The Final Day

CHAPTER FIVE

John finished packing in total silence. There had been no cross words between him and Makala after the meeting and the decision to go, and the silence was indeed deafening. He scanned through his checklist of extra clothing and winter survival gear one more time. He had added in old-fashioned auto maps once put out by Exxon covering Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, just in case they went down and had to hike back. The backup plan if such happened was to try to raise radio contact with Billy Tyndall, who would attempt to fly out and pick them up one at a time, but if that could not be done, it would be at least a two-week hike, in winter, to get back home.

He had carefully cleaned his Glock and was packing along four extra magazines. His shoulder weapon would be drawn from the community armory, an up-to-date M4 with half a dozen magazine loads.

He heard Maury’s jeep, driven this time by Danny McMullen, pull into the driveway. Rather than come in, Danny wisely just tapped the horn a few times.

John shouldered his backpack and walked out to the sunroom, where Makala sat by the window. She was clutching Rabs, his daughter’s much-battered and beloved stuffed rabbit, and the sight of her brought tears to his eyes.

She looked up at him. She was crying. He walked over and knelt by her side. She turned away from him and began to shudder with sobs.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, John,” she gasped. Then she turned, holding Rabs, and threw her arms around his shoulders.

“I have to,” was all he could get out.

“We’ve all lost too much. Jennifer became like my daughter, poor old Jen like the mother I never really had. And now this. I never knew I could love a man with such intensity.”

She broke completely, holding him tightly, and as she did so he could feel their baby quaking within her. He loosened her embrace, leaned down, kissed her distended stomach, and tried to force a laugh through his tears.

“Little bugger just kicked me in the face!”

“And if I didn’t love you so much, I’d kick you too!” Makala cried. “Haven’t you done enough? Everyone in town feels the same as I do, even Ernie. You damn near got killed more than once this spring. You’ve done enough. Forrest is eager to go; so is Ernie. You’ve already written out a letter to this Scales person, if he is even real and still alive. They can carry it and just drop it. Please, John.”

Her tears were coming so hot and fiercely she couldn’t talk for a moment.

He did not reply. He had stated he was going, what was now defined as the Senate for their so-called state had reluctantly voted in agreement, and there was no backing out now.

Chances were she was right; he was acting on an assumption, and though he had not articulated all of it openly, he fostered a deep-seated fear that Quentin had come as a warning, that something terrible was about to unfold, and he might be the only person who could find out what it was and act.

He had argued with himself in the hours after the meeting that he was simply being paranoid and taking too much upon himself, but his decision had been made, and long years of training and experience still told him that so often a first hunch, a gut feeling, carried with it the need to act.

He could only pray that Makala’s gut feeling came from emotion and was wrong. At least he could hope that was the case.

Danny tapped the horn again. John reluctantly stood up, easing out of Makala’s embrace. She stood up and threw her arms around him.

“Damn it, John Matherson, if anything happens to you, I think I’ll kill you!” She began to laugh through her tears. “God go with you and bring you back safely to us.”

“Clear rotors!” Maury shouted, leaning out the window. It had been agreed that Billy Tyndall would stay behind in case he was needed with the L-3. Danny McMullen was therefore in the copilot seat. He had zero flying time in a chopper; his military experience in the air force was working on the big stuff—B-52s, KC-135s—but at least he had a sense regarding the Black Hawk’s power plant, and it was better than no one.

A security team of three was going with John, led by Forrest and accompanied by Kevin Malady and Lee Robinson. They could have taken half a dozen more, but each additional man was another two hundred pounds of weight, which equaled more fuel being needed. Besides, Maury’s few hours of flight experience were with an empty load, and Danny in the other seat would have to learn on the job, so the less weight the better.

Side doors were opened for liftoff at Maury’s insistence in case something went wrong and they had to get out quickly. The twin turbine engines above and behind John were whining up, rotor picking up speed, icy-cold air whipping in around him. He looked over at Forrest and Malady, sitting opposite him. John had of course endured many a chopper flight while in the army and never liked them; more often than not he had his puke bag out within minutes. Those two, though, were grinning, Malady shouting it felt like old times; Forrest, M4 slung across his chest, raising his one hand in a thumbs-up.

They are actually enjoying this, John thought, struggling to maintain a calm outward appearance. Several hundred from the town had turned out to see them off, for this, after all, was a major event for the community, with their police chief, Ed, struggling to keep the crowd back a hundred yards. Maury might have some idea about flying, but John knew that getting a helicopter up and away safely was a hell of a lot more difficult than taking off in the L-3.

