The Final Day Read online

  Side doors were opened for liftoff at Maury’s insistence in case something went wrong and they had to get out quickly. The twin turbine engines above and behind John were whining up, rotor picking up speed, icy-cold air whipping in around him. He looked over at Forrest and Malady, sitting opposite him. John had of course endured many a chopper flight while in the army and never liked them; more often than not he had his puke bag out within minutes. Those two, though, were grinning, Malady shouting it felt like old times; Forrest, M4 slung across his chest, raising his one hand in a thumbs-up.

  They are actually enjoying this, John thought, struggling to maintain a calm outward appearance. Several hundred from the town had turned out to see them off, for this, after all, was a major event for the community, with their police chief, Ed, struggling to keep the crowd back a hundred yards. Maury might have some idea about flying, but John knew that getting a helicopter up and away safely was a hell of a lot more difficult than taking off in the L-3.

  They lifted off, nose pitching high, rolling as well to starboard. He could see Danny frantically pointing at something on the dash. The chopper then lurched forward, almost nosing in, Danny cursing so loudly that John could hear it even over the roar of the engines. And throughout it all, Forrest and Malady seemed unfazed. Lee Robinson, for whom this was the very first flight, had a nervous deathlike grip on John’s shoulder and was cursing as well. Glancing out the open side door, John could see the horizon tilting at what must have been a thirty-degree angle. In a light plane at takeoff, it would surely be a stall, but Maury nosed back over and gradually like a yo-yo, going up and down, they started to gain altitude, lose it, pitch back up again, and finally, nose tilted down slightly, began to move forward, still rising up, clearing the Ingrams’ parking lot.

  Maury finally managed to gain some directional control, nose pitched forward a bit more, speed relative to the ground picking up, and he spared a quick glance over his shoulder, motioning for the side doors to be closed, blocking out the frigid blast.

  The flight path was shaky at first, nose oscillating back and forth as Maury gingerly worked the controls but at least was putting more distance between them and the ground.

  He nudged the chopper into a northeasterly direction, dipping the nose a bit more to gain bite with the rotors and forward speed. They crossed over the Swannanoa Gap, now up five hundred feet above ground level. It was the place where the great battle with the Posse had been fought out. Looking out the portside window in the door, John could see the steep slopes around what had been the Ridgecrest Conference Center, the woods still evidently flame-scorched from the battle. They hit a burble of turbulence as they cleared the gap, while still picking up speed. Down below were the twisting turns and tunnels of the Norfolk Southern railroad, an engineering marvel of the nineteenth century, the longest and toughest mountain grade east of the Rockies that had taken half a decade of labor by thousands to traverse those eleven miles to the top of the pass. He caught a glimpse of the Meltons’ sawmill, in spite of the cold the water still flowing with enough energy to turn the wheel and the saws within, while a mile farther down was the clearing where the power dam for Old Fort and beyond was being installed, work stopped for now.

  They continued to climb. Danny had handed him an old FAA aviation sectional map of their route. It would skirt along the northeast flank of the Appalachian Mountains to just south of Roanoke and then cross over the range to sweep down on the Virginia city located in the southwestern corner of the state.

  With a stiff northwesterly wind still coming down into the South in the wake of the blizzard, both Maury and Billy had warned them it would be a bumpy ride, but at least on the way up, by gaining altitude up to eight thousand feet or so, the wind quartering on their tail would help whisk them to their goal and save on fuel. For the return flight, if they did not land, the flight plan was to get down low into the valley to avoid the stiff upper winds.

  As they reached their cruising speed of 140 miles an hour, a mile and a half up, they were soon sweeping past the majestic sight of Linville Gorge, formerly known as “the Grand Canyon of North Carolina.” It was a flash of memory for John, who had taken Jennifer and Elizabeth on a hike all the way up to the top of Table Rock. It had been an exhausting trek, made even more memorable because of the fright all of them had due to an encounter with a rattlesnake on the way back down. Jennifer had been terrified to the point where John had to carry her the last half mile down to the car, while more adventuresome Elizabeth wanted to go poking around in the brush with a long stick to find another one.

  Snakes were definitely one of the major negatives in his life, and during the previous summer, perhaps because of the radical decline in human population and snakes’ natural predators—such as possums, which some residents trapped as food—they had become a plague in the Montreat Valley. Regardless of his city-bred fears, some of the kids at the college had taken to eating them, a thought that turned John’s stomach.

  As they soared over the gorge and Table Rock, he hoped all the snakes down there would freeze to death with this early winter.

  They shot over Brown Mountain, that mysterious place with strange glowing lights that locals claimed were lanterns carried by long-departed native spirits, and then past the once popular tourist attraction of Grandfather Mountain, abandoned, carpeted in a deep blanket of snow.

  More turbulence and then the stomach-churning scent and sound of Lee getting sick, heaving into a plastic bag, spilling some as he cursed and fumbled to try to seal it shut. Forrest and Malady, sitting across from them, chuckled at Lee’s distress, Forrest fishing into the pocket of his winter fatigue jacket, pulling out some salted beef jerky and offering it over, shouting for him to chew on it. John could not help but smile at Lee’s scatological response even though he was fighting down nausea himself. In spite of their disagreement, Makala had set out some ginger tea for John to drink before leaving, a tonic she claimed actually did work with motion sickness, and perhaps it did so at this moment.

