Chapter 1

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Pembroke Pines, Florida, September 1982

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“Cessna One Six Gulf, North Perry Tower, turn base over Miramar Parkway. Wind three five zero at seven, altimeter, three zero zero one, cleared for touch and go, runway One Right.”

            Except for the particulars of wind and altimeter, I knew every word about to beam up to my radio. I’d heard them all over and over during my training, but this time, there was only one set of ears listening in the cockpit—mine.

            “Cessna One Six Gulf, roger.”

            It didn’t seem to matter that I’d done this pattern a dozen times in the last two days, or that my instructor, Tom Preston, was so confident that I was ready to solo. I felt like I’d shown up on my first day of high school and, once barreling down the crowded halls, realized I’d forgotten pants. Stressed out? Yeah, sure, but it was good stress, like when I asked Robyn Bryce to the junior prom. Scary as heck, but the payoffs…OMG. In spite of, or maybe because of, the thrill, an irrepressible quaver had crept into my voice as I conversed with the air traffic controllers. Tom had joined them in the tower, so of course, they knew this was my first unchaperoned flight.

            I talked aloud to myself, but the slipstream and hundred horsepower engine—inches away under that shiny cowling—that tugged me through the air buried it in a cacophony of noise.

            “Okay, half a minute till the highway passes under my nose. Then turn right and follow it.” When I looked right to clear my turn, Tom’s upbeat presence was conspicuously absent. There was that pants-off feeling again. “Easy, dude. You know exactly what to do.” Fifteen more seconds and it would be time for the next steps: Carburetor Heat—full on, power—idle, begin descent. 

            I was just reaching for the throttle, when the engine rolled itself back to idle. “What the hell!” The mixture, did I forget… No, it was full rich. I pulled the carb heat out. Maybe the carburetor’s throat had iced up. But it was eighty-five degrees. Probably not. I pumped the throttle. No response.

            “One Six Gulf, turn base now.”

            Jesus, I forgot to turn.

            “Aaaa, I gotta problem. I think my engine quit.”

            “Puma, turn directly to the airport, now,” Tom’s tense voice blasted over the speaker. I’d never heard that tone from him before.

            A hollow whistle, soft at first, like the wind shaping its lips across the top of an empty Coke bottle, brushed my awareness. When its tone sharpened, I realized it was the stall warning. Airspeed! Oh my God, I’d stopped paying attention to the one thing that would surely kill me. I was unconsciously holding my altitude with no power, and the plane had slowed to forty knots. The propellor stopped. Not enough slipstream to windmill it.

            I dropped the nose to get my speed back up and rolled my wings about thirty degrees right. Without waiting for further instruction, I double-checked the ignition. It was selected to “Both.” I pulled the throttle to idle and turned the big silver knob of the Engine Primer until its little nub aligned with a slot that allowed me to pull it out. I gave it two quick strokes and relocked it. Below me was nothing but an ocean of neighborhood homes woven with streets—kids out riding bikes, playing basketball in driveways, walking dogs. Nowhere down there to land.

            I pushed the starter button, and a loud “BOOM” shocked me. In a wink, shock turned to terror as flames poured out from under the cowling. My tongue dried up like cat turds in a sandbox. With a mouthful of desert, I microphoned out the words every pilot nightmares about, “One Six Gulf, I’m on fire!”

            The need for yelling expired when the propeller stopped. Other than a little wind noise, it was church quiet. “FLY THE AIRPLANE!” I yelled anyway. Over and over and over I’d heard aviation’s supreme commandment, its holy grail—“If anything ever goes wrong, fly  the airplane, control your airspeed, get yourself aimed somewhere.”

            Tom’s voice, calmer this time, bless his heart—I knew it was a fraud but appreciated it anyway—filled the tiny cockpit. “Puma, land the plane. You don’t need a runway. Just do it.”

            There was no way I could make the airport. There weren’t many cars on University Drive, and I hoped they could see me coming, ’cause ready or not…

            I’d gotten my speed back up to 55, put the flap lever to 10, and turned north to line up with the road. The blaze had the firewall so hot my knees were browning like marshmallows. Flames fanned out through the cowling and followed the aluminum to the windscreen right in front of me. It was starting to deform.

