by Dirk Patton
It didn’t take long to reach the general area of my neighborhood, and I gave Vance directions to get us over a stretch of empty desert that bordered the small community of homes. We’d overflown the burned out husk that had once been my house, and it looked even worse than I remembered seeing it from the bomber on the way to Los Alamos.
Vance gently brought us down, a barely perceptible bump as the landing gear touched the ground. A huge cloud of dust, kicked up by the rotors, enveloped us and blotted out the view through the windscreen. I headed for the back.
“What are we doing?” Rachel looked up and asked as I passed her.
“My house,” I said, knowing she’d understand. “I’ll be back.”
I hit the button to lower the ramp, walking out and jumping to the sand. The rotors were still spinning, kicking up a storm of stinging debris, but I ignored it and jogged away towards the wall that encircled my development. I was halfway there when I realized Dog had followed and was trotting next to me.
The wall was down in several places, apparently having been rammed by large vehicles. I picked my way through the shattered blocks, into a neighbor’s back yard. By now I had my rifle up, just in case there were any infected or survivors that might take exception to my presence.
Dog stayed next to me, moving easily and remaining silent. Moving through the side yard, I emerged onto their driveway and came to a stop. My house, or what was left of it, was directly across the street. It had burned completely, the wooden frame collapsing in on itself. The roof had been covered with clay tiles, and the exterior walls had been stacked stone. Without the structure of the framing, all of this had collapsed until there was nothing other than a pile of rubble.
I moved closer, stopping in the street for a moment, then made a slow circle around the property line. The debris was mounded deep, and it was heavy. The safe I wanted to access had been in a room that was near the middle of the house and that area was completely buried under several tons of what was left of my home. There was no way, without time and heavy equipment, that I’d ever be able to get to it.
Standing there, I couldn’t help but let my mind drift to the past. All of the time I’d spent here with Katie. Some of them bad, but those had been very few and very far between. We’d been happy. Enjoyed every minute we spent together. And we spent as much time together as we could. We’d never been one of those couples that seemed to need time apart from each other.
Lost in my memories, I looked down when Dog bumped my hand with his nose. He was sitting by my foot, staring at me. I ruffled his ears, and with a tear in my eye I took a last look at my house before turning and running for the waiting helicopter.
“Find it?” Rachel asked when I climbed aboard.
I pressed the close button for the ramp and shouted for Vance to get us in the air, then sat down close to Rachel.
“Too much debris,” I said. “Couldn’t get to the safe.”
“I’m sorry.”
She reached out and took my hand. I squeezed back in response, then she scooted across the deck and wrapped me in a hug. Together, we laid back and soon I was asleep in her arms.
Some time later, my eyes snapped open when Tiffany shook my shoulder.
“Vance needs you,” she said.
I disengaged myself from Rachel and stiffly made my way to the cockpit.
“Check that shit out!”
Vance pointed through the windscreen. I took another step forward and looked to the side. We were over Nevada, not too far from Hoover Dam. The view of the shattered top was awe inspiring from the air, especially with the massive plume of water that was still pouring through the breach. But, that wasn’t what he wanted me to see.
Several miles north, heading towards the shoreline of a partially drained Lake Meade, dozens of vehicles raced across the desert. Dust boiled into the air in their wake. I wouldn’t have cared if it wasn’t for the Humvee that was only a few hundred yards in front of the main group. It might have been their leader, but it sure looked like it was being pursued.
With a bad feeling in my gut, I activated my radio and made a call. Nothing. I repeated myself, a moment later Igor’s voice sounding over my earpiece. I could hear a roaring engine and rattling vehicle in the background.
49
“Battlespace comms with Pearl are restored, ma’am!”
Lieutenant Commander Adrienne Cable rushed to the side of the sailor who had just reported, double-checking the monitor he was looking at. She stared for a couple of seconds before turning away.
“COB,” she shouted to the Chief of the Boat, the most senior NCO aboard. “Inform the skipper.”
“Ma’am,” the communications specialist continued. “Pearl is requesting a status update on our mission.”
“Stand by,” she said, waiting for the Captain to arrive and dictate their response.
While she waited, she moved out of the control room, past the sonar station and to a cramped space where another sailor was working on a console. He was responsible for communications with the SEAL team that had gone into Sydney, and now that Battlespace was back up and running, he was working furiously to establish a link with them.
The North Carolina had heard nothing since the SEALs had departed, but there had been no other options. Even now, reaching them on the encrypted, digital radio was proving to be problematic. This was mostly due to the fact that the sub was still submerged, with only a few inches of antenna, supported by a buoy, floating on the surface. The buoy was tethered to their sail and could be reeled back in at a moment’s notice.
A high-gain satellite antenna comprised most of it, with only a stubby, black fiberglass mast sticking up for local area comms. The whole unit was stealthy as hell, and extremely difficult to spot in the daytime. And if anyone who didn’t know what it was happened to see it, they’d pass it off as a small chunk of debris. At night, it was invisible, floating on the waves. But, its range for anything other than satellite comms was very limited and intermittent.
