Hellfire (The Bugging Out Series Book 7)

by Noah Mann

  “There has to be something,” I said. “Some failsafe. Some override.”

  Pedigrew smiled at me and shook his head.

  “Mr. Fletcher, I fly the President of the United States,” he said. “If there was an override, I’d be the one to know.”

  There was silence for a moment. Schiavo drew a breath and shook her head.

  “You can’t get any help through the radio,” she said, more stating a fact than inquiring as to any possibility.

  “The protocol locks us out of communications,” Handley said. “Only the ground station can speak to us, but...”

  “They no longer exist,” I said.

  Schiavo looked past the pilots and over the instruments, to the white wall beyond.

  “The protocol should have been disabled when we lost NORAD,” Pedigrew said. “But it wasn’t.”

  “You’re telling us we’re going to crash,” she said.

  Pedigrew nodded.

  “Under normal circumstances we’d fly on this heading until we ran out of fuel,” Pedigrew said. “Somewhere just east of Japan, I’d guess, considering our fuel load and heading.”

  “But we’re not in normal circumstances,” I said.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Pedigrew said, then pointed to a display showing green and yellow and red bands. “That’s what’s ahead of us.”

  “Thunderstorms?” Schiavo asked.

  Before Pedigrew could answer, the aircraft sailed into a world of white, clouds surrounding us.

  “That dark purple area beyond this bit of clouds we’re in,” Pedigrew said. “That’s ash.”

  The eruption of Mt. Hood had spread catastrophic amounts of volcanic ash across the landscape, ejecting it tens of thousands of feet into the air. That it was reaching the heartland of America in appreciable amounts wasn’t a surprise. The weather radar was confirming that very fact.

  “We won’t make it through that,” Pedigrew informed us.

  “Those ash crystals will wear down the turbine blades in the engines, choke the systems that depend upon air for combustion, for sensing,” Handley said.

  Schiavo nodded somberly.

  “So we don’t have hours left,” she said.

  “No,” Pedigrew confirmed. “We have minutes.”

  Schiavo looked to me, some attempt at a smile twisting her lips. A grin of futility.

  “I need to be with Martin,” she said.

  I nodded. She gave the pilots a last look, then left the cockpit. Were there any way I could be with Elaine, and with our daughter, I would. But there wasn’t. In this situation, it seemed, the well of hope that had sustained me through the trials and tribulations since the blight took hold had run dry.

  “There’s nothing?” I pressed the pilots, my question incomplete, but not indecipherable.

  “Nothing we can do,” Pedigrew told me.

  I lowered myself into the seat facing the wall of instruments. The navigator’s station, I thought, though that was only a guess. I swiveled the seat to face forward as the pilots stared out the windshield at the clouds that veiled the sky ahead.

  But soon, just seconds after I’d taken the seat, the world beyond the window began to change. White slid toward grey, light from the sun settling lower in the western sky suddenly muted.

  “Here we go,” Handley said.

  Pedigrew took hold of the yoke, an instinctual move. He was a pilot, and his plane was about to be tested, to and beyond its limits. There was nothing he could do to prevent what was about to happen, but to feel the controls of the 747 in his hands was, I thought, some comfort.

  “It’s been an honor to fly with you, Jeff,” Pedigrew told his co-pilot.

  “And an honor to fly with you, Marty,” Handley said.

  Two warriors were saying their goodbyes to each other through expressions of respect. I supposed I could be back with those I’d come aboard with, my friends from Bandon. It would be right to share these final moments with them.

  But I did not want to.

  “I love you, Elaine,” I said softly, neither pilot reacting to my words. “I love you, Hope.”

  Then, through the windshield, I saw the blackness.

  I’d wanted to glimpse something before the horror. Some sliver of glorious blue sky. But that did not happen. All outside was suddenly erased as if the world had been dipped in perpetual, stinging night.

