by T I WADE
He looked around. They had about two hours of daylight left, and it was time to think like Martie. She had a good idea, and these aircraft were useless standing here and sure to be vandalized pretty soon. He searched for another aircraft.
“Where did you find the keys, Martie?” he asked as she shut down the engine.
“Where everybody puts their spare key, above the left front seat’s sun visor,” she said, excited.
“Let’s do a full ground check. Then you can start her up again and taxi me over to the FedEx building. I’ve got an idea,” Preston instructed Martie. They spend several minutes checking the Cessna from the outside before jumping in and making their way over to the far side of the airport.
While she taxied, he checked the instruments and turned the radios on to see if they worked, and set them to their local frequency.
The radios were both old Bendix King models and Joe’s voice came back when they called him to tell him they were already half way home and everything was quiet. There was a new Garmin GPS in the dash and it was useless, but the rest of the dials worked perfectly. He turned on the storm scope—a simple type of small radar screen that showed electrical storms—and he was surprised that it actually worked. It must have been and original early 1980s model.
They reached the FedEx terminal and three large jets faced the terminal in front of them. On one side, Preston found what he was looking for. It was a Cessna Caravan Cargomaster—a single turboprop the size of Sally’s Pilatus and used by FedEx for rural pickups around the country.
There were five standing there and he tried the first three. They were quite new and were totally dead. The fourth one looked much older, but the keys were not in the ignition. He checked above the sun visor and found what Martie told him he would find.
He turned the key and all the dials twitched. It worked! The fuel gauge showed it was a quarter full and he looked around her. She was old and scratched but in good condition. She also had the extra fuel tanks he knew a few of the older ones had, as winglets. They weren’t big, held maybe 25 gallons each, but he had read years ago that this aircraft had a range of 1,400 miles. These Cargomasters were used to hop from town to town picking up parcels from the smaller FedEx depots, and run all day at over 200 miles an hour on one tank of fuel.
It took several turns of the propeller, but she finally fired up. He let her warm up and got out to try the fifth Caravan. She was one of the newer ones, and would never fly again. Preston had just had a hunch that the older model would be there, and he had been correct. He got back in and let her warm up for another few minutes and then he remembered all the bottles in the bar.
Martie got the 210 out of his way as he taxied the larger Cargomaster to the commercial terminal door he had walked in earlier, shut the aircraft down as close to the door as he could, and walked inside.
The inside of the terminal looked the same as it had looked earlier, except this time a mouse scurried away from him. He opened the steel gate to the locked bar area with a piece of broken pipe from outside the gate and went to the back exit of the bar, unlocked the outside door and saw what he had seen from the outside—a steel cage holding several 100-pound tanks of gas used for cooking. His next problem was to stop the round tanks from moving while in flight and he noticed several full cases of alcohol. Shrugging his shoulders, he picked up the first gas tank.
He found a luggage trolley, loaded three full gas tanks and trundled back to the door. It was hard work, but he got the first three bottles into the aircraft. By now he was sweating hard and he went back and got the other three. This time, Martie helped him and it was quicker.
“They are going to roll if you are not careful,” she cautioned, looking at him inquisitively.
“I’ve already thought of that,” he smiled. “I think we are going to need extra cooking facilities pretty soon. I’m positive our numbers are going to grow and these bottles will be the first to go. It’s a pity that I’m going to have to use cases of booze to make them stable,” he smirked, and Martie gave him one of her looks.
He went back with the trolley and placed half a dozen cases of alcohol on it and carried them down the outside stairs of the walk-on to the Cargomaster. Martie looked around in the other shops and returned as he got the last six boxes onto the trolley and returned to the ramp. She helped him, and a total of twelve boxes were placed around the bottles to secure them in flight.
“Booze for the troops,” he laughed, and she rolled her eyes. He left the trolley by the door in case he might need it the next day when they picked up the next two fuel trailers, and they both climbed in and started up their aircraft. Martie had far fewer checks to do, and she didn’t even stop at the Eastern end of the runway. She went immediately into her take off roll and rose a few hundred yards down the asphalt. Preston took another few minutes to complete his take-off checks, looked at the load behind him and took off, the Caravan hardly noticing the weight in her cargo hold.
It was a ten-minute flight, and Martie was already down, her aircraft parked by the old shed on the opposite side of the runway and Maggie was running up to see the new acquisition as Preston came in on finals from the southeast. He also landed close to the old shed, which was filling up fast with ammo and now with alcohol. Preston asked the soldiers to help him unload and then asked them to gather all the men—it was time for their daily meeting.
“Today seems to have gone well,” Preston started, the sun going down and the windows darkening as he held the meeting in the house lounge. Everybody was squashed into the large room. Twenty people filled it up quickly.
Barbara came out of the kitchen and put up her hand to interrupt. “I have potatoes and veggies ready to be steamed for dinner. We thawed two dozen large steaks and I need a volunteer or two to start grilling them outside once Preston is done with the meeting.” Two of the off-duty soldiers immediately offered.
