Chapter Text
Now
I closed the door behind me, steeled myself and turned to confront the slap in the face that is the Arizona weather. We talk about the weather but what we get is climate and whoever said, "But it's a dry heat" was a total idiot. When the mercury tops out at over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it does not matter if it is dry as dust or wet as a salt marsh in Louisiana. It is just plain old hot. And that oh so wondrous dry heat sucks the moisture right out of your skin like a good vacuum sucks up uncooked rice. Fast and totally. I have not been back in my home state but about a month and I can already tell that I am going to have to go back to the old routine of my teen years. Buying moisturizer by the gallon and wallowing in it like a pig in slop. I grant you that is not a pretty picture but it is what a woman in Arizona does if she does not want to look like a very old leather boot by the time she is thirty-five.
It is November, the season when Thunder Sleeps according to the Navajo reckoning, so why is it still hot as blazes? And at the crack of dawn? Well, okay, it is oh-700, but for someone who likes to stay up really late and sleep until noon, that is the crack of dawn.
How did I end up back here in Arizona? Of all the questions that I keep asking myself, that last one is the one that keeps repeating over and over in my mind like a broken record. I joined the Air Force right out of college, grabbed my commission with both hands and took wing to see the world (and maybe a little bit of let the world see me).
Okay, I will come clean; I went to college just to get a commission. I wanted to see more than my quaint little corner of Arizona. Bisbee is an interesting little town. It is picturesque. It has a fascinating history and the tourists think it is just too, too darling. I wanted to see a bit more and do some serious traveling. I did pretty good for the first nine years. I wintered over in the Antarctic; spent a year "down under" (now there is a story and a half, but that can wait for another day); wandered around Europe for a bit; put in some time below the Mason-Dixon line; caught the attention of someone who thought I would do pretty good as the commander of a "Situation Team" and I met some seriously strange "visitors" in a seriously strange "situation".
I had hoped to catch some South Pacific sun for me and my team, Hawaii is great this time of year and Guam is not to be sneezed at. But here I was like a bad penny, back in my home State. Do not get me wrong, I like Arizona. It has a strange, sere beauty that grabs you by the throat. And the sunsets, well, they are just about the best in the whole, wide world. They are real mind blowers. It has something to do with the dust, the heat index and the inclination of the sun. Ask Corny, she could tell you. I would be bogged down just trying to think about it.
Corny? Sorry, I forgot you do not know my team and me. However, come to think of it, if you are reading this journal, you have managed to crack the code on my safe, or have authorization to read it and you have all my journals so you should know whom I am talking about. But, just on the off chance that I have had a stupidity spasm and left this fool thing sitting out where you can get at it and you do not have the program to figure out the players…Corny is SSgt. Caroline Cornelius from Mabelvale, a little community just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Think Dolly Parton in Battle Dress Uniform. That picture just sort of boggles the brain, doesn't it? That gal makes BDUs look like a fashion statement. Jealousy is a green-eyed monster and trust me, my eyes are green as emeralds. That, that….midget….is cute as a button, smart as a whip and makes me feel like a horse.
And get this, according to my, mmmmm, boy friend is not the term I would use…lover?...nope…that is not quite right either. He is sort of a fiancé, sort of a working partner, sort of a friend at court at the FBI, when I need it, not that the Air Force ever needs that sort of thing. Right. I do not know what the hell to call Thomas Jones. One hell of a man? Yeah, that works.
Anyway, now that I have shot off on a tangent, back to the subject at hand, Thomas Jones, all around good guy, says that Corny wants to be me when she grows up. Humph. First off, she is going to have to grow about eighteen inches. I am 6'5" and she is barely 5' tall. Vertically, that is. Horizontally….I do not want to talk about it. Let us just say that if I turn sideways and stick out my tongue, I sort of resemble a zipper and she is Venus d' Milo in miniature. Disgusting little git.
It is a good thing that she is a genius with a computer AND makes great coffee, or I would toss her off my team in a heartbeat. Yeah, sure I would. She is one smart cookie and makes this lowly Captain, almost a Major, look very good. Oh, hell, between Senior Master Sergeant Iverson and Corny and all the rest of my team…I look very, very good. Most people think I can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Boy, have I got them fooled. You can insert an evil chuckle and some "hand washing" at this point. I just stand around looking wise (which usually just means keeping my mouth shut and nodding when someone looks at me quizzically) and let the "kids" as Iverson calls them get on with their jobs.
