“Yep,” Pete growled. “Got everything I need, should be home some time tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, drive safe,” Sharon added. “I don’t like you driving at night. Your old-man eyes aren’t that good.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Love you,” she finished.
“Me too.”
Sharon clicked the phone off. “That was close to the longest phone conversation I’ve ever had with Pete.”
“But they have the fuel.” Rich was smiling as he stood up. “Let’s get these kids buckled in.”
Five minutes later, Jennifer Bowden did one last check of her preflight routine and hoped the jury-rigged generator sitting outside was putting out enough juice to supplement the Osprey’s internal battery. With just the battery and iffy fuel quality, she knew it would be a harder start than it should be. She had already disengaged the breakers to every nonessential system she could think of while maintaining only those that would help her keep the thing in the air; that was if she could get the turbines to light.
Everyone was belted in, and she looked out the window at Rich, who stood next to Pete Ballard’s portable generator. He flashed her a thumbs-up. Here goes nothing. She depressed the igniter on the starboard engine and was rewarded with the electronic clik, clik, clik of the fuel pump’s operation. There was a loud cough — “turbine fart” was the technical term — and then nothing beyond a puff of carbonized exhaust.
She waited for a count of ten and pressed the igniter stud again. The clik of the fuel bump was displaced by a low-grade hum that made her smile. The initial whoompff sound always reminded her of the furnace kicking over in her childhood home. Slowly, the whine of the turbine sped up, growing along with her spirits as she kept her eyes on the turbine’s diagnostics. The rpms came up more slowly than normal, but that was the shitty fuel. The numbers did climb, and once they hit the mark she was waiting for, she engaged the internal generator.
She watched as the systems in her cockpit came alive, and she flashed a throat-cutting gesture out the window to Rich, who moved out of sight to unhook the generator’s umbilical.
She was firing the port engine by the time he slid into the copilot’s seat. It took three passes, but the engine fired. “This fuel is for shit,” she added unnecessarily. Rich could see the engine readouts as well as she could.
“We don’t have far to go.”
“If we flame out . . .”
“Then you’ll be the first person to successfully glide one of these things in.”
That made her laugh; the Osprey had the same unpowered glide capacity as Pete’s farm truck.
She goosed the engines and lifted the beast off the ground to the characteristic roar. No radar, no ground terrain mapping; it was going to be strictly line of sight, but both she and Rich had spent a lot of time going over the map to the Muncy place. If everything went as planned, they shouldn’t be seen by anyone other than cattle and the occasional antelope. That wasn’t the only worry; on a clear night like this, anyone within five or six miles who wasn’t deaf would be able to hear them.
“I’ve got the hazard light on that microwave tower,” Rich said, two minutes into the flight. “Come to course two eighty-five . . . now.
“Next course correction, when we spot the lights of the feedlot on the port side in four minutes.”
“Of all the words I never expected to hear in my cockpit.” She had to joke; anything to relieve the pressure of flying at night, without any instrumentation that might give them away, while hugging the undulating terrain. There was just enough moonlight to make their flight plan possible.
Night duty in the Cheyenne Air Traffic Control center was boring. This part of the country had always been fly-over country; these days there was even less of that. Most of the night-time traffic was military and some of it even looked like what the FAA trainee, Richie Trahn, was seeing on his scope.
“Got a helicopter, I think. Canyon hopping. Going in and out . . .”
His supervisor, Dan Long, rolled his chair over from his own station to look at his monitor. Dan was a good guy to learn under, Richie thought, easygoing and not a total sweat grenade like the daytime manager he’d started under.
“Yeah, you do,” Dan said after a moment, “but check the airspeed; little too hot for a helo. No transponder, probably another rancher in a Cessna. Anything with a flight plan in that area?”
“Nothing.” They both knew that didn’t mean anything; the military had long stopped supplying the civil authorities with their flight plans, and technically, there was no more civilian airspace left. Every flight plan had to be logged and then approved by a newly formed division of the FAA that existed, as far as Richie could discern, for no other reason than to liaison with the ISS in Washington. They both watched the radar return blink in and out of existence for another minute or so.
“Log it,” Dan said after a moment. “We’ll file it with the morning turnover sheet.”
“Should we call it in?”
“Nah, if it’s something official, the Army or air guard would just tell us to mind our own business after they finished bitching us out for waking them up.”
Richie nodded to himself, half hoping it was a rancher and his Cessna trying to get somewhere the world wasn’t going to shit. He’d had cousins in Scottsbluff, and they were now enjoying their new home in New Mexico, courtesy of the ISS. If they could have, those cousins would have flown out as well. Not that there would have been anywhere for them to go. Mexico was a full-fledged narco-state undergoing a people’s revolution that would have been recognizable to Pol Pot and his grandparents who had fled Cambodia sixty years earlier. Canada, with exception of Alberta and British Colombia was marching in lockstep with the US and offered no refuge. There was no place to go.
Dan rolled back to his own monitor and his crossword puzzle. Richie continued watching the intermittent track of the contact, noting that it was definitely following the canyons. Within fifteen minutes, it was gone, and he went back to watching a flight of two C-141s out of Minneapolis make their way southward towards El Paso. There’d been a lot of military traffic headed that way in the last week. RUMINT had it that the people of West Texas were still pushing back.
