Tomorrow War

by J. L. Bourne

  “I saw something. We probably need to think about quitting this place,” I said to her. I swung my gun around to the hangar opening as she crawled out of her warm bag into the freezing air. I heard her toss her kit into the aircraft.

  Instead of climbing inside, she walked past me over to Elvis. In a rare showing of emotion, she kissed the animal on the nose and said something to it that I couldn’t make out before leading it to the other side of the area, near the terminal parking lot, away from the hangar. After saying her good-byes, Maggie took the saddle off Elvis, tossing it on the frosty ground.

  Back at the hangar, Maggie plugged the power cart into the aircraft and started it up just before climbing inside the multi-million-dollar business jet. She signaled for me to wait at the side door.

  After a loud compressor type bang, it sounded like she got the APU up and running. She looked back through the cockpit door down the small row of seats and gave me the signal to disconnect. I shut down the power cart and unplugged it from the Gulfstream. The APU was blasting hot exhaust, quickly filling up the hangar despite the open bay door. I decided to open the other side of the hangar to vent more exhaust. I saw Elvis watching from afar, looking apprehensive about the noise.

  Maggie left the pilot’s seat and came back to remind me to pull chocks and to show me how to stow the cabin door. I performed the last walkaround and then boarded the jet, tossing the chocks to the back of the tube before shutting the cabin door to the sound of rushing air.

  I hunched over and walked forward, ducking into the cockpit and taking the right seat next to Maggie. This time, I put on a cushy Bose headset, which was a helluva lot better than the DCs I was used to flying with. The APU noise instantly lowered to the point I could hear Maggie sharply over the ICS.

  “Glad you opened the other doors. The jet blast from taxiing might have knocked the wall out and maybe destabilized the whole hangar,” Maggie said.

  “How’s she look?” I asked, gesturing to the jet’s master caution panel.

  “Nothing critical; we’re good.”

  Maggie worked the checklist startup sequence bringing the engines online with a cough and a lot of smoke. The smoke cleared quickly, shooting out both sides of the hanger from the odd air pressure anomaly created by the exhaust vortices. Maggie hit start on her wrist chrono; about thirty seconds passed before she stuffed the checklist under her leg and edged the throttles forward.

  The metal hangar building shuddered and creaked.

  Maggie gave the engines more power, bringing RPMs up noticeably on the instrument panel. With nosewheel steering in play, she turned the jet toward the runway taxi lane delta. As she made the turn, the powerful engines swept across a wall on the hanger and all hell broke loose.

  Hurricane force winds, focused like a fire hose on the flimsy aluminum siding, sent a section of metal wall paneling spinning up in the air. I saw Elvis gallop off in fright as the metal hit the terminal parking lot and skidded across into an abandoned car on the curb. Maggie began to taxi into position, dodging sticks and other debris that Elvis and I missed on the mile and a half long piece of pavement. The aircraft was in position, nose facing into the wind, as evident by the tattered windsock at two o’clock, five hundred yards away.

  “You ready?” Maggie asked.

  I didn’t say anything, only nodding that I was.

  Maggie began the run-up sequence on the jet, sending the engines into proper RPM and internal temperatures for takeoff. Simultaneously, she let off the brakes and pushed the throttles to near firewall and the aircraft jerked forward and began its takeoff roll.

  “Eighty knots,” Maggie said about halfway down the runway. “Rotate.”

  The nosewheel left the ground, followed by the main gear, and we were off deck. Maggie climbed rapidly while bringing up the landing gear, reducing the drag, helping us to clear any terrain out there we didn’t know about. We didn’t have the required FAA pubs, and for all we knew there was a radio tower a mile in front of us and five hundred feet high, ready to cut a wing from our fuselage in fifteen seconds.

  “Systems check good. Keep an eye on pressurization for me, Max,” Maggie said, gesturing to one of a dozen gauges above my head on the copilot side of the cockpit.

