Emily reached over and touched his arm.
“How do you always know?” he said, appreciating the human contact.
“A president just senses these things,” she said in a dead serious tone, before giggling. “You’re a tough guy on the outside, but I’ve been with you long enough, and through enough crappy situations, to know a little about what makes you tick.”
He straightened, not willing to dwell on his own weaknesses. “I think you and Kyla have been talking about me. It’s not fair, you know?”
She pulled back, still laughing a little. “I’m sure you think all we did was sit around saying how great you are.”
Ted turned on the charm, to be as funny as her. “Did you?”
They shared a moment, and he thought she was going to say yes to prove him right, but she flicked on the radio and set it to the 100.0 frequency for Southern One Hundred. “Speaking of talking, it seems S-O-H is back to playing music.”
The high-flying solar aircraft broadcasting music to America were sixty thousand feet above them. If he wanted to listen to music on the flight, they were the only station left on the air. However, it was owned by Jayden Phillips, the guy who said he was responsible for attacking America. Ted wondered if there were signals or hidden messages in the songs, akin to how allied forces sent information to French resistance fighters in World War II. At that moment, the station played a violent rap song. He couldn’t imagine what message could be hidden inside.
“I’d shoot down all those flying transmitters if it would shut off this music.”
“What about free speech and all that?” she replied with a laugh. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
He had some opinions on the subject, but a blip appeared on his central avionics screen. The TCAS, traffic collision avoidance system, showed another aircraft nearby. The reliable limit of detection was about thirty nautical miles.
“We have company,” he said, all trace of humor gone.
He watched intently as the unidentified craft hovered at the extreme edge of his system’s range, almost directly behind them. It went on for several minutes, and nothing changed, leading him to wonder if it was a malfunction.
“I’m going to change heading a little to see if he matches.” He conducted a gradual turn toward the north and watched as the other plane shadowed his maneuver. When he turned back to his original course, the other guy hung with him. “Uh oh. I think we have a problem.”
The P.180 Avanti was built for small, private companies, and tiny airlines away from major hubs. The dual-prop design was great for fuel savings versus a jet, but it sacrificed speed. If the craft behind him was with the enemy, they were almost certainly traveling by jet. The Avanti wouldn’t be able to outrun or outfly them. Even a marginally-trained pilot only needed to keep them in range, so other units could pursue.
He looked outside. They were almost at Michigan. Lake Michigan was spread on the horizon ahead. Not nearly close enough to North Dakota to give up.
“You know how I mentioned parachutes?” he said with worry steeped in his voice.
“Yeah,” she responded.
“If that’s what I think it is, we might all need them.”
She leaned toward him. “You know that’s impossible, right?”
The door to the outside would never open while they were in flight. There was no way to jump out, even if they had four parachutes ready to go. He nodded. “Just trying to keep morale above room temperature.”
The transponder signal on the screen still hadn’t moved.
“Well, before we frighten the first-class passengers, let’s wait a little while and see what this thing does. Maybe it will assume we’re a friendly and let us go.”
She took the controls and jinked a bit to the left. They watched as the other plane took a second to re-orient, then it moved to the spot directly behind them again.
“Or,” she began in a hushed voice, “maybe this thing knows exactly who we are, and where we’re going. It’s tagging along because there’s no need to grab us until we land at our destination.”
“How could anyone possibly know all that?”
Emily looked over her shoulder and whispered, “Are you positive that Van Nuys character didn’t know about what the Marines were doing on his ship?”
Ted trusted that Meechum was on his side, but he couldn’t vouch for anyone else back on the JFK.
“We’ll just have to wing it,” he snarked.
Highway in Illinois
The dog flew out of the cornstalks, which forced Tabby to brace her arm against the inevitable attack. She’d recently tangled with those lost dogs back in Chicago, so her reaction time was heightened. However, when the gray dog switched from attack mode to rain-of-kisses mode, she was completely shocked.
“Deogee?”
The excited pup looked up at her with anticipation and a lolling tongue, then it barked once as if she’d gotten the answer correct.
“It is you! Guys, look who found us!”
A black dog came out of the corn, panting hard as if it had been trying to keep up with its friend. Once it saw Deogee getting lovin’ from Tabby, its tail spun into high gear and she came up to get some attention, too.
Audrey and Peter crawled over and joined in the reunion, but as soon as Audrey put her hand on the big wolf, she recoiled. “She’s been burned.”
Tabby had been so wrapped up in the shock, she’d failed to notice patches of fur along one side had been burned down to the skin. It wasn’t totally debilitating, since the dog was playful and alert, but it couldn’t have been pleasant. She immediately wondered where she’d gotten the burns from. “Where’s Sister Rose?” she asked the dog, as if it would answer.
“And who’s your friend?” Peter asked, petting the black lab. He settled the pup long enough to get a look at the dog tag hanging below its neck. “This one’s named Biscuit.”
“Biscuit and Deogee,” Tabby declared. “How did you find us?” It was a small miracle to be sure, though she wondered if it was due to the fact there weren’t many people left in the area. If the dogs had somehow tracked her and the kids, it was probably because they were the only ones making tracks. She and the teens had come up the same highway earlier on their way to Chicago. The dogs were simply moving slower.
