Doug was back as the balloon lifted its entire canvas off the grass, the side’s slick with reflective dew in the glimmer of flame from the burners. It took shape and filled out as the mad scientist hit the burners a few more short times. The gondola platform — the erector set of ladders, propane tanks, burners, bicycle seats and a car motor — began to sway on the ground, held down by a few ropes.
“Ok, let’s get on,” Doug said, gesturing Reynolds to her seat.
She took the front seat to have the best view of the countryside to navigate as Doug took the back to work the burners, rudders, ropes, and elevators and actually fly the ship. Quickly, she bungee-corded the reloaded M4 she had come to the island with to the ladder platform under her seat and took her place. Even with the addition of the two crewmembers, the Depplin was still gaining lift as the hot air in the envelope reached to the heavens, taking the balloon with it.
“Ok, guys,” said Doug as he worked the levers and gathering the ropes for the vents to the half dozen ground crew. “We are strapped in, preflight is done. Take a line and start the bounce.”
The MPs, Wyatt, and Wanda’s sons each grabbed a rope that held the Depplin staked to the ground. They untied the ropes from the ground anchors and placed a hand each on the ladder.
“Ok, I’ve got the elevators all the way back, start bouncing on three. One…two…three,” Doug said.
The ground crew pushed down on the gondola, sending it to the grass a few feet below and every time it surged back up stronger. On the fifth bounce, the craft hopped into the air and, in just a moment, Reynolds found herself twenty feet in the air, strapped on a bicycle seat that was zip-tied to the end of a ladder.
Doug cranked up the 1.3-liter Geo Metro engine at the other end of the ladder and they moved forward at full throttle. The craft continued rising and Reynolds watched the dark shape of the ground fall away until she could no longer see any of the ground crew’s faces as they moved up and away. The trees, sand dunes, and beaches lost their definition and blurred into dim dark patches of white, green, and blue.
As they rose, she heard Doug’s voice crackle in the earphones insider her helmet. She had given him Ketch’s old flight helmet and he had rigged the intercom into the
Depplin’s
modest wiring harness. “Looks like it works.”
“Looks like,” she answered. It was going to be a long trip.
««—»»
Sunrise was at 0649 according to the
Farmer’s Almanac
she had found at City Hall. By that time, she reasoned that they would be just past Fort Morgan and about halfway across the water of Mobile Bay.
Her reasoning had proven correct and as the first rays of sunlight hit the back of her neck, she placed her position at five miles from Dauphin Island. Below them stretched the still waters of Mobile Bay. The only way to calculate how fast they were going was to see how long it took to pass known reference points on the map. She estimated they were making 41-mph. Not bad for a garage-built blimp made in a week. Not bad at all.
The craft however, was far from perfect. Sometimes the winds shifted back and forth which caused the blimp, a giant sail in the sky, to move sideways, tracking a mile to the right for every two miles forward. Doug was working the rudder as hard as he could to correct it, but it was still a battle. They had risen to 2500-feet in altitude, as evidenced by the parachutist’s altimeter that Doug had strapped to his wrist. Even though that figure was relative as the Depplin pitched up and down due to thermals constantly. She had never been on a worse carnival ride.
The low point, however, was Doug’s conversation. They had been airborne for just under an hour and the only time he shut up was when he lit off the burners occasionally to keep the taco full of hot air.
“If we lose our pressure we will collapse like a limp banana peel,” he had said, each time he did it.
She looked down as they motored over the Mississippi Sound and the sun grew full in the sky behind them. The giant shape of the
Depplin’s
shadow could be seen on the wave tops below them in the morning light.
Two hours into their flight, near what the map showed to be Petit Bois Island, she spotted an oil slick — a shimmering, reflective, deep black on the water. She peered through the binoculars and could make out bright international orange life vests, pieces of wreckage awash in the waves, and what looked to be plastic inflatable lifeboats.
She called it in to the National Guard’s TOC back at the armory on Gulf Shores. The radio she had normally would reach just thirty miles, but that range was more than doubled due to their elevation above sea level. However, they were already at the edge of even that tether and would spend most of their mission too far away to make radio contact.
They continued onward, pushing across the water of the Mississippi Sound for two more hours, passing over the thousand white doormat-sized islets of the Chandeleur Islands and into the swamps around the village of Yscloskey, Louisiana just after 0900. As they passed over the brown chocolate milk-colored water of the bayou around Lake Borgne, she saw the occasional twinkle of a muzzle flash from small arms fire come up at them from the pine forests. They were much too high for anything fired from a rifle to reach them and she could not hear any outside noise over the hum of the unmuffled Geo engine twenty feet behind her. However, it was encouraging to think that at least some people remained alive down there, even if they liked to take pot shots at passing steampunk blimps.
Thirteen miles due west brought them to the Mississippi River near Belle Chasse. Enormously wide even from 2500-feet, the great brown muddy river flowed on silently below them. Several ships and barges were stationary in the river, anchored either in midstream or along the side of the banks.
“Any of them look like they are moving?” Doug asked, his voice ringing tinny in her earphones. Even though she could not see the man as he was sitting directly behind her, she had no doubt for a second that he had ever stopped being there.
“No. No smoke, no movement,” she said, consulting the map before directing him low over the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station. She had been there only six months before on a training mission. She had hoped to see the beautiful Marine CH-53 helicopters there, parked like great green frogs amongst murderous looking the F-18 fighter-bombers of the
River Rattlers
. Her heart sunk when all they saw were sandbagged fighting positions, bodies, oddly jerking zombies, and three blackened and scorched airframes along the tarmac. The CH-53 would have been perfect, as she had flown the same basic aircraft for years in the Air Force before moving into CV-22s. If they had a working CH-53 it would be a game changer. Her heart sank to know they did not.
