General Trusten Polk’s F-16 explodes on takeoff in Denver. Within hours he’s exposed as an impostor, a war hero politician controlled by others.

As Captain Boyd Chailland, the pilot member of the accident board uncovers Polk’s lonely private life he finds another pilot from Polk’s past knows all his secrets and is leaking them to the press.

Congressman Roscoe Kelly is tied to bank fraud and other politicians with ties to Polk duck and weave. The press smells blood and government corruption dominates the news cycle. Is The Other Pilot a patriot or a criminal? Where did all that money come from?

Boyd rushes to find The Other Pilot, as signs point to a criminal mastermind with a lust for revenge.

The spark to set off civil war in America is on a ranch in west Texas. Boyd, his English teacher lover, his flight surgeon pal, a vintage aircraft enthusiast with a restored P-51 Mustang, and a small town sheriff are the nation’s last line of defense.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE

The general hated flying. Any other pilot would have been thrilled to have a brand new block 50 F-16 to tool around the country instead of using the airlines. Even with his aide there to file the flight plan for him, General Trusten Polk hated it. He hated the G-suit, and the helmet, and the boots.

“Trust One to Buckley tower. Permission for takeoff,” he said, annoyed at the delay. They had his flight plan, there were no other aircraft leaving for hours. Why not just say, “Permission granted,” and let him get airborne and out of here?

“Trust One, permission granted for takeoff. Have a pleasant day, sir.”

General Polk keyed the microphone button on the stick to acknowledge the transmission, but said nothing. His left hand moved the throttle impatiently. The Falcon lurched forward.

The night before, an old friend had called in another favor, the latest in a long series of requests, tips, accommodations, lies, and fraudulent deeds. Like the round heeled whore he was, Polk had delivered with a smile.

The acceleration pressed Polk back into the seat as the aircraft rocketed down the runway. Polk had no sense of being in control, even though he wielded the stick and the throttle. He even considered closing his eyes, trusting that sheer inertia and the width of the runway would keep them on it until they reached takeoff speed.

“One sixty,” Kevin Barnes said, calling out the takeoff speed from the back seat.

In two days Polk had to be in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Tonight when he got back to Virginia, the FAX machine beside his bed would print out the questions, and the answers. No one cared what Trusten Polk thought about the issue, the four stars would speak. All he had to do Monday was read off the answers. Disgust choked him, like vomit in his oxygen mask. The Falcon’s nose lifted gracefully.

He’d been a man once. A man who had occupied space, with a personality, a soul. He’d had dreams, friends, a past, and a future. Now Trusten Polk was virtual reality. Turn off the forces that controlled him, and there would be nothing.

Polk lurched forward as the engine, emitting a loud clang, exploded. He looked down into the cockpit, mind in transition from his self pity to the checklist for engine failure on takeoff. The right wing rotated quickly downward.

“Hey!” Polk yelled, as if Kevin Barnes in the back seat could do something if he were alerted. Instinctively he put lateral and backward pressure on the stick to correct the roll and bring the nose up, but before the Falcon could respond the right wing tip hit the ground and the aircraft cartwheeled forward at 250 knots. The nose hit a moment later and 12,000 pounds of jet fuel became an aerosol. The burning rear of the aircraft rotated into this cloud of fuel and ignited it with a muffled roar and a bright red fireball.

The firemen sitting on the crash truck east of the runway were already in their crash suits, so they had only to put on their boots and start the truck. They were rolling before the stunned air traffic controllers could notify them of the crash. In less than a minute they were at the site, pouring foam on the debris and looking for survivors. The black smoke was already 1,000 feet in the air.

The pilots had been admiring Mount Evans, sixty miles to the west and 14,264 feet above sea level. Had anyone been on the top that morning they could have seen the small plume of smoke on the eastern fringe of the Denver metropolitan area that marked the end of an illustrious, if unusual, military career.

CHAPTER TWO

The long thin blade crossed and recrossed the stone. In spite of a puddle of 30 weight motor oil, it made a high pitched grating sound that fascinated the dog. A black Labrador retriever lay with his face on his front paws and his eyes fixed on the knife as if he were to receive some precious insight from the event.

