To Sing to the Love of Danger

Fiction: Two navymen in the Strait of Taiwan take a last turn to glory.

After he heard the words, Lieutenant Commander Keller wanted to get up and strangle the young ensign. He visualized his admittedly soft hands clutching and squeezing the Annapolis man’s throat until the blood burst out of his eyes and mouth like sebum leaving a pimple. Such violent daydreams for such a normally passive man were one thing, but even Keller recognized the stupid futility of killing the messenger.

​He relaxed his tense shoulders and asked the ensign to repeat himself.

​“It’s over. Command informed us today that the X-67 Ultra-Crane is being abandoned. Sir, it appears that we are out of a job.”

​“Thank you. Have you told the master chief yet?” The master chief in question was a thick-necked man named Bolling. His perpetual scowl and fleshy features constantly earned him comparisons to an English bulldog, and a particularly ugly one at that. Unlike the others, who either outright avoided Bolling orwere overly obsequious to the lifer, Keller treated the man with quiet respect. After all, the X-67 was their baby, with Ensign Adamski joining the project long after the design and commissioning phase. As such, Keller assumed that Bollingwould take the news with righteous anger. The superior officer expected to hear shouting not long after Adamski left his office.

​In the quiet of that office, Keller began to brood. On his desk were several manuals dedicated to the X-67—the self-declared “wonder weapon” of the Far East. That’s how Keller and Bolling had formally pitched the prototype to Washington.The X-67, a sleek and stealth-based modification of the earlier X-66, would be the weapon to break the years-long stalemate in the South China Sea. He and the master chief had dazzled the top brass at the Pentagon by weaving for them dreams about whole fleets of the fighter aircraft flying over Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and even the coastal cities of Shandong Province. The goal, Keller had said in the presentation, was to arm the Navy with enough of the aircraft to persistently harass the PLA, which in turn would aid in future amphibious landings. That last point had been a sticky one. The military elite were in a stalemate of their own, with some flag and field officers preferring a limited beachhead (Hong Kong or Macau given the Westernized character of those city-islands), while the more bloodthirsty demanded nothing less than the full obliteration of the government in Beijing. Keller’s weapon was seen as more beneficial to the limited war crowd, and the lieutenant commander did not help his cause at all when he stated that his small unit’s core mission was the continued protection of Taiwanese democracy. To the war hawks of Northern Virginia, including the ones in the room that day, that sounded like a call for restraint. An “unpatriotic call.”

Keller’s project was thus cancelled less than a full month after it was tepidly greenlit. The old officer should have expected such suck, but the pain of it all ending nevertheless hurt too much. The veteran of several foreign adventures began pulling his hair out. It was already thinning towards baldness. He could ill-forward to lose anymore follicles, but he rushed into the pain and tore like an Old Testament rabbi attacking his cloak.

​When it was finished, Keller leaned back in his chair and took stock of his predicament. The basic outline was simple: He was an officer in the United States Navy. His specialty was aviation. He could fly most planes. His favorite was the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, which was increasingly becoming a fossil just like him. Keller’s obvious love and passion for aviation was the reason why he had spent the better part of his career in research and development. The X-67 was supposed to be his crowning achievement—the absolute reddest cherry on top of his life’s cake. And it was cancelled. Just like that.

Keller looked across his desk and studied the large map pinned to his wall. It showed the entirety of the island of Taiwan. A dotted black line surrounded a large sliver of land on the western coastline. That’s where they were—the enemy. In the first few weeks of the war, the rapidity of the PLA’s advance had shocked everyone. Articles bemoaned the fact that Taipei was destined to fall, thus further indicating the total collapse of the American Empire. It was said that the president even prepared a speech asking the American public to accept defeat. Privately, the Pentagon made plans to fall back to the Central Mountain Range and establish a new government at Chenggong.

​Then, an unexpected miracle happened. The PLA slowed down and could not fully capture Tainan. Taiwanese Marinesand irregulars harassed the PLA long enough for American and Australian bombers to take to the skies. The city was rendered a graveyard, but after that, an informal demilitarized zone was established. The X-67—the beautiful, sleek, and powerful bird of death—was supposed to end the uncertainty. Now, Keller realized that Taiwan was doomed to the fate of Cyprus: One half communist and Mainlander, and the other half an American satrapy. Such a situation pleased nobody, including Keller.

​He reached into a drawer and hunted for his go-to bottle of whisky. He found it, but it was empty.

​“Just my luck today,” he groused. A sharp knock on his door broke his grousing.

​“Come in.”

​“Hey, sir. I figure you already know the news. It’s crap, of course. Utter crap.” Bolling eased himself into the plush leather chair across from Keller. He was smoking a big cigar, which, under normal circumstances, would have annoyed Keller to no end.

​“Yes. A typical mess. A total cock-up. It’s the kind of thing that makes a man want to give up.”

