“Yessir.”
Grafton was adding a quart of oil to the Cessna’s engine when I came walking up. I put my M4 carbine and a little bag of extra loaded magazines and a dozen grenades in the plane. The sun was trying to come up under a high overcast. The earth smelled of late summer, pungent, fertile, and hinting of fall. The temperature was in the fifties so my sweatshirt felt good. Truly, we had a marvelous piece of the planet.
I stood there inhaling it all and watching the sun fire the tops of the trees as Grafton finished his preflight. I could hear the PA system squawking, wakening the troops. I had been hesitant to wake Sarah so I didn’t kiss her good-bye; now I wished I had.
“You ready?” he asked.
“I suppose.”
We got aboard and put on seat belts and headsets, and he fired up the engine. It caught on the first crank, and the prop spun into a blur with a nice little roar, blasting the morning dew from the windscreen. I checked the fuel gauges on the butts of both wings: we were full.
There was no wind, so after waiting a moment for the engine to warm and doing a short run-up and mag check, we were rolling down the runway. The tail came up and in less time than it takes to tell, we were airborne. Out over the camp and the trees, climbing into that morning sky between the low green mountains, then turning eastward into the morning sun.
He gave me a brief on the ICS. “We’ll check the roads the two columns are going to take, then we’re going to Washington.”
“I thought we were the eyes of the army?”
“For a little while. Then we have places to go, things to do, people to see.”
“Right.”
“It’s a great morning to fly,” he said. That was Jake Grafton. He was wearing a little smile.
After an hour in the air, he reported on his handheld to the generals. No ambushes were evident. We did find a couple of campsites in the woods, but apparently the people there were refugees from the cities. Fires were giving off smoke, and we saw no evidence of heavy weapons. Our scouts would see the smoke and be forewarned.
Then Grafton set a course to the east. No low clouds, excellent visibility, so he climbed to four thousand feet. Soon Leesburg came into view, and a few moments later the long runways at Dulles airport.
The C-17 Globemasters landed one after the other at LaGuardia airport in Brooklyn. There were no flight plans, of course, since the FAA was out of action because the power was out, but these were air force planes on official business, so they landed and that was that.
The ground controller parked the four giant cargo planes on the cargo ramp, appropriately enough, and the loadmasters and their soldier passengers got busy off-loading the trucks. Also on the trucks were little cargo donkeys driven by gasoline engines, just in case.
The caravan got itself arranged, the soldiers got their weapons and got into cabs and on the backs of the trucks, two armed guards were posted at each plane, and the fliers stayed with their steeds. The rest of the hardy band of adventurers set off through the wilderness of Brooklyn toward Manhattan.
The place reminded JR Hays of Baghdad. Trash was everywhere, windows were broken out, and knots of idle young men congregated on corners, looking like packs of feral dogs. Few women could be seen, and those that were, were always walking with several men. Carcasses of burned-out cars sat pushed to the side of the street. Other cars had been stripped of wheels and even doors.
None of the stoplights worked, which didn’t matter because there was little traffic, probably because there was little or no fuel available, so the caravan rolled steadily at twenty-five miles an hour onto the main thoroughfares that led to the bridge into Manhattan.
He looked at his watch. At least this Wednesday, the seventh of September, there weren’t a couple million commuters and an endless stream of over-the-road tractor-trailers and local trucks fighting to get into Manhattan. The roads were essentially empty, with pieces of cars strewn randomly that the army trucks had to drive around. Wrecks were abandoned against the median barriers. It looked to JR as if Barry Soetoro had finally managed to choke America, and it was dying.
It was ten minutes before nine. His convoy would arrive at the bank a few minutes after the hour. He straightened his uniform, the dress uniform of a lieutenant general in the United States Army. He had given himself a promotion. He had used his own ribbons on his left breast, which was a dazzling collection for a twenty-year light colonel, but rather sparse for a three-star. JR doubted that the bankers had met many three-stars in full regalia.
As the truck rumbled along, he sat in the right seat on the lead truck praying that the Bank of Manhattan was going to be open today. If it weren’t, this trip would be nothing but two airplane rides and a short jaunt on abandoned highways and streets.
From the right seat of the Cessna buzzing over suburban Virginia, I didn’t see any airliners in the air, but I saw a bunch parked around the terminals at Dulles. Every gate was full and the ramps were crowded.
We flew on. The Washington Monument rose like a finger ahead of us. Grafton flew toward it. What a view that was, with the Potomac winding into town, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building, the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, and the long slash of the Mall.
I was nervous. I figured someone might decide to take a pot shot at us with anti-aircraft artillery or a surface-to-air missile, but apparently not. The streets looked almost deserted, yet the Mall and area around the White House certainly weren’t. People everywhere, a sea of people.
Grafton swung the airplane to fly around the White House counterclockwise, with the good view on his side. But I could see plenty. Uniformed police and cops in riot gear were arranged outside the fence that encircled the executive mansion. They faced a sea of people, ten, perhaps twenty thousand flooding toward the White House. It was the damnedest sight I ever saw.
Books have been written about what was going on in the White House that morning of the seventh day of September, about how the president and his advisors and staunchest legislative allies weighed options and tried to figure out what to do next. At the risk of stating what you already know, I will summarize by telling you that Barry Soetoro was in denial, according to later accounts, and so were Al Grantham and Sulana Schanck. They raved about the treason of the military, demanded summary executions.
The vice president thought the mob outside could be handled by the Secret Service and police riot squads, augmented if necessary by fire trucks with high-pressure nozzles. He urged calm and assured everyone who would listen that America’s progressives and people of color would ignore the crap spewing over the radio (and now some television stations), and support their president with their lives, if necessary. According to an account written by a senator, a delegation from Capitol Hill tried to warn the president that the fury of the American people was real and widespread, and had been dismissed as traitors for their pains.
Of all that drama Grafton and I were blissfully ignorant. After Grafton had made two complete circles, he leveled the wings and aimed the plane across the river toward the Pentagon, that massive stone structure between the Potomac and Reagan National Airport.
Grafton circled the Pentagon, eyeing the vast parking lot. On his second circuit, I had a good view of armed soldiers, machine-gun nests, military vehicles, and tents. We were only a few hundred feet above the parking lot by then, but no one started shooting.
Grafton swung out and began a straight-in to the parking lot. There were light poles here and there, but most of it was empty. He pulled up on the bar between the seats, which put in half flaps, then pulled again for full flaps and we were on final doing about seventy miles per hour. He plunked that thing in a three-point landing within twenty feet of the edge, just clearing some power wires, avoided all the light poles, and slowed to a taxi. Then he braked to a stop and pulled the mixture knob out. The prop swung to a stop as a Humvee came rushing up.