The Signal (The Bugging Out Series Book 8)

by Noah Mann

  Westin shook his head.

  “We just don’t have that sort of equipment,” he said. “And with the jamming...”

  Schiavo nodded, ending the need for any further explanation.

  “So someone nuked something,” I said.

  Schiavo had the ability to bring such a rain of fire down upon a target, and had shared the process to do so with me. Years had passed, though, since that responsibility had been passed to her from the President. Whether the sub that was tasked with listening for her call still existed as a viable weapons platform, or any sub for that matter, was an increasingly doubtful likelihood.

  Someone, somewhere, though, had pressed the proverbial red button.

  I thought right then about my family. Elaine. Hope. I was only able to spend a scant thirty minutes with our little girl after we’d picked her up an hour before from Grace and Clay’s. She’d loved the sleepover with Krista and Brandon and baby Alice, her ‘cousins’ as we’d come to call them, along with Aunt Grace and Uncle Clay. This new world was like the old world in that way, I thought. Bonds were not always born of blood. Often, they came from shared experiences.

  Surviving all that had come at us was paramount among those.

  Now, as I set my thoughts of Elaine and Hope aside, another layer of uncertainty had been added to the situation we faced. Somewhere out there, in the vast ocean beyond the carrier, the greatest destructive power that mankind had conceived had been used. For what purpose, and against what target, if any, we didn’t know. Not yet.

  “Sergeant, have Lieutenant Lorenzen meet me at the Garrison HQ in two hours,” Schiavo said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Any other information, Sergeant?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Schiavo nodded and Westin returned to the Humvee he’d driven to his commander’s house and drove off, disappearing around the corner.

  “Duck and cover,” Schiavo said. “The town’s going to love this.”

  I hadn’t said anything to Schiavo regarding what I’d shared with Elaine just hours before. My fear that we had become some perpetual target was even more unsettling now, considering what Westin had likely discovered.

  But it was only a fear, I knew. An opinion. And I’d been wrong before. About Bandon in particular. At one point, not long after arriving, I’d thought the place incapable of advancing toward the state of thriving it had achieved. I’d considered leaving, striking out on my own. But I had not, and Bandon, and those who made up the fabric of its community, had proven me incorrect. Wildly incorrect.

  Maybe what we faced a hundred plus miles off our coast was the last challenge. Maybe. We would be no target, then, going forward.

  There’s always hope...

  Neil was right. He’d always been right. About that, at least.

  I missed my friend.

  “Martin’s down at the harbor to talk with Orville,” Schiavo said. “I imagine that conversation is going a lot better than what we’re going to find at the airport.”

  “You’re sure you want to take point on this?”

  Schiavo nodded and reached for the passenger door of my pickup.

  “No,” she said. “But I have to.”

  Four

  Schiavo and I arrived expecting to find Chris Beekman hot, like a fire stoked to its maximum. We did, but, that turned out to not be a bad thing.

  “Chris,” I said as we walked through the open side door of the hangar.

  Beekman knelt on a small scaffold at the nose of his surviving Cessna, panels opened, tools resting on a rolling tray next to where he was working. He wore the same clothes from when I’d seen him last, trudging up the beach, soaked to the bone, shirt and pants now wrinkled after drying on his body.

  “Kinda busy, Fletch,” he said.

  Schiavo stepped past me, intent on doing exactly what she’d said. For this moment, Chris Beekman was going to be her mission.

  “Mr. Beekman,” she said. “We need your help.”

  “I’d say that’s an understatement,” Beekman responded. “But me helping you is predicated on me making some modifications here, all right? So talking is the least helpful thing you can do right now.”

  Schiavo hesitated and looked to me, more surprised than put off. In her eyes I could see the question that was raging in her head right then—is he already thinking of heading back to the carrier?

  “Chris,” I said. “A minute. Please.”

  He paused and looked back, to both of us.

  “You want to get back out there, right?”

  “Right,” I confirmed.

  “And I’m guessing the reason would be to get some of you onto that carrier.”

  “You’re already planning how to do it,” Schiavo said.

  He focused his attention on her. On the woman he did not hold in the highest regard. On the leader he believed had failed those she served. But in that instant of connection between them I did not see any of that old animus rise.

  “I’ve been planning how to do it since Fletch and I were fished out of the ocean,” Beekman said. “Planning and doing.”

  He nodded toward a collection of microwave oven doors piled on the floor, their glass portals broken and the fine mesh metal shielding within removed.

  “If you want to get back out there, I need more of those,” Beekman said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Building a Faraday cage,” Beekman said, jamming his hands into the engine compartment as he returned to working, riveting a piece of the metallic screen against the inside of the fuselage, adding it to a collection already there. “EMP brought us down. Well, not a true EMP, but the same results.”

  Electro Magnetic Pulse. The burst of crippling energy spat from nuclear detonations. For a moment I wondered if what Westin had detected could be the catalyst of an EMP attack. But where? Against what?

  “There were enough Bunker Bobs up in Alaska when I flew the bush routes,” Beekman said.

