John sped through the main gate, the guard staring at him, uncertain. He was uncertain, too. His flashers were on, but his official Officer-of-the-Day vehicle, a standard pickup truck, had no siren or gumball lights. His radio remained silent as he'd instructed.

He used his horn through the first traffic light and increased speed to fifty.

He'd been told next to nothing except that one of the navy's planes was down, across town, maybe crashed into an elementary school. He did not know which school, but a column of black smoke was beginning to rise. It would guide him.

It wasn't a large town, just remote and desert. It served the base, mostly. He was on the main road between town and base but the smoke was bearing to his left and soon he'd have to turn into the populated areas and slow down.

Anticipation turned to anxiety. What lay ahead? The climbing oily smoke evoked memories of that Hawaiian afternoon when it was Enterprise planes afire and his ship, a small boy, followed in her wake ready to pick up any survivors of the tragedy.

Yanking the truck aside, he slammed his brake pedal and narrowly missed colliding with a screaming fire truck. Both were headed in the same direction. He pulled in behind and followed.

Cars yielded. The siren plowed through them, swept them aside. The smoke grew darker and closer.

What would he do when he arrived? How could he know? How had he ever known, except to prepare for anything? At least he had a few minutes to gather himself. He'd had no time at all aboard Long Beach when the generator compartment below burst into flame and nearly trapped all of his shipmates. “Grab your shoes and get out of here!” He'd ordered them. “Move it!”

Shoes? How had that thought superseded any others? Yeh, shoes. Sure, in case they had to cross red hot steel to safety. Remembered from somewhere. Check fifty bunks. All out.

“Do you know that you're on fire?” A ship radioed, both of them making 20 knots in a choppy, pitch black sea. Bright orange flame streamed out of the cruiser's ventilation system.

“Affirmative.” Came the Long Beach reply.

Suddenly he was there and the fire engine turned left into a cleared area and stopped. The OOD skidded in after it and stood at his open door.

It was chaotic. The school was nearby, but he didn't see any children. A few cars were in the small parking lot. Two ambulances were there, doors open, medics attending a badly burned man who screamed, “I need a knife. Does anybody have a knife!”

Beyond them, at the end of a long plowed up strip of desert, lay the airplane, slewed sideways, a perfect wheels up landing. Oily smoke and fire blazed from it. The OOD recognized it. An F-86 Sabre. Yalu River dogfights. He had built models of it as a child. It was at least 30 years old, had to be. It still had its U. S. Air Force markings.

What was it doing here? And then he saw that its canopy was slid back and that the pilot was still inside, his face tiny within the white helmet. The man's eyes were wide and so was his mouth. Absorbed in the crackling of blazing avgas was the sound he made as the fire enveloped him and the heat, like a shock wave, flashed over them all.

And that look seemed to mirror the watcher in those few seconds, those seconds of abject powerlessness, utter futile connection …

“Senior Chief!” Another sailor hurried to him, a pilot from the test squadron in khaki and brown shoes. His flight jacket bore the squadron emblem. “Chief!” He shook the taller man's shoulder and saw him close his mouth, breathe sharply, and turn toward him. “Get back to the base.” He ordered, “I'll take it from here.”

The OOD might have said, “Aye, sir.” or maybe not. As he drove back to the base, slowly, the scene embe dded itself in his memory. What, two or three seconds, 3 thousand milliseconds, three billion nanoseconds – an entire quantum galaxy. He drove slowly and by the time he got back to his office the smells and screams and sights had been neatly sorted and stored, and forgotten.

Oh, it was big news, and there was lots of scuttlebutt about this and that. The school was named after the hero-pilot. He justifiably received medals for heroism and was buried with full military honors. After all, he'd ridden his plane down to avoid the school and save all those children, hadn't he? A talented, well trained navy pilot, wasn't he? How many missions over North Vietnam? How many carrier landings?

