Part I: Silver Badge
Chapter 1

“Becca, go.”

The words slipped from fifteen-year-old Bree Gravengood’s lips into the headset’s microphone in a flat, almost emotionless tone at a perfectly normal volume, with nothing of the excitement she’d often shown when cheering her sister on at any number of ball games. Bree wasn’t excited now, just ready. There was a difference, and she knew it.

“Here we go,” Becca’s voice sounded in the earphones.

Bree could see the brake lights go out on the pickup truck three-eighths of a mile ahead as the golden polypropylene rope between the pickup and the old single-seat Schweizer 1-26 sailplane stretched from tight to taut. For an instant, the irony that often had amused Bree stole across her again: Becca, you may be able to drive, but I can fly!

As always, the acceleration pushed Bree back against the pads when the sailplane started to move. Bree didn’t look, but she knew that Aunt Jackie would only have to run a couple steps from where she had been holding the wings level before her handhold was out of reach. By then the ailerons out toward the end of the white sailplane’s forty-foot wingspan were biting enough air that Bree could keep the wings level by controlling the stick between her legs.

Becca didn’t have to drive fast. The far end of the towline was attached to a concrete deadman set into the runway and ran through a pulley on the back of the pickup and then to the glider. By the time Becca had it going twenty miles an hour, Bree was doing forty and easing back on the stick to get the Schweizer off the ground. By the time the little sailplane’s airspeed indicator read sixty, Bree only had an instant to glance at it; she had the stick all the way back against her belly, and the 1-26 was pointing high, racing into the blue of the sky above like a homesick angel. She stole a look at the variometer, the instrument that told her the rate of altitude change, and could see that it was pegged somewhere beyond two thousand feet per minute upward.

Up ahead of her – and increasingly down below – Becca actually slowed the pickup a little to give the Schweizer time to climb. The drag of the white sailplane against the pickup told Becca that Bree and the 1-26 were climbing like mad.

As Bree and the sailplane had to go the long way around an arc, the sailplane’s airspeed indicator didn’t notice the difference. Bree only had a few seconds to get as high as she could, and she needed to be as high as the towline could take her. The altimeter’s needle was spinning around in a blur – four hundred, five hundred, six hundred feet flashed by in an instant as Bree was almost on her back now, her heels higher than her head. Another vagrant thought crossed Bree’s mind, a snatch of poetry found on plaques or in frames in every airport office she’d ever been in: Up, up, along the delirious, burning blue, I topped the windswept heights with easy grace . . .

Passing through nine hundred feet above ground level, Bree could feel the rate of climb ease off a little. She dropped the nose of the sailplane to milk all the energy she could from the towrope. The sailplane continued to climb, inching skyward as she dropped the nose further. She couldn’t expect much more from the tow; and if she held on much longer, the rope would start dragging her downward. She dropped the nose and pulled the red knob on the panel to release the towline. There was a noticeable bang behind her butt, not loud, that told her that the rope had been released.

She glanced at the altimeter once again, one of only a handful of instruments on the Schweizer’s panel, and thumbed the little radio button on the end of the stick. “Off at ten-fifty,” she announced.

Down below, Becca had run off the end of the runway and was going through a little cut-over valley on a two-rut lane when she heard her sister’s words come from the sky. Not bad, she thought, keeping her thumb off her own radio’s microphone button. Bree didn’t need the distraction right now, and she knew it. Becca had felt the drag of the sailplane cease but knew she had to keep moving to keep over a thousand feet of the towline from tangling as it fell from the sky. In the mirror she could see it puddling on the ground in loops behind her. If she can keep the glider up there, Becca thought, I should still be able to make it over to Myleen’s on time.

Up by the hangar near the house, Jackie Gravengood looked on with mild satisfaction. Not a bad launch, she thought. She knew it just from looking at it; after all, she’d done hundreds of such launches from the airstrip out in back of the house in the nearly thirty years since she and her husband Mark had rebuilt the 1-26 from a wreck. She’d lost count of the number of auto tows she had made there, that Mark had made there; she could probably figure it out from their logbooks, but it didn’t really matter.

