Sceptre

The buses came through the gate at Riverside Field at twenty past ten, and the first thing he saw was the tents.

They were coming off a big white aircraft on the ramp nearest the gate, its tail open and its ramp down, on pallets and forklifts and the shoulders of men in khaki and green: hundreds of bundles in white canvas bags, going into a line of waiting lorries. High on the tail, painted, the Union flag with the Star of India under its crown in the middle, the old flag Delhi had never managed to agree to change. Under the cockpit, in tall letters in English and Hindi, the name of the Empire’s air force.

He watched through the bus window with his forehead on the glass.

“That’s your I,” said Theo.

“That’s somebody’s.”

He watched the bundles until the bus turned the corner.

---

He had pictured an airfield like the one in Maryland: a runway, some hangars, a gate, his one aircraft alone on the concrete with a car beside it.

The ramp was full for a mile. Grey and white and green and one nearly black, nose to tail, ramps down, doors open, the heat already coming off the concrete in waves. Eighty-five at half past ten, said Kimura, reading her zip. On the tails, the flags. He had learned them at six from a book with a gold crown on the cover, the way other children learned the planets. The yellow and white of Hanover on a grey transport, a line of people in orange coming out of it with cases, the same people as in November. The orange, white and blue of South Africa. The sky blue and white of the River Plate, with its sun and the Union flag in the corner, on an aircraft so old it had propellers. The red leaf of New Albion between its blue bars. The Union flag, plain. And at the end of the line, by itself, a small white jet with the blue and yellow cross of Sweden.

He looked at that one a long time. Sweden was not one of the fourteen. His mother had not said.

Between the aircraft, people everywhere loading and unloading, in uniforms he knew and did not. Shrink-wrapped pallets of water, grey drums, a field hospital in green tents at the edge of the ramp with a red cross on every roof, helicopters going up beyond it one after another towards the coast.

“The whole world’s here,” said Lucía, face to the window.

“Fourteen of it. And Sweden.”

At the far end, on a stand of its own, grey, enormous, high-winged, four engines, a tail like a capital T and its ramp down with nothing coming off it: ROYAL AMERICAN AIR FORCE along the fuselage in tall black letters. At the foot of its ramp, in a line in the sun, six people in green flight suits, waiting.

---

The older driver opened the door and looked at him in the mirror, and he saw that she was waiting for him, and that everybody on the bus was. He went down the steps, and the heat came up off the concrete into his face like an oven door.

Castellanos beside him. Brannigan behind. Clare Kerridge with the dark red case. Twenty yards of concrete. The six came to attention with a small sound of boots, and the one on the right, a woman of about forty with short greying hair and a major’s leaf on her shoulder, saluted.

Nobody had saluted him since Thursday. For a second he had forgotten what to do with it. Then he had not. He stood straight and inclined his head, as his father did.

“Sir. Major Helen Voss, aircraft commander. Welcome to Riverside Field. We’re ready when you are.”

“Thank you, Major.”

Something changed in her face. “Sir, I believe you were told we’d all asked to be the one to say something to you.”

“Miss Kerridge said she’d been told not to tell me.”

“She was, sir. By me.” She did not look at Clare Kerridge. “We couldn’t agree. So we drew for it last night on the ramp, at three in the morning, while they were taking the water off. High card. Captain Delgado had a pack.” A glance along the line. “Airman Soto drew the king of hearts, sir. Nobody could beat it.”

She stepped back half a pace, and the one at the other end stepped forward.

Very small, about nineteen, not much taller than Señora Ruelas, black hair scraped back so tight under her cap that it pulled the corners of her eyes, a flight suit taken in at the waist and still too big. Chin up, arms straight, eyes fixed on a point a foot above his head. She had been saying it to herself since three in the morning.

“Sir. Airman First Class Gabriela Soto. Loadmaster.” A breath. “Welcome aboard, sir. Today you’re Sceptre.”

There had been a second sentence. He watched it go. Her eyes came down from the point above his head and looked straight at him, and filled, and she did not move.

