Alex had been striving for this day for two years in Flight Academy. It was, by all accounts, a wildly short wait compared to how long it normally took for someone of high-standing within any national academy to be pulled into these ranks, but it was still too long for him. As it was, it'd taken his own father closer to three years, but Alex's aspirations were paramount. He'd been flying with more natural precision and studied, focused assurance since the moment they'd assigned him a squadron and a plane.
He had to start over, here, though. Right off the bat everyone had known his name, but he'd expected that.
Alex watched them in-turn. The men all walked the same, responded the same, practiced over and over until they could run drills and respond to commands in their sleep. It was exactly what the Officers wanted of them – but he'd always felt that what it often mechanized out of them was the passion. They were going to be thrown into this war someday, sooner rather than later, and their orders were going to be to conquer airspace. They were going to be headlong, directly against the enemy Axis, and he wanted men by his side that truly believed in the fight, and had the passion to stand and face down the enemy there beside him.
The United States Air Force, from the documents he'd read, were being tipped in the balance of the ongoing war in Europe. They were right there on the precipice like the rest of America, but one of the first ones being discussed as leverage to the Allies without fully removing their own neutrality. The documents he was confidentially shipped by his father told him of the government policies being implemented at the higher levels and the political discussions being entertained which were fueling these major changes. Even he could see some of the effects from here; recruits coming in by the dozen under Roosevelt's expansion plan, and the strain it was putting on their inventory of planes.
And, he read about what was going on over in Germany from every known rumor-mill printed to paper. But, it was the hard-handed, anonymous letters he received on rare occasion that really painted the clearer picture. Sometimes he could imagine he heard the whistles of an air raid in the middle of the night and woke up sweaty and alone. Other times, he could almost see the fear on faces conjured in his mind as the sounds of sharp, gutteral German-tongued Schutzstaffel forced their way into homes and rounded up men, women, and children to be sent to the new internment camp in Poland. He prickled under those conjurings though, with accents and the language like his mother’s. She'd always been a descriptive, creative writer with a way of storytelling that made it feel you were there, and Alex could only assume that these anecdotes were her way of keeping in-touch with him without risking more than she had to.
That's what had nestled into the darkest recesses of his mind that night, waking him after barely two hours of sleep into the pitch black of a carrier he was unfamiliar with. He'd never required much sleep, but hated the weakness, the powerlessness of dreams when they did come over him. Alex had lain there for several moments in the silence, hearing only the deep, slow sounds of rhythmic breathing in the companions around him, before sliding his body out of bed and groping around for a tee shirt, pulling it on as he walked quietly through narrow halls and out onto the deck.
He passed hours there, lazily, comfortably spread out in the cockpit of the P-36 he'd made his debut flight in here earlier that day. Elite, fast, and beautiful, Alex had coveted the ride as soon as he'd heard about the plane, and tonight in the silence he'd taken Her as his companion. He'd untucked his favorite book worn with age, and the most recent set of documents and his last letter from the waistband of his nighttime trousers, and begun reading. So absorbed, entranced in the words that painted vivid pictures into his mind, that Alex missed those first signs of light peeking through the tiny windows.
