“I know, three days ago. Izzy gave me the latitude and longitude for it, so I looked it up,” he said with a grin.
“I really don’t understand, Tim. Even if there were still people around, not just anyone can get this information. Look at this resolution! I can almost count the coconuts lying on the beach!”
“I know, amazing, isn’t it? If a beautiful and sexy woman was sunning naked on the beach, you’d be able to tell if she was a natural redhead or not!” he said, with a wicked grin, and she slapped him.
“How did you get it?” she asked.
“I looked through a keyhole,” Tim said, now toying with her.
“A keyhole?” she asked, perplexed.
“A Keyhole 11, a CIA KH11 satellite,” he said. “I tasked it to do a fly-by. I’ve got the infrared and Doppler images too, in case there was cloud cover, which we didn’t need.”
“Tim, how in the world did you task a spy satellite?” she asked, now completely exasperated.
“I have access to all the satellites.”
“All of them?” she gasped.
“Well, at least the US military ones. Just call me Desperado!” he said, and leaned back into the copilot’s seat.
She was sitting there, not saying a word, and looked at the photographs again. She looked back over to him, and keyed her intercom. “Tim, it says here on the bottom ‘NCA’. I’ve seen that before at NORAD.”
“National Command Authority, I guess that’s me now.” Not wanting to tease her anymore, he went on to tell her of the crashed Air Force One, in the overgrown soybean field in Indiana, how he’d found The Football and that he still had it.
“And everything is still on line?”
“Mostly everything, there’s no ships or subs, and there’s a few air force bases offline, but NORAD and everything, is still up and running, including all the military satellites.”
“And you’ve still got it?”
“Back there in my ruck, in the back seat of my Hum-Vee.”
She let out a long whistle, and sat back in her seat. “Tim, you know you can’t let anyone else get hold of that, right?”
“I know. That’s why I’ve got it with me. Hadn’t thought about it in years until you and Izzy showed up and started talking about your island. So I asked Iz for the coordinates and looked it up.”
“Tim, you surprise me at every turn!” she said, smiling finally. “Does Robyn know what it is?”
“Yeah, she was with me when I found it. I couldn’t hide it from her. She knows all about it.” And then he went on to tell her of prophesies told to them by Dawn Red Eagle and everything else. “You’re not upset with me, are you?”
“Oh God no, It’s just now this changes everything. Instead of you protecting me, it’s us who need to protect you!”
“I could just depressurize the cabin, lower the ramp and toss it into the sea,” he said.
“No, you can’t do that,” she said, grabbing his arm.
“Why not, it would solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it?”
“Because it’s important. Don’t ask me why, but something is telling me we still need it.”
“I have that same feeling. I don’t know what it is, but I need to hold on to it right now for some reason, but it scares me too. All that power,” he sighed.
“Maybe that’s it,” she said. “Just the fact that you have it means that someone else doesn’t. And that’s the most important part of all.” She reached across and took his hand, and held tightly for a few moments. “Tim, I…”
He looked into her deep green eyes for a while, waiting for her to finish, but she didn’t. She just smiled, and squeezed his hand.
“I’ll tell you what. If you landed a C-17 on that airstrip, in the dark, with no avionics or lights, I’m really impressed with you, lady!”
“Thank you. Just doing what I was trained to do,” she said, somewhat abashed.
“And another thing, that ship. Was it there when you were there?” he said, pointing to the wrecked freighter.
“No, must have washed ashore and broken up after everything happened.”
“Looks like a car carrier from all those cars spilled out.”
“That’s exactly what I thought.”
He unstrapped himself from his seat and climbed out, leaned over and kissed her, and she kissed him back. “I’m going to the latrine, and check out how everyone is in the back.”