  The aircraft began to shudder, vibrating unnaturally around us. I thought for an instant about my friends just a dozen yards behind and below me on the 747’s lower deck. We were all facing the same fate. A fate which connected us in these final moments of our lives, which made my absence from their presence inconsequential. I wanted to bear witness to what was to come, as it happened, even if that only meant staring into some blackness as we plummeted from the foul skies.

  “One and two are shutting down,” Handley reported.

  Our left side engines were failing, behaving exactly as the crew had warned, bits of the abrasive volcanic ash tearing at the fine mechanical workings. The aircraft began banking slowly to the left, its right-side power pushing the lumbering plane in that direction.

  BANG!

  The sound was a true explosion, one that seemed to envelope the aircraft as a pulse of the brightest light I’d ever experienced filled the cockpit for a split second.

  “Lightning,” Pedigrew said. “Generated by the—”

  “We’ve got control!” Handley shouted, interrupting his commander.

  The aircraft shuddered violently, just the flickering glow of failing instruments lighting the pilots, all outside still blacker than the darkest night. Pedigrew grabbed the yoke with his left hand and the throttle levers with his right.

  “Engines are responding,” Pedigrew said, maintaining as calm a voice as possible under the circumstances.

  “Numbers one and two are gone now,” Handley reported, no chance to restart the damaged turbofans.

  The 747 was banking to the left, severely now, the pilot struggling to get his plane back to level flight.

  “What happened?”

  Neither pilot looked back as Pedigrew answered me.

  “I don’t know. Static charge overloaded the system when that lightning bolt burst. Maybe reset the computers internally.”

  “We’re flying,” Handley said, relating the simplest of descriptions as to what the technical failures had made possible.

  “I don’t know how long that’s gonna be possible,” Pedigrew said.

  The aircraft began pitching forward.

  “Number three is shutting down,” Handley said.

  On the instrument panel, red and yellow lights were flashing as the crisp displays continued to flicker and skew, not every effect from the almost explosive bolt of lightning a positive development. The ash which had spawned it had killed two big turbofans already, and was about to destroy another.

  “You’d better get to the back,” Pedigrew told me. “All the way to the press section in back. Get everyone back there. We’re going down. It’s gonna be a hard one.”

  Black volcanic grit scraped at the windshield, racing past like a wind blowing straight from the depths of hell. Through this the men before me were flying, piloting their dying aircraft toward some ending that, with more luck than I could imagine, might end with not everyone aboard dead.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  They were grossly inadequate words to leave the men with, but there was no time for any deeper consideration of a parting thanks. I stood from the seat I’d taken and left the cockpit, racing to the stairs which would take me down to the main deck. There was hope in the pilots’ words, and in their determined actions, and even if was indicative of only a scant chance at survival. But any chance to be with my wife and daughter again was a chance I would seize and hang onto until my dying breath.

  I struggled for balance on the stairs, and again as I reached the main deck, the aircraft’s severe bank not lessening, and its dive growing more steep. If this was
what the pilots thought of as ‘in control’, I wanted no part of whatever the opposite of that state was.

  “We have to move,” I told my friends as I reached them in the forward section of the cabin, in the area that senior staff had once occupied, when there were things such as senior staff. “Back of the plane. Now!”

  “Fletch, what happened?” Schiavo asked as she and Genesee helped Martin up from his seat. “I thought we were going down.”

  “We are, but they have some control back.”

  Another loud BANG sounded from outside the aircraft, and the engine noise increased in pitch, becoming an almost painful whine as the huge 747 shook violently, floor and walls and ceiling vibrating like a tuning fork.

  “Go!” I urged. “Grab your gear!”

  Carter led the way, fighting against the incline of the steep descent as he pulled himself along the aisle, gripping seatbacks like a climber would take hold of rocks in a tricky ascent, his weapon and pack hanging off one shoulder.

  “How did they get control?” Schiavo asked as made our way aft.

  “Some sort of static buildup from flying through the ash,” I told her.

  “The lightning,” Martin said, doing his best to help those helping him toward the rear of the aircraft. “It burst right around the fuselage.”

  “It did something to the electronics,” I said.

  “Are they going to be able to land?” Genesee asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think so,” I told him.

