BRAINSTORM

by Gordon Kessler

  As the missiles came, mere seconds away from detonation, chaff flares shot from both sides of our chopper—three dozen bright, smoky streamers—and the enemy missiles discharged as they flew through the countermeasures.

  Sunny and I hid our faces from the explosions that jostled us harshly, but nothing could be done about Sarge. The fierce shockwave knocked him from the top of the cargo and he fell. As he tumbled past, Sunny and I each freed an arm, and in desperation we caught him by a front and hind leg. The heavy animal hung precariously for a brief time until, with great effort, we achieved better grips.

  When a dozen F/A-22 Raptor stealth fighters streaked in, three flights of four, I found new confidence. I had no doubt they were our own made-mostly-in-the-good-‘ol-U.S.A aircraft. But I’d had no idea there were that many of these next generation fighter planes in existence, and that they were even beyond prototype. I had been gone a long time.

  They fired four more of their missiles that darted toward their targets. The SU-27s dispersed in short order and in unison, avoiding the incoming missiles.

  The Flankers returned missiles to the Raptors. Some of their rockets came so close to the Raptors, a couple appeared to even go through the fast moving fighter planes. But none hit their targets, and the missiles either disappeared from sight or exploded on a mountain ridge. When they fired their missiles again, the results were similar, except two that seemed to pass through the F/A-22s struck an SU-27 coming up from the other side, destroying it in a huge fireball. The Flanker flying on the downed aircraft’s wing returned fire, one of its missiles also harmlessly penetrating an F/A-22 Raptor, but striking another SU-27. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. It didn’t make sense—the Flankers seemed to be shooting at each other, downing their own comrades.

  And Sunny was cheering.

  The damaged Flanker lost one wing to its comrade’s exploding missile, and it spiraled down, its two pilots ejecting out to apparent safety.

  “They’re confused!” Sunny yelled to me. “They don’t understand why they don’t see the Raptors on their radar screens—why they can’t get a weapon’s lock—why their missiles are all missing. I’ll bet their scared shitless!” She laughed.

  The Flanker pilots weren’t the only ones confused.

  With the SU-27s in utter disarray, the two jumbo jets were just making the mountain ridge two miles to our left. That ridge would help protect them from nuclear destruction.

  Four of the F/A-22s cruised nearby apparently guarding their exit, and the last of the SU-27 Flankers streaked over a far mountain ridge, driven from the area. I imagined the Flankers would be regrouping. But then, after what they’d just been through, we might not have to deal with them again.

  After reaching the other side of the protective ridge, the jumbo jets dove out of sight, and the last flight of four F/A-22 Raptors banked sharply and disappeared from view. I felt incredible relief that the thousands of Gold Rush residents had overcome the impossible and made it this far.

  But our air show wasn’t over. From the direction the Raptors had come, a flight of four World War II vintage P-51 mustangs buzzed in, painted black and yellow like bumble bees. Behind them were four P-40 Warhawks, Flying Tigers complete with shark’s mouth paint job. As soon as they disappeared over the mountain ridge, three World War I era SPAD biplanes droned into view, headed in the same direction. I had to shake my head in disbelief.

  The next plane that appeared was the kicker—a single biplane, simple in design making me think of the Wright’s Model A.

  We seemed to be directly in its flight path, and as it neared, I was concerned it would fly too close. But it kept coming. Now, I could see two people in the open aircraft. They sat side-by-side, wearing the old leather pilot’s caps and goggles.

  “What are they doing?” I yelled out above the helicopter’s roar.

  Sunny turned to see them, and her only reaction was a smile that I took as one a proud mother would give her child.

  Surely Jax would divert the helicopter before we met the small plane. But our helicopter stayed its course.

  Gripping the dog tightly and realizing a midair collision was imminent, I stared at the slowly approaching antique biplane.

  I gritted my teeth, seeing the pilots.

  They were both smiling.

  The small biplane loomed before us.

  I could read their names on the front of their aviator’s hats. Wilbur one said. The other Orville. They still smiled like crazed Japanese baka pilots—kamikazes.

