The Final Day (After, #3)(30)
In a helicopter, he always felt the exact opposite, having witnessed during a training maneuver in Germany a helicopter having a full engine failure while more than half a mile up. According to the book, the chopper should have easily autorotated down to a landing one could at least crawl away from. Halfway down, the rotor seized up completely, and it dropped like a rock, killing the crew and the six troopers on board.
“Know where we are?” Lee said, looking over at John.
“Heading home.”
“Thank God,” Lee gasped. At least this time he managed to use a baggie and seal it up. Groaning, he just leaned over while Forrest and Kevin looked at him with at least some pity, even as they traded a joking comment.
John settled in, suddenly realizing that his left hand was absolutely numb from the cold. He unzipped his jacket and slid it in under his armpit and closed his eyes, trying not to listen too closely to the engine, for there was something definitely wrong. Maury shouted he was throttling back to put less strain on it, dropping their airspeed down to a hundred miles an hour. John mentally clicked off the miles; with each passing minute in the air they were subtracting an hour of laboriously walking through the winter snow to get home.
Was this trip really necessary, he wondered, or just a folly on his part? He had harbored a fantasy that perhaps, just perhaps, he would hear Bob Scales’s familiar voice on the radio, inviting him to come in, land, and talk things over. Tucked into his vest pocket, he had even brought along a photograph taken of Jennifer and Elizabeth the year before the Day.
What did happen over these last few minutes, he was prepared for as well, confident of the decision not to land but still disconcerted that they had been fired upon.
He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, the adrenaline rush over with, now just trying to look calm as they clicked off the passing minutes for what should, he hoped, be the hour-and-a-half flight back home.
At least the message pod had been dropped, and he saw someone running over to pick it up. He had thought it out carefully the night before, writing the message on his old Underwood typewriter:
TO: General Robert E. Scales
FROM: Colonel John Hastings Matherson
RE: Contact
Several days ago, a man claiming to have served with you, initials Q. R., arrived in the outskirts of my community. He had been badly beaten by marauders on his journey and died from the results of injury and exposure before I could personally speak to him. His message, whatever it was, never reached me. I do not have, as well, any means of verification to his claim of having served or to be currently serving with you. My flight to Roanoke is an attempt to establish contact with you. If you are reading this message rather than speaking to me personally, the reasons for my decision not to land should be apparent to you. Sir, I pray that you are indeed still alive and contact between us can be established. I will maintain round-the-clock monitoring of aviation frequency 122.9 for the next seven days, fifteen minutes after the top of any hour, day or night, if you should wish to speak with me. Please attempt to reach me first by radio rather than flying to my location. You are most likely aware of the confrontation that happened in Asheville this spring, and I regret to say any air intrusion without prior notification will be considered to be hostile and reacted to accordingly. I regret such a response, but prudence after the aggression endured by my community is necessary.
As verification of who I am, you will recognize the two photographs enclosed. Also, sir, I regret to inform you that our beloved J. died shortly after the start of the war.
Respectfully,
Colonel John Matherson
State of Carolina
He had written it out half a dozen times. If Bob was not alive, he had not given away any crucial details. He had also implied that his community now possessed air-defense capability if the message should fall into hostile hands. For that matter, he was not even sure now if Bob was indeed still a comrade on the same side or if that the tragic events of the last few years now placed them potentially on opposing sides. He had made no mention of Quentin’s ramblings about an EMP, whatever that might now mean. The proof of who he was Bob would know. One photo was from a visit Bob and his wife had made to Black Mountain, a poignant trip after he passed the word that Mary was in her final weeks. It was a photograph of all of them together, Mary, still clinging to life and smiling for the photo, six-year-old Jennifer and ten-year-old Elizabeth to either side of her, John and Bob standing behind them, trying to smile as well. The second was a photo of just the two of them in the field during Desert Storm, leaning against a Humvee, begrimed, grinning, for the cease-fire—at least for the next few years—had just been announced, their brief taste of America’s first open war in the Middle East at an end.
Thinking about it now caused a rush of memories. Were they still friends, or were they now enemies? Bob had been his mentor, taking a liking to John, who, fresh out of ROTC, had been assigned to Bob’s staff. As Bob went from colonel to general, John had followed the more intellectual route of a military career, going on to graduate work in military history, their paths crossing again at Carlisle, where John had the pleasure of teaching for a year after Desert Storm.
If enemies, it made him think of the life of Robert E. Lee, who was somewhat of a namesake for his friend. Lee had served as superintendent at West Point in the early 1850s. Ten years later, more than one of his young cadets from West Point faced him across the other side in the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg, the burning woods of the Wilderness, and the nightmare slaughter in front of Cold Harbor. After such blood-drenched fights, Lee would read in captured newspapers accounts of yet another of those young cadets’ deaths and knew deep within that the cause he fought for with such tenacity had resulted in those deaths.