AMERICA ONE (9 page)

Two days later, they had an altercation with a few men in a bar in the middle of Nebraskan nowhere; they did win the fight, but spent a night in the local jail sobering up. The next morning they paid the judge $500 each for the fine and left town. They entered Colorado and headed southwest for Denver, and the mountains.

Jonesy grew quiet as they neared Denver and VIN found out from the older man, that his parents lived just west of Denver in a little village called Idaho Springs.

“When was the last time you saw your folks?” asked VIN, driving within the speed limit after passing three patrol cars going the other way within the last hour.

“About ten years ago. My dad never forgave me for being thrown out of the only institution he called heaven. He told me to never come back, but they are still alive and maybe he has softened a bit, like me.”

“I doubt that very much,” added VIN smiling.

A few miles out of Idaho Springs, the Audi had to negotiate a decent but dirty road for the first time in its life. The driveway up to the log home where Jonesy’s parents lived ever since his father had retired decades earlier was quite long; VIN drove carefully and stopped in front of a small, cozy looking house. A very old man sat on a rocker on the porch, and an old lady opened an outer door to peer at unexpected visitors coming up their driveway.

She saw the lanky blond person climb out of the fancy car’s passenger door and shouted with excitement, slowly hobbling down the porch stairs to greet her son. The old man stayed where he was.

It took a few minutes of quiet hugging and tears before the lady let go of her son. VIN, with nothing better to do walked up to the old man and introduced himself.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jones, my name is Victor Isaac Noble, most people in the Marine Corps called me VIN for short,” he said from below the stairs.

“You walk funny, son. You got a leg problem?”

“Yes, sir, an IED blew my legs off just outside Baghdad a few months ago.”

“Sorry to hear that, son. So your new job is driver of a silver airplane without wings, and driving my useless excuse for a son around?”

“You could say that, sir, and I think you are correct on one part of what you said.”

“What was that, boy?” the old man asked.

“Your ‘useless excuse for a son’ is pretty correct, sir. I haven’t found anything he is good at since I met him,” VIN replied, straight faced.

“At least somebody agrees with me around here,” declared the old man, not moving. “Come sit down. Take the other rocker, and tell me how you lost your legs. It will help me ignore that son of mine for a little while longer.”

While the two men talked on the porch, Jonesy was herded by his mother into the house.

An hour later she came out with two cold beers and two plates of food.

“So, you say you think those guys building the IEDs were Iranians?” the old man asked, accepting his plate and a bottle of beer. He nodded his thanks to his wife, and VIN verbally thanked her. VIN had already noted that both males in the family were so much alike that his travelling companion was nothing more than a wilder chip off the old block, just a quarter of a century younger.

VIN got to the end of his story and began to eat. It wasn’t long before a new question was asked of him.

“So why the hell did you pick my son as a travelling partner? I certainly wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t pick him, sir, he picked me. And, so far, in-between the hangovers—and I have never drunk so much in my life—we seem to get along.”

“I’m sure, like a snake and a mongoose. I’ve just got to figure out which is the snake and which is the mongoose.”

After a few minutes they were joined by the other two. VIN gave up his chair to the lady, and both the travelers sat on the top step of the nearly dark porch. The light was switched on as Jonesy’s mother got up to see to her food; silence reigned for most of the meal.

“So, son, have you been thrown out of any more institutions lately?” asked his father simply. “I see you haven’t been put into one that you couldn’t get out of. You must be behaving yourself.”

“Joseph, leave your son alone. He is old enough to look after himself,” admonished the mother.

“Oh, really!” was the answer she received. There were a few minutes of silence.

“Done any flying lately then, Mr. John Jones?” the old man asked.

“Just sold a crop duster, dad. I spent the last year in honest employment killing the crap in other people’s fields. Pretty enjoyable flying, I must say.”

“Well at least you still know how to fly. I suppose you already knew how to fly before you were sixteen, the amount of crap you gave your mother and me in every base we ever lived in.”

