Patriot Son

by T A Walters

  “What kind of things?”

  “Oh duh, Kat! Like learning to paint artwork, yoga classes, cross stitching, knitting, why even cooking classes.”

  Kat smiled and flipped a lock of hair from her face. “What happened to the Rec—Hall idea?”

  Penny leaned against the table, then look around like as if someone would hear her, “I’ve got it from one of the guys working on the building project that the place is gonna have a pool table from a friend’s house brought in and set up there. Do you know what follows that don’t you?”

  “No clue,” said Kat trying to conceal a grin.

  “Poker tables, card tables … why, even a bar!”

  “I don’t get it, Penny.”

  “This means I’ll be spending all my time stitching up and setting bones because of where there is a Pool Hall there are fights.” Penny stopped and stared at Kat, pursing her lips she added, “What’s so funny girl?”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  Penny made a tsk sound and proceeded to inform Kat that once again she heard it leaked from John Kehoe personally. “John came in here to have me look at his thumb. He said he had hit it with a nail hammer while building the so-called secret building and that was his exact words. While studying his thumb, I’d discovered he must have hit it several times throughout the day, so hard in fact that it split open like an overcooked hot dog. Well anyway, he told me under anesthesia that the secret building was going to be a Pool Hall.”

  “You had to put him under?”

  “I had to put three stitches in his thumb.”

  “Don’t you use a local for that, like Novocain™?”

  “Or Sodium Pentothal,” Penny confessed. “Just enough to dull the pain of the needlework.”

  “So you asked him before you slipped him under?”

  “Of course,” Penny said with an innocent expression on her face. “But he told me that he and dad were erecting a secret building. But then, later he told me it was a Pool Hall.”

  Kat grinned, “After the Sodium Pentothal, he said it was a Pool Hall.” Kat had the feeling JP, and Scuba Bill had told him that so he wouldn’t accidentally blab it around the base.

  “Ok, ok,” Penny finally confessed. “It just happened that way. So let’s keep this to ourselves.”

  “And John Kehoe, right?”

  “Nope. He still believes he kept that a secret,” said Penny chuckling.

  Chapter 20

  ~23 miles south of Shreveport Louisiana~

  The Bud & Velma Brown Farm

  The soft drone of voices and an occasional sound of a few birds off in the distance echoed in Viktor’s mind. Sometimes the voices came through clearly, and he wasn’t sure of how long he had been sleeping, for he slept still, and for a while longer it seemed. The male voice of one asking another of how long a period of time a person in a coma would be, and how bad the damage to his brain had become from what appeared massive blunt force trauma to his head. Away in the distance, once again, the voice of a woman crying, and even though he could not see her, he knew she was with him all the time. At times he felt her hand on his as she softly sang beautiful verses of songs forgotten in the years of his youth, now alive in him and in his heart and his mind. Viktor tried to sing those songs and even the words, but nothing escaped his lips; even struggling to open his eyes, yet nothing. He cried, trapped within him no tears to show, but he was here, and he fought every minute of his subconsciousness to break free into the living world around him. I am here, dear mother.

  Brother Jonas entered the bedroom where, in a coma, Viktor lie sleeping. Velma stood from her chair alongside the bed, a storybook in her hand. A towering figure of a man was Brother Jonas, well-groomed with his white hair and neatly trimmed beard; he stood six feet tall and although somewhat portly moved about the room with the poise of a man half his mass. Bud followed into the room behind Brother Jonas and stopped in the doorway to watch silently as Jonas set down his small black medical bag near the foot of Viktor’s bed. Quickly checking pulse rate and lung function with his stethoscope, he turned to Bud.

  “We’re going to roll him on his side,” he told Bud while shaking down a thermometer.

  Bud nodded and swiftly moved alongside Jonas awaiting the order to roll Viktor to his side. Glancing over the rim of his glasses, Jonas asked Velma to help steady Viktor from rolling too far forward.

  While waiting a minute for the thermometer to stabilize a good reading, Jonas pulled an elastic bandage from his medical bag. “Since it appears the pressure on Ronnie’s brain is normal now, he won’t need this spinal tap.”

