Now John was averaging eight to twelve hours of sleep a week, and it was starting to take its toll on his mind, soul and body. John had attended briefings by seasoned warriors from wars gone by about battle fatigue and the importance of commanders ensuring their troops avoided this syndrome. In World War II it had been rampant, but no one could do a thing about it. The Allies were fighting for their very lives, and there was no time to rest weary Marines or soldiers. Not seeing or feeling Jared in the brush played havoc with John’s combat mind, but he had no recourse, so he smiled and gave Jared a short wave before returning to the trailer and assisting Calvin and Carlos with getting the animals around to the back.
John was impressed with the plan Jared had initiated, and tethered his own horses next to Jared’s steeds. After securing the horses and parking the trailer against the building, John turned to searched for the VW.
“Where’d you put the car?” he asked Jared.
Jared walked him to the front parking lot and showed John where he and Barry had parked the car alongside several other marooned vehicles. John was inwardly impressed once again with Jared’s ingenuity when faced with a situation a person of his experience shouldn’t have been able to handle. After seeing what Jared had done, they woke Barry, and John set about picking the lock on the back of the building. For whatever reason, the mechanism gave up much easier than it had the first time John wrestled it into submission.
Once the building was breached, the group backed the trailer inside and locked themselves inside. The men looked to Barry for guidance in what he wanted on the trailer and how he wanted it stacked. Barry scurried about, scratching his chin and mumbling to himself until Jared grabbed the man by the sleeve and gave him an impatient look.
Two hours later the trailer was loaded, and the men sat down to quietly eat and take on some badly needed water. The last time Jared urinated, it looked like liquid gold, which he knew meant he was getting dehydrated. John was always preaching water intake and how to do it, but there wasn’t always time to be drinking when you were looking over your shoulder every minute of every day. Jared looked at the loaded trailer, wondering if the VW was going to be able to handle the load.
The little German car was taxed well into its limitations with four full-grown men on board, not to mention however many hundreds of pounds the trailer and its contents constituted. The Germans hadn’t designed the little vehicle for towing, so it was fitted with a highly sophisticated towing package Calvin and John had designed. The design consisted of a heavy-duty rope wrapped several times around the vehicle’s rear bumper, which would be secured to the tongue of the trailer when morning came and they headed back towards the ranch house.
When the men were finished taking on water and nourishment, they set up a watch rotation for the night. Devon was still out in the dark somewhere, but no one in the group was overly troubled by the teen’s absence. Devon seemed to be at peace when he was alone and was damn good at staying out of sight, as he’d proven time and again. The only sentry post John set up was again at the front door leading into the lobby. The rear doors were secure, leaving only the front of the store a threat. Anyone trying to make it through that door and down the short hallway was in for some rough times.
Later in the evening, three soft raps sounded at the back door. John and Devon had agreed earlier to the three knocks, so the door was opened, admitting the teen.
“What’s going on out there?” John asked, not expecting much of a reply from the scout.
“Lots,” Devon answered, surprising every man in the warehouse.
“Like what?” Jared said, turning his head questioningly.
“I think there are more people now than last week. At least there are more people out walking around, looking for things, going into houses and stores, stuff like that,” Devon reported.
“Any close to us here?” John asked, always worried about contact with unfriendlies.
Devon nodded his head. “Yeah, lots. I found a camp full of people and heard them talking.”
Again, both John and Jared were amazed by the young man. John was amazed, but was growing impatient with having to draw everything out of Devon one piece at a time. Jared was far more patient and could sense John’s growing impatience. He shot John a look that conveyed Jared’s desire for John to relax and not tweak the quirky kid out by getting short with him.
“So, Devon, tell us everything you did, saw and heard,” Jared coaxed the youth while John wisely remained silent, doing his best to paint a pleasant look across his chiseled features.
“I saw people everywhere, not like before. I think the ones who didn’t die are coming back from the coast. I found a bunch of people together at a gas station. They were living inside and had a bunch of cars lined up around the place like a wall. I snuck in and heard two of them talking about the government ships everyone thought were coming and how no ships ever came and how a lot of people died.”
Jared and John exchanged concerned looks as Devon relayed his findings. Jared tried to do some rough math in his head regarding the number of people who might be in the area. He figured by the deserted state he’d found San Jose in when they’d gone searching for Dwight, they must have passed through the city right after most people left seeking government assistance.
Jared counted himself lucky, realizing he had transitioned through these built-up areas when people were for the most part still living off what they had in their homes, and then had returned when those same people had left for the coastal areas. Now it seemed the people who were still alive were returning to the Bay Area and their homes or at least the area they lived in before the solar flare.
Jared couldn’t remember ever hearing what the population in the Bay Area was, but assumed it was in the millions. The more he thought, the less he was sure he could even make an uneducated guess at the number of people they would be dealing with. There was no way of knowing how many died in the beginning, not to mention how many more perished on their way to the coast. The human population was like a snake’s skin, constantly shedding its numbers as the population moved to the coast and then back to the bay.
