by Ralph Kern
“In other words,” Dillon continued as he pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced across at Grayson with a wink. “Karl the Jackal strikes again.”
“Team effort, Navy. Team effort.” Grayson pulled his water bottle from his webbing and took a long gulp, the pure liquid washing away the gritty taste of sand in his mouth. “If you’d be so kind as to call it in?”
“No problem.” Dillon keyed his lapel mic four times.
As expected, there was no reply to the announcement that they’d completed their mission and were withdrawing.
Grayson screwed the cap back on the bottle and slid it back into its pouch before looking around to ensure they’d picked everything up as Dillon disassembled and stowed the spotter scope in his backpack.
Twisting onto his knees, Grayson slung his sniper rifle over his shoulder and picked up the SCAR-H battle rifle lying next to him. They weren’t going to be looking for any more trouble, but it was a long hike back to the US-controlled Green Zone. A long hike through some pretty damn unfriendly territory. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Dillon responded.
They dropped through a hole which had been long since smashed through the eastern corner of the building and trotted down the rubble-strewn stairwell. At the entrance, Grayson lifted his Peshmerga scarf from around his neck to cover his face before looking up and down the ruin-lined street.
“Clear. Let’s move out.”
Chapter Two – The Present
Lieutenant Grace “Mack” McNamara pulled up on the collective and the Seahawk responded, lifting over the rolling forest-clad hills surrounding the crystal blue waters of the bay.
She checked the engine gauges, seeing the needles flickering within the green wedge indicating they were operating correctly. Yeah, pressures and temps were good, she was good, the helicopter was good. In fact, it was an all-round damn awesome day to be a pilot.
But it was time to call it.
“Okay, that’s enough for one day. Let’s bring her on in,” she said, pressing the radio stud on the cyclic. “USS Paul Ignatius, this is Sierra Hotel 1-2. Requesting clearance to land, over.”
“Sierra Hotel 1-2, Ignatius. You’re cleared for RAST to the flight deck.”
“Thank you, Ignatius. Coming in now.”
Mack cleared the last of the hills, glancing down as she did so at the outskirts of their new home, called—fittingly—Anchorage. The fields were bordered by ramshackle huts and the ant-like specks of people were scattered everywhere. Yeah, they’d definitely made their mark on this place, beginning the long process of making this world belong to them again, belong to humans again—stamping the lush and verdant land with agriculture and industry.
Before Mack, the bay opened up in all its glory. Nestled within were ships of every description. Small boats flittered amongst the rickety, hastily assembled piers where myriad medium-sized craft—fishing trawlers, freighters, and ferries—moored. And further out, the high-tech floating palace that was the huge cruise ship, Atlantica, and beyond her, the vast dirty bulk of the super tanker, Titan. The make-shift refinery atop her belched out black clouds of smoke—a necessary evil in this pristine environment, to Mack’s way of thinking, to ensure the fleet had sufficient fuel to make a go of it here.
Almost lost, nestled into the flank of Atlantica, just offset enough so the flight deck protruded behind the cruise ship’s stern, Mack’s home sat—the drab and mean-looking gray Arleigh Burke class destroyer, the USS Paul Ignatius.
“I think we’ve done a good job fixing up the baby.” Lieutenant Michael Phillips slapped the top of the console.
“Don’t jinx it just yet,” Mack retorted with a grin. Never say something was going well or fate would come and give you a hard smack somewhere it’d hurt the most.
But yes, she was quietly proud of their accomplishment, turning the cannibalized hulk of Ignatius’s spare hangar queen helicopter into an actual flying aircraft once again. That was a win in anyone’s book.
The squat, long helicopter descended toward the ship. Ignatius’s features became more pronounced as they closed on her. Mack couldn’t help but give a wince as she saw the twisted, patched radar mast on top the ship’s super structure and the discolored paint work where fires had engulfed her in the brutal battle of Nest Island. A battle which had been fought against those who were now their allies.
