In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  “Tacoma Base, this is Rodeo King, I’m on station, commencing my run in zero-five minutes. Jake, you got me out there?”

  Jake smiled at his friend’s voice in his headset. “Roger that, Rodeo King. Negative visual, but I’ve got you on radar. Safe run, buddy. Don’t fly into anything.” Rodeo King was the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 flown by Martin Hodges, an old friend he hadn’t seen often, at least before this crisis. Although they were both currently flying out of Tacoma, Martin was normally based in Spokane, while Jake’s bird roosted in a slip at the old Alameda Naval Air Station in San Francisco, the base long closed but portions leased to the Forest Service.

  He focused on his own work now as the Bluetail slid down through five-hundred feet, level and slowing, approaching the moonlit water of Puget Sound. He wasn’t crashing, and he wasn’t landing either.

  Aerial firefighting was normally work carried out over wilderness areas, with the intention of stopping the threat before it could reach populated areas. Things were different now, and the targets were population centers, specifically major cities, with over a thousand flying tankers, water bombers, Catalinas and fire choppers running missions along the West Coast. If this tactic worked the way its planners believed (and Jake prayed it would), the heaviest concentrations of the disaster would be snuffed out, and the remaining, smaller hot spots quickly dispersed. Then the smoke jumpers – also with a new mission and new tools – would move in and take the fight to the ground.

  “Here we go,” he said aloud, for the benefit of the man seated to his right, his co-pilot Aidan. Co-pilot, he thought, grinning. A sixty-year-old who couldn’t fly an aircraft and had a powerful fear of flying, Aidan looked uncomfortable in his green jumpsuit – a departure from his usual uniform – and sat without touching the controls, hands tightly clenched in his lap as he stared out the windscreen. This was their third run of the night, and the older man hadn’t gotten used to it yet. So long as the fuel lasted, and with Puget Sound so convenient, they could make a run every fifteen minutes. Maybe by the end of the night he’d have found his stomach. It didn’t matter much to the pilot, as long as the man did his job.

  They passed through three-hundred, then two, then one. Jake hit a switch, and hydraulics opened the belly scoops in the curved hull. The JRM Mars, a sixty-year-old design commonly known as a flying boat (sometimes confused with the smaller Catalina until one got a look at the impressive size difference), roared towards the waters of the Sound at just under 100 knots. The mission of the Forest Service’s Air Attack Squadron may have radically changed in the past month, but this part remained the same.

  Martin Hodges’s voice announced in Jake’s ears that Rodeo King had delivered its payload, twelve-thousand gallons of water on target, and was RTB. Jake barely noticed, hands gripping the yoke as he brought the Bluetail down to kiss the water.

  From a distance, the act appeared graceful, the aircraft skimming the surface gently and leaving a feathering white wake. The reality was more like riding a freight train over speed bumps. The Bluetail smacked the water, thudding along in a sudden, rumbling sawmill of noise as the airframe shook hard enough to rattle teeth, Jake fighting to keep her level, to keep from dipping a wing or dropping the nose, maintaining airspeed. The slightest mistake would mean an instantaneous, explosive tumble of metal and death, and he held his breath for an endless twenty-two seconds, the time it took for the scoops to draw seventy-two-hundred gallons of water into the tanks. A panel light turned green and Jake’s breath exploded as he hauled back on the yoke, the scoops closing automatically, his bird now thirty tons heavier.

  “C’mon, big girl,” he growled, the muscles in his arms bulging as he hauled back while kicking his throttles full forward, pushing the four, eighteen-cylinder engines towards their 2,500 horsepower capacity. The props clawed at the air and the big plane rose slowly, passing a hundred feet. Jake saw the blacked-out shape of a Japanese car-carrier suddenly pass close beneath him, crewless and adrift in the Sound. He hadn’t seen it on radar. Was the equipment malfunctioning, did he lose it in the surface clutter, or had he simply not been paying attention? No answer was a good one, and he shuddered, realizing that if he had started his loading run five seconds later, he would have flown broadside into the ghost ship.

