The Wacos and Hornets were fully assembled. The Chinooks and the Eipper were stripped down for transport, which meant the wings had to be reattached.
Michael was in heaven. He dispatched two of his men to transfer some avgas from the fuel reservoir up to the skypark, assigned several other pilots to airstrip weeding detail and sent Jason to tell Bob Young the good news. When Jason came back, looking positively smug, Michael knew he had a tale of his own to relate. He did-but being Jason, he had to do it in his own way, which meant dragging out the suspense until everyone was ready to choke him.
The news was worth the wait. A scouting party headed by Daniel Windwalker had come in that morning, arriving just after Michael’s group left. Daniel and his squad had found a couple of undamaged bi-wing crop dusters at a small private airfield. Oh, sure, the tires were rotted out and the batteries were stone cold dead, but they were sitting inside an intact hangar and at least birds weren’t nesting in the cowlings. Michael sent Able Emery and Angus Kirkwell, who would not be left behind, to check them out. They returned with the news that the crop dusters were Pitts Special S-2B’s, among the most aerobatic planes ever made. Michael’s smile grew so wide his face almost split.
*
The next morning dawned clear and calm so Michael demonstrated how to put the wings on the Chinooks and the Eipper and started flight school.
“Flying ultralights is easier than learning to drive,” Michael explained, “but only when there’s no wind.”
Jason Banda turned out to be a natural as a flight instructor. By mid-afternoon, everyone had experienced their first taste of ultralight flying. More than one pilot wondered aloud why they hadn’t taken it up before.
“Now I know what a bird feels like,” was the most commonly expressed sentiment. Even Jason was impressed with the feel of flying them, though he complained they were too slow.
The following days merged together into a blur of activity as Able directed ten of the more mechanically inclined pilots in the overhaul and repair of the crop dusters, while the rest of the crew, under the leadership of Arnold Begay, a Navajo gunsmith, tried to figure out how to arm them.
It was a lot easier said than done. For one thing they practically had to reinvent the wheel when it came to deciding where to mount the guns. If machine guns are mounted on the wings of a plane the fire from them is less accurate than if they are mounted along the cockpit, where the pilot can use the gun sights. But if they are mounted along the cockpit-or more correctly, on the cowling in front of the cockpit-then certain modifications are necessary before the gun can fire through the propeller without shooting it off.
The Allies and the Germans had the same problem in World War One. A German named Fokker solved the problem by inventing what he called an “interrupter gear”, which led to the first true fighter planes. Like most good ideas, it was simplicity itself. He attached a cam to the propeller shaft. The cam lifted a rod any time the propeller blade was in front of the machine gun muzzle. The rod, being attached to the trigger mechanism, stopped the gun from firing whenever it would hit the propeller. The Allied Air Force would have to do the same thing.
Another concern was the guns themselves. There were several machine pistols, Uzi’s, Mac 10’s and M16’s available. The pilots had even scrounged some old M2 .50 caliber machine guns and a few M60’s from the Provo Defense Force. The problem was that all of these guns were either clip fed or designed to be fired in an upright position. The M2’s consistently jammed if fired inverted or even if tilted too far to the side. Both conditions would certainly exist during aerial combat, or even on strafing runs.
Michael and Arnold were still brain-locked over the problem when Jason Banda walked in with two pairs of ancient Vickers machine guns he’d taken off a W.W.I. era Spad 13 and a Sopwith Camel. The planes themselves were in ruin, along with the rest of the vintage aircraft collection housed at the Utah Skypark. But the guns were repairable, their fabric belt-feeds serviceable and they fired .303 caliber rounds, which were plentiful, as it was a popular rifle round. Best of all, Jason had been able to retrieve the synchronizing gears. The crop dusters were armed and the Allied Air Force was at least technically capable of flying missions in less than two days.