What did matter was that up until a couple of years ago she’d never have believed she would have ever seen what had become a relatively routine sight: Bree flying the sailplane, and from all she could see, doing a damn good job of it, too.

In nearly forty years of marriage, she and Mark had never had kids. There had always been a little sense of loss there, but they were beyond caring about it until a few years before, when an unexpected phone call came. Mark’s late brother’s daughter had been killed in a still somewhat-mysterious auto accident, leaving behind two orphaned daughters. There were no other relatives, and without reluctance Mark and Jackie had agreed to take the two in.

Becca, the older girl, then fourteen, took the sudden change relatively well. She was a school athlete and was becoming a good one, the kind of kid who made friends easily and did just that. Bree, however, had been another story: painfully shy, rather introverted, without the kind of personality that easily made friends of strangers. She’d taken the loss of her mother and having to move to a new home with more difficulty than her sister, and for a while Jackie and Mark had worries about how they were going to connect with the kid.

Then a small doorway opened. More as a “get acquainted” thing than anything else, Mark had taken twelve-year-old Bree flying in Rocinante, the antique Cessna 140 Jackie and Mark had owned since the early seventies. In a word, Bree loved it!

Both Mark and Jackie, and Bree for that matter, were totally mystified as to why flying reached deep into her soul. Bree had never before been in an airplane of any sort, had never shown any interest in flying until that flight. Even though it may have been a mystery, Mark and Jackie were grateful they’d found a lever to pry open a relationship with the rather isolated slender little blonde.

Although Mark was not a flight instructor, the second time he and Bree went flying in Rocinante he let her handle the controls. By the end of the summer Bree was taking the elderly airplane off and landing it, learning navigation and other basics along the way; when Mark or Jackie went with her in the two-seater, they were mostly along for the ride and to keep things legal.

In the middle of the summer Bree turned thirteen, and by then it was becoming clear this particular trick was only going to work for so long. Bree couldn’t technically become a student pilot until she was sixteen, nor get her private license until she was seventeen. Then, somewhere from the misty depths of his mental archives, Mark remembered that a student pilot could solo a glider at age fourteen, and get a private license at sixteen. Fourteen was only a year off . . .

It had been many years since Mark or Jackie had any real contact with the glider community; the couple of dozen flights they’d made in the 1-26 each year for three decades and more were just between themselves. It didn’t take much searching on the Internet to find a man who ran a small gliderport on his farm near Mount Vernon a hundred and fifty miles to the south; one nice September day two years before, Mark and Bree made the trip down there in Rocinante. Bree had been thrilled to learn that in less than a year she could be soloing a glider!

She did. On her fourteenth birthday she soloed the gliderport trainer they’d been using, an old Schweizer 2-33. Two weeks later the four of them took the wings off the 1-26, put it on a trailer, and Bree got to fly that down at Mt. Vernon too, towed behind an airplane to launch.

Rocinante wasn’t powerful enough to tow the 1-26; Mark and Jackie had tried it years before down at the county airport, but the fence at the far end of the field had gotten much too close for comfort. For a while they towed it more successfully with Mark’s father’s old Stinson 108-1, but after his father had been forced to give up flying and sell the airplane, Mark and Jackie had to turn to auto tows from the grass runway behind the house. That was fine; although there were more limitations, Jackie thought auto tows were more fun anyway. Fred Hammerstrom, the man who owned the Mount Vernon Gliderport, had been nice enough to trailer a 2-33 up to Spearfish Lake so Bree could have a little dual training at auto tows, and she had been doing them in the 1-26 ever since.

Flying had been the key that made Bree part of the family; in fact, it had worked better than anyone could have dreamed. Bree was still pretty quiet, still rather shy, still pretty introverted, and still didn’t make friends easily – but now, at least, she had a passion. In the earliest days in Spearfish Lake Bree’s only interest seemed to be curling up in a chair with Perky, the largest and laziest of the family cats, in her lap while reading a fantasy book aimed at rather older readers. These days, if she couldn’t be in the air she still preferred to be curled up in the chair with a book and Perky in her lap, but now the books were mostly classic aviation books Mark and Jackie had collected over the years. Jackie knew she was currently re-reading Spirit of St. Louis for perhaps the fourteenth time.

