The plane bounced as they passed Allen Mountain to their right, the turbulence catching John by surprise. As an officer in the army, he had spent hundreds of hours in choppers, but this was actually his first flight in a small aircraft like this since childhood, and he was beginning to regret his rash decision to take a personal look. But he was committed now.
“Look, Billy, if you think the turbulence is outside what this old bird can handle, turn back at your discretion.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a bit of a chuckle. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you. We’ll have to circle a few times; with you in the backseat, climb rate is only several hundred feet a minute, and it’s nearly five thousand feet straight up.”
Fifteen minutes later, by the time Billy had completed the second full turn, circling over the North Fork Reservoir, John was firmly clutching the barf bag and wiping the sweat from his brow. He knew he was about to let go, but at least the air at six thousand feet was actually chilly this morning, which helped a bit. Coming out of the long, sweeping turn, Billy announced they were just above the level of Craggy Gap but that he’d like to get another five hundred feet altitude before venturing closer. The turbulence was indeed bad, and John could sense Billy tensing up with each sideways, up-and-down jolt from unseen winds that rattled the plane, at one point lifting John out of his seat and then slamming him back down a second later.
“Well, we’re certainly shaking out the G stress-load testing for real,” Billy gasped after one hammer-like shock. “Just did it with sandbags piled up on the wings when on the ground before. Guess we’ll find out for real if that replacement wing will fold up.”
“Thanks for sharing that,” John gasped, as he sealed up the barf bag he had just used.
They were running a mile or so south of the gap, and John could clearly see black-clad troops on the ground along the parkway, the helicopter that had carried them lifting off and heading back toward Asheville.
There were people on the ground other than the ones in black uniforms, half a dozen at least, and as they flew closer, John could see they were down, not moving, and then the realization hit. They were dead.
“Damn it,” John whispered.
“What? Reivers? So what?” Billy responded in the casual tone of someone who had seen bodies and fighting before. For that matter, all of them down to four years old had seen bodies lying prone and motionless like that, twisted up into impossible contortions with blood pooling out beneath them. The troops on the ground, a team of eight from the looks of it, gazed up at them, one of them raising a weapon to his shoulder and pointing it in their direction.
“Don’t shoot, damn you,” Billy said, and a second later, he nearly stood the plane on its starboard wing, in an evasive turn, zigzagging back and forth.
Someone was by the side of the man who had raised the gun, motioning at the plane. The weapon was half lowered but still poised toward them.
“Go over the gap, down there!” John shouted, pointing to the north-side slope of Mount Mitchell where, half a dozen miles away, the two Apache helicopters were circling in a long oval pattern, lifting up at one end in a near-vertical turn, coming about, and then sweeping back down.
“They’re shooting the crap out of something down there,” Billy announced and pointed, but John did not need to be told. He could see the trail of gun smoke streaming aft of the helicopter. He had seen it often in their mad rush into Iraq during Desert Storm, driving past the twisted, torn wreckage of a convoy of Iraqi vehicles, bodies within cut to shreds by the deadly twenty-millimeter rounds of the chin turret and side-mounted miniguns.
Down at the base of the slope of Mount Mitchell, there was a secondary explosion, a vehicle igniting, an old RV that appeared to lift off the ground, a fireball erupting, most likely its propane tank blowing.
They were still several miles out, and John now guessed that this was in fact the same encampment site he had been dragged into as a prisoner. So contrary to what Burnett had said, they had not pulled up stakes. Moving a camp like that would drink up a lot of gas, and Burnett had rightly guessed that John had dampened down the calls for a vengeance raid.
“If only we had those Apaches when facing the Posse, it wouldn’t even have been a fight!” Billy exclaimed. “Seems like a waste of good ammo on a bunch of junk vehicles.”
A couple dozen fires were burning in the clearing below. The second helicopter began its strafing run, no longer aiming at the vehicles but instead at a stretch of woods several hundred yards east of the clearing, and a few seconds later, John could see a couple dozen people sprinting out of the woods, breaking cover, running across a road.
“Jesus Christ, those are kids!” Billy cried. “Look at them.”
The attacking helicopter yawed slightly, its rounds stitching the road, bodies tumbling, bursting, going down into twisted heaps.
“John, what in God’s name are they doing?”
“Killing people,” John said coldly.
Its run completed, the helicopter banked up and away to the north.
“Ah shit, we got company!” Billy cried.
John turned to look straight ahead and barely had time to cry out as the first helicopter, which they had lost track of while watching the attack, was now coming straight at them, at eye level. There was that frightful split second, which John had faced several times before in his life, when he figured that all was finished and he was about to die.
Billy slammed the L-3 hard to starboard, and the helicopter shot past them.
“That son of a bitch was playing chicken, and I blinked, damn it!”
“Here comes the other one!” John shouted. And indeed, the second one was closing in, gun turret swiveled toward them. A quick burst of tracers shot across in front of them fifty yards ahead.
“Damn him!”
“He’s warning us off, otherwise we’d be dead now!” John shouted.
“Hell with this. I’m turning back. First time I ever get shot at in the air, and it’s by my own side, damn it!”
“Billy, you got one of those signal-to-ground streamers in the back well?”
“Yeah. Why?”
John turned, having to unbuckle his seat belt in order to lean into the storage well, and he pulled out a six-foot-long, bright-orange streamer, tearing off the rubber band so that it would unravel. He fumbled in his pocket. Damn it, no pen! “You got a marker pen back here?”
“In the side pocket well, with the maps. A grease pen.”
“Fine. Now I want you to turn about and fly straight over where those vehicles are burning; edge it in alongside the woods. It’ll be tight from the way that smoke is blowing. I don’t want this going into the woods or the fires.”
“What in the hell are you doing, John? That son of a bitch just fired at us.”
“He knows who we are. He was trying to warn us off. He won’t shoot us down.”
And as if in answer, there was a popping sound, the aft overhead plastic window behind John cracking with a neat bullet hole through it.
“What the hell?” Billy cried.
“Ground fire, that’s all. Just keep weaving!”
“Oh shit, great!”
The first helicopter was back, slowing as it came up along their portside wing. John could clearly see the gunner looking at him, turret swiveling to point straight at them.
John held his hand up and actually waved. The gunner just gazed at him, looked forward, another warning burst in front of them. John grabbed the head of the streamer, braced it on his knee, and quickly jotted a note on the streamer. Forrest, it wasn’t us. John M.
It had struck him that the survivors below, who had without doubt been watching every move of his community for months from atop Craggy Gap, had most likely seen the first flight of the L-3. There was a chance the reivers might link his town’s ability to fly with this attack. If he had stayed well clear of it all just now, chances were their rage would be focused on Asheville. But flying over like this, he had to make it clear that though the town’s plane had been seen in the middle of this attack, they had nothing to do with it. Otherwise, they might catch the blame for it with a murderous vendetta rather than just a food-gathering raid—that is, if any down below had survived this onslaught.