A Time To Die (Turning Point Book 1) Read online

  A Time to Die

  Book One of the Turning Point

  (Second Edition)

  By

  Mark Wandrey

  PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press

  Copyright © 2017 Mark Wandrey

  All Rights Reserved

  Get the free prelude story “Gateway to Union”

  and discover other titles by Mark Wandrey at:

  http://worldmaker.us/

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  Cover Design by Konstantin Kiselyov

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Acknowledgements

  As a writer, one of the most difficult things I do is write realistically about situations I’ve never encountered. For me, a lifelong flight enthusiast, writing about multiple military and civilian aircraft making difficult landings in unusual operational situations is thrilling, but daunting—especially since I’m not a licensed pilot. It’s on my bucket list, but that’s another story.

  Bridging that gap in real world knowledge is made even more difficult when writing about an airliner about which very little information is public, especially a military aircraft where most of the information on it is classified. Dear FBI, please ignore my browser history.

  I wanted to offer a special thanks to Lee Smith, an Air Force veteran who reviewed certain details of the complicated landing sequences in this novel, and his son Chris Smith who graciously put me in contact with him. Thanks, Lee, without you, this would probably have come off poorly.

  To my legion of willing friends, especially those Airedales—you know who you are. Thanks for making the U.S.S. Gerald Ford a little more realistic. Yeah, I might have bent the rules and mistreated the Ford, but I think it all came together, and the math works.

  To my test readers, valiant and patient they are. A good writer needs even better test readers, and I have some of the best. Robert Ewald, Patrick Welch, Robin Stephens, Alijah Ballard, and my son, Patrick Wandrey, who managed to read a chapter or two between rounds of various computer games.

  And finally, to the love of my life, Joy.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Titles by Mark Wandrey

  Excerpt from Book Two of the Turning Point:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Kin Wars Saga:

  Prologue

  The fox watched the rabbit with a patience born from untold eons of evolution. More than two hours passed as it watched the little herbivore transit a tiny grove in the woods, picking and eating the tender shoots of the early spring grass. The rabbit was wary, knowing instinctively that hungry predators would savor its flesh. The fox certainly coveted that flesh; it desperately needed it to survive. The winter had been long and harsh, keeping creatures like the rabbit in their burrows weeks longer than normal. Hunger gnawed at the fox’s being like a primal scream.

  Finally, after all the waiting, the rabbit moved toward the fox, who watched it with ravenous eyes, barely moving. Inch by inch, succulent fresh clover to wild grain sprout, the rabbit moved closer. Then the time was right. The same ancient instincts that kept the fox still announced the prey was close enough, and it was time to pounce. Muscles tensed, whiskers twitched, and it leaped.

  The sky exploded with light and fury, and a thunderous roar followed a half second later. The fox’s leap was off by inches, and the rabbit spun and wiggled sideways to escape the hungry jaws, leaving the fox with only a few wisps of fur for its effort.

  The light and the roaring grew in intensity, chasing the fox under the gnarled roots of an ancient oak tree. Running was out of the question. In seconds, the light grew to many times that of the noonday sun, and the sound became a physical force of pain. The fox had been shot at before—once while stealing chickens and another time while pursuing a little dog. This was louder, and it went on and on.

  The sound and light cut off in an instant, and the ground shook violently. Dirt rained on the fox’s head, and it yipped in fear, darting from cover and running blindly into the gathering darkness.

  Two days passed before the fox ventured to the same stretch of woods again, this time near evening. Three mice, six lizards, and an unlucky cardinal had found their way into his jaws since the night of light and sound. The fox’s mind wasn’t designed to remember events in detail; it only knew that caution was called for in returning to this place. It was the memory of the rabbit that drew it back. Curiosity had served numberless generations of the fox’s predecessors well, helping them find food…and enabling them to carry on their genes.

  There was the faintest hint of the rabbit’s scent. Perhaps enough to trail it to its den? The fox worked back and forth, its nose busy digging into leaves, grass, and dirt for any sign of the rabbit’s passage. There was a strange, foreign smell that kept interfering. Not man-smell; it was different, yet also similar. Nothing in the fox’s experience could make sense of it. Then it caught another smell, more familiar—the smell of death.

  The scent of decay mixed with the strange new smell. A new kind of death. The curiosity that served its species so well drew it toward the source. Even in death there was often benefit. The fox’s metabolism was tolerant of carrion. It wasn’t a favorite food, or even preferred in any way; however, an empty stomach spoke of opportunity. Even an animal dead for several days might have a few pieces of edible meat, especially a larger animal.

