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Unable to settle the argument of where to go, Bill and Trisha were in neither Budapest nor Boston. Fort Campbell exchange tracked them down in Scotland, and Claudia and Michael flew in on a commercial airliner to meet up with them.
Claudia set the meeting in a warm Edinburgh pub, because May sure wasn’t as warm here as on the North Carolina beaches. The problem was the bottle-to-throttle rule. In civil aviation, there was a required minimum of eight hours from your last drink to wheels up. In SOAR, it was twenty-four. And since SOAR pilots were technically on call twenty-four by three-sixty-five that didn’t leave a lot of chances for a drink.
She finally decided that if she was in charge of this mission, she’d make sure they didn’t fly within the next day, because she definitely need
