by T I WADE
“Are there any cleanup crews?” asked Preston, now flying over Durham and seeing what the pilot had just described, but in much smaller detail.
“There are over a thousand men with all the vehicles they can use or commandeer working daylight hours only, to transfer bodies to body depots. There, they are identifying the dead and then cremating them in a dozen operating crematoriums around the area. I was told that thousands of bodies are being cremated a day, in huge pits and they aren’t even scratching the surface yet, the number of bodies I mean.”
“Thousands a day?” exclaimed Martie over her radio.
“I’ve also heard that the army is repairing a massive trash incinerator somewhere close by Manhattan. The electronics are down, but they believe that they can get it working in a few days and this trash incinerator will increase the cremation numbers.”
“Wow!” replied Preston.
“I have you on my radar system, you are about ten miles due south of me. I’m climbing through 12,000 feet and you guys look like you are higher than me,” suggested the C-130 pilot getting back to flying his aircraft.
“Roger that,” replied Preston. “We are heading due west now towards north Raleigh and descending through 16,000 feet. We have seen bodies in and around Durham and we are checking out the area before going into RDU. Over.”
“I flew over RDU day before yesterday,” replied the C-130 pilot. “It looked like a January sale there, over a hundred people walking around and taking everything they could. They all scattered like chickens when I went over at 500 feet. So be careful; I don’t think you will find anything left there.”
Thirty minutes later Preston watched as the convoy of two ferrets and David’s English Saracen drove down an empty Highway 540 towards the airport.
“Any excitement down there?” asked Preston several thousand feet above them. “I can’t see anything moving in front of you.”
“Plain boring!” replied Joe. “We could ride down 540 on bicycles and be just as safe. Nothing has changed except that I always feel eyes all around me, looking at us mean-like. Now I know what it must have been like hunting in Africa. The roads have less carnage, metal and bodies. We stayed away from Highway 55 and Apex. I don’t really want to go there just yet as I’m sure that the reserves of food in the area are all used up and it’s all down to Air Force deliveries until further notice. I’m sure we will get an answer at RDU.”
The convoy of three vehicles passed peacefully through their usual airport gate and onto the tarmac. The gates were now hanging broken and open at the international airport as the two Mustangs came in several minutes later getting the all clear from their mobile ground control. Both aircraft’s guns were loaded with .50 caliber rounds as well as a couple of old air-to-ground rockets and were ready for any trouble, but it was nice to have ground clearance first.
Preston and Martie stood up, stretched, and worked their way out of the cockpits and down onto terra firma. Joe and David walked up to meet them while Joe’s sons kept their fingers on the triggers of the vehicle machine guns now surrounding the P-51s.
Everyone looked around visually taking in the changes since their last visit nearly a month earlier.
Half the nearby terminal was blackened and burned. A couple of the aircraft Preston had seen on the tarmac on their last visit were nothing more than blackened heaps. The large windows of the air terminal were mostly broken, as well as all of the terminal doors. Even some of the aircraft walkways were broken, and one was even missing. Preston couldn’t understand what a whole one-ton walkway unit could be used for.
“I don’t believe we will find anything of use here,” suggested David.
“It looks like a bunch of piranha has gone through here and left just the skeleton,” added Martie.
“I’m sure that the aviation fuel hasn’t been touched yet,” stated Preston. “It would be nearly impossible to pump anything out of those massive tanks.”
“I heard the U.S. Air Force were here for a week pumping gas into tankers, air and ground,” added Joe. “I think that the looting happened at the times the Air Force wasn’t here.”
“Even with what Seymour Johnson and Fort Bragg have in the way of air and ground tankers, they couldn’t have got even a quarter of the aviation fuel in those tanks,” stated Preston. “I’m thinking to get Seymour Johnson to put a guard back here just to protect the fuel tanks or some dimwit will set fire to them or something and blow the whole place up.”
“I’m sure we are going to need every drop of fuel in this country in the near future,” added Martie with all the men agreeing with her.
For an hour they inspected the older terminal. There was nothing left. Martie was right; it was as if a group of piranhas had cleaned up everything. Many areas had been burned. They agreed that fires had probably been started to keep people warm, while they ate the food in the terminals. They counted over 50 new bodies not there on their last visit, mostly male with bullet holes in different parts of their anatomy. The smell wasn’t good, even in such cold weather and they did not want to return once it got warmer.
The new RDU terminal was even worse: fires and explosions had gutted large holes in the building, burning up all of the aircraft at the gates. Many of the aircraft had exploded with the fires and large gaping wounds made the terminal now uninhabitable. Every area of the long wide building had damage and looked naked inside.
Even the control tower was an empty shell. All its useless electronics had been removed and bare wires stood out everywhere.
The FedEx building had fared a little better, but was empty of everything, including furniture and the several aircraft, big and small, which had stood outside on their last visit had all been ransacked or looked lifeless with their doors torn open.