  The rabbit forgotten, the fox easily followed the smell of decay to its source. Near the source was a structure like a man-thing. It was not large, not like a chicken coop. Saliva dripped from the fox’s jaws as it approached a still form on the ground next to the structure.

  Flies circled without landing as if they also sensed the strangeness of this dead thing. Its shape was completely unfamiliar. The head was strange, shaped somehow wrong, and the limbs were also different. The fox paced back and forth for a while, looking at the animal and sniffing the air. No other predators were nearby, and no carrion eaters, either. Everything was wrong about this. Everything except the fox’s undeniable hunger as it finally turned and moved in.

  The fur of the animal was smooth and green in the diffused sunlight. The fox sniffed tentativel
y before reaching in for a bite of dead flesh—only it wasn’t dead. Fast as lightning, the strange creature spun its head and bit the fox. Needle sharp teeth easily penetrated fur and hide, and the fox yipped in pain and panic.

  Just as quickly, the animal released the fox, which spun and raced off. Some distance away, it stopped and licked the tiny wound on its foreleg. It stung, but bled only slightly, the blood already drying. It looked back in the direction of the not-dead animal ruefully, regretting the loss of a meal, regardless of the price.

  As night came on, the fox lay under a bush, blind hot with fever and shaking uncontrollably. By morning the fever was gone, and it was surveying the woods with a quiet intensity. Its memory yielded some details, and the fox set off through the underbrush.

  As the sun beat down on it, the fox passed another of its kind. The other fox sniffed as its fellow passed and shied away from the wrongness. The first fox regarded the other for a moment, then it moved on.

  Half a day of travel brought it to a road that bisected the woods. It watched with calculating eyes as first one automobile, and then another, rumbled past. The fox came to a decision, and it set out along the road in the same direction the last vehicle had taken.

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  Chapter 1

  Friday, April 6

  Andrew Tobin watched the instruments as his student executed a gradual banking turn to enter final approach to the Mid-Way Regional Airport. The Cessna 162 Skycatcher practically flew itself, so it took little of Andrew’s attention. The student, a forty-something computer technician from Dallas named Linda, was in her final hours before her solo and, like the Skycatcher, required little supervision.

  “Smooth turn,” he praised almost automatically as the plane leveled out, and Linda established the proper angle of attack. He ran a hand through his sandy brown hair and continued to watch. She only nodded as they passed over U.S. Highway 287 with its busy Friday afternoon traffic, carrying commuters between Midlothian and Waxahachie. The approach from the south sometimes distracted newer pilots. Linda had herself squared away and didn’t spare it a glance. Less than a minute later, the fixed tripod landing gear settled onto the tarmac with a perfect flare, and they were taxiing to the flight center.

  “That felt good,” Linda said as she applied the brakes and cut power to the Continental engine.

  “Glad to hear it. A couple more cycles, and you’ll be ready to solo next week.”

  Linda smiled and bantered as they did the post-flight walk around of the Cessna. She helped Andrew attach a pair of ground cords to the wings (something most students didn’t bother to do), before heading in for him to sign her log book. A couple of comments on her stick handling, a handshake, and she handed him that week’s check before leaving. He watched her go, glancing at the horizon to see a line of thunderstorms developing.

  Spring in North Central Texas was often a study of contrasts. Typical warm weather battled with sudden storms that could be as violent as they were unpredictable. You never knew if you were going to get sunshine or hail. He’d grown up farther south, not far from Waco. The weather was not much different down there.

  “Any more students today?” Andrew asked Tina, the flight school’s matronly office manager.

  “That was the last, Andy.” He nodded and headed back to the flight lounge. He’d tried to get her to stop calling him Andy when he’d come to work six months ago. The effort was completely wasted. The other pilot instructors had explained it was Tina’s manner to give every instructor a nickname. If your name could be shortened, that was what happened. “You’re lucky she didn’t make one up for you,” explained an older teacher named Mark. She called him Buzz, and no one could tell Andrew why.

  The Mid-Way flight center kept him busy, which Andrew was grateful for in many ways. The pay wasn’t bad, and the job was stable. The two adjacent towns provided a good amount of their business, and with Dallas/Ft. Worth just to the north, they always seemed to have a steady stream of prospective pilots looking to get away from the much more expensive schools of the metroplex.

  Andrew dropped into one of the three worn easy-chairs in the lounge and sighed. He bent over and removed his lower left leg. The stump was covered in angry red splotches, the result of the not-quite-perfect mating of the artificial limb with his body.

  “That freaks me out every time I see it,” said a voice nearby.

  Andrew craned his neck to see William LeBaron sitting by the back door, drinking a Coke and reading a technical manual.

