Brett Battles - No Return

“The pilot who was trapped in the cockpit when I got there was not the same man the Navy is saying died. I was just trying to get you to actually listen to me, but everyone’s just been trying to shut me up. Why? You’re in the service, Lars. This is one of your colleagues. The question is, why doesn’t it matter to you?”

Lars opened his mouth to speak, stopped himself, then said, “Of course it matters to me. Do you think I ignored what you were saying? We’re handling this internally, and your prodding isn’t helping.” He paused for a moment. “Look, what if I could prove to you Adair was the pilot? Would you accept that?”

“Prove how?”

“Hold on.” Lars pulled out a cellphone, then walked out of earshot and made a call.

Wes looked at the article again. Mandy. Dead. He figured she’d grown up, moved away, gone on to better things. Not this. Never this.

As Lars walked back up, Wes slipped the clipping into his pocket.

“Come on,” Lars said.

“Where are we going?”

“To show you that you’re wrong.”

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Mandy asked from the front passenger seat.

She was excited, and probably a little anxious. It was her first party at the Rocks, after all. Wes and Lars were pros compared to her.

“I’m sure,” Wes said from the driver’s seat.

The dirt road was really not much of a road at all-two ruts on either side, beaten down by the tires of those who’d passed this way before, and a narrow, deeper gouge running roughly between them, cut there by the infrequent desert rains.

Wes turned the wheel suddenly, barely missing a rock sticking out of the ground on the right side. In the backseat, he heard Lars tumble sideways and the sound of several bottles clinking together.

“Careful!” Lars said. “You don’t want me to break any of these in here, do you? Try explaining that to your folks.”

Wes eased off the accelerator. “You should be holding on to them.”

“I am holding on to them.”

“Dip!” Wes yelled out.

The van lurched downward, then jerked up just as quickly.

“Woohoo!” Mandy cried out.

“Holy crap,” Lars said.

When the road evened out, Wes said, “We need some kind of code phrase to let each other know we’re ready to leave.”

“Leave?” Mandy said. “We haven’t even got there yet.”

“Yeah, but if any of us gets to the point where they want to go, then we all go. That was the deal.”

“Right,” Mandy said, sounding less than happy. “I remember.”

“So the code word?” Lars said.

“Dip!” Wes yelled out.

The car bounced again.

“I’m not sure ‘dip’ would be a good word to use,” Lars said. “Hard to work into a sentence.”

“Very funny, jackass,” Wes said.

“Why don’t we just say we want to go?” Mandy suggested.

“Because that would be completely uncool,” Lars told her. “We want to sneak away so people think we’re still there. We don’t want them knowing we left early. They’d think we were a bunch of losers.”

“Even if they do, at least we won’t be the only losers there,” Wes said. “Tommy from the debate team said he’s coming with some of his friends from band.”

They all laughed.

“Some of the guys from the football team are going to be there, too,” Mandy said.

“Really?” Lars said. “That sucks.”

“How do you know that?” Wes asked her.

“Jack told me.”

“Jack?” Wes asked.

“Jack Rice.”

“Why were you talking to that jerk?” Lars asked.

“He’s not so bad once you get to know him.”

Wes rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Question number two,” Lars said. “Why would anyone want to get to know him?”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Wes said.

“You guys are idiots,” she said.

“ We’re the idiots? Who’s the one getting all kissy-kissy with Jack Rice?” Lars said.

“I never said anything about …” Instead of finishing the sentence, Mandy punched Lars in the arm.

The VW swerved a few inches off the road, brushing the front fender against a creosote bush. “Hey! Careful. You want to kill us?”

“A little sensitive on the whole Jack thing, aren’t you?” Lars said, rubbing his arm.

Mandy groaned. “Just stop talking. Both of you.”

They drove in silence for nearly a minute before Lars said, “We, uh, never came up with our exit phrase.”

A wry smile grew on Wes’s lips. “How about ‘There’s Jack’?”

He was already ducking when Mandy’s fist slammed into his shoulder.

They rode in lars’s truck to the main entrance of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, neither of them saying a word. Just before the gate, Lars pulled in to the visitor center parking area.

Wes started to get out with him, but Lars shook his head. “No. You stay here.”

Lars disappeared into the building for a few minutes. When he climbed back into the cab, he handed Wes a piece of plastic.

“I’m sure you know what to do with this.”

It was a visitor’s badge, complete with a clip. Wes attached it to his shirt as Lars pulled back onto the road and drove over to the gate. Once the guard there checked both their badges, he waved the truck through, and just like that, they were on the base.

If driving through Ridgecrest after all this time had been strange, being back on the base was absolutely surreal. There was so much that hadn’t changed since Wes had been a ten-year-old riding in his parents’ VW van, and so much that was completely different.

Whole swaths of base housing had disappeared, leaving empty desert. From what Wes could tell, both of the houses his family had lived in on the base were gone. It was as if a specialized bomb had gone off and had left only roads and sidewalks and desert, but no debris at all.

Wes tried to guess where they were going, but once they’d passed Michelson Lab, his geographical knowledge from his youth ran out. All he could tell was that they were heading north into the open desert portion of the base, which probably meant Armitage Field.

Lars wasn’t saying anything, but it was apparent he was growing more and more tense with each mile. Twice he looked over at Wes, scrutinizing him, but he remained silent. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t sharing.

They came to a second checkpoint. One of the guards took Wes’s badge and reentered the guard hut, where she made a phone call.

When she returned, she passed the badge through the window, saluted Lars, and said, “Have a good day, sir.”

As they neared the airfield, two jets rose into the air, one right after the other, and streaked toward the sky above the Sierra Nevadas, the wail of their engines momentarily drowning everything else out.

Lars turned down a road that ran just east of the hangars, then pulled up in front of a building surrounded by an eight-foot-high barbed-wire-topped fence. The gate across the entrance was closed, but as soon as they stopped, an armed guard exited the building and pushed the gate open wide enough to accommodate Lars’s truck. Lars then pulled into a parking spot and turned the engine off.

“So what’s here?” Wes asked, looking at the building.

Lars opened his door and climbed out. “Your proof,” he said without looking back.

Wes hesitated a few seconds, then got out, too.

The door to the building opened just before they reached it. Lars didn’t miss a step as he passed inside. The Big Brother feel of it bothered Wes, but he continued to follow his friend.

Just inside was another armed guard. Like his buddy at the gate, he was unsmiling. Beyond him two other men waited. One wore a khaki naval uniform, and the other a white lab coat over shirt, tie, and slacks.