Post by Defiant-Six on Mar 12, 2010 23:58:43 GMT -5
I had seen many refugees on Mt. Zion since The Fall. They usually come in small groups; 5 or 6 at a time. Occasionally, we would play host to bands as large as 20, and once there was even a small tribe unto itself of 35 individuals. Only rarely have we ever taken in singletons though; solo operators don’t last long in the wilds of the Rockies these days.
I suppose I should tell you what Mt. Zion is. My wife named it, shortly after we started taking in refugees from the People’s Republics to the west. The name comes from a line in my patriarchal blessing, which says that I will be a savior on Mt. Zion. I never felt much like a savior, but after The Fall, I could not with a clear conscience turn away people who had escaped from the terrors that were constantly rumored about since the United States became 12 different countries.
Anyway, by the skin of my teeth, my wife, my son and daughters and I managed to buy an island in the middle of a lake in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, just before The Fall. It’s not huge, but I have enough space for a home for my family, a farm to feed us with, a dock on the southern shore of the island to which our sailboat and a ferry – a converted ‘party barge’ – was tied, and a workshop for me to putter around in. By “putter around”, of course, I am referring to indulging my one real hobby: building airplanes. A comparative easy life, when stacked up next to the day to day starvation and political purge dodging that the life of your average resident of the Los Angeles basin has been reduced to.
I was on the west side of the island, running a plow through soil I was preparing to receive a crop of corn, when I first spotted him. At first, all I saw was a glint of sunlight against metal on the far shore. Halting the mule, I focused on the spot I had seen the flash and sure enough, I saw a figure moving along the shoreline. Had to have been a good-sized fella, to see him moving against the tree line almost a mile away like that. Raising binoculars to my eyes confirmed this: the guy looked like an anthropomorphized beer barrel, with a shock of dark hair on top.
Believe it or not, refugees and the Marxist scum that hunt them aren’t the only strangers that still come out to this lake; so one man on the lakeshore - while unusual these days - typically does not hold my interest for long. I made a scan of the ridgeline, to make sure the guy wasn’t being hunted, then returned my attention to Silas the mule and my plowing for the day. It may seem like drudge work, but the warming rays of the spring sun, the smell of the rich, dark soil, the brisk chill winds running down the mountain slopes around me and the shocky, jerky thrumming vibrations of the plow blade turning through the resisting earth all combined to surround me in a sensual cocoon that made the hours fly by unnoticed when I was thus employed. Besides; if I didn’t get this crop in the ground soon, the upcoming winter was going to be mighty lean, for family and refugees alike.
Thus lost in the moment, it was the gunshot that brought me out of my reverie and back to the here and now. The shot was immediately followed by the high-pitched death yelp of a wolf. It took a moment to get Silas reigned in; once he’d halted, the field glasses were again scanning the far shoreline for the origin of that shot. If the wolf was a loner, that was bad enough; the re-introduced red and grey wolves had been fruitful, multiplied, and were every bit as aggressive and cunning these days as they were in the stories, legends and fairy tales of olden days. Since being re-introduced, even lone wolves had surpassed the bears, mountain lions and every other predator in the Rockies for apex status, and seemed consciously intent on dethroning man from our role as the supreme predator of the region as well. If that wolf was just one of a larger pack however, someone was in for a hard day indeed.
A murder of crows squawked their protest and took to the skies as a second shot rang out. I swung the binoculars toward the source, and sure enough, there was my friend the beer keg, a lever-action rifle pointed up slope. That’s where I found the wolf pack: 30 animals, give or take, spread in a line about 50 yards from end to end across the ridge, inching their way in the direction of the man with his back to the lake below. Couldn’t really pick out the pack Alpha-dog; there were 3 or 4 large, healthy boyos that would have made great candidates for the job.
I didn’t know how much ammo he had on hand, but it looked like this fella had more trouble than he knew what to do with. I detached Silas from the plow by touch, my eyes never leaving the spot on the far shore where the battle was heating up as my hands worked straps, cinches and bits of assorted tack with practiced ease. Leading the mule back to the barn, I radioed ahead to Teri on the walkie-talkie: in as few words as possible, I told her what I’d seen, and had her send Preston down to get the boat ready. No sooner had I closed the latch on Silas’ stall than I did an about face, and sprinted for the dock myself.
My 10-year old boy had understood perfectly what I’d wanted. When I had got down to the shore line, I could hear the little outboard motor hanging from the fantail of my sailboat sputtering away. The boy had cleared the covers from the sails, and the mooring lines were already singled up, fore and aft. The barge we’d converted for use as a ferry could have made a steady 10 knots or so on its twin diesels, but the winds today would make the sloop even faster. I stepped on board after clearing the bow line from the cleat. Preston swiped the stern line free of the dock and gunned the little outboard, driving us out into the lake. As soon as we were clear of the cove, I had the main up first, followed quickly by the jib, and the outboard fell silent. I indicated our objective, and as my son canted the rudder to point us there, I set the sails close-hauled. With our destination immediately to the west of us, and the winds coming out of the southwest, we could sail close-hauled all the way in without the need to tack. The wind across the bow heeled us until we had only inches of freeboard on the leeward side, but we were making every bit of 17 knots and change, and we’d cross the mile or so between my island and the lakeshore in about 3 minutes. I reached through the deckhouse companionway, retrieved a rifle and two magazines from the bulkhead rack, and checked their loads.
Preston and I had retrieved many refugees under fire from the lakeshore over the past 4 years, so loading passengers on the fly was really nothing new anymore. When we got within 50 yards of our landing point, Preston threw the rudder hard port, and I dropped the sails; the boat coasted into the shore on momentum alone. I pulled back on the rifle’s charging handle and slung it over my shoulder as I went forward, and braced myself against the pulpit. Behind me, I heard Josh fire up the outboard again, preparing against the need for a quick get-away. I felt the first drag of the keel against the bottom below us; I sucked in a deep breath and jumped into the chest deep water. Nothing I could have done would have prepared me for the explosion from every nerve ending as the icy water enveloped me. I barely retained sufficient control of my faculties to order my legs to keep pumping, and I was only superficially cognizant of the fact when I finally splashed onto dry land a few seconds later. Dropping the rifle from my shoulder and bringing it to the ready position, I settled into a jog towards the sounds of the gunfire to the southeast of me.
My friend had made a substantial dent in the numbers of the wolf pack surrounding him, but it was just as clear that the wolves were poised to reduce his population just as effectively, an attrition rate that would not work out so well for this guy as it might look on paper. The two ends of the line that had formed at the top of the ridge, had wheeled around, and were only a dozen yards away from catching my friend in a pincers, complete with many sets of sharp, powerful teeth.
Somewhat fortunately for my anonymous visitor at the center of this lupine entrapment, the three animals on his right flank were distracted by my noisy arrival on the scene. Whether it would be simultaneously fortuitous for me remained to be seen, as these animals re-focused their attentions on me - the newcomer - with an audible snarl. Without waiting for them to decide who was going to lead the counterattack – or when – I opened up with a 3-round burst into the closest dog. The big grey male’s chest exploded as the .30-caliber hollow points shattered ribs and shredded vital organs with equal ferocity, and he dropped in his tracks like a switch had been thrown. His two compadres seemed to take this as a sign: not – as I’d somehow hoped – a signal that they should perhaps back off, but a sign to jump me. Together. The closer of the two sailed over me as I ducked under her leap and squeezed 3 rounds into her partner. I heard her land in the lake with a splash as the one I’d hit crumpled beside the broken remains of the left foreleg that my shots had separated from the rest of its body. I wheeled to draw a bead on the last one, but she was already in the air again. I barely had time to get the stock of my rifle between me and those flashing, savaging teeth before all of her 150lb. weight knocked the wind out of me, driving me to the rocky ground. Desperately, as my legs came out from under me, I kicked out at her body, adding force to her momentum and carrying her over me and out of position to finish me off. She skidded across the ground and I heard a yelp of pain as I rolled to reposition myself. ‘Good’, I remember thinking, ‘she’s injured now’. Only when I finally rolled up and had eyes on her again did I realize how wrong I was. She attacked again, and this time I felt the white hot flash as her jaws clamped down on my right shoulder, her head pulling this way and that to tear at the wound she had opened. I pointed my rifle into her belly and fired from the hip, and only then did I feel her jaws go slack as death overtook her. I exhaled in relief when I pushed her limp body to the ground. That’s when “Stumpy” – the wolf I’d separated from his foreleg – leapt at my throat. Once again, I leveled the muzzle of my MAK-90 into the exposed chest of a wolf as I stared down the snarling, angry maw of its jaws. I squeezed the trigger and 3 more rounds tore into the vital parts of this jet-black, 180lb. animal, leaving death in their wake as he dropped to the ground for the last time.
I did a quick mag change and then looked around. In the few seconds that I had been distracted by my attackers, a world had changed around me. With his back to a large pine tree, my stocky friend was now surrounded by the seven remaining wolves of this pack, including two of the massive Alpha-male contenders I had seen through binoculars earlier. The man seemed to have exhausted his ammunition, as he was now swinging his rifle around by the barrel like a club. Even reduced to this, he was extracting a telling price from his lupine opponents: two of them were as good as dead already, with their lower jaws splintered and hanging limply – and uselessly – beneath their head by whatever muscle and tendons hadn’t been crushed when they were struck. The others barely noticed. They would charge in low in ones and twos, coming in from too many different angles at once for the guy to effectively defend against. They were small for now, but a closer look at him showed wounds on both shoulders and forearms, as well as a blood splotch on the tattered shirt beneath his jacket, which could have been transfer from somewhere else – either his or a wolf's – or it could indicate a wolf bite that had gotten through everything.
All of this was taken in in the span of a single glance. With no more time to waste, my rifle was snugged into my shoulder and I squeezed just as soon as my eyes told me I was on target. One of the Alpha contenders, almost pure white with flashes on his face, back and haunches, went down first with 3 rounds delivered center mass. A charcoal grey female behind him dropped next, followed by another jet-black animal, an adolescent male. In an obvious – but futile - bid to protect their pack mates from my withering fire, the two with broken jaws peeled off, sprinting for me with lethal determination in their eyes. They’d cleared 20 of the 30 yards between us before I brought down the second of them with a 3-round burst into his head and chest. Re-focusing, I immediately saw that the bonzai charge hadn’t been so futile as I’d first thought: the remaining 3 had seized upon the distraction they provided, and had made their attack together. My friend was driven to the ground beneath the weight of canine muscle, bone and sinew, and canine teeth were ripping and tearing at any soft tissue or vital point they could gain access to. Like an automaton I fired my rifle: trigger squeeze; dog drops; line up on new target; squeeze again. After what seems an eternity, all wolves are down, none moving.
I ran to the still form of the stranger, praying I was not too late. Heaving the bloody, stinking carcass of a dead wolf off of the man’s body, I sink to my knees trying to feel through the bloody shambles of his throat for a carotid pulse. Another eternity passes, and not only have I finally found it, but the man even opened his eyes briefly, acknowledging me before the warm cocoon of unconsciousness enveloped him. I shout for Josh to bring the first-aid kit from the boat as I clamp my hand down on the spurting vein in his neck, trying to stem the flow of blood. I was proud of my boy that day: I don’t think he’d ever seen anyone injured as severely as this man was, yet when he dropped to my side with the trauma bag, the only sign of it was the pasty whiteness of in his face.
It took us nearly 40 minutes to get this fella patched up enough that we could move him to the boat and begin the 10 minute crossing back to safety. Blessedly, he remained unconscious through the whole ordeal – if not from the pain of his wounds, then certainly from the loss of blood. Teri and the girls were waiting at the door when my son and I got him to the house. We discovered only as we stripped him out of his tattered, filthy, bloody clothes and laid him in the guest bed that he also was a member of the Church. A refugee? Teri and I asked each other with a glance the question we knew would never be answered until and unless this stranger recovered enough to tell us his story. Minutes later, we sat at the dining table with a ledger book and the strong box, cataloging the man’s personal effects and placing them in the strong box to safeguard against the time he was well enough to retrieve them, or the time came to pass them along to his next of kin that I found a pre-Fall drivers license in the man’s wallet. We had a name for our mysterious stranger.
