Driver Pt 02

2. No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished

This is a work of fiction. All characters depicted are over the age of 18.

When Mack went to write up his paperwork he couldn't log on. Computer glitch he figured. It was late anyway, way after 2, so rather than suffer the ordeal of consulting the 'help' desk he called it a night. The post-task could wait, the longer the better and serve the company right. He caught Wendy in the foyer on the way out. There was simply too much to say so in the end they just settled for a hug. "See you at the inquiry." she beamed, turning to leave.

By the time he hit the hay it was going on for 4. Even then, the filthy insomnia turned up and when he DID sleep, in fitful dribs and drabs, it merely opened the door to Luke. Not just once, in a dream, but twice, in a dream about the dream, and a third time, in a dream of telling his mom about the dream in the dream. Not even summoning his AV Idol Ruki... or Riku... or whatever the fuck her name was, could help- as long as flashbacks kept crashing the party. Even after the girl's mother arrived to lend a helping hand. A seasoned porn star herself, she offered to do a double-act with her girl but moments after a promising start, burning rig-workers began jumping into the frame. At 6 a.m. he dragged his tormented ass out of bed and drove to the pool.

When all else failed there was always swimming. His meditation. Blue tiles, the smell of chlorine, clean, cool water, the mesmerising black line. The muffled 'splish, splash, splish' of his arms cleaving the surface tension, the sensual flow of liquid over his body. And the odd glimpse of a neighbouring female as they crossed paths lap-for-lap, sleek as a seal and just as graceful.

The 2000-meter communion left Mack feeling human once more. Not that it was bound to last. He'd turned his phone off post-mission last night, too wrung out to field any calls, and now he turned it back on, the message bank was swamped. He cycled through, automatically erasing any callers he couldn't identify, pausing once or twice to hear-out those he could. One of them was Wendy, calling barely thirty minutes ago. "Mate, if you're near a TV you better turn it on." In a follow-up message she typed, "P.S., you won't be needing a bucket of popcorn. Just a bucket."

The next call was from the company Operations Manager, Jason Baker. "Travis, pick the fuck up. This is important."

Forwarding the message to oblivion, Mack punched up the next in the list, Wayne Garcia, Chief Pilot. No doubt calling to ask where he'd mislaid his copilot. And how he'd gotten his nice yellow and blue airplane all black with soot. He sent the call to join the others in the 9th-dimensional garbage dump. Or parallel shitverse or wherever they went.

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Tammy Norton looked up as the glass doors slid open and Mack walked into reception. Tammy was like everyone's favourite aunt- as long as your aunt was black- or your mom's best pal. Funny yet at the same time sincere, she knew all the pilots' birthdays, how they took their coffees and where they'd been on vacation. Her thousand-watt smile could light up the room but this morning, when he looked, Mack could see the receptionist had been crying. He propped, frowning. "Tammy? You okay?"

"Oh, Travis," Tammy said with a shake of her head, "this is just so-"

One of several doors opened and they both looked around. Barron Shipley stepped out of the boardroom, grinning like the cat who got the cream. Until he set eyes on Mack and teetered to a stop. Smoothing back his hair, he held out his hand.

Mack leant forward and shook out of reflex. "Barron? What happened to you?"

Shipley looked around for a reply. "Me?"

"Last night? Was it just a stubborn bowel movement or did you forget we were on a job?"

"Oh... that..." Shipley said waving Mack's concerns away. "Well... you see... on my way back. The rig's doc stopped me and said he thought I was suffering from smoke inhalation. I was coughing my lungs up, you see, and my eyes were running." Pausing, Shipley summoned up a theatrical cough. "Excuse me, it's still giving me trouble. But, look. I tried to get away, honestly, but they dragged me down to the infirmary and shipped me out on the first medevac. Priority one. I tried to send word. They didn't tell you?"

Mack shot Tammy a glance. Eyes narrowed, she sat glaring at Shipley trying to set him alight with her eyes. "No," Mack shook his head, "I must have missed that."

Shipley rubbed his hands. "Not to worry. I've got two weeks off in case the symptoms come back. Just to be on the safe side. Say, Travis, I don't suppose you saw Rise and Shine this morning?"

"Morning TV?" Mack bridled. "I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a pencil. Why do you ask?"

"Oh... no reason. Listen, Tammy?"

"Yes, Mister Shipley?"

Eyes closed, Shipley pinched the bridge of his nose. "Tamara... please... don't forget I fought for your freedom. The least you could do is address me as 'Commander'."

Tammy's eyes hardened another degree. "Sorry... Sir... what can I do for you?"

