyes a little. "No kidding?" she said. Part of their fight against health problems and obesity involved carefully regulating their diet. As such, they ate fish of one kind or another at least five days of every week. It had become somewhat of a friendly challenge between them to find some way of making the fish days (as they called them) interesting, or at least not overly repetitive.
"I actually have something new for you today," he told her. "A little something of my own creation."
"Uh oh," she said warily. "That last time you freelanced you came up with those ground swordfish burgers. Not one of your finest hours."
"Oh come on," he said. "They weren't that bad. They were just a little dry. If I had put a little more garlic butter in the mixture they would have been perfect."
"Need I remind you that Hannah wouldn't eat it either?" she asked. Hannah was their four-year-old Springer Spaniel. She had indeed refused to eat any of the leftover swordfish burgers.
"She's just a finicky eater."
"I've never seen a dog spit out meat before," Meghan said.
"Oh, shut your ass," Ken growled, snapping at her spandex covered butt with his sweaty workout towel.
She giggled a little, knowing she'd won the little marital sparring match. "Seriously though, what are you making? What could you possibly do with fish that we haven't already done?"
"You'll just have to wait and see," he told her.
"Hmmph," she grunted, knowing she would get no more out of him. "What a rip."
"And no peeking while I'm in the kitchen either," he said.
"Yeah yeah."
They walked on, their feet slapping on the treadmill canvas, the sweat gradually starting to dry on their skin, their heart rates gradually dropping into the 110s. When the timers on the machines reached five minutes, they shut them off and stepped down, gathering their towels and water bottles and cell phones and then heading for the door, glad that another trip to the torture chamber was behind them.
There was an icy late winter wind blowing outside and it chilled them quite nicely as they dashed across the parking lot. Ken used the remote on his keychain to unlock the doors of his BMW 535i. He did not bother opening Meghan's door for her. They had been married for eight years now and it was understood between them that when they were sweaty and on the verge of being frozen in place by the winds of March it was every person for themselves when it came to automobile entry procedure.
Ken started the engine and began the ten-minute drive home.
"Did you see the weather report for the mid-west?" Meghan asked as they waited at a red light.
"Yeah," he said. "I saw it." Several of the televisions in the gym had been tuned to headline news channels, which showed national weather forecasts as part of their fifteen-minute repetitive updates. He tended to keep an eye on such things on nights he was scheduled to fly. So did Meghan.
"There's going to be thunderstorms in eastern Nebraska," she said. "Maybe even tornados."
Eastern Nebraska — specifically Eppley Airfield in Omaha — was his destination tonight (and pretty much every night that he flew). Omaha was right in the heart of Tornado Alley and March was right in the heart of tornado season. Both Meghan and Ken had reason to fear unsettled weather in association with flying.
"It'll be okay," Ken reassured her. "If the weather is too nasty at Eppley, they'll divert me somewhere else."
She didn't have much faith in that answer. "They didn't divert us to another field back in Florida, did they?" she asked.
No, they certainly had not. That had been back in 1998, May 2, 1998 to be exact, the only time in his life that Ken had ever felt the specter of death breathing down his neck. He vividly remembered the feeling of terror he had felt at that moment. Even now, almost eleven years later, it still had the power to send chills through him. He shoved the memory back in its hole before it could take hold of him. "I'll be fine, honey," he told Meghan. "We go through this every spring. Wind sheer already took its shot at me back in Florida. I'm safe from it forever now."
"You can't know that," she said stubbornly.
"True," he said, "but I can strongly suspect it. I'll be fine. I promise."
"And you're flying with that new girl tonight," she said, her tone almost accusatory.
Ken suspected that this was what her concern was really about. After all, the forecast was only for "scattered thunderstorms" and "possible tornadoes", which was actually pretty tame for this time of year. It was, however, his first night with a young female pilot who had just been hired and assigned as his first officer. Meghan wasn't usually the jealous type, but the thought of her husband spending nine hours alone in the intimate confines of a cockpit with a twenty-something year old woman was obviously rankling her. Ken supposed this was to be expected. After all, he did have a history of unauthorized fraternization with a female crewmember on his aircraft. Meghan knew this very well since she had been the crewmember in question.
"She's a fully qualified pilot who has been cleared on the A-300," Ken told her.
"But she's brand new," Meghan said. "She doesn't have any military flight experience."
"Hardly any of the pilots we hire have any military flight experience," Ken said. "That's why we hire them." Early Bird Cargo Airlines was, in fact, about the lowest rung on the commercial pilot ladder. A privately owned corporation that operated out of Mather Airport outside Sacramento, their fleet consisted of six Airbus A-300s that carried mostly low-priority cargo that was subcontracted to them by the larger carriers. They managed to stay in existence by cutting costs to the bone. They subcontracted out their maintenance, aircraft loading and ground shipment responsibilities. Their aircraft were all twenty to thirty year old cast-offs that had been retired from airline service. And, most significant, they only hired pilots who were willing to work for fifty to seventy dollars an hour less than what other cargo carriers and passenger airlines paid and who were willing to work without benefits, profit-sharing, or retirement. For the most part, this meant young pilots who had gone through private aviation schooling instead of military training and who did not have enough hours logged to qualify for the better-paying jobs. Early Bird was a stepping stone airline, a place where inexperienced pilots could work for a few years to build up those hours and then move on to someplace else. Ken's new co-pilot was one of three they'd just picked up and put through their training program in the last two months.
