by John Barnes
Much of the time she felt like she was trying to remember the whole party so she could tell Lenny about it afterward, but it felt good rather than sad. Lenny, I am going to bore our child stiff with reminiscences about you, guy.
On her way back from the outhouse, Arnie took her arm and guided her into the darkness of the side yard. “Allie’s bringing Everett around to here. You know what his security company guards?”
“I don’t know, nukes?”
“Some of those. Mostly, though, for some years they’ve had the contract to run and guard the special facility where they keep the politically awkward cases.”
“Which are what?”
“Well, originally . . . School of the Americas was here—the place where America trained right-wing dictators and their secret police, and sometimes helped them plan coups. There was also a research arm, where DIA and some other agencies interrogated Soviet or Cuban agents that we knew the coms wouldn’t want back. And now and then, the facility held American radicals, usually ones who had been ‘disappeared’ while overseas. Basically the Department of Never Seen Again.”
She shuddered. “I thought those days were over, but since there’s a war on—”
Arnie held up a finger. Allie and Everett joined them in the dark. Sherry’s boyfriend was a very dark-skinned African-American, tall and fit, with close-cropped hair and beard. He didn’t bother with formalities. “Okay, you didn’t hear this from me. But it’s true. The secret holding facility has a couple new guests—one of them is General McIntyre, who used to be the base commander. He’s there because he wouldn’t arrest and hold the other one—”
“Graham Weisbrod,” Heather breathed. “Is he all right?”
“Except that he’s rightfully the President of the United States, and he’s in jail, he’s just fine.” Everett glanced around them. “Look, I don’t know what it’s about, and I ain’t a lawyer, but I don’t think the Continuity Coordinator gets to pick the president, or decide when the Constitution applies. That sounds all backward to me. And I took an oath back when I was in the service myself, to support and defend the Constitution—not to work for any old guy who said he might give us our Constitution back sometime. You understand? I just . . . it’s not right. So here’s the other thing you didn’t hear from me. General Phat, I guess, doesn’t want to have McIntyre and Weisbrod in his secret stockade, so they’re going to move them up to someplace outside Athens. Seems to me that what with passing through a lot of empty country . . .” He shrugged.
“If we wanted to do something, would you help us?” Heather asked.
“I’d sure want to be a guy that you could ask.”
“We’re asking,” Allie said.
“Then I guess I’ll try to help. Enough for tonight, see you in a day or so when I have an excuse to bump into one of you. I’ll let you know through Sherry.” He vanished into the crowd; Heather went the other way. Arnie and Allie were about to have a quarrel, she could tell, and she preferred to be well away from them before it started. Well, I suppose Arnie has a point. Being volunteered for a coup, or a countercoup, without being asked first, is outside the usual boyfriendly duties.
FOUR DAYS LATER . IN THE RUINS OF ATLANTA. GEORGIA. 1:15 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 17.
“I feel like I’m in a damned costume,” Heather complained to Arnie.
“We all are,” he said, pulling his hat lower and making sure the bandana was still up around his face.
Sergeant Rogers chuckled. “That’s good, a costume. I guess it is.” He too wore jeans; a big flannel shirt (to hide the body armor, just unwrapped that morning and not yet deteriorating); the broadest hat he could find, low over his face; and a bandana covering his nose and mouth. “I guess we look like the James gang or something.” That little chuckle of his was beginning to creep Heather out. “I just want to thank you for letting me be in on this.” He and nine Rangers from Third Battalion were the nucleus of the force; Everett, who had once been a Ranger himself, hadn’t had much choice about whom he could recruit on four days’ notice.
Heather had persuaded them to let her come in as an added gun. She hadn’t mentioned that she was pregnant. Everett hadn’t ratted her out about that either, or else the Rangers had figured if she didn’t care, why should they? Whatever the reason, she was grateful; she didn’t think she could have stood to be on the sidelines for this.
