The Living Will Envy The Dead (29 page)

“We’d be quite happy to join up with you,” Mayor Thompson said, finally.  He had just been elected in a quite vote, having been the underground leader of the resistance, such as it was.  I didn’t blame him for failing to overthrow CORA.  Their set up had been calculated to make direct resistance difficult and almost always fatal.  He’d kept hope alive and that was important.  “Just don’t leave any of those bastards here.”

I shrugged.  St. Marys was going to be in trouble in the future, with or without the remains of CORA staying in the town.  They hadn’t really made enough farmland to survive, not least because CORA would have reaped the benefits of their knowledge and effort, and they might well face starvation in the future.  CORA had stockpiled as much as possible, of course, but there wasn’t really enough to tide the entire town over the coming year. 

“We won’t,” I promised.  “We can also find work for any of you who want to move elsewhere after this.  We have far too much to do and too little people to do it with.”

The Ohio River stank, I realised, as we stopped near a small dock.  Boats had used to go up and down the Ohio, but judging from the stink, something was badly wrong somewhere.  CORA had enforced strict polices of boiling every drop of water, a wise decision from them, but I made a mental note to get the NBC team to take a careful look at the water.  It might be the result of dead bodies rotting away somewhere, or it might be the result of a radioactive leak somewhere.  It would have to be checked before we did anything else in the area.

“Of course,” Thompson agreed.  He nodded once, thinking it over.  He was a good man, in his way, a sailor before he’d retired to St. Marys.  “I’ll see how many we can send up in the next few weeks.”

I went back to Mac and we worked on the military deployment plan.  CORA hadn’t cleared out the area between St. Marys and Pennsboro and so we would have to patrol it extensively enough to remove or assimilate the bandits, if there were any bandits.  I had to return to Ingalls, if only to report to the Constitutional Convention, but I left Mac in charge.  I trusted him to organise everything while I went back to Ingalls, taking the prisoners with me, along with a handful of representatives from St. Marys for the Convention.

And yes, I admit it; I made a mistake.  I missed a clue that had been dangled right in front of me.  I could have saved so many lives if I had acted on the clue, but I missed it completely.  It was my fault, for which I take all the blame.

The war hadn’t even begun.

But it was coming.

I didn't crash the plane. I simply relocated the aircraft with extreme prejudice, after a complete loss of lift and thrust functions!

-H.M. "Howlin' Mad" Murdock, The A-Team

“I’m surprised to see you here, sir,” Biggles said.  “I thought that you would have sent someone more…expendable along to the airfield.”

I smiled, rather dryly.  Biggles was actually called Rupert Elliot, but everyone called him Biggles, mainly because of the World War One flying gear he affected during the first years after the Final War.  Compared to a modern day jet pilot, he looked faintly ridiculous, but there was something oddly warming about the uniform he wore.  Biggles claimed that his great grandfather had actually flown in the Royal Flying Corps for the British, having crossed the Atlantic just to fight Imperial Germany, but I have no idea if he were telling the truth or making it up.  His own flying skills were not in doubt.  He had used to fly the Harrier for the Corps and, as such, I trusted him implicitly.  I would have been a great deal more uncomfortable with a Warthog pilot.

“I wanted to see this for myself,” I said.  It had been a week since we had defeated CORA, liberated their occupied town and brought the prisoners back to Stonewall to join the work gangs.  There was little happening in Ingalls, or the remainder of the Principle Towns, that needed my attention and I freely admit that I was bored.  I had delegated too much and, all of a sudden, all I had to do was oversee it and put in my own hours on the gardens.  “Is it really useable?”

Biggles grinned and led me over to the hanger.  The small private airfield had been largely overlooked by the refugees - and the Russians, who had definitely not considered it worthy of a nuclear bomb.  It had been used for a mixture of business and private flying, but the war had turned most of the aircraft stored on the site into expensive junk, completely unable to even power up their engines.  The trend had been going towards more and more electronics in the aircraft and…well, the EMP had put paid to that.  The damage might not be as complete as I was implying, but it was almost certainly too dangerous to even attempt to fly most of the aircraft.  We just didn’t have the tech base to check them all out properly.

“There she is,” Biggles said.  “Isn’t she a beauty?”

I had to smile.  The tiny aircraft looked like something out of the last century – which, as it happened, it was – covered in markings from the American Civil War.  The Confederate Air Force had patterned itself more and more after the Confederacy in a response to political correctness, which was whining on and on about how the Confederate Air Force was promoting slavery and all the other evils of the CSA, and I had to admit that the aircraft looked spectacular.  There was never much political about the Confederate Air Force – it was really a group of flyers trying to keep older aircraft running, including a B52 from the Second World War – but they were stubborn when it came to their name.  It had become a gesture of defiance more than anything else and I rather appreciated the irony.  They were the closest thing we had left to an air force.

“They intended to disperse all of their aircraft if there was a disaster of some kind,” Biggles said.  “They flew this one up here to this airfield and then…well, we don’t know.  The war forced several pilots into the air in hopes of escaping and God alone knows what happened to them.  This aircraft was just abandoned here in the hanger until we stumbled across it when we returned to the airfield.”

I lifted an eyebrow.  “But you can fly it, right?”

Biggles looked offended.  “Of course,” he said.  “This is a L-5 Sentinel aircraft, designed for use in the Second World War.  It could fly from a rough improvised airfield, or off a carrier, and there were even a few that landed right in the middle of German positions and took off afterwards.  A monkey could fly this plane, sir, and I am a demon pilot.  We’re all fuelled and ready to go.”

