The Greatest Parachute Jumper in Aerospace History
Rip passed out on the stairs. He'd drank too much champagne and on the way up to his new living room and kitchen and bedroom he'd stumbled and conked his head on the railing. Summer sausage and calamari fizzed out onto the lapel of his borrowed suit. He laid there moaning for hours. In the morning, his wife Matarena prodded him with her foot. He belched and flinched for his bootknife.
“Reep!” she said in her lingering island accent, just one of a hundred reasons she didn't go to the party with him, why they didn't do things together. The accent stayed with her like the brown in her skin, her arm almost black against his.
“Reep!” she said in her lingering island accent, just one of a hundred reasons she didn't go to the party with him, why they didn't do things together. The accent stayed with her like the brown in her skin, her arm almost black against his.
“Sorry Mattie,” he said as she helped him to his feet. “Had a bit too much to drink last night.”
“You out late,” she said, and stomped back up the stairs. “I no know when you come back.”
Rip started to remember last night's party. He had had been the guest of honor and whoever it was that decided these things sent an official representative to name him the greatest parachute jumper in aerospace history. He had jumped out of an airplane and landed in every nation on earth and now that he was back from Liechtenstein, it seemed certain that he would become rich and famous.
But the suit, now crusted with vomit, and the new house, belonged to his friend Brock Olafson; a man who'd made a fortune after he patented the dish scrubber with a soap reservoir in the handle. Rip had met him in Budapest after ten years jumping out of planes. The old capitalist took an interest in him and after a week of buying Rip breakfast, Brock had guaranteed him fame and money, financed some travel, hired Rip a lawyer. Some papers were signed, but Rip was only dimly aware of what was in them and Brock rarely brought it up.
When Rip returned to the states, he could carry all of his possessions on his back. But the first night in foreign Oregon, he and Mattie slept in a king-sized bed at Brock's. On the second day there, they'd put on blindfolds and Brock had them driven down the road to another place he owned along the coast. This one was smaller, but still much too big. It was Rip's to sleep in as long as he wanted.
He ached up the stairs trying to focus through the headache. It took a lot of steps to get anywhere in the house. He was used to sleeping in airplane hangars and under canvas tents and eight to a room in malarial hotels. The bed here was so big that he felt like he was sleeping alone and Mattie scooted as far to her side as she could.
She was making him breakfast. The smell of eggs both nauseating and delicious. He eased himself onto the leather couch and fought off the suit-jacket like an invalid. More memories from the party caught up: Brock had introduced him to an excitable, red-haired woman (Charmagne, Rip thought, though he'd certainly called her 'champagne' at least once) who was a big-shot in the sports apparel industry. She said that the public was looking for a new anti-hero to celebrate, someone the nihilistic youth could embrace. And then Ivan, the loose-cannon in Rip's crew, had shoved her into the pool. Rip could remember some of the other guests: various stuffy-looking businesspeople, some guy who claimed to have invented crystal meth as a teenager, a woman with unbelievably large breasts. At some point, Brock took Rip aside and asked if he had made any plans to sit down and talk business with Charmagne. 'Not much back-and-forth, Brock. I've been guzzling it steady,' Rip said.
The party was really Brock's. Rip kept mostly to his crew: James, who arranged travel and could sort of fly a plane; Pierre , the cook/pharmacist/driver; Ivan the Russian survivalist; two good old boys from back home that helped out however they could; and Dooley, whose smarts never seemed to come in handy. He hadn't seen them in over a year and Brock had flown everyone out for a photo op. After eleven or so, they hung out together in one of the back rooms, binging on free drinks and cracking jokes at anyone who tried to come in.
Rip took the remote from the coffee table and pushed buttons until the television turned on. Mattie came in and dropped his breakfast to the table. The omelette slid off onto the glass, and when she set the coffee down it sloshed over the brim. He never knew whether to apologize, sometimes it made things worse. He always thought that they could learn to communicate in body language or that she would pick up enough English or that she'd be so happy to no longer live in a hut that she'd put up with him.
Rip was on TV, a rerun of yesterday's spot on Wake Up America. He was wearing the same suit and squinting in the sunlight, whitecaps and rocky shore in the background. Right next to him onscreen, and a thousand miles away, Rob Ronaldson sorted through notecards. When they filmed, Rip couldn't see the host and they told him to look into the camera and listen on an earpiece. He was supposed to respond as quickly as possible to minimize the delay. Millions of people were watching him.
