Rosa Jardine undid her seat belt after the battered yellow and orange 1969 Twin Otter DHC-6-200 levelled out from it’s steep climb, and pulled herself out of her seat in the passenger cabin. “Keep your seatbelt on, Theo” she admonished her young son on seeing him attempt to unclip it from under the Husky sitting on his lap and holding him down in his seat.

“But I want to talk to Jola!” Theo whined, looking pleadingly at the beautiful young woman squatting on the floor across from him, the pincer of her mechanical arm clamped onto the armrest of the seat in front of him. Jola threw back her long, dirty-blonde hair, and with a big smile raised herself up on her bird-like mechanical legs, so that she could see Theo over the headrest of the seat between them.

“Here I am! What do you want to talk about, my dear?” she asked Theo and winked at Rosa. Rosa stepped past Jola, careful not to trip on Jola’s three-toed metal feet gripping the plane cabin’s floor. 

“Don’t ask any rude questions, Theo!” Rosa admonished her son again, and continued up to the cabin to meet up with the pilot and co-pilot in the plane’s cockpit. She looked over to Kenji Nobu sitting in the seat in front of her, clutching the Proud Americans Brigade manual, and peering at the QuadriStar plans concealed in it. 

Entering the cockpit, Rosa looked through the front windshield out to the brightening sky, seeing the desert valley floor far below and the morning sun marking out the silhouette of the mountain ranges to the east. She leaned in to the handsome young man piloting the plane, almost touching his dark hair with her nose and lips. “We’re heading south?” she asked him, and glanced at his co-pilot, the huge, hulking man barely fitting into his seat. Skoaler paid no notice to Rosa, focusing on his navigation maps and checking the dashboard instruments and occasionally pulling on his long black hair and pulling it back under his cowboy hat.

“Yes, we’ll head straight to the border to Mexicali and then veer west to the coast once we’re in Mexican airspace,” Hanyo Soon said casually, turning to look at Rosa, their eyes meeting. He paused for a second and then continued, “We’ll land at the coastal town Rosarito and make my spice deliveries before we take off again and fly over the Pacific Ocean back up the California coast to Ventura.”

Rosa rolled her eyes and said sarcastically, “Yeah, I can just imagine what kind of spice you deliver.” Skoaler stopped looking at his charts and instruments to, and stared at Rosa with his deep brown eyes.

“What are you getting at, huh? I’m above the board on this, you know. Coriander, cilantro, cumin, and whatever else is in demand,” Hanyo said, “Spice!” He looked back at the package thrown to him by Sheriff Jebediah Haught, laying in one of the passenger cabin seats and added, “Among other things.”

“I knew it,” Rosa said as she narrowed her eyes and stood up, folding her arms and staring at the horizon in front of them. 

“You should go back into the cabin and get comfortable. You look exhausted… when did you last sleep? It’ll be several hours before we get to Rosarito,” Hanyo said, turning to look at her and giving her a crooked grin with is straight, white teeth and running his hand through his shoulder-length hair.

“Once we get back to Ojai, you’ll get paid and we can part-“ Rosa started to say, but stopped on seeing a flash of bright light streak across the sky in front of the Twin Otter, “What was that?”

Hanyo’s grin disappeared as he looked through the windshield and followed the streak of light ahead of them. “I don’t know… a military jet?” he mumbled and instinctively slowed the aircraft and banked it westward.

The cockpit was then filled with a brilliant white light, and Jola shouted out to all the occupants of the plane, “Shield your eyes! Don’t look at the light!” 

Rosa fell to the floor of the cockpit as Hanyo pulled the aircraft into a sharper turn away from the light, and she struggled to get back up again as the bright light dimmed and turned yellow, then orange, then red.

“What was that?” Rosa shrieked, struggling to stand up again.

“That, my new friends, was a tactical nuke,” Jola said solemnly, her eyes blank and unfocussed, “I know that flash well from the SEA war. Hang on! We’re going to be hit next by the shock wave!”

Just as Jola finished speaking the Twin Otter was lifted by it’s tail and thrown, as if swatted by a huge hand. Hanyo and Skoaler fought to bring the aircraft under control again, and were able to bring it out of its freefall as the shockwave from the blast passed them.

Hanyo was breathing heavily and glanced at the roiling red light out of the corner of his eye, saying to Skoaler, “Recalculate our heading to Mexicali around… that.”

Skoaler nodded and flipped through his charts and tables, and adjusted the autopilot controls.

“Where are we?” Kenji called out from his seat in the cabin, “Are we close to Joshua Tree Park?”

Skoaler nodded to Hanyo, who then shouted back to Kenji, “Yes… but if Jola is right about this being a nuke, it’s not there anymore.”

Kenji’s head sank to his chest, and the PAB manual he was holding fell to the cabin floor. Rosa clambered back to the cabin and knelt next to Kenji in the aisle, rubbing his back as he quietly sobbed.

“The hidden garden is destroyed?” Theo asked quietly, his eyes wide with awe, “Why? It was just a spring and some palm trees!”

Kenji couldn’t answer in his grief, so Jola explained to the young boy, her eyes sparkling in the red light filling the interior of the plane from the massive fireball rising form the desert valley, “I think I know how it came to this, kind of figuring out what is going on here. You see, blind greed will attack anyone in its way. But I don’t think a young boy can understand that. It’s better that you don’t understand, but I know personally,” Jola said and waved her mechanical arm at her robotic legs folded under her, “that this lust for power or wealth, or whatever, is indiscriminate and will hurt those who least deserve the pain inflicted on them.”

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***