            I heard calls coming from my radio but couldn’t answer. The mic had fallen on the floor and there it stayed. Too much else to worry about. There was a good gap in the traffic, which was going faster than I was. I aimed for it. I’d become so blinded by flames and smoke, I opened my side window and hit it hard enough to break the bracing. It flew out at a forty-five-degree angle into the slipstream, and I kicked the right rudder which skewed the flames across to Tom’s vacant side, but also blew my window closed. I pushed it back open and wedged my left arm out to hold it. That gave me air to breathe and enough visibility to see the highway. It also wrecked the aerodynamics of the plane by turning it broadside to the wind and doubled my descent rate. I had a hundred feet to go until impact and was dropping so fast I thought the plane and I would get smashed against the asphalt. At the last second, I straightened the plane with the left rudder and pulled back with all my might on the yoke. Miraculously, the wheels kissed the road in one of the best landings I’d ever had. I mashed the brakes hard enough to skid the tires and was stopped in two hundred feet. I opened my door and, at the last second, remembered a halon fire extinguisher that was secured to the cockpit wall next to my left calf. I jumped out, then reached back in to grab it. Cars were stopped in all lanes both ahead and behind. I didn’t have any spare attention to pay them, but they were paying it to me.

            I pulled the safety pin on the fire bottle and emptied it into the engine compartment through the big cooling ports molded into the nose. Incredibly, two drivers had fire extinguishers in their cars and ran up to help.

            The tower figured out what I was going to do and had called the fire department. Miramar Fire and Rescue #70 was two blocks away and snaked around stopped traffic. They were there in two minutes.

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***

            That was the first of what would ultimately be two extraordinary birthday surprises, this one in 1982. Sweet sixteen came with a few minutes when I thought I wasn’t going to get my cake or eat it. But an ability I didn’t know I had surfaced that day—showcasing an unusual degree of levelheadedness, I was told, to function under extreme pressure. That perk saved me, and the plane. N2216G was back in the air by the following May.

            Turned out the fuel truck that filled my tanks that nearly disastrous morning had a sliver of rust that broke away from its aging fuel chamber and found its way into my life’s story. It clogged my fuel filter, and my subsequent priming, imparted with panic-assisted forcefulness, had burst a fuel line. A backfire gave me that godawful “boom” and the ignition source to turn my engine into a campfire with hurricane breezes to fan it. Gravity flowed aviation gasoline from my overhead wing tanks to enrage the blaze. 

            The incident didn’t dissuade me from my dreams nor did my family or friends. Newspapers were always looking for heroes or villains, and I landed in the former category with my escapade. The FAA found me faultless and even called my performance “praiseworthy.” And the cherry on top happened when the FBO—Fixed Base Operation which meant “gas station”—that owned the impaired fuel truck offered to pay for the rest of my pilot training and gave me a thousand dollars for my trouble. Happy birthday to me after all.

            In a little less than two decades, I would get birthday surprise number two.

            And everyone knows misfortune comes in threes.   

 

Chapter 2

Florida – Mid-’70s to 1982

 

Puma

 

             I’m sure I wasn’t the first kid ever to wonder what convoluted idea had lodged into his parents’ heads when they got around to name choosing. I didn’t appreciate it much at first, but by the time I was a young man, I’d bent toward it like tides slaving at the moon. I supposed that was Mom and Dad’s intent, but I wonder if they considered the bumpy ride that was likely to come with “Puma.” I’m not saying I waded into “boy named Sue” hullabaloo, and I didn’t grow up mean. But you better believe it toughened me up through my kid stages, and I learned early how to clench a fist and throw it with results.

            My first crack at dealing with my oddball name came unexpectedly, when Dad found me wallowing around in the doldrums.

“What’s with the long face?” he asked.

            I was no troublemaker, so it was unusual for me to be direct if confrontation loomed with a parent. But I’d been ticking toward my wits’ end and just outted with it.

“I don’t like my name.” Even though I was only eight, I remember it embarrassed me how whiny that came out.

Dad looked at me wide-eyed. “You’d rather be Dan, Phil, or Jack?”

“Yes.” I could see in those ocean-blue eyes I was in over my head, and having already embarrassed myself, I went tight-lipped.