Boyd Chailland (SHYland) sat on the back steps of his rented farm house just east of the Denver International Airport. His gaze shifted from Mount Evans, to Longs Peak to the north, and back to the filet knife he was sharpening. From his vantage point in the prairie east of Denver he could see the whole city and the mountains beyond. He could look down the line of airliners descending from the east, and with the usual departure route to the north, he could marvel at how those huge loaded crafts could rise so quickly in this thin mountain air.

“You ready to chase some trout, Eight Ball?” he said to the dog as he wiped the motor oil on his jeans and stood up, admiring the blade.

The telephone rang. Boyd had only been in Denver a month and could think of nothing good that could come from a telephone call.

“Captain Chailland?” the voice asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Colonel Bertz. We’ve had an accident this morning.” There was a quiver in his voice. “General Trusten Polk crashed on takeoff at 0700. He and his aide were both killed. I’ll be the chairman of the accident investigation board and I’ve assigned you to be the pilot member.”

“Yes, sir. Should I come over now?” Boyd saw the image of Polk speaking just the day before. Earnest, decisive, and energetic, he had been wired with a collar mike and paced the stage.

“There are those in Congress…” Polk had said several times, straying perilously close to a political statement, forbidden to military officers. He had only touched on the anniversary celebration of Buckley being upgraded to an Air Force Base from an Air National Guard base, his reason for coming to Denver. The thrust of his talk had been toward preservation of U.S. military superiority in an uncertain world, and a caution to watch for, “those who would leave us open to a stab in the back from bitter enemies who covet this beautiful land.”

That last statement had been the 20 second sound bite delivered as the lead story on the evening news the night before. With it had gone a complimentary piece about how the Colorado Guard unit was part of the backbone of America’s might, with its state-of-the-art F-16s ready to deploy worldwide on a moment’s notice. Boyd had felt pride for the first time since taking an active duty assignment as a pilot with a guard unit instead of another active duty fighter wing. His choice had been between a non-flying job or flying with the reserves.

“What happened?” Boyd asked the obvious question without waiting for an answer to his first one.

“Engine exploded on takeoff. Never even cleared the end of the runway,” Bertz said woodenly, like he’d already told the story more than he wanted to, then added, “Yes, come over now. Wear ABUs and bring an extra change of clothes.”

Boyd relived a take off; damn little of it before the end of the runway. Then he saw the general again, striding off the stage to applause, waving.

“Come to flight operations and we’ll assemble before going down to the site. We usually bring in somebody from another base for the board, but you’re new here, and you’re an instructor pilot with combat experience in the F-16. Headquarters said to put you on the board. How soon can you be here?”

“Half an hour, sir,” was Boyd’s crisp military response. It masked his considerable aversion to the task and the disappointment in having his weekend plans changed so abruptly.

A change of clothes? Boyd thought as he stood in his kitchen looking south out the window. A smudge of smoke was visible high in the southern sky toward Buckley.

“Change of plans, big guy,” he said as he filled Eight Ball’s water dish and tossed him a couple dog biscuits. He strode back down the steps into the worn back yard and kneeled to rub the dog’s ears and head. The dog looked up expectantly from his dog biscuit, brushing his heavy tail against the dust.

Boyd stood and returned to the house. He quickly threw a spare flight suit and boots along with a change of underwear and socks into a leather athletic bag.

The smell of the leather briefly took him back to the carefree leave he’d enjoyed in Italy while flying combat air patrol over Afghanistan. He’d felt invincible then, before the drawdown eliminated half the pilot billets and sent shit-hot fighter jocks to the airlines, parcel services, and graduate schools. Fighter wings were different now. Performance was not for pride as before, but to stay in the upper half of the top gun standings and avoid the next cut.

He turned off the lights, unplugged the coffeepot, donned the black baseball cap of the cougar squadron of the Colorado Air National Guard and walked out to his muddy and battered Chevy pickup. No need to lock the door.