"It makes me nervous that someone like that will be flying half the legs for you," Meghan said. "You're up near the top of the seniority list. Can't you request a more experienced FO?"
"Only if I want to give up my line and start working the Oklahoma City route," he said. "That's longer flight time when I'm on but fewer hours per month. That would suck on several different levels."
"Yeah, I suppose," she said, frowning in displeasure. "But promise me you won't let her land if the weather is bad in Omaha."
"If it's her leg it's her leg," Ken said. "It would be insulting to take the plane from her."
"So insult her then," Meghan told him. "You're the pilot in command. If you think it's safer for you to handle the landing you have the right to do it."
"I'll keep that in mind," Ken told her, having no intention whatsoever of doing what Meghan wanted.
Meghan, of course, knew this. "At least promise me you'll take over if there's a chance of wind sheer," she said. "That's all I'm asking."
That was a hard thing to promise since there was virtually always a chance of wind shear whenever thunderstorms were in the vicinity. He did the best he could though. "I promise that if it seems like wind shear is a problem and that she's not able to handle it, I'll take over."
She looked at him, her green eyes probing his face, trying to gauge the sincerity of his promise while her mind tried to think of a way she could word a counter-promise that was more in her favor. Finally she decided this was as good as she was going to get. "Okay," she finally said. "But if you die in crash because that bimbo was at the controls in a wind shear, I'm going to piss on your grave."
"Deal," he said, reaching over and patting her bare leg affectionately.
She reached down and grasped his hand, giving it a conciliatory squeeze, letting him know she would let the subject drop for now. He smiled at her and then let his hand slide a little higher on her leg, until his fingers were flirting with the hem of shorts. He probed underneath, just the tiniest bit, just enough to feel the baby soft skin on her upper thigh.
"Hmm," she said, letting her legs fall apart just a bit. "Are you after something?"
"I was just wondering something," he said.
"What's that?"
"If you have to piss on my grave, can you be sure to wear the yellow summer dress and the red thong panties?"
She slapped his hand away, though the motion was playful and not angry. "You're an asshole," she told him.
"An infected asshole?" he asked.
"An infected incontinent asshole," she assured him.
The city of Roseville was some seventeen miles by freeway from the city of Sacramento, for whom it served as a bedroom community. It was the sort of place that every large American city had at least one of within its sphere of influence. It wasn't where the truly elite lived — the real estate developers, the corporate honchos, the owners of successful businesses—but it was where the upper end of the middle class and the lower end of the higher class chose to purchase their tract houses.
Ken and Meghan had both come from poor backgrounds and it sometimes amazed them that they owned such a nice home in such a nice place. They had bought a twenty-five hundred square foot tri-level on a premium lot back in 2001, just at the start of the housing boom. They'd bought large because they'd planned to start a family. It was a plan that hadn't worked out. After more than a year of trying to get pregnant, Meghan had gone to a fertility doctor where it was discovered that uterine scarring from an unrealized case of endometriosis had left her unable to conceive. Now there was just the two of them in the big house — three if you counted Hannah the Springer Spaniel, who was accorded pretty much all the rights and privileges that a child would have been accorded.
Ken parked the BMW in their three-car garage next to Meghan's Lexus SUV. They stepped out and walked around to the front of the car from opposite sides, meeting just in front of the door that communicated from the garage to the kitchen.
"So ... she's good looking?" Meghan suddenly blurted.
"Who?" Ken asked, although he knew perfectly well who she was talking about.
"The bimbo they assigned to fly with you," she said.
"Why do you keep calling her a bimbo?" Ken asked. "You've never met her and you know absolutely nothing about her."
Meghan rolled her eyes, as if to say that had absolutely had nothing to do with what she was talking about — and in her mind, it didn't. "Well ... is she?" she asked.
"I've never met her before either," Ken said, putting his key in the lock.
"What've you heard though? I know you had to have talked to Charlie. He's the one who trained her, right?"
"He said she's all right looking," Ken said, not meeting Meghan's eyes as he said it. That was only part of what Charlie — one of the few pilots senior to Ken at Early Bird — had said. Yes, he offered that she was 'all right looking', but he had also added that, for some reason he couldn't put his finger on, she was the sexiest woman he had ever met in his life.
"I don't know what it is," he'd told Ken a few weeks before, "but there's just something about her. She's cute and her body is okay but she just ... I don't know ... exudes sexiness. She gives the impression that she knows her way around a bedroom. You see her and you want her. That's all there is to it."