They lifted off, nose pitching high, rolling as well to starboard. He could see Danny frantically pointing at something on the dash. The chopper then lurched forward, almost nosing in, Danny cursing so loudly that John could hear it even over the roar of the engines. And throughout it all, Forrest and Malady seemed unfazed. Lee Robinson, for whom this was the very first flight, had a nervous deathlike grip on John’s shoulder and was cursing as well. Glancing out the open side door, John could see the horizon tilting at what must have been a thirty-degree angle. In a light plane at takeoff, it would surely be a stall, but Maury nosed back over and gradually like a yo-yo, going up and down, they started to gain altitude, lose it, pitch back up again, and finally, nose tilted down slightly, began to move forward, still rising up, clearing the Ingrams’ parking lot.

Maury finally managed to gain some directional control, nose pitched forward a bit more, speed relative to the ground picking up, and he spared a quick glance over his shoulder, motioning for the side doors to be closed, blocking out the frigid blast.

The flight path was shaky at first, nose oscillating back and forth as Maury gingerly worked the controls but at least was putting more distance between them and the ground.

He nudged the chopper into a northeasterly direction, dipping the nose a bit more to gain bite with the rotors and forward speed. They crossed over the Swannanoa Gap, now up five hundred feet above ground level. It was the place where the great battle with the Posse had been fought out. Looking out the portside window in the door, John could see the steep slopes around what had been the Ridgecrest Conference Center, the woods still evidently flame-scorched from the battle. They hit a burble of turbulence as they cleared the gap, while still picking up speed. Down below were the twisting turns and tunnels of the Norfolk Southern railroad, an engineering marvel of the nineteenth century, the longest and toughest mountain grade east of the Rockies that had taken half a decade of labor by thousands to traverse those eleven miles to the top of the pass. He caught a glimpse of the Meltons’ sawmill, in spite of the cold the water still flowing with enough energy to turn the wheel and the saws within, while a mile farther down was the clearing where the power dam for Old Fort and beyond was being installed, work stopped for now.

They continued to climb. Danny had handed him an old FAA aviation sectional map of their route. It would skirt along the northeast flank of the Appalachian Mountains to just south of Roanoke and then cross over the range to sweep down on the Virginia city located in the southwestern corner of the state.

With a stiff northwesterly wind still coming down into the South in the wake of the blizzard, both Maury and Billy had warned them it would be a bumpy ride, but at least on the way up, by gaining altitude up to eight thousand feet or so, the wind quartering on their tail would help whisk them to their goal and save on fuel. For the return flight, if they did not land, the flight plan was to get down low into the valley to avoid the stiff upper winds.

As they reached their cruising speed of 140 miles an hour, a mile and a half up, they were soon sweeping past the majestic sight of Linville Gorge, formerly known as “the Grand Canyon of North Carolina.” It was a flash of memory for John, who had taken Jennifer and Elizabeth on a hike all the way up to the top of Table Rock. It had been an exhausting trek, made even more memorable because of the fright all of them had due to an encounter with a rattlesnake on the way back down. Jennifer had been terrified to the point where John had to carry her the last half mile down to the car, while more adventuresome Elizabeth wanted to go poking around in the brush with a long stick to find another one.

Snakes were definitely one of the major negatives in his life, and during the previous summer, perhaps because of the radical decline in human population and snakes’ natural predators—such as possums, which some residents trapped as food—they had become a plague in the Montreat Valley. Regardless of his city-bred fears, some of the kids at the college had taken to eating them, a thought that turned John’s stomach.

As they soared over the gorge and Table Rock, he hoped all the snakes down there would freeze to death with this early winter.

They shot over Brown Mountain, that mysterious place with strange glowing lights that locals claimed were lanterns carried by long-departed native spirits, and then past the once popular tourist attraction of Grandfather Mountain, abandoned, carpeted in a deep blanket of snow.

More turbulence and then the stomach-churning scent and sound of Lee getting sick, heaving into a plastic bag, spilling some as he cursed and fumbled to try to seal it shut. Forrest and Malady, sitting across from them, chuckled at Lee’s distress, Forrest fishing into the pocket of his winter fatigue jacket, pulling out some salted beef jerky and offering it over, shouting for him to chew on it. John could not help but smile at Lee’s scatological response even though he was fighting down nausea himself. In spite of their disagreement, Makala had set out some ginger tea for John to drink before leaving, a tonic she claimed actually did work with motion sickness, and perhaps it did so at this moment.

They soon crossed over Interstate 77 up near Mount Airy, the highway twin ribbons of white, the snow-covered humps of long-abandoned cars still cluttering the road. As they passed over villages and small towns, here and there he could see a plume of smoke from a chimney. Mount Airy, which had claimed to be the role model for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, actually showed signs of life; a cluster of homes in the center of town had smoke pouring from chimneys, and a few farmhouses on the outskirts of town showed signs of life as well, with even what looked to be several horses out in a snow-covered field.

