The Final Day (After, #3)(40)
“All right,” he finally said with a sigh. “Alternatives?”
“This guy, if he is real, is trying to reach out to you,” Reverend Black said, forcing a smile to try to ease the moment. “If real, he tried to reach out to you with that tragic messenger. Now this cryptic reply in Morse code.
“Those two methods”—Black paused for a moment—“tell me that there is some important reason behind this entire affair, and he wants to keep his cards close, perhaps even from those around him. Acknowledge receipt of the message, counter with some alternative.”
“If it is so all damn important, tell him to come here,” Forrest snapped.
“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.”