  Aidan had seen it too. He started praying out loud.

  The Bluetail banked left in a gentle horseshoe, and Jake lined her nose up with his attack coordinates. Downtown Seattle approached in his windscreen, a far different looking target area than he had become accustomed to over the last seven years in Aerial Fire Attack. It was as blacked-out as the drifting car-carrier had been, not a single streetlight or highway stripe with white light coming one way and red going the other, no glittering skyscrapers, no field lights at the airport or even avoidance strobes atop the Space Needle. Darkness, lit only by the night sky. At his eleven o’clock, Jake could see the route Rodeo King had flown, sporadic pinpoints of fire in the streets and on rooftops to show where he had dropped.

  Jake’s coordinates took him slightly east of there, north of I-90 and to the right of downtown. Seattle University. He tipped the heavy bird down to five-hundred feet and eased back on the throttles, keeping her low and slow, then flexed his fingers on the yoke. He glanced at Aidan, who had his head down and his eyes closed, still praying loudly.

  “Tacoma Base, this is Bluetail, I am commencing my attack run.” His voice was the same, bored-sounding tone familiar to pilots the world over. It was that calm pilot’s voice he’d used when the Bluetail nearly had to ditch in a Canadian forest fire the previous year, the same steady tone he used six years before that, when an Afghani insurgent with a Stinger had tried to put a missile up his tailpipe. His business voice.

  Only this business was far deadlier and with much higher stakes than anything he had ever done before.

  The aircraft roared in over the city as Jake made his final adjustments, and he glanced down out the left window as his right thumb snapped up to pause above a red button at the top of his yoke. Even without light he could see the swiftly passing streets below, every avenue overrun and filled with movement. A look out the front showed the sprawling campus before him as he descended to three hundred feet, and there he saw more of the same, rooftops and common areas alike, all swarming with figures. They might have been refugees, panicked survivors trying to escape the city.

  Jake knew they weren’t.

  “Releasing,” he said, triggering his payload.

  Thirty tons of Puget Sound – what Father Aidan’s prayers had since transformed to holy water – erupted from the belly of the Bluetail as it swept across the campus, covering a four acre area.

  The vampire swarm took the full force of the hit.

  They exploded in flames, hundreds of figures immolated in seconds, running and burning and collapsing in the night.

  Free of its burden, the Bluetail seemed to leap into the air, and its powerful engines found altitude as Jake checked his dials and knee chart and began planning for another pick-up. Rodeo King could only make a single drop before returning to base, but Jake’s flying boat could keep this up all night. As the plane rose, a wash of moonlight across the fuselage showed that the sexy pin-up painted on the nose was holding a stake and a mallet.

  Jake looked at the priest in the right seat, Aidan and others like him the Forestry Service’s newest recruits in a new war. He looked fatigued, drained. “We can make another half dozen runs on our fuel before we have to head back to base. Think you can handle it, Father?”

  The older man took a deep breath, then nodded and smiled just a little.

  “God willing.”

  TRAIL OF BREAD CRUMBS

  They sat at the table across from each other, fraternal twins and physical opposites. He was robust, plump with rosy cheeks. She was sallow and drawn, cheeks and eyes sunken in her face, staring down at a doll in her lap. The boy was shoveling a third plate of meat into his mouth.

  “You need to eat something,” he said between
mouthfuls.

  She didn’t reply.

  He looked at her as he chewed on a rib. Four weeks of near-starvation had left his sister a skin-wrapped skeleton in a baggy gray dress. He shrugged. She would eat when she was ready.

  After a few minutes, the girl spoke without looking up. “Father left us in the woods to die.”

  The boy chewed and swallowed, nodding. “Because of the famine. Mother told him we were too many mouths to feed.” My goodness, he was hungry. Living on nothing but sweets had created a serious protein deficiency in him, as well as doing unpleasant things to his teeth. He looked around the delicious cottage as the old woman’s raspy song played again in his head.