But so much of the landscape was empty, barren, devoid of life. No roads were cleared, of course, the landscape below, once teeming with life, now a vast dead world that was once bustling with the activities of man. Near the interstate, except for Mount Airy, village after village appeared to have been burned out and abandoned.

John unbuckled from his seat and, crouching low, went up forward to squat between Maury and Danny.

Maury looked over his shoulder after struggling for a moment with the controls, nose pitching down slightly.

“Damn it, John, you moving around throws off the center of gravity on this thing.”

“Sorry, just wanted to check on how we are doing.”

“Fine, but just don’t move around now.”

“We on course?”

Maury had yet to figure out what must have been the built-in navigation screen during the few hours he had practiced with this chopper and decided not to waste battery and fuel to figure it all out, so they were navigating by dead reckoning and an FAA sectional spread out on Danny’s lap.

“That’s Interstate 81 off to our left on the other side of the mountains. We’re crossing into what was once the state of Virginia.”

The way Danny had said what was once struck him.

“About twenty minutes out, I’d reckon; the wind up here is giving us a good fifty-mile-per-hour boost.”

After Mary died, John had taken the girls on several trips up to the War College at Carlisle to visit Bob Scales when he was commandant there and then would bore Elizabeth to death spending a few days visiting and hiking around Gettysburg and Antietam. Jennifer, however, loved the trips because of the Boyds Bears shop just south of Gettysburg. He pushed that memory aside; it was far too poignant. The drive up and back was a long one—it usually took four hours or so to pass Roanoke—and here they were approaching it in little more than fifty minutes.

“Anything on the radio?” John shouted.

Maury shook his head. He had barely mastered that system as well, knowing enough to have it tuned to 122.9, the old frequency for general air traffic in what had once been defined as uncontrolled airspace, and alternating it with the frequency for what had been the civil airport at Roanoke as listed on the FAA map.

They started over the mountains, turbulence picking up again, Danny shouting off waypoints he had marked on the map with a grease pencil, while working an old-fashioned circular slide rule, once the standard tool of all pilots, to check on relative ground speed and rate of drift from the quartering tailwind, giving course corrections to Maury.

John looked over at his friend and could see that he was relaxing a bit. If anything, this first cross-country flight was instilling some confidence in his friend, who had only practiced locally since the capture of the chopper, carefully conserving their limited supply of jet fuel with each practice flight. John scanned the gauges, figured out which one was fuel, and was pleased to see they had consumed little more than one-eighth of their load.

More buffeting as they dropped through three thousand feet, airspeed up to 170 miles an hour, a whiff of an unpleasant scent produced by Lee mingled in with the exhaust from the turbines.

“That’s Roanoke,” Danny announced, pointing ten degrees or so off to their port side.

In the cold winter air, it stood out clearly just beyond the low range of hills surrounding it, larger than Asheville. Plumes of smoke were rising up, not for heat but rather buildings that were burning.

“Think it’s hot down there; something’s going on,” Danny announced, looking over at John, who nodded.

The airport was located just north of the city. To reach it, they’d have to fly directly over the city and whatever was going on down there.

“Swing us west, Maury,” John said. “Circle us out a half dozen miles or so; don’t go directly over the city, and we’ll approach the airport from the other direction.”

It came up quickly with a ground speed of well over three miles a minute, John scanning the air around them. There was a flash of light from a building at least ten stories or so high, smoke rising up an instant later.

“Damn it, there’s fighting down there!” Danny shouted.

John felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw that Forrest was leaning on him for support, joining them to look forward.

“Looks like a hot LZ to me!” Forrest shouted. “Where’s the airport?”

Danny pointed to the right and forward. John picked up the binoculars resting in a flight bag between Maury and Danny, knelt up, trying to keep his balance, and finally got a close-up glimpse of the airport on the far side of the city.

It was packed with aircraft, nearly all military. Half a dozen helicopters, a mix of Black Hawks and Apaches, and two old C-130s. Friend or foe? Like the choppers Fredericks had brought with him back in the spring, nearly all the aircraft lined up below were painted in faded desert camo scheme, military equipment brought back to the United States after the Day.

“Someone’s calling us,” Maury announced, slipping one headphone back and looking at John. “Demanding we identify ourselves. What should I do?”

This was not exactly what John expected. But then again, what did he expect? A deserted city? A destroyed city? A war going on that they were blundering into? But certainly not a welcome mat with a big sign scraped out of the snow: “Welcome, John! We were expecting you.”

“John, what do we do?”

“Just state we’re from Carolina and if General Scales is available to put him on the line.”

Maury did as requested, waited, and then shook his head.