CHAPTER THREE

Boyd stood stunned by the transformation of the aircraft he had flown almost daily for six years. It had changed from a graceful light grey ballerina of the clouds to a broken black beast, surrounded by a 150 foot circle of burned grass, and pieces. “Pieces of what?” Boyd murmured to himself with a wave of nausea.

The perimeter of the site was marked by day-glow orange ribbon and patrolled by guards toting M-16s. Boyd and Moses Eubanks, the crew chief on his aircraft, stepped out of a van only a few feet from the smoldering wreckage. The air reeked with the smell of burned and unburned kerosene, and burned grass, paint, plastic, and human flesh. The ground was singed inside the barrier. Firemen milled around, still carrying hoses and spraying water and foam on a few smoldering hot spots. Fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and command vehicles, each chattered on their own radio frequency. All the doors were open. All the engines were running.

“Over here, gentlemen.” A voice emerged from the chaos, and the accident board walked numbly toward it, their eyes still fixed on the wreckage. “I’m Major Graham. I’ll be in charge of crash site security. Now that you’re here we can enter the area. We’ll stay together at first and take a quick walk around, then we can spread out and look for objects to chart. The pilot member of the board needs to be the first one to examine the flight controls and instruments so nobody touch the cockpit area until he’s been there. The remains will stay in place until the flight surgeon has all the pictures and diagrams he needs. Don’t pick up anything yet. When we begin charting parts, call for a technician to come over and measure how far something is from the center of the site and what compass reading it is. One of the actual board members will confirm and initial all notations.” As he said this, the guards moved the ribbon and they walked onto burned grass.

The carcass of the F-16 lay on its side without the wings. The jet engine, really just a pipe with a fan in the middle, was blackened by the fire and its outer wall had a fist-sized hole on the right side. The fuselage that had surrounded it was gone. From the rear cockpit forward the outer skin of the aircraft was intact in a few places, missing in others. The canopy was broken, and only a few pieces of it were scattered about on the ground below the fuselage. Both pilots were still in the aircraft, their fireproof helmets, visors, and flight suits still in recognizable condition.

When the fuselage had collapsed on impact, the shape and size of the cockpit contracted and expanded drastically in a moment. This had fragmented the pilots’ bodies and caused their fluids to form an aerosol like the jet fuel that had caused such a spectacular fireball. The explosion and fire after impact had been anticlimactic for them.

Moses Eubanks vomited immediately upon looking into the cockpit. Boyd a moment later. Most of the others followed within a minute or two. The security guards and firemen politely turned their attention to details in another direction from the vomiting accident board.

A gentle breeze was blowing from the north and by stepping into it one could get respite from the smell. Boyd turned and looked at the mountains, stood straight and breathed deeply and remembered the first and last lines from a poem all pilots know.

“I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth…

…and touched the face of God.”

Others were looking at the mountains too, each making his own adaptation to cope. One by one each returned his attention to the subject at hand and began talking in low murmurs about various aspects of the crash.

Boyd returned reluctantly to the cockpit. The flaps were down, as they should be this close to take-off. The stick was in a neutral position, typical for the F-16, as the controls are actuated by pressure on the stick rather than movement. The airspeed indicator was stuck at 200 knots. The attitude indicator was correctly indicating 30 degrees of bank, which was about the position of the fuselage at this moment. The throttle was in afterburner, all the way forward; a desperate last ditch effort to stay in the air. The landing gear were in the locked down position. Things were just how they should be according to the pre-flight checklist. He stood back while the photographer recorded all findings.

“Wingtip hit here.” Moses Eubanks called, standing fifty yards behind the fuselage. The others walked over to see the surprisingly narrow gash in the ground that was only a couple feet deep. A young man, not more than twenty years old, and wearing an orange jumpsuit, rushed over with a brand new construction tape measure and began documenting its exact location. He was ashen faced and seemed eager to get that far away from the aircraft.

“Look at this stuff all over the ground.” Boyd said, standing beside Moses as the others walked around the site. The ground was littered with tiny bits of things.

