“OMG! if that don’t look like backside of Terralingua Canyon I’ll eat my hat.”

Kang Sora cocked her ear to the voice in her headset and peered at the barren, rocky earth thousands of feet below. “Roger Appa. Looks like West Texas, all right. Can’t say when I’ve seen more dust, unless it’s that time you made the whole family go camping. Didn’t Omma threaten you with divorce to get us back to civilization?”

“Kid, you ain’t old enough to remember that!”

“Wanna bet?” Kang Sora laughed as her father cleared gravel from his throat and sputtered.

“What I’m saying is, there ain’t that much difference between land here and back home in West Texas. Dry, Lord a’mighty, there ain’t a drop of water from Pecos to El Paso. Wouldn’t want to make an unplanned landing in either place.”

“I read that loud and clear. There’s the pipeline.”

“That’s our landmark then, we follow it all the way to little ol’ Coo-way-tee International.” The depth of his Korean drawl made Sora chuckle. “I reckon we’ll be at the Persian Gulf in a quarter hour.”

Sora ayawned as her eyes travelled across the state –of-the-art console, noting fuel status, engine pressure, air temperature and altimeter reading. Locked onto autopilot, she didn’t have much to keep the tedium at bay.

“Don’t you go getting sleepy on me baby girl!” Her father’s drawl came again through her high-tech headset.

Sora knew how to shake off the sleepy spell and break the monotony of flying on autopilot. Take manual control. She nosed into the golden dawn and flew the Vixen 2016-2 in a roundabout figure eight, under, over and around the plodding, straight-as-an –arrow course of her father’s Vexin. “Who’s sleepy?” she challenged. “Wanna race upside down to the gulf?”

“Settle down Sora-baby. I don’t want a single bolt, rivet or widget rattled out of place in either these two ladies.”

“The crystal wouldn’t dare rattle in the galley!” Sora teased. It wouldn’t, either, not with the velveteen-covered foam castings she’d design within each cubby. The only way any breakage would occur on a Kang Vixen was if it was deliberate.

Grinning over the force of G’s pressing her against the moulded seat, Sora flew a wide elliptical orbit around her father’s identical jet. A rush of adrenaline to her brain obliterated the last trace of boredom.

“Don’t you hate turning these babies over to someone else, Appa?” she asked in a found, whimsical voice.

“Hate it? No. what would I do with a flying boardroom? I do all my arguing at the kitchen table.”

“Well, I mind. I could use a toy like this.”

“Toy?” Mr. Kang snorted. “It’s time you stop playing with toys and giving me ulcers and settle down to give me grandchildren instead. Cut it out, Sora. Baby! You just made me spill out my coffee.”

Sora executed two barrel rolls in quick succession, talking while the horizon tilted and spun. “Don’t ask me for grandchildren. I just started playing the field.”

“Hmf! At twenty-six your old enough to have been exhausted the field.”

“Why, you devil!” Sora didn’t try to keep the laugh out of her voice. “I’m just as innocent as the day I was born!”

“You just pull back on that throttle, baby. We’ve come all the way from Texas with no mistakes. There won’t be time to spruce up when we land. The minute you grandfather, Uncle Jack cracks the door, there’ll be a hundred of those sheiks swarming over both these ladies, going over them with a fine-tooth comb.”

“I know, I know.” Sora grumbled good-naturedly. She came even with her father’s jet, surrendering the lead. The planes would get all the attention. Not even Miss America stood a chance of being noticed with a lady like Sora’s Vexin 2016-2 gleaming on the tarmac. When it came to her father’s clients, the craving for fast, sleek machines to fly through the air in splendour and ease, Sora fully understood a mere woman’s second place rating. It didn’t do any good to get jealous either.

There was a time when she thought being extra ordinarily tall and having a silky jet-black hair that reaches few inches above her waist ought to have gained her some notice. That was before she realized that men who hungered for jet speed and open skies, who pitted their wits against bonds of earth, craved women, second, third, and in some cases, not at all. She suffered from the same fever. It was a rare man indeed who could entice her into giving up those spare precious hours of flight time so necessary to keep her skills equal to the requirements of her licenses.

It took only a couple of sorties into the world of aviation to learn that jet pilots were as arrogant as she was. Cocky, spoiled and self-confident. Kang Sora was a different class of female entirely, an aviator - and a good one – not to mention that she was Kang Jim’s youngest brat.

