Richard Authier Lee

1-Return

He recalled Leitrim only as a weathered gray whistle stop sitting hard by the Atlantic, north of Portland and south of God knows what. There was a Twilight Zone aura to that little town, nestled in the crook of a coastal inlet where the broad Penobscot Bay spilled into the North Atlantic. It might have been another Maine summer vacation spot, like the surrounding coastline. Lobster shack restaurants, fishing boats for hire, campgrounds, mini-golf courses and antique shops. But Leitrim? What the hell happened here? A few boarded up old mill buildings hugged the sea, tipped and sagging. Their battered docks looked ready to slip into the surf with the next good storm.

The road broke inland and uphill and the change in altitude allowed him to make out the shoreline ahead where Owl’s Head jutted out into the Bay. He took his feet off the gas and rested them against the firewall, letting Drive Pilot take control of the Mercedes. He was cresting hills fast enough to feel the suspension expand under a fraction of a negative G. He let go of the gearshift and slipped his thumb under his seatbelt, as he had then. The ride stiffened, the speed eased up and the car’s auto drive took over. He closed his eyes and let the sound of the air rushing in the window wash over and relax him.

It had not that long ago. A year or so. There had been no moon, just a deep black star field and sea as black as the sky in all directions. The autopilot and instruments rocked and skidded as guidance adjusted his speed and heading. Until the target lock came. That night in the aircraft he felt the pitch steepen and the hard snap of a precise one-hundred-eighty-degree roll.

Steve Thayer called out from the rear seat. “System engaged.”

He had concentrated on the instruments, hands off the stick and throttle as they had trained him. The aircraft held to the prescribed fifty-five-degree climb, its weird hybrid engines heaving impressive thrust, pressing him back into his seat, the altimeter whirring past eighty thousand feet—fifteen miles high. The Pod lights flared a brilliant magenta, the cockpit dimmed and he felt his head swim. He struggled to look out over the nose for visual confirmation. They said the Bolt would spear the night with a blue-red needle like St. Elmo’s fire.

and

the

stars

seemed

close

enough

to

touch —

“Jesus,” Thayer hollered over the comm. “Jesus, what a flare!”

Michael Babcock blinked and lunged for the wheel. He disengaged the auto drive system with a flash of his fingers and instinctively covered the brake with his right foot. The car took the next turn too hard and skidded on gravel on the shoulder before he wrestled back control.

That night, the Bolt struck quick and hard, unloading on a target which in an instant became a one-hundred-million-dollar mass of melted wire and wax tumbling hundreds of miles overhead, to later deorbit and disassemble on reentry.

That night, he became the second pilot in history to shoot a satellite out of orbit from a fighter aircraft. Both times were from an F-15. The first, in the 1980’s, used a missile. He had done it with an energy weapon borne aloft by an new generation of engines that were smaller, lighter, and much more powerful. The weapon then re-energized in flight and could strike targets over and over again, so long as the black-ops engines had fuel and just a sip of air.

The greatest night of his life had also became the end of his military flight career. Confused, trembling and disoriented, in his post flight physical, he freaked out the flight physician and enraged Project Manager Teal. Doc wanted to understand what was happening. Decker Teal couldn’t ship him out fast enough.

He didn’t remember much for a while after that, through days of vomiting, disorientation and hallucinations. He thought he was back home in Santa Cruz, then at the San Diego Naval Air Station. He woke up days later in the Balboa Naval Hospital, looking up into the face of a worried Navy Nurse. He didn’t have a clue what was happening, but he knew if his face put that sort of fear into the eyes of a Navy Nurse, it wasn’t good. Over the next few weeks he had rallied, began walking and sat through an endless series of debriefings, some medical, some technical. Some just seemed designed to harrass and confuse him. It was clear they wanted to label this a seizure brought on by his own age and mental and physical decline and not the flight test, the aircraft, or God Forbid their black box weapon system bolted to the airframe.

What the hell did they expect him to say? It was pretty clear. Throw yourself under the bus and they’ll put you on a downhill glide from disability to discharge. Your career flying twenty million dollar jets was now in the rear view mirror. He didn’t give a shit about a nice severance package, if it meant he couldn’t fly. The game with the medical people was difficult at first when he was still foggy-headed, but as time passed he thought more clearly and became wise to how he needed to play the game. Lots of smiles. Feelin’ good. When can I go home?

The High Ground people were harder to bullshit. “What was the last thing you recall before blacking out?”

