The pell-mell rush to Anderson Valley Vineyards was a success, except for the ballooning part.  Kris had the folded and refolded envelope in its canvas bag, standing next to the basket, which had the two big burners thrusting upward from a brace up across from its center, but he hadn’t laid out the nylon over and across the parking lot by the time I arrived on the scene.  Ballooning is very work-intensive, and the crew assembling was absolutely required in order to spread the nylon envelope flat, attach the throat of it or the basket, and then angle the cold high-speed fan to allow air to be pressured into the throat for initial inflation.  Hot air could only be shot or exhausted up into a swelling envelope that was expanded by the cold air driving into it.  The cold air expanded but would not allow the balloon to rise beyond its taking shape in preparation for the infusion of hot air blasted into it by the ignited propane. Kris and I worked fast and hard, instructing everyone in what had to be done, which entailed everyone moving around all over at the same time quite quickly.

“Man, this is more like a NASA moonshot blast-off than the launching of a balloon. Nash remarked as he went to work, starting the Briggs and Stratton fifteen-horsepower motor to spin the wooden propeller.  The unit had a twelve-volt battery driving an electric motor to help, but the compression inside the engine had to be generated by using both the motor and a heavy pull cord.

I almost laughed out loud at John’s comment.  The operation was way more like the ‘Flintstones go ballooning’ than anything ultra-high-tech as all NASA projects certainly were.

“Wind is up,” Kris whispered into my right ear as he passed by in order to assume his position under the tilted burners to ignite the propane when he deemed the cold air swelling of the envelope was at a maximum, which it was very close to being.

I stood up straight and paid attention to the growing strength of the wind which had made no impact on me before.  I knew immediately that the desert wind at such high speed, right across the ground was too high to fly up into.  The problem not being going up, the problem presenting itself when it was time to come down.  Kris was seasoned and gifted enough as a pilot to be able to handle the balloon in the air, but once the basket hit the ground and began to drag, that was a matter generally considered to be in God’s hands.

Kris was continuing the preparations as if we were going to fly as he approached the small pilot light spigot to begin the chain of fire…or ignition of the propane as it was released under pressure to provide millions of BTU energy and transfer all that by nearly instantly heating the air inside the envelope.

I moved to his side, just outside the basket, which came up to just above my waist.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

Kris clicked the long-barreled hand-held igniter a couple of times experimentally.  Each time a brief spark of fire shot from the narrow tube and then went out when he released the button.

“I’m flying, are you?” he asked, a big smile on his face.

I looked up at the semi-inflated envelope of the huge balloon, the force of the wind making it lie at about a flattened thirty-degree angle to the ground, the cold air infusion part of that, but most of it due to the growing strength of the wind.  I knew in my heart that I was going to fly, but I also knew that the reason I’d wanted to skip across the light fantastic and skim over the desert was being retired.  This would be a ballooning adventure with every possibility of being hurt or worse.  It could no longer be considered a part of my self-therapy for the stress I was enduring.  A gust of about thirty miles per hour blasted the back of my head.  No, this was simply more of the same in a wildly different package and direction.

“No passengers, right?” I asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from Kris himself.

“Not a one,” he said, igniting the pilot light and then returning the igniter to one of his thigh pockets.

Without passengers, the power of the ground crew chief was negated.  I wasn’t certain, but I didn’t think Kris had appointed one anyway.  The ground crew chief made the decision to fly or not, but only as it pertained to passengers.  The pilots and co-pilots could fly no matter what.

Kris climbed out of the basket and ushered me up over the lip to replace him.  The weight was vital, along with some of the ground crew holding on, to keep the basket on the ground until the envelope was inflated with hot air to the point where lift was generated.  I stood waiting as Kris ran to the winery warehouse.  He went inside for a few minutes before coming back out, dragging some big black tarps behind him.  When he approached, I asked him what the hell they were for.

“When we land, these rolled up will cushion us from the tanks.

I looked down inside the basket.  Each corner of the rectangular shape of the thing was occupied by a well-strapped vertical running propane tank.  The tanks were solid steel.  I knew Kris had been up in difficult air before, and it was immediately apparent why he’d gone back in for the off-label rubber padding. There was no give to steel cylinders, but there sure might be to human muscle, bone, ligaments, and other sensitive stuff.  Kris made one more run to the warehouse, but quickly reappeared with a case of wine.

“What’s that for?” I asked, seeing way too much wine for the two of us to consume.

“We’re flying, not drinking,” he said, pushing the box into Kingsley’s hands.

“Without this, the crew might not bother to follow us and do all the stuff they have to do when we land.”

“They’d be there anyway,” I argued, “and do we really need our ground crew to be drunk on their asses?”

