by Noah Mann
I gestured toward what I was seeing and Schiavo looked, just as Borenstein came jogging our way with his men.
“What’s going on?” Martin asked as he stepped out of the helicopter, surprised that we hadn’t begun to move toward our ride home.
“I think we’re about to find out,” I said.
Borenstein stopped, facing us, but his men continued past and boarded the Blackhawk.
“Colonel Schiavo,” he said, greeting his now superior officer with a salute.
Schiavo returned it, but was both puzzled and wary.
“You know about my promotion,” she said.
“We received word from Columbus,” Borenstein explained. “Along with orders.”
Past the Army captain there was more movement. The crew of the downed Blackhawk, minus their wounded comrade, came fast down the stairs and raced toward the helicopter just behind us, passing us at a dead run and joining Borenstein’s troops aboard the bird.
“Captain...”
Borenstein hesitated briefly at Schiavo’s prompting, his mood verging on grim.
“We’ve been ordered to Columbus to help with the evacuation of the president. The route they had secured out of the city is no longer safe.”
“We know,” Schiavo said. “We came through it.”
“Colonel Pedigrew and Major Handley will get you home,” Borenstein said, gesturing toward Air Force One. “They’re flyboys, but they get the job done.”
Schiavo nodded at the mild poke at the Air Force officers who would be flying us back across the country.
“We won’t give them any trouble,” I said.
“The Stryker unit will meet you at McChord to take you the last leg home,” Borenstein said, an obvious sense of finality to what he was sharing.
Behind us, the Blackhawk’s rotors spun at speed, just a bit more throttle necessary to get it into the air. Borenstein and the others would be on their way to face their destiny in no time. To me it seemed that he was not reluctant to perform the duty he’d sworn an oath to fulfill, but, rather, that he knew that this might be the last moment of his life which would exist without some form of death racing at him.
“Captain,” Schiavo said, locking her gaze with Borenstein’s, “you give them hell. And then some.”
“Will do, ma’am,” the man said, allowing a smile.
Schiavo nodded, and Borenstein moved past us, joining his men and the others. The Blackhawk’s doors slid shut and it rolled forward, rising into the sky, nose low as it sped fast over the runway and dead fields beyond. It was heading east, straight for the city.
“They’re not going to make it,” Martin said.
“We did,” I told my friend.
He turned to me, grave reality hardening his face.
“We were running away,” he reminded me. “They’re heading into it.”
I couldn’t argue with the cold logic he had thrown at me.
“Hey!”
The call came from an unfamiliar voice. A man’s voice. We looked and saw an Air Force major running our way from the aft stairs, ducking slightly against the jet wash from Air Force One’s idling engines.
“Major Handley?” Schiavo asked as the man reached us.
He tossed her a quick salute and nodded.
“We need to get you aboard, Colonel Schiavo,” Handley said. “The doctor with you needs assistance on the quick.”
There was no more discussion. We ran to the plane and climbed the stairs. Handley followed, the steps folding up as soon as he activated the controls to retract them. Air Force One began to roll almost immediately, its four engines spinning up.
Our journey home had begun.
Twenty Five
The mighty white and blue 747 rose sharply into the sky, nose coming up at a severe angle. A few seconds after we were airborne, the sound of the massive landing gear assemblies retracting rumbled through the aircraft.
We were nowhere that allowed any view of the scenery outside. Nor were we inclined to care. Instead both Schiavo and I stood with Genesee in the surgical suite near the nose of the aircraft, Martin and Carter just outside, bracing themselves, the aircraft gaining altitude as we fought to save the wounded sergeant. The space around us was equipped with every device and instrument necessary to keep the President of the United States alive, no matter the health crises that faced the Commander in Chief. Genesee had realized that getting his patient to this airborne medical facility was his only chance to save the anonymous sergeant.
“We don’t even know his name,” I said.
“Lyons,” Genesee said as he cut away the man’s camouflaged shirt, his name stitched above the breast pocket.
“Sergeant Lyons, can you hear me?” Schiavo asked.
The man’s open eyes stared blankly at the sterile ceiling above, harsh lights glaring down at him as his chest heaved irregularly, every breath pushing spurts of blood from two gaping wounds in his abdomen that the doctor worked furiously to wipe away
“Hang on, Lyons,” Schiavo said, taking wads of gauze from Genesee as each became soaked with blood.
Genesee probed the wounds with bare hands, the protocols of a sterile environment negated by time and situation.
“Roll him on his side,” Genesee instructed.
Schiavo and I did that, pulling the back side of his shirt that hadn’t been cut away clear, revealing one massive exit wound where both rounds had left his body.
“Jesus,” Genesee said. “It had to be a fifty.”
Lyons coughed, blood pouring from his nose and mouth.
“Keep him on his side,” Genesee said. “I need to get an IV started.”
The doctor turned away and pulled open cabinets in the unfamiliar space, finding a bag of saline and most of the implements needed to get an intravenous line flowing.
“Where are the damn needles?”