“That’s the plane,” Moses said solemnly, stooping to pick up a piece of composite no bigger than a toothpick, and just as sharp. It looked like fiberglass. “You take the engine and avionics out of one of these things; four men can pick it up.”

“No shit?” Boyd said, thinking about the 18,500 lbs it weighed empty and the 7,000 lbs of fuel it carried internally, and the 15,000 lbs of bombs or rockets it could easily carry. “I guess that’s all it is, really. Engine, instruments, gas, bombs, and men.” Boyd had to look at the mountains again after that. Pilots prefer to approach plane crashes in the abstract.

The different parts of the plane were discovered, talked about, catalogued and photographed. Before they knew it, it was noon. Lunch was delivered and they were all called over to eat.

Just before leaving the perimeter Boyd stopped and picked up something totally unexpected; they looked like a pair of vice-grip pliers, blackened from the fire and bent. Moses and Major Graham stopped to examine them and the airman quickly began the measurements.

“Vice-grips?” Boyd said to Moses as they washed their hands and opened a can of Pepsi. “I’ve never seen a Vice-grip on an aircraft before.”

“They aren’t vice-grips. They’re dikes. We use them to cut the wire that tightens the bolts on the inside of the combustion chamber. The bolts have a safety wire attached to them that is twisted to be sure the bolt doesn’t come loose and fly about. Sometimes dikes do get left in the aircraft. It doesn’t usually cause a problem.” Moses looked worried.

“Looks like they might have gotten into the engine and then it spit them out the side, rupturing the fuel tanks,” Boyd said, still whispering.

“Maybe.” Moses said slowly as he wrinkled his face, removed his hat and ran his hand over the top of his bald head as if he were smoothing down the hair that no longer was there. The head looked like a mahogany colored bowling ball.

They ate lunch in silence, without pleasure. Bologna sandwiches on white bread with one slice of American cheese and doused with mustard will stop any thought of additional food for a good six hours, and what is a meal for if not that?

By mid-afternoon the sun was high and warm and they were all working in their ABU pants and t-shirts. The firemen had packed up and left, and the security police were occupied with a small band of reporters who had been allowed to approach the site and report back to the army of journalists at the main hanger. Finally there was nothing else to do. Mortuary Affairs began to remove the remains. A final walk around, within, and a large circle outside, the perimeter failed to turn up anything new. They boarded the crew bus and were driven back to the briefing room.

Tired, thirsty, and smelling of fiery death, Boyd hopped out of the crew step-van at base operations and followed Moses Eubanks inside. The accident board walked silently down the hall, the pilots and admin people standing aside, out of respect and revulsion at the smell. Some were already stripping down in anticipation of the showers at the end of the hall.

“Chailland! Got a call,” the Supervisor of Flying stopped Boyd in the hall. “Some guy says he has something for the pilot member of the board and won’t talk to anyone else.”

Boyd took the yellow phone message form from the major serving as SOF for the day and walked a few paces before looking at it. The call was long distance. Boyd stopped, angry, grumpy, and in the mood to argue.

“I need a class A line, this is long distance,” he said, hoping someone would say he couldn’t use the phone and he could crumple the note up and go shower with the rest of the guys.

Amiably, the major pointed to the phone on the SOF desk and left the room. Wearily Boyd sat down and dialed.

“Lamar Implement Company!”

“This is Captain Boyd Chailland, Colorado Air National Guard, here at Buckley. You left a message for me to call back.”

“Oh yes, that was Mr. Switzler, hold just a moment please?”

“Hello, John Switzler. Thanks for calling back. I understand there’s a board investigating that plane crash this morning. It’s all over the news.”

“Yes, I’m Captain Boyd Chailland, the pilot member of the accident board.” Boyd said, crisp and formal. He wouldn’t be at all sad to have this be short.

“Look, Captain, I’m not any happier to be having this talk than you are. I just want to be sure I’m talking to the right guy. I don’t want to create any problems, and maybe I’m mistaken about this. So, if I have some information that’s relevant to this case, can I just report it to you?”