It also happened to be the name of a very close friend and the husband of one of my dearest friends ever. Marcus, Scott Isaac.
It’s been a long time since I’d last seen Scott Marcus; we both lived up in Washington long before Washington became yet another despotic People’s Republic, following along with the other states of the western coast of North America. In spite of all the intervening time, the photo on the face of the plastic ID card brought things sharply into focus, and at once I knew that the man lying unconscious in the next room was indeed my old friend. That knowledge brought with it its own collection of questions and worries. As I’ve said, Scott is a close friend, but he’s married to the woman whose affections brought me back into the Church, and thus was one of the dearest friends I’d ever had. The likelihood that Scott would have willingly left Jolene’s side was about as remote as my ever willingly leaving Teri’s. And then there were their children to consider: Scott and Jolene have 6 kids that I was aware of – the last I’d spoken to them was prior to The Fall, over 4 years ago after all – and I knew that he was as enamored of them as he was of his Eternal Companion. All of this added up to something terrible happening, and with Scott unable to tell me, I had no idea whether it had occurred in California, just the other side of that lakeshore rise where I’d found him, or any of a thousand places in between. The thought that I could have been within a hundred yards of Jolene and her children out there and not known it filled me with horror. Between Scott and me, that wolf pack had been completely wiped out near as I could tell. This meant next to nothing though, as I knew of at least four wolf packs that called the woods surrounding my lake home. And again, that count doesn’t factor in the occasional lone wolf transiting through this territory; fully as dangerous to a defenseless woman and children as a full-on pack could be. Of course, with 30-odd rotting wolf corpses to attract every predator and scavenger for 100 miles, the bears, mountain lions and coyotes were just as much a threat as the wolves.
Over Teri’s vociferous protests, I told Preston to saddle up: we were headed back out. Teri was sure that my shoulder needed a few stitches; I told her that if I hadn’t bled out by now, the probability that I might do so in the next few hours was low. We only had a couple of hours of daylight left. Pulling a MAK-90 from the rack and under-arming it to Preston, then pocketing a few spare mags for both our weapons – just in case – the boy and I headed out of the house and back down to the dock.
The sun had long since disappeared behind the western mountains, and a waning quarter moon was high in the night sky when Preston and I finally tied up to the dock again. We had found no one, and no trace that anyone else had been in the area recently. To the extent that I hadn’t left Scott’s family to the mercy of the wilderness, I was relieved. Before she would allow anything else, Teri insisted on treating my shoulder. She told me there’d been no change in Scott since I had left, so after she cleaned out the wound with disinfectant and set a couple of stitches, I was able to go upstairs and clean up, then Preston and I sat down to supper with my wife.
After a night’s sleep, I was once again out plowing when Teri called me on the walkie-talkie at about noon, telling me that Scott was coming around. I had Preston come and take over the plowing for me.
When I entered the house, I did so in the midst of a heated argument coming from the guest room. The twins - Katelyn and Alina - looked up from their play on the living room floor when I walked in, but otherwise ignored me. I could smell a stew over the fire, simmering as I listened to Scott arguing that he had to keep moving, and Teri telling him that if he didn’t let his wounds heal, he’d be dead by morning. One would think that after being married to Jolene for as long as he had, Scott would have recognized the steely resolve in my wife’s voice and known this was an argument he was destined not to win. Lord knows I saw enough similarity between the two women, and the last time I’d heard such tones in Jolene’s voice was at least 20 years ago.
I managed to smother my grin by the time I got to the guest room door; it would not help the credibility of the serious tone I was about to affect for this meeting, if an idiot grin was undermining every word I said. Pushing the door aside, I saw Scott sitting upright on the edge of the bed, Teri hovering over him as he swayed weakly. “You’ll do nobody any good if you try to leave now, Scott”, I said. “Nobody but the wolves, that is. Near as I can figure, you’d lost about half your blood volume by the time we got your jugular stitched up. That kind of blood loss is going to take time to recover. Time, and the kind of nutrition you aren’t going to get hoofing it across the Rocky Mountains this time of year.
Scott deflated. He was a chiropractor prior to The Fall. He could argue with Teri, no matter how much she argued like Jolene, and he could argue with me. But present him with facts like these, and he could not argue with himself. Teri stepped back a pace as he stopped fighting her, and I grabbed the straight-back chair from the corner of the room and straddled it, folding my arms across its back.
“Who are you? How do you know my name”, Scott asked.
“We know who you are because your name was on your driver’s license. I’m not surprised you don’t remember me though,” I answered. “It took seeing your name on that license for your face to click in my head. It’s been almost 20 years since we last saw each other.”
“So who are you”, Scott repeated, staring into my eyes for something he might recognize.
“Where’s Jolene, and your children”, I countered.
“How do you know my wife”, he demanded. I did not know the source of the panic in his eyes, but it caused him to jump up from the bedside, and the low blood volume just as quickly sent him spiraling back down onto it. When he had sat himself up again, and regained some semblance of composure, he said, “I know there were pictures in my wallet, of my family, I mean. But none of them have names. You didn’t get my wife’s name from my wallet. How do you know me?”
His eyes widened when I told him, “I’m Jeff Dru.”
With a little help, Scott was strong enough to sit with us for supper that night. My girls took it upon themselves to nursemaid our injured guest, and sat on either side of him. As he ate – ravenously; it appeared that he hadn’t had a real meal in weeks – he explained that after The Fall, at first there were no noticeable changes to his life, other than the times being a bit leaner than before. He and Jolene had supplemented their income from the few people who could still afford a chiropractor’s services with a garden and the stocks from their year’s supply. Sure, when the Ideological Purity Act came down from Sacramento they had to register with the government as Mormons, but, “even then, they really didn’t harass us much. They even authorized me an exit visa and a seat on an airliner to attend a chiropractic conference in Kansas City. That was back in December”, Scott concluded, his shoulders slumping.
Oh no, I thought. And yet, I couldn’t keep from asking, “what happened”, even as I watched the train wreck unfold, unable to look away.
“There was no chiropractic conference. There were 192 men on that flight: bank managers, engineers, attorneys, accountants, and, of course, chiropractors. All members of the Church, I discovered later. The flight attendants – State Security officers really – were practically gloating as they told us all our fates, once we were airborne. That our families were being arrested even now, they said. That our children were going to ‘re-education facilities’, to learn their proper duty to the State; and our wives were to be sent to labor camps so that the State could extract whatever meager value was possible from their ‘corrupt, worthless bodies’, before they died. We, they told us, were being deported out of California, because we were too incorrigible to remain among proper citizens of the People’s Republic, and the ramifications of our banding together and offering unacceptable levels of resistance if we were sent to labor camps, had been deemed an unnecessary risk by the General Secretary.”
I had no more stomach for eating, just a heavy lump sitting like lead in my gut. In spite of everything the Californian government had done to suppress and deny the rumors, the truth was that knowledge of what happened in these camps was too good of an instrument for instilling fear to pass up. The inmate population at these places was about 85% female, according to the rumors, and the stories of the liberties the State Security guards took with those inmates were unanimous in their hideous brutality. I wanted to retch at the thought of any man’s wife incarcerated in one of those hell holes. The thought that Jolene – the woman who could be credited with every blessing I had received in my adult life – might be one of those tortured souls filled me with a fierce anger and unspeakable dread simultaneously.
Scott must have read the despair in my face, or else knew from his own experience what I was feeling, because he said quickly, “They didn’t get her.” He may as well have said, “The queen is a golden retriever”, for all the sense his words made to my ears.
“The plane we were on wasn’t going to Kansas City. Instead they dumped us off right on the tarmac in Detroit.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about Detroit since the government crumbled, but the place is a hive of absolute anarchy. Anybody and everybody there will shoot you, stab you or rape you for any reason, or no reason at all. I guess the State Security thugs thought the inhabitants there would make short work of a bunch of soft, gullible, business suit-clad Mormons, and that would be the last they had to worry about us.”
While we were in Detroit, the lot of us hung together for mutual safety. Just outside the city, I bought a telephone call with the wristwatch Jolene gave me for our anniversary. Just after the regime took over California, one of the new mandates was that pre-paid, throw-away cell phones were declared illegal. They’re still all over the black market and as cheap as dirt to get a hold of; just don’t get caught holding ‘em when the state comes knocking. They’re relatively safe to use; so long as you’re willing to use any given SIM card only once - and then only for a brief time - there isn’t much the government can do to stop their use. Well, as part of our emergency supplies, I bought both of us a throw-away phone and 3 SIM cards. We got ‘em for an emergency, if we were separated, you know, like if the Big ‘Quake hit while I was at the office? So I called Jolene’s throw-away, and just prayed I’d get an answer.”
“She was there”, I asked, not daring to believe it.
“She answered on the first ring”, Scott confirmed. “She said that on the way back from dropping me at the airport, she spotted somebody following her in the rear-view mirror, and just felt that something was wrong. She lost the tail, and then she and the kids drove out on highway 50, telling all the checkpoints that she was headed out to help a family friend weed his farm up in Alpine. They just kept driving, and finally holed up in a little town called Susanville with some other friends of ours.”
“I’m familiar with Susanville”, I said absently.
We sat in silence after Scott concluded his tale. Teri was watching me for reactions, waiting for what I’d say. I was deep in thought at the moment, not really planning anything per se, but definitely turning Scott’s predicament over and over in my mind, looking for ways to help him out. And her too, of course. So as we sat, the only sounds that interrupted the silence were those associated with my three children consuming their supper.
Finally, I asked him, “What is your plan, Scott?”
He gave me a quizzical look for a moment, before he said, “how much of a plan could I have? Assuming I can hitch all the way into the Tahoe area un-noticed, I still have to get everybody loaded into our van and back through 500 miles of California-controlled desert before I can get to the nearest safe ground in Utah. With the State in control of all of the gas pumps in between, and considerably less than a full tank in the van, I can envision a running gun fight with State Security goons from Reno all the way to the Utah border as the best possible scenario.”
I nodded agreement with his assessment of the situation, settling back into deep thought again. “Did you and Jolene have a specific destination in mind once you got out of from under the thumb of the Californian government”, I asked him finally.
“No, I figured we’d enter Utah as refugees and work out the particulars of rebuilding our lives after we’d made it someplace where we’d be free to do so. Haven’t really had the chance to consult with Jolene about it, but I know she’s got a few very extended relatives in Utah, and David and his family out east, and that’s about the extent of our family-specific options.” In other words, about what I’d figured.
I looked at Teri for a moment, waiting for her to catch what I was thinking. She nodded. “If I can make it so that you don’t have to go all the way in to California yourself to get your family back out, how far back of your intended ‘starting all over again’ position would being without your van put you”, I asked carefully.
“How could you do that”, my friend asked, and I could see light start to flicker again in his eyes.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can yet, so I don’t want to get your hopes up until I know more. I may be able to tell you what I have in mind tomorrow morning. Let me make a phone call or two after supper tonight. Until tomorrow, let’s just keep each other in our prayers, and you just rest easy.”
Scott’s eyes were red and welling up as he fumbled for words; gave up and settled for a shaky nod when none were forthcoming. Cautiously, he got up from the table and gingerly made his way back to the guest bedroom.
“Scott”, I called after him. “Jolene still has one or two of those SIM cards, right?” He nodded, holding up two fingers as he closed the bedroom door behind him.
“Do you really think you can go in there, get them, and get back out again”, Teri asked.
I shrugged as I replied, “I don’t know; would you want me not to try?” Without hesitation, she shook her head.
“There you have it”, I said as I scooted my chair back noisily against the varnished pine floor. Excusing myself and giving the remainder of my supper to the dog, I walked determinedly to the office, sitting opposite Scott’s bedroom door.