Early on in my career, when (then MSgt.) now SMSgt. Dan (NMI) Iverson took me under his wing to train me, he told me to let people do their jobs, support them when they need it, stand between them and some idiot that thinks he knows their job better. In other words, be a bullshit filter. That bullshit filter stuff works in both directions, by the way. You keep the brass off the "kids" backs as the stuff flows downhill. The way it works is, if something goes wrong, it is all your fault. It is never the "kids" fault. If something gets praised, it is all because of the "kids." You listen to every word your "kids" tell you, sort out the doable from the pipedreams and then push it uphill, and jam it down some bureaucrat's throat. Praise them to high heaven in front of God, the General and everyone, quietly slap them down in private when they merit it, but make damn sure you have all the facts before you start swinging. When they eat cold rations, you eat cold rations. When they sleep in the mud, so do you. Remember that keeping them alive is job one. If you can get a handle on that, well, you just might have a shot at not folding under pressure. So far, I have been very seriously lucky and there are no fold creases on me.
Whew, there is nothing like baking your brain in the Arizona sun to make a person turn all introspective and philosophical.
Oh well, on with my story, I just know you are dying to hear the rest of it. Where was I anyway? Oh, right, I had just shut the door. I closed the door, made sure it was locked and climbed into my car. Okay, my truck. When you are as tall as I am, a car just does not have the headspace or the leg space. Pickups are almost as fancy and, in some cases, fancier than most cars and they have the head and leg space that I need to keep from turning into a pretzel. If it weren't for the fact that I never knew when or where I was going to have to go at the drop of a hat, I'd have walked to work. If I stand on my roof, I can chunk a rock and hit the main gate of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or the ranch as Iverson calls it. That is as the crow flies. As the feet walk (or the wheels roll), it is one block west, three blocks north, one block west and then eight blocks south (no alleys, darn it) to the corner of Craycroft and Golf Links where the main gate is situated and then it is three miles from the gate to my little fiefdom in the desert.
We have our offices in one of those "temporary" metal buildings situated next to the last of the original World War II hangars. I hate those temporary buildings. The cooling/heating system is always the wrong size for them, usually a smidge too powerful. So, in the summertime, we ice skate like penguins and in the winter, we roast like chestnuts. There is never a happy medium.
We use the hangar to park our vehicles and store assorted classified and unclassified, wanted and unwanted, needed and unneeded, useful and useless materiel. One major problem with the military is that once an item finds its way onto a TOA (Table of Allowance) it is almost impossible to get rid of it. It is sort of like trying to fire a Civil Serpent once they have been in the system a couple of years. It just cannot be done. So we have more junk than we can shake a stick at and most of it never sees daylight. A lot of "stuff" is seasonal and geographical. We very seldom take our skis and parkas if we are headed for the Sahara.
The ranch? That is what SMSgt. Iverson calls Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. He says that it is easier to say. I say he does it because he likes to stir up the locals. However, when you sit right down to think on it, it does sort of look like a ranch, a not very profitable one at that. Everything is dirt brown or sand tan and anything that resembles green growing things is at best meager. On the "ranch" about the only thing other than quail and squeaks (prairie dogs) that passes as livestock are the A-10s. Not very big, slow-flying, ugly and beloved of all ground troops. Tank Killers is what the ground pounders refer to them as. And that is what they are. They do serve to keep the rustlers at bay.
Remember what I said about walking and chewing gum at the same time? Some things can be done on autopilot. Like driving a vehicle. All the time I was nattering on to you, or me, or whoever it is that I think I am talking to, I was driving my truck onto base and around the perimeter to my hideout. Some hideout, anyone driving down Alvernon or Golf Links can see our building. We do not have a sign out front advertising the fact that we are there and most folks seem to have decided that we are some kind of reserve unit. Hey, more power to them. The less said and speculated about, the less worries we have. I am not sure that even the Base Commander has a real good idea of what it is we do.
Come to that, I am not sure our team even has a complete in-depth grasp of what we do, I know I sure don't. We do what we do when we need to do it and where it needs to be done. Did that make sense? No? Good.
Then
Tully tilted his steel pot back and watched Troy atop the sand dune for a couple of minutes before returning to his letter writing. He licked the dull pencil tip and carefully added a couple of words to the collection on the grainy paper. He squirmed in the seat of the jeep trying to find a comfortable spot that was not hot as hell and finally gave it up as a bad deal.