“They’re ordering us to land immediately.”

Maury gazed intently at John, who mulled that over for a few seconds while looking toward the city that was now off their starboard side half a dozen miles away. There was definitely a fight going on in the downtown area. It looked similar to Asheville, a cluster of taller office buildings downtown, suburban sprawl stretching out for several miles in every direction.

“Tell him we’ll comply.”

“What?” Forrest shouted. “Are you flipping crazy, John? There’s a fight going on down there. We land and Lord knows what we’ll be getting into. Whoever is down there will keep this bird, and if we’re lucky and not shot on the spot, we might just be allowed to walk home.”

“Just tell him we’ll comply,” John shouted again, “and then be ready for a low-level pass so I can drop a message pod and then get us the hell out of here!”

He looked back up at Maury, who now had approximately eleven hours of stick time on this chopper. He was asking for a maneuver that nearly all pilots loved to do, legally or when no one was looking, illegally. Before the Day, the mountains around Asheville served as a practice range for pilots preparing to deploy to Afghanistan or wherever there was mountainous terrain, and he always got a kick out of watching their high-speed passes, sweeping in low through the Swannanoa Gap, skimming up over his house, at times nearly at rooftop level, and weaving in and out across the mountain passes. And all of them most likely had hundreds of hours of airtime before trying such maneuvers.

Maury grimaced, Danny looking over at the pilot and forcing a smile.

“John, get aft, make sure everyone is strapped in, and open the door!” Danny shouted.

John staggered back the few feet to the aft compartment, sparing a quick glance at Lee, who truly fit the definition of green faced, shouting for him to tighten his belting. Forrest strapped in across from John and then shouted instructions as to how to open the side door, which John had to struggle with as the helicopter pitched back and forth, the door at last sliding open, the cold blast of winter air whipping by at 140 miles per hour stunning him.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out the message pod, a plastic torpedo-shaped container with a thirty-foot red streamer attached to it, snapping off the rubber band that held the streamer in a tight ball, letting several feet unravel.

He glanced up and through the forward windshield and saw that Maury was banking in toward the airport but was now caught in a strong crosswind, struggling to crab the chopper so they could fly down the length of the main runway. There was a hell of a bounce as Maury nosed over, Lee looking at John wide-eyed and a second later disgorging what was left of his breakfast and dinner from the night before onto John’s lap.

“They’re threatening to shoot if we don’t land!” Maury shouted, barely heard above the roar of the slipstream racing past the open door.

“Tell them to screw themselves,” John shouted, “after we get the hell out!”

They crossed the threshold of the runway, going flat out, Maury, nervous at running so low, bobbing up and down, tail rotor assembly swinging back and forth as he fought to keep control at such low altitude, with a variable crosswind sweeping across the open runway. John glanced up again. They were a hundred or so feet up, crossing over the paved runway, a large white number 12 flashing by underneath. To their right, he could see the airport terminal, the building burned out, collapsed, a couple of dozen private aircraft, long ago abandoned, pushed off to one side of the tarmac and jumbled together. Next to it, the control tower was still intact. He wanted to shout for Maury to try to get closer to the control tower, fearful that the dropped message might not be noticed.

He waited a few more seconds.

“They want us down now!” Maury shouted.

John ignored him, leaning out the open door, message cylinder and red tail ribbon bunched up in his hand, anxious at the thought that it just might get wiped aft and tangled into the tail rotor.

They swept over a grounded Apache, several personnel on the ground craning to look up—or were they pointing something—and in answer to the thought, he caught the flash of a tracer round snapping past the open door.

He threw the message cylinder out, arm getting whipped back by the slipstream, slamming it against the outside of the chopper, the wind sucking the glove off his left hand, shoulder feeling as if it were about to break.

More tracers, a metallic crackling sound behind him, like someone punching a hole through aluminum or titanium, which was exactly what was happening as several rounds slammed into their Black Hawk.

The impacts startled Maury, who instinctively pulled the chopper into a steep banking turn, and if not for the safety harness, John would have been pitched out. Gasping for breath in the violent crosswind, he caught a glimpse of the message cylinder already down on the ground, the red tape attached to the tail still spiraling down, someone running toward it, while at least two others with weapons raised were continuing to fire at them.

“You damn fools!” John screamed, making a universal rude gesture as Forrest, one-handed, stretched out and grabbed the back of John’s harness to help pull him back in. Even as he did so, Maury pitched the chopper hard to starboard, causing John to tumble back in, landing hard on the floor, which was splattered with Lee’s vomit.

Kevin Malady unbuckled himself from his safety harness, half crawled over Forrest, and slammed the portside door shut.

“We okay?” John shouted.

