The Final Day

CHAPTER SIX

“It’s seven days now without a word from Roanoke or anywhere else.” John sighed, looking over at Maury Hurt, who, along with several of the ham radio operators in their community, had been monitoring 122.9 around the clock.

The response was silence.

“Could it be a signal couldn’t carry that far?” John asked.

“It used to be an open channel for uncontrolled air space,” one of the “hams” replied. “With a handheld unit, I sometimes picked up traffic sixty miles away. The antenna I’ve got set up now picks up some distant chatter—not sure from where, I suspect down toward Charleston—so we should have heard something.”

“And we’re certain it was monitored 24-7, at fifteen minutes into each hour? No holes, no one asleep?”

The small group looked at each other, shaking their heads.

“John, we set up a regular rotation, at least two monitoring at any given time. Zero, zilch, nothing.”

“Okay, thanks for coming over,” John sadly replied. The four left his home, Makala seeing them off and then coming back to sit next to John, who was gazing absently at the fire blazing inside the woodstove.

“Feel it was all for naught?” she asked.

He winced slightly as she took his left hand to examine it. He had lost a glove while leaning out of the chopper, and by the time he had finally arrived back home, his hand was completely numb with a touch of frostbite that was healing but still troublesome, along with the wrenched shoulder from getting slammed against the outside of the chopper.

Makala had hovered over him ever since their return, muttering in stern nurse manner about busted ribs and other assorted injuries from the past with this new one now added in. The trip had drained him, again reminding him that he was no longer a young lieutenant or captain in the field; those days were more than half a lifetime ago. Once home, Makala held him in a fierce embrace, stifling back tears, whispering that when their return was long overdue, everyone had begun to fear the worst—that they had crashed, been shot down, or foolishly landed into a trap and taken prisoner.

He was beyond grateful for her response, given the anger she was feeling when he left and the way she snuggled up close to him after feeding him some hot soup and then packing him off to bed for twelve blessed hours of sleep.

A day later, another storm had rolled in, dropping an additional ten inches. Before the Day, such a storm, though significant for the South, was just part of life. Lifelong residents of the area were now saying it was beginning to look like the worst winter in decades, and given how precarious living now was, a long, snowy winter could indeed turn into a starving and freezing time. In the last three weeks, John calculated that he and Makala had gone through six to eight weeks’ worth of firewood. With a baby due in just about two months, it was becoming another source of worry. He dreaded the hours of work splitting and stacking an extra cord of firewood.

The other source of worry was the apparent loss, at least for some time to come, of their Black Hawk. Bob Gillespie was stripping down the damaged engine; one of the turbine blades had indeed fractured. The wreckage of the three helicopters destroyed in the battle around Asheville Mall back in the spring had been dragged into the old Sears building to get it out of the weather and still rested there. John had agreed to allocate yet more precious gas reserves for Danny and Maury to go to Asheville to see if replacement parts could be salvaged from the wrecks and then transported all the way down to Morganton.

This apparently failed venture to try to get a message to Bob Scales had cost the community several hundred gallons of precious fuel already, along with the possible permanent loss of their captured Black Hawk.

He had long ago learned to compartmentalize the multitude of issues and anxieties that had become part of his daily life, and he had to do so now, forcing a smile as Makala gently massaged his still-tender hand and then checked his shoulder, which was still sore as well. The room was quiet, warm. John sighed and leaned up to kiss her on the lips as she stood beside him.

“You know, this could kind of lead to something,” he whispered, and she hugged him. Several seconds later, he received a solid kick from their baby.

“And that little devil is a mood killer if ever there was one, John Matherson.” She laughed. “Maybe come spring, we can get back to some fun.”

He sighed, content to just hold her, both of them chuckling as the baby continued to squirm and kick.

He finally looked down at his old-style wristwatch, hugged Makala tightly, and then reluctantly stood up. “I really should go up to the college. Ernie and the Hawkinses want to show me what they’re up to.”