  “Nibble, nibble, little mouse. Who’s that nibbling at my house?”

  He remembered the way she had pinched his cheek and said, “That will make for a nice bite.” The boy went back to forking meat into his mouth.

  “I hate them,” his sister said, looking up. Her eyes were flat and dull. Gone was all trace of childhood, and her brother saw that although the old woman had failed to kill her, something inside his sister had died nonetheless. It made him sad.

  “You were very brave,” he said. “A hero. You saved me from the cage, saved our lives.”

  She looked at him without expression. “I don’t feel bad about doing it.”

  The boy nodded again, his teeth crunching down hard on something. He picked it out of his mouth and examined the object. A button. Then he remembered the witch had been fully dressed when his sister pushed her into the oven. He flicked it away.

  “Children!” called a voice from outside. “Children?”

  The girl walked to a window and peered out, seeing the woodcutter making his way up the forest path, heading for the gingerbread house. “It’s father,” she said. “He’s sorry for what he did, and came looking for us, just like you said he would.”

  The boy tossed a rib onto his plate and burped.

  “It’s mother’s fault, too,” she said, walking to the wood pile beside the oven and picking up a hatchet, then returning to stand beside the door. “I want to push her into an oven.”

  The boy sucked grease off his fingers and hopped down from his chair, bringing a butcher knife with him as he moved to flank the other side of the door. “She’s quite skinny,” he said, looking at the reflection of his eyes in the blade. “We’ll have to fatten her up a bit.”

  Then he smiled. “But father first.”

  ZERO TOLERANCE

  The Lincoln Navigator left Ashville behind as it chased the setting sun on Interstate 40. Twilight had come to western North Carolina, and Thomas Kirkland switched from his daytime running lights to full headlights.

  Traffic was sparse along this section of highway, but still the Navigator stayed at a cruise-controlled sixty-four miles per hour. A big Freightliner with Piggly Wiggly emblazoned on the side rocketed past doing eighty plus, and once it moved out of sight the road was empty save for the big Lincoln.

  Within the air conditioned comfort of the luxury SUV, Thomas tapped his fingers lightly on the steering wheel, keeping time with a Kenny Chesney song playing softly on a classic country station. Beside him, Bianca appeared engrossed in an old Nicholas Sparks novel, but he knew she was dividing her attention between the book and the back seat, listening to the bickering. Angela and Carl, sixteen and fourteen respectively, were debating the rightful ownership of a Spin magazine. Their Generation XII iTablets were drained and dead, and they were already bored with both the games and movies available for the rear seat video screens. Had to have something to argue about, Thomas thought. But they were smart enough to keep their voices low, knowing that if they really fought about it, one or both of their parents would get involved, and the magazine was likely to get tossed in a trash can at the next rest stop.

  Thomas lifted his gaze to the rear view mirror and let it drift past his two oldest children to come to rest on Edwin, his nine-year-old. The boy was in the third row seat, nestled amid suitcases and propping his back against a duffel bag. Edwin had inherited his mother’s love of reading, but not her taste. At the moment he was intently absorbing the contents of a thirty-one page pamphlet entitled Summaries of Chinese Civil Defense Research Reports. It was a booklet put out by the U.S. Office of Home Affairs, presumably so Americans could learn what the bogeymen on the other side of the world thought about preparedness, and apply some of those organizational skills to their own lives. Edwin had picked it up at the Georgia State Fair last week. Thomas shook his head, amazed for the umpteenth time that the boy was interested in – much less capable of understanding – such an obscure and no doubt abysmally dry topic. But then with two of his children running the emotional gauntlet of teenagerhood, he often felt he was long past trying to understand his kids.

