How to Hotwire an Airplane

99k words, Political Thriller

In the spring of 2001, we first meet Hiram Bleeker in a run-down motel in Fort Stockton, Texas during a sordid, soulless encounter with a sex worker. Later that night, Hiram, a lonely Vietnam vet, is about to blow his brains out with his service revolver when he gets a call that saves his life: Can he fly a dog for the animal shelter the next day? Postponing his plan to die by suicide, he meets the dog-handler—“Dog Lady”— at the airfield the next morning.

In a flashback, we learn that Hiram has a small plane, one of the few assets he retained from a bitter divorce, and the only thing he has going for him is that he loves to fly dogs for rescue shelters, taking them to their adopted owners. The “Dog Lady” he meets that morning is assertive, not accepting any of Hiram’s implicit and unconscious sexism. Hiram is smitten.

When flying, the dog goes crazy, breaks out of his cage, bites Hiram, and threatens to crash the plane. Hiram manages to deadstick his plane into an abandoned airfield where the “Dog Lady”—Lucy—is impressed that Hiram stuck to his mission and stayed with the dog even though he is severely injured.

The next day he wakes to two surprises, his hand has completely healed from some mysterious unguent she applied to it, and Lucy wants him to fly another dog, this time from a ghost town on the Mexican border—Lajitas. In the course of doing so Hiram learns this is just a pretense, Lucy has set him with a gig ferrying workers between two ranches over the undeclared but very real internal border of the US—flying over the Border Patrol checkpoints that are known to interdict and harass people of Hispanic descent.

The ranch owner convinces him to take the gig when he tells Hiram of his cook who was held by the Border Patrol for eight hours, treated horribly, and subjected to invasive cavity searches, only to be released without an explanation but with a $5400 bill from the hospital that performed the scans and cavity searches. (True story.)

The story follows a parallel track from there. Lucy and Hiram have a series of dates and he falls in love with her. She moves in with him, and he flies workers over the checkpoints. Things come to a head when Hiram finds young immigrant children confined in cages at a Border Patrol checkpoint. He begins ferrying immigrants, saving them from almost certain death in the Texas desert, flying them over the internal checkpoints.

On one of his runs, Hiram finds a man who died of thirst in the desert, having given the rest of his water to his family so that they might live. We are treated to several chapters where Hiram experiments with, and then perfects, the art of dropping bubble-wrapped water bottles out his plane window. We learn that the US has instituted a policy called “Hold the Line” with the explicit intent of channeling immigrants into the desert where they die of thirst, to dissuade others.

In interludes with Lucy, we learn that Hiram is almost overcome with guilt from an incident in the war; he feels responsible for the deaths of some of the men in his unit. Through Lucy, he comes to realize he is not responsible for them, and he is partly though not fully relieved of his crushing burden of guilt. These scenes reveal Lucy is not quite of this world—she does not show up in any databases, she has a habit of appearing where she should not be and of knowing things she should not, and there is the issue of magic goo that healed his shattered hand. Hiram doesn't care, he loves her.

The tension ramps up as Hiram is forced to use his wits and not-inconsiderable flying skills to thwart the Border Patrol as they tighten their noose. Things come to a head when America is attacked on September 11 and security forces are given free rein to clamp down on immigrants. Hiram rents half of his duplex to two Salvadoran sisters with five small children between them. Hiram takes the oldest daughter, Elena, to a dress shop to pick out her quinceanera dress, only to return home and find the authorities have taken the entire family into custody.

Determined to protect Elena, Hiram elects to fly her to the ranch in NM where she will be safe. After accidentally blowing up a Border Patrol truck and a close run-in with an F16, he flies Elena to the New Mexico airfield where he finds it has been turned into a military camp. Hiram has flown directly into the heart of darkness! He is taken into custody and beaten.

A government agent (the agency is never identified) informs him that he has been classified as an enemy combatant, a made-up term that strips him of both his rights as a US citizen and also Geneva Convention protections. He is to be sent to a black site in Romania where he will be tortured and will never again see the light of day.

It is then, while he is waiting to be drugged, trussed up, a diaper shoved between his legs and a black bag cinched over his head, that Hiram has an epiphany—he is happy and at peace with himself. The darkness is gone, vanished while saving the lives of the immigrants. It was worth it. If only he could see Lucy one more time.

That wish is granted when she appears. Somehow, she has gotten through the military cordon and has also found Elena in the medical tent, where she was treated for injuries sustained when the F16 jumped them. Hiram, Lucy, and Elena make their escape by hot-wiring Hiram’s plane, taking off in the teeth of Humvees on their tail and the clatter of machine guns behind them.

But they are not home-free. A Border Patrol plane appears on their tail. With no way to outrun it, Hiram lures it into the canyons of the Davis mountains, which he knows well from previous flights. He leads his pursuer on a merry chase, emerging from the mountains just tens of miles from his destination: Lajitas. Just as he begins to hope he has made it, the Border Patrol appears on his tail. He has lost.

Or has he? In a final desperate maneuver, Hiram lures the Border Patrol plane into a trap, causing it to crash and leaving him to fly to Lajitas, where Lucy and Elena have a chance of escaping.

In the penultimate scene, Lucy offers Hiram a choice: Stay there and deal with the Border Patrol, or come with her, to her world. Hiram finds that with the darkness that imprisoned his heart now gone, he can see and understand that world. The book’s theme is redemption through service. The darkness in his heart made Hiram blind, but now he can see. Hiram and Lucy fly off to meet their fate. Somewhere else.

The final scene is straight out of Schindler’s List. Many years later, the survivors and descendants of the people Hiram rescued get together each fall and hoist a beer, to the man that risked his life and ultimately gave it, giving them a chance at a life of their own.

This is the author's first novel and second book. His first, "Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War" is currently on Amazon's #1 Bestseller list for Military Biographies, Navy.