  Both Bud and Velma turned their heads to look away while Jonas slipped the tap from Viktor’s back and replaced it with a small elastic bandage. In a fluid motion, Jonas removed the thermometer and held it up to examine it through his bi-focal eyeglass lenses. He blinked hard a few times and then gave a slight smile, “97.9. Looks close to being normal to me, but better still, no infections to worry about. I also see his shoulder wound and head laceration healing nicely.”

  They gently rolled Viktor back on his side. “So this means he’ll be waking soon?” asked Velma.

  Brother Jonas was looking down on Viktor at the time Velma asked her question. “I believe he already has.

  Mrs. Brown I believe you and Mr. Brown have your son, Ronnie back.” Jonas added while looking back at Viktor. “Pleasure to see you back Ronnie. I’m Brother Jonas of the Antioch Baptist Church. As your physician, I’ll be removing your feeding tube, ventilator, and a few other pleasantries. In the next two days, you will regain some of your strength by re-learning to walk. You’ll be on a banana bag for the next few days while I progress you through to a solid diet. You’ll be back to eating steak and potatoes this time next week!”

  Ronnie/Viktor blinked his eyes and slowly turned his head from side to side; not remembering why he was here, nor understanding how close he had come to death. He saw the face of a woman, tears streaming down her cheeks as she told him he was going to be all right. It was the voice he remembered and how it all fits together now. He tried to call out to her, only his lips moving with the words ‘mother, I love you.’

  She looked up at the ceiling and cried her praises to the Lord God. She took Ronnie’s hand and sang praises and prayed, while Ronnie studied every word of her beautiful voice. In the whole time it took for Brother Jonas to remove hoses, tubes, and catheters – even suturing and finalizing all impediments to Ronnie, she prayed until finally being allowed to moisten his parched lips and throat with a damp sponge.

  Several hours later, Ronnie was sitting comfortably in a chair next to his bed. Bud had little time to spare with Ronnie while he made several trips to and from his pickup truck, loading the medical equipment to return to Brother Jonas’s home. The small generator used to keeping the ventilator and oxygenator going 24/7 while Ronnie was in a coma, was also loaded into the pickup truck and returned to another parishioner’s home.

  It was only an hour before sundown when Bud made his way back home. In the time it took for Bud to drive the distance from the road up to the house, the temperature fell ten degrees, and snowflakes began to swirl around in the bitter cold air. It was time to haul in more wood for the fireplace, and now that Ronnie was recovering, a Christmas tree would be lovely. This, being the final week before Christmas, Bud, his arms loaded down with split oak, walked up to the porch and paused to glance over his field of corn to the tree top forest in the distance. He seemed to recall seeing young spruce about the right size and shape while plowing a section of land a few weeks ago.

