Loss Of Reason by Miles A. Maxwell (reading list TXT) 📖

It was cold out. The sun was about to rise. Franklin, Chuck and Andréa found Everon inside a big red and white helicopter, its blades already turning.

“What is this?” Franklin yelled over the sound of the engine.

“Helicopter, looks like!” Everon yelled back.

“This is Chuck Farndike,” Franklin introduced. “He’s the regional Red Cross blood coordinator.”

“Nothin’ like a Slick,” Chuck yelled.

“What?” Everon mouthed.

“Troop carrier. No weapons. Called ’em Slicks in the Army — Hogs, Frogs ’n Chunkers all had missiles or heavy weapons. Here!” Chuck untwisted a cap from a bottle and pushed a dropper full of some brown liquid toward Everon’s face. “Let me put some of this under your tongue.”

Everon eyeballed the overweight guy in muttonchops. “What is it?” he yelled.

“Lugol’s Solution. We’re goin’ in, aren’t we? Hospital’s nearly out of iodine pills. It’ll have to do — protect our thyroids!”

Everon let him put the drops under his tongue.

From his bag, Chuck pulled an old gray box the size of a loaf of bread.

“Radiation counter,” Everon acknowledged, surprised. “Good!”

For Chuck’s part, he was actually covering up the deep twisting dread running through his gut at the prospect of going into the city, something he hadn’t felt since the years he’d last flown on a combat chopper. Diverting his fear by thinking about what he should take, jabbering on like some young weenie about the Lugol’s.

Then again, some part of him felt more afraid of chickening out. And some part really did want to go, something inside that felt totally underused doing those blood donations. It was this, had convinced him to go in the first place — not the things this wacky dark-haired minister said to him, whatever they were.

Everon pulled his brother forward by the jacket into the cockpit. “What’s with the bullfrog?”

“Would Red Cross authorization help us?” Franklin smiled, his first since getting on the jet.

“He’s our way in? How’d you convince him?”

Franklin shrugged. “Tell you about it later. Can you fly this thing?”

“I haven’t logged many helicopter hours lately. Nan usually flies our MD-900 jobs. But this is just a more beat-up version of one I flew down in Houston, a personnel transport out to a couple of oil rigs.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long since you’ve flown any helicopter?”

“I flew our MD-900 last year.”

“And one of these?”

Everon was busy checking fuses when he said it. “Fifteen years.”

Franklin shrugged. Better than nothing I guess. He’d never seen an aircraft their older brother couldn’t fly.

Franklin took a look through the rear cabinets. Beneath one bench seat he found four thick stainless cables, each terminated in an eyelet. Their other ends were joined by a large hook.

“There’s a cargo hook back there!” he told Everon. “Do we need it?”

“Maybe.”

Chuck Farndike pulled out a folded pair of huge Red Cross stickers. Shoved his heavy green suitcase under a bench. What they didn’t use they could leave in Manhattan.

There’s a problem, Franklin realized. He looked at Chuck. “We have to switch the tail number!”

“Damn,” Chuck said, “you’re right! What’s the —” he stepped outside, a moment later back in. “Two-Two-Bravo-India. Twenty-Two-Bravo-India,” he repeated. “Man, I’ve got Six-Six-Six-Kilo-India on the brain.”

Franklin let Chuck take the helicopter’s left seat and Everon handed Chuck another old headset. Keeping his eyes on the radio, Franklin spoke in Chuck’s ear, softly yet forcefully, gripping Chuck’s right collar bone, “Really happy YOU GOTTA be able to GET THAT CLEARANCE!”

“Right!” Chuck answered. He reached overhead to dial in a frequency and began calling the tower.

Franklin threw his duffel bags under the seat in the crew area. He and Andréa went outside and began applying Chuck’s huge Red Cross stickers to either side of the Pelican’s fuselage.

When they came back in, Chuck dropped his headset on the seat. “I’m going over and talk to those bozos myself!”

He ran off for the tower.

Did our original clearance get approved because Chuck requested a Red Cross mission, Franklin wondered, or because somebody knew the Army had already requisitioned Everon’s helicopter-from-Hell?

Andréa climbed in the back of the blasting Pelican with a case of bottled water and a box of energy bars, moved up into the cockpit and pulled the headset away from the left side of Everon’s head. “Do you really think they’ll let you go in?” she shouted.

“We’ll see. You fly the company choppers, don’t you? Do you know how to fly a Sea Pelican?”

She eyeballed the ratty old gray-metal cockpit dubiously. “Do you?”

“Well enough.”

“I’ve got to stay with the jet and try to contact Mr. Williams.”

“I could use a co-pilot.”

She shook her head. “This old derelict may not have much performance left in it. You’ve already got Franklin’s big Red Cross guy. If I go with you, it’s another survivor you can’t bring back.”

He frowned and adjusted the throttle, trimming back power as the big engines smoothed out.

“I put a case of water and some snack bars off the Learjet in back.” Her eyes looked up at him. “Be careful, will you?”

Everon nodded. “Yeah.”

She kissed his lips hard and left.

Hunt would want her to stay with the plane? If he really thought about it he was probably better off without her.

