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.