“Why not?” Black intervened. “Forrest is onto something. Tell him to come here.”
The answer was so simple and obvious. As he contemplated it, John found himself wondering why he had not thought of that first. Perhaps a touch of the old hierarchy of command still held sway within him. When a general summoned a colonel to a meeting, it was “Yes, sir, where and what time do we meet, sir?” and that was it.
John smiled and nodded. “Okay, I’ll go for that. How and where?”
“Asheville?” Frank Nelson, now the mayor of that town, suggested.
John shook his head. “Too public. A helicopter coming in there just might spook folks who survived the fighting back in the spring to take a potshot at it.”
“The Asheville airport, then,” Frank pressed.
“We disabled the runway,” Black interjected, “and it means an overflight of all our territory around here. Chance for a good recon if he is not on the up-and-up.”
“9A9,” Danny said quietly.
“What?” John replied, not sure what he meant.
“Old FAA designations for airports. All airports in public use were given a three-letter code. CLT for Charlotte, AVL for Asheville. Shiflet is an old grass strip airport in Marion, which is our territory. You come in over the mountains to the north, and there it is. No overflight of our territory.”
“Then why not Morganton?” Maury asked.
“Our disabled chopper is there,” Danny replied. “Even though it’s in a hangar, if he or the people with him poke around and see that and then they try to take it back, it would become a confrontation. Even if they don’t try to take it back, they’ll know our bird is down. Also, if they are planning some sort of nasty surprise, bringing in a lot of troops aboard an old C-130, we’re not offering them a big paved strip. Stripped down, they can land at Shiflet. But take off with all that snow on the ground?” He chuckled. “They can land, but then try to take off? If we see a C-130 coming in that can carry up to a hundred troops, we just bogey off and leave them stuck in the snow.
“Shiflet would be ideal, John. Couple of dozen hangars, most of them ramshackle affairs like out of the 1930s. We put some heavily armed people in there as backup if they try to pull any stunts with a couple of choppers—hell, we might even pick up an extra bird or two if they try any crap. Plus, 9A9, you transmit that on Morse code, some geek listening in might not even recognize it and figure it is code for something else. I say 9A9 Shiflet.”
John looked around the room and finally saw nods of agreement. “All right, then. Send out a response on the new frequency they shifted to. Ernie, can you and Danny figure it out? Something like 9A9, a date, and then Zulu time and see what the response is.”
“And if they reply no deal, we go to meet them?”
“Politely tell them to go to hell,” Makala replied sharply.
*
On the walk back from the meeting, John held Makala tightly by his side to ensure she did not slip and fall.
“You aren’t trusting this, are you?” he asked.
She laughed softly. “I never understood just how much a pregnancy can mess up one’s thinking. I want my husband by my side when the baby comes. I want him by my side as our baby goes through all those moments that then follow—the first smile, the first belly laugh, the first crawl, the first step, then the little hellion running amok around the house, and then one day—”
She paused and began to choke up. “Damn it, I was never this way before, John. Yeah, someday, if this world ever turns sane again, that we watch our child graduate from college, your college, and still are together when they one day come through the doorway carrying their child, our child, the same way you look at Elizabeth and her toddler. I want that, and anything that might snatch it away fills me with dread.”
She struggled to hold back her tears. “You heard Elizabeth after the father of her child was killed,” Makala continued, and now the tears were flowing, “bringing a child into the world with the baby’s father dead, the way she would cry herself to sleep at night. The times she would look at her boy and we could sense she could see the boy’s father being there, but he was not and never will be. Don’t get me wrong; her husband, Seth, is an incredible, decent young man, the spitting image of his father, Lee. The fear she carries now is that something will happen to Seth the same as it did to Ben. I carry that same fear. At least the idea of this mythical friend of yours coming here alleviates some concern, but even then, what if it’s a trap? Let’s just say that rather than your friend coming in to meet you, it’s half a dozen of those attack helicopters—or, for that matter, some plane loitering at thirty thousand feet, and they pinpoint your being at this remote airport and drop one of those fuel-air bombs I hear people talking about or even one of those neutron bombs as payback for what you did to Fredericks.”
“If they really wanted me dead, they would have taken this place off the map months ago. That’s why I have to believe that Bob Scales is real, most likely in command of the forces up in Roanoke, and is trying to reach out to me, perhaps to prevent further bloodshed.”
“It still makes me anxious.”
He did not reply that it filled him with the same concerns and fears. If there was no reason for anxiety, if Scales was indeed alive, the overture to meet would have been overt, out in the open. Not like this.
Whatever the reason, he did know one thing for certain: He had to find out the truth and find out now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Black Hawk, which had crested over Linville Gorge just a few minutes earlier, came sweeping in low over frozen Lake James, crossed over the railroad bridge that spanned the Catawba River where it emptied into the lake, and came sweeping down the length of the snow-covered runway at well over a hundred miles an hour.
John shaded his eyes against the glare of the early morning sun, watching as it raced in, scanning it carefully with a pair of field glasses, feeling a touch of nostalgic pride at the sight of the chopper painted in faded desert camo, taking him back to the desert of Iraq so long ago when, filled with awe, he watched scores of them sweeping out ahead of his armored battalion.
He spared a quick glance to Forrest, who was watching intently, silently, wondering what this torn-up veteran of Afghanistan was feeling at the sight and sound of a machine that meant that friends were overhead, ready to protect, ready to attack anything in their way.
The chopper thundered past, the Doppler roar dropping in pitch as it passed, and then it pitched up in a steep turning climb.