Devon Ford - The Fall

“Valdez, Farrell, back to the chopper,” he said, pausing to receive a brief acknowledgement of the order. “Jenkins, take the base personnel back to the bunker. Hammond, escort them,” he said, sending one of their Black Hawks back to base. “Pilloni, Taylor,” he said, calling the crew which had carried his team and were now split flying a helicopter each, “we continue to a second objective. Apache with us. Acknowledge.”

A round of acknowledgments fired in sequence in his ear; the benefit of being a small unit commander with dedicated air support being that he recognized each voice without the rigmarole of lengthy call signs. Call signs were great when working outside of his team, but for this they simply weren’t needed, and in the Special Forces world something which is unnecessary and slows you down is ditched. Now, having split his team, he introduced a degree of separation.

From the bird’s eye view which Colonel Simon and Major Healey enjoyed, the four birds spun up and lifted off, one black and one gray heading east, and an identical pair heading due north. Troy hit the transmit button again.

“Endeavor Actual with Endeavor One and Two en route to secondary objective,” he said. “Bunker, are you receiving?” A split-second pause before Dillon’s voice came back to him from their base. “Endeavor actual, Bunker. Acknowledged and awaiting Endeavor Three and Four to return. Confirm Apache with Endeavor Actual.”

“Apache confirms,” came a female voice, “call us Hawk.”

Troy had to smile at the all-round show of bravado, as the five birds split up and went two separate ways.

“Understood,” Drew said again before hanging up the satellite phone and prompting a wave of déjà-vu for Madeline. “Our ride is inbound, ma’am,” he said, reaching to speak into his personal radio and repeating the information to the four agents deployed to protect the secluded diner. “ETA five minutes.” Drew hadn’t checked, but he assumed they would have enough room to take the principle, Hell, the soon to be president , he thought, as well as her aide and the six Secret Service agents.

Five minutes went by in a blur, and the rotor noise was audible before the aircraft came into view between the tall trees either side of the road. The parking lot was big enough, despite the three armored SUVs parked there, for a pair of helicopters to set down long enough for three armed and fiercely wild-looking soldiers to drop out. Troy ran to the door, indicated for them to get their asses on the aircraft by way of waving them forward and directing them with a bladed hand toward the light gray helicopter. Six dark-suited agents formed a tight pack around two women and moved as a single organism toward the helicopter. They climbed aboard, and Troy pointed toward the headsets with attached boom mics. With their passengers safely aboard, Troy and his two operators jumped back onboard their Black Hawk, and once again under the ever-watchful eye of their own personal Hawk, dusted off. The noses of the helicopters all dipped and their tails raised to propel them eastwards, toward the distant mountain. The radio burst to life in Troy’s ear.

“To whom am I speaking?” said a female voice, richly cultured and accented. Troy had to assume that was the principle he was tasked to retrieve and protect.

“Captain Troy Gardner, ma’am,” he said. “US Army Special Forces.”

“Captain Gardner,” came the response, “I, and my people, are grateful for your assistance.”

“Ma’am,” Troy said back, “we’re all your people now.” A few glances were shot at him in the back of their helicopter, and he assumed now was as good a time as any to let everyone know what they had just achieved.

“Bunker, Endeavor Actual,” he called into the radio, “be advised Endeavor Two is now Air Force One.” The silence in response was answer enough to the gravity of the situation, regardless of the slight inaccuracies of the call sign.

“Acknowledged, Endeavor Actual. Bunker awaiting safe arrival of Air Force One. Out.”

“We can’t stay on the highway like this,” Louise said as she leaned through to the front seat. The roads were getting busier now, with people heading in all directions driving overloaded cars. “Head south from here,” she told Jake, “we can cut across country.”

The conversation to accept Ricky into their small group was a short one, and Louise had made her feelings clear from the outset. He turned out to be easy company, making any natural silence feel comfortable as they travelled along deep in their own thoughts.

The overwhelming deluge of cars heading in the opposite direction told a story by itself, as Pittsburgh and the surrounding towns disgorged their human contents to scatter the population to the wind. The four of them had driven all afternoon, stopping only once to siphon gasoline from abandoned cars. Mob rule had taken over everywhere; the inescapable element of human nature seeing everyone and everything as either prey or predator. Many others, just as they were, brandished their hunting rifles and shotguns as a means to dissuade anyone from trying to take what was theirs, and the sense of human cooperation had disintegrated when applied to strangers.

Turning away from the masses and taking the smaller roads added time to their journey, but made for safer passage. Their pickup was relatively new, and they were well equipped with both weapons, supplies and medicines after taking everything they could carry from Ricky’s store.

Cal thought that what he saw was the opposite of how the Brits had faced any attack in the past, even though the current concept was only applicable to the Blitz of World War II. In British history, when faced with attack, his ancestors would congregate in large towns to rely on the strength of walls and numbers. They would cooperate.

He imagined if the UK was suffering the same fate. If they were reeling from nuclear strikes in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham. If they were hunkering down and watching the fate of the United States of America on television, or if they too were grabbing their belongings and heading for the hills to disappear and disassociate with the populated areas. His personal reverie was disrupted by the sight of an overturned station wagon with a wheel still spinning. They rolled past slowly, seeing nobody with the wreck and no signs of anyone nearby.

“We should keep moving,” Ricky offered from the back seat next to Louise, a hint of nervous tension in his voice, “it is likely that people will use such things to try and make us stop.”

That observation went unanswered. None of them were that surprised how quickly mob rule took over, but all of them were quietly horrified how fast it happened and how quickly a fellow human being would resort to animalistic violence when facing the terrifying prospects they all imagined. Picking up their speed again, Jake nursed the pickup along the winding roads gaining and losing elevation in contrast to the long, straight highways they had been traveling on before.

One thousand and three hundred miles south, dull green troop transport planes stacked up on the runways for their turn to take off. Plane after plane rammed with as many troops as could be carried jostled for their uncomfortable space onboard to await the even more uncomfortable and deafening journey north east where they took care to skirt the area of radioactive destruction which had been Florida.

The People’s Liberation Army had transported almost a hundred thousand troops to Cuba and Venezuela over the last month, all carried by routine cargo ships and none of them arousing the suspicion of the world’s intelligence community. The Chinese troops themselves had not been told where they were going, for fear of them telling anyone. Without warning, entire regiments of soldiers were shipped without affording them the opportunity to contact anyone they knew. They were spirited away by night, boarded onto ships or flown out of the country. Fifty thousand more were aboard troop transport ships, as three quarters of the Chinese Navy steamed toward the western seaboard.