In the Time of Man: A Novel, Ch. 2

Through the waves of heat shimmering off of the tarmac, Becky Acuna had difficulty seeing details with her cheap binoculars.  But enough of the scene was visible to leave her mystified.  A gray jet aircraft had landed at Luke Air Force Base and had been met by an unmarked panel van.  Although the base had been shut down by a presidential commission several years earlier, it had been in the process of being transferred to civilian control and Becky assumed any air traffic was associated with new commercial endeavors.  What she had been witnessing for a few months, however, did not make sense.  She squinted through the lenses and slightly racked the focus as a figure appeared on the threshold of the jet’s stairway.

Over Luke AFB, Phoenix

A man teetering on obviously unsteady legs looked down and appeared to contemplate the dozen steps between him and the runway’s surface.  Behind him, someone was holding up a bag of intravenous fluids.  Becky wondered why a person so feeble was being asked to walk down the stairway until two attendants came out from behind the van and rushed up to cradle the patient’s arms and guide him down to the runway.  The man they were assisting wore loose green scrubs and had long brown hair tangled in clumps, as if he had been sleeping and sweating for many hours.  Becky thought he was frail and emaciated but at this distance and through the haze she was uncertain.

Becky Acuna scanned the length of the plane with her binoculars to look for any distinguishing markings.  There was no insignia of any type on the fuselage and even more oddly the tail was absent standard identifying numbers.  She had seen the planes from the deck of her family’s new home but had not given the landings any thought until a barbecue with neighbors when someone had mentioned noticing the strange passengers.  Theories had been voiced at the cookout that the base was being turned into a critical care military hospital without the consent of the people of Phoenix.  In a beery conversation, the man living two doors down from Becky had claimed to have seen numerous aircraft unloading sickly passengers but that he had never noticed anyone leave on an airplane. Maybe, Becky guessed, they were getting well and then departing in personal vehicles.  Since she was a journalist, though, Becky decided to see if she might get some simple answers through observation.

She had moved with her husband Gene and their children into one of the stylish new developments sprawling in the desert around Phoenix.  Land adjacent to Luke Air Force Base, which had once been owned by the government, had been sold and was being turned into a community with leaning palms, upper middle class homes, a golf course and tennis courts, and one of those activity centers with a pool and a clubhouse where family gatherings were conducted on children’s birthdays and summer holidays.

Becky, of course, immediately assumed that nothing secretive was being done on the base or the government would have not allowed the pricey tract homes to be built that close to its boundaries.  The assumption was not necessarily a good one, though, because when she talked to a few of the initial homebuyers, who had been living in the neighborhood since it had been opened, Becky discovered there had never been a cessation of air traffic on the base; it had only been reduced.  The small training jets were no longer doing touch-and-goes and the big C-class cargo planes had permanently disappeared but there was still significant activity on a military reservation that was supposedly shut down more than five years ago.  Becky wondered if it had been put back into service because there was no other available facility and the military had felt no need to inform the general public.

It became a bit of a distracting habit for her to keep checking the far runways through her kitchen windows when she was home.  On weekends, she took her coffee on the deck and began to keep the binoculars on a window sill to be quickly snatched if she ever saw anything worth examining.  Over the course of several months, Becky realized there was no schedule or discernible pattern for the arrival of the aircraft and their mysterious human cargo. The afflicted passengers were easily recognizable, painfully distinct from the medical technicians who were lifting them down off of stretchers or assisting them as they practically staggered to the ambulances.  Most of these patients shuffled slowly across the tarmac to a waiting van, unmarked car, or emergency medical vehicle, which then drove quickly away in the direction of distant hangars.  Often, Becky saw people immobile, lying on their backs and being transported by gurneys.  There was never even the slightest movement and their bodies were so thin it looked like there was little more than a blanket being carted across the runway.

Becky also realized these planes never stayed on the ground very long.  One jet turbine was always kept turning as if the pilots were anxious to get back airborne and seek safety in the great desert sky, distancing themselves from the lesser beings they had left behind, faltering on the ground.  Frequently, just as the last gurney had been wheeled clear of the engine cowling, the jets started their slow pressurized whine.  It was rare if their landing gear remained on the ground for more than fifteen minutes.

After a few weeks, Becky had begun to write down descriptions of all of this in her reporter’s notebooks.  She also started logging the appearance of various vehicles, apparently entering the base from the front gate and then traveling back to the rows of hangars on the remote edge of the old base.  A few times she was able to make out white-frocked orderlies, who had been hovering just behind the double doors of the tall corrugated steel buildings, as they hurriedly attended the arrival of the EMT buses. Whatever business was being conducted, punctuality was essential to its performance but she was unable to see if there were more of the patients being delivered because of the manner in which the EMT vehicles were backed up to the hangar doors.

Only a few houses were situated near the southwest corner of the base’s perimeter and they were barely close enough to the hangars to make their glimmering steel walls visible.  Developers of Becky’s neighborhood had not yet cut roads through the desert that would take the construction of homes nearer to Luke’s fence line and a nature trail was plotted to maintain a permanent separation between the houses and the base.  Already, though, there was a broad open space of acreage between the clusters of homes and the bases’ perimeter and through the stands of Saguaro and Organ Pipe it was hard to see much of anything beyond the desert sun.

In fact, hardly anyone in Phoenix paid attention to Luke Air Force Base after it had shut down.  Operations at Luke were deemed not to be an integral part of national defense planning for the twenty first century and the base and its civilian employees and a multi-million dollar payroll were lost to the Phoenix economy. Efforts to save the operation by the Arizona congressional delegation resulted in a public relations fiasco for the state and had created sufficient controversy that commercial development of the vast military reserve and its buildings had been almost non-existent.  Investors seemed to want nothing to do with Luke’s destiny, whatever it was to become.

Becky Acuna, though, was becoming increasingly curious about the movement of people on Luke Air Force Base. Over several weeks, her notes showed a slowly increasing number of flights carrying the sick.  Once, she had gone so far as to make calls to Air Force and Congressional sources.  They yielded no information and left her with the common suspicion the government was lying.  Becky was not the kind of journalist who immediately distrusted everything the government said but she was certain the people she was talking to were either giving her the runaround or they were oblivious to precisely what was happening in the Arizona desert.  She had become convinced after months of patient scrutiny that there was an organized medical operation of some kind at Luke and there was an effort to keep it secret.

As the latest twin-engine jet turned around and rolled out toward the pastel horizon, Becky put down the binoculars and sipped her coffee.  She remembered just then that her husband Gene still owned the old telescope he had purchased for the star parties he used to attend when they lived in West Texas.  The lens was likely not very powerful and maybe she could use it to get a better view of the planes and people on the base.  She thought the telescope was still unpacked and on a shelf in the garage.  So while her husband and children slept through the bright early morning in the Great Sonoran Desert, Becky Acuna got up and went to the garage to dig around in musty boxes.

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