  They soon crossed over Interstate 77 up near Mount Airy, the highway twin ribbons of white, the snow-covered humps of long-abandoned cars still cluttering the road. As they passed over villages and small towns, here and there he could see a plume of smoke from a chimney. Mount Airy, which had claimed to be the role model for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, actually showed signs of life; a cluster of homes in the center of town had smoke pouring from chimneys, and a few farmhouses on the outskirts of town showed signs of life as well, with even what looked to be several horses out in a snow-covered field.

  But so much of the landscape was empty, barren, devoid of life. No roads were cleared, of course, the landscape below, once teeming with life, now a vast dead world that was once bustling with the activities of man. Near the interstate, except for Mount Airy, village after village appeared to have been burned out and abandoned.

  John unbuckled from his seat and, crouching low, went up forward to squat between Maury and Danny.

  Maury looked over his shoulder after struggling for a moment with the controls, nose pitching down slightly.

  “Damn it, John, you moving around throws off the center of gravity on this thing.”

  “Sorry, just wanted to check on how we are doing.”

  “Fine, but just don’t move around now.”

  “We on course?”

  Maury had yet to figure out what must have been the built-in navigation screen during the few hours he had practiced with this chopper and decided not to waste battery and fuel to figure it all out, so they were navigating by dead reckoning and an FAA sectional spread out on Danny’s lap.

  “That’s Interstate 81 off to our left on the other side of the mountains. We’re crossing into what was once the state of Virginia.”

  The way Danny had said what was once struck him.

  “About twenty minutes out, I’d reckon; the wind up here is giving us a good fifty-mile-per-hour boost.”

  After Mary died, John had taken the girls on
several trips up to the War College at Carlisle to visit Bob Scales when he was commandant there and then would bore Elizabeth to death spending a few days visiting and hiking around Gettysburg and Antietam. Jennifer, however, loved the trips because of the Boyds Bears shop just south of Gettysburg. He pushed that memory aside; it was far too poignant. The drive up and back was a long one—it usually took four hours or so to pass Roanoke—and here they were approaching it in little more than fifty minutes.

  “Anything on the radio?” John shouted.

  Maury shook his head. He had barely mastered that system as well, knowing enough to have it tuned to 122.9, the old frequency for general air traffic in what had once been defined as uncontrolled airspace, and alternating it with the frequency for what had been the civil airport at Roanoke as listed on the FAA map.

  They started over the mountains, turbulence picking up again, Danny shouting off waypoints he had marked on the map with a grease pencil, while working an old-fashioned circular slide rule, once the standard tool of all pilots, to check on relative ground speed and rate of drift from the quartering tailwind, giving course corrections to Maury.

  John looked over at his friend and could see that he was relaxing a bit. If anything, this first cross-country flight was instilling some confidence in his friend, who had only practiced locally since the capture of the chopper, carefully conserving their limited supply of jet fuel with each practice flight. John scanned the gauges, figured out which one was fuel, and was pleased to see they had consumed little more than one-eighth of their load.

  More buffeting as they dropped through three thousand feet, airspeed up to 170 miles an hour, a whiff of an unpleasant scent produced by Lee mingled in with the exhaust from the turbines.

  “That’s Roanoke,” Danny announced, pointing ten degrees or so off to their port side.

  In the cold winter air, it stood out clearly just beyond the low range of hills surrounding it, larger than Asheville. Plumes of smoke were rising up, not for heat but rather buildings that were burning.

  “Think it’s hot down there; something’s going on,” Danny announced, looking over at John, who nodded.

  The airport was located just north of the city. To reach it, they’d have to fly directly over the city and whatever was going on down there.

  “Swing us west, Maury,” John said. “Circle us out a half dozen miles or so; don’t go directly over the city, and we’ll approach the airport from the other direction.”

  It came up quickly with a ground speed of well over three miles a minute, John scanning the air around them. There was a flash of light from a building at least ten stories or so high, smoke rising up an instant later.

  “Damn it, there’s fighting down there!” Danny shouted.

  John felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw that Forrest was leaning on him for support, joining them to look forward.

  “Looks like a hot LZ to me!” Forrest shouted. “Where’s the airport?”

  Danny pointed to the right and forward. John picked up the binoculars resting in a flight bag between Maury and Danny, knelt up, trying to keep his balance, and finally got a close-up glimpse of the airport on the far side of the city.

  It was packed with aircraft, nearly all military. Half a dozen helicopters, a mix of Black Hawks and Apaches, and two old C-130s. Friend or foe? Like the choppers Fredericks had brought with him back in the spring, nearly all the aircraft lined up below were painted in faded desert camo scheme, military equipment brought back to the United States after the Day.

  “Someone’s calling us,” Maury announced, slipping one headphone back and looking at John. “Demanding we identify ourselves. What should I do?”

