Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  They stood shoulder to shoulder under the flapping white-plastic dome tent. Aluminum girders stretched in arcs above their heads, the rolling garage door open just enough to walk through crouched over. Two of the other domed plastic buildings along the airstrip were also intact, but empty of aircraft, while at the edges of the field a collection of single and two-engine planes laid scattered, all with some crippling damage, and all covered in layers of ash and ice. But the Cessna under this domed structure looked pristine, or at least, not destroyed by Nomad.

  “These things are workhorses. Probably thirty years old, but I can’t see any damage.”

  Raffa spoke quickly to Giovanni, nodding and gesticulating, and opened the pilot-side door. He climbed inside and dipped beneath the instrument panel, unscrewing part of the cowling.

  “What’s he doing?” Jess asked.

  Giovanni paused, then said, “He thinks he might be able to, how do you say, hotwire it?”

  “In here?”

  “We’ll pull it outside. Starting it is the only way we can find out if the engine works.”

  “If Raffa can get it going.”

  “Help me push.” Giovanni knelt to grab the door handle and pushed the door to the hangar fully up. Raffa jumped out and pulled the orange chocks free from the wheels.

  The Mediterranean was not visible from this ridge overlooking Civitavecchia, yet she felt the sea looming next to them. She half-expected it to swell again, drown them in freezing water. In the morning she was happy to break camp and get away from the shore. She understood what the ragtag groups, that came to them begging food, meant when they said they feared the water.

  She feared it now, too.

  The airstrip was on a plateau a thousand feet up in altitude and a mile back from the sea. After discovering the intact Cessna this morning, they decided to make camp in the hangar next to it. Leone took charge and organized a second camp for the people that appeared from the mist. They were as thirsty as they were hungry, and Rita seemed keen to help.

  Or keen to have Raffa see her helping them, Jess thought gently.

  She was about to join the men in pushing the plane out of the hangar when Roger came swaggering around the corner, smiling. He was clear-eyed this morning.

  “No need, my friends.” He held his arms up. Keys jangled in one hand. “I broke into the offices at the end of the runway and busted open the lock box.” He inspected the nametag on the keys. “And this is a 1981 Cessna 182RG, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.” Jess frowned at Giovanni—as though to ask who’s-this-guy?—before realizing: “Holy Christ, it’s more than a decade older than me.”

  “Lucky thing, too,” Roger pointed out. “The 182RG has a range of a thousand miles with a hundred and seventy knot cruise speed. That’s about two hundred miles an hour of wind speed. I found the manual with the keys. I think I’ll take her for a spin.”

  “In the air?”

  “Why not?”

  “For one; the runway is full of snow,” said Giovanni.

  “I just walked it going to the buildings. It’s covered in ice, but most of the snow has blown off. Maybe an inch or two of hard pack still clinging. I kicked aside all the big debris.” He pointed at the Cessna. “And it’s got oversize tires for rough field takeoff and landing. Cold like this, I only need to get up to 55 knots. I’ll float her up and around and do a bump and run.”

  “You seriously want to fly this thing?”

  “Another hour and we won’t be able to.” The clouds were thickening, fat snowflakes starting to fall. “No other way to really know if she’s airworthy. And you want to get out of here, right?”

  “I’m going to come with you,” Jess said.

  “That is not a good idea.” Giovanni held his hands out, miming a wall. “No way.”

  “Because it’s not yours?” Roger said.

  “Because it’s too dangerous.”

  Roger took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, okay? Let me make it up. I’m good at this. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?”

  A squall of wind brought swirling snow-devils of flakes into the hangar. “We ain’t gonna be flying tomorrow, maybe not the next day, either. You know a bit about this, Giovanni, right? About flying?”

  He waited for a nod before continuing, “If this thing flies, then we spend the snow days doing flight plans. And anyway, it’s my neck.” He held up one hand, jerking his head sideways as if it was caught in an invisible noose, his tongue dangling loose from his mouth.

  “The sooner we have a plan the better,” Jess said. “If you think you can, go ahead.”

