Standing at the Edge

by William Alan Webb

  Fleming checked his watch. They were thirty-one minutes behind schedule. Only at the last moment did he see something in the far distance, something he hadn’t expected to see: light, perhaps a bonfire. He twisted in his seat to stare backward, but it was gone.

  #

  Jamal Kando felt both awed and slighted. Except for disconnected fragments, he remembered nothing of the pre-Collapse world. Television he could picture in the form of a cartoon with little blue people. He also remembered lights at night and cars, lots and lots of cars, but however many frozen moments might still be stored in his memory, he had no sense of what that period had been like.

  What he did know for certain was that for the past fifty years, he’d devoted his life to protecting the remnants of the old USA in the Creech area. Mostly he’d been keeping a promise to his mother, who’d been a colonel in the USAF and taught him about America, to protect the airplanes from people who might misuse them. He’d been just young enough to keep his vow until it first became a habit and then a way of life.

  And now these newcomers came onto his base, the one he’d spent all his adult life protecting, and took it over without even asking him. Sure, the helicopters were impressive, and watching the two Comanches firing at the GRs had been exhilarating, but six helicopters and some technicians wasn’t an army.

  “Assholes,” he said to himself. For a while he watched the activity in the hangar, especially the workers led by the dark-haired woman they called Frame, but when Green Ghost left and didn’t come back, his wonder gave way to indignation. To hell with these arrogant bastards. Wandering outside, he forgot potential enemies lurking in the darkness and found himself on the shoulder of Highway 95.

  Decades of listening to the desert at night made him aware of how loud the clangor coming from the hangar truly was. Whines and whangs and all sorts of unidentifiable noises drowned out the usual backdrop of crickets, howling coyotes, and screeching, hunting hawks. When you grew up in the desert, it became part of your life, like a silent friend that was always there, dangerous but predictable.

  Far to the south, he spotted lights. Squinting, he tried to decide how many were coming his way and estimated dozens. It could only be the convoy the newcomers had said was en route.

  Hurrying to the main entrance, Kando opened the metal gates, which still hung from their brick-and-steel supports. Four Humvees pulled in and stopped. A large black man wearing a camouflage uniform sat in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, and he rolled down his window. Even in the darkness Kando saw three stars on his collar.

  “Good evening,” he said in a deep, resonant voice. “You’re a general?”

  Kando’s left hand went to the single star on his own collar. “I am… uhhh, sir. General Jamal Kando, base commander.”

  “I’m Lieutenant General Norman Fleming. General Kando, as you know we’re in a hurry. We need to know where to park and deploy, and how to get the fuel to this C-5. Can you show us?”

  “Yes, General Fleming, of course. Follow me.” He began walking into the base.

  “General Kando, wouldn’t it be faster if you rode with us?”

  “What?” Another arrogant jerk. “Yes, of course, it’s just been… I haven’t ridden anything except a horse since I was a child.”

  The Humvee’s driver jumped out and opened the back door. Gingerly Kando climbed inside. The slamming of the door startled him.

  “Where do I go, General?” the driver asked once he was back in his seat.

  “There’s a road ahead. Turn right and I’ll show you from there.”

  #

  Opening the hangar doors manually had required several dozen paratroopers. Once they’d done that, they could only sit on the tarmac and wait.

  Green Ghost found Fleming, Kando, and Nado standing to one side of the paratroopers. Although buildings blocked the eastern horizon, the sky overhead had begun to lighten with the approaching dawn.

  “Who got elected to fly that thing?” Fleming asked.

  “Carlos and Randall. Carlos actually has some minor experience in a C-5, and Randall’s done a lot of fixed-wing flying.”

  “Can they pull this off?”

  Green Ghost’s answer began as a deep breath followed by a sigh. “I don’t have an answer, Socrates, and I don’t think they do, either. If I had to bet, I think they can get it in the air, but after that all bets are off.”

  “Socrates?” Kando said. “I thought your name was Fleming?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Green Ghost pointed to the hangar, his hand silhouetted against the brightness from inside. “If anybody knows a good prayer, now’s the time to say it.”

  Twenty seconds later, a high-pitched whine started, similar to that of the two big helicopters except it kept getting louder, and then it was joined by a second whine, a third one, and finally a fourth. By the time they reached a steady pitch, Kando clamped his hands over his ears.

  #

  Chapter 77

  Only the impossible is worth doing.

  Akong Rinpoche

  Creech Air Force Base, NV

  0532 hours, April 21

  “Ready?” Joe Randall said.

  “This is nuts,” Carlos replied. “I can’t fly this thing.”

  “Sure you can. You got the engines started.”

  “I’m not kidding, Joe. The C-5 is the biggest airplane we ever built. It’s five stories tall, for God’s sake! I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.”

  “It’s too late to back out now, amigo.”

  “I can’t do it! If I fuck this up hundreds of people die! This whole thing is bent.”

  “Look at the bright side. You’ll only feel guilty for a minute or two.”

  “It’s not funny!”

