PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

‘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.

15

DUGWAY WAS THE size of Rhode Island with two thousand people living on the base. But we could see nothing when we got in at half past five A.M. Laurel turned us over to a soldier, who put us in a truck and drove to a place where we could rest and freshen up. There wasn’t time for sleep. The plane would be taking off later in the day, and we needed to be on it.

Lucy and I were checked into the Antelope Inn, across from the Community Club. We had a room with twin beds on the first floor, furnished with light oak and wall-to-wall carpet, everything blue. It offered a view of barracks across the green, where lights were already beginning to come on with the dawn.

‘You know, there really doesn’t seem any point in taking a shower since we’ll have to put on the same dirty things,’ Lucy said, stretching out on top of her bed.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ I agreed, taking off my shoes. ‘You mind if I turn this lamp off?’

‘I wish you would.’

The room was dark and I suddenly felt silly. ‘This is like a slumber party.’

‘Yeah, the one from hell.’

‘Remember when you used to come stay with me when you were little?’ I said. ‘Sometimes we stayed up half the night. You never wanted to go to sleep, always wanting me to read one more story. You wore me out.’

‘I remember it the other way around. I wanted to sleep and you wouldn’t leave me alone.’

‘Untrue.’

‘Because you doted on me.’

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