He didn’t understand it. He’d never felt anything quite like it before. But like in a dream, he sensed there was a monster coming at him and he couldn’t turn to run.
“Come on,” he repeated as he paced up and down the hall. “Come on, come on, I’ve got to find a flight!”
* * *
Flight operations continued on a twenty-four-hour cycle, and every hour that went by, the place became more frantic and intense. Sam kept himself awake for as long as he could, terrified of missing his chance, but sometime after four in the morning he finally fell asleep, crashing in the crew lounge across a leather couch with a couple of pilots just in from Germany. As the sun rose, he forced himself awake, washed up in the bathroom (wondering how the military base maintained its water pressure), and started stalking again.
Eight hours later, after hounding and begging and threatening all sorts of things that no one really believed, Sam got the best offer he was going to get. A KC-135 air refueling tanker was heading out to Portland. Yeah, they had some room, and yeah, they’d allow him to take up one of the small seats in the back, but it was a five-hour flight across the States with no stops in between. Sam begged again, but lost the battle. No way were they going to make a stop for him.
“It’s cool, it’s cool, you don’t need to,” he pulled back. “Just get me close. That’s all I need. I’ll take care of the rest.”
The pilot, a pretty major with short brown hair, camouflage flight suit, and puffy eyes from spending too much time in the air, stared at him, suspicious. “Don’t you go fooling around with my sortie, you hear me, Lieutenant Brighton?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing stupid. But if you’ll just fly a little farther north than you were planning on, it would really help me out.”
“I already told you, we’re not stopping.”
“You won’t have to, major. All you’ve got to do is get me close.”
“But if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”
—Doctrine and Covenants 38:30
Chapter Thirty-One
Interstate 65
Fourteen Miles Southeast of Chicago
The afternoon passed, rainy and wet, and dark came quickly because of the low clouds.
An hour before nightfall, Ammon and Luke set off, hiking north. This time Luke reluctantly carried the gun tucked between his waistband and the small of his back. He also wore a poncho, which concealed his hands, allowing him to reach for the weapon without being detected if he needed to.
He desperately prayed it wouldn’t happen. He had shot a gun before—their father had insisted on his sons knowing how to handle a weapon—but he was hardly an expert. More, he was completely unprepared to shoot an actual person. Would he do it? He didn’t think so. When it came right down to pulling the trigger, he simply didn’t think he could. To save his brother’s life? Maybe. But he probably couldn’t shoot to save his own.
The two young men moved quietly and quickly through the growing darkness, staying near the tree line, which paralleled the road. A mile passed and their boots became heavy with rain and mud. The rain let up and, to the west, the clouds began to thin. On their left, sometimes a hundred yards, sometimes more or less than that, the freeway had grown less crowded. There were a few people here and there, but most had given up traveling for the night and were hunkering down, setting up camp inside other people’s cars.
Approaching the edge of the trees, Ammon crouched and pointed. “There,” he said.
Luke knelt down at his side. The men were still there, guarding the bridge. They stood together in the rain, baseball hats and wet hair and clinging clothes.
“Who are they?” Luke wondered. “Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? It makes no sense.”
“It’s crazy,” Ammon said, then pointed farther up the freeway. “You see that?” he asked.
Luke strained to see against the growing dark. “Looks like . . . what is that . . . is that a car that’s been overturned?”
“It’s a Highway Patrol,” Ammon explained. “It was easier to see it this morning when there was more light.”
Luke sucked in a breath. “You sure?”
“Really sure.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Don’t know. But it leaves a lot of questions. Where’s the patrolman? What happened to his car? You saw what happened—the EMP didn’t cause a big explosion or anything. Everything just quit working, coasting to a stop. That trooper didn’t flip his car. Someone overturned it. Why would they do that?”
Luke thought as he stared. “You didn’t tell Mom anything about this?”
“No. I was going to, but I changed my mind. No reason to make her worry more than she already is.”