  “How do you think I feel?” Andrew asked.

  William grunted and nodded before turning back to his book. Andrew wasn’t offended. William was a Gulf War vet himself, with more than a thousand hours behind the stick of an A-10 Warthog. He’d picked shrapnel from his own thigh after one particularly hair-raising close air support, or CAS, mission near Baghdad, but was lucky enough to come home with all his limbs. Andrew hadn’t been that fortunate.

  “They ever going to get you back in for a new fit on that thing?”

  “The schedule keeps getting pushed back.”

  “They’re just cooling you until your commitment is up.”

  Andrew nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing. If the limb could be fit well enough, he’d be eligible to fly again. A Cessna 162 might pay the bills, but it was a piss poor substitute for an F-15. A year ago, he’d been dusting antiquated Syrian fighters two at a time. Then, after a long day of one sortie after another, he’d brought his Eagle back to the base without a scratch. As he was doing his walk around, a group of young airmen screwed up and lost control of a GBU-31 JDAM. The 1,000-pound bomb had clattered to the deck and rolled onto Andrew’s leg. The corpsman said he was lucky to be alive, but his foot and eight inches of lower leg were not as lucky. With his foot went his chance for a second bar, and probably his career as a fighter pilot.

  “At least no one is shooting at me for fun anymore,” Andrew quipped.

  “Careful what you wish for!”

  Later, Andrew drove his aging Chevy back to his apartment in Waxahachie, long after the modest rush hour traffic was gone. The sun lit up the western horizon in one of the famous Texas sunsets that made him glad he lived there. As he parked at the apartment, some of his gratefulness faded. He’d rented the second story walkup as a compromise, figuring he’d only be there a few months while he finished his temporary detachment and healed. The job was another “compromise,” provided by a contact in his squadron. His whole damn life was becoming a series of compromises.

  He climbed the two flights of stairs with a lot less pain than he’d experienced the day he’d moved in. The refrigerator yielded a slice of two-day old pizza and an ice-cold beer for dinner. Life wasn’t too bad. He flipped through a few channels of boring network sitcoms and reality TV before catching a news report. NASA in South Texas was investigating last week’s meteor storm. More than a hundred meteors had impacted the ground, and they were eagerly searching for them.

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  Ranger Erin Burr drove the Jeep Wrangler down the old trail with her jaw tightly locked to reduce the chance of biting off a piece of her tongue. Another ranger had done just that her first year working in Big Bend National Park; he’d hit a large rock and jarred his Jeep hard enough that he bit the tip of his tongue clean off. The story was a thing of legend, but sadly all too true. Ironically, the man still worked in the Terlingua Resort—Terlingua meaning “three tongues”—and his speech was more than a little difficult to understand.

  “Isn’t there a regular road to the…site?” The last word was accented as the man’s head bounced off the fabric roof while they navigated a particularly challenging rut in the trail.

  “No such thing after you get south of Boquillas Canyon,” she told the man. Her park supervisor had told her he was a NASA scientist. He looked like one in his conservative suit; a floppy hat was his only compromise to the conditions around him. His gray suit was coated in light brown trail dust, and his steel cases of instruments in the rea
r of the Jeep flew around like dice in a cup as the Jeep bounced down the trail. A cliff loomed off to their left as she negotiated a turn.

  “Is that Mexico?” he asked, his knuckles white on the Jesus bar as the wheels got within a foot of the drop off.

  Erin smiled; she’d purposely taken them close to the drop off to see his reaction. Weren’t astronauts supposed to be bad-asses? “Yep, the Rio Grande is about a thousand feet down that-a-way!”

  “Shit,” he hissed silently as they got even closer.

  An hour later they were just east of the river landing used by summer rafting trips, and the man was cursing nonstop as he examined his battered equipment. Several of the delicate instruments were much the worse for wear after the 20-mile excursion. “I should have gotten a helicopter,” he complained.

  “Can’t land on this side of the river,” she pointed out and gestured at the overhanging pine trees. “When we get a rafter that needs evac, we have to take them off the Mexican side.”

  He grunted and tried to salvage his gear. As he worked through the morning, Erin busied herself checking the trail markers and other park equipment in the area. A fellow ranger had been out here only last week, but she had nothing else to do. She hiked up the trail half a mile and inspected the emergency solar-powered radio, calling in a radio check before marking it off on a clipboard. By the time she got back to the NASA scientist, she’d worked up a good sweat.

  “How much longer?” she asked as he came into view.

  “A while,” he said distractedly. He had a dizzying array of devices with blinking lights, displays, and touch-screens set up on a pair of ingenious folding aluminum tables he’d had in a pack.