She helped to bundle him up, went into the kitchen, and came back with a quart mason jar of canned peaches, stuffing the bottle into his pocket. “That poor girl nursing twins needs these more than I do right now. Send her my love, and tell her once it’s safe to walk I’ll come up to check on her.”

She watched as he went out the door, calling for him to stay in the middle of the road in case he fell. Maury had brought word to them this morning that one of the Wilson boys had been found dead the day before. Out hunting, he apparently slipped on some ice, fell, compound fractured his leg, and lay there helpless until he bled out and froze. In the few years prior to the Day, when cell phones had become a part of everyone’s daily lives, such an accident was all but unheard of. If in trouble while out in the woods, one simply called and cried out for help. Falling where no one could see or hear you replaced the worry last summer about the plague of copperheads and rattlesnakes that had erupted in the area, at least a dozen getting bitten and, with no antidote, two children dying.

Warmly wrapped up, wearing a scarf, which he had always disdained before but was now grateful that Makala had wrapped one of hers around his neck, he trudged down to Montreat Road by the abandoned tennis courts and headed north for what used to be a short hike up to the campus. In a different time, he would have soaked in yet another beautiful morning after a snowstorm. No wind had followed the storm down here in the narrow valley, the trees canopying the road bent under the heavy weight of the wet snow forming a tunnellike vista ahead of him. A couple of heavy branches had snapped off, which he had to climb over, a barrier that road crews once took care of within minutes. To his right, Flat Creek was still roiling downstream through the park where he used to take his children to play. A couple of students were down there, enjoying the morning, laughing, the girl chasing the young man, tackling him, the two, not suspecting someone might be watching, rolling together, laughing, and then kissing passionately. He smiled as he surreptitiously watched for a moment, again aware of the desire he had felt for Makala just moments ago, and then seeing where their frolic might lead, he figured it best to quietly move along.

Even in the midst of death, there was still life, and young life. He recalled a favorite science fiction series, Battlestar Galactica, when after the near annihilation of the human race, survivors aboard a few remaining ships fled their home worlds. A fierce debate ensued with one character demanding that they make a final fight while the newly appointed president declared they should flee and that if there was a priority now, it was to have children, lots of children.

In the midst of death, life was again trying to reassert itself. The historian in him knew such was true; after every brutal annihilating war, the primal instinct was to repopulate, to replace with a new generation all those who had been lost. It made him think of Jennifer. She’d be fourteen and a half now, no longer his little girl, on the cusp of becoming a young woman. The baby would be Makala’s first child, but for him? In a symbolic way, was the baby about to be born a replacement for the one he had lost?

He glanced back at the couple in the snow, definitely behaving like a young couple in love, ignoring the coldness of the snow for a moment, this next glance telling him it was definitely time to move along.

A wisp of a sad, understanding smile creased his features as he pushed on, leaving the secluded park behind, reaching the road bridge over Flat Creek, walking up the steep slope past what was now the community’s source of electricity. To his right was Anderson Auditorium, converted into the town factory for turning out turbines, generators, and wire, the fundamental building blocks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technology.

He felt he should drop in to at least say hello, but he realized those working away inside the factory might see it as some sort of inspection tour and be thrown off their routine, and he therefore pressed on.

The road steepened for fifty yards or so, memories flooding in of one icy day when classes were dismissed early and he wound up driving down it sideways, laughing students helping to push him out of the ditch where he had finally come to a stop. It was distressing to realize now that this short walk, up a slope, trudging through nearly two feet of snow, left him so winded that he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath.

As he rested, he turned to look around at his valley. After a snowstorm, all sound was all so muffled. When still living near Ridgecrest, he delighted in the fact that the distant rumble on Interstate 40 ceased for a day or so during and after a storm. From childhood, there were memories of the sound of the few cars still on the road, tires wrapped in chains for traction, rattling by, and, blessing of blessings, days off from school. Now, except for the distant sound of hammering from Anderson Auditorium, all was silent. Whoever had penned “Silent Night” knew and understood it, as did Robert Frost when he wrote about stopping in the woods on a snowy evening.

