The sun was smiling on Tokyo. The previous week, the warm temperatures heralding the arrival of April had found a last, stubborn winter front, churning the sky into gray and rainfall. Today though, the sky was clear.
While the change in weather added a warm and comfortable start to the new school year, to Ayumu Kasuga it also brought a much less welcome change in the skies. Walking to work for this first day of classes, she could even now hear the gathering of airplanes going back and forth through Tokyo's crowded air.
The high school, like so much of the rest of the city, found itself squeezed between the painfully close airspaces of three airports; Haneda International to the east, Chofu to the north, and Yokota Air Base to the west.
In her days as a high school student, Ayumu had often traced the long white trails left in the wake of passing airliners going in to or coming out of the big airports at Haneda and Narita. She liked Haneda, though she could seldom remember its name. Some years ago, as a third-year student at the very school she now taught at, she and her friends had left Tokyo through the airport for the class trip to Okinawa. Even if for just that reason, Ayumu didn't mind Haneda.
The second airport, Chofu, was typically quiet, a good turn of fortune given its proximity to the school. The first time Ayumu had seen an airplane headed to the small airport, it had flown so low over the school that everyone in her class was certain it was going to crash.
Yokota, however: everyone seem to have their own thoughts to trade about Yokota.
From this large base outside the city of Fussa, came the droning hums and ear-splitting roars of American military aircraft. While growing up in Osaka with its own airport had acclimatized Ayumu to the noise of big passenger jets, her former home city had never had any military bases. Not even Japan's own Air Self Defense Force had anything like Yokota back in Osaka.
The big, droning planes, so Ayumu was told, were cargo planes coming from America. Though they were loud, they didn't come very often. When they did however, they flew low enough to disturb the television reception in her apartment. What really terrified Ayumu though were the fighter jets; those small gray specks that moved too fast for her to follow and sounded like thunder, the sound of which unnerved her even in adulthood. No doubt she could expect to hear plenty of both so long as the weather stayed nice.
As she rounded the corner and saw the school building, Ayumu even now heard a low, but firm drone coming from the city. As the sound grew louder, she could feel the vibrations caused by the large gray plane as it came into view.
The crosswalk at the intersection turned to red. Ayumu, by now a seasoned Tokyo dweller, dutifully stopped at the crossing. Her slow, spacey gaze however continued to follow the plane. She wondered if airplanes ever had to stop for anything. They had to stop on the ground, but what if they had to stop in the air, if another airplane had to cross in front? How did they not hit each other then? So far as she knew, there weren't any crosswalks in the sky, so how would they know to stop..?
The crosswalk began to blink green.
But wait a minute, she thought, airplanes have to keep moving or else they'd fall out of the sky. Airplanes were funny things that way. You could stop a car and not die, but then again, cars didn't have wings. An image took shape in Ayumu's head, of the passing cargo plane's pilot hitting the breaks (or whatever counted for brakes in airplanes) and the machine simply stopping and falling straight down…
The sign stopped blinking. Its light now a steady green, the pedestrians began to cross the street, leaving Ayumu behind.
Airplane pilots must be pretty good for not letting their planes just stop in midair, then everyone would really be in trouble, she thought. But then again, all they had to do was keep moving all the time…
There was a loud squeal of tires from down the busy street, coming from the direction of the city. The sound triggered something in Ayumu's memory, pulling her back to earth. She slowly turned her head just in time to see a badly dented silver Toyota sedan blaze past the intersection, sending the morning pedestrians scrambling to the safety of the curbs.
An all too familiar voice came from the driver's side window:
"HEY! You've all had your turn! It's my turn now! Move it dammit!" Ayumu knew that voice well enough. She briefly remarked how seven years had done little to dull Yukari-sensei's thrill-ride style of driving.
The incident now passed, Ayumu prepared to cross, only to be greeted with a solid red light on the crosswalk sign. She glared, somewhat perplexed at the signal.
From down the street came another roar of tires and brakes as the Yukari mobile thundered past yet another intersection. An exchange of horns and the faint sound of cursing drifted through the morning air.
Ayumu shuddered. Stop signs, crossing pedestrians, even commuter trains seemed to have no effect on the Yukari mobile. Her former teacher, it seemed, always needed to keep moving all the time.
Overhead, the gray American transport plane droned on towards Yokota.
"Hmm…"
Maybe Miss Yukari would have made a good pilot…
---------------
As part of the standard training for one's first overseas deployment, two things had been drilled into Air Force 2nd Lieutenant Adrian Holmes' head - be aware of your surroundings and be aware of your footing. Ian had, admittedly, never been very good at the former and his failure in the latter had now put him on the floor of the cargo bay.
"You all right, Ian?" a voice shouted at him.
Ian slowly looked up to see the face of 1st Lieutenant Kyle Short, an old friend and the crew chief of the C-130 that Ian had transferred to at Okinawa.