  “This is reckless.” Giovanni turned, shaking his head, but he motioned for Roger to get into the plane. “But you take it up by yourself first. Jess, you don’t go on the first run.”

  “All right then.”

  Stepping onto the wing strut, Roger swung himself up into the Cessna’s cockpit. “Even a full tank of gas,” he observed as he scanned the gages. He put the key into the ignition. “Everyone, stand back. Okay, magnetos and solenoids on…”

  The plane’s engine wheezed, then emitted a high-pitched whine. The propeller began to spin, a loud tock-tock-tock knocking from the engine, and then a growl, the propeller whirring into a blur before the knock-knocking again and the propeller froze in place.

  “…okay, let’s try that…”

  Tock-tock-tock knocked the engine and the propeller spun around in jerky circles again before the engine growled to life, this time the roar deepening and soaring in pitch. Roger gave a thumbs-up and closed the airplane’s door, pausing to strap himself in before gunning the engine again. A cloud of dust, snow and debris rushed into the back of the hangar from the prop wash, sending Jess and Raffa and Giovanni coughing to escape ahead of the aircraft.

  The Cessna followed behind them, the engine almost deafening at this close range. Jess clapped her hands over her ears. Grinning at them, his thumb up again, Roger angled the rear rudder and turned the plane onto the runway. Everyone emptied from the hangar-camp a hundred yards away, with Elsa and Rita holding back Hector, who tried to run to Jess.

  The engine whined to a higher pitch and the Cessna began to bump along the runway, gaining speed. It bounced and lurched from side to side, hitting chunks of ice and lumps of snow. More than once, Jess thought a wing tip was going to hit the ground, but Roger kept it centered, and with two bounces it jumped up into the air, twin tornadoes of snowflakes rippling off its wingtips. The Cessna’s nose jerked upward, then straightened out. The air grew still, the noise subsiding into the whistle of the wind brushing snow across the ice, the Cessna disappearing into the gray-white fog of snow.

  Jess became aware of her breathing, that her labored breaths were sending puffs of white vapor into the air. Her heart pounded. She could hardly believe Roger managed to get into the air, it seemed impossible.

  “You think he’s coming back?” Giovanni said quietly.

  “Where else would he go?”

  No noise now, just the flapping of the torn hangar fabric. Then a faint whine, like a wasp's, to their left.

  “There!” Jess pointed toward the sea.

  Through the twisting clouds of snow, the Cessna appeared and disappeared, the buzz of its engine growing louder again. They all turned, as if attached by an invisible string to the airplane in the sky, mesmerized. The small plane swung around in the distance, gaining altitude, then lined up with the runway, it’s engine coming down in pitch, the wings swinging from side to side in the cross wind. It roared past them and bumped once, twice, three times off the icy runway before it settled into a rumbling roll.

  The Cessna turned on the runway and made its way back toward them.

  Roger leaned out the window, thumb up, a wide grin on his face. “Jess, you want that flying lesson now?”

  “What’s your man up to, I wonder?” the blond-haired Englishman said, passing the binoculars back to Salman.

  “Gaining their trust,” the old I
talian replied.

  He took the binoculars and focused on Roger and Jess getting out of the Cessna. They gave each other a high-five. The snowfall was thickening and had allowed them just enough time to make another flight.

  From this perch in the second floor of a building, what was once a bakery, across the road from the airfield, he was having trouble seeing through the two hundred yards of distance to watch Giovanni and Raffa push the airplane back into the hangar.

  “I thought your man was supposed to keep them down at the water?”

  “He was to keep them in this town.”

  “Not what you told me yesterday. And now, they have the capacity to fly away.” The Englishman fluttered his fingers in the air. “Do you think someone else in that ragtag assemblage can fly an airplane? Why did your man take it up?”

  Salman put the binoculars down. He took one hand out of a glove to test the cracked skin over his cleft lip. “I told you—”

  “That does look uncomfortable, old chap—”

  “I grow tired of you.”

