#
Both of Overtime’s V-22 Ospreys came in after the last of the Red Riders were either dead or had fled. They landed near a hangar on the eastern edge, the same one Rossi and her crew had entered. Green Ghost directed the setting-up of workstations, generators, Klieg lights, and charging stations. Engineers had come in with the Ospreys and worked to get everything operable as soon as possible.
Jingle Bob, Nuff, Dalton, and Kando all stood with mouths open and stared at the artificial lighting that illuminated the inside of the hangar like summer sunlight. People in new-looking uniforms scrambled about while six helicopters sat parked on the runway. The newcomers even ate food out of boxes and bags, and heated it with water. They’d never known anything like it. Only Nado wasn’t impressed; after all, she’d been inside Overtime.
After the shock wore off, Bob pulled Nado aside. “Your mother was fine when I left her,” he said. “And I’m sure she’s still doing fine. She’s as tough as buffalo hide.”
But Nado had been to Overtime and knew why they were at Creech in the first place. “It’s bad up there, Bob. The Chinese attacked them late this afternoon and are coming back first thing in the morning to finish it.”
“How can you know that?”
“These people,” she said, indicating all the newcomers with her chin, “they’re the American Army, the real one. Don’t ask me how, I don’t really understand it, but trust me when I tell you they’re the real thing. You should see their base! It takes up the inside of a whole mountain. They sent a helicopter up north to find out what’s what and it radioed back how bad things are. Right now a long line of these big military machines is heading for Creech with guns and fuel and men. All these people are here to get that big plane flying again.”
“Can they do that?”
“I don’t know, but they think they can do it by dawn.”
“Dawn when? Do you mean tomorrow?”
“Yeah, sunup tomorrow. In that line of trucks and cars there’s these men called paratroopers. They mean to fly that plane up to Sierra so those paratroopers can jump out, float to the ground, and save Mom and everybody else up there.”
“I saw pictures once, in a book.”
“Then you know how it works.”
“I’ll be damned… this must be what the old world was like, before The Collapse. People floatin’ out of the sky.” He rubbed an eyebrow and turned away.
#
The LED lantern lit Jamal Kando’s office well. The general sat to one side, instinctively realizing he could add nothing to the discussion at hand. Green Ghost sat on the front edge of the desk, arms folded, staring at the floor as he spoke. Standing before him in a semi-circle were Joe Randall, Bunny Carlos, Alisa Plotz, Andy Arnold, and all of the helicopter pilots. “None of you is four-engine qualified?”
The pilots all looked at each other. Joe Randall acted as spokesman. “We fly helicopters. Getting qualified for fixed-wing is an entirely different process and takes years. We’re not even in the right branch of service for that; that’s Air Force flying. But I think you’re asking the wrong question.”
“Then please tell me the right question.”
“You should be asking if anybody can fly that thing.”
A corporal interrupted the meeting with a knock. Green Ghost motioned him in, and he set down a steel urn of coffee and a tray with cups, powdered milk, and sugar. They all got in line to pour a cup, all except Kando. All he could do was stare.
Green Ghost noticed and took him a cup. “How do you take it?”
“What?”
“How do you take your coffee?”
“I don’t know,” Kando said. “It was long gone by the time I was old enough to drink it.”
“Good, you don’t have any bad habits to unlearn. Drink it black. That’s how it’s best.”
Five minutes later, the caffeine had re-energized the group and Green Ghost got the discussion going again. “All right, so let me ask the right question this time: can anybody fly that big-ass plane over there?”
Caffeinated or not, nobody spoke, in that way nobody speaks during business meetings when the next voice to be heard attracts all kinds of negative attention. Randall kicked at the ground, Plotz and Arnold looked away, and Carlos crossed his arms.
“Did I ask the wrong question again?” Ghost stared at his brother-in-law. “If those techs get that plane up and running, somebody’s going to fly it. If nobody volunteers, then I’ll appoint somebody. Now think. Do any of you have any experience whatsoever in flying something like that?”