  Collision imminent, I braced myself protectively against Sunny.

  Bright lights from the ground—perhaps three spaced a considerable distance apart—blinded me.

  The Wright Brothers’ classic plane passed through us, and the intense lights were gone.

  There was no impact, no turbulence, not even additional prop wash from the small craft’s push prop.

  I turned to watch it edge away. In a few seconds, it dimmed and disappeared—not flying out of range of sight, or behind the mountains. It just vanished.

  Sunny was still smiling, straining to help hold Sarge. “I pieced it together pretty quickly,” she said and turned to me. “Didn’t have time to edit that last part out. But it worked. Holographic aviation models.”

  I looked at her perplexed.

  “The DHID. It’s a large-scale, dynamic hologram illumination device. I designed it. What you just saw was its first practical field testing.”

  The F/A-22s were mere holograms—the Aurora, the Wright plane? Impressive, it was, but I had little time to be impressed. My hold on Sarge grew weaker, and I wouldn’t be able to manage it much longer even with Sunny’s help. We each had one arm still hooked in the cargo net and the other around the shepherd. The dog didn’t struggle and was obediently calm, but he was a big dog. I hoped we would clear the danger and find a safe place to put down soon.

  I turned to find our last hurdle directly in front of us. We approached the ridge much too low. I suspected the crest’s altitude was near, if not over, the helicopter’s ceiling with such a heavy payload. If there were more time, we could set down, get into the helicopter and leave the cargo net full of valuable records. But we would be lucky to make the ridge in time as it was.

  The chopper’s rotor accelerated to its maximum and the twin-engine turbos rapped loud and tight. We climbed, steadily, but so terribly slow, I set my jaw as if that would help. We neared the ridgeline—two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty.

  Gunny Sampson stuck his head out, looked up at the ridge, then back at us. He seemed to be listening over his shoulder. He looked down at us, made a hooking motion with his arm and then held it to his chest, signaling for us to hold on.

  Sampson showed us ten fingers. Then nine. Then eight. He counted down the time to the first nuclear bomb’s detonation. At seven, Sampson gave a quick salute and ducked back inside. Sunny and I embraced and held onto Sarge like we were about to ride a roller coaster to Hell.

  I counted down the first explosion in my head as I looked into Sunny’s eyes, remembering that there would be yet a second detonation five seconds following it.

  Five.

  We weren’t going to make it, fifty yards from the ridge, the helicopter seeming sluggish, now, at its limit and barely creeping higher.

  Four.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  Three.

  She yelled back, “And I love you. Forever.”

  Two.

  We kissed.

  One.

  I held Sunny close and watched over her shoulder as the bomb buried deep within Mount Rainy exploded five miles away. The entire Biotronics facility pushed out from the mountain, mostly in one piece for a fraction of a second. A forceful conflagration followed, fire and smoke engulfing and pulverizing to dust and ashes anything that had been recognizable, launching fiery debris miles into the air. Then the shockwave came, like a thousand-mile-an-hour freight train of destruction, it rolled down from the leveled mountainside toward
the town before me. The ground buckled in huge waves, racing toward us. Buildings and homes tossed, crumbled. I knew we had only a couple of seconds before the second explosion annihilated us also—it was less than two miles away and above ground. Although that blast was imminent, I feared the tsunami of earth that shoved toward us from the first one, now streaking up the hillside below, toppling large trees and tossing boulders into the air under our feet. Then, it hit.

  The shockwave struck us with an incredible gust of hot wind, and the helicopter flew wildly, nearly out of control, being pushed up toward the rocky crest.

  Somehow, we topped the rim, our cargo net scraping against the rocks, sending us into a tumultuous spin.

  Seemingly gaining some control after cresting, Jax forced the helicopter into a severe dive over the backside of the ridge, and I felt it in my stomach.

  Chapter 40

  The light is blinding.

  The shockwave of the closer, above ground bomb follows much quicker and hits us as if we’ve struck a concrete embankment.

  I lose Sunny and Sarge in the dust cloud and only know I’m falling. Evergreen limbs lash at me time and time again, and I land on a mattress of pine needles. The wind is incredible, burning hot, yellow with pungent smoke and ash, and dark with dust.