“Sure, we may need to check back with you in person if it’s something important.”

“That’s no problem.” There was a pause, as if John were struggling to find a starting point. “Look, Trusten Polk and I were friends; college roommates; fraternity brothers at Oklahoma. We kept in touch for awhile, then I didn’t hear anything until today. The last time I saw Trus was after the Viet Nam war. He was going to Libya to fly fighters there. I was living in Tulsa then and he came by the house. We had some beers, caught up on the good times. Right after that I heard he’d been in a plane crash.”

“I’m writing this down. I haven’t been over his personnel file yet, so I can’t say if we need anything that far back,” Boyd said, confident now he could bring this to a close.

“I’m not calling about any of that. The fellow on the television last night, the guy that made the speech; the one on the news this morning. That’s not Trusten Polk.”

“What do you mean it’s not Trusten Polk?”

“Not the guy I knew.”

“Maybe you knew a different Polk.”

“On the news it said he went to OU, won a silver star in Viet Nam. I went to the Air Force web site and read his bio. It all fits; but it’s not him.”

“How could it not be him?”

“I was thinking maybe the news got the wrong picture.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it. We’ll have his personnel file in the morning; with the official picture, finger prints, DNA; everything.”

“It’s probably just a mixup of pictures, or something. I’ll just hang back, not talk to anyone.”

“Good idea. Look, I’ll get back as soon as I see the file; probably tomorrow afternoon. Keep it quiet till then.”

“Deal.”

Leaving the base Boyd felt dirty. In spite of a long shower the smells of the crash were still on him. He didn’t want to take that back to the sanctity of his rented farm house and Eight Ball. His spirit was wounded. He needed a beer, and Dozer’s Bar was just the place. Way east of Denver International, Dozer’s had opened when the initial grade work was being done. For more than two years heavy earth moving equipment churned the prairie to get the grade and elevation right for the runways, and Dozer’s was the watering hole for the drivers.

Boyd had been to Dozer’s a couple times since moving in a few miles down the road. The walls were lined with pictures of bulldozers, graders, dump trucks, survey crews, and mountains of dirt as it documented the construction phases of the new airport. Boyd entered and sat at the bar, ordering a long neck and swiveling around to look at the Saturday happy hour crowd.

A man stood in the door, his eyes adjusting to the darker interior. Tall, heavy, dressed in western style pants with a bolo tie and Wellington boots. He spotted Boyd and walked over, taking the adjacent stool.

Retired colonel, Boyd thought to himself. Sees my flight suit and wings from over there; wants to talk about the crash. Can’t tell him anything. Don’t even need to acknowledge I’m on the accident board.

“Captain Chailland?”

“Yes,” Boyd said. How’d he know, was what he thought.

“May I buy you a drink?”

“Sure.” This is just what Boyd had hoped to avoid.

“Let’s sit over here, it’s quieter.” He nodded to the bartender to send over two more and walked toward a table in the corner. Boyd followed, taking a seat and watching passively as the older man sat, leaned his cane against the table and pushed another long neck across the table to Boyd.

Boyd took a long pull of his beer and felt the cold slice down into his middle. He waited for the questions to start.

“Trusten Polk was my best friend,” the man said solemnly.

Boyd looked the man in the eyes for the first time, not hiding the surprise in his own. The man was intense, watching him.

“I have friends at Buckley. They called me after the crash. Too late then, of course, to do anything.”

“Do anything?”

“About what he told me at dinner.” The gaze was direct, piercing.

“Wait, who are you?”

“Barney Freeman, just an old retired colonel. Trus and I go way back.”

“There’s a form for the accident board; I have to document the previous 24 hours. I need to know what he ate, with whom, where, how much he had to drink. That sort of thing,” Boyd said, trying to remember what else he needed to find out.

“Ate with me, at the Brown Palace, steak, one cocktail. That’s not what’s important for you to know. Listen, Trus was in big trouble. It was eating him up. He’s gotten into something in Washington. Something illegal. Something big. Something that may have led to that crash.”

