Phoenix Rising

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Dunes, Fort Morgan—Wednesday, August 8

“Lookie here,” James said as he, Bob, and Jerry were poking around in the refuse left by the hurricane.

“What?” Jerry said.

“This a solar panel power setup. Or, what’s left of it after the storm.”

“You think we can reconstruct it?” Bob asked.

“Let me see what’s here,” James said. “We’ve got the panels. We’re going to need to poke around and see if we can find everything else we need.”

“What would that be?” Jerry asked.

“We need a current regulator, something that will keep the batteries from overcharging, or draining in case the current tries to run backward.”

“Like a reverse current relay between a battery and a generator?” Bob asked.

“Yes. And if we’re going to use it in a house, we’ll also need a converter that changes DC to AC.”

“Why do we even need to mess with it?” Jerry asked. “I mean, as long as we’ve got propane, we have power.”

“What happens when we run out of propane?” Bob asked. “Where are we going to get more?”

“Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Okay, let’s see if we can find everything that you need,” Jerry said.

“Problem is,” James said, “this setup will only power one house.”

“No problem. When the time comes and we’ve run out of propane, we’ll just choose the house we want, and we’ll all move in together,” Bob said.

“Or build us a new house,” James said. “One that will accommodate three families, and make maximum use of the electricity we can generate this way.”

“Whoa, I don’t know. I’m not much at house building,” Bob said.

“James and I will build it. You can be the gofer,” Jerry suggested.

Fort Rucker—Wednesday, August 8

With all their survival gear on board, Jake pulled pitch and the helicopter took off. As they passed over the golf course they saw two people playing golf, and Jake laughed.

“What is it?” John asked. John was in the left seat and, like Jake, was wearing a flight helmet. Jake keyed the mic switch to the first indent, which was intercom. “I always heard that come hell or high water, a committed golfer was going to play. Look down there.”

Jake made a circle around the Silver Wings Golf Course, and the two players waved up at him.

As they flew south toward the Gulf, they saw, as they expected, the highways littered with cars and trucks. Then he heard Karin’s voice on the intercom. She was also wearing a headset and was plugged in to the crew chief’s section.

“Jake, look down there,” Karin said.

When Jake looked around, Karin pointed to something on the ground. There, below, in white paint on the grass behind a farmhouse were the words:

HELP

We Need Food

Medical Care

“Can’t we land so I can see if I can help?” Karin asked.

“They probably need food more than they need medical care,” Jake replied.

“Maybe we could give them a case of MREs,” Karin suggested.

“It’s all right with me if you can get the others to agree,” Jake said.

Karin discussed it with the others, then a moment later keyed her mic again.

“Everyone else says it is okay,” she said.

“All right, we’ll land and see what we can do for them.”

Jake circled back, then started his descent. The rotor blades popped loudly as they cavitated down through their own rotor wash.

Just as he was flaring out to land, two men ran of the house. Both were carrying M-16s and they began shooting.

Jake terminated the descent, pushed the cyclic forward, and jerked up on the collective. The helicopter leaped up over the house; then he lowered pitch, flying nap of the earth and putting the house between them and the two gunmen on the ground.

He continued flying at a low level, popping up just high enough to clear the ground obstacles. Finally, when he was more than two miles away, he climbed back up to altitude.

The blades were now making a whistling sound and the helicopter had picked up a slight vertical bounce.

“Damn,” John said. “We’ve got a whistle and a one-to-one vertical.”

“Yeah, I’ve been through this before,” Jake said. “We took a round, or maybe a couple of rounds, through the rotor blades.”

“They didn’t really need help, did they?”

“No. They were using it to lure a helicopter down so they could do to them exactly what they tried to do to us.”

“Yeah, but, you’ve got to wonder just how many helicopters there are flying around right now,” John said.

“Can’t be too many, I don’t think,” Jake said. “As far as I know we are the only ones to fly out of Rucker in the last six weeks, and I can’t think of anyplace that would be more likely to launch a helicopter than us. Bless their hearts, we were about their only chance and they blew it.”