  The instrument indicated that cabin altitude was climbing, but it stopped at 2,000 feet as the aircraft shot past that altitude and leveled off at a mile above the earth.

  “Gas?” I asked.

  “Based on projected burn rate and fuel state on takeoff, still plenty of fuel,” Maggie said, tapping the multifunction display on her side.

  I pulled out our maps and did a quick scan of terrain near our takeoff airfield. We were good to go at 5,000 feet, but wouldn’t win any efficiency awards.

  This prompted me to ask, “We’re not efficient—why are we staying at five thousand?”

  “Look at the road.”

  Maggie banked the aircraft, giving my window a great view of the scene below. There were people on the road, headed to the airfield. I didn’t see any armor, but did see at least two technicals, white pickup trucks with what looked like tripod mounted guns on the back. People on all types of motorcycles were streaming down the road to the airfield.

  “If we didn’t get out when we did, this jet would have had enough holes in it to look like a cheese grater,” Maggie said.

  Smoke began to shoot from the barrel of one of the truck mounted guns below.

  “Time to go, Mags. They’re shooting at us.”

  Maggie leveled the wings and began to climb, pointing the aircraft east, flying off wet compass.

  “I’m going higher, but we still need to see the interstate when we get to it. No GPS, no TACAN or VOR. We are visual direct to DC,” she said.

  The aircraft cooled off at ten thousand feet and the cabin pressure maintained. Maggie dodged winter clouds, letting us both maintain visual on the road below. I traced our highway with my finger on the map, making sure to calculate time/speed/distance to our next road.

  We had about four smaller airports we were going to attempt near Alexandria, but couldn’t really count on any one of them. They could have debris all over the tarmac or even aircraft left abandoned. If all our airfields were a no-go, we’d set the aircraft down in some field. Not optimal, but it was either that or run out of gas.

  —————

  31 Jan

  Potomac

  I have some purpose. I realize that now. Today. Forever.

  I knew that I wasn’t destined to go down in history as the guy that crashed the world, not just yet. We survived the impossible, the improbable, and that counts for something.

  It has to.

  The problem started with our first outlying airfield. Because we were flying lower than the aircraft was designed to cruise efficiently, we burned a helluva lot more gas than we should have. We were at our first airfield option with just over an hour of gas to go. The first airfield had fire trucks spaced at even intervals, blocking the runway from use. When Maggie hit the throttles, climbing out of that aerodrome, we only had enough gas for one, maybe two more airfields.

  The rain was heavy over Virginia when we made our low pass over the second runway to survey the field. What we saw sent terror down my spine.

  Chinese Flankers.

  A squadron of them parked neatly in rows. We were low enough to see the red stars painted on their vertical stabilizers.

  As Maggie once again pushed the throttles, the jet began to climb, but not before we noticed two men bust out of one of the buildings, white reflective flight helmets swinging in their hands as they sprinted for their jets ahead of a flock of maintainers, who were also running for the fighters.

  “Oh, fuck,” Maggie said.

  “Weather is bad. Think we can shake ’em?” I asked.

  “No. We’re on fumes. Probably flame out in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  I unbuckled my harness and walked hand over hand to the back of the jet, flipping over seat cushions and opening latched cabi
nets until I found it.

  Life raft.

  I buckled the life raft into one of the leather seats near the over wing exit along with our kit before running back up to the cockpit.

  “Can we depressurize?!” I yelled over the drone of the engines into Maggie’s covered ears.

  Maggie glanced up at the gauges and nodded to me that we could.

  I ran back to where the sealed life raft was buckled and followed the instruction sticker on the over wing hatch. After a near-death scare, I managed to jettison the hatch, hearing it hit the side of the aircraft as it fell away. We were either getting shot down or we were going to ditch this sucker. It was the only way. We had no time to find a suitable airfield. The safest place to put the aircraft down on short notice was in the Potomac River.