It used to be his favorite time of year. It no longer was with all the worries about survival to spring for his family and community. The worry was compounded by the unanswered questions. Was Bob Scales still alive? Had Bob indeed sent one man on a desperate journey to reach him, and if so, why? And overarching all were Quentin’s dying words about EMPs. The obsessive question haunting him. Were they ramblings of a delirious man slipping into death or a dire warning?

The thoughts of that terminated his moment of peaceful contemplation, and with breath somewhat back to normal, he turned to climb the last few hundred yards to the library.

Rounding the corner of the road by the chapel and the library, he was amused to see some of the students out sledding. Beyond their work schedule and rotation periods as community guards with the militia companies, the fact that they still had energy to enjoy such a beautiful winter day was, to him, a testament to the resilience of youth.

Going through the darkened entryway to the library, he was greeted by the musty scent of tens of thousands of books that for the last couple of years had been exposed to no temperature control and runaway moisture. The Hawkinses’ living quarters in the back corner were blocked off with several layers of plastic sheets, and once through the swinging doors to the rear office, he was greeted with cheery warmth. Becka looked up at him, smiled, and put a finger to her lips. He looked over to the cribs where the twins were tucked in, fast asleep.

She smiled and offered him a chair by the woodstove that they had installed, which was giving off a cheery warmth. “Just got the little ones down at the same time for once,” she announced, and without asking, she scooped a ladle of soup from a kettle on the fire, dipped it into a bowl, and offered it to John, who politely took it. Old Southern customs of greeting a guest with food still held, even now. The soup was watery thin; there was a hint of some kind of meat in it, wild onions, and he wasn’t really sure what else.

They chatted for a few minutes about the babies, who were thriving, John remembering to pull from his jacket the canned peaches, which she clutched with gratitude. Finished with the soup, he asked about “the guys,” and laughing, she pointed to the staircase to the basement.

“Those computers and all the other stuff have nearly turned me into a widow. Do me a favor and order Ernie to get the heck out of here at day’s end and for Paul to remember he has a wife.”

“Will do,” John replied with a smile, and he headed for the basement, which had been renamed “the Wizard’s Workshop.” A joke that few caught was that long ago it was the name for Tom Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, where he developed the incandescent lightbulb and helped trigger the electrical revolution of the nineteenth century that they were struggling to restore.

As John opened the basement door, he was surprised by the profligate use of electricity. The room was now brightly lit with fluorescent lights. He had always hated that type of illumination, but it used less juice than a standard incandescent bulb. A woodstove had been rigged into the basement, so it was no longer a damp, bone-chilling room, and, indeed a wonder, a dehumidifier was humming away. The stench of mold had at least abated somewhat as a result.

Six-foot stacks of magazines still cluttered most of the room, but a work area had been cleared in the far quarter, additional workbenches dragged over from classrooms and offices around the campus. Piled up around the benches were several dozen old computers—half a dozen more Apple IIes, early PCs, Commodore 64s, old Gateways, Dells, and half a dozen other models. Ernie, with Paul by his side, was hunched over a green computer board, and as John came up behind them, Ernie grunted out a curse and tossed the board to one side.

“Cooked, damn it. I would have liked to have had that one.”

“How’s it going?” John asked the two, obviously so intent on their work they had not heard him approach.

“Good and bad,” Ernie grumbled without bothering to look back at John as he picked up another board from a pile on the table and started to examine it.

“We’ve got half a dozen machines cobbled together,” Paul offered in a far cheerier voice.

He pointed to the restored computers off to one side, and John went over to examine them. Three were Apples, one of them an early Mac with its ridiculously small blue-screen monitor, beside them a couple of 1980s PCs and a Commodore 64. The 64 was turned on, the old television it was hooked to flickering, a popular fantasy adventure game of the ’80s running, little stick figures being chased by a stick-figure dragon.