Daniel Windwalker’s scouts continued to bring in goodies. Lady Di and Dan Osaka, who was back on his feet, had been attached to Daniel’s unit. They had the intelligence to follow up on a lead from a girl who told them her daddy, who had died during the chaos following the asteroid strike, used to collect guns. The kid led the scouts to the ruins of her old home where they patiently dug through the debris down into the basement. The result was the discovery of several dozen machine guns, more than 50 cases of ammo, LAWs rockets, several boxes of grenades and claymore mines, a pair of so-called street sweepers (fully automatic, tripod mounted, belt fed, 12 gauge shotguns) and an almost endless variety of small arms and ammunition. A bonanza!
*
“Ho, Yellow-Eyes.”
Michael looked up from under the plane he was working on into Daniel Windwalker’s smiling face. He wiped a grease smudge across his forehead with a grimy hand and slid out, glad for an excuse to stand.
“What’s up, Daniel?” Michael asked as he reached for some hand cleaner.
“Just thought you’d want to know Chris got in today. Came in with Adam’s MASH unit.”
“How is she?”
“Well as can be expected. The trip here beat her up some, but she’s one tough lady.” The pride in his voice was clear as a mountain stream.
“Why’d Adam send the MASH back? Aren’t they mobile enough for him? Or are things getting too hot out in the sticks?”
“A bit of both, Yellow-Eyes. Adam’s got us sniping at the King’s road crews, but we’re not slowing them down much. They’ll be in Payson in a few days.” Daniel kept looking around at the other pilots working within earshot and Michael finally caught on the man wanted to speak to him in private. He took Daniel’s arm and steered him out of the hangar.
Daniel told Michael about sending Mitch Stonehand to find Jim Cantrell and give him the word about enemy planes, since the atmosphere was acting up again and they were unable to raise Jim by radio.
“One thing puzzles me, though,” Daniel said. “The King has taken a powerful interest in the whereabouts of Raoul and Sara Garcia. As a matter of fact, he’s looking hard for them and he knows where they are.”
Daniel paused for a moment studying Michael’s carefully noncommittal face. “You wouldn’t know anything about that would you? Chris was wondering, too.”
Michael looked Daniel straight in the eye.
“I’d tell you if I could, but I gave my word,” he said. “One thing I can tell you is they aren’t spies.”
Daniel nodded and dropped the subject. He understood the importance of a man’s word.
Michael visited Chris briefly, only staying long enough to see that she and Daniel couldn’t wait to be alone. He smiled as he left the room. It’ll be good for both of them, he thought. Chris never thought to mention Prince John was in Nephi the day she left and therefore couldn’t possibly have been in Booby Trap Canyon that same day. She hadn’t heard the rumors going around about how Michael had killed the man. Besides, now that her message had been delivered, her mind and heart were full of other things--the love shining from Daniel’s warm gray eyes and the way his large hand swallowed her small one.
The following day, Jason Banda and Michael test-piloted the crop dusters and fired the Vickers before turning the planes over to the others. Jason was by far the best pilot and he lost no time setting up a Top Gun school to tutor the others in simple evasive maneuvers such as climbing turns, Immelmans, loops and barrel-rolls.
“Fokker Bounce,” he explained while debriefing Michael and the other pilots he’d just shot down in mock combat. As he talked, he sketched the maneuver on a blackboard.
“I dove on you from behind, strafed you, then used the speed advantage I gained diving to come up underneat
h you and hit you again.” He tapped the blackboard with a pointer. “People, the best way to avoid this is to never let an enemy get behind and above you. Unfortunately, in a dogfight that’ll happen sooner or later, so when it does, veer sharply away as he dives past. Don’t ever try to dive after him. Can anyone tell me why?”
Michael spoke up, having tried exactly that during practice. “The enemy’s going faster. He’ll either just outrun you or loop around and blast you like you did me.”
Jason smiled and tapped the blackboard again for attention. “The worst part of today’s practice was the strafing runs. I know it’s hard to concentrate on hitting a target when you’re worried about flying into the ground, but you’ll soon get the feel of it.”