“Sons of bitches!” Forrest yelled and pointed to the side of his helmet. It was dented in, a bullet having creased it.

John looked at it, a bit shaken. A couple of inches farther down and his friend would be dead, and he realized that for the bullet to have entered thus, it must have snapped past him by a margin of only a few inches as well.

“We okay?” John shouted again, Danny looking back at him.

They were past the perimeter of the airport, heading east. Danny returned his attention forward and was obviously saying something to Maury, pointing toward the instrument panel. John unclipped the safety harness and crawled up between the two.

“Problems?”

“Yeah!” Maury shouted. “I think we’ve been hit. And look off to your right. An Apache that was up in the air is peeling off toward us.”

He looked to where Maury was pointing and caught the flash of rotors. The narrow profile of the Apache was hard to see, but he could discern it was headed their way.

“They’re ordering us to come back, land, or we’ll be shot down.”

“Can they?”

Maury was silent for a moment, attention focused to where Danny was pointing at one of the gauges.

“One of the turbines might have taken a hit; it’s heating up a bit, RPM dropping. They’re designed to take punishment; let’s just hope it holds together. Supposedly, you can fly this thing on one engine, but I wouldn’t want to try it right now.”

Maury banked again to port, taking them on a direct easterly heading, away from the Apache.

“Can he catch up to us?” John asked.

“Don’t know!” Maury shouted. “I remember the Black Hawk is a bit faster than the Apache—at least it was when I was flying these things. Wait a second.”

Maury pulled his headphone down over his left ear, listened intently, spoke, and then pushed it back up so he could talk to John.

“Told them we want to come back but call off that Apache first. Telling them that might buy us some time.”

John looked to the glint of rotors from the Apache; it was still on course toward them. It was hard to judge distance, but he appeared to be at least several miles off.

“If he’s got an air-to-air, we’re screwed!” Danny shouted.

Maury looked back at John, raising a quizzical eyebrow, passing the decision on to him.

Air-to-air? He mulled that over for a few seconds. The Apache was doing ground support. Besides, air-to-air was not usual armament for a helicopter unless one was expecting to tangle with enemy air assets. Fredericks didn’t have anything like that; otherwise, the L-3 would have been toast.

“Just keep going straight east for now,” John replied.

“And pray both engines keep turning,” Danny added.

“Can we outrun him?” John asked.

“So far so good,” was all Danny said before focusing back on scanning the instrument panel.

John fell silent, letting them do their job, looking back over his shoulder to see that Forrest had his helmet off, had passed it over to Kevin to examine, the two of them talking away as if this were just another typical day.

“We got any kind of warning if something is coming up our tail?” John shouted.

Danny pointed at the blank computer screen. “It’s all in there,” he replied, “but I’ll be damned if I know how to run it. Besides, what the hell can we do if they have an air-to-air? We’re toast.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” John replied, and he backward crawled to his seat, trying to avoid the mess that Lee Robinson had splashed onto the floor and to which he had added in the last few minutes.

John strapped himself back in and settled down, trying to block out the smell. He knew there was an old saying with pilots that no matter how good an engine you have, when flying at night or over water with no place for an emergency landing your engine always starts to sound rough. It had been years since he’d last been up in a helicopter, and he tried to compare what he was hearing now versus back then. Something did sound “rough.” And looking forward, he could see that Danny was focused on the instrument panel and saying something to Maury, who just kept nodding in reply.

Maury was all but flying nap of the earth, at least as far as his skills allowed. John figured they were at least ten, maybe fifteen miles out from Roanoke, and if anything was going to come up their tail, they would be scattered wreckage by now. He was about to say something when Maury banked sharply, turning southwest, Danny craning to look back over his shoulder and shouting that if the Apache was still following he could no longer see him.

Maury began to gently nose up, trading off a bit of speed for some altitude. They had gone over the flight plan before taking off, figuring from the weather pattern that higher up the prevailing winds would be west to northwest. Gone were the days of clicking on a computer for flight service info, at least for the one helicopter of the State of Carolina. So it had been decided that for the return flight they would stay at a thousand feet or lower to avoid a strong headwind. When in a small plane, John always felt safer the higher up they climbed. If the engine quit, the plane just turned into a glider, and the higher up one was, the farther they could glide to an open field or nearby airport for a safe landing.

In a helicopter, he always felt the exact opposite, having witnessed during a training maneuver in Germany a helicopter having a full engine failure while more than half a mile up. According to the book, the chopper should have easily autorotated down to a landing one could at least crawl away from. Halfway down, the rotor seized up completely, and it dropped like a rock, killing the crew and the six troopers on board.

“Know where we are?” Lee said, looking over at John.

“Heading home.”