By now, Jackie had little doubt what Bree was going to wind up doing, at least in general: flying of some sort. But, she thought with a sigh as she watched the little sailplane turn away from the runway, it’d be nice if she were half as good with people as she was with planes.

It was quieter now that the towline had been dropped; the roar of wind over the wings had died off to an unnoticeable whisper as the sailplane’s speed dropped to what Bree knew would allow her to stay aloft longer. She knew she only had a couple of minutes to find air that was going up faster than the sailplane was sinking or she would have no choice but to head back to the runway. It had happened often enough; in fact, more often than not. She knew that in minutes Becca would be stretching the towline out so it could be used again, if necessary.

But in her two years of flying sailplanes and leaning on Mark and Jackie’s over thirty years of experience with flying them, she knew a few tricks. Once the towline had been hooked up, she’d sat silently in the cockpit, looking around for signs of a thermal – the patch of rising heated air she’d need to stay aloft. Then, a wind gust had come along, a good sign on this relatively calm day, and then she’d seen a pair of turkey vultures circling over the field to the south of the runway. The vultures liked to soar in rising air – since she’d been flying gliders she’d become sensitive to such signs of rising air she’d learned to call “lift.” On occasion she’d watched as many as fifty or more vultures circled in huge flocks she’d learned bird watchers called “kettles.” With enough altitude to go take a look, she turned the sailplane toward the birds, which she’d learned from Mr. Hammerstrom glider pilots called “markers,” for obvious reasons

The birds were still several hundred feet below when Bree felt a little bump that lifted the left wing of the sailplane a bit. Without even thinking about it, she knew that there was some air going up to her left, and she racked the sailplane into a hard left turn to find some more of it. In the seat of her shorts she felt a surge as the 1-26 was grabbed by the thermal and the needle on the variometer pointed upwards. Good air – and right when she needed it badly!

One steeply banked turn, and she was sure of it. From the variometer, but more from the feeling of the stick in her hands and in the seat of her shorts, she could feel she was off center a little – the core was off to the south a little more. She adjusted her circle a little to get more into the center of the thermal. It would be a continual process as long as she rode it, making minor corrections to get the best ride out of it she could.

The steep circle merged into another one, then another. After two or three circles, the variometer was showing a rate of climb of four hundred feet a minute, and the altimeter was taking notice. By now she’d climbed above the altitude where she’d released from the tow line and the odds were she could ride this thermal up for a long ways – very likely as much as she needed. Absently she thumbed the button of the radio again.

The radio was a CB, not an aviation radio, and working on an almost never-used channel, so she didn’t bother with a call sign as she said in an emotionless, professional-sounding voice, “Got a good one.”

A minute or more went by. Aunt Jackie must not have been near the radio. Finally her voice sounded in Bree’s headphones, “Are you going to be able to get away?”

“Think so,” Bree replied laconically. “Have to see where this tops out.” There wasn’t much else to say, and both Aunt Jackie and Becca knew not to bother her more than necessary. Working a thermal took concentration if she wanted to do it efficiently, and today Bree wanted to be even more efficient than normal. She’d waited all summer for the chance to do this flight, and there weren’t going to be many more opportunities to get it in before cold weather set in. Either the weather hadn’t been right or something else had gotten in the way of completing the Soaring Society of America Silver Badge hat trick she’d set as a goal for herself.

Not many people had ever completed all three requirements for a Silver Badge in one flight, and even fewer of them in a 1-26. The records weren’t totally clear, but Bree thought if she could do it today, she’d be the youngest – and almost certainly the youngest girl – to accomplish it.

