The air smelled of electrical ozone, scorched aviation kerosene, pressurized synthetic oxygen, dark naval chicory coffee poured from a stainless-steel field urn, and eighty-four pounds of certified admiralty vellum resting inside three open titanium transit cases bolted directly to the airframe bulkheads.
I sat in the forward command jumpseat, the four-point Kevlar harness locked securely across my sternum.
Over my dark wool traveling trousers, I wore my grandfather’s twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket, tailored in 1952 for Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Bennett. Pinned to the left lapel was his unpolished bronze badge: an anchor crossed by an antique surveyor’s transit. Beneath the fabric, the chemical burn where the sufentanil patch had sat beneath my clavicle was dressed in sterile silver-alginate gauze, tingling with the cold, astringent bite of topical lidocaine. Strapped to my left wrist was his restored 1956 Admiralty Gold Chronometer, its mechanical sweep-second hand advancing with that deliberate, unhurried sixty-cycle cadence: tack… tack… tack.