When a wave passed under it, lifting the antenna higher in the air, they had a good shot at reaching out several miles. But when it slipped into a trough between the swells, it was completely masked, and the signal would drop. The only consistent link was from an orbiting satellite that was looking directly down at the point in the ocean where the buoy floated.
“Anything?” She asked the sailor.
“No, ma’am. Not yet,” he said, never taking his focus off the equipment he was manipulating.
“Let me know the instant you have something,” she said, turning and dashing back into the control room before he could acknowledge her order.
Commander Talbot was arriving as she stepped through a narrow hatch, the COB calling out loudly that the Captain was present.
“Battlespace is back up, sir,” Adrienne said. “Jones has a message from Pearl, requesting a sitrep. Figured you’d like to handle that.”
“You figured right, XO. Any word from our SEALs?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
Talbot nodded and moved to the secure comms console, quickly read the message from Hawaii, then began dictating a reply in a low voice. As he spoke, the sailor transcribed his words into a computer that would first encrypt them, then compress the entire message into a data file that would be sent out in a burst transmission that would last less than half a second.
“Conn, radio room. I’ve got Fulcrum team!”
The shout galvanized both Adrienne and Talbot, and they dashed through the hatch to where the sailor was seated. There wasn’t room for either of them to enter the small workspace, so they stood in the passageway and leaned in. The operator was pressing one side of his headphones tighter to his ear as he spoke into a microphone in a loud voice.
“Fulcrum one, repeat last. Repeat last!”
“On speaker!” Talbot ordered.
The operator flipped a switch, an overhead speaker blaring to life with the sounds of a raging battle. Rifles were being fired, and men were screami
ng at each other.
“We’re in contact with…” Commander Sam began to broadcast, his voice rough as he was obviously running, then the transmission cut out and there was only silence.
“Buoy’s in a trough,” the operator said, though both officers knew what had happened.
The wait for the next swell to lift it high enough to restore the link was excruciating, but they endured the time stoically. With no warning, the sound of a weapon firing on full auto suddenly blared out of the speaker.
“…Bay. We’re trying to…” there was a much shorter interruption. “… men down. We’re trying to reach… sulate.”
The transmission went silent again, and Talbot suppressed a curse. He wasn’t one to let the crew see his frustration.
“They’re trying to reach what?” He asked.
“I didn’t get it, either, sir,” Adrienne said, shaking her head.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but is there an embassy in Sydney? One of ours, I mean.”
The operator looked over his shoulder at the skipper.
“Sulate is consulate?” Talbot asked when he realized what the sailor meant. “Maybe…”
He was cut off when the transmission restored.
“…you copy? We… off from the RIBs… … … in Royal Bo… Gard…”
“Get me a map of Sydney!”
Talbot shouted towards the control room. Thirty seconds later, COB appeared and extended a large, paper map, folded over to show the area where the SEALs had landed.
“Here, sir,” he said, pointing at a spot on the map. “Sounded like he was saying Royal Botanical Gardens. And here’s the US Consulate. They’re making a straight line for it, cutting through the Gardens, from where their target is located.”
He tapped locations on the paper as he spoke, Talbot and Adrienne looking closely.
“Thank you, COB,” the skipper said. “XO, stay with the radio and find out as much as you can. I need to get this message out. Maybe Pearl is in contact with the consulate and can give them a heads up about what’s heading their way.”
He rushed down the passageway to the control room as the signal restored. Commander Sam was no longer speaking, but his breath sounds were heavy from running, gunfire loud over the speaker.
50
“Are we armed?” I shouted at Vance.
“Negative,” he said, looking around at me. “Aircraft is naked.”
“Shit! OK, see that Hummer? That’s one of us, and he’s in trouble. Get over him. I’m going back to the ramp and see if I can slow those assholes down with a rifle!”
“Oh, hell yeah!”
His enthusiasm surprised me, but then he was a combat pilot. I held on as he banked sharply and began descending towards Igor. The Chinook had just leveled out when an alarm in the cockpit began screaming.
“Fuck me, they’ve got a lock on us!” Vance yelled.
Before I knew what was happening, the helicopter tilted far to the side and only the firm grip I already had kept me from being thrown around like a rag doll. It felt like he kept rolling until the deck was vertical, then twisted to the side and dropped alarmingly. Tiffany, already strapped back into the co-pilot position, fared much better.
There was nothing I could do other than hold tight. A second later, in my peripheral vision, something trailing fire and smoke flashed past our nose.
“What the fuck was that?” I shouted.
He didn’t answer, just kept bouncing us all over the sky as he brought the big helicopter down and into the cover of a series of tall hills. With a vibrating roar, our speed bled completely off, and we came into a hover.
“SAM,” he said in a much calmer voice than I could have imagined at the moment.
Shit. I’d seen these guys raiding the armories at Nellis. Not only had they gotten their hands on a Surface to Air Missile, but they also had someone that knew how to use it.
“What can we do?” I asked, not releasing my grip in case he had to make any more sudden maneuvers.
“Do? Not a damn thing,” he said. “We don’t have any countermeasures, no weapons… nothing. We’re a fucking sitting duck up here. We just got lucky as hell, and can’t count on it twice.”