Everett sat now, quiet and staring into space; everyone waits for action their own way, Heather thought. Bambi wants to chatter like a mad sorority girl, I get cross and whiny, and as far as I can tell, Rogers thinks everything is slightly funny and there for his amusement.
“Checklist, Plan B,” Everett said, looking around at the five Rangers who were present. “It’s still possible that somebody’s been turned or caught, or something big came up at the last minute. The steam train from Columbus is supposed to be flying two American flags on the front and back cars, with two red flags on the front of the locomotive. One of our guys is in charge of those flags, and his backup is one of ours, too. Check?”
“Check,” they chorused.
“So if it’s one American flag down, Rogers?”
“Package is not on the train but everything else is fine, so we pull down the block from the track, let them roll by, and if it’s safe there’ll be a note dropped from the last car.”
“Two American flags down, Machado?”
The short skinny man did not move from the crate where he sat with legs spraddled, but his voice was loud and clear. “Package is not on the train, we’re blown, run for it.”
“Extra American flag, Diem?”
“Package is on the train, proceed with operation, expect surprises or difficulties.”
“Extra red flag on the front, everybody?”
“Come in prepared to shoot, sir.”
Everett had them recite, more times than Heather could count, “Two American two red, go by plan. One down, let it pass. Two down, run. Three up, make it up. Three red, fight.”
Everett had rolled off two trains ago, reset a switch, and hung a flag; hours later, Heather and the main team had dropped out of a boxcar and hurried under cover while everybody up front was busy dealing with backing the train out of the siding it should not have gone into. Since the engineer had already been hitting the brakes after seeing the flag, and there was literally at that point not another train for miles, there was no danger, just a loss of time; since Heather and the rest of the team were not officially on the train, they were not missed when it rolled again.
Now they waited at the chosen interception point, where an observer—Sherry, taking her turn up there—in a high window could see the train far off, but the oncoming train wouldn’t see the barricade of semi trailers across the tracks too soon. The objective was to have them come to a dead halt so that the locomotive, and the five cars carrying security forces and the prisoners, stood just opposite this warehouse.
“Train,” Sherry sang out. Everyone stood up, stretched, reached for gear, and froze when Sherry added, “Three American flags and three red flags.”
They’ve got Graham, things have changed, expect to fight.
Heather felt the pit of her stomach roll over. Hey, Leonardo, (she didn’t know why but she was sure he was a boy), hang on, kid.
The time before they heard the steam train’s whistle screaming, and the grinding of wheels on rails as the brakes tried to take hold, was long; the time before the train came to a halt, where they had planned, longer still. They had moved forward into their positions by the doors; three Rangers had darted across the tracks to take up their places behind Dumpsters and wrecked cars. Rogers barked, “Go!”
Heather was with Everett and the slim man named Machado; they were tasked with rushing the second car, where Weisbrod and McIntyre were supposed to be, if their informant was right and if no plans had changed in the interim. Heather was just putting her hand on the door handle when it slid open. Kim, the Ranger on the train in charge of securing the car, had opened
it. “In,” he said, and they dashed in.
There was a dead soldier propped in one corner. Heather had a nasty moment when she saw Graham and General McIntyre lying face down on the floor, but Weisbrod said, “We’re all right, Sergeant Kim is just making sure we stay that way.”
Kim gestured at the dead man. “He said he was sent to secure the prisoners, and I told him they weren’t his prisoners anymore, but he was mine. So he went for his weapon. Bad move. I think he was Georgia Guard. So I made our special guests lie down flat, locked the doors, and waited for you. There was some shooting up forward, but my orders were to just hold this car.”
“Dearmond, or someone, changed the flags,” Everett explained.
There was a knock on the internal door toward the locomotive—thud THUD thud THUD THUD thud, the agreed signal. Machado moved to the door and slid it open, cautiously.