With obvious reluctance, Bunny Carlos raised his hand. “During my first deployment, I made friends with some Air Force bus drivers.”
“You mean transport pilots?” Ghost asked.
“Yeah, that’s right. This was before I met Joe. We were in Kuwait and hung out at the same O club. I was in Apaches then. There was this guy named Sig… Sig Olafsen. We traded rides in each other’s birds. They flew C-130s and C-5s. I logged about thirty hours flying supply drops in a C-5, officially as third seat. Then we got caught by the base commander and our asses were in a sling. We made up this BS story about it being a bridge-building exercise; the PC fucks loved that kind of shit. But truth was, the co-pilot was usually so hung over I was in the right seat most of the time.”
“So you actually flew it some?”
“More than some. Both our squadron commanders wanted to fry our asses, but neither wanted to admit their personnel had been fucking off like that, so an official cross-training project was put in place. I took courses in flying fixed-wing, they studied the Apache, and we both logged a total of seventy-five hours in each other’s aircraft.”
Randall’s mouth hung open. “I’ve never heard about anything like that! The Army and the Air Force agreed to cross-train their pilots?”
“What can I tell you, Joe? It happened. The whole thing was OTR, though… off the record. But if I got in trouble, the real crews were there to handle it.”
“You never told me any of this,” Randall said.
But Green Ghost shut that down. “Congratulations, Carlos, you’ve got the job. Who do you want in the right seat?”
“Captain Randall. He’s got a lot of single-engine hours. But Ghost, you gotta understand, a C-5 and a Comanche have about as much in common as a whore and a nun. They’re both girls, but that’s it, just like these planes. The only thing similar is, they’re both big and they fly. Plus, that was a long time ago. I don’t remember any of that shit.”
“That’s got to be good enough. You two get over there and familiarize yourself with the controls. Takeoff is in less than six hours.”
“Assuming the nut-runners get it going again,” Randall said.
“They will. They have to.”
#
Rossi stood at a worktable, rifling through tools, when she caught sight of Carlos approaching, Randall beside him. Having found the wrench, she took two strides and intercepted him. “Listen, I know I shouldn’t have sprung on you that way, but I’m under the gun to get this thing started. We can talk about it later, okay?”
“Good, because I’ve got five hours to learn how to fly this heap.”
“Huh?”
Randall chipped in. “Daddy-boy here volunteered to fly this thing five hundred miles north into a combat zone, do an airborne drop over a bunch of pissed-off Chinese soldiers, and then fly back. Then he fucked me over by requesting me as co-pilot.”
“You did what?”
Bunny scowled and shared the load. “Hey, Joe’s got a lot of time in fixed-wing aircraft!”
Frances wasn’t buying. “I don’t care about that!”
“Thanks a lot,” Randall said.
“I care about you volunteering to fly that damned thing!” she continued, as if Randall hadn’t spoken. Despite her being Randall’s crew chief, she kept going without worrying about insubordination. “You dumbass! I’m pregnant with your kid and I’m not about to raise him alone. Shit!”
�
�You won’t have to. I promise!”
She turned on a heel and called her team over for an impromptu meeting. “Randall and Carlos are flying this metal mountain into combat and it is not going to have mechanical issues. Do you understand?”
Serious and quiet, her team nodded in unison.
“Sergeant Moro has lead on this. Now get back to work, but remember, if this thing goes down, I’m taking it out on each and every one of you. Risckldyne, I want you to paint a name on each side of the nose. Call it Son of Tank Girl.”
“I’ll need a crane to get up that high, Frame.”
“I don’t care how you do it. Just get it done.” Finished, she turned on the two pilots again. With a curled lip and a snarl, she poked Carlos in the chest. “When this is over, you’re putting a ring on my finger!”
#
“Oh, my God, Bunny, what have you gotten us into?”
