Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

9. Twisted

The weeklong Diversity, Sensitivity, and Sexual Harassment class had one-hour lunch breaks. Even though his wife had packed him a lunch, Major Ian Doyle decided to hop in his car and take a drive around the base on his lunch hour. It was October, but still pleasantly in the high seventies and low eighties. Luke Air Force Base, adjoining the city of Glendale, Arizona, benefited from the sunny desert weather. This was one of the key reasons why it had been developed by the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s as one of its main centers for pilot transitional training and operational fighter squadrons. The base boasted “360 flying days a year,” and given the prevailing weather, most of those were VFR-visual flight rules-days.

The class that he was in gave Doyle the creeps. He couldn’t stand to stay in the building during the lunch hour. The greatest irony was that one of the lead civilian contract instructors, an acne-scarred woman in her thirties, was hitting on some of his classmates-both fellow pilots and some of the doctors from the 56th Medical Group-during breaks. She had even leered at Doyle and made some suggestive remarks, though he frequently made a show of twirling his wedding band. The chaplain was right: “Flee from sin!” The last thing he wanted to do was share his lunch hour with a liberal bed-hopper.

Under the Air Force’s new twisted rules on sexual harassment, officers of either sex of equal rank could be propositioned, as well as civilians within four steps of equivalent pay grade, all regardless of their marital status. And those rules only applied to duty assignments within each command. For individuals not assigned within the same command, an airman first class could date a colonel, or his wife, or both, without any repercussions. As near as Doyle could figure out, under the administration’s “New Century Military” guidelines, only children, pets, and livestock were verboten. But even those, he was told, were “now under study, as gray areas” and had just tentatively been given the same “Don’t ask, don’t tell” protection that had previously been afforded to homosexuals. The change of policy made Ian wonder why he was sticking it out in the Air Force, hoping to make lieutenant colonel before his retirement. In recent years, promotions above O-3 had slowed to a snail’s pace as the Air Force contracted in size. Ian had already been passed over for promotion once, and he had his doubts about the next promotion board meeting.

On his drive, Doyle was amazed by what he saw. Luke Air Force Base was becoming a ghost town. His own wing, the 56th Fighter Wing, had just started a rotation to Saudi Arabia, but clearly all of the other “tenant” units at the air base were depopulating while still ostensibly “mission capable” and “in place.” The parking lot at the 56th Maintenance Group (MXG) was nearly empty, as was the lot for the Mission Support Group (MSG). The Base Exchange (BX) lot was also barren, since the BX had sold out of all their grocery inventory the week before-mostly to “blue card” and “gray card” retirees who lived in the surrounding communities. There were just a few would-be patrons seated in their cars. Ian assumed that they waited there in hopes of seeing an approaching delivery truck.

The entire Taiwan and Singapore air force training contingents had quietly decamped two weeks earlier, on the pretense of mobilization orders. There were no ritualistic drunken farewell parties this time. They just quickly got on commercial flights and left a considerable quantity of household goods behind in their haste.

The parking area for the 56th Med was less than half full, mostly with cars belonging to dental patients waiting to get some work done while any dental services were still available. Finally, closer to the hangars and flight line, he drove by the operational group’s buildings. He counted only five cars and SUVs there. “Sweet Jesus,” Doyle muttered to himself. “Where did everyone go?” Doyle had heard that there were desertions, but since he was no longer in a flightline squadron, he hadn’t realized the extent of the problem. He surmised that once the mess halls ran out of their limited food supplies and the MREs kept on hand for short-term contingencies were gone, airmen started deserting in droves. And from what he had heard, when they went, they took a lot of equipment, fuel, and nearly every scrap of food on base with them.

Doyle pulled his car off to the side of the road and pulled out a thermos of cafe con leche and his lunch, two leftover baleadas-Honduran-style burritos-and an apple. He started munching absently, hardly noticing the taste. He was playing the Passion, Grace, & Fire CD with John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia, and Al Di Meola. But since he was so absorbed with worrying about his homeschooled daughter, Linda, he didn’t pay much attention to the music. He turned on the car radio and punched the pre-set for KNST 790 AM. The news announcer was repeating an FAA order that all commercial airline flights in the United States had just been temporarily suspended because there was unrest in so many American cities, and in several instances planes had been hit by gunfire as they made takeoffs and landings.

Ian shouted, “No!” and slammed his fist on the dashboard.