“Thank God,” Lee gasped. At least this time he managed to use a baggie and seal it up. Groaning, he just leaned over while Forrest and Kevin looked at him with at least some pity, even as they traded a joking comment.

John settled in, suddenly realizing that his left hand was absolutely numb from the cold. He unzipped his jacket and slid it in under his armpit and closed his eyes, trying not to listen too closely to the engine, for there was something definitely wrong. Maury shouted he was throttling back to put less strain on it, dropping their airspeed down to a hundred miles an hour. John mentally clicked off the miles; with each passing minute in the air they were subtracting an hour of laboriously walking through the winter snow to get home.

Was this trip really necessary, he wondered, or just a folly on his part? He had harbored a fantasy that perhaps, just perhaps, he would hear Bob Scales’s familiar voice on the radio, inviting him to come in, land, and talk things over. Tucked into his vest pocket, he had even brought along a photograph taken of Jennifer and Elizabeth the year before the Day.

What did happen over these last few minutes, he was prepared for as well, confident of the decision not to land but still disconcerted that they had been fired upon.

He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, the adrenaline rush over with, now just trying to look calm as they clicked off the passing minutes for what should, he hoped, be the hour-and-a-half flight back home.

At least the message pod had been dropped, and he saw someone running over to pick it up. He had thought it out carefully the night before, writing the message on his old Underwood typewriter:

He had written it out half a dozen times. If Bob was not alive, he had not given away any crucial details. He had also implied that his community now possessed air-defense capability if the message should fall into hostile hands. For that matter, he was not even sure now if Bob was indeed still a comrade on the same side or if that the tragic events of the last few years now placed them potentially on opposing sides. He had made no mention of Quentin’s ramblings about an EMP, whatever that might now mean. The proof of who he was Bob would know. One photo was from a visit Bob and his wife had made to Black Mountain, a poignant trip after he passed the word that Mary was in her final weeks. It was a photograph of all of them together, Mary, still clinging to life and smiling for the photo, six-year-old Jennifer and ten-year-old Elizabeth to either side of her, John and Bob standing behind them, trying to smile as well. The second was a photo of just the two of them in the field during Desert Storm, leaning against a Humvee, begrimed, grinning, for the cease-fire—at least for the next few years—had just been announced, their brief taste of America’s first open war in the Middle East at an end.

Thinking about it now caused a rush of memories. Were they still friends, or were they now enemies? Bob had been his mentor, taking a liking to John, who, fresh out of ROTC, had been assigned to Bob’s staff. As Bob went from colonel to general, John had followed the more intellectual route of a military career, going on to graduate work in military history, their paths crossing again at Carlisle, where John had the pleasure of teaching for a year after Desert Storm.

If enemies, it made him think of the life of Robert E. Lee, who was somewhat of a namesake for his friend. Lee had served as superintendent at West Point in the early 1850s. Ten years later, more than one of his young cadets from West Point faced him across the other side in the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg, the burning woods of the Wilderness, and the nightmare slaughter in front of Cold Harbor. After such blood-drenched fights, Lee would read in captured newspapers accounts of yet another of those young cadets’ deaths and knew deep within that the cause he fought for with such tenacity had resulted in those deaths.

Is Bob my enemy or my friend? John now wondered. If my enemy, would he kill me, or at least try to warn me at first, and was that the reason Quentin had been sent? Or, for that matter, is this all some sort of cruel existentialist joke?

A vibration running through the chopper snapped him out of his musing.

“What was that?”

He could see a look of concern now in Forrest’s eyes and those of Malady as well.

“Might be one of the turbines is starting to break up,” Forrest said calmly.

“I think I dozed off. Where are we?”

“We passed Statesville on our left about five minutes ago,” Forrest said. “My God, it’s all gone, John. Burned out, looted, looks like a wasteland. Those rumors that the Posse and other gangs like it just tore it apart are true. Sick bastards.”

Another vibration, this one more pronounced.

“We’re shutting one engine down!” Danny shouted, looking back at John.

“We gonna crash?” Lee asked.

“It can fly on one,” Forrest replied. “Not fast, but at least keep us going.”

John wondered if Maury even knew the proper procedure for shutdown while in flight or whether this was a learn-on-the-job situation. For that matter, how would the helicopter’s flight characteristics change, and could Maury handle it?

Seconds later, he began to find out when it felt like, the chopper falling out beneath them and Maury then pitching the nose forward. At least he had a thousand feet of altitude to figure it out, but at their speed, that meant a matter of seconds. He could hear the difference in engine and rotor pitch and then the additional strain on the one remaining engine as Maury pushed it to the max, finally leveling out just a few hundred feet above Interstate 40.

Going against safety procedures, John unclipped from his harness and crawled forward. He didn’t say a word to Maury, who was completely focused on keeping them aloft, Danny talking to him on the intercom, offering either some advice or just encouragement.

