Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “Hi.”

  “Hello,” she replied, her voice sounding all but computer-generated. “What now?”

  “The fellow in the back seat is Lester Brown of the Quaalatch tribe. He has enough C-4 plastic explosives in that bag to hopefully cripple the WaveRam’s outer wings, and he has the detonators. We need to get him low enough to go down by rope and place charges on either end. We can detonate them by radio from the air.”

  Jennifer’s jaw must have dropped involuntarily. “Are you out of your mind? You brought a bag full of C-4 on my helicopter? Without asking?”

  “Okay. Can we please get this done and perhaps save a few thousand people from being killed?”

  “I can’t fly explosives! Do I look like an Air Force Special Operations pilot?”

  “Jennifer, I can’t fly, and the only way to do this is with masterful piloting.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.” It was a phrase she’d always liked, but she couldn’t even muster a smile to accompany it. The knowledge of what was a mere two feet behind her in the passenger seat was distracting.

  “Come on, Jen. Why do you think I had you fly me over that big barrier a little while ago?”

  “I… I don’t know. You seemed to think it was important. I surely didn’t think you’d try to involve me in something like this.”

  “How could I not involve you?” he said, closing the door and fishing for his seat belt. “I wouldn’t trust any other pilot, and… and,” he said, holding out his hand to stop her impending response, “that’s not flattery. That’s fact.”

  She was breathing hard now, the C-4 truly frightening her where high winds and rain and impending seismic disaster had failed. If it went off, of course, she would at best have a microsecond of consciousness to be pissed off at him before being blown into oblivion. There would be no time for pain.

  And then there was the matter of Doug’s presence. Doug would die with her. Why, she thought, did that make it seem all right? The reality was almost comforting, and that fact by itself was truly disturbing.

  Clearly there was no time for deeper examination of her feelings, or his. They were already aboard, the island was clearly splitting apart, and the surreal nighttime evacuation had already taken on the appearance of a Buck Rogers movie. The planetary panic in black and white she’d laughed at as a girl.

  She shook herself mentally back to the present. “All right. Lay out your plan.”

  He took her through the steps in a quick but comprehensive briefing. She could hear the man in back working with whatever he’d brought aboard, and hear as well the click of his seat belt. Sven, she figured, couldn’t possibly know the details of this mission or he wouldn’t be standing calmly outside watching his daughter prepare to lift off with enough firepower aboard to vaporize her body, and his newest helicopter.

  “Does he have the proper clips and rope for using the winch?”

  “He says he does. He’s mountain-climbed.”

  “Which end of the WaveRam first?”

  “Ah… let’s do the southernmost wing.”

  She finished the checklist and lifted off into the wind, this time more smoothly than before, anticipating the vicious wind burbles cascading around the forward corner of the helipad. She brought the Dauphin into position again over the massive concrete breakwater just as she had before, noting that the waves were even higher now, which made the chances of losing anyone dangling from the end of a rope even more likely.

  In the back seat Lester Brown had finished laying out the materials before liftoff, dividing the eight remaining blocks of C-4 among four small knapsacks. In each block of the explosive he carefully inserted a blasting cap, feeling the same jitters as before when he connected the wires to the waiting leads from the encrypted radio detonator. They had used timers on the central power station and modified cellular phones for the emergency generators. There were now just two of the phone detonators left, one for each side, and he had just enough wire to connect the two knapsacks together across a twenty-five-foot length of rope. One knapsack would be laid on the front face of the WaveRam, the other in the back, with the combined explosive power acting somewhat like a shaped charge and blowing a hole all the way through.

  That, at least, was the theory.

  They were almost over the target when he finished, his hands shaking slightly as he rechecked the inbound phone numbers and the special six-digit code which would actually trigger the blast.

  Doug was looking back over his shoulder and Lester gave him a thumbs-up. He connected a ring from the end of the winch cable to the central ring on his harness after opening the right-hand door, and on word from Jennifer relayed by Doug, he swung himself out, supporting his weight entirely on the winch as Doug took the remote control and began lowering him.

  Hanging thirty feet below the Dauphin, the surreal oceanscape of the WaveRam barrier illuminated by the downward spotlight, Lester held on to the two bags and used hand signals to motion Jennifer lower.

  Ever so slightly, she lowered the collective, causing the Dauphin to settle until Lester’s feet were at the top of the barrier. He kicked around for a few seconds before another lowering gesture brought him down right on top of it, and he could stand on his own. He started to remove the hook attached to his harness but thought better of it, and knelt down to begin the job of laying the connecting line between the two knapsacks over the top of the barrier. He flopped one deadly sack over the front face, the other over the back, horizontally aligned.

  Jennifer had been fighting the winds and the visual illusions much too consciously, her control inputs falling behind the responses of the Dauphin. Each successive movement of her hand slightly reinforced the deviation, rather than damping it. It was as if her car had started drifting to the right and she’d mistakenly corrected to the right, worsening the situation.

  At first the gyrations were little more than a slight annoyance, but fatigue and distraction were taking their toll, and within a few seconds the malady had become significant. The Dauphin began popping up and down with uncharacteristic suddenness.