Luke lifted his hand and pointed to the crowd of men. “Is that the guy I fought last night?”
Ammon squinted. “Yeah, I think that’s him. I got a little closer this morning, but it’s hard to be sure in this light. I tell you this, though, the guy you took last night had a mean gash down the side of his head.”
“I whacked him pretty good,” Luke explained with pride. “I had a fist-sized rock in my hand when I popped him.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think he’s very happy. They sure weren’t happy to see me this morning.”
The two young men stared. Ammon’s knees started cramping from bending in a squat. “There is some good news, I think, in what happened to the trooper’s car,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe I’m wrong, but it just seems to me that sometime the authorities are going to realize they’ve lost a man out here. Sooner or later, apparently later in this case, they’re going to notice they have a man down. When that happens, I have to believe they’d send someone out here to investigate.”
Luke thought, then nodded slowly. “You might be right.”
Ammon stared at the group of ill-dressed men, counting them. “There aren’t as many of them as there were this morning.”
“Maybe they’ve figured it’s time to head out? Get home to their families or whatever. Take their share of the cash and run.”
“That’s what I was thinking, especially if they believe the authorities are going to show up.”
Luke moved his eyes up the road, toward the turned-over car. “You never saw the trooper? You have no idea where he is?”
“None at all. But he’s got to be around here somewhere. Unless he took off and started walking.”
Luke shook his head. “He’s not alive,” he said.
Ammon shivered. “I was wondering about that.”
They crouched another five minutes, watching the men guard the road. While they watched, a dozen people walked up to the blockade. The negotiations seemed to take a long time and were evidently complicated. Of the dozen who approached them, the outlaws let a few more than half go through.
Ammon shivered again. It was getting cold, but that wasn’t what was driving a chill up and down his spine. “What do you think?” he finally asked.
Luke reached up and pulled his poncho close, feeling the same chill. “I don’t look forward to confronting those guys we met last night.”
Ammon grunted in agreement. “I think we should wait until morning. We’ll leave really early, before the sun comes up. Might be these goobers will have dispersed by then. If so, good enough, we head up the road. If not, we’ll reevaluate then and decide what’s best to do.”
Luke bit his lip, thinking of the little girl huddled in the old car a mile or two behind them. “I heard Mom talking to Mary just before we left,” he said. “Sometime last week, Mary started giving Kelly morphine to control the pain. She doesn’t have any more pain medication with her. Mom thinks Kelly might be going into shock from morphine withdrawal.”
Ammon nodded slowly. “That and the pain.”
Luke stared across the empty fields toward the freeway. “If we don’t get Kelly Beth home pretty soon, I don’t think it’s going to matter.”
“Understood,” Ammon said. He got
up. “Come on, let’s go.”
Capri 44
Thirty-Two Thousand Feet over Southern Ohio
The inside of the old KC-135 air refueling tanker was cold and noisy and full of light mist from tiny leaks in the pressure and heating systems. The cabin walls were gray-stitch insulated material with the metal ribs of the fuselage showing through, and the floor was scarred and worn from an untold number of cargo pallets being rolled on and off. The main purpose of the aircraft was to carry and offload fuel for other aircraft, refueling them while in flight, and its belly was a series of enormous, interconnected fuel cells. Tonight, because the old tanker was not scheduled to air refuel, it didn’t carry as much fuel, and so the loadmaster had loaded up the cargo compartment with military supplies needed in the west. Three dozen tightly packed wooden pallets, double-wrapped in thick plastic, took up the entire cargo compartment.
A row of uncomfortable web and aluminum benches ran down each side of the plane. Sam sat alone, his head resting on his chest, his mind racing behind closed eyes.
The tension had never left him. It was growing worse instead. A deep sense of . . . he didn’t know . . . a sense of lateness crept upon him, making him irritable and intense.
Time was slipping by. He was falling behind.