The first question seemed to be about how Rip came to lose his mind. Rob laughed a little, Rip winced on both sides of the screen. Twenty years of exhaustion and risk and exhilaration and grit condensed into a three minute joke.
“Well Rob,” this stupid, warped voice responded. He did look a bit crazy: a tuft of mustache over his mouth, face tanned to the color of leather like he'd been staked to the ground in the desert, the lost eyes of a thawed caveman. “I was a pretty poor kid.” Pretty poor, pretty bored. He'd come up in a tarpaper shack in Arkansas with the whole brood standing around one pot of beans at dinner some nights. “Jumped out of an airplane the first time I ever rode in one.” That open-cabin dust-cropper his Uncle Ned liked to scare cows and old women with. “And I guess I just never stopped.”
“What made you decide to do the whole map? Jump into every country?” Rob tried really hard to seem honest. He looked straight ahead, his hair like a wax model of hair.
They would never stop asking this question and sometimes a person threw a fancy term at it like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or Monomania, but those people were never in Rip's head and they didn't know how it felt when he opened a map. Those strange cities with their unpronounceable names, countries he'd never heard of that made Arkansas look tiny and lost, blank expanses that demanded to be filled with experience.
“Well Rob,” TV-Rip said,“I wanted to spend the rest of my life jumping. And I wanted to see the world. Seemed like the only way to do it.”
Rob tented his fingers and stared back like he and Rip were really getting down to business.
“Now, most of us think of jumping out of an airplane as a pretty intense experience. After all those jumps, what does it feel like for you?”
Both couch-Rip and TV-Rip looked at the floor. How to explain to people that it still terrified him. That as soon as he walked out of the plane all of his systems believed he'd just committed suicide: his vision went clear, his ass clenched, his adrenal gland thumped like a heart. There was an infinite second where he felt everything and thought nothing. Simultaneous dread and ecstasy, a loss of himself to the enormous world and a panic in his cells. Coming out of that, and floating down on the open parachute, was like being reborn fully adult.
“You get used to it,” TV-Rip said, “you do it this many times, you hardly even notice it anymore.”
He could remember what came next and hoped it didn't sound too out there, though they hadn't brought him in to say something reasonable.
“I mean, when I jump out of a plane, it's just me and the earth. There's a view like nothing you've ever seen. No point in even taking a picture. You can't relate to it by, say, looking out the window of a 747. You feel like the earth can't be measured with the same stick you measure yourself with.”
“So, Rip,” Rob going on without a pause. “I hear you actually finished this a year ago.”
“That's right.”
“But you were stuck in, where was it, Liechtenstein?”
“We caught a stream of bad luck there. Doing this you learn that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.”
TV-Rip spoke in cliches to keep from stammering through explanations or wandering off-topic. It was a good piece of advice from Brock.
“Could you tell me a little bit more about that?” Rob asked.
“Well . . .what to say?”
Rob Ronaldson wanted to talk about how the parachuting madness ended like a tragic Benny Hill routine. No one could call it any kind of accomplishment without noting the smudge over his final jump. TV-Rip thought about a million Americans watching. They sit through three or four hours of this a day, Brock told him, and they'd only remember enough of the segment to recognize his mustache the next time they saw him. Still, each set of eyes was an anxious pinprick.
It took him too long to answer: should he talk about how as he descended over night-time Liechtenstein a throng of people crowded around the fountains and statues? How he could hear them chanting his name and almost feel the cobblestone under his feet? Rip had jumped with a bottle of champagne and as he drifted between the stone buildings he launched the cork into the crowd. The air around him full of confetti and weird tuba music.
“There was a gust of wind. The heat of the crowd created an updraft,” he said, and described how Liechtenstein-Rip, spraying the crowd with champagne, had been thrust into a building and through a windowframe and into someone's apartment. The apartment more of an antique shop with hundreds of well-kept tapestries and brass thingamabobs and an old couple shrieking and running into the hall as his parachute filled the room and he tried to get his footing.
“There was a fire,” TV-Rip admitted. A bit of parachute had knocked an oil lamp down onto a rug and the place went up like a cruel prank. “And Liechtenstein has a very complicated legal process.” The parachute caught fire, and then his legs and arms. He wrestled back to the window, cut himself free, and fell twenty feet into thornbushes where the crowd doused him with beer and buckets of water.