“Trust me,” Kris laughed, getting into the basket.  “It’s not like I haven’t done this before a time or two.”

Kris smiled, looked up into the throat of the envelope, signaled for Quincy and Pat to cut off the Briggs fan and, as they did and pulled it away, he moved the two small levers set into the bottom of the burners, and thirty-million BTUs of thermal energy shot from each, burned into the narrow throat and up into the huge crevasse of the expanded envelope itself.

With a lot of noise, as the burners burning sounded close up like two jet engines spooling up to maximum rpm, and nothing to stand in its way, the temperature differential between the air inside the envelope and the outside air was such that everything changed almost at once.  We’d been on the ground only seconds before, but now we were in the air and screaming upward.  I looked up at the color-coded telltale temperature tabs that should be visible on the inner side of the crown of the balloon, but couldn’t see them.  Kris saw me look and redirected me to look at the small instrument panel.  There was a temperature gauge, which hadn’t been there before.  The gauge read 97 degrees, and I knew that wasn’t Fahrenheit.  Over two hundred degrees inside the envelope and thirty degrees outside.  The differential density of air was causing us to rise at what seemed like an astounding rate.

Would it be enough?  I stared at the power lines running parallel to the north and south freeway, and wondered.

“Temperature aloft?” Kris asked, his voice perfectly normal.

“One zero eight,” I said, then added, “isn’t that a little high?

“It’ll take one twenty if we have to, but then the crown will probably have to be replaced.”

I looked up the throat at the crown, trying to keep my eyes off the powerlines coming at us like black blades of some unseen executioner.

The wind was strong, but we felt nothing because we were inside it.  Just then, the basket seemed to bounce and I jerked myself down.

“A break,” Kris said, “We got about three hundred feet in that post pocket gust, which means no new four thousand dollar crown?”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.  Just what were we doing up there?  I was deeply depressed and in need of a sense of freedom.  But what about the man I was with?  I’d come to prize him highly, but was he as unhinged as I saw myself to be, and what could come of that combination or joint venture?

“We’ve got to climb to get a better met,” said, hitting both burner levers again.  It took twenty minutes of spaced burning to control the crown temperature, but we made it to sixteen thousand feet.

“There, we’re looking pretty damned good, wouldn’t you say?” Kris exclaimed, pointing downwards in the direction we’d flown up into.

I stared and could not believe my eyes.  Right below us, many thousands of feet below us, was the vineyard, the Rio Grande, and even my office.

“Tough day to form a box, but we sure pulled that off,” Kris said, his tone one of exhilaration.  “Now, we descend at maximum, but must not forget that the winds across the ground are probably what they were only a bit ago when we left.

“My thoughts were all about how long it was going to take because my ‘break’ in going ballooning had taken an uncomfortable turn.

Kris pulled a slim rectangular radio from a slot next to the instrument panel, pushed a side button, and spoke. “Kingsley, what’s the wind like.  You see us straight up above, about eleven thousand feet AGL.”

I knew that AGL meant above ground level. I did some instant math.  Albuquerque was at about fifty-two hundred feet, which meant we were above sixteen thousand feet, and that helped explain my feelings of doom, gloom, and lightheadedness.  I needed oxygen.  The ground started looking pretty attractive as I stared back down.

“I’m going to pull the vent for descent.  You man the top parachute rope and pull it out the instant the basket hits the earth.”

The balloon started to plunge downward, its descent so fast that I became fearful.  I looked at the instrument panel as I hung onto the parachute rope with a vengeance.  One thousand six hundred feet per minute was shown on one gauge.  I knew that three hundred was the preferred rate, and Kris and I, along with rubber baby buggy bumpers, could probably handle a thousand or a bit more, but sixteen hundred was an injury rate, potentially fatal injury rate.  I looked at Kris and showed him my best face of nonplussed courage. His gentle smile made me feel a whole lot better.

“The gas,” he said, reaching for the two levers and releasing the vent rope.  He hit the levers, and the propane did its many million BTU thing.  The balloon slowed its rate to three hundred, and I was so relieved.  How had I forgotten the propane injection capability, and how had Kris known that I had?

We came down not a hundred feet from where we’d taken off.  My crew was yelling and carrying on, never having had to get into the chase vehicles and follow us across the ground.  The landing was rough but not too harsh because after sliding about a hundred feet, the weight of the entire crew was slung over the side of the basket, and we stopped.  I climbed out and looked at my hands.  They were black. I’d gripped the rubber mats so hard the black stain had come through to my skin.  I put my hands in my pockets and went to make believe how wonderful the whole thing had been.  I didn’t think I’d ever forget again that flying was not something you did for fun. It was work, and if it wasn’t work on maintenance, schooling, learning, and more, then you might likely die from the seemingly simplest of problems.