"What?" Ian shouted back.
"Here!" Kyle shouted over the roar of the plane's four engines. In his hand were the headphone and microphone cords to Ian's headset. His fall had pulled them both from the cargo bay's audio jack. Picking himself off the cold grated floor and fumbling in the rocking motion of the plane, Ian plugged it back in.
"You okay?" Kyle asked again, now through the plane's audio system. Ian nodded slowly.
Kyle gave a weak thumbs-up. "Man. I thought after that hop from Okinawa you'd know to stay strapped in during the turbulence," he remarked with exasperation.
"I don't remember anything about leaving Okinawa," Ian replied slowly. The flight from the southern islands had left in the very early morning and Ian had only just managed to drag his exhausted body from the warm, comfortable airliner he'd taken from Hawaii to the comparatively small, bouncing C-130 he now found himself in.
"I'm pretty sure I slept through it," he finished.
"Of course you did," Kyle's voice was laced with typical sarcasm, "only someone like you could sleep through turbulence like that."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well it was pretty rough as we crossed that front and…"
The crew chief looked at Ian and saw only empty space. He rolled his eyes; he should have known that explaining anything related to actually flying was like trying to talk to a tree. This, in spite of the fact both men were officers in the United States Air Force.
"Just forget it. But hey, long as you're up, we'll be turning over the bay in a minute here. We should be over the city about now if you wanted to see it."
Kyle indicated one of the small domed windows behind Ian. Turning put him right in front of the porthole-like opening and a gentle bank of the airplane caught central Tokyo in the mid-morning sun. At 5,000 feet high, approaching from the south of one of the largest metropolises on the planet, he tried desperately to take in his new host country.
Ian had to admit he'd never seen anything quite like Tokyo. Even the cities on the west coast where he'd grown up weren't nearly the same size or at the very least didn't look the same size. He very suddenly remembered how close the city was to several fault lines. Didn't earthquakes happen here..?
He turned his head quickly to ask Kyle, only to see his friend completing the various items needed to prepare for landing, almost bored.
"Don't you want to see?" Ian queried amiably.
"Saw it yesterday, seen it today, might see it tomorrow," Kyle dismissed, checking the holding straps on a covered pallet.
Ian returned to the window. As his gaze followed the city sprawl westward, Ian first glimpsed Yokota Air Base. From a distance, Yokota itself appeared as a ribbon of concrete on the outskirts of the greater Tokyo area; an odd little speck among the myriad of houses and skyscrapers, identifiable only by its single, long runway and a collection of large, low set structures.
"It's like an island," he remarked, forgetting for the umpteenth time his headset was set to an open-mic.
"Well, yes. Japan is indeed an island," Kyle's voice assumed its jeering tone, "Good to see those two years in Kirtland haven't at all sharpened those senses of yours."
Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico… Ian briefly remarked on his time there as one of the logistics officers responsible for the enlisted mess hall – long nights counting boxes of food, sorting said boxes, then moving them and finally counting them again. Sure he'd be doing more or less the same thing when they arrived at Yokota, but at least he was doing it somewhere overseas - in his mind, that had to count for something.
Come to think of it, what was he doing in Japan anyway? His orders had given him a reason, something the Air Force wanted him to do. Did it go beyond his normal box-related duties? Or maybe they just needed an especially good box expert with experience in all manner of box-related duties?
"Ground control to Lt. Ian? Hello?" Kyle was standing next to him, waving a gloved hand in front of Ian's eyes.
"I didn't mean Japan," he finally said back to Kyle, "I was talking about the base!"
Kyle was briefly perplexed by Ian's response and regarded his friend with a questioning glare.
"…oh! You mean what we were talking about. Right, right, uh… anyway, Colonel says to strap in, we'll be going over the numbers in a few minutes."
Over the numbers? Just what the heck did that mean? Were they supposed to check their numbers for something before they landed? If that was the case, Ian didn't have any numbers, at least none that he was aware of. He briefly panicked as he wondered if Kyle or someone else had told some numbers to memorize, but had now forgotten them...
"Ian…"
Over the numbers… what numbers? What had those numbers meant? This was all very confusing…
With no warning the C-130 banked abruptly to the right, throwing Ian off his feet again. This time however, he was lucky enough to find a seat to break his fall.
"Looks like you'd better get strapped in, we'll be landing soon," Kyle suggested.
Ian finally did as Kyle said. Once strapped in, he felt every little bounce in the plane as they descended for a landing. Straining his neck, he could just see out his window and watch the roofs of the houses get larger. As the ground came up to meet them, Tokyo seemed to become real, rather than an abstract destination. It hit him then; finally he was out of the desert, he was somewhere.
They came over the numbers. Ian smiled and waited for his first step into Tokyo.