The Homecoming

There was this Chinese Lear, first in line at Mauldar Field, locked and loaded, an arrow in a full-drawn bow, jets spooled up, brakes smoking, flaps flapping—the tower phone starts to shrill—a loud metallic howl—John Parkhurst, the tower boss, snatches it up, and what he gets—he told the cops later—is this shrieking raging rant from this loudmouthed—

Okay, to help this make sense, Parkhurst is a part-time Pentecostal minister, so when he’s talking to the cops he uses the word
individual
instead of something stronger—anyway, the guy on the horn is claiming to be an FBI agent, and what he wants—at the top of his lungs—is for that
curse word curse word
Chinese Lear to be
stopped right where it is
, held on the runway, locked down, and when Parkhurst—who’s kind of a fussy older guy who should probably have been a dentist instead of an air traffic controller—asks for a badge number, well, the guy completely
loses
it—starts to curse again—
uses the F word
—and is halfway through a phrase that starts with
you dumb c-word
and ends
you-know-where
—so Parkhurst slams the phone down.

Two minutes later the Lear, a 60 XR Luxury Edition—ten mil easy—powers up into the sky, climbing steep, riding the thunderbolt—the twin jets so loud they rattle windows for a mile around, and Parkhurst sits back, stares at the phone, his ears still on fire, and he says
dear me
and
oh my
and lets out a sigh and starts shaking his head, thinking,
and on the Lord’s Day too
.

But … other than that nasty bit of business … he got himself calmed down and looked around at the other guys—most of them staring back at
him wondering what
that
was all about—and then he looked out the windows and by God’s Good Grace it was still a lovely Sunday morning in the spring and when he glanced up at the shining blue sky there wasn’t a cloud to be seen … okay, maybe, except for something kind of odd away there in the southeast. It looked like a smudge of black smoke. Or perhaps blowing leaves.

Parkhurst, having taken spiritual refuge in the Old Testament, pondered the smudge for a time, idly speculating on its nature.

Meanwhile, a thousand feet up and a half mile downrange, the Chinese Learjet dipped a wing and banked gracefully to the south.

As Parkhurst drifted through Psalms, a flicker of unease twitched at the back of his mind. He turned to check the Doppler radar. The smudge came back as a diffuse return, essentially undecipherable. So he used his binoculars to get a closer look.

It took him a second or two to get the target in focus, and another second to make sense of what he was seeing, but once he figured it out, his throat clamped up and his chest went cold.

It wasn’t a cloud of smoke, or leaves. It was a flock of crows. A very
big
flock of crows.

Parkhurst jumped onto the radio—
Flight zero six five emergency China Lear alter your course immediately to bearing
—but by then, given the speed of the jet, it was just too damn little too damn late. Parkhurst got a brief return transmission from the copilot
—tower we are
—followed by a shrill Chinese curse.

The scarlet and gold jet, glittering in the morning sunlight, punched straight into that flock of crows and burst out the other side, its fuselage streaked with blood and matted black feathers, the starboard engine trailing a thin plume of blue smoke. The jet was already losing altitude.

The pilot was on the radio again—
tower this is Flight zero six five we have multiple bird strikes repeat multiple bird strikes—visibility zero
—then there was only crackle and static.

In the tower they all stood in stunned shock as the Learjet skewed to port—its nose dipped—the leftward bank quickly turned into a roll and then a rapidly narrowing spiral—the nose dipped—dipped farther—the plane went into a nosedive—the radio came back to life—the pilot had reverted to Hakka and was screaming into his mike—in the background they could hear voices and shouts and metallic racket of the airframe juddering—the pilot came back in English
—tower we are going in we are going in
.

They all heard one last transmission—
tell my son
—then a hoarse cry—the Lear slammed into the ground two miles away, right in the middle of the fourteenth green of the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club.

It exploded into a yellow and red and black fireball that flared outwards and rose up into the sky. A few moments later the guys in the tower felt the shock wave hit the windows, a dull percussive thud, followed by a rolling boom.

There goes my career
, Parkhurst was thinking. And then, as an afterthought,
poor souls
.

A thousand feet above the crash site the flock of crows re-formed, drew into a tight cloud that took on the shape of a scythe as it flew low across the town, wheeling and soaring, filling the cool clear air with their brassy cries, and then it rose up in one coherent mass and disappeared into the east in the direction of Tallulah’s Wall.