And for certain, that was the lot of test-pilots. Dangerous business. And he was doing important work, flying that old bucket fitted with experimental stuff, secret stuff … fly-by-wire testing that would revolutionize computer driven aircraft design for a hundred years. Basically, he was just riding a drone, back up for a computerized pilot. And when the engine flamed out … it was all in the logs, the safety reports, the redesign conferences.

It was a closed incident report.

Thirty five years later …

John remembered nothing much about any of it. Retired a short time later, he'd moved away from the base, the town. But he was still in the air space of the navy's ever expanding test facilities.

When the newer jets blasted past his house, fifty feet off the ground, he'd simply cursed the noise, marveled that they flashed straight into the mountainside, then lifted up the steep slope, up and over the tree lined crest, still a mere fifty feet above the ground.

How could anybody just sit in such a craft at hundreds of miles an hour? What kind of faith, or was it fatalism, does that take? Even so, he'd given it all no special thought, made no connections to the past.

But now, talking about his violent outbursts and fitful sleep, that nightmares which involved his strangling death … usually drowning, but sometimes it was fire … his therapist wanted to know more and things leaked out. Little things at first, like a painting which had been recently put up for auction, Edvard Munch's The Scream.

What did that have to do with anything. “O, come on, John. Get real. Stop being such a fuckin' saint!” The therapist was helpful like that.

So there was more. A burned man screaming about a knife. Such an image made no sense. It must be wrong.

And then, another day, the pilot's name was mentioned - not the pilot, but the school which had been named in his honor. Another set of synapses clicked open, a barrier fell.

A burned man and a burning plane. His neighbor went to the Burning Man fest every year. No, not that.

And a knife. A scream. A burned man, a knife, a burning plane …. and a burning man. A small face framed in a helmet. Screaming.

He figured it out, eventually, intuitively, like Sherlock Holmes.

The burned man had been trying to help the pilot out of the crashed plane. Why hadn't he succeeded? Why did he need a knife?

The jet had landed skillfully, safely, wheels up. The pilot was not even hurt. The plane was not afire, not at first, not for long minutes.

Why hadn't he gotten out? Why hadn't he bailed out when the engine quit? The school, the children? Maybe, if he'd known the school was below.

Was he flying too low? The F86 ejection seat was not effective below 1000 feet. How did that figure into this detective story.

John looked it up on his laptop. Complicated. Canopy had to be back, pilot's chin tucked in, feet in stirrups, right hand grip on ejection trigger, trigger pulled, charge explodes – sends whole seat out of disabled aircraft – pilot releases harness to be free of seat, pulls parachute handle, floats to safety … but he hadn't done any of that, had he?

It was an old airplane, but surely safety checked before being certified. It was an Air Force bird but not alien to the Navy. They had used it in a carrier based form, the FJ-2 Fury, heavily modified. But after 30 years, was anyone still on active duty who knew the plane well?

Feeling nauseated, John felt his age, but he slept better.

Well, not better. Differently. Instead of strangling nightmares, his mind was alive with excitement, actions on a list for the morrow, ideas, new avenues of investigation. Instead of nausea there was anticipation thick with its own anxieties. Did he really want to know? Yes. It was action of a sort, after so many years being frozen with helplessness.

Action.

Did any of the rest matter; whether it was the charge which failed to explode. Had it, would the pilot have been able to release himself from the seat. Failing that, he would never have been able to open his chute. But perhaps he would have preferred to die falling thousands of feet, rather than in an oily fireball.

Of course he would rather have lived, saved by walking away or by the valiant medic who tried to yank open his seat belt, a latch which neither could solve in the end. It could have happened, though, if either had carried a knife.

And that, John decided after so many years, was how it had really unraveled, what the real horror had been. If only. A simple stone-age tool in a fly-by-wire world …

Now satisfied, John made to put one more of the puzzle pieces into his box of assorted memories. He'll call this one Aircraft Down.

“Wait,” he paused. “This one fits over here, with that one.”