While in college, John remembered, he had splurged on buying an Atari 2600 game machine, he and his friends consuming endless beers while driving two tanks around an obstacle field and shooting at each other. It had triggered the first fight with Mary, who became fed up that he was spending more time on “that damn game” than with her.

He hated to disturb the two at what was obviously an obsessive task, but he felt he had to. Paul had been absent from the factory ever since the discovery of a functional computer. It was at least keeping Ernie busy and out of his hair, but still, Ernie’s skills could perhaps be better devoted to working with the ham radio operators or helping as well with the production of generators and alternators to provide power to their ever-expanding State of Carolina.

Ernie and Paul were both hunched over a computer board, wearing magnifying glasses, absorbed with testing the board, quietly arguing whether it was fried or just one chip was bad.

“Mind if I interrupt?” John finally asked.

“In a minute,” Ernie replied without looking up, overriding Paul’s objections as he pried a chip off the board, fished a replacement out of a plastic tray, and snapped it in.

“There!” Ernie announced, pointing to a volt meter that surged to life once the chip was replaced. “It’s good to go. We can use it!”

John sighed. “I hate to do this, but can I ask what we can use that board for?”

The two looked up at him as if he was a peasant rudely interrupting a royal banquet.

“If we can just get some computers back online, it’s a huge step,” Ernie announced, still wearing his magnifying glasses, which gave him something of a crazed look when you were staring straight at him.

“For what purposes that we can use right now?” John asked, regretting that his query did sound somewhat blunt.

“All right, John, we’d better settle this priority right now,” Ernie replied sharply.

“I’m just asking where this can lead us, that’s all,” John said defensively. “You two are a couple of our most valuable resources. I just want to make sure we’re spending those resources wisely.”

“You suggesting I go out on woodcutting detail instead?” Ernie snapped.

“No, damn it.”

Paul stepped between the two and put his hands up in a soothing gesture. “John’s right, Ernie. We’re spending a lot of time on these old machines; there has to be a profit in it, and he has a right to know what we’re thinking about regarding all of this.”

“All right, then,” Ernie retorted. “God knows how many times when I was with IBM or contracted to NASA I’d be working on something and some damn project manager would come along, question its worth, and shelve it. IBM could have been years ahead of Apple and the whole PC revolution if people like me had been listened to.”

“Let me take this,” Paul said softly, sensing that Ernie was heating up.

“Fine,” Ernie snapped, “but if our supreme leader is here to tell us to shut this down, I’ll just hole up at home and keep at it myself. My family and I survived through the first year without the interference of others, and, John, you were damn glad to have us blocking the left flank on the day we fought the Posse.”

“Why don’t you three arguing fools come upstairs for some tea and talk it out up here?”

They looked back to where Becka stood at the base of the stairs, holding a teapot up as a peace offering.

John nodded a bit sheepishly and followed her back up to the sunlit warmth of the old library office. The twins were still asleep, so after gratefully accepting the herbal mint drink, John followed Paul out into the main area of the library. It was cold, but one corner of the vast room was sunlit and offered the comfort of overstuffed leather chairs. The three settled down.

“I know the machines we are working on look like toys,” Paul began. “Compared to what we had just before the war, they are toys, but in their day, they were cutting-edge technology and used as such. Funny that we never thought about it before. The vast majority of computers being tossed aside were not broken; it was just that advances were coming so rapidly. It’s not like old cars that got sold and resold until they finally just died. Most computers getting junked simply just had a hard drive cook off or motherboard going bad, but the rest of the unit was still good. They were just junked with no resale in mind because after three to four years, they were antiques. Moore’s law at work.”

“Refresh my memory, please,” John asked.

Ernie sighed as if asked a dumb question by someone who should know better.