“Thank you, Airman Soto.”

Something in how she said today. Her accent, the accent of the woman in the apron and of the girl with the cool box.

“Where are you from?”

“Oxnard, sir.”

It went through him like the floor of the gym.

“Your family.”

“They’re okay, sir.” Very fast, the answer ready on top of everything else. “They were on the roof from Thursday morning. All of them. The water came up to the gutters. My mom and my dad and my brothers and my grandma. A day and a half. The Coast Service took them off yesterday afternoon. They’re in a shelter in Camarillo.” She swallowed. “My dad wouldn’t leave without the dog.”

“It bit Ray,” said Frederick.

Airman Soto stared at him. The whole line did: Voss, the tall captain with a pack of cards in his breast pocket, a lieutenant, a broad grey master sergeant with a clipboard, a technical sergeant with a headset round her neck. Behind him on the concrete the class had stopped getting off the buses.

“Sir. How do you know Ray?”

“He came to the lawn at Government House last night in the helicopter, to refuel. He had a bandage on his hand. The pilot told me about a roof in Oxnard by the fields, and a father who said he’d lost the house and the car and the fields and he wasn’t losing the dog. So Ray went down the cable for it, and it bit him.” A pause. “Ray said it was a good dog. He said it was frightened. He said he’d have bitten himself.”

She began to laugh and to cry at the same time, at attention, arms straight, chin up, tears running into the collar of the flight suit. You did not move at attention. Nobody in the line moved either.

“His name’s Bruno. He’s eleven. He bites everybody. He bit the mailman twice.” A breath that shook. “My dad said on the phone, go fly the King home, mija. Bruno’s fine.”

“Tell him Ray said it was a good dog.”

“Yes, sir.” And then the second sentence came back to her, all at once, and she said it through the tears exactly as she had practised it: “We’ll have you home by tonight, sir.”

---

He had only ever been in the front of these aircraft, in the long grey cabin they fitted for his father, with seats and a table and a curtain. There was no cabin today. The hold went back from the ramp into the dark like the inside of a whale, high and round and grey, ribs showing, cable and pipe running along them, rails and rings in the floor, a ladder at the far end going up to a door in the ceiling. Down both sides, folded from the walls on metal frames, red webbing seats facing inwards across the empty floor.

“Is this it?” said Marcus.

“This is it,” said Master Sergeant Gorski, who had taken charge of the class completely and without asking, the way Mr Abernathy did. “Same seat the Army sits in, son. Fill it from the front. Belts across the lap, buckle in the middle. Bags under the seat.” He looked at the class, which had no bags, and something happened in his broad grey face. “Or under the seat in spirit.”

Mr Abernathy counted them on aloud at the foot of the ramp, one, two, three. The master sergeant counted beside him silently with his pen. When Mr Abernathy said fifty-seven, the master sergeant looked up and said fifty-seven, and the two men with lists looked at each other.

“Fifty-eight,” said Mr Abernathy, looking at Frederick.

“Sir,” said Major Voss, quietly. “There’s a pallet forward. Seats, a table, behind a curtain. We brought it out from the capital in case. You’d have it to yourself.”

Down the hold, both sides: Marcus and Felix and Priya and Lucía and Devon. Señora Ruiz with the folder on her knee. Mr Ferrante with his bad leg out straight across the floor and a stick beside him he had not had on Tuesday. Kimura at the back with a bottle of water. Theo, a third of the way down on the left, his hand flat on the empty seat beside him, holding it.

“Thank you, Major. I’ll sit with my class.”

“Yes, sir.” She did not seem surprised.

“Fifty-eight,” said Mr Abernathy, and made a mark.

---

Technical Sergeant Tran gave the briefing from a card in the middle of the floor, in a voice like a schoolteacher’s. Belts, exits, the masks from the ceiling, the life jackets under the seats, which were for water and they would not be over water but she had to say it. Airman Soto came down the rows with a plastic tub of orange foam earplugs, two each. The engines were louder than anything they had ever heard.

