He saw the Sea Stallion just ahead. It had a tail ramp like a cargo jet, lowered and facing the runway. There was a crewman standing at the foot of the ramp. Overhead, the giant rotor was already spinning. Travis could see the mammoth aircraft rising on its wheel shocks, like it was just a few hundred pounds shy of lifting off.
The F–15 stopped twenty yards away from it. The plane’s engines powered down immediately, their pitch dropping through several octaves per second—again Travis had the sense that normal procedures were out the window here. The pilot punched the canopy release and shoved it up and open. Travis stood up in his seat and bent at the waist to clear the angled canopy. He tucked the cylinder under his left arm and held it there as tightly as he could. Then he leaned forward, right out of the cockpit on the left side, grabbed the edge with his free hand and let his body swing down and out. It was over ten feet from cockpit to ground. His shoes were three feet above the tarmac when he let go; he landed hard, straightened up and sprinted for the chopper. He glanced at his watch as he ran. Three minutes and fifty seconds.
They sat at the fire, eating apples from a tree Bethany had found at the southern edge of the park. Something had eaten everything below about eight feet, but the rest had been untouched.
Paige watched the long needles of a white pine bough curl in the flames.
“It’s mid-October,” she said. “Any night from now on could freeze. We need to go south if we want to survive.”
“Do we want to survive?” Bethany said.
Paige looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” Bethany said. “I’m not trying to be a quaalude, but . . . what’s the point? Unless I seriously, seriously misunderstood high-school biology, we’re the end of the line, right? You want to live to be a hundred here?”
Paige lowered her gaze to the flames again and tried to think of an answer to the question. It was essentially the same one she’d been asking herself since the middle of the night.
The Sea Stallion crossed the East River at a height of two hundred feet, just north of a long, narrow island that paralleled the Manhattan shoreline. A second later the aircraft was screaming over the rooftops of the Upper East Side, banking in long, gentle arcs to avoid the taller structures.
Two minutes, thirty seconds.
Travis was standing upright, holding onto the doorway in the forward bulkhead just before the flight deck. Other than himself, the only people aboard were the pilot and co-pilot. Behind Travis was the cavernous troop bay. Its long side walls were lined with bench seats made of steel tubing and canvas. The walls themselves were just the structural ribs of the fuselage and the metal outer skin. Hydraulic lines and wiring conduits ran everywhere. Harsh overhead fluorescent panels lit the space.
The co-pilot turned in his seat and shouted over the thrum of the rotors and the turbines driving them. “Our orders are pretty damn specific. In addition to the phrase haul ass being emphasized about a dozen times, here’s how I understand it. We land in the biggest clearing toward the south end. We leave the ramp closed. We face forward and we don’t pay any attention to you for the next two minutes.”
“That’ll work,” Travis said.
“What the fuck do we do after that?”
“Whatever you want,” Travis said. “I’ll be gone by then.”
The guy stared at him a few seconds longer, waiting for the rest of the joke. When it didn’t come, he just shook his head and faced forward again. He mouthed something Travis didn’t catch.
They passed over Fifth Avenue at a diagonal, still doing just under two hundred miles per hour. The pilot started cutting the altitude, even as he kept the forward speed maxed. Travis saw the clearing ahead, coming up very fast. They covered most of the remaining distance to it in just a few seconds.
“All right, hang on tight,” the pilot shouted.
Travis gripped the doorway with his right hand. He held the cylinder tight against himself with his left. He saw the pilot pull back hard on the stick, but for the next half second nothing happened. Then the park and the skyline, visible ahead through the windscreen, dropped away sickeningly as the chopper leaned back into a steep tilt. Nothing through the windows but blue sky. In the same moment its massive tail swung around like a boom, and when Travis saw the park again it was turning like a schoolyard seen from a merry-go-round. He saw people below, running like hell to get clear as the chopper descended fast.
Just before touchdown Travis looked at his watch. One minute, forty seconds.
Paige was still thinking about Bethany’s question when the sound started up. A heavy bass vibration through the trees, like a bank of concert amplifiers playing no music, but simply cranked to full volume and humming. There was a rhythm to the sound, as well. A cycling throb. Like helicopter rotors.
Bethany flinched and turned where she sat, looking for the sound source along with her. It was almost impossible to get a fix on. It was deep and diffused and everywhere.
Then they heard a man shouting, from very far away.
Travis.
Shouting for them to answer.