The joyful reunion was a small consolation prize for losing their car. She wondered if the dogs would have gone all the way to Lake Michigan before they realized she’d turned around and gone back toward home. Were they that smart? Could they be useful to them, since they were all on foot?
The three of them spent the next half-hour clearing what they could from the broken car. The shotguns were scratched but otherwise undamaged. That was her main concern. If those plows came back, she wanted to be ready.
Eventually, a vehicle passed on the highway, heading toward St. Louis. It was an average-looking four-door car, a lot like the Subaru in the corn. A few minutes later, a big truck passed on the northbound lane, heading for Chicago.
“It looks like the route is now open again,” she said cautiously.
Audrey held Biscuit by the collar. “We should stay away from the interstate. Whoever those people are, they aren’t our friends.”
Tabby sighed, wondering if there was a right answer for what to do next. They could cut across country and probably find a car soon enough, but she had no map. If they left the interstate, she wasn’t sure how to get home.
“I want to get this trip over with,” she said. “The plows went north. We’re heading south. There are still lots of cars in the ditch alongside the highway. I’m sure we can find a working one and get the heck out of here. It doesn’t look like they’re driving special cars or anything, now that the road is open. We’ll blend in.”
Peter laughed. “You don’t think they’re going to check our IDs?”
She tried to think logically, for all their sakes. Hundreds of millions of her fellow Americans were dead and gone. Other than the convoy, she’d seen no living soul
s between the big cities. If these new people were taking over, they couldn’t be everywhere at the same time. They’d probably only be watching where the interstate met other highways, or over the Mississippi River.
“I vote we get a car and head for St. Louis. We’ll drive slowly, in case they have roadblocks or whatever. When we get to the river by the Arch, we’ll spy on the bridge to be sure there’s no one there, then we’ll cross. If we see anything along the way, we can pull over and hide, like we did here. All we have to do is stay vigilant.”
Audrey and Peter shared a look before the girl replied, “We trust you.”
Peter wrapped his arm around Deogee. “You’ll be our guard dog, won’t you?” The wolfhound licked his face, making him fall over on his side giggling uproariously. Again, she thought of how easily the teens were able to blot out the loss of their friend.
Deogee soon left Peter, sniffed all over Audrey for a few moments, then she came and threw herself at Tabby. For a few minutes, she rolled and played with the dog too, trying to forget all the problems swirling around outside their patch of cornfield. She didn’t make a big deal out of it when another car passed by on the road, but it reinforced the idea she was doing the right thing.
Driving straight home was the smart play.
CHAPTER 16
Over Wisconsin
While Emily and Uncle Ted sat up front, Kyla had eight comfortable seats in the back to share with Meechum. The plane was barely big enough for one small restroom, which was a godsend on the long flight, but it had no door between the seats and the cockpit. She chose to sit near the back, if only to give the pair privacy in the cockpit. She had her suspicions about what they were talking about; she’d seen the way her uncle was gaga over Emily’s dress.
“Do you think they like each other?” she asked Meechum under her breath. Kyla wasn’t a gossip at heart, but this was a special case. She thought back to all those fake boys she mentioned to her partner Ben back on the job. She’d exaggerated and made stuff up to avoid telling him she wasn’t dating anyone. It was all fake, but it passed the time. However, there, on the plane, she was convinced real things were happening.
She shifted positions to better see Meechum.
The short-haired woman sat across the aisle from her. She had her rifle in pieces for the umpteenth time since they’d taken off. She’d seen her do it before, which led to her thinking the woman was super thorough about cleanliness and preparation, but Kyla now believed it was a trained habit designed to keep her endlessly occupied, possibly because she’d said flying wasn’t her thing. The Marine didn’t even glance over. “It wouldn’t be proper for me to get into it. She’s my commander-in-chief.”
“Oh, come on. You mean you never speculated about who Tanager would end up with?” President Kirby Tanager was famous for entering office as a bachelor, but that didn’t last long. He married one of his spokeswomen who was as loud and obnoxious as he was. For the brief time before he settled down with her, the tabloids were on fire with speculation about who would make the perfect first lady.
Meechum stared at her. “Do I look like the type of woman who cares who other women are doing? I have enough trouble finding a man, and I work at a company with nothing but men.” When she’d made her point, she resumed working on her rifle.
“I bet you scare the hell out of those guys.”
“Marines aren’t afraid of anything,” she deadpanned. “I just don’t go for the big, stupid types. I also don’t go for men in my unit. Do you know how much trouble it would cause? Those dumbasses would lay down their lives one after the other to protect me when the bullets came our way.”
Kyla detected an undercurrent in her words. “But there is someone, isn’t there?” she taunted in a friendly manner.
Meechum’s lip almost formed a smile, until she caught herself and turned the tables. “What about you? Did you date that fellow you were with when we found you?”