In truth, Ken was actually looking forward to making her acquaintance. He loved Meghan deeply and had no intention whatsoever of cheating on her, no matter how sexy or tempting a woman he encountered, but Charlie's words intrigued him. His last FO had been Dan Markely, an obnoxious, foul-mouthed, immature kid who thought that producing loud farts in the cockpit at thirty thousand feet was the height of comedy. After working six months with that, the idea of sharing his cockpit with a sexy female was appealing. Not that he would ever tell Meghan that.
"All right looking?" Meghan asked. "What does that mean? Is that guyspeak for fuckable?"
He opened the door to the house. Hannah was there waiting, her tail wagging, her favorite tennis ball in her mouth. Ken reached down and scratched her head for a moment before taking the ball from her mouth and tossing it out the back of the kitchen and into the family room. While Hannah ran after it, Ken punched in the disarm code for their burglar alarm. "You're getting paranoid, Meg," he told her. "She's just another pilot who will be here for a few years and then move on. She'll probably only be my FO for a month or two before she bids on another line."
"A lot could happen in a month or two," Meghan told him, giving him a meaningful look.
He shook his head and grinned. "I swear," he said. "You fuck one boom operator on one KC-10 and they don't trust you for the rest of your life."
She tried to maintain her serious face but failed miserably. She cracked up, slapping at him with her hand. "Shut up," she told him. "That's why I'm so worried. I know how easy it is to seduce one of you flyboys. You were risking a stretch in Leavenworth when you boffed me that first time. Fraternization between enlisted crewmen and officers was some serious shit, but you did it anyway. Now we're talking simple adultery. That's not even against the law anymore."
"I boffed you back then because I was in love with you, Meg," he told her. "That's why I risked what I did. I still love you now. I'm not going to cheat on you."
She sighed. "I know," she said. "It's just my irrational fear."
"We all have that," he said. "Don't worry. I probably won't even like her."
"We can always hope," Meghan said. She leaned forward and kissed him, her lips lingering on his longer than usual. Her hand slid downward, trailing over his chest and ending up on the string that held his sweats closed. "Wanna go upstairs and sweat a little more?"
"Hmm," he said thoughtfully. "I really should get dinner started."
Her hand dropped a little lower, touching him in a place he liked to be touched. "Are you sure?" she asked sweetly.
"Well ... now that you mention it, you can never have too much exercise."
She smiled and started walking toward the stairs. "I thought you might see things my way," she said.
Ken's dinner turned out a little better than his experiment with the ground swordfish burgers. He took marinated ahi tuna steaks, grilled them until they were barely seared on both sides, and then chopped them into bite-sized chunks. He rolled the chunks up in whole wheat tortillas, placed them end to end in a glass baking dish, and covered them with a sauce made from melted jack cheese, cream of asparagus soup, and chopped fresh cilantro. After baking in the oven for twenty minutes or so, his latest masterpiece was ready for human consumption.
"Ahi enchiladas?" Meghan said doubtfully when he explained what they were.
"Don't knock 'em until you try 'em," he told her confidently. He had already sampled one and knew he was onto something here.
Meghan agreed when she tasted them. She ended up eating four, washing them down with two large glasses of unsweetened ice tea.
"Definitely put this one on the list," she said—the highest praise they had for each other's cooking.
"It's done," he told her. "And I expect something just as original and savory tomorrow when you cook."
"You keep expecting that," she said. "Disappointment builds character."
"Keep it up and I'll be forced to cut you off from sex," he warned.
"Yeah, right," she scoffed. "Easy for a man to say when he just got laid an hour ago. Make that threat to me this time tomorrow."
"Before or after we fuck?" he asked.
The obligatory post-meal banter over with, Meghan excused herself to go get ready for work. While she showered and got dressed, Ken put away the leftovers and straightened up the kitchen. Both finished at about the same time. Meghan emerged from the bedroom dressed in a pair of black business slacks and a burgundy blouse that clung to her bosom in a way that was just short of being unprofessional work attire. Meghan had nice boobs, she knew it, and she wanted everyone else to know it too.
"Did I ever tell you that is one of my favorite blouses?" Ken asked.
"You say that about all of my blouses," she said.
"Not true. I hate anything your mom gives you."
Meghan giggled. Her mother — a devout Catholic — was always sending her oversized peasant blouses that, if worn as directed, hid every single curve and every square inch of skin between her neck and her hips. Meghan never wore them outside under any circumstances but she did wear them around the house on those occasions when she was absolutely not in the mood for sex and unwilling to be coaxed into the mood. Ken called them her just-say-no blouses. "You don't go for the classic Irish homemaker look?" she asked.
"Not even if it comes with a beer," he said.
She gave him a kiss — a long, luxuriant kiss instead of her typical goodbye kiss — and then fended off his groping hand when he tried to squeeze her left breast. She put her serious face back on. "And if there is wind sheer, you won't let her land?" she asked again.
"If wind sheer is going to be a problem, I won't let her land," he said.