  “No, it’s not! But you don’t have much of a choice. It’s either you fly the plane or the Chinese get their hands on a couple of armored corps and who knows what else? Look, I trust you enough to put my life in your hands on a daily basis and I know you can do this. This is a volunteer mission and all those paratroopers know you’re a rotorhead, not a bus driver. They’re getting on this plane because they want to fight, and they trust you and me to get ’em there in one piece, and that is exactly what we’re gonna do.”

  Carlos scowled and stared straight ahead. The flight helmet felt awkward since he couldn’t use the one from Tank Girl. The one he had to use rubbed the top of his ear, and it was already sore from the near miss earlier. “You told me something recently that I thought made a lot of sense. I’ll never forget it,” he finally said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “If this thing crashes, you’d better die with it. Otherwise I’m gonna kill you for getting me into this.”

  “I didn’t get you into this!”

  “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  #

  “Son of a bitch,” Kando said. “It’s moving. The damned thing is moving.”

  The C-5 eased out of the bright hangar into the darkness of night, lights glowing on and inside the fuselage. Like a giant pterodactyl, it turned onto a taxiway and then turned again onto a north-south runway. Light breezes from the southwest created a minor tailwind.

  Somewhere in the night, a single shot echoed across the desert, followed by a rapid flurry of high-pitched gunshots. Green Ghost recognized without thinking the report of an AK-47 and those of M-16s. Nothing indicated damage to the plane, or to anything else, and the AK-47 did not fire again. It was likely the Green Berets cleaning up the last of the Red Riders.

  On the edge of the runway, the giant craft stopped. Like the snout of some mammoth shark opening and exposing a maw filled with teeth, the nose of the C-5 rose upward and revealed the massive cargo bay. Once it stood at a right angle to the fuselage, a ramp lowered to the concrete. Inside the plane, a dull glow gave enough light to board by.

  “Load ’em up!” Fleming said, winding his finger in the air even though nobody could see it.

  Three hundred and sixty p
aratroopers gathered up their gear and headed for the ramp, but not before the battalion’s senior master sergeant snarled the opening lines to Blood On The Risers, the official unofficial theme song of the U.S. Airborne, sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

  He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,

  He checked all his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;

  He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar,

  "You ain’t gonna jump no more!"

  Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

  Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

  Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

  He ain’t gonna jump no more!

  Fleming had to smile at the bravado of those troopers, most of whom had never jumped into combat before and all of whom knew they might be using their parachutes long before arriving at the drop zone. He wished he had a video camera to show Nick how they looked boarding the plane.

  From her position standing close behind him, Nado didn’t sound quite as sanguine. “What a horrible song.” She spoke loud enough to be heard over the jet engines. The C-5 had moved far enough away that they didn’t have to yell to be heard. “Why are they singing something so awful? Do they want to die?”

  Beside her, Jingle Bob and Dalton glanced at each other, then looked away.

  “Gallows humor,” Fleming said. “Laughing in the face of death.”

  “Does that make dying easier?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But the hardest time isn’t during the battle; it’s all the waiting and preparing beforehand that’ll eat up your soul. Those men rode all night in cramped trucks, then unloaded and waited some more on this tarmac, and now they’re loading onto an airplane to wait some more. That gives plenty of time for your nerves to get the better of you, and this is one way of fighting that.”

  Then he reached down and picked up his own pack, rifle, and parachute. Turning to Green Ghost, he extended his hand. “If you talk to General Angriff, give him my regards.”

  “You’re not supposed to go on this mission, sir,” Green Ghost said.

  Nado and Kando listened, eyes wide, but said nothing.

  “I’m the commander on the spot, and I say that my going is necessary. Are you trying to forbid me… Colonel?” He said it with a smirk.

  Green Ghost stood with arms folded and his usual stoic stare as the only hint to what he might be thinking. “No, sir, you’re the general. And I don’t think I could stop you even if I wanted to. But if we’re gonna board, we’d better get our asses moving.”

  “Wait.” Nado reached for Ghost’s arm. “You said you weren’t going!”

  Fleming’s shocked expression turned quickly to bemusement.

  “I never said that!” Ghost said. “I told you I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to, and I have to.”

  “Why? Why do you have to go?”

  “To keep an eye on him.” Ghost pointed at Fleming. “My stuff’s already on the plane, sir. Let’s get out of here.”

  Shaking off his surprise, Bob trotted to catch up with them. His job would be to help pick out a landing zone. As they neared the plane, in the darkness behind him Green Ghost could just make out Nado’s angry frown and hands planted firmly on her hips.

  “You might not want to come back for a while.” Fleming patted Ghost on the back.

  “What’s her problem? What difference does it make to her?”

  “Oh, you poor guy, you.”

  #

  Nado, Dalton, and Nuff all sat cross-legged in the grass several hundred yards away from the screaming jet engines. They gaped in awe at the huge aircraft quivering on the taxiway like a cougar perched on a boulder waiting to pounce. Someone passed out MREs. The men had no idea what they were for until Nado showed them. Watching the C-5, they munched on the strange food and wondered how it got into the odd containers it came in.

  “I don’t much mind when people hand me food,” Dalton said. The rest kept eating.