I fired up the computer. It took me 20 minutes of searching before I found the contact name and number I was looking for. Opening the video phone software, I dialed in the number I’d extracted. Seconds later, the beaming, tawny face of my friend Rollie Alonzo was staring back at me.
“Jeff”, he exclaimed pleasantly. “What brings you here tonight?”
“Rollie”, I replied with a smile. “How’s the wife and family doing?”
“Don’t ask; the baby is teething. Means nobody gets any rest around here.” Sighing as he came to the point, he asked, “what can I do for you?”
Using as few details as possible, I explained Scott’s predicament to him. Then I asked him, “do you still have your contacts in California’s Air Control Administration?
“I think so”, he told me. “As hard as it is to get news out of California, I don’t think they’ve gotten around to purging my friends there yet. If I can contact them, what would you want them to do?”
“If I were to e-mail you a flight plan, do you think your friends could get it slipped onto ACA’s approved flights list as a ‘special goods’ flight?”
He smiled, exposing two perfect rows of teeth. “Ahhh”, he said knowingly. “Jeff, you are a sneaky son of a gun.”
“Well”, I answered, trying not to blush. “My first impulse was to charge in with a razor-sharp bowie in my teeth, guns blazing, and devil hang the consequences, but in the light of reflection, that plan seems somewhat contra-indicated.”
“Probably so”, he said, grinning again. “Alright; it might take a day or two to get things arranged, but I think I can do this. When can you have the flight plan to me?”
“No later than tomorrow, noon”, I answered.
“And so we can make it look like the ‘special goods’ are destined for the right party boss, where do you expect your destination will be?”
“Susanville”, I said. “Pre-Fall, there was a small class ‘C’ or class ‘D’ airport there.”
“Pretty deep in California territory”, Rollie mused. “It shouldn’t arouse much suspicion, depending on where the State Security garrisons are rotated to this time of year, of course.” In a signal to wrap up the call, he then concluded, “get me your flight plan, and I’ll see about making you look like an honest-to-goodness smuggler in the eyes of California’s bureaucracy. I’ll be in touch”, he said, as the call terminated and the screen went dark.
I turned in my chair, pulled out sectionals and a note pad from my desk drawer and began jotting down figures. I opened a spreadsheet on the computer; the one that listed how much of a laundry list of expendables I had stored at my hanger at the Grand County Airport. Since The Fall, FBO fuel supplies had been spotty at best, so in order to keep gas in my plane, I grew sunflowers and pressed oil from the seeds, then converted the oil to bio-diesel every winter. My remaining supply of that was the first thing I checked. After that, I cracked open the sectional charts and started plotting my route, trying my best to think like a smuggler might – not exactly my strongest skills set, to be sure. Then, I thought cynically, if my plan was successful, I really would be a smuggler. Well, technically, anyway: I’m sure the fact that I was smuggling precious cargo OUT of a despotic, totalitarian police-state rather than into one wouldn’t count too deeply against me at the Smuggler’s Guild meetings.
It was well after midnight before I finally clicked [SEND] on the encrypted e-mail to Rollie and shut things down for the night.
The sun was well up the next morning when I finally rose again and stumbled down the stairs to join the rest of my family. Scott was moving around as well, and seemed to be doing so with greater ease and strength than he’d displayed the previous evening. As I helped Teri lay out a breakfast of eggs, venison steaks and cracked wheat – breakfasts had become much larger affairs in our household ever since I’d bought the island and assumed the role gentleman farmer – I filled Scott in on what I had in mind for bringing his family out of California, and what steps I’d taken to set that ball into play. As we sat down to eat, I asked my friend, “do you feel strong enough to help me prep the K’vort today?”
“The what”, he asked.
Realizing – after a second or so – that he had no idea what a ‘K’vort’ was, I clarified for him. “The plane, Scott. The plane. Would you like to come with me to prep the plane for the mission today?”
“Sure”, he answered.
After breakfast, as soon as I set Preston to his school work for the day, I motioned to my friend, and we went out the door. I led him around the house to the shop on the west side.
“The K’vort is in there”, he asked.
I laughed. “No. Not anymore anyway. I did build the K’vort in there, though.” Opening the large bay doors, I revealed our transportation to the airport: a helicopter, also of my own design and fabrication. I had the familiar whine of the chopper’s turbine soothing my jumbled nerves not long after tugging the brute out onto the pad, and a mere 5 minutes after we lifted off, we were hovering over a steel building set away from the rest of the hangers. I set down on the concrete apron and shut down. Inside of a minute, the only sound audible was the soft whistling of the wind. Unlocking the door inset into the two-story bay doors, I led Scott in for his first look at the K’vort.
The sight of my baby standing in the midst of the semi-dark gloom was one to warm the cockles of my cold, steely heart. The K’vort was a 6-place, single engine turboprop arranged in a “pusher” configuration. She has a low wing sitting about 40 inches off the ground, retractable gear and a pressurized cabin. When I’d laid down the specifications for the power plant, I was shooting to turn out 300 horsepower and make 250 knots at 25,000 feet. To my happy surprise, I’d designed a system that cranked out 475 horsepower and could sustain 388 knots at up to 36,000 feet until the fuel tanks ran dry. Moreover, she had internal tankage for a range of about 1,600 miles, and was designed with detachable external tanks under the wing roots, good for a range boost to 4,800 miles, unrefueled.
The single feature that was going to be most beneficial on the mission I had in mind though, wasn’t the service ceiling, the top speed or the long range – though I was going to need the range the external tanks could give, to make sure I could make the full, round trip on this flight. Nope, the feature that was going to be most useful for this hop was the design of the wings themselves.
The term “K’vort” is a reference to the name of the smallest class of Klingon ‘bird-of-prey’ scout ships. Accordingly, just like the wings on a Bird-of-Prey in the movies do, the wings of my K’vort sweep forward, with a gentle dihedral upward as well. ‘Bus-driver’ pilots hate this configuration because in their eyes, it makes the ship ‘twitchy’ at the controls. I love the configuration because the ship is absolutely maneuverable at slower speeds. Against the F-16, F-18, and F-22 I would be foolish to believe I wouldn’t encounter patrolling the border airspace, I stood absolutely no chance of out-running or out-climbing the more powerful jets. Instead, I would have to rely upon the fact that the K’vort’s stall speed was nearly 100 knots slower than theirs, and that if I had to get down into the weeds in order to dodge or avoid them, I could do it and still be agile enough to avoid splattering myself against the trunk of a tree, side of a billboard, or a radio tower.
As I watched, Scott slowly walked around the perimeter of the plane, his hand constantly in contact with the smooth metal skin, as if it were a thoroughbred’s heavily muscled flank. While he was examining the T-tail that towered over him, I went over, touched a latch in the side of the fuselage, and the port-side boarding ladder dropped silently from its cavity to the full-extended position. Stepping up, I unlocked and popped open the canopy over the pilot’s seat. The cockpit light winked on, illuminating one of my favorite places to be. As Scott came around the smooth, tooth-like point of the nosecone, I stepped down and away to allow him the chance to inspect the interior of my creation.
“You’ll be able to go all the way to Susanville in this”, Scott asked, amazement evident in his voice.
“As it’s currently configured, I’d make it all the way there, no problem. With those drop tanks over there”, I said, pointing to the grey teardrops against the back wall, “I can get out there AND back, and won’t have to land for anything but to pick up your family. The external fuel also gives me enough reserve that if the interceptors show more interest than they should, I can maneuver without putting us all in danger of running dry.”
“What do you mean, ‘more than they should’”, Scott asked.
“I mean, I’m going to get intercepted. There’s no two ways about that. They flush interceptors for any flight approaching the border as soon as it shows up on radar. If things work out the way I’m hoping though, that initial sniff will be all the interest they show.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a friend who works for UPS. He’s trying to get me slipped onto the ‘approved flights roster’ as a smuggler for the Lassen County party boss. With that, and a ‘special goods’ tag for my transponder signal, I should be able to make the fighter CAP think that it might not be in their best interest to give me more than a routine sniff.”
“Wow”, Scott said, digesting the details slowly. “And to think we used to live in a free country.”
“Yeah”, was all I could say. “Shall we get started”, I asked, gesturing to the tanks on their cradles.
Working carefully – even with vents, there are always fuel vapors in the tanks once they’ve held fuel – it took only about 20 minutes to mount each tank beneath the K’vort’s wing. Scott maneuvered the hoist dollies, positioning the tanks under the connection points in the wing while I waited underneath with the wrench. Quick-connect the plumbing and electrical fittings, then while Scott hoisted the tank, I torqued down on the bolts that secured the tank sponson against the wing.
Tanks mounted, I went over to the hanger wall, mashed my thumb into the green button, and above me I could hear the motor whirring to life, drawing the bay doors open like curtains. Escape route opened, I went back to the large tank dominating the southwest corner of the hanger, behind the right wing of the K’vort. Pressurized the pump, then I unspooled the hose dragging it by the nozzle under the right wing, first connecting the nozzle to the right external tank. It only took about a minute to fill the 100 gallon tank hanging from each wing, then it was on to the internal. 2,400 pounds of fuel doesn’t take long to transfer, then its reel the hose in, shut off the pump, disconnect the ground straps and seal the tanks.
Scott went for the tug - a quad ATV – while I pinned the tow rig onto the nose wheel axle. A minute later, highly polished green metallic paint glistened in the sunlight on the concrete parking apron. Vaulting up the boarding ladder for a moment, I reached in and grabbed the plane’s checklists from their storage pocket beside the pilot’s seat; dropping down again, I started my pre-flight walk-around. The control surfaces moved freely, as did the prop. The tires were in good shape, there were no leaks from the oleo struts nor mystery puddles on the hanger floor, and when the fuel was sampled, it showed free of any water or other contaminants. Counting the red “REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT” flags I’d collected on my walk-around, I came up with the appropriate number: 21. Fumbling in my pocket for a second, I came up with my key ring: while I was on the starboard side, I unlocked the co-pilot’s canopy and let it hiss up on its lifting strut. Sliding out the starboard boarding ladder, I told Scott, “climb in”.
Took a peek around the plane after mounting the pilot’s side ladder again, checking for foot traffic in the danger zone that I’d need to be aware of: as usual there was nobody. I flopped down into the left seat and opened up the pre-start checklist. Scott stepped in and took the seat beside me. I pointed to the headset dangling above him, indicating that he should put it on. As soon as he had the muffs seated snugly over his ears, I yelled out, “CLEAR PROP!!!”, then told Scott, “starting engine”. I stabbed the key into its slot, gave it a quarter turn, then jabbed my index finger down on the [START] toggle. Instantly, the heavenly whine of the K’vort’s single turbine engine began rising in pitch and intensity, as the starter motor spun the compressor up to operating RPMs. I gestured to Scott that it would be a good idea to close the canopy, and he brought the clear Plexiglas down, latching it when it seated in the door frame. I waited until I heard the engine ignite before I followed suit with my own hatchway.
I watched the N2 RPM indicator ribbon climb out of the red range and stabilize at the bottom of the green range out of one eye. After that, I switched my attentions to the exhaust gas temperature gauge below it on the small LCD screen as I said to Scott, “this ought to keep the eavesdroppers at bay for a while.”
Scott gawked; his expression was pure incredulousness when he replied, “Isn’t that just a little paranoid? Colorado’s supposed to be free territory, after all.”
“Before The Fall”, I countered, “I was working on a surveillance satellite for the government. You remember how, on some of those cop shows on TV, they’d stake out the bad guys from a building across from where the crooks were meeting up?” Scott nodded. “You remember that device they had, that could listen in on a conversation with digital clarity, just by bouncing a laser off the glass of a window?” He nodded again. “Well, the satellite I was working on put one of those lasers into orbit, and if you knew who you wanted to listen in on, where they were going to be and when they were going to be there, this satellite could use that laser to listen in on any conversation, thru any building or vehicle window, anywhere within the satellite’s field if view. Before The Fall, I know at least 12 of those birds got lofted into high elliptical orbits; orbits with long dwell times over the northern hemisphere. At least 4 of them were controlled by the ground station at Vandenberg when the government came crashing down.”