John laughed so hard that tears began rolling down his face, and only Karin, who also had a headset, knew what he was laughing about. The others looked at her quizzically, and she tried to explain what they were laughing at, but it wasn’t the same.

The flight down was almost two hours in length, and all along the route they saw vehicles abandoned on the road, towns with their business districts deserted, and burned-out houses. They also saw several bodies, some alongside the roads, some on the streets of the town, and others lying out in open fields.

“There it is, the Gulf,” Jake said.

Before them the Gulf spread from horizon to horizon, blue and sparkling in the sunshine. Jake turned right and they saw a long peninsula stretching toward the west. The peninsula was quite narrow and it separated the Gulf of Mexico from Mobile Bay.

“Where is this place we’re going?” John asked.

“It’s at the very end of this peninsula.”

“It’s an island,” Karin said. “They call it Pleasure Island.”

“How can it be an island? It isn’t surrounded by water,” John said.

“Yeah, technically it is,” Jake said. “We just crossed the intercoastal canal. That cuts the peninsula off from the mainland and makes it an island.”

Jake dropped down to about five hundred feet, then flew right along the surf. As they looked out onto the very expensive houses along the beach they could see the extent of damage from the recent hurricane. At least one out of every three houses was completely destroyed, and half of the ones still standing were damaged by degrees from light to severe. The farther west they flew, the greater the damage.

“Look at these houses,” Karin said. “They are million-dollar-plus houses.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “And that was back when a million dollars meant something.”

The Dunes, Fort Morgan

Bob Varney was on page one hundred thirteen of his work in progress. One thing he did miss about the computer was the word-count feature. He estimated that he was just under twenty-five thousand words, using his old method of counting at two-hundred-twenty words per page.

After he finished the book, he would have to go back through the first draft as he did in the pre-computer days, marking up typos, and making editorial adjustments. That would require retyping the entire manuscript. It was hard to believe that he wrote his first one hundred books that way.

Suddenly Bob heard a sound that took him forty years back in time. For a moment, he wasn’t in the third-floor office of his beach home, he was in the BOQ at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon. He was typing on this very typewriter, and passing overhead was a UH-1 helicopter returning to the base.

Bob had been hearing helicopters pass overhead for the last ten years, but he had not heard anything like this in a long time. The UH-1 has a very unique sound. Put any Vietnam veteran in an open field, blindfold him, and fly ten helicopters overhead but only one Huey, and the veteran will be able to tell which one is the Huey.

“Damn, Charley, that’s a Huey!” Bob shouted. Getting up from his desk, he stepped onto the front deck and saw, flying at an altitude of about five hundred feet over the surf, a U.S. Army UH-1D helicopter, in the muted colors that were used for such aircraft in Vietnam.

“Choi oi,” Bob said, using the Vietnamese expression that covers everything from mild surprise to total shock. “It is a Huey! What is it doing down here?”

Charley looked at him quizzically.

“You don’t understand, do you?” Bob said. “Well, here’s the thing, see. I used to fly that very same kind of helicopter. Oh, this was long before you were born, Charley Dog. And the thing is, this is definitely an Army helicopter, but the Army doesn’t fly them anymore. And, even if they did, what is it doing down here?”

Bob watched the UH-1D as it headed west, still over the surf; then he saw the pilot make a climbing turn out over the water, gaining another two hundred feet or so as he continued the turn through two hundred seventy degrees. Then the helicopter started descending.

“Where is he going, Charley?”

Bob ran back into the house. “Ellen!” he called. “A Huey!”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear the helicopter?”

“Yes. What about it? Isn’t it going out to one of the offshore rigs?”

“No, it wasn’t a civilian helicopter. It’s Army. It was a Huey, a UH-1D model.”

“Maybe the Army sent someone down here to check on the damage from the hurricane.”

“This isn’t the Army.”

“I thought you just said that it was.”

“I meant it was an Army helicopter, but not the kind they use now. This was a Huey, like I flew in Vietnam. Only it’s been thirty years since the Army flew them, so who is flying it, and what is it doing down here?”