“We need to figure out what our plan of action is,” continued Preston. “And will have a meeting every day from now on at the airport here. So, to re-cap what has happened in the country so far and try and figure out what the hell is happening, I’m going to state what I think. All electricity went off at around midnight last night. I know it seems like weeks ago, but not even 24 hours have passed since the beginning of whatever this is. All the aircraft in the air at the time—we heard from California and have seen them here—went down, killing I don’t know how many people, most probably thousands. Every single motor vehicle that was not from the early 80s or before is dead, scrap metal. Even the General’s aircraft is scrap metal until somebody flips the switch and turns everything on again. Can that happen? Maybe, but not for the thousands of aircraft that crashed last night. They can’t be turned on again, and with so many people already dead, this is the real thing, guys—whatever it is. It is not just a little power outage. Any thoughts so far?” Grandpa Roebels put his hand up.
“If it was a sun flare,” he started slowly, “which I doubt since more stuff would be kaput, even your fancy old aircraft dials out there would be dead. So, if somebody has turned off all the country’s electricity, then I don’t believe that the electricity is meant to be turned on again. Also, all the car batteries will only last a week or two in this cold winter weather before they need electricity to power them back up. If it was a country or an Army who wanted to attack America, why would they want to turn the electricity back on and let all our troops return? If it is the work of a country wanting to attack us, then I believe everything is kaput until they want it turned on again.”
“My thoughts, exactly,” replied Preston. “I believe we must now act as if the world has changed forever. It’s already getting mean out there. The real problems will begin when the gas runs out in most of the houses around here, and when the pantry becomes empty. We were shot at once today and people were killed. There are dead people lying in their cars. Most of the cars are empty, but we saw looters on the highway and they were ready to shoot to kill. They were young kids who I assume t
hink this catastrophe is nothing more than a big computer game and are ready to kill the moment they walk out of the door with their father’s rifle or pistol. Weapons in this country are in nearly every household and it is going to get worse, even by tomorrow. Good people are going to need help. Do any of you soldiers know what food stores you have at your Air Force base?”
“General Allen might be better at answering that, sir,” said one. “At Seymour Johnson, many of the soldier’s families were already housed on base. I heard that they were going out of the gates in squads and rounding up the family members of all the airmen, here or overseas. That should fill up the empty housing on base and I think Pope Field and Fort Bragg will be doing the same. We supply the overseas troops from Pope and Seymour on a daily basis with C-17s. There are two large warehouses where millions of tons of supplies are kept. Hal, here, is one of the loaders for one of the warehouses. Hal, tell them what’s in there.”
“We have everything to run a war, sir,” described the second soldier. “The hangar is about 20 times the size of yours, and we have two of them constantly full to the brim. When I left earlier today, both were full and on lock-down. We have had to resupply so much stuff by air lately that we have had to keep them full. We’ve had more than a dozen C-17 Globemasters going out from Seymour Johnson every day. Just the freezer for the frozen food is bigger than your hangar. We also have tents, hospital equipment, whole mobile base camps, emergency equipment for disasters, and I’ve been over to Pope’s supply warehouses. They have much the same. There are several Abram tanks there awaiting delivery and a complete armory full of everything you could wish for in a war. If that ever blows up, the landscape is toast for miles.”
“So, I’d better speak to the General since my concern is what do we do with starving civilians when the time comes? We have already run out of sleeping room here. I’m thinking about clearing the hangar of aircraft, getting a bulldozer from Joe—you still have that old thing you helped me clear the trees for the runway don’t you, Joe.” Joe nodded. “I need to increase the clearing on the other side of the airstrip for protection as well as a parking place, and start putting people into the hangar to sleep. Tents won’t work since the floor is concrete and you can’t put in tent pegs, but we can hang lines and make rooms and get military beds in.”
“Preston, before you get carried away and save the world, do you know how many people are out there?” asked Joe.
“I understand what you mean, Joe. Somebody started all this for a reason and either we are going to get attacked, or everybody is just going to be left to die. The country will shut down. People up north must already be freezing to death and my question is what do we do when people come knocking on our barbed wire gate for food and shelter?” The room was quiet.
“Give them each a packet of Southwest Airlines peanuts,” suggested Martie. “We have 300 million packets! The room shared some nervous laughter.
“No, I agree with Preston. We must think of the future. It will take about a week for the people out there to get cold and hungry. Another week after that, there will be ten times more hungry people. Let’s say it takes a second week to clear out the supermarket shelves and shoot each other fighting over the last Twinkies. Then our troubles will really start. The military troubles will also start because bases will be overrun with people fighting and begging and killing to get in. We will be forgotten, or not, but with aircraft flying in and out every day, somebody is going to follow those aircraft to us and we had better be ready. What happens if there are people already watching us with radar?”
“Radar is down,” shared her father. “The only way they can track us is now from space. Only Russia and China can do that on a grand scale.”
“They can’t track our aircraft,” responded Martie. “They are too small.”
“Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but if I was a foreign power and wanted to invade another country, I would want to track their armies, ships, and aircraft.”
“How would they do that?” asked Preston. “There is no way to track an F-16 fighter or a C-130 or a C-17 from space, unless they are tracking the heat omissions, or the metal of the aircraft. How else could they know where every aircraft is?”