“Ok, here is our turn, head due north and use the river as your reference. Let’s go check out the Big Easy.”
“They call it Naw-lins.”
“No, they don’t. My ex-husband works at Tulane. Only people that grew up somewhere else and moved there later say Naw-lins,” she answered.
“Too bad we are late for Mardi Gras.”
As they crept into the city and bayou was replaced by urban sprawl, the pine trees faded to concrete. It was hard to tell New Orleans from the air. So much of it was still a decaying ghost town from Hurricane Katrina, that what would seem out of the ordinary anywhere else, did not stand out. For a half hour, they hung low over the crescent city, flying over giant hotels in the city center, the French Quarter, the Mandeville Docks, over Canal Street to the Garden District. It was on Canal Street that they saw the first water standing. In some places, all they saw was water along the streets up the rooftops of buildings below.
“It always was an engineering mistake to build a city here, I thought. It is in a geologic bowl surrounded by water on all sides. You have to pump it out every day. If the pumps stop, it just fills up. Friggin’ Atlantis on the bayou,” Doug said quietly as they passed over the city, passing judgment from 1500-feet.
“Did you notice there were few zombies and fewer bodies?” Reynolds asked him.
“Yeah, guess they sank. Probably giving the alligators hell.”
Just outside of New Orleans to the northeast, the city fell away to be replaced again by the ten thousand year old bayou that surrounded the river metropolis. As Reynolds looked down for geographical points of reference, she noticed that the swamp grass had changed from a green and brown color to a dull rusty ginger. On the right-hand side of the
Depplin
, the forest was lush and green, even in fall, due to the pines and evergreens. On the left hand side of the blimp, the forest was made up of the same trees, but it looked as if it had rusted away.
“I’ve never seen anything like that and I’ve flown over the woods on five different continents,” Reynolds said.
Doug was quiet for a minute before he spoke. “I’ve seen that once before. On a documentary about Chernobyl. The pine trees in the swamp around the reactor absorbed so much high-level radiation that they turned colors. They called it the Red Forest.”
Reynolds felt a chill. “Is there a nuclear plant around here?”
“Yes, in Taft.”
Reynolds checked her map; Taft was only ten miles behind them. “Ok, open the throttle up on the Geo and let’s keep putting space between ourselves and here.”
She examined their map as the came out over Lake Pontchartrain. “Okay, next turn, yaw the rudder to move us 45 degrees off of north and head north-north east. We should be passing into Mississippi.”
They moved in silence, letting New Orleans sink into their minds. It had been a city of a half-million, the jewel of the Gulf. Now it was submerged and there was no FEMA, no National Guard, just water, alligators, and what used to be was now hidden underneath the radioactive new swamp of Orleans Parish.
They were over the thick loblolly pines of southern Mississippi by 1030 and Reynolds turned to a Snickers bar to pass the time as mile after mile of nothing passed below them. Dark pine forests, alternating with the occasional ribbon of road and rural highway, and the occasional farm, moved under them in repetition.
For two hours, the view remained the same, as the sun grew high in the sky. Even though the sun’s heat and the warmth of the burners helped lower the ambient air temperature, it was still 3-degrees colder every 1000-feet they rose. That fact, coupled with the 40-mph wind chill of forward movement, was having an effect on Reynolds’ exposed skin. She wore NOMEX flight gloves but could barely feel her fingertips. Whenever she was not using them to update their location, she had them stuffed into the pockets of the borrowed leather jacket. Her face, exposed around the corners of her hose-less oxygen mask, had long since become too wind burned to be anything but numb and she tucked her chin down into the collar of the bomber jacket to help keep her neck warm.
“So, how long were you married?” Doug asked unexpectedly. Another invite for in-flight conversation of the worst sort.
“Long enough to have two girls and realize he is a total ass. Everything about that relationship was a mistake but them.”
“How old are they?”
“18 and 15.”
“Tough ages.”
“You aren’t kidding. They are good girls though.”
“Where are they?”
“With their father.”
Doug shut up and went back to playing with his ropes and levers.
««—»»
It was noon when Reynolds came over the microphone and ordered Doug to slow down so they could find Mississippi Highway 49 near the Brooklyn community among the deep pine forests. The four-lane highway popped up like an asphalt vein through the green heart of the countryside. It was the main north-south route from the Coast to Jackson in the center of the magnolia state. It was around the Brooklyn area that the largest military base within 500-miles of Gulf Shores was hidden.
The Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, or in alphabet soup parlance, the CSJFTC, covered more than 136,000 acres of property, or about 250 square miles. Officially a National Guard base, the center had been there since World War I and most of the National Guard units in the south spent their summer training there.
Stone had advised her that the communications overheard by the
Fish Hawk
in Mobile Bay had most likely come from there. He theorized that the base usually had a brigade pre-training there to go to Iraq or Afghanistan on deployment. A brigade could mean as many as 4,000 troops with tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships, and everything else allocated to fight a modern war.
“Veer over there. That’s Shelby,” Reynolds said as the base loomed over the tops of the pines. It was located relatively in the middle of nowhere for the clear purpose of allowing tank drivers to maneuver their 70-ton armored beasts, and artillery gunners to get some firing practice, without disturbing the neighbors.
They passed low and slow over the huge base. Row after row of neat barracks buildings were laid out in grids below them. Drill fields, firing ranges, and motor pools stood ready to be used by unseen thousands of soldiers in training. Only the motor pools were empty, no soldiers could be seen, and the base was a ghost town. Reynolds’ heart rose again before plummeting to an even lower depth when she saw a half dozen pristine helicopters and transport planes arranged symmetrically on the parade field next to a cement building.