“But that's all straightened out now?” Rob asked. TV-Rip looked back at the camera, the wind blowing around his mustache like he was chewing his words before he spoke them.
“More or less.”
Rip turned the television off. He couldn't watch the rest of the interview: a question about Mattie, something about his plans for the future. And then Rob had wished him well and as Rip disconnected the earpiece he heard him say something to the television audience about the world taking all kinds and that their next interview was a famous pet psychic.
Rip sipped his coffee. It was just after nine, the long day ahead nerve-wracking in its lack of demands. The quiet reminded him that he hadn't eaten a meal alone since Arkansas. Even when it wasn't the crew it was a merchant in Islamabad, a rebel leader in Somalia. And then at least Mattie or Brock. Some fame all this was.
“Mattie!” he called. He wanted to get up and walk into whatever room she was in and say something, give her those sad eyes, tell her he loved her in her own language. A month was not enough time for her to get over the long year in Liechtenstein. The crew had left her in a hotel room and her crafty, restless hands just sat in her lap as she stared out the window. She went for walks, but later told Rip she couldn't stand seeing old couples in the streets. Rip spent the time locked up, the wiry old jailer with lobotomy scars letting him out for meals so he could practice his pointless English.
A phone on the table rang, definitely Brock calling. Rip let it ring. His coffee had gone cool now and he took the rest of it in one go. After three rings, he answered.
“Rip, good morning,” Brock said in his groomed accent.
“How's it going, Brock.”
“Splendid. I trust you made it home alright?”
“Something like that.” He must have walked, or insisted on a ride. The lump at his hairline throbbed.
“Listen, Rip.” Brock took a preening tone, like he simply couldn't make it without him. “Meet me down at the Starbuck's in the village, I'll send a car—”
“I'll walk Brock, it's right there.”
Rip stood up too fast, closed his eyes against the headache and pinched the bridge of his nose. He wasn't sure what to do with the dishes. Being rich required a certain competence that Rip didn't feel up to, he was hardly housebroken and walking across the hardwood floor he felt the need to tip-toe, to leave every bit of the TV-room exactly as it was. The notion of having an entire cupboard full of dishes that matched this plate and cup seemed like a joke Brock was playing on him. Memories of eating meat slurry out of gourds in Botswana.
Mattie was in the kitchen yelling Gilbertese curses at the dishwasher. When Rip had first met her, he would have said this kind of anger was impossible. That was a few years before Liechtenstein, when Rip was touring the South Pacific. The crew got sloppy with the easy opportunities and the the jumps were poorly planned. While the plane was in the air, the ground crew would still be bribing pearl-divers to rent out their boat or scrounging up fishheads in the market for dinner. More than once Rip had to wait hours for someone to pick him up.
When he jumped over Kiribati, he wasn't even sure which scrap of land would count. He picked a target and after spraining his ankle for the seventh time he just laid there amongst his flapping parachute. For a long time, he watched the sky drawn tight above him in unspotted blue, the pain of his ankle swelling against his boot. In that rare snatch of solitude he gave up parachuting and then re-embraced it, considered what kind of place he might settle down in and then shook his head and committed to traveling always. He dozed to the peaceful sound of the waves.
Mattie's soft bronze face leaned over him, the sun backlighting her frizz like a well-worn halo. And when her eyes met his she giggled and moved away. Beautiful. Rip sat up and she was still there, sitting delicately on her knees in a faded pink dress. She got him to his feet and helped him hop to a grass-roofed pavilion. There she dabbed his forehead with a cold rag and fed him slivers of coconut and fish. He asked her questions and she blushed and put her hands to her face—it didn't matter what he said. Two days later, the crew found him and as they started to leave Mattie could not be persuaded to stay and Rip could not be talked out of bringing her along. Now she was here in Oregon.
“Mattie,” Rip said to her hunched back, brackish water frothing out onto the floor. “Just leave it, we've got help for that.”
Mattie turned to him, her eyes veined with frustration.
“No work, Reep. Can make it work.”
He reached over and brought her close to him. She came up to his armpit, nuzzling into his chest there. His breath was unscrubbed tobacco smoke and puke and coffee and he tried to exhale it in the space over her head.
“It's okay. You'll get used to this.”
“I want to go home,” Mattie said, muffled against his shirt.