"There's a queue of media lined up round the block, gagging for interviews. If they come through here you're not to give them my number."

"You mean I am to follow standard company procedure? Of never giving out numbers? To anyone? Ever?"

Shipley nodded. "If you could see to it."

"I'll do my best."

A voice said, "Captain Mack?"

Mack and Shipley looked round at the figure leaning through the boardroom door. Operations Manager, Jason Baker. Looking pointedly at Mack, he crooked his finger. "Informal chat, Travis. If we could have a moment of your valuable time."

Shipley gave Mack a comradely pat on the shoulder then winked, clicking his tongue. "Go gettum, Tiger. And gimme a call when you're done with your interview. We'll hook up for coffee."

"Sure." Mack nodded, thinking, 'That'll be the day.'

Baker led Mack inside and closed the door behind him. Three further individuals were seated at the boardroom table, with a row floor-to-ceiling, panoramic windows behind them. Wayne Garcia, the overweight, perpetually sweaty company Chief Pilot. Jim McBride, Chief Engineer. And Megan Jones, the blonde airhead who masqueraded as the Manager of People and Talent. As he sat, watching Baker take a seat opposite, Mack realised he'd just walked into an ambush.

"Goddam cowboy!" McBride snarled, "You nearly fucked one of my machines."

"Jim!" Baker snapped, "That's enough. I know you're upset. We all are. But that's not gonna help."

"You'd think with the sort of money we pay pilots he could have turned up in a suit." Garcia said under his breath. Mack looked himself over. What did he mean? He was wearing his cleanest pair of blue jeans, recently washed. And his best sage-green polo shirt. He was even wearing socks under his Keens, a sartorial nod to the gravity of the occasion. It didn't matter anyway. This was management. He could have turned up in a tuxedo and they'd still find a reason to fault him.

Eyes down, rifling through the documents scattered all over the table, the Hit Squad talked among themselves for a while, ignoring him. A cheesy slice of theatre, Mack realised, put on for no one's benefit but their own. The lard-ass Baker was a career bridge salesman, who'd climbed the greasy pole out of stores. Garcia was ex-army. He hadn't lay hands on an aircraft for more than a decade, and even then, he'd over-torqued the damn thing. McBride, a civvy, was a well-known tantrum-chucker who'd been run out of the Middle East for his vociferous racism, against the very same people who paid his wages. And Megan. Well, she'd come out of oil and gas. Tales were rife how she'd managed the transition, from lowly intern to Head of Personnel through the powers vested in her crotch. Now here they were playing judge, jury and executioner, holding the fate of a snivelling driver in their hands.

Tired, bored, and not in the least unnerved, Mack looked around, then plucked an aviation magazine off a nearby coffee table. Quickly immersed in a fighter-pilot's riveting tale of dodging SAMs in his F-16, Mack sensed a change in the energy and looked up.

Garcia nodded at the magazine. "So you can read?"

Mack blinked in surprise. "Excuse me?"

"You can read? Or were you just looking at the pictures?"

"No," Mack shook his head, briefly mystified, "I can read."

"Well that's gonna come in handy." Garcia said and shot his neighbour a glance.

Taking his cue, Baker slid a sheaf of printout over the desk.

"What's this?" Mack frowned."

"I thought you said you could read."

"And I thought you said 'informal chat'."

The document was an extract of the leviathan company operations manual. FAA-approved. The top-page header read, 'Risk Management'.

"Recognise this?" Baker asked. "You should do. You signed off as having read it."

Mack heaved a sigh and set the magazine aside to take with him when he left. "Yes, Jason. I do."

"So. What's it say about unnecessary risk?"

Mack cleared his throat. He was now on overtime, and the longer he could drag this out the more they'd have to eventually pay. "It says," he began, "'Before accepting a task, the Pilot In Command should'-"

"You don't have to read the whole goddam thing." Baker groused. "Just 61 point-4 point-3. See. I highlighted the paragraph, so you wouldn't have to go hacking your way through uncharted territory."

Mack heaved another sigh. He'd served in one of the most stifling bureaucracies on Earth- the US Military- and knew what he was in for. A game of high-stakes charades with no possibility of victory. "'The severity of needs," he began, "must have no bearing on the Pilot In Command's decision to accept a task. Regardless of the consequences, the safety of the aircraft and its crew must always be the Pilot In Command's overriding consideration. Natural human impulses must always be tempered by measured, rational-"

"Thanks, Travis. Just where it's highlighted."

