Allegiance (32 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

Near Pierre, South
Dakota

The minute deceleration
awoke Cade from his slumber a few seconds before Ari’s voice resounded in his
flight helmet. He looked out the port window as Ripley guided her Osprey to a
perfect linkup with the white refueling hose extending behind the trailing edge
of the KC-130s right wing.

“Nice...” Durant
intoned. “She got the basket on the first shot.”

Ari matched speed with
the flying gas station and watched with one eye the delicate dance happening
off the Ghost Hawk’s nose. After what must have seemed like an hour to Ripley,
but in reality had been only a couple of minutes, the fuel had been transferred
from the Herc into the Osprey’s puncture-resistant fuel bladders, and she had
disengaged and put her bird in a position mirroring that of the Ghost Hawk—only
on the opposite side of the refueling bird.

“Oil Can Five-Five, how
copy?” Ari said to the pilot of the turboprop Hercules.

 “Good copy, Jedi
One-One,” came the pilot’s tinny reply.

“Seems like Whipper’s
turned over a new leaf,” said Ari. “Word is he released enough fuel for the
mission and then some. Any truth to that?”

“Pull up and find out,”
said the Hercules pilot. He had a familiar southern twang in his voice but Ari
couldn’t place where he had heard it before.

“Copy that,” Ari replied
as he matched airspeed with the Herc and finessed his own controls as the
bigger aircraft’s slipstream buffeted the helo momentarily. “In the sweet spot.
Hitting the drogue,” he informed the crew chief, who was in the rear of the
refueling plane looking through a small porthole, and had, for very good
reason, the best seat and view of the refueling procedure than any of them.

Sitting with his back
pressed firmly to the bulkhead and his eyes shut tightly, Cade smiled at the
comment about Whipper and his newfound understanding of a concept most people
learned early on in life: Sharing is Caring. Then, through the ship’s
thinly-layered carbon fiber skin, he sensed the coupling taking place thirty feet
in front of where he was. The slight
clunk
reverberated almost
imperceptibly through the seat of his pants as the trailing hose mated with the
retractable fuel probe sticking from under the helo’s chin plexi.

Another few minutes
passed and Cade felt the helo shudder and decelerate and lose altitude.

He looked out the port
side window at the hardscrabble landscape gliding by. From the briefing two
hours earlier, he knew their first refueling was set to take place seventy-five
miles south and west of Pierre, South Dakota, and from what little he
remembered from geography in school, the sparkling silver snake running off
into the distance on the left had to be the Missouri River.

Meanwhile, in the
cockpit, Ari flashed the boom operator a thumbs up that he hoped got noticed.
“Jedi One-One. Going to the hard deck to recon Pierre,” he said to Ripley in
One-Two over a separate secure channel. Then, after receiving a “
Copy
”
from Ripley’s co-pilot, he switched over to the previous frequency—the same one
on which he had been chatting up Oil Can Five-Five.

“Where the heck have my
manners gone?” said Ari. “Thank you for the drink, Oil Can Five-Five.”

“You got it, Jedi
One-One,” the pilot drawled.

“Looks like we’ll be
picking you up over Winnipeg for a top off,” added Ari, who had just received
updated flight data on his HUD—Heads-Up-Display—courtesy of Durant, who was
also in the process of setting up a live satellite downlink to be shared
between both the Ghost Hawk and the Osprey. “Maybe we’ll take in a Jet’s game and
get a couple of Molsons when my
customers
finish their
transaction
,”
he added.

“Copy that,” said the
pilot, playing along. “And they had better be frosty. It’s been too long since
I’ve enjoyed a cold beer... or a
hot
woman for that matter.”

“Copy that, I feel ya,
Tex,” Ari quipped as he nudged the stick forward and fought hard not to
chuckle. “You know what they say... misery loves company, and beggars can never
be choosers. And if you ask me... those two go together like OJ and his
gloves.”