“Look, Puma, your mom and I put a lot of thought into that name. How many kids do you know named after a two-hundred-pound cat that can tear a man’s head off, but mostly strides around unnoticed, unafraid, and savvy enough to never miss a meal?”

He had me already but kept going.

“You got a name that puts you at the top of the heap. You don’t like being stealthy and clever? And see if vicious doesn’t fit when you need it. You think Dan, Phil, and Jack have all that going for them?”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well, why can’t anyone ever get it right?”

“Because you say it like you’re a kitten. Put a little roar behind it and see what happens.” 

That’s the day my self-confidence bloomed, which I might not have needed in such spectacular profusion had Zain Qadir not been born into a wealthy Punjab, Indian family on the other side of the world. I had a long way to go before I got comfortable with a religious point of view, but it eventually settled on me that God’s quality control guy must have taken long lunches from time to time. That’s the only way I could figure folks like Hitler and Stalin. Like a few other bad apples, Qadir must have slunk past the QC desk, and lucky me was going to eat the brunt of his shit.

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***

The path of least resistance, Dad said a million times, wasn’t necessarily the best one. He was a firm follower of that adage which he demonstrated by raising me and my two younger brothers while taking care of my ailing mom who’d suffered a stroke after Buck, the youngest, was born. Like me, Dad didn’t need much sleep. He worked full-time at Palmetto Ford, selling cars all day, then, year after year, worked on a business degree at night.

La Villa Drive ran north and south in Miami Springs, and the houses fronting it were all built in the 1920s and ’30s. Mom and Dad had moved into a bungalow there, just north of Eastward Drive, after the Country Club Estate era and before all the airline people started moving in. It was affordable mainly because it used to be one of the big equestrian estate’s garages. Someone had remodeled it into a house, and Dad had enough handyman skills to make it nice.

Like everyone else in Dade County, our yard grass was resilient enough to park on, but if you went a couple of weeks without mowing, coral snakes might move into your imitation jungle. Encounters with those had unappealing consequences, so lawns were kept short. There were lots of retirees in the neighborhood that preferred to hire kids to do the cutting, so any enterprising youngster that wanted to make money had no shortage of opportunity.

I’d watched the papers and found Eagle Flight Training was running an introductory special for eager, wannabe pilots. Three hundred and fifty dollars, if paid in advance, would get a student pilot trained through solo. That seemed too good to be true and triggered my next step.

            “Dad, can I talk to you a minute?” I asked, trying to sound calm, which I wasn’t.

            “Sure, Puma.” He set his BusinessWeek magazine down on the coffee table which I knew meant I’d better not dawdle. 

            I blew through the details of the Eagle doozy I’d found, trying to sound grown-up, another thing I wasn’t.

            “And you need me to give you the money,” he said.

            “No, not give—loan. And I’ll pay interest.”

            He smiled. His life lessons hadn’t been wasted on me. I knew how to make a fair proposition and that, apparently, pleased him. 

            “I know you’re serious about this, Puma. I’ve watched you doing your research, and I’ve noticed you out there in the neighborhood mowing lawns and washing cars. You’re saving up, aren’t you?”

            “I’ve already got a hundred bucks, and yeah, I’m dead serious.”

            “Let’s find another word when we’re talking about flying lessons, okay?”

            That’s the thing about Dad, I had to remind myself. He’s a details kind of guy, and once you’ve got his attention, you’ve got it all. “Good call, Dad.”

            He rubbed his five o’clock shadow with his thumb and first two fingers, a gesture I knew meant he was considering it. My heartbeat kicked up by ten. I looked over at the array of periodicals—Life, Time, Consumer Reports, and National Geographic, neatly fanned out under the set-aside BusinessWeek. I was afraid if I didn’t look away, my stare would start to seem pesky, like a dog begging at the dinner table.

After a minute, he looked up and said, “Tell you what. You chip in fifty, so you’ve got some skin in the game, and I’ll come up with the rest. How’s ten percent sound?”

If I was to act out the thrill that exploded inside me, I was afraid he’d rescind the offer. The clownish fireworks aching to come out in bounces and cartwheels would look unbefitting for an aspiring pilot.

Logistics were solved by bus service that could get me to Pembroke Pines in under two hours.