  The aircraft leveled slightly, its nose down attitude less severe than a moment before. Perhaps Pedigrew and Handley were getting a handle on their plane. But one look through the windows next to us as the aisle hugged the left side of the 747 quashed any true hope that we were out of the woods. Everything outside was black. The ash cloud still held us in its grip.

  Another BANG shook the aircraft, tossing us against the windows. Almost immediately the irregular whine of the engines stopped, the last of the dying powerplants spinning down.

  “Hurry,” Schiavo said.

  Carter rushed aft, the rest of us behind him, until there was no further we could go. We tossed our packs aside and took seats, buckling in. I strapped my AR across my chest and looked to the right, where my friends had positioned themselves as the aircraft descended rapidly, tipping back and forth, some intense struggle for control of the huge plane going on in the cockpit. There was no engine noise, just a screaming whine of the plane slicing through the ash-filled atmosphere outside.

  BANGBANGBANG!

  The jolts shook the cabin around us, our backpacks flying upward.

  “We’re on fire,” Carter said, pointing past me.

  I looked out the left side window and saw swirling orange and black, flames and smoke blotting out the ash which had doomed our flight. Something had happened to one of the dead engines. A fuel leak, maybe. Or a fan blade shattered by collisions with millions of grains of volcanic grit. Whatever it was, the world outside was no longer a veil of ash—it was flame.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Martin said.

  I looked away from the window to my friend, one of his hand’s clasped tightly with Schiavo’s.

  “We are,” he said.

  I didn’t nod any acknowledgement, because I didn’t believe him. Hope had been my mantra for so long.

  There’s always hope...

  That had been the gift Neil had given me. Had left me with. My daughter bore the concept as her name. But this that we were facing...

  BANG!

  “It’s like it’s coming apart,” Carter said about the terrible sounds penetrating the cabin.

  He was right. The aircraft rocked back and forth, no power to propel it, Pedigrew and Handley doing what they could to control what was essentially a four-hundred-ton glider.

  “This is it,” Genesee said.

  I looked to my right, past the others, and saw him clutching the arms of his seat, pulling up on them out of some instinctive response to the sensation of falling. The thought of some flight attendant giving instructions to survive a crash landing flashed suddenly, but I wondered how much good tucking my head between my knees would do. And, still, I wanted to be witness to...

  Blue sky...

  It was just a flash of it. A glimpse that lasted less than a second, but past the swirling flame and smoke outside my window I did see it. That could only mean one thing—that we were free of the ash cloud.

  But not free of its effects. That fact became abundantly clear as the nose of the aircraft pitched slowly upward, more than leveling out, reaching what many pilots would consider a stall angle—the point at which the speed of the aircraft had reduced so much that not enough air was flowing over the wings to maintain lift. All this, though, mattered for just a second or two.

  The instant after that, our fall from the sky ended with a horrific impact that was filled with tumbling and fire and screaming and smoke. And then...

  Silence.

  Part Four

  Our Final Battle

  Twenty Seven

  I hadn’t been knocked unconscious, but as my eyes opened and my senses recovered, it felt as though I’d come out of a dream, my waking self dragged up from some dark precipice where sleep and death mingled perilously.

  But I was alive.

  Smoke...

  Waves of acrid stench rolled over me and stung my eyes. I coughed, feeling a dull pain in my right side. Everything else was sore, but I noted no sharp discomfort that would indicate more serious injuries from the crash.

  We crashed...

  And we lived. Or, at least, I had. I looked around and saw only twisted metal and hanging tangles of wire and insulation. My seat still seemed anchored to the cabin floor, and me to it with the seatbelt, but those where my friends had been secured were gone entirely. Just a jagged rupture in the floor to my right remained, precisely where they had been.

  Light...

  The beam flashed across my face through a hole in the smoke. It was familiar light. Daylight. From the sun. But how could that be? The ash cloud we’d flown into had been total. A blinding blackness.

  Blue sky...