Rogers stepped through. “Dearmond and Crespin just learned to drive the choo-choo,” he said. “The engineer jumped for it, letting the dead man switch stop the train. Dearmond was supposed to be the guard in the locomotive cabin, and Crespin was supposed to detain six Georgia Guard in the next car. They got the Guard under control—just a couple injuries, they’ll all be okay—but they had to figure out how to be an engineer and a fireman for about a quarter mile there.”
“Hell,” Dearmond said, “it’s pretty simple. You don’t even have to steer or navigate.”
“So what’s in the car behind us?”
“That would’ve been Taggart’s job.”
“Well, we can’t move our main package till we’ve secured the next car.” They directed Weisbrod and McIntyre to crawl out of the line of fire. Then, cautiously, Rogers moved to the far side of the car, and made a flurry of hand gestures out the open boxcar door.
Crashing and shouting in the car behind them; a shot, and then what sounded like a volley.
“All clear, sir, but we’ve lost Taggart,” a voice called.
“Dammit.” Rogers dropped from the car and ran to the one behind it.
There had only been three Georgia Guard in that car, but they had been clever or lucky, and when Taggart seized control, one of them had shot him. They had lain in wait, hoping to ambush whoever was attacking the train; they had not anticipated how fast things would happen with three Rangers entering from two doors and a window simultaneously. Only one of the Guard had fired, and he had been killed instantly by the returned fire.
“This really sucks,” Rogers said. “Taggart was just transferred here from the Second Battalion, which is based up in Washington State, and his family’s all up there. He might’ve been home for Christmas, and . . . well, shit. Guess we’ll have to let the Third Battalion bury him, too, and hope they won’t let the politicians make an example of him. But I don’t see any way we can take his body with us.”
They laid him out carefully on one of the benches. “You Georgia Guard need to attend to your dead. We can’t leave you here completely unarmed,” Everett explained to the exhausted, frightened young men. “But we also can’t let you interfere with what we’re doing. Now, I am going to tell you this once, and I hope you will believe me. First of all, this is Graham Weisbrod, the sole surviving member of the Cabinet, and that means he’s President, and as soon as we can we’re gonna put him in front of a Federal judge to take the oath. We were rescuing him because he was being held illegally. Your duty as loyal soldiers under oath is to help us, and I am sorry that there was no way to explain that to your brave comrades before the shooting started.
“But whether or not you believe me, I think it’s advisable for me to confiscate your weapons and move them on up the tracks to those semi trailers. I’ll leave two men with your weapons; if any of you comes out of this car while they are there, they will shoot, and they are expert snipers. Just before they depart, they’ll wave a white flag at you. I suggest you take your time about retrieving your weapons, and especially do not even think about trying to run to them and fire upon my rearguard. By way of incentive, the weapons will also be partly disassembled.
“Once you have re-secured your weapons, I suggest you immediately send a man up the track in one direction, and down the track in the other, with a red flag to stop the next train. Any questions?”
There were none. The rescue party and the freed prisoners moved out quickly, walking up the tracks until they were out of sight of the train, and then veering sharply to the west.
“I don’t suppose you’d mind telling us where we’re going,” General McIntyre said after a while. “I think the risk of recapture is small, and I’d really like to know what is going on. It sounds like some of you are serious about supporting and defending the Constitution.”
“We like to think so,” Heather said. “The bandanas are kind of hot and hard to breathe in, too, and I don’t feel like dressing like a Wild West train robber anymore, anyway.” She took hers off. “We have about an hour to walk, but we do have water in our packs. We have a stretcher if either of you is injured, but you look—”
“The water would be good, but I can walk fine,” Weisbrod said.
“Same here. Now where are we going?” the general asked.
“Peachtree; used to be one of the big general-aviation airports for Atlanta.”
“You’ve got a functioning airplane?” Weisbrod was incredulous.
“Well, for certain values of ‘airplane’ and ‘functioning,’ yes,” Arnie said.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER . PEACHTREE AIRPORT. ATLANTA. GEORGIA. 3:15 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 17.
Heather breathed a sigh of relief when they arrived at Peachtree; there was a clear runway. They’d had only three aerial and six satellite photos, all days apart, and it had always been possible that someone or something had made the field unusable.
