The Final Day Read online

  “It is a bit more complex than that,” Billy interjected, “but yeah, Maury’s right on this.”

  “Maury, yes or no, can you fly me to Roanoke and back?”

  Maury hesitated.

  “Yes or no.”

  “If I plan to see my grandchildren”—and he paused before the next jab—“or your child that’s coming, all bets are off.”

  John sighed with exasperation. “Let’s get down to the bottom of this and why I feel I have to go. I think this Quentin Reynolds was carrying some information way too important to ignore and to let disappear in the frozen ground with his dead body. He died for a reason, and that was to somehow get to me with a message. What, I don’t know, but for him to set off over land to reach me means it must have been damn well important.”

  “Or the excuse of a deserter who got jumped on the way—then, delirious, had some made-up story to worm his way into our community.” Ernie sniffed. “You yourself said you still aren’t even sure if he is valid or not.”

  “Look, damn it. There is one fact that can’t be disputed. I served under Bob Scales during Desert Storm One. Without his help, I would never have moved here.” He hesitated, looking at Makala. “When my first wife was hit by cancer and wanted to be close to her family in her final months, it was my friend General Scales who networked me into a job at Montreat. If he is still alive, I owe him a hell of a lot. If he is still alive and sent this Quentin fella to find me, it must be important, damn important.”

  Makala offered a sad smile of understanding, and he nodded his thanks for that.

  “Quentin Reynolds, I believe, just might have been sent by my friend to contact me. Just to know he is alive means the world to me.”

  “And you’ll risk your ass and the only helicopter in our entire state to find out?” Ernie interjected.

  John wanted to shout yes in reply but thought better of it. If he turned this personal, the council would vote him down, and frankly he could not blame them then if they did.

  “The question of why has to be answered and answered now. If it is about an EMP, another one, we had damn well better find out and quick. It might have been the ravings of a dying man remembering the tragedy all of us endured. Or was it a warning that we might get hit again?”

  The low murmuring in the room of those he could sense were about to tell him to just calm down, relax, go home with his wife, and take a few days off after the stress of his trip over the mountain now fell silent.

  “Are we going to be hit again?” John asked.

  “By who?” Again it was Ernie. “Why bother? America is finished as we know it. Sure, we flattened Iran and North Korea. India and Pakistan are turning each other into radioactive wastelands, the same in the Middle East. We still have the nuke boomers at sea. Why would anyone want to hit us again?”

  John looked at Forrest, and though he felt the demonstration would be absurd, perhaps it was the only way to get his message across.

  “Forrest, you got any of those K-Cups of coffee on you?”

  Forrest, who had been listening intently to John, recoiled slightly. “What the hell is this, a shakedown?”

  “Just yes or no—you got any on you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Give me one.”

  “Why?”

  “Okay, loan me one; I promise I’ll give it back.”

  Forrest reached into the side pocket of his battered fatigue jacket and pulled one out and reluctantly tossed it over. John snatched it and looked at the lid.

  “Hazelnut, my favorite,” he whispered, and he put it on the desk in front of him. “Okay, my friends, who’s gonna grab for it first?”

  “Come on, John, what kind of game is this?” Reverend Black asked.

  John could see the hungry gazes of those crammed into his office. His own indulgences with Forrest these last few days he had not discussed with anyone else in this room, Makala and Lee the only ones present who had enjoyed the largesse of Forrest’s secret hoard.

  “To my point. You all want it; I know you do. But let me just add this one caveat in.”

  “You and your professor’s Latin.” Ernie sniffed, his gaze locked on the small, white plastic cup.

  “One chance in ten—no, make it one in a hundred that coffee in there is laced with cyanide poison. A one in a hundred chance it turns into you drinking the Kool-Aid—Jonestown kind of stuff. Some of you remember that insane day. Still want it?”

  He could see the confused glances.

  “Hell, you might risk it for yourself just for the taste of coffee again. But share it with your spouse, your kids? Who wants to try it?”

  No one spoke.

  He scooped up the white plastic cup and tossed it back to Forrest, who looked around a bit suspiciously, reminding John of Gollum the way he clutched at the One Ring, and quickly slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Point made,” John announced.

  “What point, damn it?” Ernie snapped.

  “One chance in ten, maybe one chance in a hundred, that the message that Major Quentin Reynolds was carrying was a warning of things to come. Last time we got hit, no one here knew it was coming, and look at us now. Suppose someone somewhere is planning to do it again? Suppose my friend General Scales is still alive and wanted to get a warning to us?”

  “Then why all the mystery?” Ernie retorted. “If your buddy is still alive out there and has this big secret he wants to warn you about, just fly in and tell us, or get on the radio and announce it. The whole thing is screwy, John, and you know it.”

  “I agree in part, Ernie. Yeah, it is strange, a lone guy claiming to have served with the general showing up half-dead. But we definitely live in a screwy world. Maybe my friend has reasons for not doing what you said. I can think of a dozen of them.”

  “Name one.”

  “He knows something he can’t let anyone else know for whatever reason and wanted to get word to me. Send it out on a radio and the entire world can listen in. Fly here? That draws notice as well. I could go on, but there’s a couple, for starters.”

