Unnatural Exposure

Chapter Fourteen

The flatbed truck was waiting when we arrived, the vinyl-shrouded camper on top of it gleaming an eerie translucent blue beneath the stars and moon and still hooked to a pickup truck. We were parking nearby on a dirt road at the edge of a field when a huge plane passed alarmingly low overhead, its roar louder than a commercial jet.

'What the hell?' Marino exclaimed, opening the door of the ranger's Jeep.

'I think that's our ride to Utah,' Lucy said from the back, where she and I were sitting. The ranger was staring up through his windshield, incredulous, as if the rapture had come. 'Holy shit. Oh my God. We're being invaded!'

A HMMWV came down first, wrapped in corrugated cardboard, a heavy wooden platform underneath. It sounded like an explosion when it landed on the hard-packed dead grass of the field and was dragged by parachutes caught in the wind. Then green nylon wilted over the multiwheeled vehicle, and more rucksacks blossomed in the heavens as more cargo drifted down and tumbled to the ground. Paratroopers followed, oscillating two or three times before landing nimbly on their feet and running out of their harnesses. They gathered up billowing nylon as the sound of their C-17 receded beyond the moon.

The Air Force's Combat Control Team out of Charleston, South Carolina, had arrived at precisely thirteen minutes past midnight. We sat in the jeep and watched, fascinated as airmen began double-checking the compactness of the field, for what was about to land on it weighed enough to demolish a normal landing strip or tarmac. Measurements were made, surveys taken, and the team set out sixteen ACR remote control landing lights, while a woman in camouflage unwrapped the HMMWV, started its loud diesel engine and drove it off its platform, out of the way.

'I got to find some joint to stay around here,' Marino said as he stared out at the spectacle. 'How the hell can they land some big military plane on such a little field?'

'Some of it I can tell you,' said Lucy, who was never at a loss for technical explanation.

'Apparently, the C-1Ts designed to land with cargo on unusually small, unapproved runways like this. Or a dry lake bed. In Korea, they've even used interstates.'

'Here we go,' Marino said with his usual sarcasm.

'Only other thing that could squeeze into a tight place like this is a C-130,' she went on. 'The C-17 can back up, isn't that cool?'

'No way a cargo plane can do all that.' Marino said.

'Well, this baby can,' she said as if she wanted to adopt it.

He began looking around. 'I'm so hungry I could eat a tire, and I'd give up my paycheck for a beer. I'm gonna roll down this window here and smoke.'

I sensed the ranger did not want anyone smoking in his well-cared-for Jeep, but he was too intimidated to say so.

'Marino, let's go outside,' I said. 'Fresh air would do us good.'

We climbed out and he lit a Marlboro, sucking on it as if it were mother's milk. Members of the USAMRIID team who were in charge of the flatbed truck and its creepy cargo were still in their protective suits and staying away from everyone. They were gathered on the rutted dirt road, watching airmen work on what looked like acres of flat land that in warmer months might be a playing field.

A dark unmarked Plymouth rolled up at almost two A.M., and Lucy trotted to it. I

watched her talk to Janet through the open driver's window. Then the car drove away.

'I'm back,' Lucy spoke quietly, touching my arm.

'Everything okay?' I asked, and I knew the life they lived together had to be hard.

'Under control, so far,' she said.

'Double-O-Seven, it was nice of you to come out and help us today,' Marino said to

Lucy, smoking as if it were his last hour to enjoy it.

'You know, it's a federal violation to be disrespectful to federal agents,' she said.

'Especially minorities of Italian extraction.'

'I hope to hell you're a minority. Don't want others out there like you.' He flicked an ash as we heard a plane far off.

'Janet's staying here,' Lucy said to him. 'Meaning, the two of you will be working this together. No smoking in the car, and you hit on her, your life is over.'

'Shhhh,' I said to both of them.

The jet's return was loud from the north, and we stood silently, staring up at the sky as lights suddenly blazed on. They formed a fiery dotted line, marking green for approach, white for the safe zone, and finally warning red at the end of the landing strip. I thought how weird it would seem for anyone who had the misfortune of driving by as this plane was coming in. I could see its dark shadow and winking lights on wings as it dropped lower and its noise became awesome. The landing gear unfolded and emerald green light spilled out from the wheel well as the C-17 headed straight for us.