“I can’t understand why people have to be so bent on destroying things,” noted Martie. “Why must they destroy everything?” she asked.
I suppose they were fighting over it, or making sure nobody else wasn’t going to get something they wanted,” suggested Preston.
“Look at that pile of bodies over there under the FedEx 757,” commented David. It looks like there was a fight over control of that living space. There are five bodies directly underneath the open front door and it looks like more dead inside. I can see three more and look at that dead stiff half-hanging out of the door.”
“I’d say that they were happy eating the in-flight food, another group wanted their new accommodations and decided to fight over it,” suggested Joe.
“Well, it doesn’t look like anybody is in there now, and I’m not getting any closer,” stated Preston. “We are wasting our time here. Martie, I think we should fly down to Seymour Johnson and get a report on the food distribution. Joe, David, I’m going to get this fuel safe and ask them to comb through the rest of this airport. I think it would be a good distribution center.”
“I’m sure they need any ideas and they could feed a lot of people from here; it is central and an easy walk from the surrounding habitable areas,” recommended Joe.
The Mustangs touched down an hour later at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base outside Goldsboro and were met by their good friend Colonel Mondale, the base commander. Joe and David had decided to head back to the farm. There wasn’t a lot they could do and the protection of their farm was priority right now, even though there were also three Air Force personnel fully armed and on guard duty at Joe’s farm, just in case.
Lunch at the base was a simple affair of fresh bread—they had part of the bakery working—and corned beef, Martie’s favorite. Preston asked for anything else and looked away from the meal Martie had forced on him only a few weeks earlier. He did not like corned beef and was happy to eat the bread with a hot military-style SOS sauce.
“We have twelve aircraft and twenty trucks working out of here on a daily basis,” stated a tired Colonel Mondale, looking like he hadn’t slept much since the New Year. “By the way, we found several hundred 50-pound bags of quality bread flour, which
is getting close to its expiration date. The pallets were in one of the last loads we got in just before Christmas and had not been logged in before the computers went down. If you have a bread machine I can let you have several bags, Martie. Also I have an extra 20-pound bag of still-frozen bread yeast and several spare bags of salt and sugar if you guys are interested.”
“Yes, yes!” she replied happily. “I have an old bread machine, used it only last week to make our last loaf. “It would really be nice to have fresh bread and I can make pizza dough and rolls and all sorts of things with it. Thank you, Colonel, I’ll take whatever you are offering.”
“Well, I think we still owe you for the truck generator you gave us, Preston. We have several of our military generators back in operation now. Buck McKinnon and our engineers tore out and by-passed the defunct parts and tomorrow we are going to send your generator to a smaller base in Tennessee which needs power,” continued the colonel. “I’ll get a dozen bags of the flour and the other supplies on the flight into your farm tomorrow with your fresh guards.” Preston and Martie thanked the colonel.
“How are the troop flights doing?” asked Preston, enjoying his meal of army food and fresh bread.
“We have all the Jumbo Jets operational and they are bringing in 10,000 troops a day, as well as any needed machinery or weapons, which can be repaired at Andrews,” replied Colonel Mondale.
There were only three of them at the table eating lunch in the Officers’ Mess. “Your friend Buck and your Chinese guy and his family are working their butts off getting Andrews up and running again, as well as anything the flights bring in. We got some bad news from overseas last week. Most of our modern machinery, all of our most modern fighters, bombers, and transporters are all history. So are all the modern warships and army/marine weaponry. Buck and his team of over 500 engineers of all types have told us to scrap everything, or not expect all our modern weapons to be operational for at least a decade or more. It’s the same with all civilian aircraft. Buck figures that in most of our aircraft, military or civilian, there are well over 10,000 electronic parts which need replacing; and news from your father in California, Martie, is that it will take our current electrical engineering facilities decades to copy and manufacture all the needed parts. Those Commies sure did a good job on our equipment, and the whole world’s for that matter.”
“You heard from my father?” asked Martie.
“Yes, several of the base commanders and the President spent a day on your father’s and grandfather’s wine farm last week,” replied the colonel. “You guys told us to leave you alone and we did. It was quite an eye opener to know how much stuff is totally kaput, as your grandfather put it. They believe that the entire nation’s electrical grid is going to take decades to get going again. Of course, we have the country’s security as our number one priority, and we don’t know when or where the next invasion of our country will come from, but the whole infrastructure rebuilding is number two. It’s a shock to the system what has happened, and how weak we actually are!”
“I could guess where our next attack will come from,” suggested Preston, sitting back and taking a sip of water.
“That is something I would like to hear,” replied the colonel.
“What we witnessed out there as we flew around today,” continued Preston, “is that anarchy will be the next threat, followed by disease from the warmer weather in a few months. There is no law out there, except maybe the new laws of the concrete American jungle. People are dying from violence, starvation and probably a host of other reasons. And I think that total lawlessness is going to grow out of the lack of control.”