  Fast moving air shot through the fuselage, tossing loose papers and small items everywhere. I rushed back to the front and got back in my harness, checking Maggie’s, too.

  “We ditching?” Maggie asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Yep. You know where,” I said, grabbing my checklist to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

  As I scanned the checklist, our radio blared to life on the guard frequency.

  “Unknown aircraft, unknown aircraft at four thousand feet on a heading of zero nine four at one hundred and fifty knots, you are in violation of standing no fly zone executive order. You are to change course to zero two four and land immediately at Andrews Air Force Base.”

  Either ground radar had us or the Flanker radar did. Both would be bad.

  I could barely make out the contours of the large river up ahead.

  “I think we’re losing number two,” Maggie said as the aircraft began to vibrate.

  Maggie executed a shutdown of engine two, adjusting for the new flight characteristics from the lack of thrust and the new barn door attached to the aircraft outside.

  Ten miles to the water.

  The altimeter began to tick down and the trees began to get bigger.

  “Gear up, flaps set,” I said, keeping Maggie focused on setting us down in the river ahead.

  We both screamed when the Chinese fighter made its high-speed pass, no more than twenty feet off our right wing. The sonic boom was deafening even through our headsets. I watched the Flanker bank right and then roll, revealing multiple missiles mounted to the hard points on its wings.

  They wouldn’t bother with another pass. They were no doubt setting up for a perfect aspect shot.

  Five miles to the water, Maggie began to configure the aircraft for a ditch. The rain was still coming down and visibility wasn’t all that great. The only way the fighters could have found us was with radar vectors or their own onboard radars. Neither mattered.

  I scanned the checklist for anything that would kill us if we missed, and held on for dear life.

  “Virginia side if you can!” I said into the boom mike with no verbal response.

  The aircraft made a slight heading adjustment as the altimeter dropped to fifty feet. We had no idea what the setting should be, so we could be ten feet off the water or thirty. It was difficult to tell, until the aircraft machine gun helped us.

  The Flanker strafed, shooting water up into the air next to the Gulfstream. This gave Maggie the perspective she needed to judge our altitude just before hitting the water.

  I’d never ditched an aircraft before and was underwhelmed. The aircraft just slowed down really fast and came to a stop like a boat, pushing a bow wave of water ahead of it. Maggie and I disengaged our harnesses and ran into each other trying to get out.

  “Ladies first,” I said, happy to be alive.

  She punched me hard in the arm and pushed past me to the opening where I’d previously jettisoned the hatch.

  “Save the jokes, Max. You think that Flanker won’t do another run?” she said, tossing the raft out and yanking the cord to inflate it with one motion.

  We threw our gun-strapped packs into the inflated raft and used our hands as paddles, hauling ass to the shore. Much to my surprise, the Gulfstream didn’t sink immediately. Also, we were only about a hundred yards away from the Virginia bank of the Potomac. I could even see part of Mount Vernon before we got too close to shore.

  We ditched the bright orange raft and disappeared into the thick foliage to the sound of Communist fighter jets buzzing at high speeds up and down the Potomac River.

  DELMAY

  Maggie and I kept moving inland from the river, navigating via compass and our wet and tattered maps. The foliage was thick and unforgiving and would have been impassable in the summer. Based on our charts, we were only a mile from George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate. As we trekked through the forest, I wondered if General Washington ever hunted in these woods and if he might have followed the ancient trail that Maggie and I traced north to Route 1.

  The thumping of helicopters continued for the rest of the day and into the evening, but the sounds were faint and to the south of where we found ourselves.

  Moving slowly to avoid detection, we broke through the trees into the back end of suburban Alexandria as we waited for complete darkness to conceal our approach to our CIA front, Delmay Glass. Fighting fatigue and cold, we both took a dose of speed pills that we brought in the event we had to stay awake and make mission.