“Coming in for final approach.” Mack refocused on the pre-landing checklist. With practiced ease, and without even glancing at the thick manual strapped to her thigh, she ran her hands over the controls.
“Tail wheel switch: lock. No cautions or advisories. Armaments: safe. Harness locked...” she spoke quickly as she ran through her procedures. “Moving to the RAST checklist.”
The Seahawk settled over Ignatius’s flight deck. Mack released the cable which would be attached to the ship’s flight deck and winch the helicopter down. With a thump, the cable dropped. Somewhere below her, a crewman would grab it.
“We have you, Mack,” the landing system’s officer announced, far less formally than Ignatius’s communications officer. “Getting ready to reel you on in.”
“Roger that, LSO.”
The winch began hauling the helicopter steadily, yet surely down. Mack applied minute commands, keeping the helicopter level. They slewed gently to one side. Mack responded, pressing her right foot against the pedals.
A loud bang came from somewhere above and behind her. An ominous grinding noise filled the cabin, overlaying the dull roar of the engine, and the cyclic and collective began vibrating in her hands.
Ignatius’s superstructure swept to the left and an urgent warbling noise came from the console. Warning lights flashed as the alarm rang in Mack’s ears.
Without hesitation, she applied force to the opposite pedal even as the aircraft yawed to the right. Phillips, working with perfect synergy, slapped the emergency release button for the RAST. From below came a popping noise as a hydraulically powered guillotine sliced through the cable tying them to the flight deck.
“Shit,” Mack muttered as she fought for altitude. The tail boom narrowly missing Ignatius’s already scarred mast as it swung around. The massive blue and white wall of Atlantica’s flank swept past. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
The world completed a 360-degree pirouette, the pilot feeling herself being pressed in the opposite direction by the centrifugal force. Something was wrong with the tail rotor and they’d lost control of their yaw. And that was pretty damn problematic for Mack if she wanted to land on the warship’s tiny flight deck.
More warning lights flashed as she increased throttle to climb them higher into the clear blue sky, seeking that sweet spot where the rotor power of the main rotor and the balancing thrust from the malfunctioning tail blades would match.
“You got it. You got it,” Phillips urged as Mack slowly brought the spiraling helicopter under some semblance of control.
The wild yaw slowed, then stopped. They found themselves in an unsteady hover, high above the mothership.
“Okay, no way we’re bringing this bird in on Ignatius,” Mack said grimly as she banked the Seahawk around in a juddering turn, arcing away from the two ships. “I’m going in for a run-on landing as close to Anchorage as I can put her.”
Pushing forward on the cyclic, the nose dipped and they began slipping forwards. “Forty knots, forty knots,” she chanted, as if the vehicle was under voice control. She glanced at the airspeed indicator, fighting to keep them at the correct speed.
The white-capped waves rolling beneath them gave way to the gold of a sandy beach rushing by. The small, ramshackle settlement swept by to her right. The last thing she wanted to do was smash up the place as she came down.
“There.” Phillips pointed at a plant-laden field approaching fast. “Looks good, Mack. Put her there.”
“Got it.” It looked as good a prospect as any, and better than most. She dipped the nose, letting the airspeed creep up slightly. The field grew as it rose towar
d them. Specks resolved into people, running left and right to get out of their way as they thundered forward.
“Come on, come on!” She kept glancing at the ASI, then out of the window. They swept over the boundary of the field. “Flaring!”
She hauled the cyclic back and thrust down on the collective. The helicopter lurched down, skidded and bounced onto the field. The spinning rotor blades kicked up billowing clouds of dirt and dismembered plants. “Kill power.”
The blades whipped down, slowed, and stopped. With more flicks of switches, the aircraft shut down.
“Goddamn,” Phillips muttered as he leaned back. “Good flying.”
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” Mack said, before turning and cuffing her copilot with the back of her hand. “I told you, you shouldn’t have jinxed it.”