But he didn’t know for what.
Yet he was growing more tense by the minute, his mouth dry, his muscles tight.
He felt a gentle push on his shoulder and looked up. The loadmaster was standing there. “Boss wants to see you in the cockpit,” the master sergeant said.
Sam nodded, stretched to pull the tired muscles in his back, then stood and followed the sergeant to the cockpit. He stepped around the forward bulkhead, between a narrow entry, and through the cockpit door.
The aircraft commander was sitting in the left seat, one foot propped up against the lower portion of the cockpit display panel. Sam moved forward and stood between the two pilot seats. Looking through the cockpit windows he stared, completely stunned. It was like flying through the emptiness of space. A few stars above them. Endless blackness down below—not a single ground light anywhere. Utter darkness straight ahead.
He stared until the pilot interrupted his thoughts. “Kind of strange, isn’t it?”
Sam shuddered at the darkness.
“So you really want to do this?” the pilot asked.
“Absolutely,” Sam replied without hesitation. He thought of the growing tension deep inside him. “I’ve got to do it,” he said.
“You don’t know what you’re jumping into, do you, Brighton? You don’t have any idea what’s going on down there.”
“Doesn’t matter, really, does it, ma’am? It’s going to be the same everywhere. Here. Portland. Everything in between. Everyone’s going through the same thing right now.”
The pilot thought again. “We’ve never done this before, you know. We just don’t do such things from a tanker. C-141, C-17, yeah, any day, but we’re a different kind of aircraft, a different system. We don’t have a ramp that can drop down. And we’re supposed to be trained and qualified before we go tossing people out.”
The radio sounded in her headset and she paused and listened as the other pilot responded to the radio call.
Turning in her seat, she looked at Sam. “You understand how many rules and regulations we’ll be breaking?” she asked. “Tons. Way too many.”
“I understand,” Sam replied. “But I’m telling you, ma’am, it’s no big thing. Descend as low as you can to equalize the pressure and get a little warmer, slow down as much as you can, and give me a thumbs-up when we’re there. That’s all you’ve got to do.”
The pilot dropped her foot and sipped from a bottle of water. “I don’t suppose too many people are going to be so concerned about peacetime regulations right now,” she concluded, then shrugged and glanced toward the other pilot, who gave her a “whatever” kind of look. “Okay,” she said. “If you’re willing to take the chance, who am I to tell you no?”
“Thank you,” Sam said, his face illuminated by the subdued white and green fluorescent lighting in the cockpit.
The pilot checked her NAV readout. “Twenty-one minutes, then,” she said. “Go get your gear on. We won’t delay if you’re not ready.”
Sam nodded, then turned and left the cockpit without saying any more.
Interstate 65
Fourteen Miles Southeast of Chicago
It was very dark. Luke and Ammon moved silently back toward their cars. Sara was waiting for them, standing near the edge of the trees. Hearing movements through the brush, she quietly called their names. Minutes later, they emerged from the darkness.
“What do you think?” she asked them as they approached.
They stopped and explained the situation. While they talked, Mary moved toward them, listening intently.
“We really ought to wait until morning,” Ammon concluded.
Mary’s face sank. “Another day!”
“Another night, Mary. We’ll try to leave for the city in the morning.”
“We’ve got to leave in the morning. I can’t stay here another day. My baby needs her medicines!”
Ammon glanced toward Luke, looking for support. Luke shook his head in sympathy. “I understand,” he said, turning back to Mary. “But Mrs. Dupree, we need to think this through and be careful. It’s dangerous right now. It will get better—I don’t think it’s going to be like this forever—but right now, with those guys out there, we need to wait.”
“But my little girl, my little girl . . .”