That she inherited her traits from the man flying the lead plane made her doubly proud. But those same traits made it doubly hard to find a soul mate who could fit into her world. Sora’s trouble was, she’d never settle for a man who didn’t have the same passion for flying that she had. It was a Kang curse. She had resigned herself to the curse at sixteen, when she earned her first solo license and her boyfriend of the moment had puked in her Piper Cub.

A lot of soap and water had washed out on the tarmac in eight years since. The test of true love inevitably was a zip around South Texas skyways. Guys who turned green in air pockets, rainstorms or barrel rolls just couldn’t cut it in Sora’s book.

To make matters worse, like her other siblings, Sora could dismantle a put back together any engine that man had thus far devised, Mechanical ability flowed in their bloodline even though their mother didn’t know a ratchet from a spanner.

Easing off the throttle, Sora said, “Seeing as how we’re at most there, I’ll slap on my serious face. What’s the first order of business when we land?”

“Selling Vixens!” Mr. Kang affirmed. “It’s my intention to write up another twenty of these babies I sack out and let you fly me home in the goose.”

“That old rattletrap.” Sora scoffed at the company’s albatross, an ancient DC-7. She squinted at the golden light reflected off the desert. “I should be so lucky somebody ditched the goose in the middle of this desert.”

“Hah! You know better. Jack keeps it gassed up and raring to go just for you.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I’ve had twenty hours sleep, two steaks and a quart of beer,” Sora insisted. “And a shower and a change of clothes.”

“You’ll be crying for featherbed next. You’re getting soft, Sora girl.” Mr. Kang’s chuckle was warm, mellow.  He was right proud of his youngest daughter and her flawless blueprint designs. She made precisions and accuracy of flight design seem carefree to the point of accidental.

His Sora was a perfectionist – a stubborn, mule-headed, aggravating female genius, to boot. Mr. Kang had to search sometimes to find anything to complain about. Then Sora would crop up to do something impulsive, something so all-fired irrational – a hundred percent female – which every one of his gaskets could blow. Like this trip.

His eldest son, Matt, the heir-apparent of Kang Enterprises was supposed to be flying the Vexin 2016-2 with him to Kawait. But that was before Matt, the thirty-three years old, level-headed right-hand man to Kang Industries volatile redheaded CEO, had been goaded into a tennis match the day before yesterday by his squirt of a baby sister. In the throes of Texas midmorning heat, Matt had gone after a serve of Sora’s that any idiot could have seen was going out of bounds. Lounging in the peanut gallery on the back patio over-looking the tennis court, he watched in horror as his eldest son’s leg had snapped right out underneath him.

Though he knew better, Mr. Kang swore that Sora had made the wide serve on purpose. She had to grease the soles of Matt’s tennis shoes because the argument over who was going to fly the second Vexin jet to Sheik Wali Haj Haaris had begun the minute the blueprints came off of Sora’s computer-assisted drawing board.

When the first of the immensely rich sheik’s pretty babies had come out of the hangars for inspections and test flights, the argument between Kang siblings had escalated to outright war.

Only three members of the family-operated corporation held licenses necessary to fly this class of aircraft. He, Matt and baby Sora. No one dare suggest he stay home and let the youngest take the planes, but Sora had had the audacity to demand she go along, period.

A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Kang had agreed to allow his talented daughter to come along as his co-pilot. It was capitulation to her outright manipulation.  He knew it, damned if he didn’t, but it seemed the only way to end the in-house fighting. It was pretty hard to intimidate Sora. He didn’t have a good handle on it and poor Matt had ever mastered the skills, ever. The girl had been running circles around Kang men since the day she was born.

“You know,” he said, “I still want a straight answer to why it was all-fired important to you to deliver these planes yourself Sora.”

“Call it a vendetta,” Sora responded with a chuckle. “A strike back at purdah. Appa, these planes are my design, and mine alone. Nobody but me touched a single one of the designs that over-rich oil prince fell in love with. He’s paying you enough money to float a couple of third-world nations for a year just to have a fleet of them. One for each and every one of his spoiled male chauvinist sons.”

“Is that what got your back up girl?”

“Something like that. Those sheiks are all bunch of preening peacocks. Every last one of them!” Sora said contemptuously.

“I still don’t get it,” he said bluntly.

“I’m talking about your sheik’s sons, Appa. He’s got twenty, according to the last count.”

“So? He can afford it, can’t he?”

“Yeah? So could you. Do you realize that all of Sheik Haaris’s sons were educated at Oxford, Harvard and Yale?”

“So what?”

“None of his daughters have been.”

“What’s your point Sora?”

