The next morning, with nothing left of Clay’s Jeep but the frame, the men drove over to the Army Aviation Museum. Like all the other buildings on the fort, the museum had been vandalized and stripped of anything that could be construed to be of value. But the display of a Huey, depicting an LZ in Vietnam, was still intact. John opened the cowl and took a quick glance at the engine.
“All right!” he said. “Looks like nobody has messed with it. I think we’ve got a shot at getting this thing going!”
The hardest thing was going to be getting the helicopter loaded onto the back of the Jeep, but anticipating that, they had brought a crane and pulley system from the hangar and, after half an hour getting everything rigged up, John climbed up onto the engine deck and screwed a lifting eye onto the top of the mast. This was exactly the kind of lifting eye that was used by the aircraft recovery teams when they were sent in to pick up a downed helicopter on the battlefield.
When everything was rigged up, they began cranking on the crane and pulley system until the helicopter was lifted from the place it had occupied on the display for nearly twenty years, then swung over to the Jeep frame and lowered. The skids were lashed in place, and everyone but Deon, who was driving the Jeep, climbed into the helicopter for the drive back to Hanchey Field.
Once they had the helicopter in the hangar, John began a more thorough examination.
“Damn!” he said. “How did I not see this?”
“What?”
“We’re missing a drag brace.”
“How important is that?” Deon asked.
“Not all that important, if you don’t mind throwing a rotor blade,” John said.
“Anything out there we can use?” Jake asked.
John shook his head. “No, they are very precise.”
“John, isn’t there a Cobra helicopter there in the museum?” Marcus asked.
A huge smile spread across John’s face. “Yes! And they share the same rotor system!”
“Let’s go back.”
“Deon, go with them,” Jake said. “It’s getting a lot more antsy out there. I don’t know what they might run into.”
“All right,” Deon said. “Willie, the M-two-forty is still in the tower. How about you going up there and keeping an eye open while I’m gone?”
“Good idea,” Willie said.
John, Marcus, and Deon climbed back onto what was left of the Jeep, as Willie went back up into the tower. That left Jake, Karin, and Julie alone in the hangar.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to see if we can get anything else on the radio,” Julie said.
“You know how to do it?” Karin asked.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve been watching Willie.”
Julie turned the crank to build up the power; then she turned the radio and started moving the dial through all the frequencies.
Oh, do you think that’s real?” Karin asked.
“I don’t know if it is for real or not,” Jake said. “But his name is obviously false.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Francis Marion was in the American Revolution. He was the first guerrilla fighter.”
“Are we going to try and make contact with them?”
“We’ll play that by ear,” Jake said. “For now our primary objective is to survive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When John, Marcus, and Deon returned a couple of hours later, they began unloading parts.
“We took everything we might possibly need,” John said. “We got both drag braces, the dampers, the pitch change links, the igniters, the fuel pump and fuel control, the hydraulic pump, the servos, the tail rotor gearboxes, the hangar bearings, everything we could get.”
“We’ll have this sucker up and flying in no time,” Marcus said confidently.
“No trouble, I take it?”
“Not really,” Deon said.
“What do you mean by not really? Was there trouble or not?”
“The place is crawling with scavengers,” Deon said. “And they are getting frustrated.”
“How do you know they are getting frustrated?”
“They’ve been setting fire to all the buildings.” He looked at Karin and Julie. “The hospital is burned down,” he said.
“Why would they burn the hospital?” Julie asked.
“My guess is they were after drugs, if not for themselves, to use in barter,” Deon said. “But you know, for sure, that there were no drugs of any value left in the hospital when it was abandoned.”
“You’re right,” Karin said. “As a matter of fact there was nothing left even before the hospital was abandoned. For the last two months, the strongest thing we had was aspirin.”
“There are others like us out there,” Julie said, happily.
“I’m sure there are,” Deon said.
“No, I mean for real, like us,” Julie said. “We heard them on the radio.”
“Did you?”
“They call themselves the Brotherhood of Liberty,” Julie said.
“They’ve asked us to join them,” Karin added.
Deon and the others looked directly at Jake. “Are we?” Deon asked.
“Are we what?”
“Are we going to join them?”
“Maybe, someday,” Jake said. “If they are legitimate.”
“Why would you think they would not be legitimate ?”
“The way I look at it there is a fifty–fifty chance that it is legitimate. It could either be set up by the SPS to reel in the revolutionaries, or it could be legitimate. When the time comes, we may check it out. But this is not the time.”
Because the helicopter had been flyable when it was put on display in the museum, work on it proceeded much faster than it had on the original Blackhawk. They had a little trouble with the drag brace because, as it turned out, the chord of the blade was a little wider than they thought, which meant the drag brace was a little longer, so they had to compensate by repositioning it slightly.
