William Johnstone - Phoenix Rising

HELP

We Need Food

Medical Care

“Can’t we land so I can see if I can help?” Karin asked.

“They probably need food more than they need medical care,” Jake replied.

“Maybe we could give them a case of MREs,” Karin suggested.

“It’s all right with me if you can get the others to agree,” Jake said.

Karin discussed it with the others, then a moment later keyed her mic again.

“Everyone else says it is okay,” she said.

“All right, we’ll land and see what we can do for them.”

Jake circled back, then started his descent. The rotor blades popped loudly as they cavitated down through their own rotor wash.

Just as he was flaring out to land, two men ran of the house. Both were carrying M-16s and they began shooting.

Jake terminated the descent, pushed the cyclic forward, and jerked up on the collective. The helicopter leaped up over the house; then he lowered pitch, flying nap of the earth and putting the house between them and the two gunmen on the ground.

He continued flying at a low level, popping up just high enough to clear the ground obstacles. Finally, when he was more than two miles away, he climbed back up to altitude.

The blades were now making a whistling sound and the helicopter had picked up a slight vertical bounce.

“Damn,” John said. “We’ve got a whistle and a one-to-one vertical.”

“Yeah, I’ve been through this before,” Jake said. “We took a round, or maybe a couple of rounds, through the rotor blades.”

“They didn’t really need help, did they?”

“No. They were using it to lure a helicopter down so they could do to them exactly what they tried to do to us.”

“Yeah, but, you’ve got to wonder just how many helicopters there are flying around right now,” John said.

“Can’t be too many, I don’t think,” Jake said. “As far as I know we are the only ones to fly out of Rucker in the last six weeks, and I can’t think of anyplace that would be more likely to launch a helicopter than us. Bless their hearts, we were about their only chance and they blew it.”

John laughed so hard that tears began rolling down his face, and only Karin, who also had a headset, knew what he was laughing about. The others looked at her quizzically, and she tried to explain what they were laughing at, but it wasn’t the same.

The flight down was almost two hours in length, and all along the route they saw vehicles abandoned on the road, towns with their business districts deserted, and burned-out houses. They also saw several bodies, some alongside the roads, some on the streets of the town, and others lying out in open fields.

“There it is, the Gulf,” Jake said.

Before them the Gulf spread from horizon to horizon, blue and sparkling in the sunshine. Jake turned right and they saw a long peninsula stretching toward the west. The peninsula was quite narrow and it separated the Gulf of Mexico from Mobile Bay.

“Where is this place we’re going?” John asked.

“It’s at the very end of this peninsula.”

“It’s an island,” Karin said. “They call it Pleasure Island.”

“How can it be an island? It isn’t surrounded by water,” John said.

“Yeah, technically it is,” Jake said. “We just crossed the intercoastal canal. That cuts the peninsula off from the mainland and makes it an island.”

Jake dropped down to about five hundred feet, then flew right along the surf. As they looked out onto the very expensive houses along the beach they could see the extent of damage from the recent hurricane. At least one out of every three houses was completely destroyed, and half of the ones still standing were damaged by degrees from light to severe. The farther west they flew, the greater the damage.

“Look at these houses,” Karin said. “They are million-dollar-plus houses.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “And that was back when a million dollars meant something.”

The Dunes, Fort Morgan

Bob Varney was on page one hundred thirteen of his work in progress. One thing he did miss about the computer was the word-count feature. He estimated that he was just under twenty-five thousand words, using his old method of counting at two-hundred-twenty words per page.

After he finished the book, he would have to go back through the first draft as he did in the pre-computer days, marking up typos, and making editorial adjustments. That would require retyping the entire manuscript. It was hard to believe that he wrote his first one hundred books that way.

Suddenly Bob heard a sound that took him forty years back in time. For a moment, he wasn’t in the third-floor office of his beach home, he was in the BOQ at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon. He was typing on this very typewriter, and passing overhead was a UH-1 helicopter returning to the base.

Bob had been hearing helicopters pass overhead for the last ten years, but he had not heard anything like this in a long time. The UH-1 has a very unique sound. Put any Vietnam veteran in an open field, blindfold him, and fly ten helicopters overhead but only one Huey, and the veteran will be able to tell which one is the Huey.

“Damn, Charley, that’s a Huey!” Bob shouted. Getting up from his desk, he stepped onto the front deck and saw, flying at an altitude of about five hundred feet over the surf, a U.S. Army UH-1D helicopter, in the muted colors that were used for such aircraft in Vietnam.

“ Choi oi ,” Bob said, using the Vietnamese expression that covers everything from mild surprise to total shock. “It is a Huey! What is it doing down here?”

Charley looked at him quizzically.

“You don’t understand, do you?” Bob said. “Well, here’s the thing, see. I used to fly that very same kind of helicopter. Oh, this was long before you were born, Charley Dog. And the thing is, this is definitely an Army helicopter, but the Army doesn’t fly them anymore. And, even if they did, what is it doing down here?”

Bob watched the UH-1D as it headed west, still over the surf; then he saw the pilot make a climbing turn out over the water, gaining another two hundred feet or so as he continued the turn through two hundred seventy degrees. Then the helicopter started descending.

“Where is he going, Charley?”

Bob ran back into the house. “Ellen!” he called. “A Huey!”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear the helicopter?”

“Yes. What about it? Isn’t it going out to one of the offshore rigs?”

“No, it wasn’t a civilian helicopter. It’s Army. It was a Huey, a UH-1D model.”

“Maybe the Army sent someone down here to check on the damage from the hurricane.”

“This isn’t the Army.”

“I thought you just said that it was.”

“I meant it was an Army helicopter, but not the kind they use now. This was a Huey, like I flew in Vietnam. Only it’s been thirty years since the Army flew them, so who is flying it, and what is it doing down here?”

Fort Morgan

Jake circled over Fort Morgan so everyone could get a good look at it.

“Wow,” John said. “It’s shaped like a star.”

“Yes, that’s the way forts were built then.”

“What is it doing here?”

“It has been preserved as an historical landmark,” Jake said. “This very fort is considered the finest example of military architecture in the Western Hemisphere.”

“It sure looks old.”

“It is old. Well over one hundred fifty years old. It was a very important fort during the Civil War.”

Jake made a wide circle out over the sea, nearly as far out as the old Mobile Point Lighthouse; then he turned back toward the fort, setting up a 500-feet-per-minute rate of descent. He made a long, shallow approach to the fort until he cleared the walls. Then he arrested his forward motion, moved into a hover, and finally made a vertical descent for the last fifty feet. The rotor wash blew up bits of grass and some of the sand that had been blown in by the recent hurricane. He touched down, then killed the engine, and the blades coasted down until they stopped.