  * * *

  A moment passed before I realized a body lay across me, and I prayed it was a living one.

  “Sunny,” I called out, the sound of a hundred tornadoes engulfing us.

  “I’m here, Dan,” she yelled. “I’m right here. I’m okay, sweetheart.”

  I was sure she was delusional, and I was disappointed the first name she called was her husband’s.

  As the wind calmed and the air cleared enough for us to see the eighteen inches separating our faces, I said, “Sunny, it’s me, Robert.”

  I noticed her sweatshirt torn at the right shoulder, and I inspected her skin for an injury.

  She smiled at me. “Danny,” she said and touched my face. “We made it.”

  She hadn’t heard me. “Sunny, I’m Robert.”

  I noticed the mole on her right shoulder. It was the mole missing from Michelle’s shoulder. It was the sexy mole I wanted to see there, the one Harvey—Sunny—had pointed out wasn’t on Michelle’s skin.

  Her face straightened. She looked seriously into my eyes. “Sweetheart. Don’t you know? There is no Robert Weller. You’re Daniel McMaster. You’re my husband.”

  I blinked in surprise, trying to piece it all together, and we kissed, but as we did, I couldn’t help but analyze and question what she was telling me.

  When we pulled back, I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Danny, would you have believed me? Or would you’ve thought I was nuts and pushed me away?”

  “I don’t know.” For only the second time since this morning, I knew what I was being told was the truth.

  “I wasn’t sure at first,” she said. “Everyone thought you were some kind of brainwashed duplicate or clone that only looked a little like you. Then, when I saw you in the park I knew it. That little nose job and the hair die they gave you couldn’t fool me—they even added pigment to your eyes to change them to brown.”

  I touched my hair and then felt the bridge of my nose.

  “I knew for sure in the morgue when I saw the dark spot between your thumb and forefinger. It was such a small detail, they had no reason to duplicate it. But I knew it was from pencil lead. You’d told me about the third-grade bully that stabbed you with a pencil when you were defending a little girl classmate. You’ve had the graphite scar ever since. Even after I saw the proof, it was easy to pretend Robert and Dan were two different people. You were always so critical of yourself. But that doesn’t matter, now. We made it through the tough part. Now we’ve got to get home.”

  But I didn’t know where home was.

  The radioactivity was worrisome. I glanced around at the dust. The blast had dissipated the snow cover that had been there only a minute before. “Radiation in the dust,” I told her. “We’re being poisoned.”

  “We were several miles from the blast,” she said as if she knew what she was talking about. “The fallout yet to come will probably be worse than what’s in the air now. They have potassium iodide treatments now, and new drugs made from turtle’s blood.” She smiled. “Maybe we can be guinea pigs.”

  “Turtle’s blood?” I shook my head and patted her knee, a great relief beginning to set in. “Sounds like a slow remedy. Think we can talk them into using greyhound blood instead?”

  She kept her smile and put her arm on my shoulder.

  Whether we’d be affected permanently or even fatally by the radiation would depend upon how much we’d inhaled and were now inhaling. After tearing a sleeve from the opposite arm of my now already tattered, dark-blue fatigue shirt, I ripped it into two strips and fashioned makeshift dust masks out of the two pieces. We quickly put them to our faces and helped each other tie them around our heads.

  In the meantime, Sarge came trotting up, whining and wagging his tail anxiously, and we both greeted him with enthusiasm, joyful he was alive.

  “He’s yours,” Sunny said.

  I could have guessed. I hugged the dog. Sunny began to tear her right sleeve off the rest of the way, and I helped her. We made a scarf over Sarge’s muzzle, and I was a little surprised he didn’t seem to mind playing our version of nuclear-fallout dress-up.

  “What now?” Sunny asked, stroking the dog’s neck.

  I remembered the map the dying helicopter pilot had given me, the one that was taken away from me at Biotronics. I was wearing the fatigues of the guy who had stuffed the map into his pocket. I unsnapped one of the side thigh pockets and reached inside. The map was still there. I pulled it out, and unfolded the laminated paper.

