“The attack at Schriever?” Lev prompted.
After turning a one-eighty and peering down the street for a long three-count, Daymon pointed to a whitewashed church and two-story house sharing the fenced-in lot due east of it. Regarding the others, he said, “Let’s go on a little hike and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Chapter 17
A handful of minutes after the Stealth Chinook pulled out of the slow menacing orbit over Bear River, Cade knew there was no way Colorado Springs was its next destination. For one thing, the sun remained in relatively the same position as it had been since the first course correction that saw them follow 16 and ultimately arrive over the small town. Albeit sitting a little higher in the sky, the sun was still parked off the helo’s port side at roughly eleven o’ clock to the nose and barely showing through the veil of high clouds. That they were heading mostly south now versus southeast was a given. That the Rangers and crew chief didn’t seem concerned they weren’t tracking on more of an easterly heading led Cade to believe the waypoints had been set in long ago and the place they’d ultimately be landing was familiar to everyone aboard.
***
Now, forty-five minutes later, the helo, call sign Nomad One-One, a nugget of info Cade had gleaned from eavesdropping on the pilot’s chatter, was bleeding both altitude and airspeed.
Even as the ground rushed by outside the window at a dizzying clip, the rotor noise and turbine whine seemed to have diminished. On the sage-dotted tan and ochre desert floor, cacti, tumbleweeds, and scattered islands of upthrust, snow-crusted red rock blipped by. Now and again on a distant road paralleling their flight path, the sun glinting off dusty chrome and glass would draw Cade’s attention to colorful knots of stalled-out cars. Some were small caravans piled high with worldly goods and most likely had been stranded due to mechanical failure or lack of fuel. Others were victims to major pileups, the vehicles involved forever locked in embraces of twisted metal or burned to shells where they had come to rest. With first responders suffering the brunt of the casualties those first hours of the outbreak, it came as no surprise to Cade that nobody had come with tanker trucks full of water and brandishing jaws of life to extricate the victims—some of which still sat inside, dim silhouettes thrashing around in reaction to the passing helo.
Cade had been transfixed on the scenery outside his window and was caught completely unaware when the bottom suddenly fell out from under him. One second there was gravity pressing him into his fold-down seat. In the next—having just learned the hard way that the desert floor was actually the top of a red rock mesa—he found himself momentarily weightless with the horizon outside seeming to rear up as the helicopter dove over the unseen precipice.
Collecting his stomach from his throat, Cade swallowed hard and swept his gaze around the cabin just as the helo leveled and turned hard to starboard. Unlike the sudden drop, the turn came as one fluid motion that had the crew chief and everyone aboard pressed hard into their seats.
“Gonna puke?” mouthed Spielman.
Cade didn’t afford him the satisfaction of an answer. No way he was earning a puker patch today. If Ari throwing him around in the Ghost Hawk hadn’t earned him one, there was nothing the Night Stalker pilot at the controls of this exotic craft could do to make him succumb.
After wiping the bead of sweat from his upper lip, Cade craned around and resumed watching the dead world blip by. A tick later the pilot said, “Bastion Actual, Nomad One-One … how copy?”
Bastion replied at once. “Good copy, Nomad. Bastion Actual requesting a SITREP.”
“Bastion Actual, we are conducting a standoff flyby of GJR and will continue west. Incoming with two KIA. Clear us a spot at the table.”
Simultaneously, there was silence in Cade’s flight helmet and off the port side a small city he recognized came into view. Just like he remembered it from before: whole neighborhoods on its periphery were completely razed by fire. Grand Junction Regional—a place both he and Taryn knew all too well—sat silent and somber off the craft’s nose. On the near side of the medium-sized airport, throngs of zombies—just clusters of small black dots from this distance—patrolled the runways and tarmacs with impunity.
A different voice sounded in Cade’s helmet: “I’m picking up zero heat signatures.” Cade assumed it to be the co-pilot in the left-hand seat operating an infrared camera and relaying his observation to the pilot in the right-hand seat. And he had a good idea why the low-level flight was necessary, even this close to a United States military outpost. Though the Chinese Special Forces scouts he had come across in Huntsville had been infected, it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that there were more of them out there who may be armed with FN-6 MANPADs (Man Portable Air-Defense Systems), China’s newest lightweight shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Similar to the U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles the Afghani Mujahedeen employed against Russia’s heavily armored MI-24 Hind helicopters with such ruthless efficiency, the FN-6 packed more than enough punch to knock down this bird. So if low-level-flight and the occasional stomach-churning maneuver associated with it was deemed necessary to stave off even the most remote possibility of facing one of the lethal weapons, Cade was all for it.
“Copy that,” came the reply in Cade’s headset from some soldier in charge back at Forward Observation Base Bastion. The voice was gravelly and accented, therefore not his old friend and mentor Greg Beeson, who last he heard was still in charge of the lonely outpost.
Minutes after giving Grand Junction Regional the promised flyby, Nomad One-One overflew the small unincorporated town of Loma and continued on a die-straight westerly heading that saw the dead towns of Loma, Fruita, and Mack, Colorado slide by underneath the helo.