She nodded and then gave him one last smile. "And remember," she said. "I'm the only one who gets to extend your boom."
This was an old joke between them, a flirtatious innuendo that dated back to their days on the KC-10 when she had literally been the one who extended his boom. "I wouldn't have it any other way," he dutifully replied.
She patted Hannah on the head, gave her a kiss on the nose, and then headed out the door for her twenty-five minute drive to the Sacramento Register building in downtown Sacramento. She would work from 3:00 PM until the 11:00 PM press time, editing news stories submitted by the reporters for tomorrow's edition of the paper.
Once she was gone, Ken, still wearing the ragged pair of sweat pants and the even more ragged sweatshirt he'd put on after their lovemaking session, sat down in his favorite chair and played fetch with Hannah. He had perfected the art of throwing her tennis ball at oblique angles that would bounce it off the walls and into various rooms on the far side of the lower portion of the house. He could sometimes even bounce the ball off the ceiling just under the staircase and then off the third riser into the upstairs portion where it would roll down the hallway between the bedrooms, although a bad throw here could potentially cause the ball to go off target and end up colliding with the crystal chandelier that hung in their formal dining room. Needless to say, this was not an activity that Ken and Hannah engaged in while Meghan was at home.
As usual, Ken was the first to tire of the game (Hannah would chase the tennis ball from sunrise to sunset if she could get someone to throw it for her). He spent a few minutes petting her, talking to her, and scratching behind her ears and under her collar before going upstairs to the master bedroom. The bed was still rumpled from the earlier action that had taken place upon it. Ken checked his alarm clock to make sure it was set for 5:30 PM and then removed his clothes and got beneath the covers. Usually he had trouble drifting off to sleep in the afternoon on nights he was scheduled to fly. Today, however, the exercise, the sex, and the food combined to hit him with a sedative-like effect. Before Hannah was even settled in at the foot of the bed for a nap of her own, he was fading away. In less than ten minutes, he was snoring.
When the alarm went off he dragged himself out of bed and staggered into the master bathroom where he spent fifteen minutes shaving and showering. After toweling off, he put on his usual flight uniform: a pair of blue jeans and a light blue, button-up shirt with Early Bird Cargo stenciled above the left pocket. He put on his tennis shoes and clipped his laminated security badge to his shirt. After a brief check of the trunk of his BMW to make sure his flight bag and his leather jacket were there (they were), he climbed behind the wheel and started the twenty-minute drive to work.
Mather Airport was located in the suburb of Rancho Cordova, on the far east side of the Sacramento metropolitan region. Mather had once been a bustling air force base that had served as a training ground for flight navigators and a Strategic Air Command base for long-range alert bombers that could take off at a moment's notice and deliver nuclear weapons to eastern Russia. At the end of the Cold War, Mather had been one of the first military bases to be decommissioned. The United States government removed all of their aircraft, did a half-assed job of cleaning up the toxic waste they'd left behind, and then transferred ownership of the base to the County of Sacramento, who already operated a moderate-sized international airport north of the city.
Slowly, over the next decade, Mather went from almost complete desolation to a fairly busy regional air cargo hub that served nine different carriers. In this role the former SAC base was well suited. There was no passenger service or private aviation based there so getting aircraft in and out whenever needed was a breeze. In addition, the main runway, designed to handle B-52 bombers, was more than eleven thousand feet in length. The space shuttle could land on Mather's 4R/22L runway if it had to. This meant that heavily loaded multi-engine cargo planes had plenty of room to wind up to takeoff speed and get airborne.
When Ken arrived at the airport it was just before sunset. Since night was the prime time for cargo air services, the flight line was bustling with activity. More than twenty cargo jets — everything from brand new 767s to forty year old DC-8s — were parked on the tarmac, their compartment doors open, their ramps extended. Loading crews scurried back and forth, using mini-forklifts to unload containers from a line of trucks and put them in the aircraft.
The SAC command center building still stood next to the flight line. A four story, steel frame building of standard 1960s military architecture, it now served as an office complex for the various cargo carriers who operated from Mather. Ken entered the building using his security badge and checked in with the armed security guard at the front desk. From there, he rode the elevator up to the top floor, where Early Bird Cargo's main headquarters occupied eight hundred square feet of office space spread out over three rooms.
After signing in for the night at the main desk, Ken checked in with the flight supervisor, a balding, notoriously lecherous man by the name of Tommy Venturi. Tommy was one of the original pilots for Early Bird but he had been grounded three years before when he developed early-stage emphysema and was medically disqualified from holding a commercial pilot license. He was not really a supervisor, per se, although he liked to refer to himself as such. He had no disciplinary power over the line pilots at all. His role was actually more like a dispatcher. He was responsible for reviewing the cargo to be transported and routing it to the specific planes. He would then put together the air cargo manifests and give the information to the pilots when they checked in. He was perhaps the most easily replaceable asset the company possessed and his pay reflected it. He made less than half of what even the FO's made.