  The headlights reflected off a green highway sign, informing Thomas that he would soon be making the turn onto Route 215. Thank God, he thought, this had been a hell of a drive. They had a late start yesterday, and made little more than a hundred miles from their Atlanta home before stopping for the night. Today had been devoted to driving, and Thomas was sick of it. The fact that Bianca was intimidated by and refused to captain the big SUV kept him behind the wheel for the entire trip. But he admitted to himself that it was better to face a sore back and exhaustion than the tension which went with sitting in the passenger seat and watching his wife try to handle the Navigator.

  Thomas watched the darkening woods slide past, trying unsuccessfully not to think about business, but as the owner of Kirkland Insurance this was a nearly impossible feat. It wasn’t the actual details of the insurance business that captured his thoughts, however. It was Howard MacDonald, his former top sales agent. There was some unpleasant business.

  He couldn’t say he was really surprised when Howard was arrested in Los Angeles while attempting to board a flight to Venezuela. Nor was he surprised that Howard was tried, convicted and subsequently executed three days later on the gallows in front of the state courthouse, an event which was both televised and blasted over the internet. What surprised Thomas was that Howard had embezzled the money from the firm in the first place. All fear of punishment aside, Howard just shouldn’t have done it. He and Thomas were friends, for Chrissake! And Howard was no moron, either. That was one of the things which was most puzzling, that Howard would even think he could get away with it, especially these days.

  The volume of the bickering in the back increased, pulling Thomas back to the present.

  “I said hand ‘em up, you little creep!”

  Bianca twisted around, slipping out from under the shoulder belt. “What’s going on?”

  “Mom, Edwin’s hogging the pretzels, and he won’t give us any,” Angela said.

  “Yeah,” seconded Carl.

  Bianca sighed. “Well, do you think you could ask nicely for things, young lady?”

  Angela put on a look of astonishment. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Carl.

  “Stay out of it, Carl.” Thomas looked at his older son in the rear view.

  “Edwin, give your sister the pretzels.”

  The boy peered over the pamphlet and shrugged, tossing the bag to Angela. “It’s okay with me if she wants to turn into a blimp.” His face sank behind the pages.

  “You little geek,” hissed Angela.

  “Pizza face.”

  “That’s enough, both of you.” Bianca raised her voice just enough to show she meant it, turning back and ducking under the shoulder belt once again.

  “Yeah,” grinned Carl, as he snatched the magazine from his sister’s hands.

  The squabbling returned to a low roar, and while Bianca went back to Mr. Sparks, Thomas turned the radio up a little and kept his eyes on the darkening road. The Lincoln was in hill country now, indicating the turn-off was getting nearer. On the radio the station was between songs, and the drawling DJ cut to an affiliate’s live news report from Toronto, for an update on the hostage drama being played out the
re.

  Thomas listened as a reporter recapped the story. A TWA 787 had lifted off from O’Hare International this morning, bound for Pittsburgh. Shortly after it was airborne, two men claiming to be soldiers in the service of Allah took control of the plane, shooting one crew member and forcing the pilot to detour to Toronto. Thomas didn’t envy the folks who would have to explain how someone managed to get firearms on an aircraft, and he was amazed that the Air Force hadn’t simply shot it down. As soon as the aircraft landed, a Canadian-American counter terrorist team disabled the landing gear, immobilizing it. The terrorists demanded the release of political prisoners held in Guantanamo, along with the usual demands of troop withdrawal, safe passage, blah, blah, blah.

  Now, the reporter explained, the crisis was over. In support of American foreign and national policy, the Canadian government permitted two U.S. fighter jets to enter their airspace – better late than never, Thomas supposed – and they attacked without warning. The fighters came in low over the airport and loosed a pair of smart bombs which impacted the 787’s fuselage near both the cockpit and coach seating. One bomb would have been more than enough, and the big white aircraft disintegrated under the double blasts, leaving a massive crater in the runway. There were no survivors. A low-ranking spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice made the usual, tired speech about how the United States would tolerate absolutely no terrorist activities which affected American interests or citizens, directly or indirectly, and would respond to all acts of aggression swiftly and without compromise. An unwavering message of strength, the government proclaimed, was U.S. policy.