Paul said, “Moore’s law, named after one of the founders of Intel back in the 1960s, postulated that computing power as defined by the number of transistors per square inch will double in a very rapid progression. It meant that computing power, speed of calculations, storage, all of it will increase at a geometric progression, while at the same time cost per unit such as a hard drive for example will plummet. That Apple IIe we first brought online had around 64K, not megabytes or gigabytes, but 64 kilobytes’ worth of chips in it for around three thousand dollars of 1980s money. Eight years later, it was obsolete and thus wound up in the basement down here, and I bet in Black Mountain alone we could find a couple of hundred of them not plugged in on the day things hit the fan and therefore perhaps still viable. Imagine if we had two hundred of your old clinker Edsels. Unlike computers, they were run and resold until finally just junked. Not so with computers, and that is what has Ernie and me fired up. Your average five-hundred–dollar computer just before the war wiped out nearly everything that was hooked up online was equal to the military’s top Cray of a couple of decades earlier.”

“Therefore?” John pressed.

“That’s the whole interesting point that we all seemed to overlook,” Paul continued. “I remember the year the college purchased new laptops for every faculty and staff member. Great idea, but three years later, they were obsolete; five years later, they were in our junk pile or just tossed into a closet and forgotten. I remember seeing a whole Dumpster load of them, recalling when they cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars on delivery and five years later we couldn’t give them away, so we just tossed them out instead. There was no secondary market for five-, let alone eight- or ten-year-old computers. Files once stored on five-inch floppy disks or even reel-to-reel were transferred to three-and-a-half-inch disks, and then to just memory sticks, downloaded into the hard drive of your new machine and the old machines tossed. Those files are still alive, John. But we’ve got to dig up the hardware to read them again and then build off that.”

“Build what? I’m worried about having enough food and firewood to see us through the winter. Everyone is screaming for more electricity now that we’ve got something up and running again. Hey, I’d love to have a computer in my office, even an old green-screen machine hooked to a printer. I’m sick of my old Underwood typewriter with the dang F and J keys sticking half the time. But the time to get even one computer up and running, especially now?”

He pointed to the blowing snowdrifts outside the window, and a thought flashed of the young couple down in the park. He wondered if the cold had finally driven them back inside.

“It’s stuff we can use now. Databases, for one,” Paul replied. “We were lucky to find hard copies of all the IEEE journals from the nineteenth century so we could figure out how to start rebuilding, using the same designs Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison did. It’d be nice to have all those millions of words in a searchable database. Even the library cataloging went online years ago, so we are no longer even sure what we have in the book stacks around us.”

“And that would help us…?” John let the question trail off.

“Okay, I agree,” Paul continued. “A computer working here, one in Asheville, another in Morganton… big deal other than the convenience of using writing machines we once took for granted. To talk with others? We already have some telephones up and running. Cell phones and Wi-Fi? Forget it for years to come, so yeah, I can see your point on that score. I agree; our more immediate concerns are firewood and food.”

“I’m not saying stop working on this,” John interjected. “It’s just that as of the moment, I’m not seeing the short-term benefits. We replicate computer technology of the 1980s, maybe the ’90s, and then what?”

“We eavesdrop,” Ernie said with a smile, acting at least somewhat nonconfrontational for a change, “like I said the other day when Paul showed you the first machine up and running. Come on, John, I’m talking about Bluemont. You’re ex-military. When you were in the Middle East, how did the White House and Pentagon micromanage every move you guys made?”

“Commodore 64s and Apple IIes?” John replied with a cynical smile.

“Not much better, actually, if you go back a few years. When Linda and I were writing software for Apollo, its guidance systems were 40K computers—40K! Think of it. We went to the moon on 40-kilobyte computers.”

Ernie sighed and looked out the window at the snow-covered lawn in front of the library. “America did that in the ’60s, and it seems crazy today. The first shuttle flights had little more than a meg on board. All that data going back and forth on something your cell phone, at least before the system fried off, trumped a thousand times over. Again, Moore’s law.”

“So with what you are doing downstairs, you think you can hack into Bluemont’s communications. How?”