Linda was on her annual six-week-long Grandmom and Grandpop trip, staying with Ian’s parents in Plymouth, Michigan, an upscale suburb of Detroit. Linda was eleven years old and this was the first year that she had made the trip alone, escorted on the flight by an airline stewardess. After making the trip for several years in a row, accompanying their daughter, Blanca decided to stay home and relax and do some oil painting and pastels. “She’s old enough to fly up there herself,” Blanca had told Ian. “There’s no connecting flight. It’s a direct shot from Phoenix Sky Harbor to Detroit.”

When class was over, Ian drove home to Buckeye, a thirty-five-minute commute from the base. It was originally a farming town, but it had gradually become a commuter bedroom and retirement community. The housing developments were an odd mix of 1950s and 1960s one-story houses with composition roofs, interspersed with neo-southwestern developments of earth-tone stucco three-thousand-square-foot McMansions built in the 1990s and in the decade of the aughts, just after the turn of the century. Interspersed between these developments, there were still many fields, mostly cultivated with cotton and alfalfa. There were also a couple of large dairy farms that produced milk and cream for Glendale and Phoenix.

The rent in Buckeye was just half what it would have been in Glendale. They also had benefited from a lower crime rate and much less smog. Ian had picked their house because it had an extra deep garage that had room for his hobby airplane, a Laron Star Streak, which was normally kept in its trailer with the wings removed.

The night before, Ian had had a lengthy discussion with Blanca. They were horribly worried about their daughter.

“I think that on Saturday I should fly up to Detroit personally to get her.”

“But, Ian, all of the flights are cancelled.”

“No, I mean a cross-country, in a D-model Viper. They’re two-seaters. I can zip up there to get her and be back all in a day-that is, if my dad drives her down to meet me at the airport.”

Blanca frowned and shook her head, but Ian continued in rapid fire: “Wayne County Airport is too big and it’s close to Toledo, so that’s too risky. The Canton-Plymouth airport is only two miles out of town, but it’s only a 2,500-foot strip. I’m sure you remember, an F-16 officially needs 8,000 feet, but it’s actually under 4,000 in a pinch. I suppose that’s a little hard on the brakes. Like my F-16 Transition instructor used to say: ‘If it’s a short strip, then pop the ’chute and stand on those brakes, boy!’ So I checked on the Internet last night: the Detroit Lakes-Wething strip is 4,500 feet. I could do that easily in good weather.”

“Are you crazy, Ian? You’ve got sixteen years in. Just four years to go until you qualify for retirement. You steal a plane-”

“Borrow a plane,” Ian interrupted.

“-you’ll get court-martialed.”

“I’ll just log it as a cross-country,” Ian argued.

“You put a civilian passenger in a fighter, it’s a court-martial offense. You file a false flight plan, its at least an Article 15, maybe a court-martial. You make an unauthorized landing on a civilian strip of insufficient length, also probably a court-martial. Some busybody writes down the tail number with an ‘LF’ prefix, and the finger is pointing right at you. No way! You cannot play ‘You Bet Your Bars’ when you’ve got sixteen years in. Es imposible.” After a pause she added, “That’s muy loco!”

Doyle meekly dipped his head to his chest. He said, “Look, I also thought about flying the Star Streak up there, but that would take at least six hops each way: there’s only two seats. It would be a six-day round trip for one of us. I can’t get that much leave on short notice.”

“I agree, the Star Streak is out. With that many hops, I don’t know where for sure you’d get avgas. You could get stranded in the middle of nowhere with no fuel.”

Blanca went on: “We just have to wait until the riots die down in Detroit, and wait until they start up the commercial flights again, or you take a couple of days leave, and one of us-or maybe both-drives up there and back.”

Ian frowned. “Do you know how many cities we’d have to drive through to get to Plymouth? The rioting is too unpredictable. We’d have to zigzag up there. And how will we get gas to get that far and back?”

Blanca hugged him, and said, “Look, this is just a temporary thing. Your parents, they live in a very safe neighborhood. The riots and lootings, they are just in Detroit, not any further. We wait until things calm down. If need be, we dip into our savings and we pay a charter pilot from one of the General-A strips in Michigan to fly her down here. If things keep going like they’re going, the money will be nada in another month, so we might as well spend it. Let’s just wait a few days. You can’t take any leave until after you are done with your fruta class, anyway.”

“Okay. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and the stupid course ends on Friday. But here’s another idea: How about we rent a Cessna 172 or maybe a Beech Bonanza from the Glendale airport? We fly out at oh-dark-early on Saturday, we take turns on the yoke, with the other one napping, and in about four hops we fly straight to the Canton-Plymouth airport. Then we do a four- or five-hour RON and we get back here either late Sunday or early Monday. After all, I still have my civilian ticket. Your ASEL just lapsed, but who’ll be looking if we rent the plane in my name?”