“Sierra Hotel 1-2, Ignatius Actual. Are you okay?” Commander Heather Slater’s cool voice asked.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mack looked out the canopy as people slowly returned to the fields, approaching with weary curiosity. “But I think we’re in bandit country here.”
“Roger that,” Slater responded. “We’ll get someone out to you ASAP.”
Mack pulled off her helmet, and glanced at Phillips who returned her look with a frown. They could be in real trouble. They may officially be allies with the people in this area, but there was history here. Recent history. Bad history. She reached to her shoulder harness and pulled out her sidearm and, ensuring it was tucked out of view in her lap, pulled back on the slide, making the weapon ready before replacing it in its holster. Phillips nodded, mirroring her movements.
“Right, let’s go meet our new best friends, shall we.”
***
Bautista pushed and twisted his way through the outskirts of the crowd toward the downed helicopter. Its wheels were sunk half way into the soft earth, the crew wearily standing by the open hatch.
The mood was palpably ugly. Murmurs of anger and discontent washed over the mass of people. There was the very real possibility a lynching would take place. After all, one of these damn things was responsible for killing dozens of their community. Possibly—probably—it was even this helicopter and this crew.
But a lynching couldn’t happen. Not now, not when they’d accomplished so much. Worked so hard to repair the troubled history between them.
“Stay here.” Bautista held the back of his hand in front of Karl Grayson’s chest, preventing him from following him forward. “The last thing we want is them seeing you. They might just decide it’d be worth the fight to just put a bullet in you.”
Grayson nodded and loitered on the outskirts of the crowd as Bautista pushed the rest of the way through the thickening throng. The people who saw him parted respectfully. Those that didn’t, he unceremoniously shoved out of the way.
Reaching the front, he turned. “What are you doing here ogling?” He gave a shooing motion. “You all have work to do. Vamoose.”
“They don’t just settle for shooting at us,” one surly man growled. “Now they’ve churned up our fields. Then they’ll have the gall to demand a cut of our food too.”
“I said...” Bautista stepped forward, well inside the man’s personal space, and stared straight into his eyes, daring the man to challenge his authority. “Vamoose.”
For a moment, it seemed the man would take up the challenge. Then he gave a shake of his head before spitting in the direction of the gray helicopter. Turning, he roughly pushed his way back through the crowd.
The mood seemed to break and the danger dissipated. People began tromping off through the churned-up mud and wreckage of plants, muttering in discontent.
With a barely hidden sigh of relief, knowing how close they had just come, Bautista turned to the crew. “There are better places for you to land than in the middle of one of our fields.”
“Yeah.” A tall ebony-skinned woman jumped down from the hatch. He saw emblazoned on her flight suit breast her name beneath the golden wings of a pilot. Lt G. McNamara. “I’d agree with you there. But we didn’t exactly have a lot of choice.”
“What happened?”
“What can I say?” the woman responded with a grin. “A helicopter is five thousand moving parts, all of which are trying to do you bodily harm.”
Bautista raised an eyebrow. That tallied with what he suspected when he’d seen the vehicle lumber in. It hadn’t been a voluntary landing. “Come on, G. McNamara. I’ll take you to get some food and drink while we await your colleagues.”
“Ma’am?” the other man piped up, still standing within the cabin. He gestured around him at the helicopter. “It probably ain’t a good idea to leave her with this... bunch.”
Very suspicious of him. But also, prudent.
“You two,” Bautista barked at two farmers still loitering nearby. “You look after this. If anything goes missing, you are responsible. Now please come. We clearly have barriers we need to break down.”
With a shrug, the woman looked at her copilot. “If they want to take our shit, us two ain’t going to be able to stop ’em. If Mister Bautista here wants to deal with Cap’n Slater on the warpath, the more fool him.”
Bautista felt a thrill of fear course through him at the thought. Last time they had gone against the captain of the warship in the bay, it had cost them dearly. Too dearly. The deck of his ship, the Liliana, was still stained with the blood she had spilt.