Devon told his friends the gas station with the people was about two miles west of them, and there seemed to be in the neighborhood of twenty people in the group. Devon only saw a couple of women and no children at the gas station, but confessed he hadn’t spent enough time there to be absolutely sure of the group’s demographics. The gas station people were armed, Devon told John specifically, like he knew John would be the one most interested in this bit of information. Other people he saw during his time out were for the most part unarmed and appeared to be trying to avoid contact with other humans.
When Devon finished his debrief, John felt his stomach turn in knots of tension. He already had a plan for the following day, and it included sending the kid out ahead. He felt like he was pushing the kid past what should be expected of a teenager, but was acutely aware of the change in society. Seventy years before the solar flare, kids ten years old were operating tractors and helping bring in the crops. Now, times seemed to be returning to the ways of old, and much more would be expected of children at much younger ages.
A low rumble began to tickle the group’s ears as they sat in the silent blackness of the warehouse’s interior. Within a few seconds, John was on his feet, moving towards the back door. He knew the sound; he’d ridden the beasts into battle enough to tell the make and model of the approaching helicopter. There was a Black Hawk helicopter inbound at a high rate of speed. John could tell by the noise emitted from the aircraft that the pilot was low and fast.
John cracked the rear door slightly, not wanting to walk right out in plain view of the passing aircraft, and was not surprised when all he saw was the dark sky. The pilots were flying blacked out, like every other combat mission John had ever participated in. The helicopter passed overhead at five hundred feet above ground level (AGL) and kept moving west until the sound faded and silence returned. John turned sligh
tly; Jared was an inch behind him, straining to see and hear what was going on outside.
“Jesus, man, give me some room,” John growled, not because he felt crowded, but Jared’s close proximity had unnerved him.
“Where do you think they’re going?” Jared whispered.
John shrugged as he shut and locked the rear door. “I have no idea. I’ve been gone long enough the entire mission goals have probably changed. They don’t seem to be helping people yet, or they wouldn’t be sailing around in the night all blacked out like they’re hunting for the ace of spades.”
Chapter 41
Josh Talley was a sergeant major in the Army, which he’d called home since he was eighteen years old. Josh grew up in Florida and joined the Army the day after he graduated high school. He never played sports, instead focusing on more important things like skateboarding and chasing female classmates. When he arrived at his first unit, the 101st Airborne, he realized quickly he was going to need more from the Army.
He spent nearly two years with the Screaming Eagles before being accepted into Ranger school. Once he finished Ranger school, Josh immediately set to getting out of his current unit and into a Ranger battalion. Once he was a Ranger, he deployed constantly and realized there was even more the Army had to offer a young man. Josh applied for the Special Missions Unit and went through their selection process, which he found much harder than most of the things he’d been required to endure in the Ranger community.
Josh spent the next five years of his life running around the world, doing things most people couldn’t begin to imagine. His body had taken a beating, but he enjoyed every second of his time in the unit. When the lights went out, Josh and a handful of his mates were the only members of the unit not deployed. They became the tip of the spear in the government’s effort to secure assets and begin to rebuild. Josh found most of what he was being asked to do seemed self-serving by whoever was in charge, but he was still doing what he loved and hadn’t missed a meal to date, when millions of others were dying of starvation all over the planet.
The missions were pretty straightforward and nothing Josh hadn’t been trained to do in his past life. So far, he had mostly been asked to fly into the built-up areas and bring people out the government deemed vital to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Most of the operations had been fairly mindless work for Josh compared to some of the complex missions he’d participated in overseas. So far, Josh’s newest command had lost only one helicopter and one operator from Josh’s unit, along with several men and women who were wannabe warriors, in Josh’s opinion.
Most of their casualties came in the one incident. No one ever figured out what had happened to them, and no one really seemed to care much after about a week. Josh and John had not been close friends by any stretch of the imagination, with Josh viewing John as a bit of a do-gooder type. Josh never had a problem with John, but didn’t see him as the kind of guy Josh would hang out with away from the chaos of their work. When John failed to return, Josh gave it about three seconds of thought before moving on.
Josh sat inside the blacked-out helicopter as it raced over the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. He’d spent time in San Francisco, working with the Alameda County Sheriff’s SWAT team, performing threat assessments on key infrastructure sites all over the Bay Area. Other than his brief time in the area, he was mostly unfamiliar with its geography other than what he could draw from looking at photographs taken from satellites or studying topographical maps.
Josh felt fortunate that he had been on home soil when the solar flare occurred. Many of his friends were deployed, and as far as Josh knew, not a single one of them had been heard from. He and the few other men from his unit were quickly tasked with various missions like the one he had been assigned to for the last two months. He had been bequeathed five active duty and reserve troops as part of his small section. These five men accompanied Josh when he was tasked with a mission.