The cockpit of the C-5 made Tank Girl’s controls seem primitive. The two pilot seats looked and felt like lounge chairs, compared to the Comanche. Computer screens and instruments popped up in front of the pilots, between them, by their knees, and in seemingly every bit of free space in the entire cockpit. And where screens didn’t take up the panels, dials or switches did.
“It’s like an intergalactic bus,” Carlos said. “Why didn’t they think about this before we left Prime? You know somebody there had real multi-engine time.”
“You’d think so,” said a new voice from behind them. They turned. Green Ghost stood in the gloom of the engineering compartment, right behind the cockpit. “But you two are the closest thing we’ve got. Two of the fighter pilots still in Long Sleep are actually qualified on a C-5, but they couldn’t be awakened, prepped, and released for duty that fast. You know how Long Sleep affects reflexes when you first wake up.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Carlos said. “Shit, this is like nothing I’ve ever flown, man. Not without somebody qualified to cover my ass in case I fucked up.”
“Maybe your hot-shit ground crew can’t get this tub started.” Ghost glanced at his watch and handed them a thick, heavily ring-bound book. “But I’m betting they do, in which case you’ve got a little over five hours to memorize this.”
Carlos flipped to the cover. For Training Only: C-5 Handbook. The table of contents listed 585 pages.
#
“Making progress?” Green Ghost asked. Several hours had passed, and puffy circles ringed both Randall and Carlos’ eyes.
Joe Randall answered without looking away from the panel. “It would help if these instruments were lit up. You do realize this thing won’t fly without power, don’t you?”
“That’s what I’m here to tell you. Electric power should be on within another minute or two, and Rossi needs you to try and start the engines as soon as the fuel gets here.”
“I think we’ve figured out how to do that much. If we haven’t, we’re really screwed.”
“Then stand by to power up, and cross your fingers.”
“Y’know, you could have told us about this before we left Prime.”
“You mean flying this thing?”
“Yeah. You knew then we were gonna have to fly it. It was a dick move not to tell us.”
“Not my call. Talk to your father-in-law.”
“He did that?”
“Yep.”
“Oh.” Randall went back to reading. “Maybe it wasn’t such a bad move, after all.”
#
SECTION NINE
War
Chapter 75
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
Sierra Army Depot, Herlong, CA
0212 hours, April 21
Vapor knelt and scanned the desert to the west with his NVGs. After the previous day’s fighting, they’d found no evidence the Chinese had night vision gear, but he wasn’t taking chances. Aside from their own scattered defenses, any heat signatures were far away. Even the wildlife sensed danger in the zone of death around the base.
“We’re good,” he said.
Junker Jane exited the headquarters building along with Aretha Lamar. The air inside had turned foul with the coppery scent of blood. Clean night air revived them both. Jane leaned against a tall heap of dirt and sand bracing the outside wall in the absence of sandbags.
“Normally I love the night air, but it hurts to breathe,” Lamar said.
“With three broken ribs, I’m surprised you can walk,” Claw said.
“I know I’ve said it, but thank you both for being here. I thought Jingle Bob’s story about mysterious Americans was an excuse to head south and save face in front of Jane. I never believed it was true. I thought we were all alone.”
“Don’t go changing your mind just yet,” Vapor said. “I can’t get anybody on the radio and to be honest with you, there’s no way they can get help up here before the Cs overrun this place. Our base is seven hundred and fifty miles from here and all we’ve got for air transport is helicopters.”
“Dawn’s in four hours, give or take.” Lamar leaned against the doorframe, relieving pressure on her injured left side. “So I guess that’s it. You two don’t have to stick around; you know that, right? No sense you getting killed, too.”
“Our Blackhawk is close by. We can fit two, maybe three more people on it now that we’ve used up most our fuel coming here. You and Jane and maybe a couple of the kids. It won’t get us all the way home, but we’ll be a long way from the Cs.”
“Thank you… I haven’t even asked your name and rank.”
“Just call me Vapor.”
“And I’m Claw.”