 

Chapter 3

Punjab, India, 1942 ~ 1951

 

Zain Qadir

 

                  My mother and father, Ammi and Abbu, could hardly have chanced into a more precarious time to begin adding tiny, new Muslims to Islam’s multitudes. I was first to arrive, born on November 1st, 1942, in our ancestral homeland of Punjab, India. The British were then neck-deep in another world war, spurred in part by their disingenuous management of the Middle East and its exploitation following the War To End All Wars. They were simultaneously climbing out of their quagmire-riddled empire in my home country where religious strife roiled the Hindu and Muslim populations. Elsewhere, Nazis were annihilating Europe’s Jews. The world was aboil.

                  Rampant mutual genocides among India’s disparate dynasties and tribes killed hundreds of thousands of relocating peoples after the 1947 partition that created the state of Pakistan. My family’s roots sank deep into oceans of old Punjab money, where my abbu was a high official in the All-India Muslim League. That liaison, and our wealth, insulated us from most of the turmoil during our move to Pakistan. My young eyes, however, were not entirely shielded from the bloody barbarism or rampant sexual defilement against women and girls. From a young age, I became aware that I was mostly immune to emotional paralysis. Not even in the presence of brutal carnage did I tend to waver, instead finding stout armor encased my heart and fitted me with a calm, steady temper.

                  My mother pumped out babies every eighteen months, plus or minus, for two decades. I was first in a volley that ended at thirteen. Groomed to herd and rule my siblings from the time my milk teeth began falling out, my future as a leader was cast early. By the time Ammi finished adding Muslims to the world, three had already gone to live with Allah.

                  On an unusually cold and foggy January morning in 1951, my abbu left early for his office. Ammi, as usual, stayed put to mind the home but was, by then, a week into a cantankerous bout of bronchitis. She’d woken up coughing at four in the morning, and it was left to me to do the nursing. Ammi finally drifted off to sleep after I’d coaxed a cup of ginger tea with honey down her shredded throat. I’d padded to our prayer room, content to begin my commune with Allah early.

Three-month-old Shabana and our sister Rahima had been moved to the dining area to allow Ammi some semblance of refuge. My peace was interrupted by Shabana’s bawling less than a minute after I’d said good morning to God. She must have been hungry. I grabbed a warm bottle of breastmilk Ammi had pumped earlier, but the baby would not take it and her fretting persisted. She wasn’t wet or soiled, so I picked her up, hoping I could rock her back to sleep. Nothing seemed to soothe her. I was sure her commotion would soon wake Ammi and the others, so I set her back in her bed and put a blanket over her face to muffle her cries, which exacerbated her fussing.

A voice shocked me and I snapped my head around to see who was speaking. Except for my tiny siblings, I was alone. The voice endured with clarity as scrutable as my molvi’s at madrassa, yet Rahima slept on undisturbed. “Give her to me. Do not fear for her. She will be an angel forever in paradise.” As the words landed on my heart, I pushed the blanket harder and held her kicking legs. The authority in my commission left me steadfast. Of course I would obey.

With my fingers walking like a spider to gather the blanket, I inched it down, exposing her coffee-brown eyes already surrounded by a forest of dark lashes. I had to watch, to see what death looked like as it happened. Her panic bore no sting on my heart. I observed as if watching Ammi slice a carrot for the dinner stew. At some fascinating point, her eyes stopped transmitting emotion and turned inanimate, like a doll’s. Her squirming then stopped—she’d gone to Dar-us-Salam, Jannah’s ultimate sanctuary. I smiled at my magic trick and stroked her hair, then leaned down to kiss her forehead. I loved the way her eyes looked, and left them star-staring.

“Go back to your prayers now. There, you can visit her as long as you wish. You know nothing of how she passed away.”

            While I’d seen much death, this was the first at my hands, and it gave my nerve a staggering boost. Could I call it fun? Interesting would be a better word. The lying, on the other hand, yes—a fabulous new skill I mastered on the fly.

“After I fed her,” I said, tears streaming down my face, “she fell asleep, peacefulness whispered in each breath. I can’t believe she…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, staggered by grief and shock.

It had all been so easy, and the best part—I had been chosen as a soldier of God!