Josh did his best to train the men, but most of them were not mentally tough enough for his liking, so he trained them all the while resenting each and every man under his command. Josh was accustomed to serving with partners who were cut from the toughest cloth in the world. Men from the Special Missions Unit were conditioned to suffer in silence while giving their absolute all. The men under Josh’s command would complain about blisters when he worked them on weapons manipulation drills, causing him to wish violence on them all.
As he sat lamenting the hand he’d been dealt in regard to the weaklings in his new unit, Josh thought about the last mission to this part of the state. To date, no one knew what had happened to John’s team along with the air crew. In times before the event, Josh knew the US government would have moved heaven and earth to locate a lost aircraft and its crew. Nowadays, they didn’t have the resources to search for crash sites.
Josh’s mission tonight was to fly to the coast and link up with twelve SEALs who were currently aboard a submarine. The submarine was the USS Connecticut, a Seawolf-class nuclear submarine. The boat had been cruising the Pacific Ocean when the solar flare occurred, and remained hidden until recently when what was left of the Pacific Fleet Command was able to establish communications with the boat. The powers to be arranged for the SEALs to swim ashore south of a town called Halfmoon Bay, where they would move to a preplanned extraction site and be picked up by Josh and his team. After the pickup, the two teams were to be flown back to base, where the SEALs would be rotated into operations being run to shore up a crumbled government.
The pilot interrupted Josh’s thoughts by announcing they were ten minutes to the extraction site. Josh clicked his mic twice in acknowledgment. When they were one minute out, all the men readied themselves in case there was any trouble, which no one expected. If there had been trouble, the SEALs would have alerted them long before they were anywhere near the landing zone (LZ). The SEALs had simply given the go-ahead for pickup, otherwise maintaining radio silence.
Josh felt the pilot ease the nose of the aircraft up as he lowered power, bringing the big craft into a nose-up descent angle, down and toward the LZ. The nose-up position slowed the aircraft while the decrease in power allowed the giant bird to slip down toward the ground. All the pilot had to do was use the cyclic to hold the nose at the desired angle and then feather the collective in order to control his descent rate. Josh had watched this a thousand times and didn’t really give it much thought anymore, until a hard crack sounded, and the Black Hawk shuddered violently before lurching nose slightly over. The pilot struggled mightily for a very long two seconds before regaining control of the rebellious aircraft.
Something on the rear of the aircraft contacted a tree, causing much concern inside the Black Hawk. The pilot had never crashed or contacted a solid object, so when the tree reached out and touched his aircraft, he momentarily panicked, but caught himself, knowing his calm-under-fire demeanor was what would save everyone’s lives. He regained control of the helicopter, went a little longer in his approach than he wanted to, but was able to set the shuddering aircraft down without any additional excitement. He immediately initiated his shutdown procedures as Josh came nearly all the way into the cockpit.
“What are you doing?” Josh screamed over the whine of the decelerating engines. “Let’s get these Navy boys on and get the fuck out of here.”
“No can do. We hit something. I have some pretty bad vibrations in the pedals. We take off and we might just fall out of the sky. I want to check it out and see how bad it is,” the pilot hollered back, continuing his shutdown of the aircraft’s systems.
“We gotta go, man,” Josh pressed with a little less conviction of his own.
The pilot shook his head as the engine slowed even further. “Can’t, man. Gotta make sure we can fly. There is no place to make an emergency landing once we get up in the mountains.”
Just then the first SEAL poked his head in the side of the downed Black Hawk. Josh heaved a sigh, turned, and moved to the man. “Hey, can you
guys set up a perimeter, and I’ll augment with my guys in a second. Fucking pilot hit a tree or something on the way in.”
The SEAL smiled broadly. “No shit, bro.”
Josh was embarrassed and jealous all at the same time. At least this guy was working with all his mates and not a bunch of second- and third-rate weekend warriors.
The pilot and copilot shut the helicopter down, then tried inspecting it, but in the darkness, they weren’t able to tell if the helicopter had sustained any real damage. The two pilots and their crew chief staged the tools they thought might be needed for an inspection once the sun came up, while Josh and the SEALs worked a perimeter around the temporarily decommissioned bird.
The following morning as the sun peeked over the top of the coastal range of mountains, the two pilots along with their crew chief got to work pulling panels off the aircraft in search of what was causing the vibrations in the helicopter’s foot pedals. Within an hour they solved the problem. Although the tail rotor had contacted some part of a tree, it was designed to endure significant impacts without disintegrating. The rear wing had contacted a branch of medium thickness, which caused a moderate amount of damage to the leading edge of the right-side wing. The impact had completely torn off both static discharge wicks along with deforming the wing itself. The impact had driven the branch down and across the top of the aircraft’s dorsal spine fairing that covered the driveshaft for the tail rotor.
The damage to the fairing concerned the air crew the most since if the tail rotor driveshaft were to come apart or stop working, the aircraft would lose its antitorque capability and spin out of control unless the pilot were able to arrest the situation quickly. This fairing damage delayed the crew even longer, causing them to remove portions of it in order to inspect the drive shaft and its bearings.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 2 | Tears of Chaos Page 31
