Free Counterattack by Sigmund Brouwer Page A

Red’s next words stopped him.
    â€œBe a shame, wouldn’t it,” Red told Nate, her back to him, “if someone knew that the hangar at the end of the runway had a twin Otter with the door unlocked and the keys in it. It’s an old beater hanging around, a relic from the old days, but it still runs really well.”
    Red turned toward Nate and grinned. “Be even more of a shame if someone knew that twin Otter airplane was fueled and ready to go, like it had been parked there for someone to take on short notice ever since those Combat Force goons showed up and threatened me not to help you. Biggest shame of all is that I might not even notice the twin Otter was gone for a few days, and by the time I filed the paperwork on it, who knows, that someone might even have returned it.”
    â€œReal shame,” Nate agreed. He smiled.
    Red reached out and shook Nate’s hand. “Thanks for trusting me enough to come here. I still owe you plenty.”
    I wasn’t sure if I understood what I’d just heard.
    â€œGot to be going,” Red finished. “My favorite show just started. Inside the trailer, I have to crank the volume on my television to hear it above my air conditioner. When I’m in there watching, it’s so loud, planes can come and go and I don’t have any idea of what’s happening out on the runway.”
    Nate got into the van. He started the engine.
    â€œBy the way,” Red told him through the open window, “there’s a little trail behind that hangar that leads into the trees. I suspect if anyone ever drove a couple hundred yards down that trail with a rented van, it would be weeks before anyone noticed where it was parked.”
    â€œThanks,” Nate said.
    â€œThanks for what?” Red grinned again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Right? Not a thing.”

CHAPTER 18
    What an incredible world!
    We flew in the twin Otter at 2,500 feet, low enough to see the changing terrain. As the hours passed in the airplane and as I traced our westward path on a map, Nate pointed out different landmarks. The three of us were equipped with headsets that let us speak and hear easily above the roar of the twin prop engines.
    Less than 20 minutes after takeoff, we’d reached the Gulf of Mexico. With the beauty of the clouds and sun and the endless stretch of light bouncing off the whitecaps of the waves below, I’d hardly been able to breathe.
    Then we’d cut back over land, crossing Alabama. Everywhere I looked, it was green. I was staggered to think of all the life that swarmed the earth and the sky and the water. Later, after refueling, we had crossed the Mississippi. I’d been unable to comprehend a flow of water hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of miles long, all of it filled with fish and insects and frogs and turtles.
    Then the landscape had slowly changed, as the carpet of green trees began to break into open areas and we began to cross the Great Plains. Nate told us that less than 200 years earlier, millions of buffalo had lived there, and I tried to imagine the immense herds in a sea of waving grass.

    We had to stop after the first day of flying, because Nate didn’t want to fly at night in the mountains. I didn’t understand why he wanted to be cautious until we began to fly again the next morning.
    At first, the mountains were just blue smudges across the horizon ahead of us. Then the snowcapped peaks came into focus. And then we were in them, with Nate following highways below us so we could make it through the passes. Wind shook us from side to side until our wingtips seemed to brush the snow and the granite. It was strange to imagine our plane as just a little speck floating high above the pine forests and rivers.
    Time and again on our journey I stared—and wondered what it would have been like to grow up on Earth and to be able to see this incredible world every single day.
    As we