I had the paralyzing sensation that I was witnessing a crash, that this monstrous flat- gray machine with vertical wing tips and stubby shape was going to plow into the earth. It sounded like a hurricane as it roared right over our heads, and we put our fingers in our ears as its huge wheels touched down, grass and dirt flying, great chunks chewed out of ruts made by big wheels and 130 tons of aluminum and steel. Wing flaps were up, engines in thrust reverse as the jet screamed to a stop at the end of a field not big enough for football.

Then pilots threw it in reverse and began loudly backing it up along the grass, in our direction, so there would be enough of a landing strip for it to take off again. When its tail reached the edge of the dirt road, the C-17 stopped, jet exhaust directed up away from us. The back opened like the mouth of a shark as a metal ramp went down, the cargo bay completely open and lighted and gleaming of polished metal.

For a while we watched as the loadmaster and crew worked. They had put on chemical warfare gear, dark hoods and goggles and black gloves that looked rather scary, especially at night. They quickly backed the pickup and camper off the flatbed truck, unhooked them, and the HMMWV towed the camper inside the C-17.

'Come on,' Lucy said, tugging my arm. 'We don't want to miss our ride.'

We walked out onto the field, and I could not believe the power surging and the noise as we followed the automated ramp, picking our way around rollers and rings built into the flat, metal floor, miles of wires and insulation exposed overhead. The plane looked big enough to carry several helicopters, Red Cross buses, tanks, and there were at least fifty jump seats. But the crew was small tonight, only the loadmaster and paratroopers, and a first lieutenant named Laurel, who I assumed had been assigned to us.

She was an attractive young woman with short dark hair, and she shook each of our hands and smiled like a gracious hostess.

'Good news is you're not sitting down here,' she said. 'We'll be up with the pilots. More good news, I've got coffee.'

'That would be heaven,' I said, metal clanking as the crew secured the camper and

HMMWV to the floor with chains and netting.

The steps leading up from the cargo bay were painted with the name of the plane, which in this case, appropriately, was Heavy Metal. The cockpit was huge, with an electronic flight control system, and head-up displays like fighter pilots used. Steering

was done with sticks instead of yokes, and the instrumentation was completely intimidating.

I climbed up on a swivel seat, behind two pilots in green jumpsuits, who were too busy to pay us any mind.

'You got headsets so you can talk, but please don't when the pilots are,' Laurel told us.

'You don't have to wear them, but it's pretty loud in here.'

I was clamping on my five-point harness and noting the oxygen mask hanging by each chair.

'I'm going to be down here and will check on you from time to time,' the lieutenant went on. 'It's about three hours to Utah, and the landing shouldn't be too abrupt. They got a runway long enough for the space shuttle, or that's what they say. You know how the Army brags.'

She went back downstairs as pilots talked in jargon and codes that meant nothing to me. We began to take off a mere thirty amazing minutes after the plane had landed.

'We're going on the runway now,' a pilot said. 'Load?' I assumed he meant the loadmaster below. 'Is everything secure?'

'Yes, sir,' the voice sounded in my headset.

'Have we got that checklist completed?'

'Yes.'

'Okay. We're rolling.'

The plane surged forward, bumping over the field with gathering power that was unlike any takeoff I had ever known. It roared more than a hundred miles an hour,

pulling up into the air at an angle so sharp it flattened me against the back of my chair. Suddenly, stars spangled the sky, the lights of Maryland a winking network.

'We're going about two hundred knots,' a pilot said. 'Command Post aircraft 3060I. Flaps up. Execute.'

I glanced over at Lucy, who was behind the co-pilot and trying to see what he was doing as she listened to every word, probably committing it to memory. Laurel returned with cups of coffee, but nothing would have kept me up. I drifted to sleep at thirty-five thousand feet as the jet flew west at six hundred miles an hour. I came to as a tower was talking.

We were over Salt Lake City and descending, and Lucy would never come to earth again as she listened to cockpit talk. She caught me looking but was not to be distracted, and I had never really known anyone like her, not in my entire life. She had a voracious curiosity about anything that could be put together, taken apart, programmed and, in general, made to do something she wanted. People were about the only thing she couldn't figure out.

Clover Control turned us over to Dugway Range Control, and then we were receiving instructions about landing. Despite what we had been told about the length of the runway, it felt like we were going to be torn out of our seats as the jet crescendoed over a tarmac blinking with miles of lights, air roaring against raised slats. The stop was so abrupt, I didn't see how it was physically possible, and I wondered if the pilots might have been practicing.

'Tally ho,' one of them said cheerfully.