Chuck ran back breathing hard from the control tower and got in.

“Fuck it!” he yelled. “It’s in the pipeline. I called the first number in over the hospital-military radio. Now they’re giving me a hard time. Trying to reach some general — guy named Anders, military commander appointed by the President to oversee all airspace in the vicinity.”

Franklin stared at him. “That was Anders before — at the gate!”

“Shit!” Chuck yelled. “Well, I’m not sitting around all day watching blood drain out of people’s arms like I did when the Trade Center went. Felt damned out of touch. I was an Army medic — really happy you boys asked me into the thick of things. We get hassled on the way in, I’ll get on the radio, see what I can do. Waiting for clearance! What stupid bureaucratic bullshit at a time like this!”

Franklin couldn’t agree more but rose both eyebrows to Everon. Everon shouted at Chuck, “So we act like we have all the clearances in the world — and hope for the best!”

“Exactly.”

“Works for me.”

Watching the turbines’ temperatures, Everon brought them up to speed. The blades were really whomping now.

A female voice came from the tower. “Helicopter at museum. You’ll need clearance to lift off. All Teterboro Airport flights are restricted today.”

“Sue?”

“Yes?” the voice came back.

“This is Everon, the guy whose radio you’re using? The guy who fixed your generator? We already have Red Cross clearance for our old chopper. Apparently there’s been some delay switching tail numbers to this one. They haven’t sent it over yet.”

“Oh. Let me check on that. See if I can speed it up for you.”

Franklin looked at his brother. “She sounded friendly!”

Everon shrugged. “She knows what we’re trying to do.”

Chuck tapped him on the shoulder. “Screw the clearance. It’ll come through on the way in.”

Franklin shrugged. To hell with waiting, he mouthed silently.

Clear to fly or not, Everon wasn’t going to take a chance shutting the big Pelican’s turbines down. Prepared to feign ignorance on the next radio call, he began to lift off anyway.

Up in the tower, Sue eyeballed Colonel Marsh who was busy talking to his men. She whispered to John, the other controller, so the military wouldn’t hear. “We have to stop him. Nobody should go in there!”

“Especially not him, right?” John looked at her sideways. “Jesus Christ, let him go. What if it was your sister! Hell, he gave us his radio, fixed our power! For fuck’s sake, Sue!”

Flames burning above the city. It’s death to go in there. So maybe his sister is in there. She couldn’t admit to John or even to herself the deeper reason. She just didn’t want something to happen to that beautiful man.

Her eyes shot to the museum again. Shit! In the morning twilight, the helicopter’s white pontoons were gapping air above the corner of the museum’s roof — He’s lifting that damned old red and white death trap off the ground!

She glanced at John. He knows the chopper’s rising! He isn’t even looking out the window. He was staring at her. Watching her eyes. She hesitated, unsure what to do. She held her breath . . . and decided, giving only a small nod of her head.

If it was really what that blond-haired man wanted to do, she wouldn’t say anything.

An airport security guard ran up, now bending forward breathless. “Colonel!” he gasped. Marsh seemed to remind himself of the man’s name from the silver nameplate. VANDERSOMMEN.

“That guy who was up here has another helicopter and is attempting an unlawful flight from the museum!”

Marsh glanced at the two controllers with irritation, and hesitated. An innate sense of fair play held him back, a growing respect. He’d heard about the four-place helicopter the man had rented, the one his men appropriated. The same man who had fixed the airport’s generator. And re-established communications of a sort. None of it the Army had been able to do. What if it was my sister!

“Sir, what about the fuel they’re burning?”

“Mmm,” Marsh hesitated, breathed out, resigned to the annoying little prick. Held out his hand. “Let me have that radio.

“Sergeant,” he transmitted, “take some men around to the museum and stop that helicopter.”

Nose angled downward in the semi-darkness, a team of six soldiers ran beneath them. Sergeant Page — uniform bunched at the hip — didn’t look happy.

“And that asshole guard Vandersommen is with them!” Everon shouted.

“Coast Guard helicopter Bravo-India!” came over the radio. “You have no clearance. Land at once!” Everon recognized the voice of Colonel Marsh.

“You’ll have to shoot us down!” Chuck yelled back.

As if they’d heard Chuck, five rifles and a pistol were targeted onto the old Sea Pelican.

“Did they hear that?”

“Nope, Bro. Hadn’t keyed the mic.”

Everon spun the tail around, jammed the big bird over and banked southeast, expecting bullets to come ripping through the fuselage any second.

A mile later the tension suddenly drained out of him. He felt relieved of the night’s frustration. Just to be in motion. Doing something. Moving.

He didn’t know how far they would make it anyway. Right at takeoff he’d noticed what appeared to be a slow oil leak somewhere in the Pelican’s turbine seals, but he braced himself with the old dictum silently: All helicopters leak. He didn’t have time to fix it right now. Every minute lost was time taken from Cynthia and Steve and Melissa.

No one in the dark houses and towers below seemed aware of their passing. A lone flashing police car moved down one of the side streets. Those able to leave had already left.

Everon scanned the early red horizon, wondering how far they’d get before the military