“Easy,” added Grandpa Roebels. “The same way air traffic controllers monitor the skies. I might be old, but I saw the birth of civilian and military aircraft transponders years ago and was behind the design of several military versions long ago with Michael in San Diego. Remember, we sold our company to Raytheon, and our products were just added to their sales inventory.”
What Martie’s grandfather said hit Preston hard, and he stood there and thought about aircraft transponders for a couple of minutes.
“So our enemy, if there is one, already knows we are here in Apex, North Carolina. Our flight transponders are sending beeps into space, being caught by their satellites, and they have already seen the several aircraft arriving and departing. When they attack they’ll come here first because we have the only aircraft flying around. And they already know that the country’s commercial aircraft, the whole U.S. Air Force, the Army, and most of U.S. Navy around the world are not using transponders anymore and totally useless to defend anything.”
“I think you have hit the nail on its head,” replied the old man. “Military transponders can be turned on and off at will. Civilian transponders in all the old aircraft you have out there also have a transponder on-off switch. All the newer civilian aircraft were automatic. They are all dead now so it doesn’t matter. But if you do not switch on your transponder, like you all do in your pre-flight or warm-up checks, then you have hidden yourself from anybody tracking the transponders, unless they have heat, infra-red, or metal radar-detection capabilities in their satellites up there.”
“I think from right now, pilots, we will stop using our transponders. I don’t think anybody is going to turn the power on soon and I don’t think we will be attacked tomorrow, but I think we must barbwire this base as much as we can and be prepared for an enemy attack within the next couple of days.” Everybody agreed.
“What about arming your aircraft, sir?” the first sergeant asked. “Our two tech sergeants here are the best in the business. Both men have been arming everything coming into Seymour Johnson since 1978—over 35 years. Tech Sergeant Matheson is retiring this year. He’s 55 and looks his age,” the sergeant joked.
“What can you do to our three P-51s and the P-38?” Preston asked the tech sergeant.
“Everything you want, sir. I took a sneak peak at the 38 earlier. It was originally set up with rocket pylons and the electronics are still in place inside the wings, just deactivated by law. It will take me a couple of hours and there’s room for two air-to-ground rockets on each wing. Any newer rockets than the older versions are most probably as dead as the motor vehicles out there on the roads. I mounted a couple of air-to-ground rockets on a P-51 a couple of decades ago, and I think two of yours have rocket setups already in the wings. I’ll have to go back to the armory repair shops and see what they have in storage.”
The tech sergeant looked around at the rest of the group, who were all listening intently. “We’ll arm all the machine guns for you, give them all a clean and get them ready. Remember, sir, your center of gravity will change in flight because the added ammunition weight in the P-38 is forward of the cockpit.”
“You have my permission,” replied Preston. “Start on the P-38. Do you have air-to-ground rockets here?”
“No, sir, but I’ll bring what we have at Seymour Johnson on tomorrow’s flight. Just get me General Allen’s permission and I can relay that to Colonel Mondale,” was the reply.
“I’ll fly them in for you, Preston,” added Sally.
“Are there any questions?” Preston asked, and there were none. “Today’s meeting is adjourned. We are still waiting for Buck and Carlos in Baby Huey. Keep some food hot for them, Chef Barbara, and let’s all eat dinner.”
Buck and Carlos flew in three hours later, bot
h exhausted, and everyone went out to help them. They had passengers, and Preston knew that this would be the first of many new visitors in the near future.
Carlos got out of the right seat and shook Preston’s hand and then Sally ran up and jumped into his arms, much to the surprise of many standing around. Both Martie and Maggie both smiled, however, knowing much more than their male companions. Two stern South American men got out of the rear, leaving a young woman sitting on the helicopter’s floor holding a sleeping girl, her long blonde hair falling out of the blanket she was wrapped in. Martie immediately went over take the little girl, and Maggie lifted the sleeping puppy, which was also covered in a blanket. Manuela slowly unfolded her stiff body and stood up to exit the aircraft. Carlos did the introductions. These three were his father’s bodyguards. His father had stayed with General Allen at Andrews while he and Buck and the bodyguard had gone to New York, where he had seen the little girl in the remains of a vehicle. Manuela had gone to get her out, but they believed both her parents were dead in the accident and they couldn’t just leave her.
Martie carried the child, and both Maggie and Barbara helped a still stiff Manuela into the house to warm up.
“Let’s close your bird down, Buck,” Preston ordered as he was handed a bag with a growling cat in it.
“I hope Oliver likes cats. That’s Smokey,” laughed Buck. “Poor Baby Huey and Smokey have had a busy day.”
“We can refuel the Huey tomorrow,” continued Preston, holding the cat away from him and suddenly noticing Oliver’s interest in the bag. “Let’s go into the lounge. We have hot coffee and a few steaks, and I’m sure a couple cans of beans can be added to the mix.”
Everybody who had exited the helicopter was tired, thirsty, and hungry. A case of beer was brought in from the cold porch and dinner was served by Maggie and Barbara.