“You could say that, dad.” I didn’t tell you the time the pilot of a small Cessna had a heart attack while he was flying me back into Dyess, did I?”

“Was that the time they found you in Italy and brought you back via the base in Louisiana? The pilot was found dead at the controls. You were fourteen I think, and, I was still at Dyess in Texas?”

“That’s right dad, we had just taken off from a base—I can’t remember its name—in this old Cessna 210 spotter aircraft. It was just him and me, and he just got her up to flight altitude and onto auto pilot when he keeled over the controls; I checked for a pulse. We were full of parcels and sacks of letters. I was sitting in the right rear seat and couldn’t see much inside the aircraft because it was full to the roof. Not heavy stuff, just a load of mail.”

“He was already dead?” his father asked.

“Felt like it to me.” I couldn’t find a pulse, so since the aircraft was heading towards Dyess, I left it alone. The flight was about three hours, I guess, and I moved the parcels and into the front right seat to monitor the controls and do the radio work. Nobody seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary when I got into the pattern at Dyess after going back to manual flight. I simply completed the pattern while the runway lights came on, turned on the inner light, read the instructional booklet on landing instructions that was taped on the roof above my head; then I got the engine sounding right, riched up the fuel flow, got the undercarriage down, landed, and taxied to where they told me. It was all quite simple, except that I think I got the propeller pitch out a little as she struggled to taxi. I placed the pilot into a straight up sitting position, put his stiff hands back on the controls, put the parcels back and climbed into the rear seat.”

“Really,” replied the old man, “good thinking. The medical captain told me that he couldn’t understand how the pilot had landed the aircraft, since his body was already cold. And you telling them that it was very cold up-there…bull crap. How many hours did it take me to convince the base commander that you didn’t murder the poor pilot! That incident cost me at least another year before the commander left, and I was finally promoted to major.”

“Why would I want to murder the man flying me? Didn’t these officers have any brains?” asked Jonesy.

“After a while I thought the same. Some of these men were purely there to get through their time and then retire. But that was just one out of dozens of problems you caused me. At least you are still alive, and it seems not an embarrassment to your family. I’m off to bed.” And he got up and left the porch.

His mother took the plates and returned a few minutes later with a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels and three glasses. “At times like this I often sit out here and have a drink or two. Want one?” Both men nodded, and she poured three Texas-size amounts into each glass and handed them out.

Jonesy relaxed more once his father had gone to bed. It was chilly outside but the liquid kept them warm.

“He always followed your Air Force career,” his mother began. “He has a whole scrapbook of all the write ups in any civilian newspapers or Air Force publications. His best cutting was when you brought that C-17 in with no engines on a dirt airfield in California; just outside Edwards, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, that one. That was San Luis Obispo airport, not a dirt field,” Jonesy replied as if it was a drive to the supermarket. “I was catching a lift from Hawaii back to Edwards and was a couple of hours out when I heard a change in rhythm in left-wing jet engine number one. I was sleeping on a row of seats that was pretty close to the engine. It sounded like a sort of fuel starvation. The jet seemed to want for fuel, so I headed up to the cockpit to tell the pilot. He was a youngster, not much younger than the kid here, about twenty-five. He was the co-pilot in the right seat, the left seat was full with a snoring flight commander, and the kid told me to mind my own business. Suddenly the engines went dead, the autopilot, or the kid did something weird, and the snoring pilot and I both hit the instrument panel hard. I heard the whack of his head on the instruments and then blood ran down my face and onto the floor I was kneeling on. Suddenly this stupid kid of a pilot starts screaming at the top of his lungs and wakes up the hundred-odd troops in the cargo hold. A couple arrived and I ordered them to get the stupid kid and the unconscious captain out of the cockpit. One of the guys knew me and got the bodies out of my way. I jumped into the left seat and took over the controls. We were losing height and going into a dive. I pulled her out and figured out that, for some dumb reason, one engine was still operating but the other three were dead. The aircraft was pretty heavy with a company of men and equipment. There seemed to be a fuel problem to the three dead engines, and I tried everything to get them fired up again, to no avail. The fourth engine was getting hot, so I calmed her down. One engine couldn’t keep the heavy aircraft airborne so I reduced power enough to keep the engine at normal to high operating temperatures, and this reduced our descent down to a glide of about 150 feet a minute.”