“I think it’s the only situation I can foresee,” added Martie. “Preston and I have seen a lot since New Year’s Eve and everything we’ve seen, the dead people I mean, were either from invading soldiers, or from our own people. I think that the bad guys in this country are the next threat, killing people for food, warmth, supplies, power, etc.”
“We are having the next meeting with the President pretty soon,” replied the colonel. “I’m sure that many will agree with you, but it’s going to take a couple of months to bring all our troops home. We are not going to get much in the way of weapons up and running. If you are right Preston, apart from troop numbers and our stores of older museum-directed weapons and machinery, we are not going to be much more powerful than any bad guys who want to take over. The information from our last meeting in California indicates it’s going to take years for our country to rearm with anything better than Vietnam-era equipment.”
“There is a good side to that; an enemy will not have anything better than we have, and we still have an army of over a million troops once we get them back,” replied Preston. “Also, Colonel, did I hear from one of your pilots that Carlos and his father and uncle had gone, or were going back to Colombia to see what was happening in that part of the world?”
“That’s right,” the base commander replied. “They actually left yesterday in the two AC-130 Gunships, full of arms, and with an old armored Vietnam Special Forces jeep from Cherry Point just in case. They flew out of Andrews, then to Cherry Point and were heading to refuel at MacDill Air Force Base just outside Tampa. Captains Powers and Watkins were the pilots. The Gunships are armed to the teeth and ready for battle with a dozen Marines and enough arms to start a war, never mind end one. They are expected back day after tomorrow.”
They chatted over lunch for another half an hour before thinking about getting back to the farm.
Life had certainly slowed down, telephones sat quietly on desks, never making a sound, radio and television were non-existent. You only heard electronic sounds if you were close to a military base system’s control center, the radio room, the base commander’s office or traffic-control offices. There were a couple of dozen old handheld field radios working on Seymour Johnson plus an old Vietnam-era headquarters’ base radio in the aircraft control tower which was the base’s main internal/external communications.
Preston could communicate with his ham radio back at the farm, or his aircraft radios while in the air, but there was no way that anyone could communicate as far as where Carlos, Sally and Jennifer were at the moment except with a satellite phone, and Preston was sure that they were pretty busy at the moment, and didn’t need to hear from him.
Chapter 2
Buck, Sally and the Smart Family – February
Buck McKinnon was still at Andrews with Barbara. Nearly two weeks earlier, Preston and Martie had taken themselves off the communications map, put themselves on the “Do Not Call List” and decided to take a break from the world’s destruction.
But Buck was in his element. He had never felt so alive and so important in his life. Everybody needed him to answer questions on electronics. He was being asked to get involved with every group of civilian, military and Chinese engineers who were installing all the replacement parts which had arrived during the battles on the 747 Transporter, two massive loads and so many different spare parts.
Tons of components—millions of large, medium and minute parts—had been placed in the massive cargo aircraft on dozens of pallets by the people who had actually decided on and packed the inventory so very carefully, and who were still somewhere in China, probably Shanghai, or maybe dead from the attack on the Zedong Electronics headquarter buildings in Nanjing, or from the atomic blasts that hit two of three major cities.
Many of the electronics parts came in dozens. Buck assumed there were backups for backups, but if they could figure out why they were on the pallets, then, much like a kid’s puzzle, they could re-erect a machine, or a fuse, or a resistor of a machine, or part of a system of a part of a machine. The Chinese engineers had a partial list of machinery to repair, planned by the enemy Politburo. These machines were mostly in the harbor and the three airports of New York.
Within three days the harbor cranes were working and most of the electronic systems at JFK, Newark and La Guardia were operational again. Extra fuses and con
nectors were put into similar equipment at Andrews Air Force Base and now the four airports could talk to and assist the Jumbo Jets arriving daily, sharing the 25 incoming flights into the four airports. This helped speed up the disembarkation of troops and refuelling of the aircraft and got them on their return trips within hours.
Still, many of the millions of components remained unplaced. A group of think-tankers made up of senior military engineers, several of the senior Chinese engineers, Lee Wang and Buck tried to comprehend the thinking of the enemy Politburo to figure out what they wanted operational in the United States once the country belonged to them.
Many of the parts would be useless unless they found the exact place each was meant to be installed.
For Buck and Lee Wang, this was the best work they had ever done. Carlos had visited for a week in between restoring his telescope computer system in Salt Lake City, scrounging any parts he thought might be useful and telling them that he had been ordered by his uncle to travel back to Colombia with him and his father.
From then on, Lee Wang travelled with Carlos, his wife and daughter going with him wherever he went. The Wang family even travelled to the White House with Carlos and Buck one day to sit and have lunch with the President, giving him their full side of the story and trying to make the tired President understand that things were not going to get better for a very long time.