“First of all, the data goes up and down. Sat comm. Even low-earth orbit satellites are super hardened against EMPs generated by the sun, coronal mass ejections. For military use hardened against EMP hits as well. But a lot of that stuff goes all the way up to geosynch orbit. How did you get your television before the crap hit the fan?”

John started to smile. “An eighteen-inch dish.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s encrypted, isn’t it?”

“It all comes down to zeroes and ones in the end, John. When Linda and I left IBM, we set up our own business, writing software and providing some of the precision hardware for large-array tracking dishes—mostly civilian business contracts, but a few overseas governments as well. Recall a scandal a few years back of a high government official with an unsecured server in their home that was hacked by some guys in Poland, Romania, somewhere overseas?”

John had some recollection of it. So much of what happened before the Day, which had once seemed all so important, was now becoming hazy memories.

“John, you remember this college was starting on a cybersecurity major before the war started.”

He nodded with memory of that. President Hunt had even asked him, as an historian and ex-military, to think about creating a course on the history of technology. The idea had intrigued him, and he had even done some preliminary research into the fascinating history of World War II, the tales about Enigma, Ultra, the tapping into Japanese and German radio traffic, the work of the legendary Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, England.

Is that where these two were leading?

“Take me to the conclusion,” John said, looking out across the windswept yard in front of the campus library. Lowering clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, a light sprinkling of snow flurries swirling down. If another storm was coming in, he wanted to get home, split some more wood, and huddle in close to the woodstove with Makala before it hit.

“Remember those huge satellite dishes folks used to have in front of their homes twenty years ago?” Ernie asked, pressing in.

John chuckled. It was a bit of a stereotype of ramshackle trailers, with a dish half as big as the trailer planted in the front yard for television.

“They nearly all disappeared once the big mainstream servers came in with an eighteen-inch dish you could tack to your living room window.”

John nodded, remembering installing one himself when he and Mary moved here with two young girls. A hundred-plus channels to choose from, and he had visions of all the educational programs that could be offered, rather than what most stations had degenerated into with the advent of the nauseating reality-show craze.

“If I could get my hands on some of those big old dishes, which hopefully were off-line and disconnected on the Day, and cobble together parts that were not cooked off, I think in a few weeks I could be tapping into communications traffic.”

“Of…?”

“Bluemont, for starters,” Ernie replied enthusiastically. “Raw reportage from BBC uplinking and downlinking out of Canada, even the Chinese. They still must be using comm sat systems. You just point, listen, download, and evaluate.”

“Just? You make it sound easy, Ernie. So you got gigs of data flying around, and chances are the stuff we want to know about is highly encrypted. They’re no fools.”

“No chain is stronger than its weakest link. No data is foolproof. Turing built a system from scratch and was able to break down the German codes, looking for patterns of usage coming from those German Enigma machines that supposedly could be programmed to create billions of variables and thus thought to be uncrackable. Come on, historian, how did we figure out the Japanese were going to hit us at Midway in June 1942?”

John smiled at such an easy underhand pitch. “You know as well as I do if you asked the question. Paul, do you know?”

John looked over at his electrical wizard who had once been a student and was surprised to see the quizzical look and shake of a head.

“I remember you being in my World War II class, Paul.”

“Sorry, sir, I was diverted a lot that year,” he replied, smiling. John remembered how Paul and Becka had shared the same class and spent most of it staring at each other.

“All right, then. We were picking up radio chatter about a ‘Target X,’ indicating the Japanese were preparing for a massive naval strike. One of the cryptanalyst guys at Pearl Harbor came up with the idea of Midway Island sending out a report that their desalinization plant to provide fresh water on the island was off-line and they were desperate, the message to be sent via a code we knew the Japanese had already cracked.

“The message was sent, and only hours later, radio traffic from Japan was monitored that extra desalinization equipment would have to be shipped to Target X once taken. Bingo—we knew where their next offensive would hit; we had our carriers waiting to receive them and wiped out their carriers in a surprise counterstrike. It is a textbook example of code breaking changing the course of a war.”