  “Bunker what?” Schiavo asked.

  Beekman kept working as he spoke, some determination driving him to complete what he’d begun.

  “Bunker Bobs,” he repeated. “Guys who’d move up to the big wide open and throw together some off-grid refuge because they wanted to be ready for some pandemic, or civil unrest, or—”

  “A blight,” Schiavo interjected.

  “Nah. Most of them weren’t thinking that plants would signal the apocalypse.”

  “Were any of us?” I asked.

  Beekman ignored my question and continued working and explaining.

  “The biggest thing they were all worried about was an EMP attack. From terrorists, or North Korea, or who knows. So I had a bit of an education hauling those guys in and out of their bug out spots. What an EMP attack would do. How it affects electronics. And how to maybe protect against it. With all this.”

  My rudimentary understanding of what a Faraday Cage did gave me some insight as to what he was attempting. If I remembered correctly, the metallic mesh was supposed to act as some sort of conductor to shield sensitive electronic components from electromagnetic interference. It was apparent he was trying, with his sole surviving aircraft, to protect those very systems which had failed on the Cessna he’d lost just hours earlier.

  But I also recall hearing, on occasion, that such a cage would do little, if anything, against a true EMP burst. Then again, we weren’t exactly facing that, a point which Beekman had already latched onto.

  “That signal is powerful,” he said. “Powerful enough to fry electronics if they’re close enough for a long enough period of time. I can’t think of any reason all those systems on an aircraft would fail, and fail spectacularly, without something affecting them.”

  Schiavo approached the nose of the Cessna and stepped onto the small scaffolding next to Beekman, peering past him into the engine compartment.

  “This will protect the plane?” she asked.

  Beekman hesitated just an instant, likely, I thought, beca
use he’d expected the discord which had existed between them to simmer still on her end. But she was letting it go, as was he. At least for now.

  “We’ll know in due time,” he said.

  “Chris...”

  He paused his work and turned toward me.

  “Can you land on that carrier?”

  He only considered my question for a few seconds, as he’d obviously already considered the necessity of that very act.

  “Probably,” he said.

  “That’s not promising,” Schiavo commented.

  “I’m cocky,” Beekman said. “I know that. But not above my ability. If I can’t do something, I admit it. This thing that you want to do...it’s a maybe.”

  “Can you take off again after landing?” Schiavo asked.

  Beekman nodded.

  “I’m more confident of that. But there’s a lot of variables. How much weight on both legs of the trip.”

  “Three passengers with gear,” she told him.

  “Three passengers with only essential gear,” he said.

  “The plan is to bring any heavy stuff out by boat,” I said. “With more personnel.”

  “Getting us on the carrier will allow us to board everyone from the boat,” Schiavo added.

  “Everyone,” Beekman repeated, though he didn’t react negatively to what he’d heard. “I have a feeling you may need them.”

  He set his tools aside and stepped off the scaffolding and began picking through the microwave doors.

  “No reason for that thing to be out there other than to hurt us,” he said.

  Without stating so explicitly, Beekman had agreed with the concerns I’d expressed to Elaine. And if he was worried...

  “If I get some help to scavenge more of these doors, can you be ready to fly tomorrow afternoon?” Schiavo asked.

  “Get me enough and I’ll be ready tonight,” Beekman answered.

  “Tomorrow will be good,” I said.

  Beekman returned to the engine compartment with another piece of wire mesh. We turned to leave. At least I thought we had. Schiavo, instead, simply stepped off the scaffolding and stood there, close to the man working to keep his plane safe against the unseen threat blasting through the air as we’d spoken.

  “Beekman...”

  Beekman stopped and looked to Schiavo.

  “I need you to get us there,” she said. “We can come back on the boat, but I need to know you can get us on that ship in one piece.”

  “You don’t want a maybe,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  He considered the choice being presented to him. Commit to success, or there was every chance Schiavo would scrub the plan. Risks were one thing in her business. The chance of dying was ever-present. But risks had to be calculated. Death had to be a possibility—not a likelihood.

  “I can land on it,” Beekman said. “I can get you there. It may not be pretty, but I’ll get you there in one piece.”

  Schiavo accepted that with a nodding hint of a smile.

  “Okay,” she said, pleased. “Fair enough.”

  Five

  “I was thinking about what you said.”

  Elaine looked at me from across the dinner table, waiting for me to respond. Just to my right, Hope was playing with a pile of peas on her plate, the high chair struggling to contain the bundle of two-year-old energy that she was.

  “And?”

  “What would you do?” my wife asked.

  What would I do? If I were an omnipotent being, it might be the smart play to turn back the clock to the point before the blight was even a glint in some scientist’s eye and prevent it from ever happening. But, with that power, I would effectively erase what I saw before me at our modest kitchen table. Elaine would still be FBI Special Agent Elaine Morales, working white collar crime in some anonymous Bureau building somewhere. And Hope...

  Our child would not be at all. No part of her would cross our separated minds. This future we’d come to know, and to embrace, would not even exist in a fevered dream.