“Are those supposed to be names or ranks?”
Vapor knew Green Ghost would have given her a blank stare and not answered the question, but he wasn’t Ghost. “They’re names, ma’am, like code names.”
Wheezing, she took fast, shallow breaths. It made her light-headed. “The American Army is a lot different than I thought it would be.”
#
Chapter 76
We will find a way or we shall make one.
Hannibal Barca
At the Mike O’Callahan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Colorado River
0312 hours, April 21
The trek to the bridge had been harrowing. Even with a clear sky, bright moonlight, and headlights, drivers could only see the largest cracks and potholes before hitting them. So far a Humvee and a Bradley sat broken on the side of the highway behind them, but now the real test began. Glowing in the moonlight ahead stretched the Mike O’Callahan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Colorado River, a/k/a the Hoover Dam bypass bridge.
The driver of the lead Humvee had volunteered to walk the bridge’s entire span with a flashlight. Two lanes of traffic traveled in each direction with a concrete divider down the center. The private had a long way to walk — 1,900 feet and back.
Norm Fleming paced as he waited on the eastern bank, a high rock on one side and lower crags on the other. Far below at the bottom of the canyon, the river rushed between its steep walls. Behind him gathered a small knot of men and women from the leading vehicles, who could only stand and watch the light sweeping back and forth, far away and nearing the other side. Among them were the commanders of the infantry and the airborne battalions.
Twenty minutes later, the private arrived back, panting and sweating from his run. Hands on knees, he gasped out his report. “There’s no holes in the surface, General, on either side. It looked and felt sound to me… I can’t be sure. But I’ll be damned if some welds didn’t look fresh.”
“So there’s no obvious problems?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you.” He turned to the battalion commanders. “I’m going first. If I make it across safely, get the rest of the column across two at a time. We’re behind schedule, so once on the other side, it’s top speed.”
“General,” the infantry commander started, “I don’t think you should be the one to go first.”
“
Thank you, Major, I appreciate your concern, but now we’re wasting time. If something happens to me, you’re in command. Now let’s gitfoh! Next stop, Creech.”
The unaccustomed slang did the trick. They all moved like their asses were on fire.
#
Las Vegas wasn’t supposed to look that way. In contrast to the stoic persona he projected in public, Norm Fleming had always loved Las Vegas. The reflection of millions of lights during a dark desert night was something he found hypnotic. The bombast, the glitz, the sheer artificiality of it all appealed to a part of his soul he kept deeply buried from even his closest friends. Not even Nick Angriff knew Las Vegas was his favorite place on Earth.
He wasn’t a gambler and rarely played anything more than quarter slots. What he loved about the city was the raw and transparent emotionalism of it all. Emotions in Sin City ran the gamut from the lowest depression of those who’d just lost the rent money, to the euphoria of the gambler who’d hit a jackpot, or the lovers sharing a fantasy weekend. He admitted to himself it was the voyeurism that most called people watching. But he often sat for hours sipping single malt scotch at a bar in a busy casino, preferring the smoky and peaty flavor of Island malts.
Whenever he’d gone to Vegas, he’d stayed at the Flamingo, in a room overlooking the Strip. At night he’d opened all the curtains and lit the room in the blues, reds, and other garish colors flashing and flaring outside. Somehow, the bizarre lighting had helped him sleep. Above all, he’d loved the food, especially a pasta dish served at a restaurant facing the Strip on the hotel’s ground floor. The pasta had been homemade with a light cream sauce, garnished with capers, sun dried tomatoes, and bacon.
Speeding down old Interstate 515, he couldn’t help wondering how the city had died. Had the power shut down right away or had the Hoover Dam kept the lights on even as the food supply had dwindled? Had the people rioted or had they left to find someplace where food might still be available? And what about the thousands of visitors caught there when The Collapse began? Had they stampeded the airport looking for a way home? The dark ruins slipping by the elevated roadway offered no answers.
Standing at the Edge Page 36