Allegiance (44 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

Near Pierre, South Dakota

“I’ve got you on visual,
Oil Can Five-Five,” Ari said. “Right on time once again.”

“Roger that, One-One.
Five-Five maintaining altitude and speed.”

“Copy that,” Ari
replied. He switched to the shipboard comms. “General Gaines, please remind me
to give Whipper a big fat sloppy kiss when we get back to Schriever.”

“Forget Whipper,” Gaines
intoned. “Captain Grayson here is the one who should be on the receiving end of
that affection.”

Cade had been lost in
thought, staring out the window, watching the multicolored plats of land slide
beneath the helicopter, but as soon as he heard his name mentioned he glanced
over at Gaines, shook his head and returned his gaze to the landscape below.

“Want to tell them what
transpired between you and Whipper?” Gaines asked.

Cade said nothing in the
hopes that Gaines would drop it.

“You tell them or I
will.”

Gritting his teeth, Cade
wondered who’d told Gaines about the scuffle. Then he decided it didn’t really
matter—it was done. Water under the bridge, so to speak.

Cade turned his gaze to
the general. “I knocked his dick in the dirt,” he said slowly over the comms
for all to hear. In the background, he noticed Hicks turn from the starboard
gunner’s seat and flash a thumbs up as a broad grin creased his face.

“Wait one, Captain,” Ari
said, cutting him off. He tapped a button on the glass display that caused a
noise underfoot as the refueling boom extended from the Ghost’s snout. “After
we refuel... I’m all ears.”

Ari maneuvered close to
the Herc and expertly plugged the probe into the bobbing drogue chute. Then,
fighting against a minor side wind, he kept the helo level and steady while a
considerable amount of fuel was transferred. Next he uncoupled, eased away, and
then retracted the boom into the helo’s belly.

“Next,” Ari said,
indicating it was Ripley’s turn to commence her final refueling of the flight.

“Roger that. One-Two
moving into position,” Ripley said. Effortlessly, she hooked the Osprey up with
the lumbering Hercules. A couple of tedious minutes later, hundreds of pounds
of fuel had flowed into the Osprey’s tanks, Ripley bled her airspeed and backed
off from the drogue.

"Jedi One-Two, why
don’t you go ahead and get your passengers back to Schriever. I’m going to the
deck to check on our friends in Pierre.”

“Copy that, One-One.
Jedi One-Two is RTB—returning to base.”

“Roger that. Meet me at
the mess tent, Ripley?” Ari asked in an amorous tone.

“Don’t bet on it,
Night
Stalker
. This aviator doesn’t see other aviators.”

“Copy that,” Ari said,
putting on a sad act. “Too good for us
commoners
,” he added in his best
British accent.

“One-Two out. See you
back at Schriever.”

Ari watched the
Frankencopter
accelerate and climb while at the same time he did the exact opposite.

“Durant has been on the
horn with Schriever,” said Ari. “Whipper came through again. I’ll go low so we
can see with our own eyes.”

“Did he arrange an ammo
resupply?” Cade inquired.

“And then some. Beans,
bullets, and bandages. The whole nine yards,” Durant answered.

“Dang, Captain,” Lopez
piped up. “What did you do? Give the old first sergeant a couple of titty
twisters and force him to say uncle?”

“I heard it was a reach
around,” added Cross, who had been silent and brooding since they went wheels
up in Winnipeg.

Cade shot him a
murderous stare that softened somewhat after a beat. “You’re not Delta yet,
Cross. That means you don’t have the pedigree to bust my balls like that. Now
put a couple more missions under your belt riding along with us on... what does
Ari call his new venture?”—Cade thought on it for a second—“
Night Stalker
Airways.
You meet those requirements, then, and only then, will you become
an honorary Delta shooter and be able to crack on me like that. Right,
General?”

Gaines turned his head
to the Secret Service agent and nodded. “How bad do you want to be a member of
Delta?”

“Am I being recruited?”
Cross asked incredulously.

“No... we’re just
fucking with you,” said Cade.

“Sorry to break up the
love fest, ladies,” quipped Ari. “But we’re two mikes out from Pierre.”

The operators shifted on
their canvas seats to get a better view.

Tice readied his Nikon.

Lopez couldn’t resist.
“Preserving visions of hell for future generations, eh, Spook?”

“Following orders,
pendejo
.”

Lopez bristled then
stood down. “I almost forgot Mister Puker Patch here is honorary Delta now. I
prefer
asshole
over
pendejo...
asshole.”

***

As Ari held the Ghost
Hawk in a tight orbit over the battlefield below, Durant called up the
commander on the ground. A subordinate fielded the call, and then after a few
ticks of silence a new voice came over the comms. An upbeat-sounding Captain
Rodriguez thanked whoever arranged the drop and then explained how—in just the
span of a few hours since the resupply—he and his men were finally beginning to
make a dent in the number of walking dead.

“It was nothing,” Gaines
replied. “I’m sure you would do the same for us if the tables were turned.”