Nearly straddling the border with Utah and a short drive from FOB Bastion, Mack was where he and the Kids had liberated the Ford Raptor from the vehicle lift inside the 4x4 shop. Mack was also where Cade had come across the two-story Craftsman so closely resembling his childhood home back in Portland. The long dormant memories that brief in and out had dredged up had stuck with him for some time. And though from where he sat he couldn’t pick out the particular house that had momentarily transported him back to a time before all of this madness had begun, he knew the place was down there somewhere, just as he had left it: quiet, dark, and longing for the family whose uneaten breakfast still sat forlornly on the table nestled in the little eating nook.
With the melancholy from revisiting that day still wending its way through his head and heart, FOB Bastion—formerly Mack Mesa Municipal Airport—was creeping into view at the forward edge of his small window.
No longer a lonely and hastily thrown together outpost, Bastion’s south side had swallowed up untold acres of flat land and now bordered Interstate 70, the four-lane running east all the way to Colorado, Springs and west all the way to Cove Fort, Utah.
Seeing the surprise in Cade’s narrowed eyes, or perhaps having seen countless other returnees gape at the changes, Sergeant Spielman said, “She’s come a long way, hasn’t she.”
Cade looked the length of the helo, nodded, and flashed a quick thumbs-up.
The crew chief was right. Once a postage-stamp-parcel of land—by airport standards—Bastion now rivaled GJR in both size and complexity. Judging by the aircraft and support vehicles scattered about the base periphery, the place probably had the ability to sustain round-the-clock combat operations if needs be.
The Rangers’ body language told Cade they’d already been-there and done that where FOB Bastion was concerned. The ones who were still awake remained stoic—holding that thousand-yard stare Cade was all too familiar with on whatever they’d been looking at when Spielman offered up his inane observation. Small talk. Cade despised it, for the most part. There was a time and place, but not here with two dead Rangers lying on the cabin floor.
Still, to a man, the Ranger chalk didn’t seem fazed.
So Cade saw no reason to share his bitter feelings about the matter with the SOAR
load master. Which was a good thing. Because the unease over being kept in the dark by Nash was beginning to push at the edges of the vacuum in his mind where he kept all of those type of emotions bottled up. And the second that seal got breached, the offending party was going to wish they hadn’t gone there.
The helo suddenly popped over a stand of trees and buzzed a football-field-sized grave containing thousands of grotesquely twisted corpses.
Cade crossed himself and returned his gaze to the looming base. The closer the helicopter got, the taller the fence surrounding Bastion seemed. Might have been the extra rolls of razor wire added to the top that gave the illusion, but Cade couldn’t be certain. One other thing that stood out starkly since he’d been here last was the addition of a half-dozen real guard towers. The sturdy twenty-foot-tall items had taken the place of the sheet-plywood and two-by-four treehouse-gone-wrong-looking jobs that Beeson’s boys had thrown up in haste around the tiny airstrip those first days.
To be honest, the place now had the look and feel of some of the more secure FOBs Cade had had the displeasure of passing time in during his multiple stints in the Sandbox.
In his ear, Cade heard the same gravelly voice give directions on where to land to the SOAR pilots up front.
In response, Nomad One-One swung around the east entrance, overflew the interstate and entered the base airspace from the south, low and slow. Splitting the two perimeter guard towers like a goalpost, the helo’s flat underbelly cleared the top roll of razor wire, flared, and Cade heard the muted sounds of something mechanical at work underfoot. Next there was a series of thunks immediately followed by a slight ripple through the cabin floor as the bird’s tricycle-style landing gear locked into place. Then, running strangely quiet, the helo covered the next hundred yards to the designated landing pad at a slow, level crawl barely a dozen feet off the cement apron.
This kind of approach was far different from how Ari would have brought them in. However, Cade had a feeling the sudden reduction in airspeed was to keep the craft’s rotor wash from sandblasting the contingent of soldiers he knew must be waiting for them. And he concluded after mulling it over for half a beat, the sudden halving of the engine and rotor noise was a direct result of the bigger helo sharing the same blade design and turbine exhaust routing technologies as the smaller Ghost Hawk.
Fifty yards from the flight line, the ochre, dust-covered ground gave way to black asphalt marked by painted symbols and numbers whose meaning only an aviator could fully grasp.
Then the pilot changed course starboard a few degrees and the welcoming party Cade had imagined came into view outside his window. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder to an Army chaplain and just beyond the reach of the wind-whipped haze was his old friend and commander of FOB Bastion, Major Greg Beeson. Both men wore Army-issue MultiCam fatigues, the only difference being that the man of the cloth actually had the sacred cloth draping his shoulders. Beeson had one hand clamped down on his cover, while the chaplain wore nothing on his bald head, but both of his hands were currently employed at keeping the camouflage stole from whipping his face.
Behind and to the right of the major and chaplain was a group of soldiers clad in the same fatigues and also standing at attention, no doubt an honor detail hastily assembled for the morbid task of whisking the fallen Rangers from the arriving bird to receive their last rights and then a proper burial.