Mack spun the extract one-eighty degrees and pushed it across the table. To give them their due they were right. He HAD acted on impulse. Well-informed impulse, maybe, backed up by several thousand hours' experience and a bunch of combat tours, but impulse nonetheless. He'd pushed his aircraft, and his crew... well half of it, anyway... and himself to the limit. In what some might reasonably claim was a flagrant breach of the company rules. "Well..." he lied, "I did sort of do an on-the-spot risk analysis and judged the task to be feasible."

"Going to the moon was feasible, Travis." Garcia growled.

"So was going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel." Baker added, just to make it crystal clear.

"Look," Mack said, "I'm just a dumb driver. What exactly are you trying to say?"

Drawing himself up, Baker parked his forearms on the desk. "What we're trying to say is, you came this close..." he raised his hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching, "to losing one of my aircraft and two of my crew."

"That close but no closer." Mack pointed out. "And hey, look on the bright side. We got twenty odd guys off that rig. Check out the vision from the news choppers. I'm pretty sure they'd all be dead without us."

"Or not," Baker said, "who can tell? By the time it sank that deck was barely fifty feet off the water."

"At night. With the tenders unable to approach."

"That's as may be, Travis. Bottom line is, you endangered that aircraft."

"I guess I did take a calculated risk." Mack conceded.

Baker slumped back in mock dismay. "You took a risk? So you admit it?"

"Hold on. You missed the bit where I said 'calculated'."

"You were a Marine, weren't you, Travis?" Garcia weighed in.

Mack Shrugged. That's what it said on his Personnel Profile.

"And had a reputation for being a bit of a cowboy."

"I did?" Mack arched his eyebrows. "That's odd. I've always been a bit wary of cows. One gave me a head-butt one day. Right in the ass."

"I'm serious, Travis."

"So am I. Do you know how hard a cow-"

"Court martialled, weren't you?" Garcia pressed, not in the least amused. "Convicted of disobeying a direct order? For transporting an enemy combatant, wasn't it? Without security? On a medevac bird?"

Mack took a deep, fortifying breath. That was the problem with courts. They didn't give a shit about context, only facts. "If you're talking about that eleven-year-old girl. Who'd just had her legs blown off."

"Eleven?" Garcia scoffed. "Then by local standards she was almost a grandmother. And the bomb was set by the villagers, wasn't it? In HER village. To kill Americans."

"But it killed her aunt instead. And nearly killed her."

"But you had to go playing the hero again. Didn't you? You just can't help yourself. What if she'd been concealing explosives? Hmm? And you got airborne and... 'boom'?"

"More like 'phut!'" Mack snorted. "The blast blew her clothes off, not to mention her legs. Where would she be hiding them? Up her butt?"

The blonde, Megan, looked away grimacing. "Oh, Mister Mack. Don't be vile."

"That's not the point." Garcia continued. "You were told, 'No. Under no circumstances'."

"She would have died."

"Or maybe she wouldn't. There was a convoy heading that way."

"Know what I'm sensing?" Baker cut in. "A god-complex. The Great White Saviour."

Garcia let Mack stew for a moment then went on. "I understand you lost an aircraft over there?"

"Lost it?"

"A Yankee model Bell. Once again, in direct violation of orders."

Mack gripped the edge of the table and narrowed his eyes. "Oh, I didn't lose it. I knew exactly where it was."

There was a moment's rattled silence then McBride jumped in. "Right where you left Echo-niner last night! On the scrapheap."

"Echo-niner's on the scrapheap?" Mack blanched, taken aback. The last time he'd seen her, SARbird-2 was still in one piece. Just a bit sooty.

"She might as well be. Those repairs are gonna cost millions."

"What repairs?" Mack asked, genuinely surprised. All the way back to the base, via a stop to unload at the hospital, not one single caption.

"Well, the paintwork for starters. She'll need a full strip and repaint."

"Why not just wash the goddam thing?" Mack bridled. He'd done a thorough post-flight walkaround. When he swiped his finger through the soot on the tailboom, clean yellow paint shone out beneath. "Tell you what, I'll go and get my crew and we'll even do it ourselves."

"Well, you can fix that goddam delamination while you're at it."

Mack sat back, blinking. "What delamination?"

"In the tailboom. From the heat."

"Where?" Mack asked, for the first time truly curious. For much of the time in the hover over the deck, he'd had no idea what was happening to his tail. Had the flames really been that close?

"It doesn't matter."

"No, really. I'd love to know.

McBride's eyes turned suddenly evasive. "On the left, under the strake."

Mack slumped back in his seat, suddenly realising the lengths they were prepared to go. To serve up his head. On a charred black platter. "That delam has been there for months." Mack curled his lip. "Everyone knows. They're just waiting for the next heavy."