“Do you do it in rhymes?” said Marcus. “On Southwest they did it in rhymes.”

Technical Sergeant Tran looked at him over the card.

“No.”

Airman Soto, coming back with the tub, stopped by Marcus and said, perfectly seriously, her face still blotched from the ramp:

“Put in your plugs and buckle your belt. The Air Force regrets the heat that you felt.”

The whole hold laughed, both sides, all the way down. Tran shut her eyes. At the foot of the ramp Master Sergeant Gorski put his clipboard over his face.

---

Mr Ferrante was opposite, across the empty floor, the bandaged knee out straight, the stick across his lap, earplugs in his hand. He wore the look he wore in history when somebody was about to say something stupid and he had decided, out of kindness, to let them.

“Sceptre,” said Mr Ferrante.

“You told us. At the airport.”

“I told you a fun fact.” He turned the earplugs over. “On Tuesday it was a word on a strip of paper in a room at the top of a tower, and a captain saying it back once, levelly, and you at the window of twenty-three A pretending you hadn’t heard.” He looked down the hold at the ribs and the dark and the white light at the ramp. “It’s not a fun fact now, is it.”

“No.”

“No.” Then, more quietly, across the floor: “Your father was Sceptre for fifty-six years. I looked it up. I was going to tell you that on Tuesday too, and didn’t.” He put the plugs in, one and then the other, and leaned his head back against the cargo net and shut his eyes. “Fifty-six years,” he said, too loudly, the way people talk with earplugs in. “And it took him a week to get used to it.”

---

At twenty to twelve the ramp came up with a deep hydraulic groan he felt through the seat frame, and the white square of daylight shrank from the bottom to a slot, a line, nothing. Yellow lamps along the ribs. Very quiet for a moment, and very hot.

Major Voss came down the ladder at the far end and walked the whole length of the hold between the two rows, helmet under her arm, and bent down in front of him.

“Sir. If you’d like it, there’s a seat on the flight deck for take-off, behind the captain’s chair.” A pause. “Your father always came up for the take-off. The crews say he never once missed one. He said it was the only part he liked.”

He looked at Theo.

“Go on. I’ve got the seat.”

---

Up the ladder, through the ceiling, along a short corridor with a bunk on one side and a galley on the other, to a long low room with windows all round the front and white sun coming through them. The major in the left seat, the tall captain with the cards in the right. Behind them, raised a little, a third seat folded down on a rail with a harness, and a headset on a hook.

Lieutenant Yeboah, very young, strapped him in the way Brannigan did things, every buckle twice, and put the headset over his ears gently, as though it were a crown that did not fit. “Listen only, sir. Don’t press that.”

The world came into his ears. The hiss. Voices coming and going very fast and very flat, in English that was not quite English. Two-seven-niner. Roger. Wilco. Contact ground. The white one from Delhi cleared to taxi. Hanover Four holding short. Somebody called Plate Two asking about fuel. Then the engines, one, two, three, four, a long rising whine up through the seat and the floor and into his bones.

On his father’s knee by the flight-deck door at five. Sceptre, contact Boston Centre. What does it mean? It means me.

They taxied slowly along the line of tails: Hanover’s yellow and white, South Africa, the sky blue with the sun, the red leaf, the small white jet with the blue and yellow cross by itself. At the white aircraft from Delhi the last tents were going down the ramp, and the men in khaki and green stopped and stood on the concrete and turned to watch the grey aircraft go by, and one of them raised his hand.

The end of the runway. The engines quiet a moment, waiting. The long grey runway going away through the windscreen into the shaking air towards the brown hills.

A woman’s voice in his headset, flat and calm, from a dark room somewhere:

“Sceptre, Riverside Tower. Wind three-one-zero at eight. Runway three-two, cleared for take-off.”

And Major Voss, in exactly the same voice, as though it were the most ordinary word in the world:

“Cleared for take-off, Sceptre.”

---

Not the borrowed word with somebody else’s name stuck on after it. Just the word.