“Wait, I gotta write this down,” Boyd said, looking over at the bar for a legal pad, some paper.

“No. Just listen.” A big hand pinned Boyd’s arm to the table. “He was a member of the Delano Society. Mention that to your board chairman. Ask him to run that by the SecDef. You’ll see some fireworks.” Freeman stood, dropped a twenty on the table and walked out, he didn’t use the cane.

CHAPTER FOUR

She was early, but waited in the car until the staff cars with the stars and eagles on the front unloaded in front of the chapel. The wives wore their church dresses and the guys their class A’s. There was to be a burial at Arlington in two days, this was the memorial service for the Air Combat Command staff and those who might have known General Polk here at Langley in Virginia. Some big guys from the Pentagon and other bases had shown up here, to show support and respect.

Nobody knew Trusten Polk. Carmella De Beauvoir was sure of that. She entered the chapel with the bulk of the crowd, those who came in from their workplace in the uniform of the day, lining up to sign the guest registry. The lump in her throat became the first tear as she signed it herself. She’d been to a hundred of these, every active duty death on every base her husband had been posted to in a thirty year career. Bud De Beauvoir had led flights, squadrons, wings, and held staff jobs at every level. She would pull herself away from kids, or golf, or bridge, put on her best dress and meet him at the chapel or rush out to the car when he honked in front of the house. Most of the time she hadn’t known the deceased, some young airman in a car crash, a pilot in a training accident, cancer, heart attacks, a boating accident. This was different.

“Will Colonel De Beauvoir be coming?” a young Airman from the ACC staff asked. He wore Honor Guard shoulder braid.

“No, he’s TDY. I’ll just sit in the back.”

“The other staff colonels are in the second row. Could I escort you up there?”

She looked up to the second row, the place her husband’s job entitled her to sit. Phyllis and Ned, Carol and Raphael, and Maxine without Tommy were all together. They were her neighbors, pretty good friends, and part of Polk’s bridge club.

“OK. Put me on the far end of the row, next to Colonel Franks,” she whispered. Maybe sitting next to Maxine would help her maintain composure. If she lost it, she’d be so far toward the end of the row it might not be noticed.

“Where’s Bud?” Maxine Franks asked.

“He had to go to Randolph for a promotion board. He’ll be back tomorrow. We’re going up to the burial at Arlington,” she said as she slipped in next to Maxine. Carmella dabbed her eyes as tears flowed. Who would take the guest registry when the funeral was over?

Bud had had the Wild Weasel squadron at Spangdahlem, ten years before. The dark, damp German winters took their toll and he’d had to spend a lot of nights shoring up morale at the club and at various gasthouses around the Eifel region of southern Germany. The Weasels were the squadron that went into a target first to take out the anti-aircraft radar. They went TDY to every hot spot and exercise in the hemisphere. Carmella played bridge. Brigadier General Trusten Polk, the wing commander, was her regular partner.

In the chapel at Langley, the music started, and Carmella De Beauvoir remembered Trusten Polk.

“Five, No Trump,” he had bid, with authority, and a twinkle in his eye for Carmella. Their opponents folded and Polk proceeded to work through the cards, skillfully switching suits to trap their face cards and win the hand, and the tournament. Afterward, helping him clean up in the kitchen of the wing commander’s quarters, she’d felt an attraction, brushed against him, flirted, and finally, they’d embraced.

Carmella was not a stranger to being felt up in the kitchen. Fighter pilots back from a long TDY or passing a big Operational Readiness Inspection celebrate, and some celebrations are marathon affairs going from house to house gaining momentum. A butt pinch or a tittie squeeze in the midst of general merriment is not a foul. This, however, was a long wet kiss with Polk’s hands thoroughly exploring her plump butt and ample, matronly bust.

“Oh, God!” he’d said at the break, the blushing anguish on his face and the bulge in the front of his trousers told Carmella two things: Trusten Polk was not queer, as some had suggested because he was a lifelong bachelor, and secondly, he was a needy, lonely man.