Kris required that we go to Sadie’s for a late breakfast, which we all did after putting the balloon back together and driving it to the vineyard to be stored for another day.

I went home to tell Mary where I was going, and I’d be leaving right away.  I knew that might be worse than the balloon flight, plus the King Air, although powerful, only sped through that air at about four hundred miles per hour, not the five-fifty or six hundred of commercial airliners.  The flight to London would be long.

When I’d informed the guys, they’d been ecstatic and kind.  They never mentioned how much money I was going to have to cheat and steal to pay them.

I awakened with a brief startling shock, scrunched against the ninety-degree corner the window seat makes with the bulkhead, soft because the business jet is of such high quality and expense, carrying only four passengers.  Nguyen stared from his facing seat toward me, while Kingsley slept next to him, looking like a reversed clone of me, no doubt. I covered my waking reaction with a fake cough, not yet really understanding why I’m covering it up until the present catches up with me in a rush. The A Shau Valley. I blink myself awake.

I was there again. The place I visit in my dreams is one of unquiet peace, a place paused in time, the fighting and dying all present there but not menacing, the terror gone, leaving the dull sense of something immeasurable lost and not to be found remaining in my mind.  The water, of the river, or the mist of the drops gathering like blinking stars on the ferns and leaves, diamonds among voracious animals crawling, hiding or sleeping away the danger and dreaming of nothing that can be described by other animal life not so exposed to valley life and death…the two deeply tied, braided and annealed, like ropes, sometimes cable or even steel.  Diamonds, flowing and dropping like rain except so much brighter, lit by a moon that smiles coldly down, lighting everything just enough so that unease can remain, attentiveness in semi-sleep…always aware.

I visit the valley every once in a while, now, like last night, confounding therapists and other veterans alike.  They have their own beliefs about such things, and some have their own places of comfortable discomfort, but the A Shau is mine.  Mired back in 1968, a year of bad wine, bad social unrest, and a really bad war. The valley is with me because my genes were soaked in its mushy mud, its brown snake-dwelling river water, and even the impure purity of the diamond glistening water drops I might lick from the ends of the leaves, having grown accustomed to the sweet tart hint of taste the coating of Agent Orange gave them. The agent dropped from the sky regularly, just so we mud-warriors from the Planet Mongo might not forget what a taste sent all the way from home might remind us of.

My genes refuse to let me forget, to be sidelined only momentarily with drugs or alcohol, because my genetic structure was modified to ensure that I never forget…for I may need all that I learned so harshly, so brutally, and so morally, again. My flank security is out this night.  My video cameras are all focused and covering three hundred and sixty degrees around my home, and some also cover the night sky with night vision in search of drones that never appear. I’m ready in other ways of overwhelming response and force, yet nobody, nobody appears, nobody comes or threatens to come, and my equipment, so diligently watching and patrolling, yields a fox warren of an adult and five young, six racoons, two skunks and a half dozen deer or more, as they mate and grow and then get shot by the crazed hunters who think killing animals and men is more than the tiniest part of reality in true armed combat.  These chicken-hawk warriors don’t know about the other parts, and I can’t tell them, as their belief structure is built by solid beliefs burned into them by hilarious stories, hilarious to combat vets like me, best illustrated by a monstrously mythical character named Rambo.

Quincy came up the aisle carrying a porcelain mug, but as I leaned forward to accept, shakily, he pulled back, protectively hovering over the steaming cup.

“No galley,” Quincy said, “no microwave, only a hot plate.  Had to head to the ceramic to heat the coffee inside.  Very hot.”

“Where are we?” I asked, noting that Kingsley had awakened just after me.

“About two hours off the Atlantic coast and about six hours from London.  We’re flying into tomorrow so it’s good that you slept, as did the relief pilot.”

I grasped the cup with both hands and leaned into it.  It was hot but not too hot.  Quincy nodded his head forward and angled across the aisle, and my eyes followed the movement.

John Nash was asleep in a seat a little bit forward of mine.  All the seats were window seats, which I knew, but the information hadn’t really impacted me as I was so used to commercial air.  The King was not commercial air.  Nash leaned into the aisle as he slept.

“Can he fly a King Air?” I asked, feeling a bit of uneasy shock.

“He said he could fly anything after the Phantom he flew in Vietnam,” Quincey replied.

I had taken a swig of hot coffee.  I almost spit it back up.