He was sitting behind his desk, his shirt open at the collar and showing the mat of black hair on his chest. He smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke and the cheap aftershave he put on to try to mask the smell of the stale cigarette smoke. "Kenny, my man," he greeted as Ken entered the room.
"What's up, Tommy?" Ken returned, his voice monotone. He, like most of the pilots, did not care too much for Tommy. And he most certainly didn't like being called Kenny.
"Oh, you know," Tommy said. "Just sitting in here, trying to keep this place running."
"I don't know what we'd do without you," Ken said, with only the barest attempt at trying to sound sincere. "Everything running on time out there?"
"For the most part. There's a few snags on the Austin line — a couple of the containers came in weighing more than we have on the master list — but your plane is loading on schedule so far."
"Good to know," Ken said, this time with genuine sincerity. Delays on the ground — either here or in Omaha — could extend his workday by hours without adding any money to his paycheck. Early Bird Cargo, like most aviation providers in the United States, only paid their pilots for the time they were actually behind the controls. "Do you have my manifest?"
Tommy shook his head. "Already gave it to your new FO," he said. "She showed up about twenty minutes ago, all eager to get to work."
"This place will burn that out of her in a few weeks," Ken said.
"Ain't that the truth?" Tommy replied. "Have you met her yet?"
Ken shook his head. "Nope. Charlie told me she's a nice kid though. Didn't have any problems with her during training."
"I'm sure he didn't," Tommy said with a grin. "She seems like she can operate a control stick just fine, if you know what I mean."
"Oh really?"
"Hell yeah," Tommy said. "She ain't much to look at or nothin', but there's something about her..." He shook his head, as if the memory was just too much to take. "You'll see what I mean. I think you're in for a hell of a partnership, my man. You'll probably get your mile-high card stamped a few more times."
Ken didn't dignify that with a response. Instead, he bid Tommy farewell and walked through the door on the other side of the office into the pilot's preparation room. This was the largest room in the office. Lockers lined two of the walls and a large map of the United States was pinned to one of the others. Three cafeteria-style tables sat in the middle of the floor and two desks with computer terminals sat near the far wall. Four different flight crews were in here at the moment, going over their paperwork or working on the computers. Most looked up as Ken entered and gave him a nod of greeting.
Ken spotted his new FO immediately. She was one of only three females in the room and the only person he didn't know. She sat at the far end of one of the tables, by herself, staring intently at the clipboard that contained the air cargo manifest and the rest of their flight paperwork. She did not look up at his entrance.
Ken's first impression of her was not much of an impression at all. Her hair was brunette, pulled back in a ponytail, and her face was plain—neither beautiful nor ugly. She was dressed the same as every other pilot in the room, in a pair of blue jeans and a standard issue Early Bird shirt. It was hard to tell much while she was sitting down, but she was neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short. In short, she looked like a standard, run-of-the-mill, late twenties American woman — the kind of woman you would see and forget ten seconds later.
Why the hell does everyone think she's so sexy? Ken wondered as he looked her over. I don't get it.
He walked over and stood next to her. "Hi there," he said. "You must be Josephine?"
She looked up at him and gave a nervous smile. "That's me," she said. "Although you can call me Jo. Everyone else does."
"Okay," Ken said. "It's nice to meet you, Jo. I'm Ken Patterson. Looks like we'll be flying together for awhile." He held out his right hand to her.
She shook with him. Her grip was firm, not quite as firm as a man's handshake, but certainly in the neighborhood. "It's nice to meet you too, Ken," she said. "I hope you don't mind having a newbie in the cockpit with you."
"As long as you don't mind having on oldie in there with you," he said.
"You're not old," she said.
"I am for this place," he said. "Number four on the seniority list. That makes me ancient around here." He sat down next to her on the bench. "Tommy told me you already grabbed our manifest?"
"Uh ... yeah, I did," she said, suddenly anxious. "Was that okay? I mean, I was here and I just thought I would get a head start on..."
Ken chuckled as he held up his hand, signaling her to stop. "It's okay," she said. "If you get here first, feel free to start working on the paperwork. It ain't like there isn't enough of it to go around."
She gave him the nervous smile again. "Okay, thanks," she said. "I just wanted to make sure I wasn't stepping on your toes or anything."
"You weren't," Ken assured her. "So how are we looking tonight? Just another routine haul?"
It was. They went over the air cargo manifest item by item, eyeballing the contents and weight of each shipping container that would be loaded onto their aircraft. It was all pretty standard stuff for Early Bird. A big chunk of the load consisted of automobile parts going from a factory in Milpitas to a distributor in Lincoln, Nebraska. There was half a ton of fresh flowers that had been flown in from South America and were destined for floral shops all over Nebraska and western Iowa. There were more than sixty laptop computers and thirty desktop computers coming from a bay area manufacturer and going to customers in the Midwest. There was three hundred pounds of perishable pharmaceuticals — which usually meant insulin — coming from a pharmaceutical plant and going to a regional distributor. Last, but certainly not least, there was six hundred pounds of frozen seafood from a San Francisco specialty shop that had been packed in dry ice for the trip to the distribution hub in Omaha.