“Could you make Edwards with one engine?” asked his mother.

“No way! If I increased power she could fly straight and level, but the one engine would overheat pretty quickly at maximum thrust. I had the Charlie-17 descending through 11,000 feet and everything still worked, the engine was also powering up the electronics and, I hoped, the undercarriage when I needed it. I turned off everything unnecessary and asked if anybody was a pilot. Apart from the kid, who seemed upset and was tied to a seat by some of the guys, I was the only one. The guy who knew me was security, ex-marine I think, and I got him in the right seat to check maps for a possible landing site. We were still over 195 miles from the coast and descending. Our forward speed was about 200 knots and I needed every foot of altitude to get her over an airport somewhere. The closest airport to our route, as I said, was San Luis Obispo. We were north of the usual route due to passing around a thunderstorm an hour or so earlier. The civilian runway was long enough to get the Charlie-17 down as long as the undercarriage and brakes worked. I did my numbers and deduced that the aircraft would have 900 feet of height once we went in, so I called up Edwards, who called up the civilian airport; and we headed there. They had plenty of warning, cleared the airspace for me and got ready. I would only have one chance, and if the undercarriage went down I would put her down on the asphalt. If it didn’t, I would use the grass on the side of the runway. I waited until we were at 1,200 feet altitude and half a mile out when I tried the wheels. I pushed full thrust on the engine, which I hoped fed maximum power into the undercarriage system. They went down. I trimmed her out for landing, told everybody to buckle down, and went in for a perfect landing with the one engine on full thrust. One part I had not thought of was that I only had reverse thrust to help brake on one engine. It wasn’t much help, and I stood on the brakes the last half of the runway and left beautiful black tire marks for a couple hundred yards. Only three tires gave out and the aircraft stopped with a foot or two of asphalt to spare. It wasn’t a very long runway, and I’m sure I touched her wheels down within inches of the beginning of the blacktop. Nothing really much to brag about, mother. I was just doing my job.”

“And those soldiers’ lives you saved?” she retorted.

“Yeah. A couple of the guys came and said thanks before they disembarked. Nobody at Edwards thought I had done anything fancy, and I never heard anything more. That was a long time ago.”

“What was the problem with the engines?” VIN asked.

“The Air Force never gives out that information, but I think it was fuel starvation. I don’t know why only three of the engines and not four, but I would bet something clogged up three of the four fuel lines.”

It was time for bed.

After an early breakfast, and the re-appearance of the old man, returning from a long walk, they readied to leave.

“If you are passing through Idaho Springs, son, I think it’s decent for you to visit your mother. I’ll do my best to put up with your stay. Kid, try and keep my boy out of trouble. That gene went missing when the guy was born!” shouted the old man over the din of the exhausts as he was warming up the engine and about to say their goodbyes. Jonesy had certainly made his mother happy, and his father seemed to have warmed to his son, to at least one percent of a perfect hundred.

All the way through the remainder of Colorado, not a word was spoken by either man. The Bang & Olufsen speakers blared out 80s music from the satellite radio system, while Jonesy sat deep in thought. VIN realized that his partner had never once asked to drive his car. He could put a damaged C-17 down on a short runway, but had no interest in driving a car which very few had ever had the chance to get behind the wheel.

He slowly forgot about the rest of the world as the road began to snake through tight mountain passes, and he enjoyed putting the tires through their paces.

A week after leaving the East Coast they reached the end of I-80, in the middle of nowhere, many miles south of Salt Lake City. The car was stopped, the engine was turned off and both men just sat there in silence.

After about five minutes, VIN realized that it had been four hours since breakfast at Idaho Springs, and his stomach needed some sustenance or victuals. He had heard the weird names the westerners called food in this area.