Genesee searched frantically. To my left, though, Schiavo was calm. More so than just a second earlier. She eased her hand from where it had supported Sergeant Lyons’ body and shook her head at me. I let go as well, and we let him roll gently back until he was flat on the mounted gurney.
“Commander,” Schiavo said, trying to get Genesee’s attention.
“Give me a second.”
“Clay,” she said, hoping that the familiar would draw him from what he was focused on. “Clay.”
As if he knew what her choice of words, and her tone, meant, Genesee stopped his search and turned back toward his patient, his arms bloodied to the elbows.
“He’s gone,” Schiavo said.
Genesee said nothing. He just stood there. Behind me I sensed movement, and a second later Martin stepped past both me and his wife, a sheet retrieved from a shelf in hand. He opened it and spread it over the lifeless form in front of us as the plane leveled off, climbing at a more gentle angle now.
“Hello.”
The voice behind us was unfamiliar, but the uniform, crisp blue, was not. It was an Air Force officer in shirtsleeves, insignia on his collar showing his rank as equivalent with Schiavo.
“I’m Colonel Martin Pedigrew,” he said, looking past to the bloody mess in the surgical suite. “Major Handley said we had a patient aboard but...”
“His wounds were too severe,” Schiavo said.
Pedigrew nodded, looking to Genesee, the doctor still focused on the shrouded body before him, crimson stains soaking through the stark white linen.
“Commander,” Pedigrew said, and Genesee looked up, finally. “You should wash up. You did what you could.”
“I didn’t even get a chance to try,” Genesee said. “There was no time.”
“There isn’t always time,” Pedigrew told him. “And even if there is, it might be too late. Now get cleaned up, all of you. We’ll see to this soldier’s proper burial when we land.”
Silence filled the space for a moment as Schiavo handed Genesee a large towel. He wiped his arms and stared down at the shrouded body. At the patient we’d lost.
“I’l
l show you to your seats,” Pedigrew said.
* * *
A few minutes later we sat in a section of the aircraft most recently occupied by Captain Borenstein and his small unit. It still bore evidence of their presence. Simple things. An empty paper cup that had very recently been filled with coffee. A smear of mud on the once pristine carpet, left there by a boot which was more at home on a field of battle than in the flying office of the President of the United States.
“We’re going home,” Genesee said from his seat across the space, looking to me. “Almost all of us.”
I knew why the emphasis was so important to him. I’d stood next to him on the ash choked interstate on our way to find our friends, right after the crash which had given him a glimpse into a kind of death he hadn’t known to that point. Desperate death. Hopeless death. A family gone together in a broken-down van so long ago that they were little more than mummified horrors. Shortly after that, he’d saved Martin, and had nursed the man along through the events which had followed.
Then he’d been faced with Sergeant Lyons. A combat death. The first that Genesee had truly faced with bullets flying. His first loss of this kind.
“No one was going to save him,” Martin said. “No doctor. No ten doctors. It was his time.”
Genesee knew that. Probably more than any of us. I suspected the unfairness of that had begun to gnaw at him. As he’d said, we were all going home. To our families. Our friends. And, in his case, to a new future. To a new love.
“Grace will be glad that you’re coming home,” I told him.
A quiet shift of attention happened, both Schiavo and Martin, and, to a lesser extent, Carter, looking to me, then to our doctor friend. Clearly the feelings that had developed between him and Grace were not public knowledge yet. She’d admitted their quiet relationship to me, as had Genesee on our trek to reach our friends, and now I was very plainly hinting at it, openly, for his own sake.
“Grace said Elaine and I are invited for dinner when we get back,” I told him. “I want to see what you’re capable of putting on the table.”
Genesee considered my words for a moment as he absorbed the approving looks from the others, then he smiled lightly.
“I can burn any piece of meat on the grill that you want,” he said. “Grace will probably insist on actually making something edible.”
And there was that flash of humor the man was capable of, according to Grace. It looked good on him. The ability to express joy had been one trait lacking in Clay Genesee. It had contributed to the perception, for a time, that his defining quality was aloofness. If my friend’s widow was moving past her grief to a place where she could love again, and bring out the better person in the town’s doctor, then what we were witnessing right now could only be seen as a sign of the world righting itself for two people.
If only the remainder of humanity could experience the same, we’d be on a better path toward a truly sustainable time of surviving.
That, though, was only a hope. A wish. And one that would not be granted for us on this trip home.
Twenty Six
“We’ve got a problem.”
It was the co-pilot, Major Handley, delivering the news as we sat in the spacious cabin, not quite thirty minutes after moving there from the surgical suite. That he had come back from his place in the cockpit was worrisome enough.
“What kind of problem,” Schiavo asked the Air Force officer.
“We’ve lost control,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘lost control’?” Schiavo pressed.
Handley gave each of us a brief look, his uncertain gaze returning quickly to Schiavo.
“You’d better come see for yourself,” he told her.
Schiavo stood. As if on cue to put an exclamation point on what Handley was hinting at, the aircraft bucked slightly, shuddering for a moment until the stillness of flight enveloped us again.
“Turbulence?” Martin asked.
The co-pilot didn’t answer. Or couldn’t.