While Jason and Michael were teaching the pilots to fly crop dusters and ultralights like fighter planes, Bob Young showed up and asked them to come up with something that could be used against tanks and other armor. He was particularly worried about the huge self-propelled howitzers Ken Bilardi had told him about a couple of weeks before. Able Emery solved the problem by rigging electric igniters to some LAWs rockets and installed them, one pair per side, on the wing struts of the crop dusters. The mechanic was proving a godsend and Michael’s early suspicions faded more every day.
Able had already mounted four belt-fed machine guns on an equivalent number of ultralights and placed the street sweepers on the other two. One of the things Able liked about the Hornets and the Chinooks was they were pusher-prop models, with their propellers located behind the wings and the pilot. This greatly simplified the task of arming them. The Wacos were pull-props-also called tractor props-and therefore required the same redesign and rebuilding as the crop dusters. A satchel of grenades and another of tear gas hung within easy reach of the pilot. Able acquired the gas from Bob Young, whose scavengers liberated it from the Provo police headquarters. The Allied Air Force was now fully armed and as ready as a few days training could make them.
*
Luna City
Alice Anderson didn’t have the luxury of forgetting about the long term consequences of her decisions. As mission commander she’d limited herself to one child, her six year old, Tommy, while everyone else bitched ceaselessly about not being able to have a third or fourth. Hell, she wanted another child, but cold, hard facts could not be ignored.
She pointed to the graph on her tablet that showed intersecting lines of population growth and resource depletion and said, “Look, I don’t like it any more than you do, but until we solve the lack of resources problem we can’t lift the birth restrictions. You want our kids to starve?”
“Of course not,” Pavel Yurimentov said. Beside him Ludmilla Gargarin simply nodded.
They, along with Christine Jorgensen had showed up at her door shortly after she’d tucked Tommy into bed for the night.
Christine tossed her blonde braid back over her shoulder and said, “The only reason we’re here is because we’re all sitting on a powder keg. It isn’t just Linette and Mary making noise now. Reproductive rights is a hot topic at the cafeteria.”
She pointed to a large family photo hanging on Alice’s living room wall. In it Alice was seated at a long dining table with her parents and siblings, three brothers and a sister, enjoying a Thanksgiving feast.
“Maybe it’s the sense of isolation from our families on Earth, or maybe it’s our biological clocks ticking. Whatever the cause, resentment is spreading and discussions are growing more heated.”
“Well I can’t just conjure up the raw materials we need,” Alice said. “Elena and Suzy have taken time off from expanding our farming and living caverns to look for ore bodies. Kenny Chang has the chemical plant running at max capacity, looking for alternatives. Henri and Celia told me Earth’s ring might have some of the rare elements we need...”
“Alice,” Ludmilla said. She laid a hand on the General’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “We know you’re doing everything you can, but you’re talking about facts and this is an emotional issue.”
Alice raised her eyebrows and Christine said, “Most of us spend a lot of time at Li Chin elementary school teaching the children, surrounded by them. The youngest ones buoy us up with their laughter and energy, but the eldest are rapidly approaching puberty. If you think you have a problem now wait ‘til the hormone bombs start popping.”
That comment brought smiles in spite of the severity of the situation.
Chapter 30: Air Raid
The King had been broadcasting propaganda over a small portable A.M. radio station he’d rebuilt in Nephi. The messages were all pretty much the same. “Resistance is useless. We are better armed, better trained and much more numerous. A New Order is rising. Surrender now and you will join a great Empire whose subjects enjoy running water, electrical power, garbage collection and free medical care. Fight and you will all die!”
That kind of drivel was amusing, in an annoying sort of way, the more so because the station dubbed itself K.I.N.G. Most of the pilots listened in whenever they could because the enemy had taken to broadcasting Troubled Land Band concerts live and everyone enjoyed their music, even though Denise Lachelle was getting a reputation as the Tokyo Rose of Utah.
