The Freedom of the Skies

When wolves fly over clouds like sheep

My parents bought me a flying lesson for my birthday. It was meant as a simple gift, an afternoon in the sky, but it became something I have never stopped measuring my life against.

The lesson was in a small twin-engined Cessna, light in the air, almost fragile-looking from the ground but reassuringly solid once you were inside it. I remember weaving the plane over and under small fluffy clouds in the glittering sunlight. I remember the aircraft tilting gently as it was jolted by the air currents moving all around the aircraft. The world below dissolved into the multifaceted greens of forests and fields, black lines of roads, and greys of concrete, and for a few hours I felt something I had not known before or since: utter, uncomplicated freedom. Like a bird, but more than that: like the idea of emancipation itself.

The world, I realized then, was larger than I had ever been told. And it was still open for exploration. Maybe that part of me never truly grew up.

Now I sit on the runway at Milford Sound Airport on the South Island of New Zealand, waiting for clearance from the tower, and I feel the weight of everything that has happened in between.

I had once dreamed of flying for the RAF. That future ended quietly, almost absurdly, first with the discovery of my short sight, then with the humiliating truth that I was too tall for anything small and fast. A fighter pilot’s dream shrank to the possibility of transport aircraft, C-130 Hercules, heavy and practical, all utility and no elegance. And eventually even that became someone else’s life. Instead I built a different existence.

I emigrated to these islands on the far side of the world. I married. I raised children. I built a house that once felt like a victory. But time has a way of unmaking what you assume is permanent. I married a Chinese business woman, Shanhu, who settled on the island and bore me two children. So my kids grew up bilingual Chinese and English with a love of both cultures. We were frequent visitors to China seeing many of its wonders ancient and modern.

Shanhu was arrested for espionage and indeed I was also investigated but then acquitted. It was a shock to me to find out that she was a Chinese spy though all those family picnics near military bases and listening posts did make sense after finding out.

I visited my wife in prison regularly and saw her become a Christian there. Apparently her getting married in a church was nothing to do with faith before that. After conversion she spoke freely about who she was and with some regret about how she had broken our family and our marriage. I never stopped loving her despite what she had done. Shanhu was sent back to China in some kind of high level political deal. I protested but they shut me down. Only a year later we lost contact, and my son, who visited China and saw her family there, suspected that she may have been executed.

Her last words to me were, "When I fell in love with you I thought you were naive for being a Christian and for not feeling any kind of threat to this country. Now I understand that you were just better than me inside, purer, good, a believer in something higher than what I served. I am sorry for not seeing you but please now open your eyes to the other things that I see, don't be so naive, the world has changed."

I was only a single parent a few years and then the children grew up, as they were supposed to, and built lives that no longer orbited mine. The house, once full of movement and noise, now echoes in ways I cannot quite ignore. After she died I filled my time the only way I knew how, parties, gatherings, borrowed laughter. People came and went, leaving glasses on tables and footprints on the deck. But when the last car lights disappeared down the road, the silence always returned, larger than before.

And so I came back to the sky. Not as the boy I was before her, but as a man trying to find something he cannot quite name.

This flight would be my first IFR-certified solo sortie, no copilot, no shared workload. A real test of instrument flying. The upgrade from VFR to IFR had felt, on paper, like a restoration of something lost: permission to enter cloud, to fly when the world below disappears, to trust machines and training more than sight.

It had taken years of study and practice. Charts, procedures, holds, missed approaches, small acts of discipline repeated until they became instinct. Hard work, yes, but also something like healing.

The runway at Milford Sound lay between steep green mountains that rose like walls on either side, funneling wind and cloud into the valley. It was drizzling lightly at ground level. A low ceiling of cloud, about 2,500 feet, hung over the landscape like a lid, muting color and sound. Above it, I knew, the estimate was the clouds topped at 4,000 to 6,000 feet. Then there would be sunlight.

I longed for it with a kind of quiet desperation.

My aircraft, a Cessna 172, from the same family as that first flight decades ago, sat waiting. Familiar, unremarkable, yet capable of carrying me into the hidden brightness above the cloud layer.

Then the radio crackled. “ZK-RJK, Cessna 172, hold position. We have bird traffic on the runway.” It was Jake on duty today, I knew him well from years of flights at the airport. We even frequented the same bar talking politics and planes, but on the job the man was a professional.

I looked ahead and saw them. A flock of bar-tailed godwits had settled across the runway, scattered and unhurried, as though the strip of asphalt was simply another estuary. They moved in small clusters, probing the ground, completely indifferent to the human geometry surrounding them.

“Copy that, tower,” I said.

I watched them for a moment longer than necessary. Migrants of impossible endurance. They would soon lift from here, rise toward northern harbors, Auckland first, perhaps, before continuing a journey that would carry them across oceans to the Northern Hemisphere.