  I remembered what I’d glimpsed just before the impact. That flash of clear day beyond the windows. Somehow, we’d made it out of the ash cloud. Perhaps we’d just been on its edge when the lightning burst had given the pilots back some modicum of control. Enough, maybe, that they’d been able to guide their dying craft toward clear air.

  Another cough. But it wasn’t mine. The sound came from somewhere to my right. I released my seatbelt, the angle of the wreckage almost sending me tumbling. I grabbed the seatback to steady myself and rose up, looking back through the thin veil of smoke drifting through what remained of the cabin.

  That was when I saw my friends.

  They were alive, still belted in their seats as I was. A gentle gust of wind, glorious fresh air, rolled in through the torn fuselage, casting the smoke aside, revealing a glimpse of that wondrous blue sky above.

  “Fletch!”

  Carter’s urgent shout snapped me out of the brief savoring of the clear daylight. I clawed my way through severed cables and buckled floor panels to the spot where my friends were, all secured to their seats, still. All alive, if somewhat stunned.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  Schiavo responded first with a look, her gaze fixed on the AR still strapped across my chest.

  “Always ready, Fletch, huh?”

  She laughed softly after that, drawing quick breaths of clean air, then turned to Martin.

  “I’m fine,” he told her, and me. “Better than I expected to be.”

  Genesee and Carter both unbuckled their seatbelts and stood, crouching below a crushed section of overhead bins.

  “No one’s hurt?” Genesee asked, almost incredulous.

  “I’m okay,” Carter said.

  Schiavo pulled herself up from her seat and surveyed our surroundings. Small licks of flame burned a few
yards forward, and the smoke drifting through the ruptured cabin was almost overwhelming at times, but there seemed no imminent risk of being overtaken by either. Still, this wasn’t a place we needed, or wanted, to be.

  “Is our gear close?” Schiavo asked.

  “I don’t see any,” Genesee answered, scanning the mangled space.

  “Over there,” Martin directed, pointing.

  Our backpacks and weapons had been tossed about, but remained in the same general area as us, only Martin’s AK taking some extra effort to retrieve from the space it had fallen into beneath the shredded cabin floor. Within two minutes we had almost everything back in our possession, minus a few inconsequential items.

  One thing, though, was more important than all the rest.

  “Do you have it?” I asked Schiavo quietly as the others were occupied gathering our gear.

  She checked her shirt pocket and nodded. The code card, the apparent reason for our entire journey, was still in her possession.

  “Let’s clear out,” Schiavo ordered.

  We worked our way over buckled floors and broken seats, toward a massive gash where the fuselage had been torn open during our crash landing. Emerging from the wreckage of the aircraft we could see that the once beautiful 747 had been broken into three major sections, not counting the wings which had been ripped fully off as the plane tumbled and came apart, each mangled and mixed with the center section, fuel from internal tanks spilled and blazing.

  “That’s where we were,” Genesee said. “If we hadn’t moved aft...”

  We would be dead. That reality, which hadn’t come to pass, didn’t need to be spoken for all of us to realize how fortunate we were.

  “The cockpit,” Carter said.

  I looked and saw that he was pointing to a spot in a dirt field a couple hundred yards from where we stood, near a bend in the highway the pilots had clearly aimed for as some substitute for a runway. The blunt forward end of the aircraft, with its distinctive hump, was still recognizable, even on its side and ripped apart from the fuselage it had left behind in a blazing pile.

  “Let’s move,” Schiavo said.

  That we could was a miracle, I thought. But it would take that and then some to believe that the men who’d brought the dying plane down were still alive, considering the damage that was becoming more and more apparent as we crossed the distance to reach the severed front section of the plane. When we reached the twisted and battered nose, it became clear that we would be finding no survivors. Genesee and I climbed atop the wreckage and peered through a yard-wide gash in the aircraft’s skin, both of us seeing the same thing—Pedigrew and Handley still belted in their seats, the cockpit compressed around them. There would be no burial for the men who’d saved our lives. Removing them from the tangle of steel and aluminum would be a futile effort. The place where they’d done their best work, served their last full measure, would be their tomb.