  Sunny asked, “Where’s Jax?”

  “Jax was piloting the chopper. I hope they made it okay. I don’t want to find their wreckage.”

  “That wind was so bad,” Sunny said.

  I nodded back, translating the frown that accompanied her words—that Jax and everyone in the helicopter might have run out of luck.

  “Where do we go?” she asked.

  I kept the large topographical chart folded in quarters for convenience and ran my finger over it. None of the places looked familiar on this section. The names were all wrong. I tried to sound out a couple, but I couldn’t to my satisfaction. Then, Sunny pointed to a hand-drawn circle near the middle of the map and the hand-printed words Gold Rush.

  “There,” she said.

  I searched near her finger, trying to find Summitview, but couldn’t, not even penciled in. Couldn’t find Denver, or Colorado Springs, or Estes Park.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked glaring at the map. “This isn’t Colorado!”

  Sunny gazed at me, dumbfounded. “Oh, Danny, I’m sorry. I took for granted you knew by now.”

  The sound of the helicopter drawing near uplifted my heart. The chopper’s rotor kicked up dust once again as I found on the map a machine-printed name that looked, sounded familiar. I’d heard it somewhere, but never associated with Colorado. I read it aloud, “Qinghai Province.”

  I thought of the POWs, Dr. Yumi and the Falon Gong, and the Flanker fighter jets.

  Sunny was smiling at something downhill, and I turned to find out what it was. Through the dust, a man emerged wearing a flight helmet and a big smile. It was Jax. An image formed quickly in my mind. This one wasn’t framed by some sort of viewing screen, and I immediately realized it was a scrap of actual memory. I remembered this same smiling face without the helmet, Jax wearing a tux, handing me a ring, huge flowers all around. I recalled taking the ring and turning to the woman to my left—Sunny, smiling big, sublimely warm eyes. I remembered the feeling inside my chest—how I compared it then to the first time I stepped from a jet at 20,000 feet for a HALO parachute jump. The memory made me smile.

  I looked down at the map and unfolded it completely.

&n
bsp; A word was printed at the top in large letters.

  CHINA.

  Chapter 41

  My mind numbed.

  When Jax stepped up, he said, “Looks like we lost most of your records of proof.”

  I scanned about us, and in the slowly clearing air, I saw the broken cargo net draped halfway over a small twisted pine tree. A few sheets of paper were stuck to it, and some danced in the dust around us. Several busted video cassettes lay scattered at the base of the tree along with empty cardboard file boxes. Two of Jax’s men were picking up what they could quickly gather.

  I pointed to my temple. “It’s all up here.”

  Sunny, pulled her scarf down and said to Jax, her face beaming, “It’s him, Jax, Dan!”

  He returned her smile, and his eyes met mine. “I know. Known it since Sarge greeted him at the chopper, and then he started telling me what had to be done.” He chuckled as did I.

  Two more flights of four jet fighters streaked in overhead, as Jax and Sampson helped Sunny, Sarge and me to the helicopter.

  Sunny and I looked at Jax questioningly. He relieved us both when he said, “They’re ours. F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Abraham Lincoln in the Bay of Bengal. They’re going to escort us out.”

  Several explosions came from the distance, and again I looked at Jax for an answer to my unspoken question.

  “Cruise missiles armed with electromagnetic charges. They’re making sure we did a good job of knocking out all the radar on the way in. We’re pretty popular now. Got lots of friends in high places. President Mason is on our side. We’ve an AWACs monitoring our egress, a C-130 Black Talon meeting us halfway and flying point to the border, and there’s a KC-135 on standby to refuel us when we cross.”

  “But China, Jax. They’ve got lots of defenses—and offenses. How can we possibly make it through? We’re liable to start war.”

  “Just be concerned with getting out of here, now. Let the big boys worry about the war business. The Navy’s been sending in all kinds of decoys—unmanned drones with big radar signatures. They’ve been hammering the Chinese communications and defensive radar network with EM charges on cruise missiles for the past ten minutes. We’re hoping we can keep them confused long enough to slip away.”