  “As I do of you.” The Englishman dusted off the lapels of his woolen overcoat. “And I’m equally tired of this cat and mouse.”

  “They go nowhere in this snow. They are trapped—”

  “Unless they decide to fly away.”

  “Nobody is flying away.”

  “They better not be, on that we can agree.”

  “Why don’t you make your contacts again? They have flying machines, yes?”

  “You’re not so sure, are you? Which is why you have me as a partner. I can make copies of whatever Ms. Rollins has in that bag. Create backups. Safety, my friend, is why you need me.”

  “As soon as the snow stops, we do this my way,” Salman said, his voice low and menacing. “We go, and we take them.”

  “Not your way. Too blunt. No, no, no. You don’t put a frog into boiling water. You heat it up slowly. It struggles less, unaware of the creeping danger.”

  “So what is your way?”

  “Divide and conquer, old boy.” The Englishman smiled a greasy grin. “But the frog still boils.”

  15

  A THUNDERCLAP SPLIT the heavens, a tearing, cracking sound followed by a roaring boom. The hairs on Jess’s arm prickled as the interior of the hangar strobed white in staccato bursts, electricity rippling through the air in the Range Rover. The rumble echoed outside, fading, the slap and tremor of the wind tearing at the torn flaps of the hangar’s stretched fabric. She held Hector in her lap, and he gripped her tight, his breathing ragged.

  “It’s okay,” she cooed, kissing his forehead. “It’s just the thundersnow. We’re safe. Try to sleep.”

  She adjusted the nest of blankets in the back seat to cover him. They’d parked inside the second hangar, a hundred feet from the one with the Cessna in it, in an attempt to escape the maelstrom raging outside. The new snow was already two-feet deep, the last time Jess checked, with snowdrifts as high as she was next to the hangar’s door. That was an hour ago.

  “What if we fly straight to Palermo?” Giovanni stabbed one finger at the map of Italy spread haphazard across the driver seat and steering wheel.

  He leaned over the seat to get a better look. A dim red light seeped from a headlamp attached to the Range Rover’s sun visor. The red light setting conserved battery power, but it was hard on the eyes, and made distinguishing colors almost impossible.

  “That’s five hundred kilometers over open water. No way.” Roger had a pad and stack of books in his lap, a pen in his hand. Notes and calculations were scribbled across the paper. The map was in kilometers, the airplane specs in knots and nautical miles.

  “You said the 182RG has a range of 1500 kilometers.”

  “1550 kilometers with 93 gallons of grade-three jet fuel, at a cruise speed of one-seven-three knots.” Roger tapped the manual.

  “So that’s what, two hours in the air?”

  “You ever done any cross country flights? We can’t do IFR. For one thing, there are no airport transponders working. Or at least, I’d doubt it. This is going to be all visual, and water doesn’t have a lot of fixed visual reference points.”

  “What about these islands?”

  “You want to try and find islands by dead reckoning? We need to fly city by city, one reference point at a time.” Roger held out two fingers and rotated them in the air.

  “But we might not even be able to recognize cities,” Giovanni pointed out.

  “Big piles of rubble miles across sitting on the coasts, covered in snow. Easy to see from the air.”

  “But going that way adds hundreds of kilometers of distance.”

  Thunder cracked and boomed outside again, the flashes of lightening revealing the tents huddled outside the truck.

  Roger snorted and leaned back in the passenger side seat. “Do you know why you don’t fly over water in a single engine plane?”

  “In case the single engine fails. I’m no idiot.”

  “When you fly over water, you always keep enough altitude to be able to glide back to land if the engine fails. From fifteen thousand feet, with the glide ratio of this Cessna, that’ll give you…nine nautical miles. Ten statute miles, sixteen kilometers.”

  “But if we have to land anywhere”—Giovanni swept his finger along the western edge of Italy’s coastline—“we’re dead. If that engine fails, we’re not getting airborne again.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But do you want to be dead dead? Because that’s what will happen out here.” He pointed at the water on the map. “Along the coast, I guarantee I can land that thing, and then we’ll just be back to this.” He did his best to smile ironically.