“So do I,” Rip said. No image in mind, no place that could even be returned to. They were both plunging through the air, to land wherever he landed.
“I have to go see Brock.”
She pulled away and looked at him.
“You want to come?”
“No.” She wrung the dishtowel, goosebumps on her bare arms. “You just go.”
“I'll be right back. He called, so I'm going.”
“Why you see him always? Why you not see me always?”
“I owe him something, Mattie. We wouldn't have anything right now if it wasn't for him.”
They looked at the dishwasher still gurgling and dripping onto the floor. Mattie hummed, a musical prayer she'd never explained to him, and went into the hall and down to their bedroom.
===
A hang-over is nothing compared to malaria. Rip made the ten minute walk to the coffee shop with his eyes slitted against the sun. As he walked down the street, he saw curtains held back to catch a glimpse. A man pretended to examine his Sunday mailbox just to get a closer look and give Rip a long, nodding stare. Rip might as well have been back in Tanzania, hobbling scuffed and hungry through the market like a blasphemy. Oregon was no more home than Senegal or Eritrea or Uruguay.
The Starbucks was deep and narrow. Way in the back, Brock sat under a mural of a boat in sepia and black. Rip asked for coffee and Brock waved the young woman off when she started to ring him up.
“Do you like my Starbucks?” Brock said, in front of him a stack of paper two inches thick.
“It's nice.”
Rip sat. He closed his eyes until the headache settled.
“I trust you had fun last night? Quite a party, huh?”
“Yeah,” Rip said, “do you know where the crew ended up?”
“Not precisely,” Brock said and stifled a laugh.“Lots of bodies lying around, I couldn't make the names of everyone.”
Brock liked to watch what he called the crew's 'mischief', even now at seventy. He had aged well, but when Rip met him he didn't need reading glasses. His hair had been grey, now it was white and mostly gone—but he never seemed old. He was always energized over some new venture and carried the left-over enthusiasm of a person that never has to plunge a toilet or drive a car or do the laundry. A self-made prince with no burdensome empire to inherit.
Rip downed the coffee and wiped his mouth with a sleeve.
“I see a daily shower has not yet become one of your habits,” Brock said with a chuckle.
“Oh, I'll get to it. You wanted to talk about something?”
Brock tapped the stack of papers and carefully spun it on the table for Rip to read.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Okay,” Brock said and spun the papers back. “What you need to know is that you've done something very marketable—”
“How's that?”
“I mean, that you and your crew have done something remarkable—it's a story that I think people are going to be interested in.”
“You've said that before.”
“Yes, and now I know how to get it out there.”
Rip remembered that Dooley had been writing in a journal through the whole parachuting adventure. He'd buried it all in the Sudan once and it was the only thing the warlord didn't confiscate. Someone from Brock's staff had typed it up and now the enormous manuscript sat between them, over eight hundred pages of descriptions and observations and stories at least partially true.
“It's actually quite good. Listen to this,” Brock said, and read a passage in a low, even voice:
“'In China, we had to get jobs. There were no good prospects for jumping, we were stuck without a map or bearings in Shanghai, and there was a warrant out for Ivan's arrest. Once a week we stole from a bakery dumpster just to stay upright. The whole crew slept in a van, ate bruised fruit and hard bread. We kept the parachute in the center so when anyone woke up it would be the first thing he would see. It became an altar of sorts, a reminder that as long as we had a parachute and determination, we could really pull this thing off.'”
Rip smirked under his mustache. China had been a screaming nightmare. Six months to get off the ground, then another lost week trying to find their way out of the Tulu Ravine. Yelling at each other in the rain and the dark with no place yet to sleep.
“'But in China we had our best nights,'” Brock continued, “'we hit rock bottom and all of our previous brushes with failure now seemed like preparation. Huddled in that van on the outskirts, I realized that it wasn't about jumping or the record, failure for us wasn't like losing a job or the big game. There was, in fact, no failure because our real goal was to get as much out of our lives as we could. And though we didn't jump for months, I knew then that there was no other way to live but in awe of the present moment.'”