“Wow”, Scott said again.
“Yeah”, I answered, checking my watch. “We’re in a gap in coverage for the next 8 minutes”, I said, taking out a pen, and strapping my kneeboard to my leg. “You said Jolene has two SIM cards left. Once we get confirmation that the flight has been slipped onto the roster, you’ll need to burn one of those to let Jolene know what the plan is. That’ll get her up on ‘stand-by’, ready to move when it’s time, but I’ll need the number to her last SIM card so that I can coordinate the final link-up at the airport with her directly, and get your family on board and out of there in the shortest time possible. There’s no telling how soon my ‘smuggler’ cover story will fall apart when I don’t unload anything after I land, but I’ll feel a whole lot safer being in the air and as far from that airport when they get wise to me.”
“Wait”, Scott protested. “I’m coming with you, right?”
I gestured to the passenger cabin behind me. “Look around you”, I told him. “The way I figure, If Robby has grown up built anything like you, I’ll be putting him where you’re sitting, and Jolene will be back there, so she can be with the younger kids. That leaves 3 seats back there for 5 children. I’m not certain at this point, but Mark or Carrie may wind up riding up here on Robby’s lap, just so I can be sure everybody’s belted in securely.”
“What about setting them down on the cabin floor”, Scott asked.
“What about it”, I asked back at him. “If my cover gets blown while we’re still in California airspace, the likelihood is that I’ll have to fly nap of the earth in order to keep the fighters from zinging a missile up my tail. That will almost certainly mean pulling gees in order to make myself as horrible a target as possible. Are you sure you want one or two of your children pranging around my passenger cabin like eggs on a roller coaster because we can’t strap them down?”
Scott looked about to protest further. As a husband and father myself, I could understand what he was feeling, why he needed to be there when we got his family out of California. I looked him squarely in his eyes though, and said, “Scott, this plan is risky enough. I believe it will work, and we’ll have your wife back in your arms for good before the week is out, but there are still about a million and one things that can go wrong with this and get everybody on board this plane killed. Trust me. What I need more than anything to make this work, is for you to trust me to bring your family out for you, safe and sound.”
I saw moisture glistening at the corners of Scott’s eyes, and he ceased arguing with me. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his billfold, and took out a business-card sized slip of paper with three 10-digit numbers on it; the number at the top of the paper was crossed off in pencil. I copied down the last of the three and silently handed the paper back to him just as the alarm on my wristwatch beeped. I put my finger to my lips so that Scott could see that I could no longer guarantee that this conversation wasn’t being overheard, then reached between the two seats for the red arrowhead shaped knob of the fuel cut-off valve, and gave it a turn. The engine started winding down, and Scott and I began shutting things off and making preparations for moving the plane back into the hanger.
With the K’vort returned into its usual position in the hanger, I told Scott that there was one last chore we needed to get done, gesturing to a large, red cabinet on the east wall of the hanger.
“What’s that”, Scott asked.
“Ordnance locker”, I answered. I may have told Rollie that going in “guns blazing” was contra-indicated, but that did not mean I intended to make this trip like the proverbial lamb being led to the slaughter. Popping the padlock, I opened a pair of cabinet doors, exposing metal boxes, holding 250 rounds of .50 caliber machine gun ammo each. I got a pallet and pallet jack, and Scott and I loaded it with 16 cases of ammunition. We took the shells to the baggage door behind the starboard wing of the K’vort, which I keyed open, and then pulling up on the luggage bay floor, exposed the magazines for the .50 caliber gatling guns, mounted in each wing root.
The rest of the day progressed uneventfully. I was in the office that evening after dinner, checking over Preston’s essay on the root causes of the 1929 depression, when the chime of an incoming e-mail sounded from the computer.
It was from Rollie. He confirmed that his contact had gotten my flight plan planted on the ACA roster. Then I read the details. “Scott”, I called loudly.
It took a minute for Scott to make himself decent, and then cross the living room to poke his head through the doorway. “What’s up”, he asked.
I tossed him a phone. “Get Jolene on the horn. We’re rolling. The flight plan is filed, but the only slot they could get me means that I have to be in Susanville in just over 4 hours.”
“Is that a problem”, Scott asked as his finger punched numbers into the phone’s keypad. “Can the K’vort make it all the way to Susanville that fast?”
“A straight run there is about a two, maybe two and a half hour flight, depending on the winds at altitude. If I’m to be playing the role of a smuggler though, my run in should be anything but straight.”
“Um”, Scott said, nodding his agreement as he put the handset to his ear.
While he and his wife were electronically reunited after 4 long months of enforced separation, I busied myself getting final preparations underway. After only a second’s hesitation, I stripped down to my skivvies and fished my flight suit out of the vertical locker behind my desk and pulled it on. Next came my boots, followed by my shoulder holster. I slid open the left-hand drawer of my desk and retrieved the .45-caliber automatic stored there, securing it in the holster under my right armpit after checking the load. After that, it was a simple matter to transfer my keys and my knife into the pockets of the flight suit, and then frisk myself to make sure I had nothing identifying on me.
While I dressed, Scott filled Jolene in on where he was and what we were planning to do. I pulled out an airport chart for Susanville that I had looked up the previous night and laid it on the desktop. Getting Scott’s attention, I pointed: “The runway runs pretty much perpendicular to highway 395 over here. The main entrance from the highway is here”, I told him, pointing to a service road that ran up to the airport terminal on the northwest side. “Stay away from that; it’s liable to be crawling with State Security goons. Instead, come to this gate on the southwest side, a little further down 395 from the main entrance. It leads to the general aviation hangers, and it’s got an automatic gate mechanism so pilots can get to and from their airplanes without disturbing the somnolence of a live guard. The lock code for the gate is usually something easy for pilots to remember: the airport code for Susanville is S-V-E. Try that first. When you get in the gate, drive over to the hangers and park between a couple of ‘em. No lights, no noise; don’t do anything that might attract the attention of State Security over at the terminal. When I’m on final approach, I’ll call you on your last throw-away. That’ll be when I’m about 5 to 10 minutes out. I’ll stay on that line until we have you all in the plane, so don’t hang up, no matter what. There may be activity over at the terminal when I land; that’ll be where I’m expected to go. Instead, I’m going to taxi over to the hangers like I’m lost. When you see the plane start to pass in front of you, blink your headlights once, and I’ll hit the brakes, pop the hatch, and that’ll be your cue to run like mad for the plane. Remember, the prop will be turning the whole time we’re loading y’all in, so do not approach from directly behind the plane for any reason. Run to the nearest wingtip and then come in to the cabin hatch from there.” As I went over each point with Scott, he relayed my words to his wife. I paused a moment to think: were there any other little details that might jump up to bite us in the butt? Oh yes; “Scott, tell her that when I call, I will challenge her identity with the name of the high school we graduated from. If all is well, and she and your family are alone she should answer with ‘high school’. If she has State Security goons in the van with her, the answer should be ‘Trojans’. I’ll have to make something else work, but I won’t abandon them there. After another minute or so of standing around with my thumb up my backside, I decided that if any other unexpected problems came up, I was just going to have to improvise on the fly. I did take the time to send Rollie’s e-mail to the printer: it had the name of the guy I was supposed to be delivering contraband to, if nothing else. Scott confirmed for me that Jolene understood what the plan was, and then I was out the door.
I flew a straight course from Granby to Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake. This routing made me just a little nervous. The reason was simple enough: I was flying into California in the guise of a smuggler, and the Air Guard of Utah was particularly intolerant of smugglers. There was a single bright ray of hope, though. I had a running bet in the back of my mind, that Rollie’s contacts in California were field officers in the Order of Caleb: the part of the new defensive arm of the LDS church tasked with intelligence gathering since The Fall. It was even money whether Rollie was Calebite himself. The point being, if they were in the Order, I stood a good chance of being able to make this run, without having to behave one way for the fighter patrols over Utah, and another way entirely for the fighter patrols over California. The alternative – being under the guns of both air forces – was just too gruesome to dwell upon further.
Night flying had become a whole lot scarier since The Fall of the federal Government. Used to be, I could file an IFR flight plan to anywhere in the North American continent and be reasonably certain that the network of radar control centers would be watching my flight, making course corrections, and ensuring that me and any other aircraft had no close encounters we would all regret. Nowadays, even knowing that a particular radar center was still manned and operational was no guarantee that they’d even talk to you. I’d found, over the past few years, that the best I could do under the circumstances was to turn the illumination on the instrument panel down to nearly nothing, and then use night vision goggles to improve my ability to see and avoid other traffic.
The GPS unit warbled for attention in my headset about 70 minutes after I’d lifted off. I looked down at the moving map display in the center of the console, and noted that I’d reached the waypoint I’d programmed to alert me to the edge of Utah airspace. I let out a sigh of relief; I’d made it to the California border without incident. Well, it wasn’t actually the border yet: I’d set the waypoint far enough east of the border that I could descend from the 28,000 feet I was currently cruising at, to one that might be closer to that expected of a “sneaky son-of-a-gun”. There was no need for me to adjust the controls; I’d programmed the autopilot with all of the heading and altitude changes I’d need to make the trip out and back unmolested. The only reasons I’d have for deactivating the autopilot was boredom, or if my cover story fell through, and I needed to head for the weeds.
As if on cue, my radar warning receiver lit off as soon as I was out of the salt flats and well and truly over the northern deserts of what used to be Nevada, until it was “annexed” by California. According to the frequency and pulse rate, I was being painted by the APG-68 radar in the nose of an F-16 fighter. Two of them apparently, by the divergent bearings I was being radiated from. Sure enough, it wasn’t more than a few seconds later when my headphones crackled with a voice coming over what was still the guard channel. “Attention unidentified aircraft. You have entered the sovereign airspace of the People’s Republic of California. If you deviate from your current heading or altitude, or fail to respond to communications from us, you will be shot down. Acknowledge immediately with your aircraft’s identity, cargo and destination.”
I had already memorized the roster entry that Rollie had sent back to me, but I pulled the sheet of paper out of my breast pocket anyway. The first of the two fighters had already pulled abreast of me; the second was apparently hanging back, above and behind me, so as to make good the threat to shoot me down if I wasn’t compliant. I’d heard stories that the military budget for California in the last couple of years hadn’t been as much as they’d hoped, and the fighter bases had taken to repainting dummy ammo to look like live weapons, in order to mask the fiscal shortfall; but I wasn’t particularly eager to test the theory, personally. “California, this is K’vort 5-2-5 Charlie Juliet, inbound for Susanville with perishable cargo. I have confirmation code Bravo-3-1-9, and am setting my transponder to squawk code as instructed by ACA; stand by”, I said as I powered up the transponder.
Data-linked in, as the interceptors had to be, it took an excruciatingly long time for them to check out my bona fides. All the while, doubt nagged at the back of my mind like sandpaper over raw, exposed nerves. If the mission had been blown, I was far too sitting a quacker at this altitude and airspeed for them to not stamp [PAID] on my ticket permanently. The pit in my stomach – the one I used to get all the time whenever a cop would pull me over to write a ticket – seemed to grow and swell until it felt like it had filled the entire cockpit.
I was drenched with sweat – and I think that was the whole purpose of this exercise to begin with – when the radio crackled to life again. “K’vort 5-Charlie-Juliet, you’re cleared to proceed as filed. Do not deviate from your flight plan, or the response will be immediate and severe.”
“Acknowledged, California. K’vort 5-Charlie-Juliet, good day”, I answered dutifully, breathing a sigh of relief as soon as I’d let go of the mic button. After another couple of minutes “escorting” my lowly airplane across the California desert, the F-16 on my wing, banked sharply right, peeling up and away, leaving me alone in the night sky once again.