Eventually, as if answering some silent signal, the flock tightened. One bird rose, then another, and suddenly the entire group surged upward in a single fluid motion. They circled the airfield once, high and loose, then slid over the mountain ridge and vanished.

I found myself thinking: they are not free, not really. They are bound by something older than choice, instinct, pattern, survival written into bone and feather. They do not decide to leave. They simply become what they are meant to be.

“ZK-RJK, Cessna 172, you are cleared for takeoff.”

“Thank you, tower.”

I taxied into position, aligned with the runway, and brought the engines up. The aircraft trembled gently as power increased, the world narrowing to vibration, sound, and forward motion.

Acceleration pressed me back into the seat. The runway blurred. The mountains held steady on either side like silent witnesses. Then the wheels lifted.

The plane climbed steeply, eager for altitude, the valley dropping away beneath. The engine note steadied as I trimmed the aircraft, angling upward toward the cloud base. At roughly 110 knots, the climb felt deliberate rather than fast, an ascent measured in patience rather than urgency.

Seven minutes later, the world changed. I broke through the cloud layer. A vast white sea stretched beneath me, rolling gently over valleys and ridges, the mountains now islands in an endless ocean. Above, the sky was pure and deep, an impossible blue that made the air feel sharper, cleaner, more real.

I could see Mount Tutoko nearby, its peak still far above me at nearly 9,000 feet, cutting into the sky like a blade. To the east, the Darran Range rose in smaller, broken silhouettes, their tops emerging from the cloud like islands in snow.

It was quiet up here. Almost sacred. For a moment, I simply let myself exist in it.

Then I saw them. Three small points of light against the sky, emerging from the direction of Mount Tutoko at extreme speed.

At first I thought they were American jets. Carrier-based, perhaps as there were no bases nearby. But the idea made no sense, not here, not over this remote corner of the South Island.

As they closed the distance, their shape resolved into something else entirely. Sleek, unusual silhouettes. Not American. Not anything I expected.

A memory surfaced from a recent aviation magazine. Shenyang J-35 Chinese naval fighters, the silhouettes matched and I never forgot an aircraft like that. A carrier strike group, the Chinese carrier Fujian, flew Blue Sharks, I remembered, but why here?

They passed closer now, the sound delayed, their motion violent against the stillness of the cloudscape. Fast. Too fast. Well over Mach 1, slicing the air as if the sky itself offered no resistance.

“Tower, ZK-RJK, Cessna 172 calling, I have visual confirmation of a flight of three fast-movers. Chinese military aircraft. 90% sure these are Shenyang J-35 Blue Sharks. Please respond.”

There was a pause before the reply came, tighter than before.

“ZK-RJK, Cessna 172, confirm identification. These contacts are not showing on civilian radar.”

“Yes Jake, confirmed, like the ones we saw in AirForces Monthly. Three fifth generation stealth aircraft. Heading northwest past Mount Tutoko. Extremely high speed.”

Silence again.

Then: “We are escalating to defense coordination.”

I frowned. New Zealand’s air defense posture had always been minimal, almost symbolic. No interceptors on standby. No meaningful capacity to challenge something like this alone. Reliance on allies, on distance, on the assumption that isolation was a kind of protection.

“ZK-RJK, Cessna 172,,” Jake's voice returned, more strained now, “we have confirmation from another aircraft. The target appears to be the Waihopai facility near Blenheim.”

I felt the words land slowly.

“Target?” I repeated. “As in... strike confirmed?”

A brief hesitation.

“We are losing telemetry from the station. It has gone offline.”

A colder thought followed immediately, forming before I could stop it.

“Those aircraft may be carrying directed-energy or EMP payloads,” I said. “If they’ve hit Waihopai, they’ve taken out a Five Eyes intelligence node.”

There was no correction. No denial.

Only silence, and then:

“That assessment is consistent with current speculation and fits the news about Taiwan.”

Taiwan had dominated the news the past days as the Chinese had built a considerable naval presence in the straits. Taking out the Five Eyes stations in Australia and New Zealand, without loss of life, could be a logical part of any campaign there. I looked up at the untouched brightness of the azure sky and was overwhelmed by how distant heaven felt from earth right now. Looking down, the white canvas of the clouds seemed to be painted with a darker and more dynamic map of current events, moving in real time connecting me to geopolitical changes that would change our lives forever.

The sky had changed, it was no longer my cherished happy place of freedom. It had become a wilder landscape filled with wolf warriors flying stealth aircraft across a green country littered with fat sheep ripe for the eating.

Shanhu's face seemed, for a moment, etched into a nearby cloud, an illusion born of glare and turbulence, but it was enough to jolt something loose in me. It was as though she gave me a sad smile, love in her eyes, but also regret, and I remembered her words. "Don't be so naive, the world has changed..."


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