"Lots of flowers and seafood," Ken said. "At least it'll smell good if we go down."
"There's always that," Jo said with a little laugh.
"Shall we check our weather and start putting our flight plan together?"
"Sounds good," she said.
They went over to one of the computer terminals and sat down next to each other. Ken let Jo control the mouse since he wanted to evaluate her skill on the computer. She called up their weather site without any problem and spent ten minutes gathering current reports, not just on Eppley Field, their destination, but for every major airport they would pass along the way and for the two most likely diversion airfields near Omaha.
"Well, what do you think?" Ken asked. He already knew what he thought — that it had turned out to be a pretty good night for flying after all — but he wanted to see what the newbie's conclusion was.
"Nothing to be concerned with at any of our emergency landing fields along the way," she said. "Reno is clear and cold. Salt Lake City is windy, but nothing an A-300 can't handle. Denver is cloudy, ceiling at nine thousand, with isolated flurries—again, nothing we can't handle. Lincoln is clear as a bell and so is Eppley. The only potential problems I see are with the two diversion airfields—Des Moines and Sioux City. They're both experiencing isolated thunderstorms and the potential of a tornado warning."
"Very good," Ken said with a nod. "So what does that mean?"
"It means if they close Eppley for some reason, our best bet for diversion will be to put down at Lincoln instead."
"In a perfect world," Ken said. "However, Early Bird has an arrangement with Fast Freight Cargo in Des Moines. As long as there are no active thunderstorms in the area, we would still divert there before Lincoln. It would be much less of a pain in the ass that way."
"So we'll keep that as the primary diversion for the flight plan?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, "although with a notation about the weather concerns. Lincoln will go down as the secondary diversion airfield instead of Sioux City since Sioux City is no more or less a pain in the ass than Lincoln."
She nodded. "Sounds good," she said.
It was during this conversation that Ken first began to catch a glimpse of what Charlie, Tommy, and several of the other pilots who had made acquaintance with Josephine were talking about. Her voice was very soft, very feminine, yet not girly or subservient in any way. There was just the slightest hint of a southern accent there — mostly on the short vowels. Ken got the idea that she would have a pretty singing voice. And then there was her face. True, it was your basic plain, unremarkable face — certainly not ugly in any way, but also not a face that would be sought after by a Hollywood movie producer — but at the same time, there was something about it. Her skin was very smooth, very soft looking. And her eyes ... though a fairly ordinary shade of bluish-green, they were striking nonetheless — striking in some way he could not put his finger on.
"Ken?" she asked, those blue-green eyes turning to look at his. "Did you hear me?"
He realized she had spoken to him and he had been so intent on thinking about her voice and her eyes that he hadn't heard what she'd said. What the hell? That was not a typical behavior for him. "I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head a little as if to throw off the effect. "I kind of went to the Bahamas there for a second. What did you say?"
She gave him a nervous little giggle. "That's okay," she said. "We all do that once in a while. I was asking if we should start working on the flight plan, or did you want to go over the weather reports some more?"
"Oh ... right," he said. "I think we're good on the weather. Go ahead and bring up the flight plan program and we'll go over it."
She smiled. Not a nervous smile this time, but a full-fledged smile. It was a very nice one. Just a hint of white teeth beneath it, and her lips ... they were really kind of pouting in way he hadn't noticed before.
He caught himself staring and turned his eyes away from her, putting them on the computer screen instead. She made no comment. She simply exited the weather program and called up the flight plan software in its place.
It only took them about ten minutes to put together a flight plan and then file it. The task was made easy by the fact that the Mather to Eppley flight was something that took place every night using the exact same route as long as there were no weather concerns to cause a change. All Jo had to do was update the minor changes in the diversion field order, put her name and Ken's in as the crew, and then attach a copy of their air cargo manifest.
"All done," Jo said brightly when the plan was electronically sent off.
"Yep," Ken said. He had been looking at her hand while she'd been moving the mouse around the tattered pad. It was a nice looking hand, with dexterous fingers and neatly trimmed nails upon which she'd put red nail polish. He remembered it had been soft when he'd shaken it. I bet that hand would feel nice stroking the side of my face, he found himself thinking. Or maybe my upper arm. She probably has a nice touch, the kind of touch you could really...
He forced his eyes away from her hand, concentrating on the screen instead. Jesus, what's wrong with me tonight?
The urge to stare at her, to ponder the texture and aesthetics of her various body parts faded considerably when they left the ops building and headed out onto the flight line. By the time they made it over to their assigned plane, the whole incident seemed nothing more than a vague memory.