I flew the next 140 miles – about a half an hour – enjoying the quiet solitude; my only companion the steady thrumming of the propeller blades against the air behind me. Finally sure that there would probably be no more surprises on the way in, I punched up some music over the intercom and reclined back in my seat slightly, happy to let the autopilot while I scanned the skies as if they were still as full of flying machines as they would have been 5 years ago.
-continued-
I suppose I should tell you what Mt. Zion is. My wife named it, shortly after we started taking in refugees from the People’s Republics to the west. The name comes from a line in my patriarchal blessing, which says that I will be a savior on Mt. Zion. I never felt much like a savior, but after The Fall, I could not with a clear conscience turn away people who had escaped from the terrors that were constantly rumored about since the United States became 12 different countries.
Anyway, by the skin of my teeth, my wife, my son and daughters and I managed to buy an island in the middle of a lake in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, just before The Fall. It’s not huge, but I have enough space for a home for my family, a farm to feed us with, a dock on the southern shore of the island to which our sailboat and a ferry – a converted ‘party barge’ – was tied, and a workshop for me to putter around in. By “putter around”, of course, I am referring to indulging my one real hobby: building airplanes. A comparative easy life, when stacked up next to the day to day starvation and political purge dodging that the life of your average resident of the Los Angeles basin has been reduced to.
I was on the west side of the island, running a plow through soil I was preparing to receive a crop of corn, when I first spotted him. At first, all I saw was a glint of sunlight against metal on the far shore. Halting the mule, I focused on the spot I had seen the flash and sure enough, I saw a figure moving along the shoreline. Had to have been a good-sized fella, to see him moving against the tree line almost a mile away like that. Raising binoculars to my eyes confirmed this: the guy looked like an anthropomorphized beer barrel, with a shock of dark hair on top.
Believe it or not, refugees and the Marxist scum that hunt them aren’t the only strangers that still come out to this lake; so one man on the lakeshore - while unusual these days - typically does not hold my interest for long. I made a scan of the ridgeline, to make sure the guy wasn’t being hunted, then returned my attention to Silas the mule and my plowing for the day. It may seem like drudge work, but the warming rays of the spring sun, the smell of the rich, dark soil, the brisk chill winds running down the mountain slopes around me and the shocky, jerky thrumming vibrations of the plow blade turning through the resisting earth all combined to surround me in a sensual cocoon that made the hours fly by unnoticed when I was thus employed. Besides; if I didn’t get this crop in the ground soon, the upcoming winter was going to be mighty lean, for family and refugees alike.
Thus lost in the moment, it was the gunshot that brought me out of my reverie and back to the here and now. The shot was immediately followed by the high-pitched death yelp of a wolf. It took a moment to get Silas reigned in; once he’d halted, the field glasses were again scanning the far shoreline for the origin of that shot. If the wolf was a loner, that was bad enough; the re-introduced red and grey wolves had been fruitful, multiplied, and were every bit as aggressive and cunning these days as they were in the stories, legends and fairy tales of olden days. Since being re-introduced, even lone wolves had surpassed the bears, mountain lions and every other predator in the Rockies for apex status, and seemed consciously intent on dethroning man from our role as the supreme predator of the region as well. If that wolf was just one of a larger pack however, someone was in for a hard day indeed.
A murder of crows squawked their protest and took to the skies as a second shot rang out. I swung the binoculars toward the source, and sure enough, there was my friend the beer keg, a lever-action rifle pointed up slope. That’s where I found the wolf pack: 30 animals, give or take, spread in a line about 50 yards from end to end across the ridge, inching their way in the direction of the man with his back to the lake below. Couldn’t really pick out the pack Alpha-dog; there were 3 or 4 large, healthy boyos that would have made great candidates for the job.
I didn’t know how much ammo he had on hand, but it looked like this fella had more trouble than he knew what to do with. I detached Silas from the plow by touch, my eyes never leaving the spot on the far shore where the battle was heating up as my hands worked straps, cinches and bits of assorted tack with practiced ease. Leading the mule back to the barn, I radioed ahead to Teri on the walkie-talkie: in as few words as possible, I told her what I’d seen, and had her send Preston down to get the boat ready. No sooner had I closed the latch on Silas’ stall than I did an about face, and sprinted for the dock myself.
My 10-year old boy had understood perfectly what I’d wanted. When I had got down to the shore line, I could hear the little outboard motor hanging from the fantail of my sailboat sputtering away. The boy had cleared the covers from the sails, and the mooring lines were already singled up, fore and aft. The barge we’d converted for use as a ferry could have made a steady 10 knots or so on its twin diesels, but the winds today would make the sloop even faster. I stepped on board after clearing the bow line from the cleat. Preston swiped the stern line free of the dock and gunned the little outboard, driving us out into the lake. As soon as we were clear of the cove, I had the main up first, followed quickly by the jib, and the outboard fell silent. I indicated our objective, and as my son canted the rudder to point us there, I set the sails close-hauled. With our destination immediately to the west of us, and the winds coming out of the southwest, we could sail close-hauled all the way in without the need to tack. The wind across the bow heeled us until we had only inches of freeboard on the leeward side, but we were making every bit of 17 knots and change, and we’d cross the mile or so between my island and the lakeshore in about 3 minutes. I reached through the deckhouse companionway, retrieved a rifle and two magazines from the bulkhead rack, and checked their loads.
Preston and I had retrieved many refugees under fire from the lakeshore over the past 4 years, so loading passengers on the fly was really nothing new anymore. When we got within 50 yards of our landing point, Preston threw the rudder hard port, and I dropped the sails; the boat coasted into the shore on momentum alone. I pulled back on the rifle’s charging handle and slung it over my shoulder as I went forward, and braced myself against the pulpit. Behind me, I heard Josh fire up the outboard again, preparing against the need for a quick get-away. I felt the first drag of the keel against the bottom below us; I sucked in a deep breath and jumped into the chest deep water. Nothing I could have done would have prepared me for the explosion from every nerve ending as the icy water enveloped me. I barely retained sufficient control of my faculties to order my legs to keep pumping, and I was only superficially cognizant of the fact when I finally splashed onto dry land a few seconds later. Dropping the rifle from my shoulder and bringing it to the ready position, I settled into a jog towards the sounds of the gunfire to the southeast of me.
My friend had made a substantial dent in the numbers of the wolf pack surrounding him, but it was just as clear that the wolves were poised to reduce his population just as effectively, an attrition rate that would not work out so well for this guy as it might look on paper. The two ends of the line that had formed at the top of the ridge, had wheeled around, and were only a dozen yards away from catching my friend in a pincers, complete with many sets of sharp, powerful teeth.
Somewhat fortunately for my anonymous visitor at the center of this lupine entrapment, the three animals on his right flank were distracted by my noisy arrival on the scene. Whether it would be simultaneously fortuitous for me remained to be seen, as these animals re-focused their attentions on me - the newcomer - with an audible snarl. Without waiting for them to decide who was going to lead the counterattack – or when – I opened up with a 3-round burst into the closest dog. The big grey male’s chest exploded as the .30-caliber hollow points shattered ribs and shredded vital organs with equal ferocity, and he dropped in his tracks like a switch had been thrown. His two compadres seemed to take this as a sign: not – as I’d somehow hoped – a signal that they should perhaps back off, but a sign to jump me. Together. The closer of the two sailed over me as I ducked under her leap and squeezed 3 rounds into her partner. I heard her land in the lake with a splash as the one I’d hit crumpled beside the broken remains of the left foreleg that my shots had separated from the rest of its body. I wheeled to draw a bead on the last one, but she was already in the air again. I barely had time to get the stock of my rifle between me and those flashing, savaging teeth before all of her 150lb. weight knocked the wind out of me, driving me to the rocky ground. Desperately, as my legs came out from under me, I kicked out at her body, adding force to her momentum and carrying her over me and out of position to finish me off. She skidded across the ground and I heard a yelp of pain as I rolled to reposition myself. ‘Good’, I remember thinking, ‘she’s injured now’. Only when I finally rolled up and had eyes on her again did I realize how wrong I was. She attacked again, and this time I felt the white hot flash as her jaws clamped down on my right shoulder, her head pulling this way and that to tear at the wound she had opened. I pointed my rifle into her belly and fired from the hip, and only then did I feel her jaws go slack as death overtook her. I exhaled in relief when I pushed her limp body to the ground. That’s when “Stumpy” – the wolf I’d separated from his foreleg – leapt at my throat. Once again, I leveled the muzzle of my MAK-90 into the exposed chest of a wolf as I stared down the snarling, angry maw of its jaws. I squeezed the trigger and 3 more rounds tore into the vital parts of this jet-black, 180lb. animal, leaving death in their wake as he dropped to the ground for the last time.
I did a quick mag change and then looked around. In the few seconds that I had been distracted by my attackers, a world had changed around me. With his back to a large pine tree, my stocky friend was now surrounded by the seven remaining wolves of this pack, including two of the massive Alpha-male contenders I had seen through binoculars earlier. The man seemed to have exhausted his ammunition, as he was now swinging his rifle around by the barrel like a club. Even reduced to this, he was extracting a telling price from his lupine opponents: two of them were as good as dead already, with their lower jaws splintered and hanging limply – and uselessly – beneath their head by whatever muscle and tendons hadn’t been crushed when they were struck. The others barely noticed. They would charge in low in ones and twos, coming in from too many different angles at once for the guy to effectively defend against. They were small for now, but a closer look at him showed wounds on both shoulders and forearms, as well as a blood splotch on the tattered shirt beneath his jacket, which could have been transfer from somewhere else – either his or a wolf's – or it could indicate a wolf bite that had gotten through everything.
All of this was taken in in the span of a single glance. With no more time to waste, my rifle was snugged into my shoulder and I squeezed just as soon as my eyes told me I was on target. One of the Alpha contenders, almost pure white with flashes on his face, back and haunches, went down first with 3 rounds delivered center mass. A charcoal grey female behind him dropped next, followed by another jet-black animal, an adolescent male. In an obvious – but futile - bid to protect their pack mates from my withering fire, the two with broken jaws peeled off, sprinting for me with lethal determination in their eyes. They’d cleared 20 of the 30 yards between us before I brought down the second of them with a 3-round burst into his head and chest. Re-focusing, I immediately saw that the bonzai charge hadn’t been so futile as I’d first thought: the remaining 3 had seized upon the distraction they provided, and had made their attack together. My friend was driven to the ground beneath the weight of canine muscle, bone and sinew, and canine teeth were ripping and tearing at any soft tissue or vital point they could gain access to. Like an automaton I fired my rifle: trigger squeeze; dog drops; line up on new target; squeeze again. After what seems an eternity, all wolves are down, none moving.
I ran to the still form of the stranger, praying I was not too late. Heaving the bloody, stinking carcass of a dead wolf off of the man’s body, I sink to my knees trying to feel through the bloody shambles of his throat for a carotid pulse. Another eternity passes, and not only have I finally found it, but the man even opened his eyes briefly, acknowledging me before the warm cocoon of unconsciousness enveloped him. I shout for Josh to bring the first-aid kit from the boat as I clamp my hand down on the spurting vein in his neck, trying to stem the flow of blood. I was proud of my boy that day: I don’t think he’d ever seen anyone injured as severely as this man was, yet when he dropped to my side with the trauma bag, the only sign of it was the pasty whiteness of in his face.
It took us nearly 40 minutes to get this fella patched up enough that we could move him to the boat and begin the 10 minute crossing back to safety. Blessedly, he remained unconscious through the whole ordeal – if not from the pain of his wounds, then certainly from the loss of blood. Teri and the girls were waiting at the door when my son and I got him to the house. We discovered only as we stripped him out of his tattered, filthy, bloody clothes and laid him in the guest bed that he also was a member of the Church. A refugee? Teri and I asked each other with a glance the question we knew would never be answered until and unless this stranger recovered enough to tell us his story. Minutes later, we sat at the dining table with a ledger book and the strong box, cataloging the man’s personal effects and placing them in the strong box to safeguard against the time he was well enough to retrieve them, or the time came to pass them along to his next of kin that I found a pre-Fall drivers license in the man’s wallet. We had a name for our mysterious stranger.