John could see the airspeed indicator. They were down to seventy—he was not sure if it was miles per hour or knots.

“I think I smell something burning!” Forrest shouted, and John picked up the scent as well. What the hell was it?

“That’s Hickory up ahead!” Danny shouted. “Still Indian country in places. We’re trying for the Morganton airport, which is ten miles farther on.”

“If it holds together,” Forrest replied.

“The airport in Morganton is ours. Can we make it?”

“My thoughts!” Danny shouted. “Hangar’s still intact. Old Bob Gillespie still lives there, used to work on choppers.”

Passing the outskirts of Hickory, flying low, they passed within easy landing distance of that far larger airport, but it was still an area not really secured. And as if in answer, there was a sharp rattling beneath them.

“Some bastard down there just hit us!” Forrest announced. “Thank God this isn’t a Huey with no armor; I might have caught one in the ass!”

John crawled back to his seat and strapped back in, Danny shouting they were just minutes out if things held together.

Crossing over narrow Lake Rhodhiss, John could clearly see the Morganton airport straight ahead—one long runway up on a slight bluff. Maury aimed straight for the middle of it, approaching the runway at a right angle, not bothering to swing out the few extra miles for a standard runway approach.

He began to ease off the throttle, pulling in the collective, the nose flaring up, view forward changing to nothing but sky for John.

He looked over at Lee, trying to offer a reassuring smile. His old friend and neighbor, a man with six generations of family history in their valley, a man he would want more than anyone else by his side in a fight, was definitely having a hard time with his first flight. In spite of the cold, sweat was beading down his face and his eyes were closed, his lips moving in silent prayer.

“Almost there!” John shouted, putting a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder. Lee simply nodded and then leaned forward to retch again.

“Brace yourselves!” Danny shouted.

Forrest leaned over to unlatch the side door and slide it open. The cold blast of air swirling in a refreshing shock washed out the stench of vomit and whatever it was that was burning.

The landscape outside was tilted at a crazy angle. With a lurch, the helicopter banked sharply to port, and John was now looking nearly straight down at a runway fifty feet below. Maury straightened the wounded bird out, throttled back more, the ground coming up fast. There was a final blast from the rotor, slowing their rate of descent, and with nose high, he slammed down hard on the runway while still going forward. They bounced and came down again for another bounce, and then he cut power back so that with the third bounce the wheels stayed on the ground. They were still rolling forward at a fair clip, Maury or Danny working the brakes, and they finally rolled to a stop.

“Out! Everyone out!” Maury shouted.

John was definitely not going to hesitate with that order. He reached over to help Lee, who was fumbling with his safety harness, the buckles slick with frozen vomit, so that John could not help but gag as he helped his friend to his feet and pushed him out the door. Command instinct told John that he should be the last one out. Forrest and Kevin, still acting if the day were routine, were already unbuckled and out the door, while up forward, Maury and Danny fumbled at switches to shut the Black Hawk down.

Maury looked back at John and motioned for him to get out. John needed no further urging, reaching over to pat Maury on the shoulder before exiting. Overhead, the rotor was still slowly spinning but winding down.

As he stepped out, he was greeted by the smell of burned metal. Old training reminded him not to breathe deeply. Burning aluminum and titanium were toxic.

“Son of a bitch!” Forrest cried, pointing at the portside turbine mounting. “Either damn lucky bastards or damn good shots.”

The housing was scored with half a dozen deep dents standing out clearly, the paint having been blown off. Black smoke was trailing out from the exhaust pipe, the northwesterly breeze whipping it around them.

John covered his mouth to go up and look closer with Forrest by his side.

“None of the rounds penetrated?” he asked. “So what happened?”

“Supposed to be proof even against 20mm rounds as long as they’re not armor piercing, but still, it dings the metal and bends it in; sometimes fragments of bent metal pop off inside the engine housing and get whipped into the turbine. We most likely cracked a turbine blade. If we had shut down immediately, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Now I’m not sure how much damage it did.”

The rotor came to a stop, Danny exiting the aircraft, coming aft to join them, fire extinguisher in hand, reaching up high to hose down the intake and then exhaust ports.

John stepped away from the Black Hawk, knees feeling rubbery. Lee was just lying in the snow, breathing deeply, looking up at the sky. John went up to his side and knelt down.

“John, we’ve been friends for Lord knows how many years,” Lee gasped, “but I’ll be damned if I ever go flying with you again. For that matter, I’ll be damned if I ever go flying again, period.”

Kevin Malady, who had knelt down on the other side of Lee, chuckled. “Hey, that was a piece of cake.”