“The Vexin is my baby!” Call it pride in craftsmanship. Call it one-upmanship. Call it stupidity of the first degree. I want just one conservative Muslim Sheik to have to face up to the fact that a woman can do as fine as a job a man. That’s why I am flying this plane today.”

“Baby girl, we’re in the business of modifying airplanes. That’s what we do for a living. It ain’t our job to judge the people who buy our planes.  That ain’t the way I’ve raised you to be.”

“I am not judging anyone, Appa. All I want to see is the look on Prince’s face when you introduce Kang Sora to him. I won’t say a word either. I’ll just stick out my hand and smile for the cameras.”

“Hell’s bells, you;ll start an incident with that sassy mouth of yours. I’m telling you right now, Sora, I’m living Kuwait with Sheik Haaris’s comer the radio was mission for the other twenty planes in my back order book. You start thinking about something else and you’ll wind up sitting out the whole negotiation in the back office. I mean it!”

Sora laugh. “Look at it this way. Maybe some desert prince will offer you twenty horses for my sassy mouth.”

“They do, and I’ll take the offer so fast your little head will spin.” He bantered right back. Sora’s laughter over the radio was music to his heart.

“Admit it Appa. It won’t hurt our business if these plane-mad people to know you’ve got a whole passel of kids just as gifted as you are, males. . . and females.”

“Hmf!” he grunted. That sort of flattery tripping off Sora’s tongue usually made him a malleable as putty to his youngest daughter‘s whim. As if he didn’t knew when he was being manipulated! “You’ll mind your p’s and q‘s when we land in Kuwait, just the same.”

“Of course I will,” Sora assured him in a perfectly bland professional voice. “Business is business.”

“Damn straight,’ Mr. Kang concurred.

“Well look there Appa, we’ve got company at nine o’clock.” Sora announced.

“Been there for the last hour, chatterbox. It’s a hawk reserve out of Riyadh. They’re on manoeuvres this week.”

“Well, I’ll be. That must meant we’ve kissed the desert bye.”

“Yup, Kuwait’s dead ahead. Better get out ears on.”

“I’ve got static on my radio. Leave the short range on, okay? I love your heavy breathing.”

While her father laughed, Sora looked at the distant gray bird in the golden sky. Clearly, it was hawk, a military patrol. She left her radio open as her father made contact. A cultured English voice asked her to identify herself, and she did.

They both logged into Kuwait International’s multi-layered holding pattern, circling the busy Mideast airport.  In this exercise, as always, her father took lead. The boss of the company had the rack to land first.

“Tell Jack to get steaks out of the freezer as soon as you land,” she told him. “I’m starving to death up here.”

“Will do. We’re the only orange-and-white hangar. Keep a sharp eye for it when you taxi around. See you on the ground baby girl.” Mr. Kang promised.

Sora waited for her landing instructions as she cruised over brown land sleek green water just south of the crescent of Al Kuwait Bay. “Kuwait control, this is Kang Vixen 2016-2. It sure is crowded up here. Are weekday mornings always like this?”

“Roger Vixen 2016-2, every day is like this,” a controller responded in English. “Stick to the southern dogleg at twenty-five hundred feet.” Sora scanned the crowded airways. Above her, six commercial 747 liners and a Concored circled monotonously. At twenty-five hundred feet, she counted no less than twelve jets similar to the Vixen. Her radar screens informed her of a whole lot more circling below. Getting clearance to land was going to take a while.

It was coming up to 8:00 AM Kuwait time. Sora yawned deeply. Her last stint in bed was more than forty hours ago. The Vixen generous cockpit now felt cramped and crowded, too confining with words. Twelve hours at the wheel, solo, covering eight thousand miles, hadn’t seemed so daunting when they took off yesterday from San Antonio.

Her time in holding lengthened to tedium.

A glance at her watched showed it nearing 11 PM back home. Bedtime and she was feeling jet lag. Her neck hurt from sitting for so long. Another yawn made her breathe and blink. She knew her father had to be feeling the worse than she. He was thirty plus years her senior.

Both of them ought to have their heads examined for not bringing co-pilots.  They had had trouble with the last minute visas. Some days her father could call the State Department and get everything he wanted, including red carpet waiting on the tarmac. Then there were days like yesterday, when nothing went right and everything that could go wrong did.

Their original flight plan has been lovely little hops. San Antonio to Lisbon, Lisbon to Baghdad with an overnight stop to get some shut-eye and a couple of hot meals. Sora had an itch to see Baghdad and shop at the bazaar that was likely no other bazaar in the world. She’d tapped out her savings account to do just that.