The Band’s last radio concert had consisted exclusively of several old Jefferson Airplane tunes, making Michael wonder if Jacques and Denise were trying to send a message. The Kirkwells, up in the hot air balloon, were instructed to be especially watchful for enemy aircraft.
The weather had settled into a pattern the locals called seasonal: clear mornings with afternoon and evening showers, which limited the ultralights to just a few hours flying time a day.
For the past week, attacks on Provo’s outlying defenses had been escalating. The King had moved almost ten thousand of his troops up from Nephi to Payson, where they’d forted up and from where they’d been giving Provo considerable grief, including lobbing a few random howitzer shells into the city. It certainly wasn’t a full-scale artillery barrage, but the occasional lucky hit made it more than just an annoyance.
Bob Young decided it was time to make the King’s Army feel welcome, so Michael and Jason planned a sortie and the Air Force flew out in their ultralights and strafed and bombed the camp. For bombs they pulled the pins from hand grenades then carefully inserted them inside mason jars. Drop the jar. The jar breaks, releasing the safety lever. Three seconds later, BOOM!
These worked well against fuel and ammo depots, but weren’t so hot against dug-in troops; when a grenade explodes on the ground, most of the force of the explosion is directed up and out. So for troops in foxholes and trenches, the flyers pulled the pins and dropped the grenades without jars from an altitude of about two hundred fifty feet. The grenades would blow about twenty feet off the ground, driving shrapnel down into the enemy’s foxholes and trenches. Of course, it was a bit hairy flying that low and slow with everybody in the world shooting at them, but they managed to hurt the enemy without losing any planes or flyers.
The following morning on K.I.N.G., there was a message for the pilots.
“Congratulations on your ingenious air force,” it began. “Such ingenuity deserves a reward. Your fearless flyers are invited to try again.”
It didn’t take long for Jason and Michael to agree on an appropriate response, but when Michael first went to Bob Young with a proposal to accept the challenge, Bob looked at him like he was nuts.
“Michael, we’ve only got six of those little planes and too few pilots to waste them on kids’ games,” he said, thinking, this is exactly the sort of stunt Adam warned me you might want to try.
“Yeah, but if they’ve come up with an effective counter to our aircraft…, well, Bob, we’re better off finding out now than during their main offensive,” Michael said.
Bob said, “I can see your point. I just think it’s too risky.”
The strain of the past several months showed clearly in his hollow eyes and drawn countenance.
“But it’s a risk we have to take,” Micha
el continued. “We know they have tanks and other armor, howitzers and light field guns. My God, we even know they have ultralights and some other aircraft-but we don’t know what kind of planes they have, or if they have some other defense against air strikes.”
Michael paused for a moment, watching Bob shake his head. It occurred to Michael that maybe Bob was thinking he’d already sent too many men and women out to die. He didn’t look like he’d been sleeping very well.
“C’mon, Bob, that’s not something we can afford to be guessing about when they start rolling those tanks at us.”
“I’m really starting to hate this, Michael,” Bob said with a haunted look in his eyes. “I mean I’ve been in fights before. God, everybody who survived The Dying Time has fought battles. But this is my first war.”
Bob shifted his chair around so he could look at the battle map that hung on the wall of his office. Michael moved around beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Back during the Vietnam War I was a student in college,” Bob said, gesturing at a globe. “Adam was already over there fighting, making a name for himself. Mom and Dad told me to stay in school. ‘One hero is enough for any family,’ they said. So I stayed here, nice and safe and eventually, I joined the protesters.” He paused and swallowed, trying to contain his emotions. His eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“You weren’t the only one, Bob.” Michael spoke softly. “Besides, that was a rotten war fought the wrong way. We knew better by the time Gulf wars one and two rolled around.”
“That’s what Adam told me...” Bob’s voice faded out, then came back a little stronger. “Anyway, there I was, a long-haired, brain-washed, slogan-shouting pacifist when Adam came home.”
The Dying Time (Book 2): After The Dying Time Page 31