“Let’s go,” Handley said.
Schiavo looked to me.
“You, too, Fletch.”
I wasn’t sure if Handley would disapprove of the invitation I was being offered, but I didn’t care. I rose from my seat and stepped into the wide aisle.
“Major...”
Handley hesitated only briefly at Schiavo’s gentle prodding, then he gave a quick nod and led us forward.
* * *
We stepped through the cockpit door, Handley leaving it open behind us. Gone were the days of security procedures, it seemed. As were the days of a fully crewed presidential aircraft, I thought, watching Handley take the right seat as Colonel Pedigrew looked back to us from the left seat. A third crew member should fill the empty position to our right, facing an array of instruments on the electronic wall before them. To our left and just behind, opposite the entry door, another station sat empty. The president was not aboard, but I had the impression that, like all things in this new world, Air Force One had been forced to operate with less.
“Colonel Schiavo,” Pedigrew said, a slack discomfort to his face.
“There’s a problem?” she asked.
“We no longer have control of Air Force One,” Pedigrew said.
I looked past the pilots, to the myriad of gauges and displays that told them everything about the aircraft, and about the world around it. Weather radars. Radios. Engine thrust settings. And dozens more bits of information at their fingertips, not to mention the yokes, the plane’s equivalent to a car’s steering wheel, each one rising from the cockpit floor between their feet. With those, and with sophisticated flight management systems, the pilots could guide the aircraft to any place on the planet.
Or so it had seemed until just a minute ago.
“We’re still flying,” Schiavo said, pointing out the obvious to signal her confusion as to the statement.
“We are,” Pedigrew confirmed. “But we have no control over the aircraft.”
“Both you and Major Handley have told us that now,” I said. “That doesn’t explain anything that we’re seeing out the windshield.”
A bank of clouds in the distance blotted out the sky, but glimpses of the earth below still peeked through. Fields that once had been green. The breadbasket of the world and the Great Plains.
“Air Force One has every defensive measure possible,” Pedigrew said. “We can blind radars, jam missiles, confuse our enemies. Those are all external threats. But in the years after September Eleventh, a new countermeasure was designed and implemented. One that could deal with a different kind of threat. One from inside the aircraft.”
“A rogue pilot,” Handley explained. “Or two.”
Pedigrew gestured back toward the instrument cluster which would normally inform the decisions he made while flying
“What you’re seeing is not us flying the aircraft,” the pilot said.
Schiavo took just a few seconds to process the information.
“You’re telling us that someone else is in control of Air Force One?”
Pedigrew shook his head.
“No, just that we aren’t.”
The pilot’s hand extended, a finger pointing to a small red triangle in the upper corner of the central display.
“That tells us that step one has been activated,” Pedigrew said.
“Step one?” I asked.
“It’s a two-step countermeasure,” Handley explained. “A signal relayed by satellite first cuts all pilot input, leaving the aircraft flying straight and level. That signal can be sent from any number of stations. A second signal then instructs the flight computers to accept only inputs from an external control station, which would maneuver Air Force One to a safe landing at a secure airfield. Except...”
“Except that station doesn’t exist anymore,” Pedigrew told us.
“It was taken out in a Unified Government attack on Cheyenne Mountain,” Handley said.
“NORAD,” I said, using the acronym for th
e North American Aerospace Defense Command, a complex located in the heart of a Colorado mountain. “They control that?”
“They destroyed it,” Handley said.
“They used infiltrators,” Pedigrew explained. “Opened up the mountain to a direct assault.”
“It was still operating?” Schiavo asked, puzzled by the fact that such an installation would still be staffed for effective use so long after the blight took its toll on the world.
“Barely,” Pedigrew said. “It was deemed a vital facility after the state of emergency was declared.”
“Wait,” Schiavo said. “They destroyed it? They didn’t capture it? Occupy it?”
“There’s no indication of that,” Pedigrew answered. “If they had control of the station, they could just fly us into the ground.”
Handley glanced out the windshield, the wall of storm clouds drawing near.
“So you’re saying that someone knew enough to put this protocol into action,” I said.
“The codes to do so are as highly guarded as the ones the president would use to launch a nuclear strike,” Pedigrew confirmed.
I’d traveled across the wastelands with a man, an Air Force officer, who’d used one of those codes to launch a Minuteman ICBM that saved my life, along with Elaine’s and Neil’s. It was a sledgehammer killing a flea, to be certain, but that incident showed, if anything, that those codes were only as secure as the men and women who were entrusted with them. Both good and evil could result from their use. Or misuse.
We, based only on our perspective, were bearing witness to the latter.
“If they had infiltrators in NORAD,” Schiavo said, the suggestion implicit in her statement.
“Yeah,” Pedigrew agreed.
If the government had been penetrated at that level, it was hard to imagine how anyone could be trusted. Anyone.
“So what can be done?” I asked. “How do you regain control?”
Handley glanced to his commander, then back to us and shook his head.
“If I had a dozen computer programmers and equipment and ten years, I might be able to crack the security that has locked us out of our own aircraft,” the co-pilot said. “But I don’t.”