"This one is ours," Ken told her as they reached the parking area for their assigned aircraft. It, like all of Early Bird's planes, was an Airbus A-300, a two-engine jet similar in size and appearance to a Boeing 737. This particular plane was eighteen years old and had spent all but the last three of those years as the property of Wilmington Express — a regional airline that operated out of Minneapolis. Early Bird preferred this make and model of aircraft for two reasons: enough of them were being retired from frontline airline service that they were reasonably cheap to acquire, and they only required two crewmembers to operate, thus saving the cost of employing a flight engineer for each line.
The plane was painted two-tone in white and blue, the white on the top down to the passenger window line and the blue filling in the bottom. The company name was painted in bold red lettering across both sides of the fuselage on the white section. On the tail was the company logo: A happy cartoon falcon taking to the air with a worm in his mouth (apparently no one in the corporate design department realized that falcons don't eat worms). The loading process had been completed but the cargo ramp was still down so Ken and Jo could make a visual inspection of their load. The front hatch was also open, a steel ladder leading up to it.
"Have you flown this one before?" Ken asked Jo.
"No, I mostly did the Austin line during training," she said. "Any quirks?"
"Nothing major," he said. "The cockpit temperature regulation is a little touchy — it seems like you're either too hot or too cold and never just right — and the oil temp on the APU sometimes creeps up a few degrees above optimum for no discernable reason. Other than that, it's a pretty good plane. I've got more than fifteen hundred hours in it."
"Do you like the A-300?" she asked him.
"Yeah, actually I do," he said. "I like it much better than the 727s we used to have. One less engine and one less crewmember to worry about."
"I suppose that makes sense," she said.
For the next thirty minutes they went through the first stage of their pre-flight checklist. They reviewed the cargo diagram the loading chief had filled out to make sure that the weight of the load was evenly distributed. They then walked up the ramp and into the cargo compartment to make sure it was actually loaded that way and securely strapped down. Having the weight uneven or having the load shift in flight was a good way to cause an unscheduled meeting of the aircraft and that large, immovable object known as Mother Earth.
Satisfied that all was as it should be with the cargo, they went back down the ramp and watched as two members of the loading crew closed it and sealed it shut. From there, Ken climbed into the cockpit to start the main pre-flight systems checks while Jo performed an exterior inspection of the aircraft, looking for leaking fluids, low tire pressure, burned out lights, or damage of any kind to anything.
It was only after the main checklist was complete and Ken was ready to start programming the navigation system waypoints that Jo entered the plane. She stowed her flight bag in the cubby near the rear bulkhead and sat down in the right hand seat. It was only two or three minutes before Ken started to become distracted by her again.
He hadn't noticed it before, but her jaw line was nicely rounded. The way it connected with her chin and formed her upper throat ... well ... it was just ... pretty. There was really no other word for it. It was the kind of jaw a man would love to trail kisses down as he worked his way to her neck. As he looked at the jaw in question, he could almost feel the texture of soft skin and hard bone beneath, could almost taste...
"Ken?" she said, just a hint of concern in her voice. "Are you okay?"
He blinked, trying to clear the vision from his had. He realized with a start that his penis was about half erect. What the hell is the matter with me? I've never let myself get distracted like this before — not even when Meghan and I were at the height of our infatuation with each other did I let her distract me in the goddamn cockpit!
"Ken?" she said again, a little more concern this time.
"I'm sorry," he said, embarrassed and more than a little nervous. "My mind keeps trying to wander on me. I'm not usually like this."
Jo didn't answer. She seemed a little distracted herself now. She chewed her bottom lip — a seemingly unconscious nervous gesture. As she did so, Ken noticed her teeth. They were so white and so straight. They were the kind of teeth a man liked to run his tongue along while kissing her, the kind of teeth he liked to feel nipping at his earlobe, at his...
"Oh my God," Jo said, fretting a little.
"What?" Ken said, clearing his head again, realizing his half-erection had graduated to full-fledged hard-on status. Jesus, what is happening here? "What's going on?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said. "Is it okay if I use the bathroom real quick?"
"The bathroom? Now? We usually wait until we're airborne and over ten thousand feet before we power up the vacuum system for the toilet."
"I know," she said, "but this is kind of ... you know ... an emergency." She was blushing, obviously embarrassed.
"Uh ... okay," Ken said. "Let me turn it on." He reached over to a switch labeled INT VAC SYS and flipped it on. Right next to it was another switch labeled POT H2O PRES. He flipped that as well. "Your toilet is hot. I turned on the water too."
"Thanks," she said, quickly standing. She picked up her flight bag and disappeared through the open cockpit door into the service area of what had once been the first class section of the airliner. A moment later, Ken heard the sound of the bathroom door opening and then slamming shut.
As soon as she was gone, the powerful erotic images faded away, leaving only a faint afterglow. Ken didn't realize it, but his consciousness faded out a little bit as well. He did not fall unconscious, and had anyone spoken to him, he would have answered, but since he was alone he only stared at the cockpit panel before him, his brain thinking about nothing in particular.
In the tiny bathroom, Jo was breathing deeply and slowly, trying to calm herself. She knew exactly what was wrong with Ken and exactly what was causing it. Jesus God, she thought desperately. I should have fed myself before I came to work.