​“Thinking about retiring, sir?” Bolling’s small and intense eyes latched onto Keller’s. The master chief was testing the superior office’s resolve. Instead, he only found heartbreak.

​“I think so, Dave. I can’t fight the blob anymore. Leviathan won. It can have my stripes.”

​Keller expected the gruff NCO to bark at him; to yell and curse and scream. Most of all, he expected a full-throated pep talk about how the fight was still on, and that X-67 could become a full-fledged fighter jet with a little more effort and a lot more persuasion.

​Bolling did none of that. He quietly contemplated the cherry of his cigar while admitting that he too was done.

​“I’ve given the best years of my life to the Navy, and out of all of those years, I’ve enjoyed my time on the project the best. You really made a believer out of me, sir. I was convinced…hell, I’m still convinced that it’s the right weapon at the right time. Two squadrons of them would be enough to lick the Chicoms all the way back to Canton.”

​“I guess we’ll never know, will we?” Keller did not intend for his comment to sound like a question, but that’s the way Bolling interpreted it. The master chief took the hesitation as a sign. He took the sign and ran with it.

​“You know what really burns me up, sir? The finished prototype never went airborne. The bird we have downstairs never got to see the sun, and we never got the privilege of riding on her wings. That baby will be scrap soon enough, unless, well…”

​“Unless what, Dave?”

​The master chief stuck the cigar back in his jowls and stood up. He walked towards Keller’s map and placed a finger on a small smudge of land in the Penghu Islands.

​“They have it all wrong in Washington. I figured that out a long time ago. What this war needs is a new idea.”

​“And you have a new idea?”

​“Yes, sir.” Bolling slammed his finger on the map for emphasis. “That’s Wangan. That’s the island that everyone forgets about. Not even Beijing cares enough about it for rudimentary wargames.”

​“Why should they,” Keller interjected, “when there’s barely five thousand people on it, and it can be bypassed with ease.”

​“That’s why I care about it, sir. You see, I have had this crazy idea for a long time. What do you think would happen if some dumb cowboys got hold of a plane and some weapons and took that island over? It would be pretty simple. Like you said—hardly anyone lives there. Why, these hypothetical dumb cowboys could make a nice little fiefdom there, too. Lots ofdrugs move between the Mainland and Taiwan on those islands, and our boys with boats or planes could be powerful pirates if they wanted to.”

​Keller understood fully what Bolling was saying. “We’d spend the rest of our lives breaking big rocks into smaller ones if we did that. A stunt like that could also get the war rolling again. Would put Washington on the backfoot.”

​“To hell with Washington,” Bolling spit. “And to hell with their war. I’m talking about something greater than all of that, sir. I’m talking about creating something for us and for anyone with enough balls to follow behind us.”

​Keller looked at his subordinate. The man had changed. His usually empty countenance had come alive with ferocity and zealotry. In the fading late afternoon of the Asian sun, he looked possessed; he looked insane.

​“How long have you been thinking about this, Dave?”

​“What I think now, sir, is that we should finally let our baby loose.” The master chief’s voice replaced its former hardness with newfound sweetness. The short, squat, and ugly man was trying to coax Keller into doing something dangerous. “One flight. Our baby deserves that. One flight just to say that she saw the sky.”

​“And go to that island, I presume.”

​“It has an airport, sir. We could slip in and slip out. The locals would see it as nothing more than an unexpected visit from friends. Just think about it: Could you really live with yourself if you let the bird disappear from this world without at least giving it a proper sendoff? I know I wouldn’t be able to live with it.”

​Bolling had a point. The X-67 needed to see sky time. Hell, it had earned the right to swim with the angels simply for being created by Keller and Bolling. And, if for nothing else, the advanced fighter’s maiden flight would be a lasting symbol to the morons in D.C. that yes, they had made a gigantic mistake.

​Keller agreed to Bolling’s rash adventure. The two men spared no time in navigating towards the isolated hangar where the prototype waited for their hands. When Bolling removed the large tarp over the plane, Keller found himself in religious ecstasy. His plane was his idol all along.

---

​Almost an hour later, the two men where airborne over the base. The lights of Taipei glittered beneath them.

​“Look at them all down there. All those people,” Keller said.

​“People?” Bolling mumbled. “More like vermin. With each passing day, I hate people more and more.”

​“Isn’t our whole goal to help these people against Mainlanders?” Keller wanted to gauge Bolling’s level of extremism, for the master chief seemed to be going off the deep end.

​“That may have been our goal at one point,” Bolling said from behind the cockpit. “Now, I’m not sure what the goal is besides the machine itself.”

​Keller asked for clarification.

​“This plane is all that matters anymore, sir. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t have kids. Never had a wife. This plane is my legacy; it is my gift to the world. So, the machine is all there is.”

​Keller focused on flying for a time, but the surprising eloquence of the master chief’s words had already wormed itselfinto his usually quiet brain. He mulled the words over a bit before adding his own philosophy to the conversation.