  A rumbling noise overhead broke Bud from his thoughts of hunting for a Christmas tree. Less than 20 miles north was Barksdale Airforce Base, and it was not unusual to hear military air maneuvers being conducted overhead. However, in today’s recession, the world seemed to have come to a halt. Bud had not seen any signs of air traffic whatsoever, but now he stood motionless, head tilted to the sky as a B-52H bomber passed overhead. Flying low, Bud could f
eel the sound of the aircraft reverberate in the ground under his feet. Heading southwest, Bud smiled and waved at the bomber as it passed by, low overhead. Perhaps this was a sign that the recession was winding down and everything would go back to normal soon.

  ~~~~

  It was the first exercise in a bomber plane ISIS had ever accomplished. Regular take-off and landings exercises in the weeks prior were also victorious. Walid Ghazarra supervised all flight training operations from Barksdale Airforce Base with the elation of a football coach in a parody of a touch-down victory play.

  It was Walid’s plan with the completion of this second of three bombing exercises, Min Li and his army would pay dearly. The temptation to go forward following this successful bombing exercise stabbed at his better judgment, but Walid resisted that temptation knowing that tomorrow the final practice run would determine their success at a surprise attack. Once again, his flight crew would disembark to the target lands of the desert, just south of the Rio Grande. As before, they would mark the bombing location, log it, and return safely.

  Returning home safely was not in the final plan when bombing Min Li at Los Alamitos Air Base. It was of strategic importance to fly low and avoid radar, as Walid knew; B-52’s cannot escape the blast force of a nuclear bomb. As a trained Jihadist, his flight crew was prepared for such sacrifices to the cause.

  The second landing approach, the mighty bomber circled far and wide of the airbase. The pilot feathered the throttle on engine 4 and set the airbrake at position 4 as he made his final approach to the runway. A worried expression marked his order to his co-pilot, “We go full board throttle on my order. You handle the airbrake off your yoke now.”

  With that, the pilot released the airbrake control position from 4 letting his co-pilot take it.

  The co-pilot resisted with a tone in his voice that signaled he was confused, “We are not circling?”

  “No, we are landing.”

  “But I can only control my side,” he cried. “We will be thrown off course.”

  The bomber had dropped altitude too fast after the first attempt at landing, and everyone knew winds out of the western plains had developed down-drafts and horrible wind-shear conditions.

  The co-pilot reached down below the throttle controls to the cross-wind controller to figure out his cross-wind component. Indications were they were 70 degrees off a crosswind of 25 to 30 knots. Pulling up the crosswind crab knob, the co-pilot saw fear in his pilots face. He seemed to have turned to stone and was ignoring any suggestions the co-pilot yelled out. The mighty bomber shook and shuttered violently, with the deafening ‘wing flutter’ warnings blaring loudly as the co-pilot struggled to correct the forward and aft crab of the aircraft to line up with the runway. Twisting the knob on the crosswind crab, slowly made the correction necessary, but it would be too late to avoid overrunning the airstrip, so the co-pilot took over the controls throttling up all 8 engines for another try at landing.

  On the ground, Walid smiled. It appeared to him as if his fliers were putting on an airshow. Perhaps it was good that way because when the bomber finally landed successfully, the airmen filed out of the B-52 a bit rattled but eventually realized Walid knew not the better of what happened up there.

  “You keep this to us,” the pilot whispered to his co-pilot.

  “Only if you listen to me, no?”

  There was no better way for the pilot to confess other than multi-tasking was not his finer trait, “Yes I will listen.”

  Chapter 21

  ~~Chihuahuan Desert Viet Nam Memorial underground storage Base~

  ~Christmas Eve~

  The last of the several dozen wooden toys being made in the Carpenter’s Shop were being collected and sent to the Paint Shop for painting. However, there was that one special toy; a small marionette, which needed one last detail added. Ray had worked through the previous night trying to whittle a pair of puppet shoes for this toy.

  JP had slipped in through the back door and entered the carpenter shop storeroom unnoticed. It wasn’t unusual for JP to be scrounging up hardware for small projects he was involved in.

  A fellow carpenter, George, walked into the shop and grabbed a broom. The woodchips and sawdust around Ray’s feet amounted to nearly twice that of the entire shop. George walked over to Ray and peered into the trash can nearby.

  George glanced at Ray, an expression of amusement on his face. “You know, Ray, you’re a lot better at fabricating trusses and simple furniture.”

  Ray never looked up from his work. “As opposed to what?” Ray once again tried to fit a pair of shoes on the puppet he had on the bench before him. A few of his fingers were taped with elastic bandages from having cut himself over the last few days. “I think this time I will whittle a little off the feet to fit the shoe, instead of the other way around.”