“I told you, I never blacked out.”

“Well, what would you call it?”

“It felt like your goddamn pod tazed me.”

“Not possible. You were sitting in a grounded metal bathtub surrounding the cockpit.”

“Well something didn’t work right, then, didn’t it?”

“It’s never you cocky pilots when something screws up, is it Babcock? If it were, would you admit it.”

“Yes, yes”Of course, I would.”

“No, no you wouldn’t.”

“OK, maybe not, but no way I want somebody else to get fried like I did. I wouldn’t risk another pilot’s life.”

“Just your own.”

“Hell, yeah.”

“You’re a lunatic.”

“I prefer Captain Lunatic, with people I don’t know.”

When he was finally discharged, he kicked around the High Ground Technologies home office in San Diego on deadhead desk assignments for a few months and eventually the final conclusion came down. Dehydration and fatigue. They floated the idea of a panic attack and alluded to serious underlying mental illness for a couple of weeks just to get his full attention before settling on the less damning diagnosis. They had made their point. If he were ever to fly again, he would settle for dehydration and fatigue pinned to this one and otherwise keep his damned mouth shut. If he blew up this project they had enough medical and psych data to dynamite his career.

Except it was complete bullshit. Then they fired him. He could still fly, but not for them and probably not for any other defense contractor or military entity. Checkmate.

When Johnston offered him the museum gig it had been a gift from heaven. He had landed a couple of assignments in Texas flying old War birds for air shows and became known as a solid P-51 pilot, the hottest fighter of World War II. It wasn’t the F-18 or F-15s he had been flying, but it was their 1940’s equivalent. The P-51 was a massive piston engine with wings attached and when they added wing tanks to them they could reach Berlin from England had broken the German dominance of the skies over Europe. They had nothing that could hold a candle to its climb rate, ceiling, airspeed, and especially its range. When the 51’s appeared in the skies over Berlin, the Luftwaffe leadership looked up overhead and knew they were done.

But a Spit? The British Supermarine Spitfire was even more so aircraft royalty. It had been built first as a civilian racing plane which, when retooled for combat, could stiff-arm the bombers and fighter escorts the German’s sent to bludgeon the British into submission. Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes in the hands of RAF pilots won the Battle of Britain. The aircraft wasn’t quite the equal of the P-51, yet it was its progenitor. The P51 flew the same Rolls Royce Merlin engine and, because of the punishing losses during the Battle of Britain, there were far fewer Spits still in existence, much less still in flying trim. Despite the his retirement dreams with Phoebe and Marie, and despite his emotional baggage, he couldn’t turn down this one last chance to fly one.

It had been more than a year since he had seen Maine and, though it looked different from the ground, the curve of the coastline felt familiar. At the turnoff for the Eagle’s Head Air Museum, he pulled over, marked it as a point of interest on his GPS and noted time and mileage. In an F-15 the trip upriver to Leitrim took no time at all, but he guessed it might be a ten to twenty-minute drive that hugged the broad, winding mouth of the Penobscot River. The bay was twenty-five miles across from Eagle’s Head to Southwest Harbor, with breathtaking little islands and inlets and heavily wooded coastline. Here, the river slipped into the North Atlantic, its cool fresh water riding up and over the colder, denser seawater. Sea birds sailed indigo sky, spiraling higher on updrafts from the warm land before banking and drifting for miles out over the sea.

Meanwhile, the GPS had no clue to finding Leitrim. He had to guide in on Rockland and find his way from there on memory. The shoreline ahead loomed where Owl’s Head jutted out into the Bay. Northwest of there Leitrim was a splinter-dry sepia tone whistle stop forgotten by time. Battered old mill buildings close to the sea were long boarded up. There were a couple of old fishing piers still in operation of sorts, with a wholesale seafood business that looked like it had also seen better days.

The road was lined with dense woods and few buildings or businesses. It broke through into an expansive marshland that told him he was close. Milligan’s General Store was ahead, near the middle of the one-stop-sign business district. Across the dusty intersection was a hardware store, a marina and a feed and grain business. They sold aluminum water troughs, chain-ink fence and off-brand gasoline out front in their pot-holed parking lot. There were no ‘Welcome to Leitrim’ signs, no ‘Rotary Club Meets Here’ medallions. There was barely a town. Babcock turned into the marina parking lot and up to the pumps.

A handful of small cottages dotted the road up the hill past fields of wildflowers and tall grass. And at the very top of the ridge line—the old mansion was still there.