It also happened to be the name of a very close friend and the husband of one of my dearest friends ever. Marcus, Scott Isaac.
It’s been a long time since I’d last seen Scott Marcus; we both lived up in Washington long before Washington became yet another despotic People’s Republic, following along with the other states of the western coast of North America. In spite of all the intervening time, the photo on the face of the plastic ID card brought things sharply into focus, and at once I knew that the man lying unconscious in the next room was indeed my old friend. That knowledge brought with it its own collection of questions and worries. As I’ve said, Scott is a close friend, but he’s married to the woman whose affections brought me back into the Church, and thus was one of the dearest friends I’d ever had. The likelihood that Scott would have willingly left Jolene’s side was about as remote as my ever willingly leaving Teri’s. And then there were their children to consider: Scott and Jolene have 6 kids that I was aware of – the last I’d spoken to them was prior to The Fall, over 4 years ago after all – and I knew that he was as enamored of them as he was of his Eternal Companion. All of this added up to something terrible happening, and with Scott unable to tell me, I had no idea whether it had occurred in California, just the other side of that lakeshore rise where I’d found him, or any of a thousand places in between. The thought that I could have been within a hundred yards of Jolene and her children out there and not known it filled me with horror. Between Scott and me, that wolf pack had been completely wiped out near as I could tell. This meant next to nothing though, as I knew of at least four wolf packs that called the woods surrounding my lake home. And again, that count doesn’t factor in the occasional lone wolf transiting through this territory; fully as dangerous to a defenseless woman and children as a full-on pack could be. Of course, with 30-odd rotting wolf corpses to attract every predator and scavenger for 100 miles, the bears, mountain lions and coyotes were just as much a threat as the wolves.
Over Teri’s vociferous protests, I told Preston to saddle up: we were headed back out. Teri was sure that my shoulder needed a few stitches; I told her that if I hadn’t bled out by now, the probability that I might do so in the next few hours was low. We only had a couple of hours of daylight left. Pulling a MAK-90 from the rack and under-arming it to Preston, then pocketing a few spare mags for both our weapons – just in case – the boy and I headed out of the house and back down to the dock.
The sun had long since disappeared behind the western mountains, and a waning quarter moon was high in the night sky when Preston and I finally tied up to the dock again. We had found no one, and no trace that anyone else had been in the area recently. To the extent that I hadn’t left Scott’s family to the mercy of the wilderness, I was relieved. Before she would allow anything else, Teri insisted on treating my shoulder. She told me there’d been no change in Scott since I had left, so after she cleaned out the wound with disinfectant and set a couple of stitches, I was able to go upstairs and clean up, then Preston and I sat down to supper with my wife.
After a night’s sleep, I was once again out plowing when Teri called me on the walkie-talkie at about noon, telling me that Scott was coming around. I had Preston come and take over the plowing for me.
When I entered the house, I did so in the midst of a heated argument coming from the guest room. The twins - Katelyn and Alina - looked up from their play on the living room floor when I walked in, but otherwise ignored me. I could smell a stew over the fire, simmering as I listened to Scott arguing that he had to keep moving, and Teri telling him that if he didn’t let his wounds heal, he’d be dead by morning. One would think that after being married to Jolene for as long as he had, Scott would have recognized the steely resolve in my wife’s voice and known this was an argument he was destined not to win. Lord knows I saw enough similarity between the two women, and the last time I’d heard such tones in Jolene’s voice was at least 20 years ago.
I managed to smother my grin by the time I got to the guest room door; it would not help the credibility of the serious tone I was about to affect for this meeting, if an idiot grin was undermining every word I said. Pushing the door aside, I saw Scott sitting upright on the edge of the bed, Teri hovering over him as he swayed weakly. “You’ll do nobody any good if you try to leave now, Scott”, I said. “Nobody but the wolves, that is. Near as I can figure, you’d lost about half your blood volume by the time we got your jugular stitched up. That kind of blood loss is going to take time to recover. Time, and the kind of nutrition you aren’t going to get hoofing it across the Rocky Mountains this time of year.
Scott deflated. He was a chiropractor prior to The Fall. He could argue with Teri, no matter how much she argued like Jolene, and he could argue with me. But present him with facts like these, and he could not argue with himself. Teri stepped back a pace as he stopped fighting her, and I grabbed the straight-back chair from the corner of the room and straddled it, folding my arms across its back.
“Who are you? How do you know my name”, Scott asked.
“We know who you are because your name was on your driver’s license. I’m not surprised you don’t remember me though,” I answered. “It took seeing your name on that license for your face to click in my head. It’s been almost 20 years since we last saw each other.”
“So who are you”, Scott repeated, staring into my eyes for something he might recognize.
“Where’s Jolene, and your children”, I countered.
“How do you know my wife”, he demanded. I did not know the source of the panic in his eyes, but it caused him to jump up from the bedside, and the low blood volume just as quickly sent him spiraling back down onto it. When he had sat himself up again, and regained some semblance of composure, he said, “I know there were pictures in my wallet, of my family, I mean. But none of them have names. You didn’t get my wife’s name from my wallet. How do you know me?”
His eyes widened when I told him, “I’m Jeff Dru.”
With a little help, Scott was strong enough to sit with us for supper that night. My girls took it upon themselves to nursemaid our injured guest, and sat on either side of him. As he ate – ravenously; it appeared that he hadn’t had a real meal in weeks – he explained that after The Fall, at first there were no noticeable changes to his life, other than the times being a bit leaner than before. He and Jolene had supplemented their income from the few people who could still afford a chiropractor’s services with a garden and the stocks from their year’s supply. Sure, when the Ideological Purity Act came down from Sacramento they had to register with the government as Mormons, but, “even then, they really didn’t harass us much. They even authorized me an exit visa and a seat on an airliner to attend a chiropractic conference in Kansas City. That was back in December”, Scott concluded, his shoulders slumping.
Oh no, I thought. And yet, I couldn’t keep from asking, “what happened”, even as I watched the train wreck unfold, unable to look away.
“There was no chiropractic conference. There were 192 men on that flight: bank managers, engineers, attorneys, accountants, and, of course, chiropractors. All members of the Church, I discovered later. The flight attendants – State Security officers really – were practically gloating as they told us all our fates, once we were airborne. That our families were being arrested even now, they said. That our children were going to ‘re-education facilities’, to learn their proper duty to the State; and our wives were to be sent to labor camps so that the State could extract whatever meager value was possible from their ‘corrupt, worthless bodies’, before they died. We, they told us, were being deported out of California, because we were too incorrigible to remain among proper citizens of the People’s Republic, and the ramifications of our banding together and offering unacceptable levels of resistance if we were sent to labor camps, had been deemed an unnecessary risk by the General Secretary.”
I had no more stomach for eating, just a heavy lump sitting like lead in my gut. In spite of everything the Californian government had done to suppress and deny the rumors, the truth was that knowledge of what happened in these camps was too good of an instrument for instilling fear to pass up. The inmate population at these places was about 85% female, according to the rumors, and the stories of the liberties the State Security guards took with those inmates were unanimous in their hideous brutality. I wanted to retch at the thought of any man’s wife incarcerated in one of those hell holes. The thought that Jolene – the woman who could be credited with every blessing I had received in my adult life – might be one of those tortured souls filled me with a fierce anger and unspeakable dread simultaneously.
Scott must have read the despair in my face, or else knew from his own experience what I was feeling, because he said quickly, “They didn’t get her.” He may as well have said, “The queen is a golden retriever”, for all the sense his words made to my ears.
“The plane we were on wasn’t going to Kansas City. Instead they dumped us off right on the tarmac in Detroit.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about Detroit since the government crumbled, but the place is a hive of absolute anarchy. Anybody and everybody there will shoot you, stab you or rape you for any reason, or no reason at all. I guess the State Security thugs thought the inhabitants there would make short work of a bunch of soft, gullible, business suit-clad Mormons, and that would be the last they had to worry about us.”
While we were in Detroit, the lot of us hung together for mutual safety. Just outside the city, I bought a telephone call with the wristwatch Jolene gave me for our anniversary. Just after the regime took over California, one of the new mandates was that pre-paid, throw-away cell phones were declared illegal. They’re still all over the black market and as cheap as dirt to get a hold of; just don’t get caught holding ‘em when the state comes knocking. They’re relatively safe to use; so long as you’re willing to use any given SIM card only once - and then only for a brief time - there isn’t much the government can do to stop their use. Well, as part of our emergency supplies, I bought both of us a throw-away phone and 3 SIM cards. We got ‘em for an emergency, if we were separated, you know, like if the Big ‘Quake hit while I was at the office? So I called Jolene’s throw-away, and just prayed I’d get an answer.”
“She was there”, I asked, not daring to believe it.
“She answered on the first ring”, Scott confirmed. “She said that on the way back from dropping me at the airport, she spotted somebody following her in the rear-view mirror, and just felt that something was wrong. She lost the tail, and then she and the kids drove out on highway 50, telling all the checkpoints that she was headed out to help a family friend weed his farm up in Alpine. They just kept driving, and finally holed up in a little town called Susanville with some other friends of ours.”
“I’m familiar with Susanville”, I said absently.
We sat in silence after Scott concluded his tale. Teri was watching me for reactions, waiting for what I’d say. I was deep in thought at the moment, not really planning anything per se, but definitely turning Scott’s predicament over and over in my mind, looking for ways to help him out. And her too, of course. So as we sat, the only sounds that interrupted the silence were those associated with my three children consuming their supper.
Finally, I asked him, “What is your plan, Scott?”
He gave me a quizzical look for a moment, before he said, “how much of a plan could I have? Assuming I can hitch all the way into the Tahoe area un-noticed, I still have to get everybody loaded into our van and back through 500 miles of California-controlled desert before I can get to the nearest safe ground in Utah. With the State in control of all of the gas pumps in between, and considerably less than a full tank in the van, I can envision a running gun fight with State Security goons from Reno all the way to the Utah border as the best possible scenario.”
I nodded agreement with his assessment of the situation, settling back into deep thought again. “Did you and Jolene have a specific destination in mind once you got out of from under the thumb of the Californian government”, I asked him finally.
“No, I figured we’d enter Utah as refugees and work out the particulars of rebuilding our lives after we’d made it someplace where we’d be free to do so. Haven’t really had the chance to consult with Jolene about it, but I know she’s got a few very extended relatives in Utah, and David and his family out east, and that’s about the extent of our family-specific options.” In other words, about what I’d figured.
I looked at Teri for a moment, waiting for her to catch what I was thinking. She nodded. “If I can make it so that you don’t have to go all the way in to California yourself to get your family back out, how far back of your intended ‘starting all over again’ position would being without your van put you”, I asked carefully.
“How could you do that”, my friend asked, and I could see light start to flicker again in his eyes.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can yet, so I don’t want to get your hopes up until I know more. I may be able to tell you what I have in mind tomorrow morning. Let me make a phone call or two after supper tonight. Until tomorrow, let’s just keep each other in our prayers, and you just rest easy.”
Scott’s eyes were red and welling up as he fumbled for words; gave up and settled for a shaky nod when none were forthcoming. Cautiously, he got up from the table and gingerly made his way back to the guest bedroom.
“Scott”, I called after him. “Jolene still has one or two of those SIM cards, right?” He nodded, holding up two fingers as he closed the bedroom door behind him.
“Do you really think you can go in there, get them, and get back out again”, Teri asked.
I shrugged as I replied, “I don’t know; would you want me not to try?” Without hesitation, she shook her head.
“There you have it”, I said as I scooted my chair back noisily against the varnished pine floor. Excusing myself and giving the remainder of my supper to the dog, I walked determinedly to the office, sitting opposite Scott’s bedroom door.
I fired up the computer. It took me 20 minutes of searching before I found the contact name and number I was looking for. Opening the video phone software, I dialed in the number I’d extracted. Seconds later, the beaming, tawny face of my friend Rollie Alonzo was staring back at me.