He wished them luck. The government had the ultimate weapon; food. The government would just put their cordon up and wait them out. Everyone but the holdouts would cave, just like they had everywhere else. The hardcore would be hunted down, and those not killed outright in the fighting would be sent packing to the government-run “reservation” in sunny New Mexico.
*
“You hear that?” Britt turned to her husband, who was just walking back to her after checking on the dog she’d shot with the tranquilizer dart. Tom hadn’t done anything but laugh at her report of cracking a few thick skulls in the bunkhouse, but one mention of the dog and he’d left her with Pete to go check on the animal.
Pete had quickly managed to find an excuse to be elsewhere. The thought of that made her smile; she knew she made the rancher uncomfortable. It was preferable to listening to him bitch.
Tom stopped walking and just stared back at her for a moment, with his head canted to the side.
They both heard the echo of an Osprey somewhere off to the east.
“Pete! Hit the lights!” Tom yelled.
They both saw Pete run into the empty aircraft hangar, and a few seconds later, both edges of the runway lit up.
“Got it!” Jennifer beat him to the punch; she’d seen the lights come on just as he had.
“That’s a sight for sore eyes!”
Jennifer just grunted and aimed the craft at the end of the runway.
He knew what she was thinking. The Osprey paid its rent in military circles by its ability to take off and land vertically, but it could do traditional landings and takeoffs as well. Rolling in for a traditional landing would force a lot less of this shitty, injector- clogging fuel through the turbines.
He began listing his to-do list
the moment the Osprey touched down and began its roll towards the hangar. “Drain the tanks, clear the fuel lines, and check the injectors.” He’d been watching the turbines closely for the last few minutes; Jennifer had the throttles pushed almost all the way to stops, but they’d only been getting about 40 percent of the thrust that they should have been. Hopefully, the damage wasn’t beyond something clean fuel would fix.
“Six hours?” Jennifer asked.
If we catch a break, he thought, and the diffusers inside the turbine weren’t clogged beyond hope. He could clean them easily enough, but getting to them would be an all-day affair.
“If that’s all we have to do.”
“Even then, we’re going to be sitting out in the open for anyone to see.”
For about the millionth time since he’d met his wife, Rich wondered how Jennifer could be absolute ice behind the stick, and such a worrier about shit she couldn’t control.
“That hangar was built for a G-5,” she added. “Not like we can squeeze in.” She looked over at him. “And the sun’s going to be up in about three.”
“I know,” he replied. Hopefully, no one would be looking.
The kids ran down the back ramp of the plane, still living an adventure that they only half understood. Tom knelt down and swooped up both the twins in a hug that only somebody his size could do.
“Miss Jennifer didn’t sound happy, Dad,” Matty said.
“Really?”
“I heard her on the intercom. She said the fuel was shitty.”
Tom looked up into the back of the aircraft in time to see Jennifer take a knee near one of the seats, and unhook the cushion before throwing it towards the cockpit in what could only be anger. He knew there was a tool set under those back benches.
That’s not good . . .
Once she was briefed on the engine issue, Britt sprang into life and detailed Pete and Tom to help the Bowdens.
“We need the keys to all those vehicles.” She slapped Grant Ballard on the shoulder and pointed at the assortment of trucks and jeeps parked in front of the bunkhouse.
“Bring them over here and park them next to the plane, as close as you can. Get under the wings, surround the damn thing. Those big trucks by the barn as well, and any tractors you can find or any farm stuff.”
Grant just looked at her. “Where are the keys?”
“Probably in the bunkhouse with the idiots that own the vehicles.”
“Uhh . . . OK,” Grant managed after a moment. “Why . . .? Exactly?”
“Son,” Pete barked. “Stop asking questions, and do as the lady asked.”
“I imagine you’re thinking of breaking up the outline of the aircraft from the air?” Sir Geoff asked, with a single finger pointing up.
“Yes,” she breathed and glanced around, looking at everyone watching her. “Now, people! Let’s move.”
She snagged Matty by the collar as he ran by and hooked one finger at his twin brother, beckoning him close.
“You two, go help Miss Sharon and Miss Beth find some tarps in the sheds or maybe this hangar.”
She watched them all spring into action. Jennifer and Rich were already on the wing of the aircraft. They’d do what they needed to do. Her job was to get them as much time as she could.
“We are not going to be able to disguise a plane this size, out here,” Sir Geoff commented.
“No,” she agreed. “Not from a person, but the automated pattern recognition software might be fooled if we can somehow break up its profile as seen from the air.”
“I see.” He nodded in appreciation.
“The software usually tags images for the analysts to look at,” she added. “It might work, might not. Either way, it’s worth doing.”
Sir Geoff was quiet for a moment and then let go with a private chuckle.
“What?”
“I was just wondering how many satellites the US could possibly have targeted against its own territory . . . made me laugh.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “times have changed. I’d guess most of them.”
They both heard Rich Bowden let loose an impressive string of profanity from his perch on the wingtip next to the port side engine nacelle.