The requirements for a Silver Badge were staying aloft over five hours, a fifty-kilometer (thirty-two mile) cross-country flight, and an elevation gain of a thousand meters, or roughly thirty-two hundred feet. In fact, over the course of the summer Bree had completed all three – but never on the same flight. With the days getting shorter and school limiting her time to fly, it was getting down to now or never, at least this summer.

One of the other problems was that the forest country around Spearfish Lake was not a comfortable place to fly a sailplane. Almost all sailplane flights end with running out of lift, running out of sky. So long as Bree and the 1-26 were in comfortable gliding distance of the airstrip at home, this wasn’t a problem – but if she had to “land out” somewhere else, it could be a disaster. She could remember Mark telling her that was how he and Jackie had wound up with the little Schweizer in the first place – a wing had been wrecked “landing out” over thirty years ago. The two of them had purchased the wreck and spent two winters building a new wing from parts of the old one and parts supplied by the Schweizer factory.

There was another problem that went along with it: the rules on the distance flight weren’t totally clear. They said the flight had to be thirty-two miles from the point of release. If she could make it to the turn point at Warsaw, thirty-six miles to the east, she’d have to record the turn point and make it back to the airstrip. That was a total of seventy-two miles on a direct line, and she’d certainly have to go farther as the sailplane flew.

The heart of the problem was that there were not many places to land the sailplane over that thirty-six mile distance. There was only one airstrip along the way, a place Bree really didn’t want to have to land. There were odd open fields along the way, but many of them were clear-cut forests that had slash, stumps, and brush all over the place. A landing there would be just about as bad as having to put the glider into the forest, although the chances of walking away from such a crash would be slightly better. Worse yet was the fact that she knew that bending the sailplane would be the end of her glider flying for a long time, perhaps forever. She knew Mark and Jackie weren’t rich; they were able to afford her flying mostly because they already owned Rocinante and the glider.

But Bree was anything but careless about the issue. With either Mark or Jackie flying with her in Rocinante, she’d scouted the route many times and picked out places where it was reasonably safe to make an “outlanding.” What’s more, they’d visited most of them on the ground – except for the airstrip where Bree didn’t want to land. Bree wasn’t flying with an aviation chart, although she had one with her if needed – she had a special map, pieced together from several sections of high-detail topographical maps, with every reasonable landing area noted on it, along with notes like “keep to the south side.” As much as possible, any damage to the 1-26 on an outlanding would be a sheer accident, not the result of thoughtlessness or lack of preparation.

They’d done equally meticulous preparation for a flight southwest to Meeker and return, although the prospects for an outlanding weren’t quite as good. Since the wind today was supposed to be light, circumstances slightly favored the run to Warsaw.

Ten minutes after the brief radio exchange with Jackie the thermal was getting mushy and dying out. Bree widened her circle, cutting the sink rate of the sailplane to get a little more altitude out of the dying thermal, but she could see it was getting to the point where she’d gotten about as much as she could out of it. It was enough, and since it was still early in the day, she could be pretty sure there would be more thermals ahead to ride.

It was time to get on with it. Warsaw and return was going to be a long trip in a 1-26, but there was a good chance this time she’d be able to do it. She’d already gotten the elevation gain part of the badge requirement out of the way and then some. She thumbed the radio button again and without preamble said, “Topping out and heading out.”

“Roger that,” Jackie’s voice replied. “Have a good trip.”

Jackie had been standing by a corner of the combined shop and hangar watching the 1-26 circle above. By now it was just a tiny white cross in the sky, sometimes nearly invisible when the sailplane was turned directly toward her or away from her. Several minutes before she’d realized Bree was going to get high enough to head out; it showed all the signs of being a good day for soaring, starting early and lasting long. If Bree was going to make her trifecta flight this year, it just about would have to be today.

Technically speaking, Bree wasn’t supposed to be making solo cross-country flights without flight instructor supervision, but foreseeing this day coming they’d made preparations long before. Since Mark was tied up with a new job that had started about the time the girls came to live with them, Jackie had taken the time to do some study, passed her flight instruction written exam, and had Fred run her through a quickie glider flight instructor course. That made it legal, and Jackie didn’t plan on renewing her instructor certification when it expired.

