Yolanda raised the counter for him. Pompano pushed through.
“Are you finished with your memorial, Father?”
Pompano entered the back of the store. A mattress and bed spring sat along one side of the wall, out of view from the front of the store. A small stove, a half refrigerator, and a cupboard made of scrap wood filled another wall.
Off to the side were a toilet and shower. A curtain drawn across one end of the room demarcated Yolanda’s side from his.
Yolanda had grown up in this small one-room building, done her homework while sitting on the bed, watched after the store when Pompano had been sick.…Pompano bit his lip. There must be a better life for his daughter.
But his frugality had paid off. When classes started in the fall down at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Yolanda would be there. It was quite fortuitous that she was able to help watch the store this summer while he was up in the mountains—“building a memorial” for the supporters of Aquino. At least she hadn’t questioned the lie. Pompano smiled at his daughter.
“No, little one. I have some more material to pick up, and must go back to the mountains.”
“When will you return?” There was a look of concern on her face.
“Soon. But do not worry — this will be the last time for a while that I will be away. But tell me what has happened. You said the sales were good — do I need to reorder before I return?”
Yolanda screwed up her face as if in thought. “Probably only on the fireworks. Oh, and gum.”
“Gum? I thought we just reordered!”
She grew red. “Someone came in and bought it all.”
Pompano smiled to himself: he knew the habit of Filipinos to buy only what they needed, one item at a time. To have someone come in and completely wipe out his stock — that meant only one thing.
“Was this a young man, little one?”
“Yes, Father.” She looked down, avoiding his eyes.
“What is he like?”
“I do not know him very well.”
Pompano reached out and stroked his daughter’s hair. Long and black, it had natural body.
How beautiful his daughter was. She had her mother’s hair, and her mother’s eyes.
A pain stabbed through him—
For that was all the features from Lucila that she carried, as beautiful as she was.
Her angular features, her tallness … even the crook of her fingers, long and dexterous. Pompano tried to keep in the rage, subdue the feelings that had nearly consumed him some nineteen years earlier.
Lucila and he were newly married, he much older than she but just starting out in life, when they had strolled the streets of Angeles. The gang of American youths, perhaps G.I.s … The gang rape had been fast, brutal. Pompano had been forced to watch it, all the time swearing at the attackers. The devastating blow had been Lucila’s death on giving birth, birth to a baby whose father was probably half a world away. Pompano had nearly taken his life at that time, but had somehow managed to pull himself through.
His involvement with the Huks, and with this New People’s Army faction, had sustained him through the years. Striking back at the Americans while smiling and accepting their money. It was a way to get at the heart of the problem.
And now with this Huk encampment, his dreams would finally be realized.
Pompano looked up at his daughter and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Whoever this young man may be, I am sure he will be good to you. I must go back to the mountains in the next few days. When will I get a chance to meet him?”
Yolanda looked up. “After you return, Father. I will invite him over.”
“Charlie” used to be translated as sixty thousand feet; today that number is classified and is much, much higher.
The SR-73 Blackbird III pilots used the “Charlie plus” designation to identify a “base” altitude when they didn’t want their real altitude broadcast to the world, especially when they were speaking over unsecured channels.
At this altitude — eighty-five thousand feet, when Charlie was 60K — the Blackbird III was over three times as high as a normal plane might fly. And traveling over four times as fast.
Major Kathy Yulok managed to relax back in her seat, even through the layers of fabric and webbing that held her pressure suit together. Now, with the mission almost over, with the data collected and transmitted, flying the SR-73 back to Kadena seemed a breeze.
In thirty minutes she would make a low-altitude pass over the runway at Kadena and drop a small canister. The three-letter agencies already had access to the information she had collected, transmitted via satellite to a classified operating location. So the low-altitude flyby was pure “war-ready”—merely an exercise for war if communications were jammed — but it gave her an excuse to fly the bird down low and slow for a change. The film and data tapes would have been picked up and processed by the time she hangared the bird, or taxied the aircraft to the hangar.
The mission had been a milk run, not overflying any unfriendly territory but instead skirting as close to the international border as possible without sending up a missile.
Not that a missile would worry her — she had been shot at before, but the rockets had always flown too slow and were too far away to do any harm.
And as it turned out, flying next to another country’s border was practically as good as being directly overhead. With the advanced side-looking diagnostics, over a hundred thousand square miles of territory could be covered in less than an hour.
So, heading back from the South China Sea, Kathy was ready to bring her in and get some rest. Everything looked good; she couldn’t have asked for a better mission. That’s when she spotted the red lights.
She clicked her mike. “Eddie, you copy?”
Major Ed Prsybalwyki answered from the back seat. “That’s a rog. Engine flameout on one and two.”
“That’s what I’ve got.” Great, she thought. Both engines are out. She reached down and toggled a switch, trying to kick the scramjets back on. No luck. She stretched to look out the window. There was still land below them, but the coastline was heading up fast. “Eddie, you have a fix on our position?”
“Just leaving Taiwan. What do you think?”
She pondered it for a moment. Even though the SR-73 had been in commission for over ten years, most of the technology on the plane was still classified. Landing in a foreign country without copious prior preparation was frowned upon. And that was even when the nation was friendly to the U.S.
Kathy gnawed on her lip. They hadn’t lost much altitude yet, but they were definitely going down. “I’ll keep trying to turn over the engines. They may not catch unless we get back some velocity.”
“So do we circle, cry for help, or what?”
She made up her mind. “Head on home. We’ll be able to take her in if we don’t hit any downdrafts.”
Ed was silent for a moment. “You’re the boss.”
Kathy keyed her mike, switching from intercom to outside radio. With the change in altitude, she had to notify the international air control. “Ah, control, this is Stella Two-Niner at Charlie plus twenty-five thousand. We’ve flamed out and are descending.”
The radio came back instantly; the young man sounded like he was in a panic. “Stella Two-Niner, Taiwan center. Taipei International has a runway over ten thousand feet. Are you declaring an emergency?”
Kathy’s eyebrows rose. Declare an emergency?
Then she remembered — Charlie plus twenty-five.
She tried to hold back a chuckle as she clicked the mike; the poor guy thought that she was sixty-thousand feet lower than she was. “Ah, negative, Control. We’re heading for Kadena and will try to kick our engines over en route.”