It meant him.

The other word came too, the British one. East of Newfoundland in the dark, on the twenty-fifth of September. Mayday, mayday, and the name, and nothing. He had asked to hear the recording, once. His mother had not wanted him to and had let him. Then nothing for four days. Then a raft, and a crab boat, and an apron at ten to eleven at night, and the door of a grey aircraft like this one opening, and a stretcher coming down the steps, and ten steps beside it on the concrete before Castellanos took his arm at the ambulance door and said sir, once, and held on.

The engines rose all at once from the whine to a roar through the headset and the harness and the floor. The aircraft leaned back on its brakes like a horse against a rein. The major moved her hand, and it went.

Pressed back into the seat. The concrete going under the nose faster and faster, the brown hills coming up at the end of it. The captain said something short and the major something shorter, and the nose came up, and the ground fell away, and there was nothing in the windscreen but white sky.

It means me.

Somebody in a dark room said it, and meant it, and everybody else got out of the way, and you went, and nobody needed you to say anything at all. That was the part his father liked.

---

They turned north and then east, climbing, and for a moment the whole of it lay in the left-hand windows, far below.

The basin, grey and brown in the haze, flat, enormous, the grid of streets faint as the lines on a palm, the towers downtown a handful of pencils stood on end. Thin columns of smoke going straight up in the still air, three, five. At the very edge of the haze, a line where the land stopped, and a paler grey beyond.

He looked for the wheel. Sixty miles. A speck on a broken pier on the edge of the world, standing in the sea with a blue car hanging from it. He looked anyway, until the turn finished and the basin swung out of the window, and there were only the brown mountains coming up and the white desert beyond them going east.

“Four hours and forty minutes, sir,” said Major Voss over her shoulder, through the headset. “To the field in Maryland. Wind’s behind us. Your mother will meet the aircraft. That came through at nine.”

“Thank you, Major.”

“Sir.” Still not turning, hands on the controls, eyes on the mountains. “Airman Soto’s dad rang the squadron office at six this morning, before we’d finished refuelling. To say Bruno was fine. And to say he’d heard you yesterday on a little radio in a plastic bag on the roof, telling him to get down.” A pause. “He wanted somebody on the aircraft to know that his family lay down flat on that roof at two o’clock and held on to the chimney because a sixteen-year-old on the radio said to, in Spanish, and that the far side of the roof went into the water, and the chimney didn’t.”

Frederick could not answer.

“I thought you’d want to know that as well, sir. Since nobody else is going to tell you.”

---

When he came back down the ladder the hold was asleep.

Awake since five, on the lawn and the buses and the hot ramp, and now in dim grey with the yellow lamps along the ribs and the engines a steady roar through the orange foam, it had taken them one after another down both sides. Marcus with his head back against the cargo net and his mouth open, Felix asleep on his shoulder. Priya with her face on her knees. Lucía awake, her phone in her lap, looking at the floor. Señora Ruiz asleep with her hand flat on the folder. Mr Abernathy at the end of the right-hand row with his glasses on, reading the carton list all the way down, again.

Theo asleep, a third of the way down on the left, his hand still flat on the empty seat.

Frederick sat in it. Theo’s hand moved an inch in his sleep onto Frederick’s knee, and stayed there.

Airman Soto came slowly down the row between the two lines of knees, checking belts one at a time, bending over the ones who had slipped sideways in their sleep to make sure the buckle was still in the middle. Grey blankets over her arm. At Marcus she shook one out over him and Felix and tucked it in at the side, the way a nurse tucks a bed.

At the end of the row she sat at her station by the ramp, across the floor, under a panel with a headset on a hook. She put it on, pressed the switch on the cord, and said into it quietly, not knowing he could read the shape of the words across the floor by the yellow light:

“Flight deck, back. Sceptre’s settled.”

He sat with Theo’s hand on his knee and fifty-seven sophomores asleep along both sides and the desert going east under the floor, and his mother at the end of it, and found, a little to his surprise, that she was right.