  She forced herself to reacquire her alpha state, the calm control that had always characterized her flying at critical moments. Breathe! You can do this! But it wasn’t working.

  Still attached to the lifeline and winch, Lester was too busy to notice the gyrations of the helicopter until he reached over the front of the WaveRam at a critical moment, and the rope tightened enough to yank him off balance. It slackened almost as fast, leaving him toppling headfirst toward the waves and flailing the air to no avail, unable to stop his tumble, his back hurting from the sudden snap upward. He hit the water just ahead of a huge wave, but was yanked back in the air by the line to the helicopter before the wave could completely engulf him.

  Lester looked back around, relieved to see the knapsacks of C-4 right where he’d left them. There was no need for realigning them, and he frantically gestured to be pulled up. Jennifer yanked him up energetically enough to cause him to bounce and twist at the end of the rope before the winch could begin pulling him in.

  She gained a hundred feet in altitude, calming herself and looking for her “hover button,” the almost mystical melding of pilot and machine which had shocked her so long ago as a student helicopter pilot. One moment she’d been all over the sky, the next hovering rock-steady with the ease of a hummingbird. Calm again and fully in control, she flew over the northern wing of the giant concrete structure. Doug confirmed Lester was back aboard and was ready to use his cell phone, and gave him the go-ahead signal. Lester dialed the requisite number and heard it answered automatically by the cell phone in the package of C-4. Carefully he punched in the destruct sequence he’d programmed, and with the last digit the night sky lit up in a double report of light, concussion, and sea spray.

  “God! That was impressive!” Jennifer said.

  “Certainly was,” Doug responded. “Maybe we should go back and assess the damage first.”

  “You said we had li
ttle time, right?” she asked.

  He thought for a few seconds. “No, you’re right. We’ll blow the other side first.” Doug leaned over the seat back to confirm that Lester was once again ready to go down. He could tell the man was freezing cold, his clothes soaking wet from the first encounter, but Lester didn’t complain as he once again checked the security of his tether and opened the door, carrying the knapsacks with the second round of explosives.

  From Lester Brown’s perspective, the disapproval of Marta Cartwright had been a far more crushing disappointment than the possibility of prison. He’d organized the strike against the hated Cascadia development to honor her, only to discover that far from being pleased, he had shamed her. Their brief conversation in the island’s command center removed any doubt that he owed an act of redemption, and one normally achieved only by sacrifice and bravery. It had amazed him that the pathway was right in front of him. From that moment, helping Dr. Lam blow up part of the wave barrier had become a grateful duty.

  His thorough military training had rendered the handling of explosives a comfortable and familiar process, but the equipment he’d been using to damage the Cascadia facilities was far from military standard, and that had already created a few moments of panic.

  Suspended now from the helicopter, he struggled to hold on to the second two knapsacks containing plastic explosives and trigger devices, all of which were moving around loose inside. They were trying to turn upside down in his hand, and he was losing control of them. With the main flap not completely secured, the prospect of dumping the trigger devices in the water was very real.

  Once more he strained to reach around beneath the principal sack and stop the tilt, but the motion caused him to start spinning slowly on the end of the tether, making the problem even worse.

  There were only a few feet left to go before his feet could get a grip on the top of the jetty, but the gyrations were getting wilder and he found himself almost upside down, holding on to the flap of the knapsack with every ounce of control he could maintain. In such an undignified, unplanned position, there was no way his feet were going to land first.

  Overhead, Jennifer was relying on Doug’s verbal instructions through the interphone to know how to position Lester over the concrete barrier. Now he was reporting the man had begun spinning and was going to land on his side.

  Jennifer pulled up slightly, the Dauphin fighting the winds as she pulsed the controls.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the right place, but he’s on his side and spinning around. Not like before.”

  “Is he giving you any signals?”

  “No. I think he’s having too much trouble holding on to the sacks. Take him down more. Let him touch down sideways. That’ll stop the rotation.”

  “You’re sure that won’t hurt him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  A vicious side gust hit the Dauphin at the same moment and Jennifer worked to get them back under control, but the movement was enough to start Lester swinging, a motion which further confused the inputs to the chopper’s controls.

  “I’m going to bring us up. You need to winch him in.”

  “No, he’s motioning for you to come down, Jennifer.”

  “Down?”

  “Yes.”

  “But… is he swinging? It feels like he is.”

  “A little, but he wants down, and I think he can land on top.”

  She lowered the collective too fast and too much, her correction coming too late.

  Twenty feet below, Lester Brown had almost righted himself when the line dropped a few feet at the apex of a lateral swing. He was on his side, struggling to come back to the vertical, his body beginning a downward arc toward the wave-pounded concrete abutment. He could see what was coming, but there was no way to avoid the impact between chest and concrete, and even over the noise and the wind he could hear his ribs snap and feel the breath knocked out of him.

  Somehow the impact dislodged the lifeline, unclipping it from the chest ring and whipping it away in the wind. He could imagine the startled response overhead in the helicopter.