The Hercules pilot
laughed and then signed off and nosed the gray bird into a climb to get to a
more fuel-friendly cruising altitude.

The SOAR pilot, being
anything but demure, almost always left the shipboard comms open so that anyone
wearing a flight helmet and had it plugged in would be privy to his ongoing
banter. And it was no secret among his peers and the people he delivered into
combat that the exceptional chopper jock considered his knack for comedy a
close second only to his prowess at the stick. Desantos, in a roundabout way,
had kind of contributed to these antics. The salty operator had always looked
the other way when it came to the Night Stalker’s penchant for ongoing chatter,
because he knew from experience gained on battlefields all over the world that
when the time came for Ari to do his job—which was flying a helicopter as if
his nerve endings were grafted with the thing—the aviator was all business. So
Gaines had been content to just sit back and enjoy the dog and pony show. After
all, the precedent had been set by one of his all-time favorite peers, so who
was he to go changing the rules in the middle of the game.

Cade couldn’t keep from
smiling after hearing the last part of the conversation between Ari and the
unnamed pilot who was flying the most important aircraft in the sky save the
one that Cade was strapped into—the aircraft that was currently carrying enough
JP8 to see everyone aboard both the Ghost Hawk and the Osprey home with some to
spare.

He cast a sidelong look
at Gaines and noticed he was smiling as well. Then, without making eye contact,
he looked away in order to take in the countryside below. He estimated the helo
was now no more than five hundred feet from the deck. The descent had been so
gradual and quiet that he hadn’t noticed the seventy-five hundred feet of
altitude Ari had shaved off in just a matter of minutes.

Cade rested his eyes as
the Ghost Hawk droned on for another fifteen minutes, and when he opened them
the Missouri River dominated the terrain and a small city was scrolling into
view. He watched Jedi-One One’s shadow far off on the port side keeping pace as
they paralleled a two-lane road that entered the city from the southwest.

Aside from a few squat
office-type buildings, and one massive domed structure he took to be the
capitol building, most of Pierre consisted of tightly packed residential
neighborhoods radiating from a central downtown core.
Pretty unimpressive
for a state capital
, thought Cade. Strangely enough, the blacktop below
wasn’t choked with cars or Zs like the highways near Colorado Springs and
Denver had been after the outbreak.

He searched his memory,
trying to recall how many people lived in Pierre.
Nothing.
Though he had
impressed himself by remembering that Pierre was the state capital, he didn’t
know one other fact about the place.

“How many people in
Pierre?” he asked over the comms to no one in particular. He received a shrug
from Hicks, whose eyes were hidden behind the smoked visor of his flight
helmet.

“No idea,” Tice replied
as he snicked a
Hubble
-sized telephoto lens onto the black Nikon camera
body. He put the gear bag aside and panned the camera around the cabin, nearly
decapitating Lopez in the process.

“There were less than
twenty thousand before the event,” Durant answered.

The city bumped up to
the edge of rocky bluffs north of the Missouri River and was fairly flat,
except for a few low rolling hills far away in the distance. Tice whirred away
with his camera as the Ghost Hawk overshot the river and made landfall once
again. Directly below the helo was a sizable National Guard presence complete
with a dozen or so Humvees—half of them parked on a lonely bridge straddling
the turbid brown water. Soldiers and citizens waved at them as Ari slowed the
chopper and scribed a large arc in the sky overtop the aging iron bridge. With
only two lanes, one going each way, the black span looked like it was built
from an old discarded Erector Set.

“Looks like there are
quite a few survivors down there,” Cross noted. He stabbed a finger at the
glass. “See the road-blocked streets? There... and there. Looks like the dead
own a good chunk of downtown.”

Durant’s voice crackled
through the onboard comms. “Damn smart of them to keep the bridge clear as an
egress route.”

“
Egress
to
where... the desert? The great wide open?” Lopez asked. “Can’t be much more
than tumbleweeds and oil derricks out there.” Then his voice rose an octave.
“Madre,” he said. “I see
demonios
... thousands of them.”