Blanca smiled. “With El Infierno, renting a plane will be expensive, but hey, renting a General Aviation plane’s the perfect solution. In the morning I’ll call around and find a plane. I’ll work out all the refueling stops at little country airports-you know, private FBOs-I can call ahead or do e-mails and make sure which ones still got avgas to sell. This can work, Ian! We’ll get Linda back home.”

Major Doyle’s unit was one of the last operational units in the active component of the U.S. Air Force still equipped with F-16s. The 56th Fighter Wing had just begun a rotation to Saudi in its first overseas deployment since its TO&E began the transition from a tactical training wing to a tactical fighter wing two years before. This change was necessitated by the simultaneous downsizing of the Air Force overall, the ramping-down of the F-16 fleet, and the emergence of the pitifully few “re-scoped” F-22 squadrons. Three years earlier, for political reasons, F-22 transition training had been shifted from Luke AFB to Shaw AFB in South Carolina. As it was explained to Doyle, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee was a third-term South Carolina Democrat. Some last-minute petitions before Congress saved the 56th from extinction. It would go back to being equipped with all F-16s, with nearly all of them in operational squadrons. But the Armed Services Committee chairman made it clear: “Once F-16s are obsolete, so will be the whole 56th and its support groups.”

Doyle came on board just a few months into the shift from pilot training to an operational wing. In the first staff weenie position of his career, Doyle was assigned as the wing maintenance officer. In recent weeks his duties necessitated spending most of his time doing paperwork at either the 56th Operations Group (OG) or the MXG hangars. It all seemed rather pointless, since all but a few members of his own wing were in Saudi. He expended many hours writing maintenance training plans and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for notional units that would be needed for a theater-wide war contingency. He realized that his unit would never get the funding for F-22 Raptors and that they were indeed doomed to eventual deactivation. His work seemed absolutely pointless.

Doyle had orders to catch up with the wing in Saudi in late November, but he dreaded doing the rotation. It would take him away from Blanca and Linda. With the current economic meltdown, he worried about their safety in his absence. Several times Ian thought out loud, “What if things get even worse?”

On one of his class breaks, Doyle used his cell phone to call one of the civilian technicians at the 56th OG headquarters who always had his finger on the pulse of the organization. The news startled Doyle. “The chief of staff of the Air Force is working up contingency plans for the emergency redeployment of almost all of the close-air-support aircraft in the Air Force inventory back to the States. Some know-nothing at the White House must have dreamed this one up! Rumor has it that our whole Wing will deploy to Hurlburt Field.”

“Florida? What for?”

“Get this: ‘riot control and looting suppression.’ They want to be able to use close-air-support planes.”

Doyle was flabbergasted. “What kinda bad weed they been smokin’ at the White House? Use C-A-S planes against rioters? The collateral damage would be hideous!”

Doyle paid little attention to what was presented in the class for the rest of the day. His mind was racing.

When he got home, he found Blanca in tears. She ran to Ian’s arms, sobbing. “Commercial flights are all still grounded. I spent the whole day on the expletivo phone and the expletivo Internet. I tried and tried to find a rental plane. I called as far away as Chandler, Laveen, Sun City. No go. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is doing any more rentals. They say too many planes are getting stolen on ‘no-return’ flights. One of the managers said to me that they’re getting told, like, ‘You can keep my security deposit, but you have to send somebody to pick the plane up, in Montana.’”

“How many planes are getting stolen?”

“Before they cut off the rentals, like 80 percent. Some charter pilots were also getting hijacked, so they also stopped doing any charters, too. So then I started calling FBOs and the general aviation airports up in Michigan. It’s the same thing up there. I can’t find a charter outfit to fly her down, not for any sum of money. What are we going to do?”

Ian thought for a moment, then said, “Don’t worry. My dad has several guns. He can handle any rioters that come down their block.”

On Friday, just after Ian got home from his class, they got a call from one of his parents’ neighbors in Plymouth, Michigan. Though she lived just across the street from the house, she was calling from Iowa. Sobbing, she said to Doyle, “Your dad shot two of the gang that were trying to kick in my front door. He saved my life, Ian. I am so thankful.” There was a long pause, and then she went on, “I don’t know how to say this, Ian. After your dad started shooting, they got really mad, and they surrounded your dad’s house and used those Molotov things, and they burned it down-right down to the basement. Nobody got out of the house.” She sobbed again, and then said, “Your daughter was in there. I’m so, so sorry!”

The next few days were very difficult for the Doyles. Ian took two days of emergency leave. Though they were grieving deeply, they still had current events on their minds. Over the weekend, the television news showed more and more American cities descending into chaos.