  Pointing to the trash can, George mused aloud, “There must be at least two dozen puppet shoes in this waste can!”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “My point is – why must the shoes be separate of the feet. Why not just redo the lower legs with the shoes as one piece?”

  The thought of the idea struck Ray with a tenacity to which he slapped his carving knife down on the bench in front of him, stood up and declared, “I’m going outside to have a cigarette.”

  George set his broom aside and followed his friend through the door leading outside. He watched Ray roll a cigarette, light it and then sigh as he exhaled smoke.

  Once again George asked, “Wouldn’t it be easier to whittle the shoes as part of the leg?”

  “It’s a little backward don’t you think George? I mean it would be faster, but definitely not easier.”

  An air raid siren abruptly split the night; together with the sound came the lighting of every light on the base compound. George stared wide-eyed at Ray. “Speaking of backward,” muttered Ray. “All lights are supposed to go out when an alert is sounded.”

  JP dashed out the door of the carpenter shop where George and Ray stood. “Why is this place lit up like a baseball field?”

  A rumbling sound of thunder nearly drowning out the siren, as overhead, the distinct sound of a B-52 bomber passed over the reservation.

  JP broke into a full run toward the electrical bunker near the solar farm where he nearly collided with Truck Dog whom apparently had the same idea. Scuba Bill dashed over to the barracks where his convoy assault team had settled in for the night. There was a clamber of personnel going in all directions as Scuba Bill yelled out orders to assemble his air defense team right away. Kat continued to track the lone aircraft on radar while punching in a code for coordinating a radio channel, “A single aircraft of bomber description, heading south at 205 degrees.”

  Major Edson barked orders to airmen scrambling together, “I need two choppers in the air now, and a pair of jets to follow. Jet pilots will await further instructions.”

  Encoded channels opened, and Kat turned to listen in to the broadcast channel of the bomber making a record of their sighting of the base to their commanding officers on the ground. Although the communication was in Arabic, Kat jotted down the translation on a pad of paper, then keyed her radio mic and reported the bomber was turning back for their base and that the aircraft were confirmed enemy. Outside her JLTV, she knew her message went through to all personnel radios when she heard Scuba Bill yelling down the ranks of his SAM team to ready their sights and take the bomber down before it reached tactical engagement.

  Truck Dog meanwhile worked feverishly while removing the front of a large electrical panel, while JP stood chastising him. “Cut the siren circuit, Idiot Boy! Can’t you wire up a simple electrical panel without screwing that up?”

  “Sorry dad,” said Truck Dog, yanking the electrical panel free. “It ain’t the wiring; it’s the two relays here. Some numbskull put them in upside-down. Gee, I wonder who did that.”

  JP recalled a few weeks ago while testing the early warning systems; he flipped the relays upside-down to
force all the lights on base to go on but forgot to restore them to normal. “Just flip the damn relays and close-up the panel.”

  Truck Dog pulled both relays, and for the effect of watching everywhere in the reservation going back to standard lighting, he replaced both relays in their proper positions while noticing all lights in the reservation went dark. Truck Dog grinned, “So how would you like it cooked, rare, medium or well done?”

  On the helicopter tarmac, Morris and Echols were ordered to take a defensive position north of the base, while Derrick and Joe were ordered to go up and provide backup support. As additional orders were being barked, the explosive recurrence of two F-4 fighter jet engines came to life. Joe piled into Derrick’s favorite 4A, Iroquois UH-1D chopper and took up the job as co-pilot.

  With preliminary checks and RPMs up Derrick increased rotor blade pitch and cyclic forward, nose slightly down until they reached 30 knots of speed before changing pitch and loading the rotor for a climb of several hundred feet. In the clear night sky, only a sliver of the moon to cast an eerie glow on the ground below, Joe thought he’d seen a dark shadow approaching the base from the south. Derrick saw it too, and increased tail pitch to veer the chopper west while maintaining an approach toward the northbound aircraft. Joe heard Derrick over his headset all the while radio chatter from those on the ground interrupted the warning that the SAM team had a laser tracker locking in on the incoming bomber. Joe tapped Derrick on the shoulder with a motion to pull away. “The Surface to Air Missiles is taking her down!” exclaimed Joe.

  “I can see it,” Derrick yelled. “She’s veering off course!”

  “No doubt after discovering she had a missile target locked on her.”

  Seconds later they both watched as two contrails of sparkling light that lit the sky as they approached the mighty B-52 bomber. A thunderous blast followed as a fiery ball lit the sky flashing out a ghostly silhouette of the gigantic aircraft, and in one brief instant followed a rain of sparkling debris over the desert barely less than a mile from the southern end of the base. The fiery hull of the craft slammed to the ground, skidding in a bright white light that burned rapidly for a moment until finally burning its way orange and yellow in all its clusters that spread for hundreds of feet in all directions.