Yes, it had been almost twelve hours since she had eaten last, but ordinarily that did not cause problems such as this. No, this crisis was a combination of things, not the least of which was Ken himself. He was obviously a man who was very attuned to his sexuality — a relative rarity for someone his age. There was also the fact that she was marginally attracted to him. It was nothing more than a simple physical attraction — she had always liked tall, brown-haired men with quiet, unassuming good looks — but it was enough to trigger an extra burst of hormones inside of her. Coupled with her hunger and Ken's sensitivity to her allure, the confined space of the cockpit was causing a strong reaction in him. And this was a goddamn aircraft they were about to take off in! For her own safety, she needed to minimize the effect she was having on Ken as much as possible.
Moving quickly, she unbuttoned her Early Bird shirt and stripped it off, dropping it onto the closed toilet lid. Her white t-shirt went next, leaving her standing in nothing more than a plain white underwire bra that supported her moderate-sized breasts. She left the bra on and opened her flight bag. This sort of thing had happened to her before — although never quite to this degree — and, as such, she habitually carried certain supplies to help herself deal with a crisis.
Christ, she thought as she reached into the bag and started digging around. Mom and Dad told me that trying to be a pilot was a bad idea. Why the hell didn't I listen?
From the bag, she removed a plain cotton washcloth, a small bottle of scented body wash, a container of roll-on deodorant, and a small sandwich bag half-full of baking soda. She ran some water over the rag and poured a healthy dollop of body wash onto it. Once she had a good lather worked up she used the cloth to thoroughly cleanse her armpits. She wrung out the cloth, rinsed it, and then got as much soap out of her pits as she could. After patting herself dry with a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, she slathered the roll-on deodorant on about twice as thick as what she normally wore. She then opened the bag of baking soda and pinched some out, applying about a teaspoon into each armpit and smearing it around, so it stuck to the deodorant. It left a pasty, sticky mess but it would hopefully help keep things under control.
In case these measures were not enough — it was hard to be sure with such a combination of factors at work — she decided she had better go to the extreme. She stuffed her t-shirt into her bag and then pulled out another shirt she kept in there. This one was a long-sleeved cotton and polyester blend, extra long and extra tight. She put it on and then tucked it securely into her jeans. She patted a little bit of baking soda into the armpits of her Early Bird shirt and then put that back on. As a final measure, she pulled out her leather flight jacket and covered her torso with that as well. It might get a little warm in the cockpit, but that was better than having the pilot in command zone out on her.
I hope this is enough, she though worriedly as she put everything back into her bag and zipped it up. Please, let it be enough.
Jo reemerged into the cockpit from the service area, a sheepish expression on her face, a leather jacket zipped up tightly on her upper body. She squeezed between the two seats and sat back down.
"Is everything ... uh ... okay?" Ken asked her, still feeling a little dazed. He was not sure what had just happened here. He felt a little like the past ten minutes was a dream he'd just awakened from and could not quite remember the details of. He had the vague memory of looking at Jo's jaw and at her teeth and then having her suddenly need to dash off to the bathroom. He was not sure, exactly, if those two events had anything to do with each other though. What was going on here? Why was he unable to remember a simple sequence of events that had just taken place? Was this the sign of a cerebral hemorrhage or something like that?
"Yeah, sorry," Jo said, her face blushing strongly. "I'm just a little nervous about my first day on my own. It's made my stomach a little upset, I guess. I'm really kind of embarrassed about ... you know ... having to ask you to turn on the vacuum."
He looked down at the INT VAC SYS and the POT H2O PRES switches. They were indeed turned on — quite against standard operating procedure as they caused the APU to rev higher than desired on the ground. He only had the fuzziest recollection of doing that. This made him extremely nervous. Should he really be flying right now?
"Uh ... it's no big deal, Jo," he said, flipping both switches back to the off position. "But listen. Did I just do ... uh ... anything peculiar? I was feeling a little strange a few minutes ago."
She looked at him thoughtfully, as if going over his behavior of the past few minutes. "No," she said at last. "You seemed pretty normal to me. I was the one acting like a nervous Nellie."
"Hmm," he said, still worried, but the sensation, strangely enough, seemed to be fading now. "Well ... keep an eye on me, okay? Something odd just happened."
"Something odd? What do you mean?"
He tried to find a way to put it into words, to explain what had happened, but found it impossible. He could hardly remember now what it was that had been so concerning. Very strange. "Never mind," he said. "Let's just finish up the pre-flight before we get too far off schedule."
"Right," she said.
"But if I start to act ... oddly, don't let me fly."
She swallowed nervously. God only knew what kind of impression he was making on her. She nodded. "Of course," she said. "That's my obligation as first officer, after all."
They finished the pre-flight check. Nothing odd occurred. Ken kept his mind on his work and by the time they made it to the engine start sequence, his only memory of the strange event was a disquieting sensation that he had somehow embarrassed himself in front of his new co-pilot.