Maury looked over his shoulder after struggling for a moment with the controls, nose pitching down slightly.
“Damn it, John, you moving around throws off the center of gravity on this thing.”
“Sorry, just wanted to check on how we are doing.”
“Fine, but just don’t move around now.”
“We on course?”
Maury had yet to figure out what must have been the built-in navigation screen during the few hours he had practiced with this chopper and decided not to waste battery and fuel to figure it all out, so they were navigating by dead reckoning and an FAA sectional spread out on Danny’s lap.
“That’s Interstate 81 off to our left on the other side of the mountains. We’re crossing into what was once the state of Virginia.”
The way Danny had said what was once struck him.
“About twenty minutes out, I’d reckon; the wind up here is giving us a good fifty-mile-per-hour boost.”
After Mary died, John had taken the girls on several trips up to the War College at Carlisle to visit Bob Scales when he was commandant there and then would bore Elizabeth to death spending a few days visiting and hiking around Gettysburg and Antietam. Jennifer, however, loved the trips because of the Boyds Bears shop just south of Gettysburg. He pushed that memory aside; it was far too poignant. The drive up and back was a long one—it usually took four hours or so to pass Roanoke—and here they were approaching it in little more than fifty minutes.
“Anything on the radio?” John shouted.
Maury shook his head. He had barely mastered that system as well, knowing enough to have it tuned to 122.9, the old frequency for general air traffic in what had once been defined as uncontrolled airspace, and alternating it with the frequency for what had been the civil airport at Roanoke as listed on the FAA map.
They started over the mountains, turbulence picking up again, Danny shouting off waypoints he had marked on the map with a grease pencil, while working an old-fashioned circular slide rule, once the standard tool of all pilots, to check on relative ground speed and rate of drift from the quartering tailwind, giving course corrections to Maury.
John looked over at his friend and could see that he was relaxing a bit. If anything, this first cross-country flight was instilling some confidence in his friend, who had only practiced locally since the capture of the chopper, carefully conserving their limited supply of jet fuel with each practice flight. John scanned the gauges, figured out which one was fuel, and was pleased to see they had consumed little more than one-eighth of their load.
More buffeting as they dropped through three thousand feet, airspeed up to 170 miles an hour, a whiff of an unpleasant scent produced by Lee mingled in with the exhaust from the turbines.
“That’s Roanoke,” Danny announced, pointing ten degrees or so off to their port side.
In the cold winter air, it stood out clearly just beyond the low range of hills surrounding it, larger than Asheville. Plumes of smoke were rising up, not for heat but rather buildings that were burning.
“Think it’s hot down there; something’s going on,” Danny announced, looking over at John, who nodded.
The airport was located just north of the city. To reach it, they’d have to fly directly over the city and whatever was going on down there.
“Swing us west, Maury,” John said. “Circle us out a half dozen miles or so; don’t go directly over the city, and we’ll approach the airport from the other direction.”
It came up quickly with a ground speed of well over three miles a minute, John scanning the air around them. There was a flash of light from a building at least ten stories or so high, smoke rising up an instant later.
“Damn it, there’s fighting down there!” Danny shouted.
John felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw that Forrest was leaning on him for support, joining them to look forward.
“Looks like a hot LZ to me!” Forrest shouted. “Where’s the airport?”
Danny pointed to the right and forward. John picked up the binoculars resting in a flight bag between Maury and Danny, knelt up, trying to keep his balance, and finally got a close-up glimpse of the airport on the far side of the city.
It was packed with aircraft, nearly all military. Half a dozen helicopters, a mix of Black Hawks and Apaches, and two old C-130s. Friend or foe? Like the choppers Fredericks had brought with him back in the spring, nearly all the aircraft lined up below were painted in faded desert camo scheme, military equipment brought back to the United States after the Day.
“Someone’s calling us,” Maury announced, slipping one headphone back and looking at John. “Demanding we identify ourselves. What should I do?”
This was not exactly what John expected. But then again, what did he expect? A deserted city? A destroyed city? A war going on that they were blundering into? But certainly not a welcome mat with a big sign scraped out of the snow: “Welcome, John! We were expecting you.”
“John, what do we do?”
“Just state we’re from Carolina and if General Scales is available to put him on the line.”
Maury did as requested, waited, and then shook his head.
“They’re ordering us to land immediately.”
Maury gazed intently at John, who mulled that over for a few seconds while looking toward the city that was now off their starboard side half a dozen miles away. There was definitely a fight going on in the downtown area. It looked similar to Asheville, a cluster of taller office buildings downtown, suburban sprawl stretching out for several miles in every direction.
“Tell him we’ll comply.”
“What?” Forrest shouted. “Are you flipping crazy, John? There’s a fight going on down there. We land and Lord knows what we’ll be getting into. Whoever is down there will keep this bird, and if we’re lucky and not shot on the spot, we might just be allowed to walk home.”
“Just tell him we’ll comply,” John shouted again, “and then be ready for a low-level pass so I can drop a message pod and then get us the hell out of here!”
He looked back up at Maury, who now had approximately eleven hours of stick time on this chopper. He was asking for a maneuver that nearly all pilots loved to do, legally or when no one was looking, illegally. Before the Day, the mountains around Asheville served as a practice range for pilots preparing to deploy to Afghanistan or wherever there was mountainous terrain, and he always got a kick out of watching their high-speed passes, sweeping in low through the Swannanoa Gap, skimming up over his house, at times nearly at rooftop level, and weaving in and out across the mountain passes. And all of them most likely had hundreds of hours of airtime before trying such maneuvers.
Maury grimaced, Danny looking over at the pilot and forcing a smile.