Rip sighed and looked out the window the way he thought famous people seemed to in photographs. He saw a half-dozen new buildings heavy with summer geraniums in hung pots, a courtyard of fresh brick pavers, wrought-iron chairs painted black and freshly swept of cobwebs, a hunk of metal mangled into the statue of someone. Brock had taken this weedy little alley and turned it into what he called Harmony Park. He owned each of the shops and restaurants and had much of his fortune behind them. There had been a hard fight to acquire all of the property and on the corner of one building, a barber's pole spun a meaningless red stripe, part of Brock's agreement with some 'stubborn old redneck' as he'd said.
“Of course, we will have this all massaged into something readable,” Brock said, “but what do you think?”
“It's accurate, I suppose.”
“And?”
“Well,” Rip said, shaking his head in small motions. It did not pay to owe someone, in the long run. Everyone had the potential to break into your Peruvian squat at four am and demand money because they loaned you a plane earlier that week. But that is what business is, Rip thought, owing people and paying up until, finally, someone owes you. “I'm glad Dooley found something out there, but I never thought about it that way. I just knew I wanted to do it forever.”
“Well, Rip,” Brock said, and pushed the stack of paper aside, folding his hands for a proposition.“I tell you what we want to do. We want you to spend some time with Dooley and my writer and rework this thing. We want to give it your voice.”
“What do you mean? I don't have anything to say.”
“Your perspective. Make it so that it's coming from the one and only Rip Stinson. What drives him to do these things, who is he exactly? Perhaps you could give some insight on your romance with Mattie. There's something for everyone here.”
Rip looked out again at Brock's fake little town, all whitewashed and security-cameraed and quiet. Not even a crumb for the hopping trio of sparrows to find. If Brock were given reign over the world, and the resources to make it all like this place, Rip and his crew would be run out of every corner of it. Stared down by well-dressed policemen as they shambled along.
“Brock,” Rip said, “I appreciate what you're trying to do. But I look at this place you've made here and—”
“Isn't it lovely?” Brock said, turning to admire it for himself.
“Oh sure,” Rip said, “but she's missing something. You can't just take something simple and dirty, you know, and clean 'er up and slap a label on it.”
“But this is what we talked about, Rip,” Brock said, turned back now, slumping a hairsbreadth.
“I know it, I know.”
They looked at each other, the stack of paper painfully white. Brock put his hand on it and wrenched his lips into a thoughtful frown.
“I'll think about it, okay?” Rip said, sliding the stack closer to him. “See if I can't recollect something.”
“Yes,” Brock said, becoming instantly cheerful. “Get cleaned up and give some of that a read. Fame and fortune, Rip. Anything you ever wanted.”
===
In the early evening, Rip sat out on the porch reading through the stack, letting the ocean blow the stink off him. He lost three pages to the wind and had to use his fancy booze glass to keep the flapping sheets pinned to the table. The reading was very slow going, some of the words were baffling and every few sentences something was stirred up that had gone grey during the year in jail. He sighed and laughed and turned pages before he finished them.
There was a passage about coming across those children in the jungles of Madagascar, waist-high and alone out there bundling fallen wood and throwing it over their backs. A paragraph about that wild-eyed white kid in Taiwan toting around a black cat in a bird cage. When he came to breaks in the text, Rip would shuffle through to a page deeper in the stack.
He never read much. In school, Rip had only learned the alphabet and some basic spelling, but during the parachuting business, Dooley would sometimes give him a lesson on phonetics or grammar. Rip practiced with a Bible that he took from a European hotel room. It had been in a drawer, as easy to steal as the soap or the batteries from the remote control. For a couple years, he poked around in it and when he got a bit drunk sometimes he would mispronounce verses to the crew in a booming voice. The Bible, along with everything but his passport and parachute, was lost to some Saudi thieves one night. Rip wondered if Dooley wrote about that.
On a page near the bottom of the stack, there was a phrase highlighted in yellow: Like there's no tomorrow. Brock had written next to it, as if in stencil, the word title. Rip pulled the sheet away from the others, studied it, and finally crumpled it into a ball and cast it off the balcony. If Brock really thought it should be called that, he'd be happy to have a new one typed up.
After an hour of reading, the phone rang. Brock, sounding echoey and relaxed like he was soaking in the tub, asked Rip about the manuscript. Rip said he would talk about it the next time they saw each other. Brock splashed around and pleaded for at least a one sentence response. Ten seconds of silence, then Brock said he was sending a car and hung up.