"Who you writing?" Hitch's voice carried quietly from the next jeep. The young blonde Ivy Leaguer did most things quietly, romance the girls, strangle German guards, blow bubbles with that ever present bubble gum. Except blow things up, he was really good at making lots of noise then.
Tully's first reaction was to bristle and tell him to butt out, but that lasted all of about the blink of an eye. Hitch wasn't being nosey, just making conversation. Usually, silence did not bother any of them, they could go hours without a word being said, but there was just something in the air today that had all four of them jumpier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Moffitt kept wandering around, moving from place to place. Picking up a book, laying it down, moving the map case, and then moving it back to its original location. He didn't light anywhere for more than a minute. Maybe there was a sandstorm on the way. All this flashed through Tully's mind in a split second and there was little appreciable delay in his answer to Hitch.
"Carol Sue Hillyer. She is this really smart gal from my hometown. She got herself one of those scholarship things to a teacher's college in Arkansas, Henderson State University. It is near that resort place, Hot Springs, and it ain't too far from Little Rock, that's the capital. So we all pitched in as much as we could so she would have store bought stuff and not look like some hillbilly from the sticks."
Hitch nodded slowly, "That's nice. Is she going to go back home to teach or does she have to do some teaching in Arkansas to sort of even out the scholarship?"
Moffitt's attention was caught and he moved closer to hear the conversation.
"Well, she's gotta teach at one of the schools in Arkansas for two years after she graduates, but she says she likes Arkansas a bunch. It is real pretty, like home, she wrote in her last letter, all green and mountains and such like. She says there's this little town called Mabelvale, barely a wide spot in the road, but she says they got them a nice little school built but they don't have a steady teacher. She may just stay there. She's one of them really gung-ho on teaching folks. Says that education is the only way to free folks from poverty."
Moffitt nodded, "I quite agree with her. If we could educate the world…" He broke off, shook his head and then continued, "Two to three years of teaching is not an uncommon way to get qualified teachers in areas that are, mmmm, not quite as well to do as others."
"You mean dirt poor, Doc?" Tully grinned at Moffitt's attempt to be diplomatic. "Both Arkansas and Kentucky are dirt poor, Doc, we need all the help we can get. Roosevelt started those work camps to make jobs, but even that ain't enough. Bout the only things that keep folks from starving is making and selling moonshine and hunting."
Hitch looked uncomfortable as he always did when wealth and lack of it came up. His family had more money than it knew what to do with and he was very uncomfortable with the fact that they didn't seem to want to do anything good with it for others. He pounced on a sure-fire change of subject. "You courting this Carol Sue?"
Just as he suspected would happen, Tully's face turned about the same shade of red as a fire truck and he started to stammer and stutter out denials.
Moffitt chuckled, struck a pose and quietly butchered Shakespeare, "Me thinks the lad doth protest too much."
In the middle of the quiet laughter a whistle called their attention to Sgt. Troy, still perched, belly-down, on the top of the dune. He held up one finger, clenched his fist and made a come-hither gesture. Moffitt sighed and made his way to the top of the dune, sliding and slipping on the shifting sands and dropped down beside Troy, "What's brewing?"
"I don't know. Take a look, about 10 o'clock, low on the horizon." Troy handed over the binoculars and waiting for Moffitt's verdict.
Moffitt shifted to study the area in question, stared and finally shook his head. "I don't know what it is and no, I've never seen a dust formation like that anywhere or any time in my life."
Troy grunted and squinted into distance to try to catch that odd glimpse of reflected light that he caught above the horizon and then turned his attention back to the whirling storm. "What the hell is that thing?"
Moffitt was as puzzled as Troy. The closest thing that he could compare the swirling mass of wind and sand to was a waterspout, an unbelievably gigantic one at that, but since free water was almost non-existent in this part of the desert, that was impossible. A shiver went down his spine as he watched the vortex meander across the horizon. It shifted from high to low, rose up, up and up and then turned short, and broad. And always, he could see the flying sand. There was an eeriness to the whole situation that made him want to jump in a jeep and race as far and as fast away from that "thing" as possible.
Troy finally shook his head and glancing down the hill, gave the start up signal to Tully and Hitch. "I guess we better go and see what there is to see."
Moffitt grimaced, "Now why did I know you were going to say that?"
Troy grinned, "Because you keep low and evil company?"
"Isn't that the truth, old man."
Together they slid down the dune and ran to the rumbling jeeps. They settled into a slow, steady speed and with Moffitt and Troy manning the guns, headed out across the face of the North African Desert to investigate a force of Nature.