  Elaine did not seek some fanciful explanation of the fears I’d expressed, but the reality of the life I did now have was, to me, as inconceivable as it was real. I’d never dreamed of what I now had, and what I would do to protect it, to protect them, knew no bounds.

  “Where would you want to go?” she pressed me when my silence lingered.

  “Moving a town isn’t an easy thing to do,” I said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “Not the town. You. Us.”

  “Us?”

  “A small group,” she said. “Like they did setting up Remote.”

  That settlement had been born of dissatisfaction with the town’s leadership. Forty plus individuals had rebuilt the tiny hamlet decimated by the blight. Why, though, was Elaine suggesting what I thought she was?

  “Wait,” I said, openly confused. “I was talking about the town, Elaine. Everyone.”

  “I know,” she said. “But we’d have to think of our part in a smaller group.”

  I sat back in my chair and stared at her for a moment.

  “What if you’re right?” she asked. “And we do have a target on us. Up and moving everyone, would that make us safe? Or would the target always be on us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “One basket, all the eggs,” she said, drawing on a metaphor to succinctly describe our situation.

  “What are you saying, Elaine?” I asked, turning the query back on her.

  My wife reached to our daughter and tapped the plate, signaling that it was time she start eating and stop playing. Hope obliged, awkwardly spooning peas into her mouth.

  “Once this thing with the carrier is in the past, I’m thinking of bringing up with the council that we break up Bandon. We divide into eight, maybe ten groups, and spread out. Not close, either. Far enough that each group would have to work to survive on their own. True independence.”

  If I’d been able to lean back against my chair anymore, it would have toppled. That I had planted such a thought in my wife’s head was not even a possibility when I’d told her of my fears. Fears that might have been symptoms of exhaustion and hypothermia.

  She, though, had been astute enough to recognize that they weren’t.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  I took in the sight of her. The woman I’d not even known when the blight rolled over the planet. The woman who’d traveled with me, suffered with me, and fallen for me. The woman who’d sacrificed the use of her legs to protect her adopted hometown.

  A place that she now was concluding had served its purpose.

  “You can’t force people to go,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said. “But you can lead them.”

  In those words, and in the look that accompanied them, I could see that our time in Bandon, no matter what happened aboard the carrier, was drawing to a close.

  Six

  There was no fanfare. Our mission to the carrier, both parts, began ten hours apart, with the Blue Streak departing Bandon’s harbor before seven in the morning on a journey which Orville Pehrsson estimated would take twelve hours across open ocean. That marker in time informed our departure from the airfield. We needed to reach our destination with the last light of day almost gone. Darkness would be our shield.

  But it was also going to be our nemesis.

  “A night landing,” Elaine said as I gave my gear a last look.

  “Night-ish,” I corrected her.

  “Chris assured her he can do this, Angela said.”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed.

  “You don’t sound convinced,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t say he was backed into a corner, but it wasn’t far from that.”

  She shifted her attention, trying not to focus on that most difficult of tasks, and let herself appraise the gear I was readying instead.

  “Four mags?” she asked, uncertain about the choice that was not a choice.

  “Ammunit
ion is weight,” I said. “Weight wastes fuel. And, as Chris put it, we don’t want to land a fat Cessna on a moving airstrip.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” she said.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” I reassured her.

  “I know that.”

  I finished stowing my equipment in the small backpack and slipped the four thirty-round magazines of 5.56 ammo into the snug gear vest I wore. Besides that I had one full mag in my AR, two spare mags for my Springfield, a knife on my belt, and a compact five shot Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver in a boot holster on the inside of my left leg. Martin and Angela were similarly outfitted. Chris Beekman, whose only job once aboard was to keep his plane in one piece, was bringing a sawed-off 12-gauge Mossberg room broom, with a pistol grip and no stock. It was a hideously inaccurate shotgun, but the man who would be piloting us to the carrier insisted that the pattern it put out would make up for his innate inability to hit the proverbial side of a barn.

  “Fletch...”

  It was Schiavo. She was standing just under the Cessna’s right wingtip. Beyond her, Martin was already aboard in one of the rear seats. Just in front of him, Beekman sat at the controls, waiting for the go ahead to start the engine.

  “Gotta go,” I said to my wife, leaning to kiss her.

  But as I tried to pull back she put her arms around my neck and held me there, kissing me longer. When she was finally done she let me ease back a little and looked me straight in the eye.

  “Your little girl is going to want to see you again,” she said. “Make that happen.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “I can’t resist that order,” I said.

  She released me and I stood, hauling my small backpack toward the plane. The baggage door just aft of the rear seats was open, Martin’s small bag already inside. Schiavo and I placed ours, each containing only the necessities—rope, an emergency supply of food and water, a medical kit, and extra lights and batteries.

  “Start it up, Beekman,” Schiavo said as she secured the baggage door.

  The propeller jerked, the engine growling for a moment before catching, prop spinning up to speed. Schiavo climbed in past the tipped front seat and took the space next to her husband. I readied the front passenger seat and slipped in, closing the door and donning my headset, as the others already had.