Rip took the papers inside and set them on the dresser while he donned a hooded sweatshirt and slid his bulging backpack from underneath the bed. His bag was always ready. He'd learned that when convicts are released they still huddle over their food, and when survivors are pulled from the wilderness they squirrel away their rations under a pillow. The bag was like that—a habit that had never failed him. He slung it over one shoulder and collected the manuscript, the story of more than half his life written by someone else.
Mattie was asleep on the couch with a glossy magazine spread across her chest, snoring in a soft purr. So beautiful he could feel it in his stomach, her perfect face rendered under the happiest sun, those lidded eyes indescribable in the crass language Rip knew. He brushed his fingers along the hand she'd laid on her stomach and she blinked awake. Two strangers out-of-place and tired.
“I'm going, Mattie,” he said, and looked at the bag on his shoulder with a sniff. “I'm leaving.”
She gave a small nod and closed her eyes again. He kissed her forehead and the smooth skin folded into querulous wrinkles.
He went through the house and down the steps, a dried outline of puke still there from the night before. In the driveway, the chauffeur took his hands out of his pockets and opened the back door. Rip threw his bag in on the seat and stood facing him: a man who spent his entire day responding to whims, faking a smile, pocketing grieved tips here and there. Brock's well-dressed monkey.
“The backseat is for rich people,” Rip said, “I'll sit up front.”
Rip followed him to the passenger side and let him open the door. He sat down holding the stack of papers in his lap and the car whirred out of the driveway.
“But you're going to be rich,” the driver said, “that's what Mr. Olafson says. You're already famous and he's going to make you rich.”
“I'm going to be something alright, Brock's seen to that.”
It was only a five minute drive. As usual in dealing with Brock, there was a plan that he would unfold in coming days, feeding bits of it to Rip as he needed to, nudging him along with alcohol and paperwork. Rip so bored that he'd agree to anything just to get the damn thing over with.
Rip read again parts of the first page by streetlight and caught the driver glimpsing at him.
“You know what the most exciting part of the whole parachuting nonsense was?” Rip asked, and looked at the driver.
“No Mr. Stinson, what?”
“When we heard about Serbia and Montenegro,” Rip said, “independent in oh-six. We were almost done. Then Serbia and Montenegro. Jumped both of those in the same week and then, like icing on the goddamn cake, good ol' James says 'what's this little country?' on that new map he had. Licked-en-stine. Missed it the first time through. Seeing that last little spot of the map made me feel like I was eighteen again and cracking open my first atlas.”
“Fall of the Soviet Union . . .”
“Best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Sir, did you know that Kosovo went independent?” the driver asked, “four or five months ago now.”
Rip twitched and looked at him, mouth open as though he were a skeptic struggling to explain a magic trick. He threw the manuscript up onto the dashboard and made a vowel sound like a question. The driver nodded as he turned into the gate, the driveway fresh asphalt, the ridiculous yard as carefully kept as a golf course.
The crew was single-filing down the driveway, packs on their backs and cases of beer on their heads like porters. All of them wearing their bedraggled traveling clothes. Rip got the driver to stop and he leapt out, a few sheets from the stack chasing him out the door.
“What's up?” Rip said. They all looked to each other and someone told him that they were bored. That Brock was kind to let them stay, but he was an awkward guy to be in the same room with. Ivan added that there was no way any of them were getting laid in this town.
“Where's Dooley?” Rip asked, and walked up the driveway inspecting his crew. They looked different from when everything started: wise now about things they could have never expected, comfortable in all their risks.
“Dooley's staying,” James said. To work on the book. To meet with the bigshot writer from San Francisco that Brock was flying in. To be around when the money started falling from the sky. Rip listened to this and turned to face Brock's house, fists on his hips like he was surveying a landing zone. The crew watched him silently.
Rip walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened the back door.
“There a problem, Mr. Stinson?”
“Not at all,” Rip said, hoisting the bag onto his shoulder. “But, can you tell Brock something for me?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him to give Mattie whatever she wants. Tell him she wants to go home. But what's mine is hers if she stays.”
Rip closed the door and stood again in front of his crew.
“Ivan, hand me a beer,” he said, “let's have us a toast.”
“Sure thing boss, what's the occasion?”
“The fall of the Soviet Union,” Rip said with a smile. And the crew began to shout and laugh and clap, spraying each other with foamy beer and dancing strange celebrations they'd learned all over the world. Plans for getting airborne already forming in their reckless heads.