“Indeed,” he settled on in response. “Please, come this way.”
The three of them walked toward the edge of the field. Bautista exchanged a look with a man who stood watching them from among the stragglers.
Fortunately, this G. McNamara and her copilot hadn’t noticed him.
No, Karl Grayson was definitely a man to keep away from Ignatius’s crew, or they really would have a diplomatic incident to contend with.
Chapter Three – The Past
“Goddamn it,” Grayson muttered as he exhausted another parking lot row. Pulling his car around, he started up the next. One day, he might reach the illustrious heights of getting his own spot, but that wasn’t this day, and wishful thinking didn’t help him right here and now.
And if he pissed off his boss by being late, chances are that day would recede even further into the future.
Finally, he spotted a space and reversed his shabby old Mustang, still his pride and joy, and considering the exorbitant costs of keeping the damn thing running, his main expense, between two massive SUVs which dwarfed it.
Reaching into the passenger foot well, he grabbed his briefcase and climbed out.
He was a little over a quarter of a mile away from the entrance to the main building of the sprawling Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley.
Normally, he liked to take his time, walking up the winding path through the forest lying just to the south of the complex and paying his respects at the recovered chunk of the Berlin Wall on display there. To Grayson, it was a piece of history which testified to a simpler, somehow nobler time, when the only thing Uncle Sam had to worry about was the Evil Empire in the East. And, of course, the several thousand nuclear warheads pointed at them, ready to send America back to the Stone Age.
Nowadays, life had become a hell of a lot more complicated. Instead of one big enemy, they had dozens, if not hundreds. All of whom seemed to wish the death of a thousand papercuts on the US of A.
Today though, he didn’t have time to tip his hat to his predecessors, many of whom died to bring down that Iron Curtain. Instead, he took the direct route up the main path.
As he approached the entrance of the new headquarters building, he saw Dillon sitting on a bench. One arm was thrown over the back in a relaxed pose. His head was turned upward as he basked in the morning sun, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Cutting it fine, ain’t you?” Dillon said as he approached. He stood and clasped Grayson’s hand in a firm grip.
“Parking,” Grayson said simply as both men turned
and began walking toward the huge foyer entrance.
“Right.” Dillon nodded in understanding. “You’re looking particularly fine and dandy today. New threads?”
“Yeah.” Grayson shoved a finger between his tie and throat, giving it a waggle as he looked across at the similarly besuited man, the cut of which seeming to accentuate rather than hide his imposing frame. Clearly the man had spent money on getting it tailored rather than the off-the-rack number Grayson had bought. “And you look like you’ve hit the mall yourself, big man.”
“The clothing allowance has to go somewhere.”
They swept into the reception area, the echoing marbled floored chamber had the appearance of an airport check-in area. A set of metal detector arches lay in the center while armed guards gazed at them with lazy watchfulness and eager sniffer dogs pranced.
Grayson knew they were a trip wire, nothing more. If real trouble was detected, an entire company of Marines would descend on the place in a matter of minutes.
He walked to the metal detectors and dropped his briefcase, keys, change, and belt into a tray. It rolled down the conveyor as he passed through the arch and entered the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency proper.
The two of them approached the reception desk. A uniformed soldier watched them, sizing them up and probably deciding, on balance, they didn’t look like the type who had the agency’s worst interests at heart.
“Captain Karl Grayson and Chief Petty Officer Max Dillon, to see Colonel Victor Millard,” Grayson said as he slipped his Common Access Card out of his wallet and slid it into a lanyard before draping it around his neck.
“Good morning, sir,” the young corporal said, before gesturing upward. “If you’d look into the camera, please.”
Grayson stared at the small lens. A moment later, the corporal nodded him through.
The two men climbed the stairway. Passing the bustle of people in both uniforms and office wear, they walked down an unremarkable corridor which opened into another reception area where another soldier sat tapping away at a keyboard.