“And the EMP?”  I asked.  I had a good idea of the answer already, but I wanted to hear it from him.  “What kind of damage did it inflict on this aircraft?”

“Hardly any,” Biggles assured him, with a sniff.  “Those fancy modern planes are barely good for anything now, apart from cannibalising and melting down their expensive computers for raw materials, but this baby is still flyable.  The only thing she carried that was knocked out by the EMP was the IFF transponder and…well, it’s not as if we still have F-22s patrolling our skies, is it?  We won’t have access to the navigation satellites, of course, but if my grandfather could fly something like this without them, I dare say that I can do the same.”

He paused.  “The real danger is getting lost, of course, so we have rigged up a transponder here to guide us back to the airfield,” he added.  “I shouldn’t get lost, but I doubt somehow that the countryside looks the same around here as it did before the war.  I’ve also rigged up a Geiger counter and a few other bits and bobs to keep an eye on the surrounding environment.  If there’s trouble, we’ll be the first to know about it.”

“Good,” I said.  I eyed the pair of hoses the ground crew had set up and scowled.  If we passed too close to where one of the nuclear bombs had detonated, there was always the chance of picking up radioactive dust on the plane.  The ground crew would have to wash the aircraft before we disembarked.  “Is there anything else I should know before I call my life insurance people to take out a new policy?”

“Oh, parachutes,” Biggles said.  He laughed loudly enough to pass as overacting.  I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth.  “We don’t have any.  I’ll try my hardest not to crash.”

Twenty minutes later, we were in the plane as it roared to life.  It was deafeningly loud, louder than any of the transports I’d been on during my career as a Marine, but there was something almost homely about it.  I had never understood what drove some of the flyers I’d met, but perhaps I understood it more now, when an aircraft was completely under their control, rather than controlled by a computer that they directed.  It just meant more to them that they had learned a skill and had the chance to use it.

“They were smart enough to keep the original starter and other equipment,” Biggles called back, over the racket.  I could barely hear him and was starting to wonder if my ears would be permanently damaged by the noise.  “The Confederates were religious fanatics about keeping everything as it had been before, which was damn lucky for us, sir.  A more modern starter might have had problems with the EMP, or even indelicate handling.  We’re perfectly safe.”

So saying, he opened the throttles – or something; my knowledge of plane-handling is limited, as you can probably tell – and we rocketed down the runway and up into the air.

“Ah,” I said, as the plane climbed.  “This is obviously some new meaning of the word ‘safe’ that somehow was left out of the dictionary.  I don’t feel safe.”

“That’s when it gets you.” Biggles assured me.  “When you’re feeling safe, something always picked that moment to go spectacularly wrong.  Now, where shall we go first?”

I wanted to take the aircraft in the direction of New York, but somehow I doubted that we could go that far.  “Take us in the direction of Richmond,” I ordered, finally.  “I want to see as much as we can of that area.  How far can we go?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at just how far this baby can go,” Biggles said, flashing me a grin.  “This isn’t one of those fuel-guzzling F-22s, you know.  We could travel for hundreds of miles without having to refuel.  It’s just damn slow, you know.”  He paused.  “Still, we’ll have to see how far we get before we reach bingo fuel.  I don’t want to have to put down in unexplored territory.”

His words stung slightly, a reminder that most of the United States was unexplored territory these days.  I had hopes of using the aircraft to locate other surviving settlements and other survivors, but he was right.  We couldn’t take risks with our only aircraft.  Back when I’d been in Afghanistan, we’d had hundreds of briefings and warning notes about the possibility of an aircraft crashing somewhere in the badlands, where recovering it and the crew would be almost impossible.  Here, it was possible that we’d run into friends and allies, but equally possible that we would run into more bandits like CORA.  God alone knew just what there was over the next hill.  It bothered me more than I cared to admit.  Expanding might prove to be the key to our survival…or it might embroil us in an endless series of tiny conflicts.

“Look,” Biggles said, as we passed over the Spruce Knobs National Recreation Area and the Monongahela National Forest, heading down towards Lexington.  I had had hopes of finding allies at Lexington.  It was close to the Virginia Military Institute, which had been turning out cadets for hundreds of years, and should have had a fair chance at survival.  You would be amazed to discover how many supplies are stored at training centres.  No one shoots off bullets and ammunition like the new trainees.  “I think that that’s a bad sign.”

I couldn’t disagree.  Where Lexington had been, or where we thought Lexington had been, seeing as we had no GPS or other navigational system, there was a massive black crater.  It was surrounded by the ruins of a town…and, looking down more carefully, I think it was actually several craters.  The counter clicked once, alarmingly, and Biggles moved us back up towards the Institute.  It had been destroyed long ago.

“They must have regarded it as a target,” Biggles said, shocked.  Something, at last, had punched through his demeanour.  “What the hell were those cadets doing to deserve such treatment?”

I said nothing.  There was a form of nuclear strike plan that involved destroying a country’s ability to rebuild.  The Virginia Military Institute and Lexington might not have been priority targets for the early parts of the war – although I had a sneaking suspicion that the Institute might also have served as a command and control centre for forces if everything senior had been knocked out – but they could have contributed much to the national recovery.  Trained and armed cadets, led by veterans from the Gulf, Iraq, and years of attempted nation-building would have had an significant effect.  They had been targeted in order to prevent any such reconstruction from taking place.