Sir Geoff shook his head. “That, I take it, is not good news.”
An hour later, they had every spare vehicle on the ranch parked in, around, and in some cases under the wings of the aircraft. A tractor had been used to pull a horse trailer alongside one wing. The tractor itself was now attached to a hay baler and parked along the other side. The whole area in front of the small hangar looked like an auction yard for farm implements and used cars. The fact that an Osprey sat in the middle of the pile was hopefully not too obvious. Tarps had been thrown over the tall vertical stabilizer at the rear of the aircraft and tied down to create a simile of a large tent. Others covered the cockpit and were stretched out in front to where they were tied to the roll bar of a massive 4-wheel drive pickup that Britt guessed had “Little Mike” written all over it.
They hadn’t expected to spend the day here, and her prisoners had been released to use the facilities, covered by Tom and Grant. By now, everyone, including the kids had seen her artwork. She would have preferred them not to see that, but they’d been nothing but proud of their mom. The three ranch hands were now safely tied together in a much more humane and less embarrassing position across the couch in their common room, watching television.
“They need you in the hangar, sweetie.” Sharon Ballard came into the ranch house with her husband’s hunting rifle. “I can watch these gentlemen.”
Their prisoners didn’t worry her. The boys were in there watching television alongside the prisoners, and she had very pointedly given them permission to shoot the prisoners with the pellet gun they’d found if they so much as made a sound. It had started an argument over who got the first shot, but she settled that by handing the air rifle over to Caleb, Grant and Beth’s boy.
“No face shots; anywhere else is fair game. But no shots at all unless they cause trouble. They aren’t the bad guys.”
“Are you sure?” Matt had asked.
“Yes, I’m sure.” She smiled at the three ranch hands.
They all nodded their heads in the affirmative. “Yes, ma’am. We won’t be no trouble.” It was Little Mike who’d spoken. She almost found herself liking the men. They seemed very polite.
Her good mood changed immediately when she made it to the hangar, where the Bowdens and Pete had engine parts spread out on a table.
“Diffusers are full of carbon.” Rich didn’t even look up from what he was doing. “We need to clean them all. Ten hours per engine.”
Shit. She looked for and failed to find something to kick. “So, this time tomorrow?”
“Maybe a little sooner,” Jennifer answered. “If we’re lucky.”
It would mean flying during the day, unless they waited throughout the day tomorrow, until nightfall.
Jennifer handed the tool she’d been using to Pete and walked over to her.
“You’re our pilot, Jenn.” She asked, “Safer to get out of here as soon as we can? Or do we wait for sundown tomorrow?”
Jennifer shrugged. “Everything being equal, I’d rather fly at night. But without knowing what kind of threat we have breathing down our necks . . . Your call.”
“Get us ready to go as early as you can. We’ll plan on waiting for dark . . . but.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
*
Chapter 13
Isle of Landing, Chandra
The impressive sight shook Amona to his very core. The ancient Kaerin watercraft had wings like an airboat; short stubby things that projected into the water. They lifted the craft and its dagger-shaped hull out of the water as it picked up speed in the calm waters of the island’s harbor. Within moments, the craft was moving at a speed on the water—no, just above it, he realized—that until this moment he would have thought impossible.
From his cliffside perch, he glance
d off to his left where a gathering of Gemendi encircled Lord Tima in the hope that their presence would be remembered with the success of the moment. Amona found himself wanting to laugh at how quickly the fawning crowd had formed. The crowd’s formation and jubilance were in direct correlation to the speed of the strange craft. They reminded him of a herd of sheep, gathering for whatever feed was about to be tossed to the ground. Had the test of the ancient watercraft been a failure, Lord Tima would have been left standing alone, looking for someone to blame.
Amona didn’t have to look far to find the face to blame. It had been the Gemendi Barrisimo who had suggested they move the craft out of the cavern into the sun. Amona found it difficult to understand how a member of the Hijala had given Lord Tima his first real success with the ancient Kaerin weapons. Incredible as it seemed, sunlight itself seemed to charge the craft’s power system. Not for long, though. The craft, after less than a minute of operation, was slowing quickly as its hull dropped back into the water with the loss of speed. A moment later, a steam-driven paddle-wheeler was making its way out to the craft to tow it back in.
“I don’t suppose we are lucky enough that it has broken?”
He started at the voice; he had thought he was alone.
It was Breda, the one remaining Hijala member he had yet to meet. The other besides Barrisimo, Mungali, had been even less interested than the old man in hearing of his concerns. Breda had made himself scarce, several times rebuffing his overtures to speak, until now.
“No,” he spoke simply. “They believe its ability to harness the sun was only meant to extend its charge, or I guess one could say its range.” One of his duties was organizing the research findings from the various teams on a daily basis for presentation to Lord Tima. He’d been among the first outside of Barrisimo’s team to know of the success. “The sunlight is not the craft’s primary impetus.”
“That would be the generator they cannot get to function.” Breda stated it simply, nodding his head. Power generation, on the scale and in the mode that the ancient Kaerin systems used, was turning out to be a critical choke point across the entire effort that the island’s population was engaged in. They were no closer to solving that riddle than they had been when they started.
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 18