The opportunity went down the tubes when permission to travel Iraqi commercial airspace was abruptly cancelled. No explanation was given. It had force a complete change of flight plans. The only alternative route they could get over any so-called Arab country had been from Saudi’s, long-standing clients of her father.

It paid to have connections. It took twice as long and as much fuel to fly around Africa as to cut across it. Mr. Kang wasted nothing, including precious fuel. Sora chuckled, rephrasing the characteristic affectionately to penny-pinching tightwad. As if any man who commissioned planes like the Kang Vixen 2016 could ever be considered a tightwad. There was not a single component of this plane that was cheaply made. Nothing had been scrimped on, from the hand-rubber hardwood veneers to the imported leather of each seat. The plane was compact, yes, designed to transport ten adults maximum, but in such luxury as some people would never dream.

The power-packed jet engine was her brother. Thomas’ venue. What he could do with a fuel mix and a little tinkering defied explanation. Consequently, she and her father had stuck out yesterday afternoon on a six-thousand-mile nonstop flight, intending to do it on a fourteen hours maximum.

The jets could hold March one indefinitely. They could maneuver like a fox outrunning hounds. In the next moment, a clumsy military transport lumbered across Sora’s space. She buzzed out of his way with a quick twist of her wrist, which brought her dangerously close to two prop-wing commercial flights on the dogleg return over Al Kuwait Bay.

“Hey!” Sora shouted on her headset. “Who’s minding the store?”

“Roger, Kang Vixen 2016-2. Maintain assigned flight path and altitude.”

“I’m not the one in the wrong lane, guy, and while I’ve got you on the horn, be advised I’ll be riding on fumes if this merry-go-round continuous much longer. Any chance of an earlier berth, over?”

“Roger, Vixen 2016-2, we copy. Advise of exact fuel status and range.”

Sora stated the factual data. She wasn’t critical, having a solid range of four thousand mile, but each loop in the endless landing chain ate up seventy five.

“Copy that, Vixen 2016-2, proceed to seven hundred feet. Hold for the next approach o runway six.”

“Roger, thanks control.” Sora relaxed and look forward to walking, relishing the prospect of ground underfoot. Idling, she glanced out the window and watched as her father Vixen scooted down runway six, landing as prettily as a white dove touch the earth.

Sora banked and lost sight of the runway. She concentrated on enjoying the turn, the sheer maneuverability of the Vixen, the flying. She put down her landing gear and smiled approvingly at the natural drag it added to her speed. The last arm of the sleep turn west swung her unto the runway’s apron, approaching the city of Kuwait in forty degree tilt over hazy, blue water and gray smoke.

Smoke?

Sora blinked. Must have been fog. There hadn’t been any mention of fog from the tower. Her right wing hid the city. Runway six rushed at the Vixen’s pointy nose.

Another yawn pulled Sora’s cheeks. How good it would feel to stand, stretch and feel the hot desert air on her refrigerated skin. The runway rapidly go wider. She lowered the Vixen’s tail so her rear wheels would be first to touch the tarmac.

A plume of smoke rose in the middle of the long runway. Static crack on Sora’s ear. A shriek followed, the controller screamed. “Kang Vixen 2016-2! Abort landing. Return to twenty-five hundred feet. Abort runway six. Vixen do you copy?”

Sora’s yawn died mid-stretch. One hand hauled the wheel back. The other shot to her ear, to adjust the volume on her shrieking headset. “Control! This is Kang Vixen 2012-2 copy! Aborting approach to runway six. What the hell is going on down there? Oh, my God!”

The terminal erupted like Mount Saint Helens. Glass and concrete exploded, sending a plume of black smoke and flames over planes parked at the terminal gates. The control tower shattered. Her headset emitted another deafening shriek, then went dead.

Her other ear heard boom, boom, boom, sounds. Sora yanked up the Vixen’s nose and cut a diagonal over the flaming end of the terminal. Huge sheets of glass fell to the ground and shattered. At two hundred feet, she tacked a sharp tight corner and came back full circle. She didn’t care what was in the air around her. She had to know, who, what had crashed.

“Appa!” She switched to the radio channel they’d communicated on throughout the journey. “Appa, can you hear me? Appa! Answer me! Are you all right?”

“Sora!” Her father’s voice crackled over static-charged speaker on the Vixen’s console. “There’re rockets and bombs flying everywhere. Don’t land that plane. You hear me? Get the hell out of here! Go home!”