Ammon started to answer her, then fell silent. Mary’s little girl was going to die. He was certain of that now. Kelly hadn’t wakened since midmorning. She didn’t shiver anymore. It seemed she hardly moved. Sometimes she mumbled, but her eyes, when they were open, had taken on an opaque, filmy texture. She hadn’t eaten anything, as far as he knew, and had swallowed only a sip or two of water all day. No, there was nothing they could do now. She was going to pass away. Here. On the road to Chicago. Back at her apartment, maybe, if things went just right, but it was going to happen—that was the dreadful truth.
He sighed, a heavy sadness creeping over him, then turned and walked to Mary, extending his arms. She stepped quickly back. He took another step toward her and paused. Twenty-four hours ago, she had been a stranger. Now he felt a kinship for her that expanded beyond any emotion he had ever felt before. He wanted to help her. He cared for her. He even loved her.
But there was nothing he could do.
He couldn’t help her.
He couldn’t help her daughter.
He couldn’t make it go away.
And he ached, a dull and painful throbbing in his heart.
He lifted his arms again and stepped toward her. Mary held back for a moment, then fell into his chest. He put his arms around her, almost completely supporting her weight. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Dupree, I’m so sorry. If there was something we could do . . . if there was anything we could do . . .”
The small black woman started crying, tiny shudders of emotion in his arms. She knew now. They all knew. And as he supported her weight, his arms around her, Ammon thought he actually felt her heart break.
Capri 44
Eighteen Thousand Feet over South Chicago
The aircraft slowed, the engines pulling back to a quiet hum as it descended, gradually slipping out of the dark sky. The loadmaster had already moved to the rear door on the left side of the aircraft reserved exclusively for emergency evacuation situations. He had never actually opened the door even while on the ground, let alone while in flight. He had strapped an oxygen mask with a built-in microphone and headset receiver over his face and was ready to depressurize.
“Fifteen thousand,” he heard the pilot announce.
“What’s the airspeed?” the loadmaster queried.
“Slowing through two hundred knots.”
The loadmaster turned to Sam, who was finishing a final check of his equipment. “You want one-six
ty?” he called above the noise of the aircraft.
“Slow as you can get her.” Sam pulled his leg straps tight.
The loadmaster turned back to the door and spoke into his mask. “He’s looking for one hundred sixty knots. I don’t know, we’re kind of heavy to be going that slow, don’t you think?” The aircraft kept on slowing and descending as they talked.
“Okay,” the pilot said after two more minutes had passed. “One-seventy now, and ten thousand. We’re on oxygen up here. How about you in the back?”
The loadmaster checked himself and the boom operator, getting a thumbs-up from the young airman who was going to help him with the door. “Two good masks in the rear,” he said.
“Ready to depressurize.”
There was a sudden thump and rush of air as the cabin pressure was released, forming an instant cloud of mist inside the cabin. Bitter cold. Lots of noise. Building pressure in Sam’s ears and gut.
“How’s everything in the back?” the aircraft commander asked after the aircraft had depressurized.
“Good back here. Clear to open the aft emergency hatch?”
“Sergeant, you are cleared.”
The loadmaster gave Sam a quick thumbs-up. Sam moved forward and stood before the door, hands on his chest straps, bracing himself against the bone-chilling cold and blast of wind that would suck the oxygen right out of his lungs. He bent his knees and waited, just two feet from the door, his muscles tense, ready to pull his legs up tight against his body so they didn’t flail around him when he stepped into the night.
He knew that, twenty feet behind him, the enormous tail of the aircraft angled outward from the rear of the fuselage. It was possible the wind would blow him back into the tail before he cleared it, in which case he would be cut in half. Would it happen? It wasn’t supposed to. But he’d never heard of anyone bailing out of a flying KC-135 before, so he really didn’t know.
Seconds passed. The parachute straps cut into his legs. The loadmaster released the latch holding the access door release lever, then turned to Sam. “You ready?” he shouted. Sam nodded and stepped six inches forward. “Keep balled up. It’s going to blow you.” Sam nodded again, wishing he had some goggles.
The Great and Terrible Page 110