  Lester felt himself slipping over the side of the slime-slicked wall and scrambled hard to gain a handhold and boost himself up. With his feet churning against the front of the barrier and slipping with each cycle, his hands closed around an exposed piece of rebar and with a focused, mighty effort he yanked his weight up and got a foot over the ledge, working the other leg up until he was sprawled on top, all too aware that there was no longer a lifeline to cling to.

  His chest was on fire with pain, his breathing shallow and his body rebelling, hurting with every breath and protesting against the amazing cold and windchill. Somehow the knapsacks were still with him, and he checked to see if the contents were safe before slowly inching one over the back side, then reaching in the other one to check its contents.

  He dug around inside, his fingers finding the awful state of the phone before he could see it. The impact had broken the case open, strewing the electronic contents uselessly inside. There was no way it was going to work.

  He stole a glance upward at the Dauphin and saw the worried face of Doug Lam leaning out. He tried to give him a thumbs-up, but it hurt too much, and he concentrated his efforts on trying to figure out how to detonate the remaining charge.

  There was no fuse to light, even if he had a lighter that could brave the water all around him. Either the C-4 would be exploded with a blasting cap initiated by an electrical pulse, or there would be no explosion. With the shattered phone there was no longer any way to trigger it remotely.

  But, he reminded himself, he did have an extra coil of insulated wire in one of the sacks. At least a hundred feet of it. If he could manage to rig up a temporary connection with the blasting cap on one end, and the battery from the smashed cell phone on the other, he might be able to get winched back up and detonate it safely from forty feet in the air. The explosion would be terribly loud, but it shouldn’t hurt the helicopter or its occupants.

  Aware that the line was being dropped once again, Lester carefully reached inside the sack and began assembling what he needed, working hard against the pain to keep his focus and avoid what would be an instant, fatal mistake.

  The hook on the end of the line suddenly hit him in the buttocks and spun away, but he paid no attention, knowing they wanted him to grab it and hook it up again. The thought of putting pressure on the harness and on his damaged ribs took his remaining breath away, and he tried to wave “No” with his left hand, a gesture they were apparently not getting.

  There it is, he thought, his left fingers closing around the end of the extra wire, which he had already stripped and prepared. The two screw-down terminal poles he’d mounted to the case of the specifically configured cell phone were still in place and hardwired to the battery’s terminals, and he removed the existing wires and attached the new leads before realizing he wasn’t thinking clearly.

  No, no, no! Jeez! I need the new long wire to go to the old ends which go to the blasting cap. The new end I carry up to the chopper and just touch the actual battery poles to them. Not before!

  He knew there was a chance that some sort of unplanned pathway might now exist in the shattered phone case, porting electricity to some unsuspected spot. If he accidentally touched a lead wire to such a spot while the other lead was grounded, this life would be ended instantly and painlessly. Just as he’d warned Doug Lam when he thought the scientist was going to try it himself, one mistake would be fatal.

  Move by move, he got the shunt and bypass attached and quickly worked the battery out of its housing in the shattered phone. He held it tight as he automatically slipped it into his right pants pocket, then removed the new end of the connection and painfully strained to raise his head and look up.

  He was shocked to find a pair of feet practically landing on his back.

  When Doug had seen the brutal impact between Lester Brown and the concrete jetty, he knew instantly the man was
in serious trouble. Although he was gesturing that all was okay, it clearly wasn’t. Doug couldn’t get him to look skyward again, and then he realized that Lester was fumbling around in one of the knapsacks and might accidentally blow himself up. Apparently, Doug concluded, the man was delirious with pain, and therefore there was no choice but to go down and get him.

  “No, Doug!” Jennifer had responded. “You don’t have any training as a parajumper! How are you going to get yourself back up, let alone pull him up if he’s injured?”

  “We can’t leave him down there! Do you have a remote control for the winch at your console?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you’ll have to use it. One of those waves is likely to wash him off if I don’t get to him.”

  “I can take the chopper down and put the wheels right on the concrete, and you can haul him in from there. You don’t need to ride the winch down.”

  “Jen, the waves will wash you out of the sky! You can get me a lot lower, but you can’t land on that thing.”

  There had been a telling silence from the right seat.

  “Okay,” she’d said at last, “but take that second harness and put it on, and when you reach him, click his ring into the same clip as yours. As long as his spine isn’t injured, he’ll survive it.”

  What had seemed straightforward suddenly became terrifying as he zipped his jacket up and tested his weight, then swung out suspended only by the harness running between his legs and cutting painfully into his crotch.

  Jennifer began winching him down as she struggled to see his position. The thought of jettisoning her right side door and peering out like a long line pilot was becoming more attractive by the second, but there was no way to ensure it wouldn’t hit the tail rotor. Instead, she pressed her face to the side window, struggling to see. When she had him down to approximately ten feet, she stopped the winch and began maneuvering him back toward Lester’s position, working hard to maintain her visual orientation in the dark, the Night Sun providing the only horizon references by reflection.