“Hurry up. It gets lonely up here!” she said, her eyes twinkling. Finding the small toilet, he availed himself, and when he was done, went to the back, and walked around the tied-down Hum-Vees, found Izzy fast asleep, lying lengthwise on the web seats. He went around the back, rounding his Hum-Vee, and got his pipe and tobacco. He saw Jimenez chatting up Robyn, or at least he was trying to. Robyn was sitting on the web seating with her feet propped up on the Hum-Vee, her left hand toying with the bayonet in its scabbard on her belt. She was eyeing Jimenez skeptically. He was sitting next to her, leaning close, and saying something Tim couldn’t hear. When Robyn saw Tim, her eyes lit up, and Jimenez moved away slightly. Tim walked up to both of them, and smiled that old evil smile.
“Jimenez, that is off-limits, period.”
“I was just talking to—”
Tim held up his hand. “I’ll put it to you this way, Jimenez. I do know how to open these hatches in flight, and it’s a long, long way down. Do I have your attention now?”
“Yes, Sar’ Major!”
“Good,” he said, winking at Robyn, and walked forward, leaving them alone again.
“You heard him!” she said.
“Man! What is up with the Sar’ Major? Who stuck a weed up his ass today?”
“He’s my Dad,” Robyn said with a sweet smile.
“Oh, shit!” he said. “I think I’d better go check on things. Talk to you later, eh?”
Robyn sat back still smiling, and toyed with the hilt of her bayonet. “Yeah, you do that,” she said, and when he left, burst out into laughter.
Tim made his way back to the cockpit and climbed into the copilot’s seat again. When he was strapped in, and had his headphones on again, Holly keyed up.
“Everything okay back there?”
“Izzy is sound asleep, Robyn is fine, and I had to explain the dangers of deceleration sickness to Jimenez.”
“Deceleration sickness?” Holly asked.
“Yeah, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end,” he said. “He was sidling up to Robyn, trying to lay his Latin charm on her.”
“I’ll assume that she wasn’t buying into it?”
“When I walked up to them, she was toying with her bayonet, and looking at him like she does a rabbit, right before she guts it.”
“You’ve taught her well, Sar’ Major!” Holly said, laughing so hard tears came to her eyes. “I really do pity the boy she finally meets!”
“I don’t. He’d better have his shit together!”
As he said that, Holly looked behind her, and smiled. Tim turned to see Robyn standing there, looking at the instrument panel. He got up from his seat. “Here you go. Sit here and maybe Holly will let you fly her,” he said, taking off his headphones and handing them to Robyn. “I’m going to go back and have a little nap, maybe catch the inflight movie.” He bent over, and kissed them both. “I’ll leave my two favorite girls to get us there in one piece.”
Holly told her how to use the intercom, and when she was comfortable with it, she asked; “You want to fly her?”
“Can I?” she said excitedly, forgetting to push the button. She fumbled for a second, then found it and pressed down. “Can I?”
“Sure. Just put your hands on the yoke, that’s this thing that looks like a half steering wheel, and your feet on the pedals.”
“Like this?” she asked, her hands and feet where she’d been told to put them.
“Aye, that’s perfect. Now those two dials in the middle? One looks like a blue planet with wings? That’s the artificial horizon.
The other one that has a plane on it, that’s the compass. Just use the yoke and pedals to keep them right where I have them.”
“Okay,” Robyn said a little bit nervously.
Holly reached over and flipped a switch, turning off the autopilot. “Now you’re flying the plane!”
“Wow! This is so cool!”
Tim found Jimenez asleep on the roof of one of the Hum-Vees, and Izzy was still fast asleep too. He grabbed his coat from his Hum-Vee and rolling it up for a pillow, he lay down on the web seat. As soon as his head hit the jacket, he was fast asleep. He awoke later, as the plane was descending. The air pressure change in his inner ear gave a pop to let him know. He sat up and yawned, and put his patrol cap back on. He stood, and began to walk towards the cockpit. The plane hit a few pockets of turbulence, and he entered the flight deck on unsteady feet. He leaned on the unoccupied seat, in between and behind the copilot and pilot’s seats, and looked out the windshield. He saw that they were over land, and that Holly was now flying the plane and that Robyn was watching with rapt interest.
“Hi kids!” he said, loud enough for them to hear him.