"Yes... well..." McBride hedged, his cheeks pinking, "last night just made it much worse."

Mack opened his mouth to announce an end to his participation, and his intention of finding a lawyer, when Megan shook awake out of her thrall. "Captain Mack. Is it true you struck Captain Shipley?"

Mack's shoulders slumped. Here it came, the coup de gras. "Well, yes. No."

"Yes or no, Captain? The two terms, unless I'm mistaken, are mutually exclusive."

"Shift..." Mack began then managed to catch himself, "Captain Shipley tried to override my controls. I gave him a tap on the chin to make him stop."

"That's not what Captain Shipley said."

Mack leaned back, smiling, fingers laced over his belly. An old joke had just leapt to mind, about a WW1 fighter ace. Throwing whiskey on a hooker's pussy and setting it alight, the pilot proclaimed, 'I am Baron Von Brummel! When I go down, I will go down in flames!' "Go on," Mack said, "What did that sorry-assed coward say?"

"Go ahead, Travis!" Baker smiled, "Just dig yourself deeper."

"Captain Shipley claims you ignored his request to abort the task." Megan said flatly.

"That wasn't his call." Mack replied. "I was PIC."

"You know the score." Garcia snapped. "One out, all out."

"And then," Megan went on, "you coerced your Aircrew Officer into going along with your idiotic scheme."

"Coerced her?" Mack arched his brows. "Wendy? You know Wendy, don't you? She's... she's... she's un-coercible!"

"And later," Megan went on, ignoring him, "on the Doo Sung Joo-"

"A rig on which you had NO authority to land!" Baker growled.

"-you struck Captain Shipley and ordered him out of the aircraft. Badly injured by the blow, Captain Shipley had no choice but seek medical attention."

"You know," Mack breathed, "this will have to go down as one of the great works of fiction. Let's get Wendy Stamp in here. Go on. She was a witness. She can tell you what actually happened."

Megan gave him the eye. "Miss Stamp has been suspended. Pending the outcome of the board."

Mack slumped back, winded. "Suspended? What for?"

"Participating in the wilful misuse of a company aircraft. The charge may escalate into an indictable offense but for now she's grounded. As are you, Captain Mack."

Mack looked from one face to another, utterly stunned. Bad enough that they'd tried to finger HIM, but Wendy? Who'd jumped out of her aircraft onto a slippery, sloping deck, to drag one punter out of the safety net, then help him and another survivor- last man on the doomed rig- into the machine. The words, 'You motherfuckers are all on drugs', were just forming in his mouth, when Baker took over.

"When the client finds out." he said mournfully. "That one of our pilots broke every rule in the book-"

"And saved twenty-odd of their men." Mack glared.

"They're not gonna see it that way, Travis, you know that. I mean, who do you think runs offshore aviation? Hmm? The company? No. The client? No. Well let me give you a hint. It's the insurance companies, and right now they'll be turning over every rock and pebble, looking for some way to weasel out of their liability."

"While we pay millions for the repairs." McBride cut in. "Out of our own pockets."

"And who's to say those men wouldn't have been saved?" Garcia took over. "By other means? That rig was heeling over. Sooner or later they could have stepped off into the water."

"To be dragged under by the vortex." Mack said. "The fucking thing sank.

"TRAVIS!" Megan shouted. "LANGUAGE!"

"Whatever." Garcia sniffed, waving Mack's assertion away. "The bottom line is what you did was reckless and stupid. Attention-seeking bullcrap. And when the owner of the company finds out... how you placed the aircraft, your crew and those men on the rig in danger... before landing on an unauthorised rig-"

"Leaving a brand-new Stryker stretcher behind," Baker jabbed a finger, piling on, "that we're STILL trying to find."

"Ten thousand dollars' worth!" Garcia growled, "Those goddam Koreans probably threw it over the side. I can tell you. When the owner finds out... well... knowing him as I do... Mister Carter is gonna go apeshit."

"This whole sorry escapade has been an unmitigated disaster." Megan announced. "Not only are we down an aircraft, but Captain Shipley has to take a month's leave. In fact we're down TWO captains now, since we have no choice but to ground you while the matter is dealt with. And in the meantime, you are not, under ANY circumstances, to speak to the media, and you are absolutely forbidden from contacting Miss Stamp."

Baker checked his watch, then looked from one to the other of his colleagues. "We better wrap this up. We're due upstairs in a couple of minutes." He gestured at the door. "Thanks for your time, Captain Mack, we'll let you know the outcome in due course. But for the time being at least you are relieved of your duties. Without pay, I'm afraid. Voluntary non-compliance. It's company policy."