John Nash had not been a pilot. He’d been an NFO.  An NFO was an officer who specialized in the navigation, weapons, and sensor systems of military aircraft, and no NFOs were trained to be pilots.  Evidently, Nash wanted to be on the mission for whatever reason, I rationalized.  The relief pilot was not likely to be needed, and if he was needed, that would be another problem of a huge magnitude.  I took another swig of coffee, somehow containing enough cream and sugar to satisfy.  I tried to think, not just about how Quincy could know how I took my coffee, but also how it was that the plane was filled with a mix of agent, non-agent, assigned but not assigned personnel, not one of whom had ever been through the Farm or Charm School CIA training at Quantico, Cape May, and points beyond.

Was what I was experiencing deliberate or simply the result of one screw up after another?  And what was it that was so secret that the information could not be allowed to be in the possession of regular, talented, credentialed, and experienced agents who simply had to be available all over the world? There had to be a reason, or a nexus of reasons, as to why such a ragtag band of men was assembled to do something they knew not what.

The plane flew on into a coming dawn after a night I’d barely noticed, as time seemed to stand on its head, with possibly the best thing being that there was no communication with anyone on the ground while we were in the air. With Kingsley awake and eventually Nash.  There was a deck of cards aboard, so, except for Nguyen, who claimed not to know the game, the four of us played poker, using matchsticks and what pocket change we’d gathered together and assigned values to for money. I realized, after a few hours, that I was more relaxed than I’d been for many weeks, or almost all the way back to my first trip to Korea when it had all really begun.  Everything had resulted from that trip, to end up having me flying in a plane of dubious intent, with men trained more to bring people to death than to save them from death all the while making believe we were on a mission to extract some critically ill person back to the United States, which was also and most evidently a cover for the real story and situation.

Heathrow Tower could be heard squawking through the light canvas sheets hanging from the interior fuselage to form the cockpit of the plane.  I’d tuned the noises from up there out after I’d arisen but the tower chatter caught my attention.

Suddenly, the canvas sections parted, and the captain stepped through the opening.

“The two boxes in the back of the plane are for your use, and half these seats will need to be folded into beds,” he said, pointing to the back of the plane.  Without saying anything further, he went back into the ‘cockpit’ portion of the small but expensively powerful aircraft.

“Are we supposed to know what to do here?” I said, looking at my men or guys as I thought of them.

“Let’s open the two long boxes and see what he’s talking about,” Kingsley instructed. “ I think this flight is the very first evacuation flight of International SOS, and yes, I think the captain thinks we know what must be done here since he doesn’t, or he’d have stayed back here with us. Let’s see if we can figure it out before we’re on the tarmac.”

I was amazed at the array of materials in the boxes.  Sheets, stretcher bars with canvas, stethoscopes, smocks, operating room attire, and more.

“It’s like Halloween,” Nash remarked, trying on a pale green emergency attendant smock.

The landing at Heathrow was so smooth it was like we were still in the air.  With no flight attendants and not wearing seatbelts, the strange freedom was welcome, but I knew it could come at a price if things went south, although they didn’t. The pilot evidently knew international regulations and had filed a proper flight plan. English had become the language of the air in all control towers and airports, not to mention plane cabins around the world, so that was no problem, especially since we were now in Great Britain.  Part of the test would begin when the cabin door was opened, I knew.  Papers.  What documents would work and what would not in such a situation?  The Agency had produced a bunch.  I had everything in my Hartmann briefcase and was ready, wearing my doctor’s costume, when I stepped down the tiny stairs to the tarmac outside.  It was raining, of course.  A cold rain.

“Your patient is being wheeled out, doctor,” the waiting London police bobby said, holding out his hand as I stepped off the stairs.  I took his hand in a firm grip, keeping the briefcase down in my left hand.  I wondered who the phony patient might be who was there to give us our cover.

A gurney on wheels was being pushed toward the plane.  The King Air’s propellers were still gently turning.  A fuel truck pulled up to stick a hose into the bottom of the left wing.  I was a bit surprised.  The clockwork precision of everything happening at once and correctly was disturbing.  I walked toward the gurney being rushed toward the plane by three plainclothes gentlemen and two women, none wearing identifiers or uniforms, but all of them reminding me of Nguyen and Kingsley.  Players of one kind or another.

When I reached the gurney, they all huddled as the wheeled flat conveyance stopped.  I walked over to the patient to see who they’d gotten to play the role of a sick patient in need of medical evacuation.

My inhalation of breath upon seeing the patient could have been heard back at the plane behind me in the rain.

The patient was Denis Thatcher, the Prime Minister’s husband.  This was no phony evacuation.  From his unconscious condition, the real I.V., the attendants, and everything working like clockwork without anyone even asking for any papers at all, was explained.

“How fast can you get him help?” a woman asked, breaking away from her little group.

“I need a secure phone and right now,” I replied, not being able to take my eyes off the Prime Minister’s husband’s face.