“Kiss my butt,” Lee gasped before rolling on to his side and retching again.

Maury finally climbed out of the cockpit, took off his helmet, and tossed it back inside, and then, to John’s surprise, he got sick to his stomach as well.

John stood to one side, waiting for his friend to regain his composure, while aft, Forrest had climbed back inside to fetch another fire extinguisher to hand out to Danny, who continued to douse the engine. The smoke was subsiding, the aircraft’s metal ringing with metallic pings as it cooled down.

“Here comes Bob Gillespie,” Danny announced, and he pointed to a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle turning out from the taxiway and onto the runway. Its driver, an elderly man, capless and baldheaded, was slowing down to a near stop a hundred feet out with shotgun at the ready.

“Who the hell are you crazy bastards?” he shouted.

Danny held his arms up, cursing back and identifying himself. The driver relaxed, set his shotgun down, and drove up, dismounting, reaching to the rear seat to pull out a heavy fire extinguisher, and dragging it up behind the chopper.

“Danny McMullen, just what in hell are you doing out here?”

“We just went for a little ride.” Turning, he introduced the rest of the group. John had heard about Gillespie, who until the Day owned the airport and spent his life fixing nearly anything that could fly. When contact was reestablished with Morganton back in the spring, Danny had tried to recruit Gillespie into moving to Black Mountain to help with the L-3 and Black Hawk. Gillespie had managed to survive by going hermit and lying low when the Posse had been rampaging through the area. With no family, his wife having passed away years earlier, the airport had become his family.

The old man merely nodded a reply to the introductions because he was all eyes for the Black Hawk, and without a word, he slowly walked around it, taking a few minutes to look at the bullet-pocked turbine housing, poking his head into the cockpit, and clucking before finally going back to Danny.

“So which one of you screwed up six million dollars’ worth of aircraft?”

They all looked one to the other, and John started to step forward.

“I’ve seen more than one crash in my career, and by God, ten minutes ago, I figured I was about to see a bunch of fools die. That was, without a doubt, one of the most God-awful landings I have ever witnessed. Whoever was flying this, do us a favor and stay on the ground. You bent a wheel strut, you idiot.”

As he spoke, he pointed to the portside strut—which was indeed cantered out at an angle—and John now noticed the chopper was actually listing.

“How about the engine?” Danny asked.

“Don’t know until I strip it down. Most likely some cracked turbine blades, for starters. Let me guess—you kept them spinning after you got hit until things started to burn out.”

Everyone looked over Maury, who was suddenly red-faced.

“Damn it, like I told you six months ago, it’s been twenty years since I flew one of these things. At least we’re still alive.”

It was Forrest who broke the tension, reaching into his jacket pocket to pull out a pack of Dunhills. Popping one out, he then held it up, offering it to the others.

“Oh my God!” Gillespie cried, reaching out for one.

“Can this guy maybe fix it?” John whispered, leaning over to Danny.

“Don’t know until we strip the engine down.”

“I think Forrest has something to trade for the work,” John replied.

Danny nodded, and to John’s surprise, he went over to Forrest’s side and motioned for a cigarette. A minute later, all of them except for Lee and himself were smoking, Maury now shaking from adrenaline and fatigue, nervously inhaling and coughing as he exhaled but then continuing to smoke.

Forrest looked over at John, again that seductive offer. He was standing downwind of his friends and of course breathing in the delicious scent.

And then there was the memory of the photograph of Jennifer with her dying mother and the promise he made.

While putting together the drop package, he had come upon the idea of including the photographs as proof of the validity of who he was if it was actually handed intact to Bob. Fishing around in the basement of what had once been Jen’s house, he found the photo albums. Going through them had caused deep stabs of pain, and Makala had found him thus, crying softly as he looked at the photos of Mary holding Elizabeth as a newborn, and then Jennifer. And as well, old photos going back to Mary’s childhood, the day they announced their engagement, the day they got married.

She had not said a word about finding him thus, accepting without question his comment that he was looking for a couple of photographs to enclose in the message capsule as proof of who he was if the situation was too dangerous for them to land.

Looking out across the snow-covered landscape, still smelling the burning cigarettes, his friends unwinding and laughing as men do after a close shave with disaster, he wondered where all of this was leading—and what his reception from Makala would be when they finally got into downtown Morganton, made the long-distance phone call to Black Mountain, and found a way to get the last forty miles back to home.

I hope this was all worth it. His thoughts were more like a prayer. Bob, for God’s sake, I hope you are still alive, that whatever Quentin was raving about was just the memories of a dying man.

He so wanted to believe it—that not only was Bob alive but that he was on the side of Bluemont, the mere thought of him being on their side a reassurance that in spite of the tragedy of the spring, it was a government he could still work with.