“Jeff”, he exclaimed pleasantly. “What brings you here tonight?”
“Rollie”, I replied with a smile. “How’s the wife and family doing?”
“Don’t ask; the baby is teething. Means nobody gets any rest around here.” Sighing as he came to the point, he asked, “what can I do for you?”
Using as few details as possible, I explained Scott’s predicament to him. Then I asked him, “do you still have your contacts in California’s Air Control Administration?
“I think so”, he told me. “As hard as it is to get news out of California, I don’t think they’ve gotten around to purging my friends there yet. If I can contact them, what would you want them to do?”
“If I were to e-mail you a flight plan, do you think your friends could get it slipped onto ACA’s approved flights list as a ‘special goods’ flight?”
He smiled, exposing two perfect rows of teeth. “Ahhh”, he said knowingly. “Jeff, you are a sneaky son of a gun.”
“Well”, I answered, trying not to blush. “My first impulse was to charge in with a razor-sharp bowie in my teeth, guns blazing, and devil hang the consequences, but in the light of reflection, that plan seems somewhat contra-indicated.”
“Probably so”, he said, grinning again. “Alright; it might take a day or two to get things arranged, but I think I can do this. When can you have the flight plan to me?”
“No later than tomorrow, noon”, I answered.
“And so we can make it look like the ‘special goods’ are destined for the right party boss, where do you expect your destination will be?”
“Susanville”, I said. “Pre-Fall, there was a small class ‘C’ or class ‘D’ airport there.”
“Pretty deep in California territory”, Rollie mused. “It shouldn’t arouse much suspicion, depending on where the State Security garrisons are rotated to this time of year, of course.” In a signal to wrap up the call, he then concluded, “get me your flight plan, and I’ll see about making you look like an honest-to-goodness smuggler in the eyes of California’s bureaucracy. I’ll be in touch”, he said, as the call terminated and the screen went dark.
I turned in my chair, pulled out sectionals and a note pad from my desk drawer and began jotting down figures. I opened a spreadsheet on the computer; the one that listed how much of a laundry list of expendables I had stored at my hanger at the Grand County Airport. Since The Fall, FBO fuel supplies had been spotty at best, so in order to keep gas in my plane, I grew sunflowers and pressed oil from the seeds, then converted the oil to bio-diesel every winter. My remaining supply of that was the first thing I checked. After that, I cracked open the sectional charts and started plotting my route, trying my best to think like a smuggler might – not exactly my strongest skills set, to be sure. Then, I thought cynically, if my plan was successful, I really would be a smuggler. Well, technically, anyway: I’m sure the fact that I was smuggling precious cargo OUT of a despotic, totalitarian police-state rather than into one wouldn’t count too deeply against me at the Smuggler’s Guild meetings.
It was well after midnight before I finally clicked [SEND] on the encrypted e-mail to Rollie and shut things down for the night.
The sun was well up the next morning when I finally rose again and stumbled down the stairs to join the rest of my family. Scott was moving around as well, and seemed to be doing so with greater ease and strength than he’d displayed the previous evening. As I helped Teri lay out a breakfast of eggs, venison steaks and cracked wheat – breakfasts had become much larger affairs in our household ever since I’d bought the island and assumed the role gentleman farmer – I filled Scott in on what I had in mind for bringing his family out of California, and what steps I’d taken to set that ball into play. As we sat down to eat, I asked my friend, “do you feel strong enough to help me prep the K’vort today?”
“The what”, he asked.
Realizing – after a second or so – that he had no idea what a ‘K’vort’ was, I clarified for him. “The plane, Scott. The plane. Would you like to come with me to prep the plane for the mission today?”
“Sure”, he answered.
After breakfast, as soon as I set Preston to his school work for the day, I motioned to my friend, and we went out the door. I led him around the house to the shop on the west side.
“The K’vort is in there”, he asked.
I laughed. “No. Not anymore anyway. I did build the K’vort in there, though.” Opening the large bay doors, I revealed our transportation to the airport: a helicopter, also of my own design and fabrication. I had the familiar whine of the chopper’s turbine soothing my jumbled nerves not long after tugging the brute out onto the pad, and a mere 5 minutes after we lifted off, we were hovering over a steel building set away from the rest of the hangers. I set down on the concrete apron and shut down. Inside of a minute, the only sound audible was the soft whistling of the wind. Unlocking the door inset into the two-story bay doors, I led Scott in for his first look at the K’vort.
The sight of my baby standing in the midst of the semi-dark gloom was one to warm the cockles of my cold, steely heart. The K’vort was a 6-place, single engine turboprop arranged in a “pusher” configuration. She has a low wing sitting about 40 inches off the ground, retractable gear and a pressurized cabin. When I’d laid down the specifications for the power plant, I was shooting to turn out 300 horsepower and make 250 knots at 25,000 feet. To my happy surprise, I’d designed a system that cranked out 475 horsepower and could sustain 388 knots at up to 36,000 feet until the fuel tanks ran dry. Moreover, she had internal tankage for a range of about 1,600 miles, and was designed with detachable external tanks under the wing roots, good for a range boost to 4,800 miles, unrefueled.
The single feature that was going to be most beneficial on the mission I had in mind though, wasn’t the service ceiling, the top speed or the long range – though I was going to need the range the external tanks could give, to make sure I could make the full, round trip on this flight. Nope, the feature that was going to be most useful for this hop was the design of the wings themselves.
The term “K’vort” is a reference to the name of the smallest class of Klingon ‘bird-of-prey’ scout ships. Accordingly, just like the wings on a Bird-of-Prey in the movies do, the wings of my K’vort sweep forward, with a gentle dihedral upward as well. ‘Bus-driver’ pilots hate this configuration because in their eyes, it makes the ship ‘twitchy’ at the controls. I love the configuration because the ship is absolutely maneuverable at slower speeds. Against the F-16, F-18, and F-22 I would be foolish to believe I wouldn’t encounter patrolling the border airspace, I stood absolutely no chance of out-running or out-climbing the more powerful jets. Instead, I would have to rely upon the fact that the K’vort’s stall speed was nearly 100 knots slower than theirs, and that if I had to get down into the weeds in order to dodge or avoid them, I could do it and still be agile enough to avoid splattering myself against the trunk of a tree, side of a billboard, or a radio tower.
As I watched, Scott slowly walked around the perimeter of the plane, his hand constantly in contact with the smooth metal skin, as if it were a thoroughbred’s heavily muscled flank. While he was examining the T-tail that towered over him, I went over, touched a latch in the side of the fuselage, and the port-side boarding ladder dropped silently from its cavity to the full-extended position. Stepping up, I unlocked and popped open the canopy over the pilot’s seat. The cockpit light winked on, illuminating one of my favorite places to be. As Scott came around the smooth, tooth-like point of the nosecone, I stepped down and away to allow him the chance to inspect the interior of my creation.
“You’ll be able to go all the way to Susanville in this”, Scott asked, amazement evident in his voice.
“As it’s currently configured, I’d make it all the way there, no problem. With those drop tanks over there”, I said, pointing to the grey teardrops against the back wall, “I can get out there AND back, and won’t have to land for anything but to pick up your family. The external fuel also gives me enough reserve that if the interceptors show more interest than they should, I can maneuver without putting us all in danger of running dry.”
“What do you mean, ‘more than they should’”, Scott asked.
“I mean, I’m going to get intercepted. There’s no two ways about that. They flush interceptors for any flight approaching the border as soon as it shows up on radar. If things work out the way I’m hoping though, that initial sniff will be all the interest they show.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a friend who works for UPS. He’s trying to get me slipped onto the ‘approved flights roster’ as a smuggler for the Lassen County party boss. With that, and a ‘special goods’ tag for my transponder signal, I should be able to make the fighter CAP think that it might not be in their best interest to give me more than a routine sniff.”
“Wow”, Scott said, digesting the details slowly. “And to think we used to live in a free country.”
“Yeah”, was all I could say. “Shall we get started”, I asked, gesturing to the tanks on their cradles.
Working carefully – even with vents, there are always fuel vapors in the tanks once they’ve held fuel – it took only about 20 minutes to mount each tank beneath the K’vort’s wing. Scott maneuvered the hoist dollies, positioning the tanks under the connection points in the wing while I waited underneath with the wrench. Quick-connect the plumbing and electrical fittings, then while Scott hoisted the tank, I torqued down on the bolts that secured the tank sponson against the wing.
Tanks mounted, I went over to the hanger wall, mashed my thumb into the green button, and above me I could hear the motor whirring to life, drawing the bay doors open like curtains. Escape route opened, I went back to the large tank dominating the southwest corner of the hanger, behind the right wing of the K’vort. Pressurized the pump, then I unspooled the hose dragging it by the nozzle under the right wing, first connecting the nozzle to the right external tank. It only took about a minute to fill the 100 gallon tank hanging from each wing, then it was on to the internal. 2,400 pounds of fuel doesn’t take long to transfer, then its reel the hose in, shut off the pump, disconnect the ground straps and seal the tanks.
Scott went for the tug - a quad ATV – while I pinned the tow rig onto the nose wheel axle. A minute later, highly polished green metallic paint glistened in the sunlight on the concrete parking apron. Vaulting up the boarding ladder for a moment, I reached in and grabbed the plane’s checklists from their storage pocket beside the pilot’s seat; dropping down again, I started my pre-flight walk-around. The control surfaces moved freely, as did the prop. The tires were in good shape, there were no leaks from the oleo struts nor mystery puddles on the hanger floor, and when the fuel was sampled, it showed free of any water or other contaminants. Counting the red “REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT” flags I’d collected on my walk-around, I came up with the appropriate number: 21. Fumbling in my pocket for a second, I came up with my key ring: while I was on the starboard side, I unlocked the co-pilot’s canopy and let it hiss up on its lifting strut. Sliding out the starboard boarding ladder, I told Scott, “climb in”.
Took a peek around the plane after mounting the pilot’s side ladder again, checking for foot traffic in the danger zone that I’d need to be aware of: as usual there was nobody. I flopped down into the left seat and opened up the pre-start checklist. Scott stepped in and took the seat beside me. I pointed to the headset dangling above him, indicating that he should put it on. As soon as he had the muffs seated snugly over his ears, I yelled out, “CLEAR PROP!!!”, then told Scott, “starting engine”. I stabbed the key into its slot, gave it a quarter turn, then jabbed my index finger down on the [START] toggle. Instantly, the heavenly whine of the K’vort’s single turbine engine began rising in pitch and intensity, as the starter motor spun the compressor up to operating RPMs. I gestured to Scott that it would be a good idea to close the canopy, and he brought the clear Plexiglas down, latching it when it seated in the door frame. I waited until I heard the engine ignite before I followed suit with my own hatchway.
I watched the N2 RPM indicator ribbon climb out of the red range and stabilize at the bottom of the green range out of one eye. After that, I switched my attentions to the exhaust gas temperature gauge below it on the small LCD screen as I said to Scott, “this ought to keep the eavesdroppers at bay for a while.”
Scott gawked; his expression was pure incredulousness when he replied, “Isn’t that just a little paranoid? Colorado’s supposed to be free territory, after all.”
“Before The Fall”, I countered, “I was working on a surveillance satellite for the government. You remember how, on some of those cop shows on TV, they’d stake out the bad guys from a building across from where the crooks were meeting up?” Scott nodded. “You remember that device they had, that could listen in on a conversation with digital clarity, just by bouncing a laser off the glass of a window?” He nodded again. “Well, the satellite I was working on put one of those lasers into orbit, and if you knew who you wanted to listen in on, where they were going to be and when they were going to be there, this satellite could use that laser to listen in on any conversation, thru any building or vehicle window, anywhere within the satellite’s field if view. Before The Fall, I know at least 12 of those birds got lofted into high elliptical orbits; orbits with long dwell times over the northern hemisphere. At least 4 of them were controlled by the ground station at Vandenberg when the government came crashing down.”
“Wow”, Scott said again.