Just as the helicopter settled softly on its gear atop a bright yellow circle and rolled forward a couple of yards, Cade picked out a particular shape sitting amongst the lined-up helicopters behind the welcoming party. It was angular and black and seemed to devour the sun’s rays rather than reflect them.
Simultaneously the hulking craft he was in came to a complete halt and the turbines spooled down, rendering the rotor blades whisper-quiet. A tick later, getting the attention of all aboard, a hydraulic hiss filled the cabin and the rear ramp parted from the airframe, letting in a wide bar of white sunlight and a gut-churning blast of heated air tinged with kerosene and the sickly-sweet stench of rotting bodies.
Cade waited for the honor guard to come aboard. Once the flag-draped bodies were removed from the cabin floor, the rest of the Rangers, who to a man were moving like the walking dead, filed out into the light with hands clutching weapons and full rucksacks weighting them down.
The last man in the procession, a blond staff sergeant with a bull neck and a wide angular face, stopped for a tick and regarded the man in black.
Lips set into a thin line, Cade merely held the man’s gaze. He’d been there before and most certainly would be sometime in the coming days. There were no words he could offer the Ranger that would help the man reconcile whatever he had recently gone through, so he remained silent and seated.
The crew chief came forward with Cade’s duffle bag and dropped it on the seat next to him.
After what amounted to a two-second staring contest, the Ranger shuffled off into the square of light and disappeared from view.
The crew chief followed the Ranger aft and returned with Cade’s ruck and weapon. Placing the gear on the seat, he asked, “What’s in the jock bag?”
Cade said nothing. He had hoped to keep anybody from seeing what Daymon had gone out of his way to procure for him.
“Understood,” Spielman intoned. “Beeson knows you’re here, but won’t be able to receive you. Your ride is hot. She’s number four down the flight line.”
Go directly to Springs, Cade thought. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. In reality, all he wanted from his old friend and mentor was to be able to pick the man’s brain. Find out how far inland the foreign invaders had come. Any little piece of intel he could forward on to Eden would have been better than none. But that was a moot point now, because the second the crew chief had passed along the little nugget of bad news, he remembered he didn’t have a sat-phone on his person in the first place.
Chapter 18
Although the angular black craft had projected the same sense of menace as the old MI-24 Hind attack helicopters Alexander Dregan was most familiar with, he hadn’t the slightest clue as to what make or model the helicopter was that had paid Bear River a wholly unexpected visit forty-five minutes ago. However, he was aware that anybody who had been watching the craft as it lumbered overhead—in this case the town’s entire population along with several dozen equally interested zombies lurking just outside the walls—would have had to have been blind to have not seen the low-speed, low-altitude orbits for exactly what they were. Someone was sending the denizens of Bear River a message in a very real and in-your-face way. And judging by the muted gray markings on the craft’s upswept tail, that someone had the ear of the United States Army. That the landing gear remained inside the craft’s fuselage told him whoever was sending the message had no intention of landing on Main Street and delivering it via uniformed emissary.
Seeing the multi-barrel miniguns protruding from both sides of the craft during the entire three-minute show of force had added some extra emphasis to the message. It was as if the business end of a rifle was being trained on each and every person looking skyward.
You’ve been warned, Judge Pomeroy, Dregan had thought at the time. Now he was wondering why in the hell the effusive former Salt Lake City judge hadn’t come calling to discuss the aerial intrusion. Surely he wasn’t tired of micromanaging every bit of minutiae of day-to-day survival as he’d been wont to do since his admission to Bear River a few short weeks ago.
All of Dregan’s wondering ceased the second the satellite phone in his jacket pocket emitted its shrill electronic peal. There was no way the helicopter flyby and this out-of-the-blue call from his new friends to the west—the only number he’d sought fit to program into the phone—could not be connected. So he fished the slim black device from a pocket without bothering to squint and try to read the small words on the illuminated screen and thumbed the green Talk key.
“Hello,” he said, more guttural grunt than spoken word.
“Dregan
?”
He recognized the voice on the other end. Like his, it had a unique inflection. But instead of sharing his Slavic accent, this man named Duncan spoke with a pronounced Southern drawl.
“Da,” he said. Then quickly correcting himself, added, “Yes … this is Dregan.”
“Duncan here. I bet you’re wondering who was responsible for springing the surprise airshow on y’all.”
“I know who was responsible,” Dregan answered. “The helicopter had U.S. Army markings. If I had to guess, I’d say it belonged to the 160th SOAR.”
“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” Duncan said. “You an aviator, Dregan?”
Though he wasn’t a pilot, Dregan sidestepped the question. “Before all of this I liked to watch the History Channel. Back when it actually ran programs having to do with history. Not shows about hunting antiques or digging gold mines.”
Duncan said, “Me too. Sure miss the ol’ boob tube. Anyway … that was—”
“—a message for the Judge,” Dregan finished. “And almost an hour later the nosy pig has yet to come over and sniff for truffles.” He looked out over the backyard and saw his boy, Peter, toying with the blue tarps covering the military vehicles parked underneath the fir tree dwarfing the nearby run of cement freeway barriers.
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 11