They both turned and smiled, and Holly said, “Hi sleepy head! We’re just crossing over the Big Island now, and getting a little turbulence from the volcano. We should be in Honolulu in about forty minutes.” Holly said, and went back to flying.
“Holly let me fly the plane for a long time! It was so cool!”
“That’s great, sweetie,” he said, and climbed in the middle seat, finding another set of headphones. Locating a place to plug them in took another minute, but when he finally got it all figured out, he keyed up. “Nice ride, Captain!”
“Thank you! I had a most pleasurable copilot with me on this flight.”
“So how are we doing on fuel?”
“We’ve got plenty to spare. I’m going to make a few low passes over the runway to eyeball it before we land.”
“Good idea. If I had known all of this beforehand, I would have gotten some pictures of Hickam too.”
“Aye, that would have been good. But it’s still daylight, and the weather looks clear, so I think a few passes should do it.”
“You’re the expert!” he said and sat back to enjoyed the show. Soon they were over water again, and passed Maui, Lanai then Molokai on the right, and at about two thousand feet, approached Oahu rapidly. Descending still, Holly approached Hickam, and when they had the aircraft over the runway, travelling at what looked like a ridiculously low altitude and fast speed, she climbed and banked sharply for another pass, circling out over Honolulu, and back over the water.
“There looks to be to be some damage down there. There’s a few hangars destroyed for some reason, and it looks like the fuel storage tanks burned up some time ago, but the runway doesn’t look like it’s in too bad of shape.”
She made three more passes like that, and settled into an approach pattern to land. She lowered the landing gear and flaps, the plane slowing noticeably, and as she passed the threshold, pulled the nose up slightly. When they touched down, the wheels just kissed the runway, and Tim let out a whistle. As soon as all the wheels were on the runway, she reversed the pitch on the props and throttled up, pushing the air out in front of them, instead of pulling them through the air, effectively slowing the plane down rapidly.
What Holly didn’t see on her three passes was a small, unexploded softball-sized bomblet, which had been sitting on the concrete runway for over five years, and had survived typhoons and several storms. It had remained unexploded there since the cruise missile the USS Hughes targeted there had dropped them. Sometimes they all didn’t explode, and this was one of them that didn’t. They were still rolling out, going about fifty miles an hour, when the right landing gear hit it. It was then that it decided to do what it was designed to do, and exploded spectacularly with a loud bang. The wheels collapsed, the aircraft banked into make a wide right hand turn, and the wing dipped. Holly slammed the throttles to neutral, cut the fuel to the engines, and there was nothing more she could do as everyone held their breath and held on. The plane slid on almost sideways for about another hundred yards with a sickening screech of metal on concrete, until it finally came to rest halfway down the runway. No one said a word for several seconds, just stared out the windscreen, and watched the dust settle. Then Tim heard the intercom click, and Holly’s voice.
“I would like to thank all the passengers on behalf of the entire crew for flying MacFarland Airlines today, and we hope you’ve had a pleasant journey. I must remind all the passengers to remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop at the terminal.”
“What the fuck happened?” Tim asked, taking off his headset, and unbuckling his harness.
“I don’t know. We hit something on the runway.”
“That was exciting,” Robyn said, looking over at them both, slack-jawed.
Tim got up. “I’m going back to see if everyone else is okay,” then he disappeared to the cargo hold.
“Man that was scary!” Robyn said again.
“Aye, that usually doesn’t happen,” Holly said. She and Robyn both got up and went to the rear to find the side hatch already open, and no one to be found. They went outside into the afternoon sun, and saw Tim and Izzy looking at the shredded landing gear, and Jimenez already underneath, looking around. He crawled back out from inside the landing gear bay.
“Well?” Tim asked.
“Landing gear is fucked. I don’t know what we hit, but it shredded the shit out of all the tires and collapsed the first strut. And all these little holes… no telling what kind of damage is inside. Looks almost like shrapnel or flack damage.”
“I didn’t see anything on the runway,” Holly said.
“I know. It wasn’t your fault,” Tim said to her, turning to Jimenez. “I’m going to take a walk back down the runway. See if you can get the Hum-Vees out, and then see if there’s any more damage.”