  Ernie took that in. “Or the whole thing could be a trap to lure you out of this valley by claiming a friend is still alive with some sort of secret message. You take the bait, and Bluemont gets payback for Fredericks with you dangling from the end of a rope.”

  John could see Makala go tense over that one, nodding in agreement. It was exactly what she had said within minutes after he returned from trying to see Quentin. It was a setup to entrap him.

  “Think about it,” John pressed in, avoiding eye contact with his wife. “We are just starting to get back on our feet. We’ve got electricity back, a lab here on campus making antibiotics and anesthesia; they even think they’ll get one of Doc Weiderman’s old x-ray machines he had packed away down in the basement of his office on the day things hit back online soon. Think of what that would have meant after our fight with the Posse and with Fredericks. We’ve got water pumping again through the town water mains. We are starting to crawl back out of the darkness. But if we are hit by another EMP, again without warning, we might as well just bury the last two and a half years of struggle, dig a grave for the rest of us, and crawl into it.”

  “Who would be crazy enough to do that again?” Maury asked.

  John shrugged. “Who was crazy enough the first time? After the fact, we finally figured out it was North Korea and Iran handing off nukes to terrorists who launched them from container ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. There are still terrorist cells out there, maybe wanting to this time provoke a full-scale global nuclear war. Could be China wanting to push us down even further but stand there looking innocent and then suggesting we need more aid east of the Mississippi. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “Did it ultimately matter who did it last time? The result was the same; it took us to the edge of extinction. If it might happen again, and there is a chance we can get a forewarning, I want that chance for
all of us.”

  “There’s one other reason now,” Ernie said.

  John looked over at him, ready to let fly with an angry burst for him to remain silent but then realized the secret would soon be out anyhow, and laying it on the table could help with his argument.

  “Okay, this is classified, and I mean strictly classified; it has to stay in this room.” John paused, looking at the telephone receiver on the table in front of him, tempted to hang it up. But those listening in were now part of the government as well. “Do we all understand each other? What I say next can go no further.”

  There were nods of approval, all now obviously filled with curiosity.

  “We’ve managed to get a few computers back up and running.”

  “A few computers?” Billy said. “So what? Play Pac-Man, or some dumb-ass flight simulator on them? The Internet is gone forever, at least here, and unless linked up, they’re useless.”

  “Didn’t AB Tech in Asheville once offer a course on aircraft maintenance?” Ernie asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “How did they teach it?”

  “Computers, of course, and anything hooked into the net and plugged in for power got fried.”

  “Maybe the maintenance manuals for the L-3 and the Black Hawk were on CDs. I got another old PC up and running over in the library yesterday while our hero John and company were trying to kill themselves going over the mountain. Give me a computer, give me data stored on a CD, and I’ll get the machine to run it. You want it?”

  Billy could only nod.

  “And fiber optics, my friends, were not cooked off. They’re dark now, but give me enough machines and the juice to run them, and I’ll get a network—at least local—up and running again.”

  “So we can play games and send those damn tweets,” someone snapped.

  “No, damn it. Data transfer was the lifeblood of what we were. Medical libraries, technical data beyond the magazines moldering in the school basement … find a way to hook me in, and we can even eavesdrop on Bluemont.”

  Though John was growing increasingly frustrated with Ernie taking the topic off the point he was trying to close in on and talking about more than he should, this did catch everyone’s attention.

  “After I left IBM back in the late ’80s, that was the business my wife and I set up. We wrote the software and provided some of the hardware for those big array dishes. Not the crap units you all started to get with your televisions; I’m talking about the big stuff used by governments. Chances are the LEOs were most likely taken out in the war, but the geosynch stuff I bet is still definitely online.”

  “Translate, please?” the Asheville rep shouted from the back of the room.

  “Oh, jeez. LEO, low-earth orbit. Companies like those direct television networks, their satellites were high up, twenty-three thousand miles up, what we called geosynch. The comm sats up there were heavily proofed against any kind of electromagnetic pulse. Had to be in order to survive solar storms, or coronal mass ejections, as we called them. Chances are Bluemont and other surviving governments are still using them for chatter and for encrypted stuff as well. You give me enough juice, some fairly recent computers that some rich kid tossed into his basement when Mommy and Daddy gave him an even faster unit for his damn stupid games, and I know how to start listening in.”

  “You mean hacking?” Maury asked.

  “Yup. Hell, my wife is a pro at that. Some years back, we installed the tracking software for a Middle Eastern country to link into a geosynch satellite.”

  “Which Middle Eastern country?” John asked.

  Ernie just smiled and replied, “Classified.”

  No one interrupted as Ernie smiled expansively, pleased that he had obviously taken over the meeting for at least a few minutes.

  “Well, the bastards welched on the last half of a payment of around a million bucks. Figured they had the system we installed, so why bother to pay some Americans once they had it in place?” Ernie started to laugh.

  “They hadn’t counted on my wife, Linda. She sent them the usual notices and finally a warning, and they basically told us to screw off. Anyhow, they didn’t reckon on her. She had a Trojan in the software, hacked into it on day 121 of overdue payment—after all due proper notice and warning, of course—and fried their entire system off. We lost a million bucks but laughed our butts off.” Ernie chuckled at the memory of it.