Fort Morgan

Jake circled over Fort Morgan so everyone could get a good look at it.

“Wow,” John said. “It’s shaped like a star.”

“Yes, that’s the way forts were built then.”

“What is it doing here?”

“It has been preserved as an historical landmark,” Jake said. “This very fort is considered the finest example of military architecture in the Western Hemisphere.”

“It sure looks old.”

“It is old. Well over one hundred fifty years old. It was a very important fort during the Civil War.”

Jake made a wide circle out over the sea, nearly as far out as the old Mobile Point Lighthouse; then he turned back toward the fort, setting up a 500-feet-per-minute rate of descent. He made a long, shallow approach to the fort until he cleared the walls. Then he arrested his forward motion, moved into a hover, and finally made a vertical descent for the last fifty feet. The rotor wash blew up bits of grass and some of the sand that had been blown in by the recent hurricane. He touched down, then killed the engine, and the blades coasted down until they stopped.

For a long moment after the aircraft sat down and the rotors stopped, nobody got out. They all sat there in awe and silence, listening to the descending hum of the instrument gyros as they spun down.

“And this is where we are going to live?” Julie asked.

“This is it. You can consider this place your home sweet home,” Jake said. He loosened his seat and harness. “What do you say we step outside and have a look around?”

The ground inside the fort was amazingly green with well-nourished grass. The sandstone walls were high, and gray, and foreboding looking. There were several sally ports that led from the field to the outside of the walls, and into the walls of the fort itself. They looked around for a bit. Then Jake pointed to one of the sally ports. “What do you say we take a look in there?” he suggested.

They walked across the grass, then stepped up onto the paving stones and walked in to the arched passage way. Once out of the sun, it became much cooler. Coming off the sally port and branching off to one side was a large, all-brick room.

“What do you think this was?” Willie asked.

“My guess would be that it was an ammo casement,” Jake said.

“Casement? You mean like casement windows?” Julie asked.

“No, a casement is also a secure room for storing arms and ammunition.”

“Secure, huh? Well, you can’t get much more secure than this,” Marcus said. “Look at this thing.”

They left the first casement and began exploring the others. The brick rooms were large, dank, and dark, lit only by the door off the sally port and tiny slits that were more for ventilation than for light.

“This looks like a dungeon,” Karin said. “I can almost close my eyes and see someone hanging from the walls.”

“Oooh,” Julie replied with a shiver. “That’s a pleasant thought.”

“Ah, hang a few pictures, put up some curtains, throw a carpet on the floor, and we’ll have it looking really homey in no time,” Jake said, and the others laughed.

“Is this really going to be our quarters?” Marcus asked.

“Until we can come up with something better,” Jake replied. “And we can grow a garden. Did you see how green the grass is?”

“It’s too late to plant anything now, isn’t it?” Willie asked.

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t get cold down here until mid-December. That leaves us almost five months, if we get the garden in soon.”

“We’ll get it in soon,” John said. “What else do we have to do?”

“I’d like to take a look at that gun on top,” John said. “It doesn’t look like a Civil War cannon to me.”

“It isn’t,” Jake said. “It’s an eight-inch coastal artillery gun.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“This fort was manned until the beginning of World War Two,” Jake said.

“Ha! Did they think the Germans were going to attack us by ship?” John asked.

“They did attack us by ship. Or at least, by submarine. There were fifty-six ships sunk in the Gulf by German submarines. Some of the people who lived on the coast then could actually watch the attacks.”

“So, that big gun up top was used, huh?”

“No, it would have only been good against surface vessels, and if any of the German surface ships came into the Gulf, they never came close enough to the coast to be seen. Only thing to come this close were the submarines, and there were an awfully lot of them.”

When Jake and the others went back out into the open area of the fort, they were surprised to see three men standing there by bicycles. All three men looked to be in their late sixties and none of them were armed.

“Who are you?” Jake asked.

“My name is Bob Varney, and we were about to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m Jacob Lantz,” Jake said.

“What are you doing here, Jake?”