Bud De Beauvoir, call sign “Debo”, barged through life at full tilt, the little boy with the big dick, with one eye on the mirror and the other on his buddies; indestructible, fearless, restless. Sex with him was entertainment. He wanted lights and mirrors and always something new.

Trusten Polk, call sign “Trus”, tall, broad shouldered and handsome like Bud, was very different. Carmella knew, even before their session in the kitchen at Spang, it was all an act. He could swagger and joke and talk about flying, gathering the young pilots like children around him to hear his stories and share his insights on the world situation, but he didn’t feel it. He took her naked, full length, slowly in a darkened room, savoring every inch of her with his hands and face. He spent his seed in such a great rush of emotion, it seemed like pain, and she was drawn to him because of it. She wanted to see behind that mask, to know what he felt. Afterwards he was shaken, guilt ridden for committing the unforgivable sin of fucking a subordinate’s wife.

Polk went to the Pentagon after Spang.  Bud got National War College, then the Pentagon on Polk’s staff, later his own wing. Bud was sure he’d get a star, and when he didn’t it took something out of him. One day he was that boy who never grew up, mischievous and wild, the next day he was old, counting the days to retirement and an oblivious life of fishing. He lived two hundred yards from the ocean, and didn’t yet own a fishing pole.

Langley was best for Carmella. Kids grown and at nearby colleges, Bud reaping the benefits of a successful career in a soft staff job with no flying and enough travel to make him feel part of the action, and Polk needy and guilt ridden as ever, giving up more and more pieces of himself. She was fascinated.

“Our Heavenly Father, we are gathered here today to remember one of our own.” The Command Chaplain opened the service. Polk’s own preacher, selected by him for the chance to become the only general officer chaplain in the Air Force, had three pages of notes. He played bridge too.

Trusten Polk was into something illegal, dangerous, and tied up with politics. It was affecting their sex life. He was like all boys — draining off some of that sperm seems to clear their mind, lets them see the world better. Anxiety about his problems was turning their trysts into confessions, complete with tears and entreaties of, “never leave me, I have no one!”

She’d calm him down, promise whatever, get his pants down, and get on him. Afterwards, he’d talk about a friend from Texas. She’d seen the friend a couple times at Polk’s house, a stoop shouldered man with a cane. Things always seemed worse after he’d been around.

Polk would send Bud TDY about twice a month, usually for a day or two, and always with rental cars and full protocol honors, as befitting a senior staff officer of Air Combat Command rolling into town to kick ass and take names. Carmella would plan something for the early evening with friends, then on returning home turn out the lights except for her bedroom, and slip out for a walk. The security detail that watched Polk’s street changed at 2300 hours, and she’d slip into Polk’s back door. Boys are always telling sex stories, re-affirming among themselves that they’re all getting it regularly. Carmella, middle aged and heavier than she would have liked, enjoyed knowing that she was keeping the brains of two of America’s fighting men clear of that dreaded semen build up.

He needed to talk. “If the country only knew,” was one of his favorite phrases. He’d check himself, then resume the endless discussion he always seemed to be wrestling with himself over  — constitutional rights. He’d talk about how the media didn’t understand why law abiding citizens would need to carry guns. Carmella didn’t either, but Polk, apparently, did. Once she saw a film clip of him on the news from out west. He was standing in front of the F-16 he flew when he traveled, making a speech about the constitutional right to own property and control its use. She found it odd that an Air Force general would be speaking on such a thing and mentioned it to him. He paled, and asked her what channel and at what time. Had anyone else seen it?

The FAX machine in Polk’s bedroom would begin to spew out paper at midnight. Carmella had learned that if the night’s sex were not over by then, then it would be, because Polk got mad as soon as the thing kicked on to warm up. Unlike all the other documents Bud brought home and Polk had all over the house, these were not on letterhead, and the FAX cover sheet had no identifying information on it. It was pages of text, instructions, verbatim speeches, even testimony before Congress. From where? From whom? He wouldn’t say.

Continued….

Click on the title below to download the entire book and keep reading

Ed Baldwin’s The Other Pilot>>>>