“Yeah”, I answered, checking my watch. “We’re in a gap in coverage for the next 8 minutes”, I said, taking out a pen, and strapping my kneeboard to my leg. “You said Jolene has two SIM cards left. Once we get confirmation that the flight has been slipped onto the roster, you’ll need to burn one of those to let Jolene know what the plan is. That’ll get her up on ‘stand-by’, ready to move when it’s time, but I’ll need the number to her last SIM card so that I can coordinate the final link-up at the airport with her directly, and get your family on board and out of there in the shortest time possible. There’s no telling how soon my ‘smuggler’ cover story will fall apart when I don’t unload anything after I land, but I’ll feel a whole lot safer being in the air and as far from that airport when they get wise to me.”
“Wait”, Scott protested. “I’m coming with you, right?”
I gestured to the passenger cabin behind me. “Look around you”, I told him. “The way I figure, If Robby has grown up built anything like you, I’ll be putting him where you’re sitting, and Jolene will be back there, so she can be with the younger kids. That leaves 3 seats back there for 5 children. I’m not certain at this point, but Mark or Carrie may wind up riding up here on Robby’s lap, just so I can be sure everybody’s belted in securely.”
“What about setting them down on the cabin floor”, Scott asked.
“What about it”, I asked back at him. “If my cover gets blown while we’re still in California airspace, the likelihood is that I’ll have to fly nap of the earth in order to keep the fighters from zinging a missile up my tail. That will almost certainly mean pulling gees in order to make myself as horrible a target as possible. Are you sure you want one or two of your children pranging around my passenger cabin like eggs on a roller coaster because we can’t strap them down?”
Scott looked about to protest further. As a husband and father myself, I could understand what he was feeling, why he needed to be there when we got his family out of California. I looked him squarely in his eyes though, and said, “Scott, this plan is risky enough. I believe it will work, and we’ll have your wife back in your arms for good before the week is out, but there are still about a million and one things that can go wrong with this and get everybody on board this plane killed. Trust me. What I need more than anything to make this work, is for you to trust me to bring your family out for you, safe and sound.”
I saw moisture glistening at the corners of Scott’s eyes, and he ceased arguing with me. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his billfold, and took out a business-card sized slip of paper with three 10-digit numbers on it; the number at the top of the paper was crossed off in pencil. I copied down the last of the three and silently handed the paper back to him just as the alarm on my wristwatch beeped. I put my finger to my lips so that Scott could see that I could no longer guarantee that this conversation wasn’t being overheard, then reached between the two seats for the red arrowhead shaped knob of the fuel cut-off valve, and gave it a turn. The engine started winding down, and Scott and I began shutting things off and making preparations for moving the plane back into the hanger.
With the K’vort returned into its usual position in the hanger, I told Scott that there was one last chore we needed to get done, gesturing to a large, red cabinet on the east wall of the hanger.
“What’s that”, Scott asked.
“Ordnance locker”, I answered. I may have told Rollie that going in “guns blazing” was contra-indicated, but that did not mean I intended to make this trip like the proverbial lamb being led to the slaughter. Popping the padlock, I opened a pair of cabinet doors, exposing metal boxes, holding 250 rounds of .50 caliber machine gun ammo each. I got a pallet and pallet jack, and Scott and I loaded it with 16 cases of ammunition. We took the shells to the baggage door behind the starboard wing of the K’vort, which I keyed open, and then pulling up on the luggage bay floor, exposed the magazines for the .50 caliber gatling guns, mounted in each wing root.
The rest of the day progressed uneventfully. I was in the office that evening after dinner, checking over Preston’s essay on the root causes of the 1929 depression, when the chime of an incoming e-mail sounded from the computer.
It was from Rollie. He confirmed that his contact had gotten my flight plan planted on the ACA roster. Then I read the details. “Scott”, I called loudly.
It took a minute for Scott to make himself decent, and then cross the living room to poke his head through the doorway. “What’s up”, he asked.
I tossed him a phone. “Get Jolene on the horn. We’re rolling. The flight plan is filed, but the only slot they could get me means that I have to be in Susanville in just over 4 hours.”
“Is that a problem”, Scott asked as his finger punched numbers into the phone’s keypad. “Can the K’vort make it all the way to Susanville that fast?”
“A straight run there is about a two, maybe two and a half hour flight, depending on the winds at altitude. If I’m to be playing the role of a smuggler though, my run in should be anything but straight.”
“Um”, Scott said, nodding his agreement as he put the handset to his ear.
While he and his wife were electronically reunited after 4 long months of enforced separation, I busied myself getting final preparations underway. After only a second’s hesitation, I stripped down to my skivvies and fished my flight suit out of the vertical locker behind my desk and pulled it on. Next came my boots, followed by my shoulder holster. I slid open the left-hand drawer of my desk and retrieved the .45-caliber automatic stored there, securing it in the holster under my right armpit after checking the load. After that, it was a simple matter to transfer my keys and my knife into the pockets of the flight suit, and then frisk myself to make sure I had nothing identifying on me.
While I dressed, Scott filled Jolene in on where he was and what we were planning to do. I pulled out an airport chart for Susanville that I had looked up the previous night and laid it on the desktop. Getting Scott’s attention, I pointed: “The runway runs pretty much perpendicular to highway 395 over here. The main entrance from the highway is here”, I told him, pointing to a service road that ran up to the airport terminal on the northwest side. “Stay away from that; it’s liable to be crawling with State Security goons. Instead, come to this gate on the southwest side, a little further down 395 from the main entrance. It leads to the general aviation hangers, and it’s got an automatic gate mechanism so pilots can get to and from their airplanes without disturbing the somnolence of a live guard. The lock code for the gate is usually something easy for pilots to remember: the airport code for Susanville is S-V-E. Try that first. When you get in the gate, drive over to the hangers and park between a couple of ‘em. No lights, no noise; don’t do anything that might attract the attention of State Security over at the terminal. When I’m on final approach, I’ll call you on your last throw-away. That’ll be when I’m about 5 to 10 minutes out. I’ll stay on that line until we have you all in the plane, so don’t hang up, no matter what. There may be activity over at the terminal when I land; that’ll be where I’m expected to go. Instead, I’m going to taxi over to the hangers like I’m lost. When you see the plane start to pass in front of you, blink your headlights once, and I’ll hit the brakes, pop the hatch, and that’ll be your cue to run like mad for the plane. Remember, the prop will be turning the whole time we’re loading y’all in, so do not approach from directly behind the plane for any reason. Run to the nearest wingtip and then come in to the cabin hatch from there.” As I went over each point with Scott, he relayed my words to his wife. I paused a moment to think: were there any other little details that might jump up to bite us in the butt? Oh yes; “Scott, tell her that when I call, I will challenge her identity with the name of the high school we graduated from. If all is well, and she and your family are alone she should answer with ‘high school’. If she has State Security goons in the van with her, the answer should be ‘Trojans’. I’ll have to make something else work, but I won’t abandon them there. After another minute or so of standing around with my thumb up my backside, I decided that if any other unexpected problems came up, I was just going to have to improvise on the fly. I did take the time to send Rollie’s e-mail to the printer: it had the name of the guy I was supposed to be delivering contraband to, if nothing else. Scott confirmed for me that Jolene understood what the plan was, and then I was out the door.
I flew a straight course from Granby to Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake. This routing made me just a little nervous. The reason was simple enough: I was flying into California in the guise of a smuggler, and the Air Guard of Utah was particularly intolerant of smugglers. There was a single bright ray of hope, though. I had a running bet in the back of my mind, that Rollie’s contacts in California were field officers in the Order of Caleb: the part of the new defensive arm of the LDS church tasked with intelligence gathering since The Fall. It was even money whether Rollie was Calebite himself. The point being, if they were in the Order, I stood a good chance of being able to make this run, without having to behave one way for the fighter patrols over Utah, and another way entirely for the fighter patrols over California. The alternative – being under the guns of both air forces – was just too gruesome to dwell upon further.
Night flying had become a whole lot scarier since The Fall of the federal Government. Used to be, I could file an IFR flight plan to anywhere in the North American continent and be reasonably certain that the network of radar control centers would be watching my flight, making course corrections, and ensuring that me and any other aircraft had no close encounters we would all regret. Nowadays, even knowing that a particular radar center was still manned and operational was no guarantee that they’d even talk to you. I’d found, over the past few years, that the best I could do under the circumstances was to turn the illumination on the instrument panel down to nearly nothing, and then use night vision goggles to improve my ability to see and avoid other traffic.
The GPS unit warbled for attention in my headset about 70 minutes after I’d lifted off. I looked down at the moving map display in the center of the console, and noted that I’d reached the waypoint I’d programmed to alert me to the edge of Utah airspace. I let out a sigh of relief; I’d made it to the California border without incident. Well, it wasn’t actually the border yet: I’d set the waypoint far enough east of the border that I could descend from the 28,000 feet I was currently cruising at, to one that might be closer to that expected of a “sneaky son-of-a-gun”. There was no need for me to adjust the controls; I’d programmed the autopilot with all of the heading and altitude changes I’d need to make the trip out and back unmolested. The only reasons I’d have for deactivating the autopilot was boredom, or if my cover story fell through, and I needed to head for the weeds.
As if on cue, my radar warning receiver lit off as soon as I was out of the salt flats and well and truly over the northern deserts of what used to be Nevada, until it was “annexed” by California. According to the frequency and pulse rate, I was being painted by the APG-68 radar in the nose of an F-16 fighter. Two of them apparently, by the divergent bearings I was being radiated from. Sure enough, it wasn’t more than a few seconds later when my headphones crackled with a voice coming over what was still the guard channel. “Attention unidentified aircraft. You have entered the sovereign airspace of the People’s Republic of California. If you deviate from your current heading or altitude, or fail to respond to communications from us, you will be shot down. Acknowledge immediately with your aircraft’s identity, cargo and destination.”
I had already memorized the roster entry that Rollie had sent back to me, but I pulled the sheet of paper out of my breast pocket anyway. The first of the two fighters had already pulled abreast of me; the second was apparently hanging back, above and behind me, so as to make good the threat to shoot me down if I wasn’t compliant. I’d heard stories that the military budget for California in the last couple of years hadn’t been as much as they’d hoped, and the fighter bases had taken to repainting dummy ammo to look like live weapons, in order to mask the fiscal shortfall; but I wasn’t particularly eager to test the theory, personally. “California, this is K’vort 5-2-5 Charlie Juliet, inbound for Susanville with perishable cargo. I have confirmation code Bravo-3-1-9, and am setting my transponder to squawk code as instructed by ACA; stand by”, I said as I powered up the transponder.
Data-linked in, as the interceptors had to be, it took an excruciatingly long time for them to check out my bona fides. All the while, doubt nagged at the back of my mind like sandpaper over raw, exposed nerves. If the mission had been blown, I was far too sitting a quacker at this altitude and airspeed for them to not stamp [PAID] on my ticket permanently. The pit in my stomach – the one I used to get all the time whenever a cop would pull me over to write a ticket – seemed to grow and swell until it felt like it had filled the entire cockpit.
I was drenched with sweat – and I think that was the whole purpose of this exercise to begin with – when the radio crackled to life again. “K’vort 5-Charlie-Juliet, you’re cleared to proceed as filed. Do not deviate from your flight plan, or the response will be immediate and severe.”
“Acknowledged, California. K’vort 5-Charlie-Juliet, good day”, I answered dutifully, breathing a sigh of relief as soon as I’d let go of the mic button. After another couple of minutes “escorting” my lowly airplane across the California desert, the F-16 on my wing, banked sharply right, peeling up and away, leaving me alone in the night sky once again.
I flew the next 140 miles – about a half an hour – enjoying the quiet solitude; my only companion the steady thrumming of the propeller blades against the air behind me. Finally sure that there would probably be no more surprises on the way in, I punched up some music over the intercom and reclined back in my seat slightly, happy to let the autopilot while I scanned the skies as if they were still as full of flying machines as they would have been 5 years ago.
-continued-