I looked around in frustration, seeing Rachel peering around a bulkhead at me. She was on the opposite side of the aircraft from where I’d left her.
“You OK?” I shouted over the roar of the engines.
“Bumped and bruised, but OK,” she shouted back. “What’s going on?”
“Bad guys got some air defense,” I answered, not taking the time to go into details.
“Vance,” I said, turning back to the pilot. “Can you circle around, staying low, and come in over the lake? Pick up our guys at the shore?”
“I can do that,” he said, shaking his head. “But, while were sitting there loading, the bad guys are going to close in and blow our asses off.”
I was quiet for a bit, chewing on my lower lip in thought.
“Did you see that marina?” Tiffany asked.
“What marina?”
“About four miles south of where the Hummer is heading, there was a marina. If they can get there and escape on a boat, maybe we can pick them up once they’re clear of the area.”
“There were boats?” I asked in surprise.
I had noted that the level of the lake had dropped significantly. But, it was still draining. Maybe it hadn’t dropped so much that a floating dock wouldn’t still be serviceable.
“Looked like it,” she said. “Only saw them for a second, but it looked like at least a dozen tied to a dock.”
“Think we can get there without getting shot down?” I asked Vance.
“Maybe. What you got in mind?”
“Drop me, then get clear. I’ll get a boat ready to go. All they’ve gotta do is pile out of the Humvee and jump in. It’ll save them time they don’t have. I’ll head up the lake and find a place that’s in cover so you can pick us up. Now, can you get me to the marina?”
“Hold on to your ass,” he said, grinning.
The deck tilted as he spun the helo around. Accelerating, he kept the hills between us and what I was pretty sure was the militia. I watched through the windscreen for a minute, not liking seeing the ground rushing past, seemingly close enough to scrape the aircraft’s belly. Vance was keeping us low.
As he flew, I called Igor on the radio and told him what his new destination was. He responded with a long string of Russian curses, then confirmed in English that he understood.
Moving to the back, I kept a grip with my hands in case of any sudden maneuvers. Rachel looked like she’d been through a washing machine on spin cycle. She sported a bruise on her cheek that was already spreading and would become a nice shiner before it was done. But, she wasn’t bleeding, and there weren’t any broken bones. Dog lay on his belly, legs splayed out in anticipation of his world turning upside down again.
I spent half a minute filling in Rachel, then returned to the cockpit. As I stepped in, we banked hard to the left and if I hadn’t been gripping an overhead handle, would have wound up on my face.
We were over the lake now, and it felt more like riding in a really fast boat than a helicopter. The water couldn’t have been more than ten feet below the Chinook’s belly. Ahead was the marina Tiffany had spotted. From this perspective, I could see that it would soon be unusable.
The dock was one of the floating variety, tethered to the rocky shore. The chains were stretched to the limit, and most of it was already resting on dry lakebed, along with a large number of boats. Only the outer twenty feet was still afloat. Fortunately, there were three boats that still had water under their keels, tied to the outermost edge.
A couple of miles to the right, I could see the dust plumes made by the approaching vehicles. They were coming fast, and would be at the marina within three minutes.
“I’m coming in hot,” Vance said. “Brace yourself, then as soon as we’re in a hover, get your ass out the door.”
&nbs
p; “Got it,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder and running for the back.
Rachel saw me activate the ramp and reached forward to wrap Dog in her arms. I was glad she did as there was a good chance he’d follow me out.
The ramp reached its lowest position, and I dropped to my knees, grabbing a handle next to the opening. I was braced none too soon, the helicopter suddenly flaring and whipping around, nearly tearing my grip free. A few seconds later the deck leveled out, the edge of the ramp only a foot above the wooden dock. Standing, I raced to the edge and jumped.
My boots had barely thudded onto the wooden planks when Vance hit the throttles and roared away, skimming the lake’s surface. I ran for the closest boat, a large craft set up for water skiing. It would have a huge engine and be fast, and once Igor and company were on board, we needed all the speed we could get.
Of course, there were no keys in the ignition, but I was getting to be an old hand at this. Whipping out my Ka-Bar, I pried the lock cylinder free and cut the wires attached to its back. Twisting them together, I hit the starter and breathed a sigh of relief when the engine rumbled to life and settled into a steady thrum.
“Igor,” I shouted into the radio as I released the lines holding the boat to the dock. “I’m in position!”
“Cannot see!” He shouted back.
I looked up and saw the problem. I was well below the level of the surrounding desert. If the lake was full, the marina would be several feet higher and visible over the lip of terrain. Now, unless you were standing on the edge, it was hidden.
Tearing through the boat, I found an emergency kit and ripped it open. A bright red flare gun was held to the inside of the lid by two spring clips, four shells neatly contained in the lower section. Yanking it free, I loaded in a shell, held it at arm’s length above my head and pulled the trigger.
“I’m the flare!” I shouted as it streaked skyward, trailing a brilliant, fiery tail that was clearly visible even in full sunlight.
“See you,” he answered.