She watched the wings of the glider level out as it pointed toward the east, actually, a little north of the direct route to Warsaw. Jackie didn’t have to wonder why; last winter Clark Plywood had clear-cut a half square mile of tree farm a few miles out, and the heat contrast between the nearly bare soil and the surrounding forest had provided a reliable thermal generator this year. It was a logical place for Bree to look for lift, a good first steppingstone on the route to Warsaw, although it certainly wasn’t a place to land out.

She watched until the 1-26 was barely a dot in the distance, sometimes lost among the cumulus clouds that were starting to pop on this fine September morning. She was just about ready to give it up, head inside and get to work when Becca drove up in the pickup truck. As soon as the towline had completed its fall toward the ground, Becca had driven to the other end, unhooked it from the deadman, and drove back up the runway to stretch the rope back out, just in case it were needed again. It had been needed for a second launch attempt often enough in the past and almost certainly would be needed in the future, but it didn’t look like it was going to be today.

Becca leaned out of the window of the pickup and asked, “Aunt Jackie, should I go ahead and reel it up? I need to get over and pick up Myleen.”

Though Mark and Jackie had long since officially adopted Becca and Bree, the girls still called them “Aunt” and “Uncle.” It satisfied everyone to do it that way – it was a little reminder of the girls’ real mother, Shannon Gravengood, a way to honor her memory.

“Might as well,” Jackie told her. “I can’t see her needing it again today.”

“OK,” Becca said, and drove out toward one end of the towline, now laying stretched out on the grass of the runway. Long ago Mark had built a powered reel for the towline, something like an oversized fishing reel, so it only took a few minutes to roll up the three-eighths mile of rope, unlike the tedious job of doing it by hand Jackie could remember so well.

It was hard to believe the girls were actually sisters; there was virtually no family resemblance whatsoever. Jackie knew, of course, they were really only half-sisters, not sharing the same father – she’d known it since they were tiny. If Shannon had known who their fathers were she’d never told anyone, and now it would be close to impossible to find out. Becca was a big girl, on the solid side, and not a lot shorter than Jackie’s full six feet. She had dark skin, and dark, curly hair that was almost always beyond control; it was easy to speculate that her birth father must have been black. Bree was tiny by comparison, several inches shorter than her sister, fair-skinned with long blonde hair.

The two girls picked at each other in some way most of the time, but always supported each other in a sisterhood Jackie could not imagine. At their age she’d been an only child in difficult circumstances; she had two much younger half-brothers, the result of her father’s second marriage.

Becca was the athletic one, and a damn good high school girl athlete. Mark had commented more than once that if a word had “ball” at the end, Becca was good at it. The girls’ volleyball season was well under way, and while there was no meet or practice today, Becca and a group of her friends were planning on getting in a little sand-court two-on-two today just because they thought it was fun. To them, it was; Becca and her friend Myleen Kluske had many sand court ribbons, medals, and trophies to prove it. Jackie had next to no interest in the game, but had often risked splinters in her butt from sitting on bad bleachers watching the two go at it; Bree was often there too, but reading a book when Becca wasn’t playing.

As Jackie watched Becca start to reel in the towline, she gave a little sigh. For the most part she and Mark had missed out on parenthood, but the few years the girls had been with them had been special, if unexpected. Becca was a senior now; this time next year she’d be off in college someplace, and a lot of the magic of the last few years would go with her. There was no doubt she’d be going to college; while Becca wasn’t the most stellar student imaginable, the offers of athletic scholarships were already starting to arrive in the mailbox.

College was still a few years off for Bree, and it was clear she wouldn’t be getting an athletic scholarship. She was a very good student, and academic scholarships seemed likely, even if what she wanted to do for college didn’t work out. Once again, Jackie gave a sigh; it seemed like a long shot for any number of reasons, but stranger things had happened. Besides, she knew of a longer shot that had actually worked to reach the same goal.

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