“What business is it of yours what we are doing here?” Willie asked.

Jake held his hand out. “They aren’t armed, Willie. I don’t think they mean us any trouble.” He turned back to Bob Varney. “It got a little too difficult to stay where we were, so we decided to come down here. We’re going to live here for a while.”

“You’re going to live here? In the fort?” one of the men with Bob asked.

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is James Laney. Bob, Jerry Cornett, and I live here, with our wives.”

Jake looked surprised. “You live here, in the fort?”

“No, not in the fort. Just back down the road a ways, to the first bunch of houses.”

“It looked to me like nearly all the houses were destroyed by the hurricane,” Jake said.

“They just about were.”

“Are you the only ones out here?”

“We always were the only ones who lived here full time,” Jerry said. “Then, when the economy got so bad, nobody else could afford to come down here, so for the last few months we’ve been here all alone.”

“Do you have any idea about what’s going on in the rest of the country?” Bob asked. “Since there is no radio or TV, we are completely in the dark. But we heard that there were some nuclear bombs dropped.”

“They weren’t dropped,” Jake said. “They were smuggled in on board cargo ships.”

“Damn. So, what’s being done about it? Are we under martial law?” Bob asked.

Jake shook his head. “You would have to have a military in order to have martial law,” he said. “And thanks to Ohmshidi, we no longer have a military. We are all military—or at least as close to the military as you are going to get. Also you have to have a government to declare martial law, and we no longer have a government.”

“And you are?” Bob asked.

“Sergeant—that is, John. John Deedle.” John introduced the others in the group.

“We call ourselves Phoenix,” Julie said.

“Good name.”

“Bob’s an author,” James said.

“Bob Varney—yes, Robert Varney,” Jake said. “I’ve read some of your books.”

“Don’t hold that against me,” Bob said with a self-deprecating smile.

“No, I enjoyed them. Seriously. You are a very skilled writer.”

“Perhaps, but you can understand, I am sure, that of all the skills needed for survival, a writer’s skill contributes the least.”

“What are you planning to do here?” James asked.

“We are establishing our base here,” Karin added.

“Firebase Phoenix,” Bob suggested.

Karin smiled broadly. “What a great name!” she said. “Yes, this is Firebase Phoenix.”

“All right, so tell me. What happened to the president? What happened to Congress?”

“As far as Congress is concerned, Ohmshidi dismissed Congress, and the Supreme Court, so they were already long gone,” Jake said. “And as far as the president is concerned, that cowardly bastard is hiding out somewhere.”

“Or he’s dead,” John said.

“No such luck,” Deon put in.

As the others continued conversing among themselves, Bob walked over to the Huey and looked at it.

“What do you think?” Jake asked.

“I thought the Army retired the last Huey thirty years ago.”

“They did. We stole this one from the museum.”

“And put it back in flying shape. You must have some pretty good maintenance men.”

“They’re the best.”

Bob looked up at the rotor head. “That’s not the original drag brace. But evidently it held, all right. What is it? Off a five-forty rotor head?”

“A five-forty rotor head?” Jake asked.

“This is a D model. The C model and the Cobra both have five hundred forty rotor systems. Slightly different.”

“Yes, we took the drag brace from a Cobra,” John said.

“That’s what I thought. Looks like you did a good job of adapting it.”

“You seem to know your helicopters,” Jake said.

“Well, I certainly know the UH1-D model,” Bob said. “And probably just about every other one you saw in the museum.”

“Were you an Army aviator?”

“Yes, I have a little over six thousand hours, thirty-six hundred hours in one just like this. I flew three tours in Vietnam, and I taught maintenance test flight procedures at AMOC in Fort Eustis. Chief Warrant Officer-four, retired.”

Jake extended his hand again. “Major Lantz, and I didn’t get a chance to retire. Ostensibly I’m still on active duty since I never got any orders relieving me. We are all in the same boat. Karin is a captain, an Army nurse, the rest are sergeants.”

“Welcome to Fort Morgan,” Bob said. “It’ll be good to have neighbors again.”