“How many kids from this school’s old cybersecurity program are still here?” Ernie asked.

“I’m not sure.” John sighed. Too many of his students were now long gone, killed in the fighting or dead from disease and malnourishment. Those left were serving in the community’s defense force, working in the ever-expanding electrical parts factory down in Anderson Hall, or assigned to other equally crucial tasks.

“If I could pull in four or five—even just two or three—and put them to work to help me,” Ernie pressed, with Paul nodding in eager agreement, “John, I just might be able to get something useful out of our tinkering in the basement. Just imagine if you had known Fredericks’s orders before that piece of trash even came to Asheville.” Ernie pressed in with his argument, “Hell, for all we know, five hundred troops with more choppers could be on their way here right now, and we are clueless until they arrive.”

“Or suppose what that poor guy Reynolds said is true,” Paul interjected, “that something is up regarding another EMP. Who is thinking about it? Why? When? Do you want the answers, or do we sit back passively and wait?”

John looked back and forth at the two and then back out the window at what was obviously another storm coming on.

He sighed and finally nodded. “Okay, you got it.”

The two broke into grins, the elderly Ernie and young Hawkins high-fiving each other.

“Quietly, and I mean quietly, run a query today. If any of our old students were in our cybersecurity program pull them off whatever they are working on now. I then want this building secured. Tell Kevin Malady and Grace Freeman I want a guard on here henceforth. Nothing overt—just that we learned with our encounter with Fredericks that he did have spies inside our community. If we’re going for something like this, I don’t want it broadcasted all over town.”

“John, we’d be a lot more secure if we moved this entire operation over to my place,” Ernie replied.

“Why so?”

“Simple. It is out of the way of prying eyes. Easier to maintain security. Plus, my diagnostic tools are there. I can run things 24-7 at my place. Come on; it’s the logical choice.”

John hesitated as he thought it over and then just simply nodded. “Your place then, Ernie. I’m not going to mention this to our council. We keep it under wraps for a while. The kids stay at your place.”

He hesitated and then smiled.

“You house them and you feed them as well; that will justify their being pulled off of regular work details.”

To his surprise Ernie did not object to that additional requirement.

“You two got that?”

There were eager nods.

He sighed, wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck, put on his old forage cap that looked like a relic from the Civil War, stood up, and started for the door.

Once he was outside, the cold was a bracing shock, the snow coming down hard so that he pulled his hat brim low to protect his eyes. He shuffled down the path out to the middle of the road, trying to let all the concerns of his life slip away at least for a few minutes. The weather was triggering so many memories. As he walked against the renewed snowfall, he found himself recalling a time when, as a boy, a storm like this would send him out hiking up to the South Mountain Reservation a few miles away from where he lived to find a favorite secluded spot in a pine grove. Knowing the reservation patrol officers were nowhere about on such a day, he’d build a fire and enjoy the snowfall, youthful imagination taking hold, that he was a sentry for General Washington, posted along that low ridgeline to keep an eye on the British over in Manhattan.

But now? He simply longed to be back at his home for the rest of the day, sitting by the woodstove with Makala—unfortunately without any scotch to sip or cigarette to enjoy, but at least there was her company awaiting.

He glanced over at the park along Flat Creek as he stepped out onto Montreat Road and chuckled softly. He couldn’t see the amorous young couple, but there was a plume of wood smoke swirling up from within a grove of trees and he smiled with the assumption that the two were nestled in there, enjoying the storm and solitude while being together.

He shuffled on in silence, turning up the steep hill to his house above the old tennis courts, glad to see smoke rising from the chimney. Stamping the snow off his boots, he stepped inside and was surprised to see Maury Hurt in the sunroom, Makala by his side.

“John, where in the hell have you been?” Maury asked excitedly.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Bob Scales,” Maury announced with a grin. “We just got a message. He wants to meet.”