  As we waited for the drugs to kick in, we cached away the heavy Stinger missile. After all, we were horseless and Alexandria seemed abandoned. There was not even candlelight shining through the windows. I could make out the gray/green outline of Route 1 up ahead and saw the familiar specks of abandoned cars probably lined up to cross the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

  The overcast sky concealed the bright moon, providing us enough cover to begin moving at about 2100. Thirty pounds lighter, I sprung to my feet and took point through the empty backyards, mirroring the curves of Route 1 as it meandered north to intercept the loop. High on speed, we made good time, creeping behind the shadow-box privacy fences, eventually hitting the side street we were looking for.

  “Follow me,” Maggie said, gesturing us away from the path we were following.

  I followed Maggie with the trust rebuilt from trekking over half the country on horseback and being strafed by Sukhoi fighters together. We cut behind a pizza joint and were once again slogging through the type of pseudo woods that existed between abandoned city developments and masses of empty commercial lots.

  We moved for some time through these trees and bushes until Maggie stopped at a large gray boulder sitting on the middle of one of the grown-over commercial lots. The large rock was covered with graffiti, MS-13 gang markings, and some lewd interpretations of male appendages. Maggie scanned the area, unmoving. She did this for five full minutes before leaning her gun against the rock and reaching underneath.

  A loud click pierced the night silence.

  Maggie grabbed her carbine and leaned on the rock, spinning it out of the way. Underneath, I could see the massive boulder was attached to some mounting system and magnetic locking mechanism. I went first down the narrow stairs and watched her petite frame move the two thousand pound rock back into position with one hand. The rock settled down one inch onto the magnetic lock with a secondary click and we were underground.

  “Post-9/11 Delmay remodeling. GWOT funded,” Maggie said as we moved deeper into the corridor.

  “I never knew about it,” I said, fishing for a reason.

  “You were new, Max. These types of things are reserved for more vetted employees of the Agency. The covered facility is the first layer of the onion. There are many.”

  I thought about this as we moved deeper into the ground before leveling off. The subterranean passage was solid concrete, with rebar making its appearance randomly along the passage. The emergency lighting had long gone dark and I wondered how the mag locks remained functional as I watched Maggie key a code into a panel next to a large steel door.

  With a click, the lock was disengaged and Maggie swung the heavy vault-like door open.

&n
bsp; “We’re under Delmay now,” she said.

  Maggie walked over to a bank of dark screens and flipped on a breaker. The machines began to power on and the screens began scanning the drives following an improper shutdown. Maggie skipped the scan and initiated the building’s security program after the operating system was done booting up.

  Only three cameras were active, covering the lobby and a room marked SCIF in white digital letters on the live feed of the top floor. The other camera feeds had either broken or been otherwise disabled. The lobby looked as if a war had been fought in it, and the SCIF feed looked normal but completely abandoned.

  “Well, whoever has been here the past year didn’t find the Champagne Room; that’s a good thing.”

  Maggie attempted to bring the other stricken cameras back online, to no avail. They were hard down.

  “These two cameras and this terminal were the only ones hardwired to the system and off the grid. I think the computer worm killed the others,” Maggie said.

  “We’re going to have to go topside and reach the SCIF on foot,” I responded, not liking the sound of it out loud.

  “Yes. The building should be abandoned, though.”

  “Should,” I said.

  —————

  Maggie released with a click the last maglock between us and the acknowledged area of the building. We stepped through a false wall door before Maggie swung the wall back to its original position. The entrance to the basement was undetectable and, from what Maggie said, the SCIF on the top floor was configured the same way.

  We were still on NVDs, as the grid was down in Alexandria, and any auxiliary generators had likely long run out of juice. We moved over an air bridge that overlooked the Delmay Glass lobby. The area was decimated, as the glass was blown out and bullet holes peppered the once pristine white sheetrock interior walls.

  We left the lobby view for the stairwell and began to climb to the penthouse, or as Maggie called it, the Champagne Room. Halfway up the stairs, we were forced out onto the fifth floor because the stairs were blocked with likely every piece of furniture from the sixth floor.