  Nuff saw Nado’s food in her lap, untouched. “Ain’t you hungry?”

  “No,” she answered in an angry tone.

  “If you’re not gonna eat that, can I have it?”

  #

  Randall tapped Carlos on the shoulder and he pulled off the noise-cancelling headphone over his right ear. The whine of the idling engines had died to a background noise not unlike cicadas on a warm spring night in Tennessee.

  “Zone out, Bunny, zone out. Just like last year when that Stinger was on our tail, remember? Get in the zone, forget me, forget the outside world, and just let everything come to you. You can do it.”

  “This isn’t a movie and we’re not attacking a giant round space ship.”

  “No, it’s not a movie. It’s real life and when you pull this off, you’re going to be a real hero. You taxied to the end of the runway… the rest is a piece of cake.”

  Scowling, Carlos replaced the headphone cup over his ear. He sucked in a deep breath, exhaled, and nodded once.“Here we go,” he said, even though neither of them heard it. The giant aircraft shuddered as he pushed the four yoked throttles forward.

  Carlos deployed the plane’s two wing-mounted lights to illuminate the runway, but it remained difficult to see the concrete’s edges. Grass had overgrown the shoulders and in the darkness it was impossible to figure out what had dirt beneath it and what had concrete. A few volunteers held up flashlights, LED lanterns, and homemade torches, marking the runway’s path. The Green Berets had deployed closer in to protect them from any Red Riders they hadn’t yet hunted down.

  As he throttled up, the Galaxy lumbered forward. Neither man noticed the desert speeding by to either side. At 120 knots Carlos felt the controls becoming responsive. The closer they came to the takeoff speed of 145 knots, the lighter the controls felt. Carlos split his attention between the air speed and angle of attack indicator in the instrument panel beyond his right hand and the runway ahead. At 143 knots they lifted off, settled back with a bounce, and then took off, angling upward. Bunny Carlos kept a death grip on the wheel.

  #

  Norm Fleming wasn’t Nick Angriff. The legendary Nick the A would have calmed nervous paratroopers by cracking rude jokes, slapping backs, and generally acting as if flying into combat was the best thing that could possibly have happened. Fleming couldn’t do that, not and appear authentic. If he tried, those hard-eyed men would see through his act and his credibility would crumble. So instead he did what he would have done on the ground.

  Walking along the crowded interior toward the aircraft’s rear, he inspected troopers’ gear, patted arms, and uttered a few heartfelt words of encouragement. He wore the standard issue Beretta M9 handgun in a holster at his waist, the same as the rest of the troops, in sharp contrast to Angriff’s famous twin fifty-caliber Desert Eagles. He carried an M-16 slung over his shoulder.

  Aside from a few small firefights, Norm Fleming hadn’t seen combat in more than a decade of his lifespan. Unlike Angriff, a general who had no business being close to a firefight but sought them out anyway, Fleming considered one of the perks of higher command to be getting out of harm’s way. During their Kenyan deployment, he’d begun to wonder if he had a cowardly streak buried somewhere deep in his soul.

  Now he was on an aircraft heading into combat. Angriff hadn’t ordered him not to fight, because it had never occurred to him that Fleming would. And with only two practice jumps to his credit, he risked not only his own life, but also the stability of the brigade, should he be killed or, God forbid, taken prisoner. But he’d do it anyway, and knew he had a defense his commanding officer couldn’t penetrate: he was doing what Nick himself would have done.

  #

  Chapter 78

  My mother didn’t raise a second stringer.

  Lieutenant General Norman Fleming

  Operation Overtime, Nick Angriff’s quarters

  0602 hours, April 21

  He’d only slept three hours. Nick Angriff could feel his y
ears catching up to him in an aching neck and stiff legs. Pain shot down his back as he got out of bed, but he remembered to be quiet so as not to wake Janine. He made for the bathroom until the smell of coffee pulled him up short. His vision was still blurred with sleep as he stumbled down the short hallway to the kitchen he’d forgotten was part of his quarters. Ahead, someone coughed, and he rounded the corner with a long stride. His wife leaned on the counter, a cloth to her mouth.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Nick! Don’t do that! You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry, dear.” He eased behind her and kissed the top of her head. “I’m still getting used to you being here. Did you make coffee?”

  “Of course I did. I know my husband. Now, you sit down and I’ll scramble up some eggs.”

  “Just coffee, thanks. I should’ve been in the office an hour ago. It’s almost dawn and I’ve got to speak with Norm, see if they got that transport off the ground or not.”

  “You need to eat something, Nick. At least let me warm up an MRE.”

  “God, no, Nini, I’d rather starve than eat more shelf-stable eggs and rubber sausage. You know what the Marines call those?”

  “If it’s obscene, I don’t want to know.”

  A buzzing alerted him to the phone ringing, which could only be Walling or Schiller since everybody else was gone. He answered her over his shoulder. “It’s Marine slang. Of course it’s obscene.”

  #

  “Angriff,” he said into the phone’s handset.

  “General, this is Walling. We need you up here a-sap.”

  “I thought you were back in the hospital.”

  “I was, and now I’m back out again.”