Unauthorized, in a text.
“Has anything hit the media?” and ART links me to a news live feed I’m seeing in my lenses as Dick opens the door, the helicopter shaking as he climbs back in.
While Mason Dixon broadcasts his latest breaking news in front of a town house with the front door ajar, police everywhere . . .
“. . . Right here,” he points behind him in the video playing in my lenses, “that’s where this was going on, folks. An entire network of criminal activity involving illegal firearms, homemade bombs, all right here under our noses at the Dog Beach Marina and Villas . . .”
Dick rearranges his blanket, refilling his tea, and I don’t mention what I’m watching in my SPIES. Maybe he already knows that Jack Kracker’s short-term rental has been discovered, the pearl-white Jeep Cherokee inside the garage.
“What happens to Mom, Dad, to everyone?” I ask. “If Chase Place and everything about it ends up all over the news, then what?”
“I wish I had a good answer for you,” Dick says.
“At least that’s an honest one,” and I almost add for once.
“We’re less than 30 out,” he hands me the tea again, his hand warm as it brushes mine.
We sit quietly for a few minutes, sharing a tea, and I think of what Carme’s always saying. Now or never. I ask Dick what he was doing with the Secret Service and other undercover agents in the NASA hangar 5 days ago.
“Why was Dad there?” I continue before Dick can answer or not. “When I was climbing up to the top of the hangar, I could see you below with Dad and your posse tracking stuff with signal sniffers, huddled around computer displays. At the time, I thought you were searching for Carme.”
I assumed Dick had assembled his troops to hunt her down, and had Dad helping somehow.
“But now I know that can’t be true since obviously she’s working with you,” I go on. “There’s no posse after her, and Dad wouldn’t go along with that anyway. You knew where she was and have all along, yet when you spotted me climbing up to the roof, you went after me like a pack of dogs. Why?”
“Why might I not have wanted you there?” Dick says. “Beside the fact we weren’t expecting you.”
“I had to get inside the radome to reset the dish antenna if we were to restore communication with the Space Station . . .”
“Yes, yes, yes. But your showing up introduced an unanticipated risk . . . Let’s just say, a threat that was completely out of left field when suddenly there you were climbing up to the roof.”
“You knew where Carme was hiding out and didn’t want me to find her,” I can only figure.
“Plain and simple, the two of you can’t be seen together,” Dick reminds me of what’s most painful. “Your power comes from working together while you’re not. That’s all you need to know about it.”
I’m feeling my tea too much to argue, to tell him how unmanageable everything is, and I weigh my options. I can brave the bathroom here. Or I can wait until we land with more g-forces than my bladder would appreciate, and I decide to brave the elements.
“My turn,” I announce, and as I walk away from the helicopter, I think of the irony if I trip and hurt myself, what a way to scrub my first mission.
“The one thing I didn’t bring today was a flashlight,” I remark to ART as I step around shrouded wooden crates, careful of tie-downs and rings in the metal flooring.
“You have a flashlight app on your phone,” he says in my earpiece.
Duh, it seems I’m quickly forgetting how to do the smallest thing on my own. Lighting my way, I find the bathroom, a sink, a toilet, and a roll of toilet paper as promised. Except there’s no running water, and flushing doesn’t seem to be an option. Fortunately, someone was thoughtful enough to leave a few packets of hand sanitizers, and I wonder if it was Dick.
Back in the helicopter seat, I tuck my blanket around me, and ART must have taken my lecture to heart. He’s acting extra nice, paying attention, being thoughtful as we begin making our approach into Cape Canaveral. He shows me in my lenses what the pilots are seeing as we swoop over a tawny strip of beach, the white froth of waves breaking on the sand.
We turn on final for KXMR, the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station skid strip, a single runway with sandy dirt on all sides, and numerous launch pads. The moving map display shows me the runway’s configuration, letting me know its length, the elevation, our speed and the latest weather. Then the C-17’s wheels touch down, engines screaming as we brake to a quick stop that presses us hard against our seats.
As loud as it is, we give up talking until we’re being marshalled into our parking place on the ramp. What we do next strikes me as another one of Mom’s quirky conundrums. We climb out of a helicopter so we can climb out of a plane, neither of them moving. Yet all of us are at 107,826 kilometers per hour (67,000 mph) as the Earth orbits the sun at a sizzling clip.
00:00:00:00:0
“YOU DO realize we just landed without our seat belts on,” I say to Dick as we reclaim our baggage on the floor outside the helicopter.
“I guess we could have buckled up in there,” he considers.
“I’m not sure how much good that would have done had we gone off-nominal,” and all kidding aside, I don’t know the answer.
Based on ART’s lack of response in my SPIES or my earpiece, I don’t think he knows either. It’s another one of those brainteasers like Mom used to fire at Carme and me all the time. If a mosquito is buzzing around inside a car going 128 kilometers per hour (80 mph), then what is the mosquito’s airspeed?
Or in this case, if Dick and Calli are sitting inside a helicopter that’s cargo inside a transporter, what happens in a crash, seat belt or not? Are we a helicopter crash? Are we a helicopter and a plane crash or only the latter? I don’t know why such morbid preoccupations are invading my thoughts.
But I suspect it’s for the simple fact that any test pilot worth his or her salt knows that the next mission could be the last. People like me aren’t needed unless nobody’s really sure how something will work until it’s driven or flown for real. Deploying Ranger the PONG for the first time is a good example because we hadn’t factored owls into the equation, and we should have.