Arnie began rigging up the transmitter, though he warned, “This’ll be tricky—I might or might not be able to reach the plane before it leaves St. Louis.”
Graham found a notepad and a pencil in the abandoned doublewide office of a construction contractor. “Too many years as an academic,” Graham said. “I can’t think if I don’t take notes. All right, Heather, I’ve been locked up for two weeks, there’s a lot I need to know. First tell me what’s up with the Castle movement. How many of them are there and what exactly are they doing that you know about?”
He grilled everyone in turn, even the Rangers, scribbling as if his life depended on it. “General McIntyre,” he said, “any new observations about what we’ve just heard?”
“Uh, I’m not sure whether I’m sad or glad that I was never one of your students.”
Sherry was running toward them. “The Ugliest Airplane in the World is coming in to land!” she shouted.
“That’s ours,” Heather said.
That was one of Bambi’s nicknames for Quattro Larsen’s cherished baby. The other was the Checker Cab of the Air. It was his rebuilt DC-3, now equipped with greased-linen tires and a homebuilt gadget that sprayed a stream of hot lye solution from a charcoal-heated pot over the generator and battery, sweeping off and killing the nanoswarm. Its top speed wasn’t even the original 150 mph, it had to stay below 10,000 feet and not fly in freezing weather because the spray could ice the engine—but it was an airplane, and it flew, and it had made it all the way here from Castle Larsen more or less on schedule.
It was bright yellow all over, except for Quattro Larsen’s personal insignia, the black-and-white-checkerboard patterns around the nose and on the tail. The rebuilt old-style radial engines ran on his homebrewed biodiesel. The blue-black streak across the wing behind each engine attested to the miserable fuel quality, and according to Bambi, the lubricants were mostly lard; she’d said she had dubbed it the Checker Cab of the Air to avoid having it called the Flying Frier, based on its odor.
On touchdown, the plane whumped like a pillow hitting a bed; the tires weren’t as full as they should be, and the nose dipped for an instant, but Quattro wrestled it into taxiing to a stop.
Climbing dow
n, he said, “The whole back of the plane is full of cans of biodiesel, which is why my airplane smells like a bad fire at KFC. I plan to take a nap; all of you are going to fuel the plane, under the direction of my lovely copilot.”
Bambi was grinning at them, jaunty in a striped stocking cap that tied under her jaw, carpenter’s safety goggles, a probably-cashmere sweater, and bib overalls. “Come on,” she said. “He needs the sleep, and I know what to do.”
As Heather was waiting, with her five-gallon metal can of biodiesel, for Graham to finish pouring his into the fuel tank, he said, “This is reminding me of Lost Horizon. The scene where they refuel the plane in the middle of nowhere.”
“Lost Horizon?”
“Great movie from the 1930s . . . you’ll have to see it some time . . .” He gazed at something far away. “Shit. It probably existed online, and maybe on obsolete media like CDs, DVDs, and plastic-based film, so . . . shit. I guess it’s gone.” He shook out the last drops of the can into the funnel, and said, “I don’t know why, with so much else that was so much more important gone, the idea that 125 years of movies are gone should bother me so much, but I feel like crying.” He took the can over to the stack of empties; Heather uncapped her can of biodiesel and began to pour. Probably we’ll all feel like crying, often, for the rest of our lives.
THE NEXT DAY. OVER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS. 8:17 A.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18
“I can see why you wanted to rest up before flying this thing again,” Heather said to Quattro Larsen, raising her voice to be heard. “Also why you didn’t want to go till the sun was full up.”
“I was nervous about that too.” Larsen’s eyes always looked forward and outward; they had been blessed with a warm day, above freezing even a mile and a half above the Illinois prairie, but that only meant a greater potential for abrupt changes in the always-unpredictable Midwestern weather. “I’ll be glad to touch down in Belleville instead of St. Louis.”
“What’s in Belleville?”