She recoiled at the thought. “Eww. Hell no. Ben was married with kids, plus he was old enough to be my father. Oh yeah, and this is a disqualifier of epic proportions in my book, he was working for the bad guys.” Meechum knew the story of how she’d shot Ben as he tried to get off the boat, so her reason for bringing it up was to deflect from her original question. However, rather than press her on who liked whom, she tried to move the conversation away from the subject.
“How much damage do you think Van Nuys did before you killed him?”
Meechum paused her task and looked up. “If we would have had the authority to detain him at the outset, we would have kept him in that hold at the bottom of the ship. His story was fishy from the start.”
“But you couldn’t?” Kyla asked.
“No. And with no other crew around, we needed him to get the ship out of port. He did us a favor by doing that much, but his plans were probably threatened when the Marines on the Iwo showed up. At that point, it might have been possible for the captain of the Iwo to take command of the carrier, but we didn’t have any evidence backing up our hunch.”
“But now you do,” she reasoned.
“Yep. That’s why I radioed a message back to my team. They’ll work with the other captain and hopefully gain control of the JFK. I only wish I was there to bang some heads with the rest of the boys.”
Kyla didn’t have to ask if it was because she loved a good fight, or if there was someone she wanted to see again. She began to understand the dynamics of the other woman and came to a new respect for her sense of duty for going with them out west. She was about to ask if she had a sense of the odds of their journey, but the plane lurched and bounced violently before she could speak.
Uncle Ted called over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve crossed most of Wisconsin. Next up, Minnesota.”
Over Wisconsin/Minnesota
“Airspeed: four hundred miles-per-hour. Altitude: ten thousand feet. All instruments look solid.” Emily pointed to the radar screen; it still had the contact at the extreme edge of their TCAS screen. “Except for this guy, we’ve made great time.”
“Whoever they are, they must know the Avanti’s capabilities, including what distance they needed to maintain position off, or at the edge of, our avoidance system.”
Emily sighed. “We saw them the whole time. I guess they messed up.”
Like he’d done with the Cessna 172, he’d turned off the transponder before they took off, so they couldn’t be tracked as easily. It meant they wouldn’t show up on the enemy’s TCAS system, since it collected data from nearby transponders. However, if they weren’t tracking by TCAS, it meant they probably had active radar on board. It suggested a military aircraft. “Whatever, or whomever, they are, we aren’t going to lose them in flight. I’m afraid if they stay with us until Minot, they may figure out what we’re doing.”
She chuckled. “Taking the vice president to a nuclear missile base to enter a code in a computer, so real Americans maintain control of the United States ballistic missile arsenal. You really believe it’s the first thing they’ll think of?”
He stretched his legs and leaned her way. The pilots’ chairs were comfortable, but they’d been in the air for almost three hours. The lower half of his body was crying out to shift positions. “When you put it like that, lady, I don’t believe they’ll come up with it at all. However, the fact remains: they’re watching where we go.”
“Then we have to go somewhere that throws them off the scent,” she said dryly.
Ted had been thinking the same thing, but he’d kept it to himself for as long as he dared. It was too easy to sit in the plane and cross the endless miles of land below, but the cold truth was they were literally on someone’s radar at that moment. They had to ditch them before they could make their move toward North Dakota.
“I don’t want to turn around. That would make it obvious we didn’t have a real destination. From where we are, we could go to Duluth, Rochester, or Minneapolis. All are about the same distance from us.”
�
�Where do you want to go?” she asked.
“Well, considering the size of our strike force, I think it would be easy to get lost in any one of those cities, but if the aircraft behind us is also carrying military personnel from the enemy forces, I think I’d rather be in a large city. It will give us more places to hide.”
She huffed. “Why does it sound like we’re in for some trouble? Everywhere I fly with you, more trouble!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, really meaning it.
She grabbed his arm. “I’m kidding, of course. You know I trust you. This sounds like a really good plan. We’ll swoop down, jump out, and make a run for the city.”
He reflexively put his hand on hers, but he pulled it off a second later, fearing he’d make things uncomfortable. She held her hand where it was for a few seconds, smiled with a hard-to-read expression behind her eyes, then pulled back. He thought about telling her how nice she looked, or how her hair was attractive in the summer-themed scrunchy, but nothing sounded professional in his head. Failing that, he picked up the intercom microphone and went with what he knew. He pushed the yoke forward to dip the plane toward Minneapolis.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please put your seat backs and tray tables in the upright position. We’re about to descend into the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. Oh, and if you have running shoes available, please have those ready. We’ll be doing some light jogging. Thanks for flying with MacInnis Air.”
Amarillo, TX
Brent issued his orders and sent his band of merry men out into the greater Amarillo area to retrieve the necessary supplies. They avoided the airport, since that seemed to be the hub of enemy activity, but the rest of the giant city was ripe for the plucking. They’d found throwaway cars and split up; a move he hoped wouldn’t come back and bite him in the ass. There wasn’t enough time to play it overly safe.
They all rendezvoused on a residential street deep inside miles of suburban housing. He was pleased to see everyone had come back from their first mission with the right vehicles. Nine or ten big trucks were already there.
Minus America (Book 3): Rebel Cause Page 12