  “We have another resource as well,” John chimed in. “This college was starting up a cybersecurity major just before we got hit. We have some kids here that were getting top-notch training in how to keep systems secured from hackers.”

  “Which means that in order to stop a hacker, you have to know how to hack,” Ernie interjected. “Put those kids to work doing something useful rather than having them dig for roots and who knows what we might find out, not just about this rumor regarding an EMP but a lot of other stuff we haven’t even considered. It’s out there; it’s time we started listening in, and if there is another EMP that hits without warning and the machines I’ve got up are running when the hit comes, we’re back in the Stone Age, this time with no hope of return.”

  “What Ernie told us is another reason I have to go to Roanoke,” John quickly announced. “We are coming back online. Ernie, if another EMP is popped today, or a few months from now, what happens to your work?”

  Ernie looked at him and finally nodded. “I change my vote, John, even though it will eat up a hell of a lot of our reserve fuel for that chopper. I say go and get your answers.”

  John looked around at the others. “Let’s say Ernie’s statement is a motion. Those in favor?”

  All but two raised their hands—the pilot who would have to take him … and Makala. And he knew there would be hell to pay once back home, but like it or not—and though the thought of a helicopter flight did turn his stomach over—it had to be done.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  John finished packing in total silence. There had been no cross words between him and Makala after the meeting and the decision to go, and the silence was indeed deafening. He scanned through his checklist of extra clothing and winter survival gear one more time. He had added in old-fashioned auto maps once put out by Exxon covering Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, just in case they went down and had to hike back. The backup plan if such happened was to try to raise radio contact with Billy Tyndall, who would attempt to fly out and pick them up one at a time, but if that could not be done, it would be at least a two-week hike, in winter, to get back home.

  He had carefully cleaned his Glock and was packing along four extra magazines. His shoulder weapon would be drawn from the community armory, an up-to-date M4 with half a dozen magazine loads.

  He heard Maury’s jeep, driven this time by Danny McMullen, pull into the driveway. Rather than come in, Danny wisely just tapped the horn a few times.

  John shouldered his backpack and walked out to the sunroom, where Makala sat by the window. She was clutching Rabs, his daughter’s much-battered and beloved stuffed rabbit, and the sight of her brought tears to his eyes.

  She looked up at him. She was crying. He walked over and knelt by her side. She turned away from him and began to shudder with sobs.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, John,” she gasped. Then she turned, holding Rabs, and threw her arms around his shoulders.

  “I have to,” was all he could get out.

  “We’ve all lost too much. Jennifer became like my daughter, poor old Jen like the mother I never really had. And now this. I never knew I could love a man with such intensity.”

  She broke completely, holding him tightly, and as she did so he could feel their baby quaking within her. He loosened her embrace, leaned down, kissed her distended stomach, and tried to force a laugh through his tears.

  “Little bugger just kicked me in the face!”

  “And if I didn’t love you so much, I’d kick you too!” Makala cried. “Haven’t you done enough? Everyone in town feels
the same as I do, even Ernie. You damn near got killed more than once this spring. You’ve done enough. Forrest is eager to go; so is Ernie. You’ve already written out a letter to this Scales person, if he is even real and still alive. They can carry it and just drop it. Please, John.”

  Her tears were coming so hot and fiercely she couldn’t talk for a moment.

  He did not reply. He had stated he was going, what was now defined as the Senate for their so-called state had reluctantly voted in agreement, and there was no backing out now.

  Chances were she was right; he was acting on an assumption, and though he had not articulated all of it openly, he fostered a deep-seated fear that Quentin had come as a warning, that something terrible was about to unfold, and he might be the only person who could find out what it was and act.

  He had argued with himself in the hours after the meeting that he was simply being paranoid and taking too much upon himself, but his decision had been made, and long years of training and experience still told him that so often a first hunch, a gut feeling, carried with it the need to act.

  He could only pray that Makala’s gut feeling came from emotion and was wrong. At least he could hope that was the case.

  Danny tapped the horn again. John reluctantly stood up, easing out of Makala’s embrace. She stood up and threw her arms around him.

  “Damn it, John Matherson, if anything happens to you, I think I’ll kill you!” She began to laugh through her tears. “God go with you and bring you back safely to us.”

  * * *

  “Clear rotors!” Maury shouted, leaning out the window. It had been agreed that Billy Tyndall would stay behind in case he was needed with the L-3. Danny McMullen was therefore in the copilot seat. He had zero flying time in a chopper; his military experience in the air force was working on the big stuff—B-52s, KC-135s—but at least he had a sense regarding the Black Hawk’s power plant, and it was better than no one.

  A security team of three was going with John, led by Forrest and accompanied by Kevin Malady and Lee Robinson. They could have taken half a dozen more, but each additional man was another two hundred pounds of weight, which equaled more fuel being needed. Besides, Maury’s few hours of flight experience were with an empty load, and Danny in the other seat would have to learn on the job, so the less weight the better.