  “We fly over land,” Jess whispered, trying to add something to the conversation. This wasn’t her field of expertise, one of the reasons she insisted on Roger taking her up for a flight, even if it scared the hell out of her. “We minimize risk.”

  “Except we can’t avoid this last stretch.” Roger pointed his pen at the tip of Sicily, then moved it across the map to a town called Keliba on the coast of Tunisia. “That’s a hundred miles of open water.”

  “Eighty.”

  “No, it’s a hundred.” Roger waved his pen back and forth from one point to the other.

  “You just said we could glide almost ten miles from full altitude. So ten miles out, we can glide back…and ten miles from the coast on the other side, we could glide and make it. So only eighty miles in between that’s a water landing.”

  Roger wagged his head from side to side and conceded the point. “You catch on quick.”

  “And soon that open water may be solid,” Giovanni said. “Sea ice is forming fast.”

  “But we can make it?” Jess kept her voice low. Hector squirmed in her lap. Outside, the wind gained urgency, slapping the loose flaps of hangar tarp in rattling bursts like machine gun fire.

  Roger leaned forward, his face coming from the shadows into the dim red glow. “Good news is that it’s cold.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “For a small airplane like the Cessna. The air is denser, gives more lift, more to dig into. Lowers the stall speed, and makes it easier to take off and land in short distances. Usually less turbulence too, although in this case”—he paused and listened to the thrum of the wind across the hangar’s metal frame—“I'm not sure if that’s true. And there's less chance of the carburetor freezing. Cruise speed of one-seven-three knots is three hundred twenty kilometers an hour. That’s fast for a single-engine. So that’s all good news.”

  Giovanni picked up the map. He angled the plastic ruler they’d found in the Cessna’s glove box onto the map surface. “Two hundred kilometers to Naples, two hundred more to Paola, then three hundred to Palermo. From there it’s three hundred more—”

  “—mostly across open water—”

  “—to Tunisia.” Giovanni frowned at Roger. “That’s a thousand kilometers. Three hours at three hundred kilometers an hour.”

  “If all goes according to plan
.”

  “So what’s the bad news?” Jess asked.

  “Sure, airspeed is two hundred miles an hour, but we’ll be fighting that.” He pointed up. The wind howled.

  “It’s coming mostly from the north, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Wind tends to shift direction from surface winds to winds at altitude. Sometimes ninety degrees. And those thick clouds that’re blocking out all our sun? Maybe two thousand foot ceiling, at best. More like a thousand most of the time. Not enough to climb over these coastal ranges.”

  “So then you climb into the clouds for a bit.”

  “You know what’s in those?”

  Jess shook her head. “What?”

  “I don’t know either, but I bet it’s full of ash.”

  “I thought you said that just stopped jets from working in it.”

  “It’ll drop a jet, for sure, but I bet it’ll cause havoc with the pistons and injectors if we fly this thing through it long enough. And no VFR if we climb into—”

  “VFR?”

  “Visual flight reference,” Giovanni said.

  Roger nodded, smiling. “Very good. Means we’re eyeballing it the whole way with very little in the way of instruments to help.”

  “What about the compass?”

  “You had a look at one lately? Not sure south is south anymore. I’ve been watching mine, looking at this map today. I think Nomad messed with the Earth’s magnetic field. It switches from time to time, you know. North to south and south to north every few tens of millions of years. I think another gift from Nomad is a pole reversal. And it’s not like we’ll be getting any weather reports. We hit bad weather, we gotta put her down.”

  “So we can’t do this? Is that what you’re saying?” Jess couldn’t help her voice rising. Give her a mountain to climb, she could get up it, one step at a time, and then even jump off it. But airplanes were never her thing.

  “We can do it. Like Giovanni said, three hours of flying and we’re out of here to somewhere warm. Or, warmer at least. I’m just highlighting the danger.”

  “Maybe we can we use the parachutes?”