The captain didn’t
reply, but his mike stayed hot for a moment and gunfire and men yelling to one
another somewhere in the background came through loud and clear. Finally
Rodriguez came back on and said, “Tell the folks at Schriever we owe them one.”

“Will do soldier,”
Gaines said. “Godspeed to you.”

 ***

Twenty
minutes later

With Gaines’s
permission, Ari took the Ghost Hawk close to the deck, “Any of you guys seen
Top Gun?” Ari asked.

“Who hasn’t?” came
Durant’s stock answer for every obvious question Ari posed.

Heads bobbed an
affirmative throughout the cabin.

With the rocketship-like
E-Ticket ride up the eighty-degree face of the Flaming Gorge Dam fresh in his
mind, Cade merely grinned. He doubted Ari could top that one for
wow
factor, but he knew better than to put anything past the hotshot pilot.

“Well Goose,” Ari
quipped. “It’s time to buzz the tower.”

Cade felt his back press
to the bulkhead as the Ghost accelerated. He nudged his ruck under the seat
Gaines was occupying, cinched his safety harness, and held his rifle tightly
between his knees with the muzzle facing the decking.

“Hold on to your hats,
ladies,” Ari said over the shipwide comms. He eyed two rows of trees running
parallel one on either side of the helo’s flight path, spaced about a hundred
yards apart, just on the other side of what appeared to be a centuries-old
church. “Ride’s going to get bumpy,” he added as he took the ship closer to the
ground.

Through the window Cade
saw nothing but a brown and green blur. It was like he was staring at a blender
as someone whipped up something way too healthy for consumption. He looked at
Tice, who was turning whiter by the second. Then he regarded Hicks, who seemed
to be dozing—though he couldn’t see the crew chief’s eyes through the smoked
visor and couldn’t be certain.

Next to Cade, copying
what he had seen the other Delta boys already do, Cross was cinching himself in
tighter. He’d ridden into combat on a Little Bird’s platform and in a Black
Hawk a hundred times while he was in the Teams, but his sixth sense was telling
him he was in for a treat.

After signing himself
for the tenth time during the mission, Lopez eased back next to Tice and clopped
his new buddy on the shoulder.

Performing a maneuver
he’d pulled off hundreds of times in Middle East wadis, forests over the Fulda
Gap in Germany, and a hundred other places around the globe, Ari leaned the
Ghost on its side so the rotors looked like a giant circular saw about to slice
through the rapidly approaching church. Then, at the last second, he leveled
the craft and popped it up and over the black-shingled roof, narrowly missing
the white thirty-foot-tall steeple before hugging the terrain on the back side
of the building.

Tice blanched
immediately.

Cade could see the
Spook’s eyes searching for a safe place to deposit a stomach’s worth of MRE.
Then he smiled at the recollection of the former CIA man
earning
his
Puker Patch over Grand Junction Airport just days ago.
Keep the door closed
,
he thought to himself. Another whirlwind of regurgitated spaghetti was the last
thing he wanted to experience. As he turned his eyes forward and peered between
Ari and Durant, he noticed the looming canyon of trees, their skeletal branches
reaching for the helo’s skin on both sides.

“Splitting the
goalposts,” were the last words the occupants of the Ghost Hawk heard from Ari.

As Cade kept his eyes
glued to the cockpit glass between the pilots’ heads, the ground suddenly
tilted up at him and was black as night. The speeding craft juddered as a
handful of thunderous impacts rocked the fuselage and cockpit glass.

Simultaneously, Durant
said matter-of-factly, “Bird strike,” and Cade heard the turbines above and
behind his head make an out-of-place sound—a groaning dirge as an eight-pound
black bird was sucked through the baffled intake shroud and into the titanium
and magnesium blades spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute.

The impact with the
ground was unlike anything Cade had ever experienced. He felt the butt stock on
his M4 spear him in the gut and steal his wind. In his peripheral vision he saw
an angel or cherub flash by. Then something resembling the Washington monument,
tilted at a crazy angle, vanished into dust before his eyes. In one brief
snippet of time he saw pallid corpses—wearing slack faces of men, women, and
children—glide by outside the port window.

Fighting the unloading
G-forces, he turned his head by a degree and witnessed Gaines seemingly fold in
half, his flight helmet arcing down towards the helo’s buckled floor. To his
right, someone’s arms and legs chopped at the air, weightless, like a bronco
rider being thrown from his mount. His ruck levitated before his eyes, and then
a slipstream of carrion-scented air blasted him and a cacophony of sounds
assailed his ears: human voices crying out, carbon fiber shredding the earth,
and metal groaning somewhere behind and below him.

Then the
all-too-familiar copper smell of spilt blood commingled with the caustic odor
of burning electrical hit his nose.

All of this sensory
bombardment was followed immediately by silence and darkness.

###

Thanks for reading
Allegiance
. Look for Book 6:
Mortal
,
the forthcoming novel in the
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
series in
December of 2013. Please Friend Shawn Chesser on
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