Different Circles

He jogged back to the aircraft and climbed inside, sealing it up behind him. He fired up the engines and then quickly input his flight plan into the flight manager. The route he had chosen was about ten minutes longer than the fastest route, but kept them within fifteen minutes of an emergency landing field at all times. He ran through the preflight checklist, forcing himself to do it slowly and carefully despite the fact that his wife was in labor behind him. He would not do them any good if he rushed through it, missed something, and crashed them all into the side of a mountain somewhere. That would certainly be counterproductive to the passing on of his genetic code.

Finally, at 3:33 AM, he called for IFR clearance and was assigned his requested final altitude of thirty-one thousand feet. The actual tower was not operating at this time of the morning so he simply broadcast that he was taxiing to Runway 22 so he could take off into the twenty-knot onshore wind.

“How are we doing back there?” he asked his passengers. “Go for the mission?”

“Contractions are still eleven to twelve minutes apart,” Celia reported. “I think we’re go.”

“How about you, hon?” he asked Laura. “Go mission?”

“Go mission,” she said, holding tightly to Celia’s hand. “Let’s get this shit over with.”

He taxied to the head of the runway and roared into the sky at 3:42 AM, going out over the ocean and then turning back to the southeast and going feet dry again. Almost immediately, the turbulence began to batter them as they climbed out over the coastal mountains.

“It’s the bumpies,” Celia said nervously, using Laura’s lighthearted, generally unconcerned term for clear air turbulence they encountered.

“Yeah,” Laura said sourly. “I could really do without the bumpies on this flight.”

“Sorry, hon,” he told her as a particularly nasty bumpy shuddered the entire aircraft. “We’re gonna have to deal with the bumpies at least until we get south of the jet stream over the Sac Valley.”

“Awesome,” she said.

Amazingly enough, Laura still fell asleep well before they reached cruising altitude, this despite the fact that she was having labor contractions and the plane was being battered around in the unstable air. Whenever a contraction would hit her, she would wake up briefly, hold her stomach and wince a bit, and then go right back to sleep as soon as it relaxed. Celia kept one hand entwined with Laura’s and the other on Laura’s belly. She found she could actually feel when the contractions came as her fundus would tighten up. She would check her watch with each one and then note it down on her sheet and then go back to holding hand and belly.

Jake let the autopilot control the aircraft while he constantly looked at his chart of diversion airfields and hospitals as they bumped and bounced along. He kept up a constant diversion plan in his brain as they approached and then passed each waypoint. Medford, Oregon, which had a NICU equipped hospital; Crescent City, California, which had a hospital with L&D services but no NICU; Siskiyou County Hospital, which had L&D but no NICU either. They then passed over the southern Cascade mountains on the border of Oregon and California. The turbulence increased considerably at this point, bouncing them around like a ping-pong ball and making everything shudder. One of the booze bottles in the bar came loose from its restraint band and fell to the floor, thankfully not breaking.

“I have to pee!” Laura cried.

“I think you should wait a few more minutes if you can,” Jake advised. “We’re pitching around like a freakin’ boat in the ocean here.”

“I can’t wait,” she said. “I go now, or I pee my pants.”

“It might be safer to just pee your pants,” Celia said. She was quite clearly terrified by the sheer violence of the turbulence.

“I am not going to pee my pants!” Laura said defiantly. She unbuckled her seatbelt and started to rise. A big jolt sent her crashing right back down. “Goddammit!” she screamed, and then burst out crying.

Celia then unbuckled herself as well. “Let me help you, Teach,” she said, standing up, holding carefully to the seat as she did so. She then held out her hand and helped Laura rise up to her own feet.

“Be careful, you two,” Jake told them. He knew the turbulence itself presented no actual danger to the aircraft—the Avanti could handle unstable air that was three or four times worse than what they were now experiencing—but having unsecured passengers during it was actually quite dangerous. Particularly when one of them was pregnant and in labor.

“We’ll try,” Celia replied. “Come on, Teach. Let’s do this.”