Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

When they woke again it was morning. The rain had stopped but the overcast and the chill were still there, pressing down on the ruins.

They climbed to the ground. Paige saw at once where they were. The southwest corner of the park. She also saw what the pockets of deep water were. Subway stairs. The access to Columbus Circle Station was flooded to within a few feet below street level. Not from the rain, Paige was sure. It was only the natural water table of the island, in the absence of pumps to keep the tunnels clear.

With daylight they found dry wood: a dead sapling in the partial shelter of an intact stone entryway. They broke it into kindling and piled it on the dry concrete below the entry. Paige used a sharp-edged rock to carefully deform and take apart one of the SIG's.45 ACP bullet cartridges. She spread the powder in a fine layer beneath one edge of the kindling, and set the cartridge's primer at its center. Then she slammed the rock down onto the primer. The powder flashed, and a few of the twigs' ends smoked and glowed for a second, but nothing else happened.

The third cartridge-out of four that'd remained in the weapon-did the job. After that it was only a matter of finding dry enough wood to keep the fire burning. They tended it all morning and into the afternoon. They still hardly spoke. T ravis watched New York rise out of the afternoon haze far ahead. The aircraft-an F-15D this time instead of an F-15E, the distinction making no difference to its top speed-began to descend, and for the moment its speed actually ticked up a bit, from 1,650 miles per hour to 1,665.

The fighter had originated from Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami. It'd left there for Arica within five minutes of Travis's return through the iris, into the smoke of the burning private jet. Miami was only marginally closer to Arica than New York was. About three thousand miles instead of four thousand. But it was the closest place available that had two-seater F-15s.

Travis and Garner had done what they could to speed up the process: they'd secured the use of a Piper Cheyenne, the fastest thing based at Arica, to fly Travis north and shorten the F-15's trip. In theory, the Piper could've flown about six hundred miles while the fighter flew twenty-four hundred, saving the F-15 a round-trip distance of twelve hundred miles and putting Travis in Manhattan about forty minutes sooner than originally planned. In practice, that wasn't possible. Six hundred miles north of Arica there was nothing but the biggest jungle on the planet, and no airport in sight. The only viable option had been Alejandro Velasco Astete International, in Cusco, Peru-three hundred fifty miles from Arica. Travis had landed there and waited for the F-15-the move had bought him maybe twenty extra minutes to reach Paige and Bethany. Every second of them would count.

There'd been plenty of time to do the math, between the flying and the waiting. Travis had watched the line of blue lights continue to disappear, measuring the interval with his watch timer. Each light winked out twenty-eight minutes and eleven seconds after the one before it. Once he had that locked down, he was able to determine the exact time when the cylinder would stop working-assuming Finn's guess had been right, which it damn near certainly had. Speaking over the aircraft's radio with both Garner and his brother, Travis rehearsed every step of the process they'd lined up. The hastily planned scramble that would begin the moment the F-15's wheels touched down at LaGuardia.

On paper, it worked. Could work, anyway. If everything went just right. Especially at the end.

New York rose into detail ahead.

Exactly six minutes left on the cylinder.

Too goddamned close. Travis felt his hands sweating on the thing.

Manhattan gradually slid to the left of center as the plane made for the airport. The deceleration pulled Travis forward against his seat harness-he was pretty sure this wasn't the normal rate at which the plane slowed for a landing. LaGuardia's crossed runways resolved. Travis drew an imaginary line from there to the bottom of Central Park, and tried to guess the distance. Five or six miles, he thought. By road it would be twice that, and there was no telling how long the drive would take. He didn't know New York well enough to even guess, but he knew it would take a hell of a lot more than six minutes.

Which was why he wasn't driving.

By the time the F-15 lined up on its approach and settled into the glide path, half a mile out, Travis could already see the helicopter waiting. Not even parked on an apron-just sitting there beside the runway, right where the F-15 was going to come to rest. It was a big, hulking son of a bitch. A Sea Stallion, Garner's brother had called it. Eighty feet long, twenty-five feet high and wide. A massive six-blade rotor assembly on top. It could fly at about two hundred miles per hour once it was up to speed. It would cover the distance from LaGuardia to Central Park in a little over two minutes.

The F-15 descended through the last dozen yards of its altitude and hit the runway.

"Gonna roll fast and brake hard at the end," the pilot said. "Buy you some seconds."

"I'll need them," Travis said.

The cylinder had four minutes and fifteen seconds left.

"Hang on."

There wasn't much to hang on to. Travis saw two metal struts along the sides of the seatback in front of him. They looked sturdy enough. He braced his hands against them, and a second later he heard the airflow over the jet's body change radically, and his chest was pressed harder than before against the harness straps.

He saw the Sea Stallion just ahead. It had a tail ramp like a cargo jet, lowered and facing the runway. There was a crewman standing at the foot of the ramp. Overhead, the giant rotor was already spinning. Travis could see the mammoth aircraft rising on its wheel shocks, like it was just a few hundred pounds shy of lifting off.

The F-15 stopped twenty yards away from it. The plane's engines powered down immediately, their pitch dropping through several octaves per second-again Travis had the sense that normal procedures were out the window here. The pilot punched the canopy release and shoved it up and open. Travis stood up in his seat and bent at the waist to clear the angled canopy. He tucked the cylinder under his left arm and held it there as tightly as he could. Then he leaned forward, right out of the cockpit on the left side, grabbed the edge with his free hand and let his body swing down and out. It was over ten feet from cockpit to ground. His shoes were three feet above the tarmac when he let go; he landed hard, straightened up and sprinted for the chopper. He glanced at his watch as he ran. Three minutes and fifty seconds. T hey sat at the fire, eating apples from a tree Bethany had found at the southern edge of the park. Something had eaten everything below about eight feet, but the rest had been untouched.

Paige watched the long needles of a white pine bough curl in the flames.

"It's mid-October," she said. "Any night from now on could freeze. We need to go south if we want to survive."

"Do we want to survive?" Bethany said.

Paige looked at her.

"I'm sorry," Bethany said. "I'm not trying to be a quaalude, but… what's the point? Unless I seriously, seriously misunderstood high-school biology, we're the end of the line, right? You want to live to be a hundred here?"

Paige lowered her gaze to the flames again and tried to think of an answer to the question. It was essentially the same one she'd been asking herself since the middle of the night. T he Sea Stallion crossed the East River at a height of two hundred feet, just north of a long, narrow island that paralleled the Manhattan shoreline. A second later the aircraft was screaming over the rooftops of the Upper East Side, banking in long, gentle arcs to avoid the taller structures.