Tim walked off down the runway while the rest of the group helped lower the ramp to get the Hum-Vees out. Jimenez was back looking through the damage, and Izzy, Holly and Robyn, sat on the front of one of the Hum-Vees. They watched Tim walk around, looking at the ground, kicking things here and there with his boot, all the while puffing on his pipe.
“I don’t know what it could have been, Iz,” Holly said.
“I don’t know either, Holly. But I think Tim knows,” he said, pointing down the runway.
“Sounded like a bomb,” Robyn said.
“Aye, it did.”
“But why would a bomb be on the runway?” Izzy asked, not expecting an answer.
Jimenez walked up to them, wiping his hands on a rag. “Excuse me, ma’am?” he said to Holly. “Besides the landing gear, whatever it was took out three hydraulic lines and an electrical harness.”
“Can they be fixed?”
“Yes, ma’am. I can go over to the hangars and see if there’s another Herc. Probably is, and I can take the parts I need off of it. Bad news is, it’ll probably take me a few days.”
“Then go ahead and look.”
“Ma’am, do you think it’d be okay if I had my rifle back?” he asked sheepishly.
“I don’t know, Lance Corporal. Are you going to be waving it at us again?” she said, with a little grin.
“No, ma’am! I promise.”
“Alright,” she said, getting up and getting it out of Tim’s Hum-Vee. She handed it to him, along with a loaded magazine.
“Be right back!” he said, taking off at a jog towards the nearest hanger.
Tim saw him heading towards the hangars and started walking back to the plane. When he got there he asked, “Where’d he go off to?”
“He went to see if he can find another Hercules to cannibalize parts from,” Holly said.
“So he thinks he can fix it?”
“Aye, but he said it will take a few days. Did you find anything down there?”
“Yeah.” he said, and handed over a twisted piece of metal
that was scorched. “It was a bomblet, probably from a cruise missile. That’s what all the other damage is from over that way,” he said, pointing to the destroyed fuel tanks and hangars.
“Why would anyone launch a cruise missile at Hawaii?” Izzy asked.
“That I don’t know. It wasn’t recent, but it would have been after The Event, that’s for sure.”
“That’s just crazy,” Robyn said.
“They come off of ships, don’t they?” Holly asked.
“Yep, and subs,” he said.
“But I thought you said all the ships were offline?”
“The ones with nukes on board are, I haven’t a clue about any others,” Tim said, shaking his head. Izzy looked perplexed at the conversation, and when Tim gave him a Cliff-Notes version, his eyes grew wide.
“But why launch one here?” Izzy asked again.
“That’s one thing we’ll probably never know. Let’s drive over to see what Don Juan is up to,” he said, walking to his Hum-Vee. They all followed, and taking both the vehicles, drove out over the taxiway towards the hangars, Tim in the lead with a sharp eye out for anymore unexploded bomblets. They pulled up in front of the hangar Tim had seen Jimenez walk into, and the huge doors were ajar. They all walked in, and heard metallic clanks coming from a C-130 sitting inside. There were several windows broken, and puddles of water on the floor. They could also hear water dripping from somewhere. Tim walked over to the aircraft and called inside the darkened cargo bay. He saw the light from a flashlight, and then Jimenez appeared at the door, smiling.
“Hey, Sar’ Major. I can scrounge all the parts I need off this crate, and get ours fixed up cherry in a few days.”
“Good. You need anything?”
“Nah, I got this for now. I will need a hand when I have to change out the landing gear struts and tires though. I’m just getting the hydraulic lines and wiring harness I need right now.”
“Okay, you do that. We’re going to set up camp right here.”
Jimenez nodded, disappearing back into the cargo hold, and Tim walked back and told everyone to get comfortable. Robyn and Izzy said they were going to look around some in the hangars, and Tim told them to be careful. He went back outside, followed by Holly. He sat down on the ground with his back resting on the outside wall of the hangar, and Holly sat down next to him, putting her head on his shoulder.
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