​“For me, it’s more than the machine. It’s creation, you know? I think I love this bird because I…we made it. It’s man making machine, and then man beating nature.”

​“Man has been licking nature for a long time, and pretty soon the machines are going to lick man once and for all,” Bolling said.

​“What do you mean by that?”

​“I mean our time is about up, sir. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about it. The machines are getting better all the time. This bird for one thing—it’s our genius, to be sure. But elsewhere, like with AI and all that. I know I’m not smart, but even I can see that it’s only a matter of time before artificial machines are making flesh-and-blood decisions. And even worse, it will get to the point where man can’t distinguish between himself and the machines. We will have an AI president leading a cyborg army, half-man and half-machine, and it will be treated as normal.”

​“Why have you been thinking so much about this, Dave?”

​“How can you interact with Washington and not pray for the AI apocalypse?”

​The two men shared a hearty laugh. It was joviality tinged with absolute madness. Bolling bit and chewed on the malice first. “We’ve been dealing with bureaucrats for so long, and each one seems less human than the next. To be frank, they are not humans in my eyes. They should all be replaced by robots. Would not change much anyway. All our superiors are parrots squawking the same lines again and again. The same dull smiles; the same dead eyes.”

​“You’re right,” Keller agreed. “Anyone with a soul finds themselves squeezed out.”

​“You don’t even need a soul. A pure technician uninterested politics gets the shaft more than anyone else.”

​“That’s us.”

​“It was us. We are currently transcending that, sir. You know, I’ve been reading a lot about Fiume. Crazy story. They seem like complete nuts from the safety and security of our world, but they really lived.”

​“What happened at Fiume?”

​“The world’s last true adventure.” Keller twisted at the waist and looked at Bolling. The master chief put up a finger of caution.

​“The island is coming up soon, sir. We should prepare for landing.”

​Keller agreed. He focused, with fierce determination, on landing the ultra-fast fighter on the tiny and thin airstrip on Wangan. The descent and landing proved more difficult than expected. The X-67’s controls felt powerful but stiff. Keller made a note in his pocket journal to tinker more with the controls and vertical stabilizer. It was a pointless note, he knew, but he made it anyway.

​When the two men finally exited the plane, they were greeted by a pair of workers dressed head-to-toe in yellow reflective jackets and trousers. The men spoke furiously in a dialect of Min that was unknown to the Americans. Keller tried to calm them down with slowly spoken phrases taken from Taiwanese Hokkien. The workers neither calmed down nor shut up; they continued to bark and bellow at the unwanted intruders.

​“They’re pissed because we landed without authorization, sir.”

​“I think that’s obvious.”

​“What are we going to do about it?”

​The question took Keller by surprise. It was a valid question. The problem was that he had stopped thinking and planning and preparing well before takeoff. Keller was on autopilot and had no idea where he was headed. He was too detached to feel nervous.

​Bolling took the initiative. He produced a SIG Sauer from his flight suit and aimed it at the workers. They threw their hands up.

​“Hostage situation now, sir,” Bolling said. “We better move them inside so the few locals up at this hour don’t get suspicious.” Keller did not know whether or not he agreed with Bolling; he simply acted. He shadowed the master chief as all four men walked into a nearby hangar. It was empty save for two Cessnas. Like an automation, Bolling tied the two workers to the landing gear of one Cessna and secured their mouths with duct tape that he found lying around.

​“Well, there’s really no turning back now, sir. We’ve gone full pirate. Hell, we have our own Fiume right here,” Bolling said with obvious glee. For the first time ever, Keller saw that the master chief was enjoying himself.

​“No, there’s one more thing we can do.” Keller rummaged around the hangar until he found what he was looking for. He muscled the gallon of fuel to the center of the room and told Bolling to find rags.

​“We’re going to start a fire, Dave.”

​“Here?”

​“No,” Keller said while using his head to gesture to the main body of the airport. “Fire will be there. Let everyone see. Once it gets big enough to be visible, we’ll call it in.”

​Bolling smiled. The old man had finally caught on. Keller now saw the genius of Bolling’s ideals. “Our friends will race here if we tell them the fire is enemy action.”

​“I’m sure they will. The enemy won’t be far behind.”

​“They do monitor all our traffic, don’t they?”

​“Yep.”

​“And when they get here,” Bolling looked over his shoulder and up into the nighttime sky. A mad gleam entered his eye. “And when they get here, we will be ready for a dogfight.”

​“That’s right. The X-67 will show them how it’s done.”

​“Wanna bet on who gets here first?”

​“No,” Keller said with severity. “No reason to bet because it doesn’t matter. Whoever finds us, we’ll get them first. As you have been saying all night long, nothing matters more than the machine right now.”

​“Roger that, sir. To the machine and the true last adventure.”

​The two men, armed with fuel-soaked rags, walked towards the dark airport. Despite the loud landing of the fighter, the civilians all seemed to be asleep. They dreamed peacefully without realizing that the island was no longer their home.

​It was no longer safe.

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