  This was not exactly what John expected. But then again, what did he expect? A deserted city? A destroyed city? A war going on that they were blundering into? But certainly not a welcome mat with a big sign scraped out of the snow: “Welcome, John! We were expecting you.”

  “John, what do we do?”

  “Just state we’re from Carolina and if General Scales is available to put him on the line.”

  Maury did as requested, waited, and then shook his head.

  “They’re ordering us to land immediately.”

  Maury gazed intently at John, who mulled that over for a few seconds while looking toward the city that was now off their starboard side half a dozen miles away. There was definitely a fight going on in the downtown area. It looked similar to Asheville, a cluster of taller office buildings downtown, suburban sprawl stretching out for several miles in every direction.

  “Tell him we’ll comply.”

  “What?” Forrest shouted. “Are you flipping crazy, John? There’s a fight going on down there. We land and Lord knows what we’ll be getting into. Whoever is down there will keep this bird, and if we’re lucky and not shot on the spot, we might just be allowed to walk home.”

  “Just tell him we’ll comply,” John shouted again, “and then be ready for a low-level pass so I can drop a message pod and then get us the hell out of here!”

  He looked back up at Maury, who now had approximately eleven hours of stick time on this chopper. He was asking for a maneuver that nearly all pilots loved to do, legally or when no one was looking, illegally. Before the Day, the mountains around Asheville served as a practice range for pilots preparing to deploy to Afghanistan or wherever there was mountainous terrain, and he always got a kick out of watching their high-speed passes, sweeping in low through the Swannanoa Gap, skimming up over his house, at times nearly at rooftop level, and weaving in and out across the mountain passes. And all of them most likely had hundreds of hours of airtime before trying such maneuvers.

  Maury grimaced, Danny looking over at the pilot and forcing a smile.

  “John, get aft, make sure everyone is strapped in, and open the door!” Danny shouted.

  John staggered back the few feet to the aft compartment, sparing a quick glance at Lee, who truly fit the definition of green faced, shouting for him to tighten his belting. Forrest strapped in across from John and then shouted instructions as to how to open the side door, which John had to struggle with as the helicopter pitched back and forth, the door at last sliding open, the cold blast of winter air whipping by at 140 miles per hour stunning him.

  He reached into his backpack and pulled out the message pod, a plastic torpedo-shaped container with a thirty-foot red streamer attached to it, snapping off the rubber band that held the streamer in a tight ball, letting several feet unravel.

  He glanced up and through the forward windshield and saw that Maury was banking in toward the airport but was now caught in a strong crosswind, struggling to crab the chopper so they could fly down the length of the main runway. There was a hell of a bounce as Maury nosed over, Lee looking at John wide-eyed and a second later disgorging what was left of his breakfast and dinner from the night before onto John’s lap.

  “They’re threatening to shoot if we don’t land!” Maury shouted, barely heard above the roar of the slipstream racing past the open door.

  “Tell them to screw themselves,” John shouted, “after we get the hell out!”

  They crossed the threshold of the runway, going flat out, Maury, nervous at running so low, bobbing up and down, tail rotor assembly swinging back and forth as he fought to keep control at such low altitude, with a variable crosswind sweeping across the open runway. John glanced up again. They were a hundred or so feet up, crossing over the paved runway, a large white number 12 flashing by underneath. To their right, he could see the airport terminal, the building burned out, collapsed, a couple of dozen private aircraft, long ago abandoned, pushed off to one side of the tarmac and jumbled together. Next to it, the control tower was still intact. He wanted to shout for Maury to try to get closer to the control tower, fearful that the dropped message might not be noticed.

  He waited a few more seconds.

  “They want us down now!” Maury shouted.

  John ignored him, leaning out the open
door, message cylinder and red tail ribbon bunched up in his hand, anxious at the thought that it just might get wiped aft and tangled into the tail rotor.

  They swept over a grounded Apache, several personnel on the ground craning to look up—or were they pointing something—and in answer to the thought, he caught the flash of a tracer round snapping past the open door.

  He threw the message cylinder out, arm getting whipped back by the slipstream, slamming it against the outside of the chopper, the wind sucking the glove off his left hand, shoulder feeling as if it were about to break.

  More tracers, a metallic crackling sound behind him, like someone punching a hole through aluminum or titanium, which was exactly what was happening as several rounds slammed into their Black Hawk.

  The impacts startled Maury, who instinctively pulled the chopper into a steep banking turn, and if not for the safety harness, John would have been pitched out. Gasping for breath in the violent crosswind, he caught a glimpse of the message cylinder already down on the ground, the red tape attached to the tail still spiraling down, someone running toward it, while at least two others with weapons raised were continuing to fire at them.

  “You damn fools!” John screamed, making a universal rude gesture as Forrest, one-handed, stretched out and grabbed the back of John’s harness to help pull him back in. Even as he did so, Maury pitched the chopper hard to starboard, causing John to tumble back in, landing hard on the floor, which was splattered with Lee’s vomit.

  Kevin Malady unbuckled himself from his safety harness, half crawled over Forrest, and slammed the portside door shut.

  “We okay?” John shouted.

  “Sons of bitches!” Forrest yelled and pointed to the side of his helmet. It was dented in, a bullet having creased it.