Sure enough, pressed
against the crude fortifications erected at the intersection of every street
for five blocks on either side of the main road leading towards the bridge were
too many walking dead to count, let alone guestimate.

“We need to get these
folks some help,” Gaines said, finally breaking his self-imposed silence. Then
he quickly rattled off a series of orders. “Durant, see if you can get someone
on the radio. Ari, take us as low as you can, and Tice, take some extreme
close-up photos of the situation down there, then have Durant fire them off to
Nash back at Schriever so she can light a fire under Whipper and have some ammo
parachuted in to those fine Americans.”

“Copy that,” Durant and
Tice replied nearly in unison.

“General, shall I deploy
the mini-guns... and what
exactly
do you mean by
low
?” asked Ari,
who, unless instructed to do otherwise, would have them riding the razor’s
edge, skimming main street between store fronts while nearly getting paint from
the yellow centerlines on the helo’s underbelly.

“You
know
what I
mean, Ari Silver,” Gaines replied testily. “I want a
closer
look. One
hundred AGL should do the trick.”

“Copy that,” said Ari
sheepishly. “If I’m good... on the way home can I fly low and fast?”

Shaking his head, Gaines
said, “I will give it
some
thought. First we have to complete this
mission.”
You fly boys are all the same
, is what he didn’t say.

After a mental fist pump
celebrating what hadn’t yet been fully decided, Ari nudged the stick to bring
them within a hundred feet of the top segment of the bridge and the tan Humvees
he presumed were protecting it.

Durant switched over so
that only the general and the aircrew were on the same channel. “I have a man
says he’s Governor Boothe on another channel. Says they have been trying to
hail us.”

“Put them through
shipwide,” Gaines said. “We’re all on the same team.”

“Except Spooky and the
President’s manservant,” Lopez mumbled to himself.

Before engaging the
survivors on the ground, Gaines looked across the cabin and shot the stocky
Hispanic operator a healthy dose of the stink eye.

Note taken
, thought Lopez as he shifted his gaze forward
towards the cockpit, where he could see between the pilots the areas of the
city that were completely overrun by the Zs.

“I have Governor Jensen
Boothe on the open line,” Durant intoned.

Gaines nodded to
indicate that he could hear, then he keyed his mike. “I’m General Ronnie
Gaines, USSOCOM—United States Special Operations Command—operating out of
Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Who am I talking to?”

“Jensen Boothe here,
Sir. I’m South Dakota’s governor.”

“Good to meet you,
Boothe. Good to hear someone’s still keeping the peace down there. I see you’ve
got the Guard deployed. That right?”

“Yes Sir, but this is
all that’s left of the Guard. Got a captain in command down here. The adjutant
general went missing when Madison fell to the dead. Sioux Falls was silent by
the first Sunday after the outbreak. And Fort Meade and Ellsworth Air Force
Base also are not operational. The B-1 bombers all flew out of Ellsworth early
on. Good thing... Rapid City is full of those things too.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t
much left anywhere, Governor,” Gaines said. “I wish I had some good news for
you.”

“Two weeks and
everything is gone. Just gone. We’re hungry down here, Sir,” Boothe said. Then,
after a long silence. “Sir, are you there?”

“I’m still here,” Gaines
said. “I sympathize fully with you, Governor. D.C. pretty much fell apart on Z
day. MacDill fell three days after. Bragg, Dix, Lejeune, Coronado... all gone.
Can you put the captain on?”

“Sure, he’s close by.”

“What is his name?”

“Rodriguez... Captain
Rodriguez,” said the governor as a volley of automatic weapons fire filtered
over the mike along with his words.

“Captain Rodriguez
here.”

Gaines introduced
himself in the same manner he had the governor. “What can I do for you
right
now,
soldier?” he asked.

“Sir, we need ammo and
food... in that order. We’re holding them off but I don’t think we have long. I
figure we have enough ammo to last half a day max, then we have to cut and
run.”