We All Go Down Together Epilogue Part 1
Loftin Air Guard Air Field
Loftin, Texas
"Sheldon, are you absolutely sure you can do this? This bird is no Cessna and you, my gangly friend, are not trained and just because you got it up and down again once is no reason for me to let you fly it alone!"
"Dawn, Dawn, Dawn, I won't be alone. Rajesh will be in the second seat and if anything goes wrong, he's an astrophysicist and a Hindu and between his knowledge and the pantheon of deities at his disposal, any problem will be moot. Trust me, I have – "
"ME? Sheldon Cooper, you have definitely lost your mind if you think I'm flying with you 12 miles let alone 1,200! This thing is a collection of parts submitted by the lowest bidders and it's older than you are. No, I will not leave Terra Firma in your company. I will – "
"Missy will be so proud of you, Rajesh. As your future brother-in-law it behooves me to tell you that she has a weak spot for aviators."
The Major hid a smile behind her hand. Listening to these two made her day. She'd already met Melissa Cooper and if the woman needed any more weak spots for Dr. Unpronounceable it certainly wasn't apparent to her.
"I hate to rain on your parade but until we know just where we're heading and what the landing field is like, my birds are staying put." Her 'birds' were C-123 Providers that were destined for the bone yard and had ended up here for training purposes.
"Still no contact via radio, Dr. Cooper?" Sheldon had spent night after night calling the island. They launched a heliostat balloon to tether an extended antenna at 1,500 feet but so far, no response. The base personnel took over the day shifts. He didn't even know if Hideki still monitored the radio at night.
"No, but that doesn't mean anything. They may not have gotten around to launching night balloon antennas since they're keeping a low profile until they get situated. As far as landing, Dawn, I read where these aircraft were used in places with just dirt airfields in some instances. The strip on Mackinaw is paved and handled Navions, Navajos and King Airs with no problem."
"The field on the island isn't even on the charts. What happens if we fly all that way and can't land? Suppose there's livestock on the field? Suppose – "
"Suppose we just sit here and wait for food and fuel to run out. What then? Are you gonna convert those transports to rubber bands?"
"Sheldon," she said quietly, "I'm responsible for the people who man those aircraft and their families. I can't take a chance on unknowns. I just can't."
"Fine. I'll go first and land first. If I don't make it, you can land at Manitowoc and call for the Badger to ferry your people and equipment and the farmers and their stuff over. It's big enough to handle 2 of your aircraft at a time and all the people and their stuff if you can get them aboard."
"We haven't made contact with the island. All this discussion is a waste of time if they don't know to come fetch us from wherever you said. Goodness, and I thought Indian names were difficult to pronounce!"
They laughed at Raj and he got angry. "Why are you laughing at me? It's true, I tell you."
"Raj, those are Indian names."
"He has a point. If we can't contact them, we can't opt for the alternate field. It will have to be the Mackinaw airstrip or we'll head on to St. Ignace although it's probably not much better."
"When do we leave?"
Mackinaw Island
'The Colony'
Bomber and Leslie were lounging around as usual in the passenger lounge waiting for word from the scrounging party that had headed up US2 from St. Ignace to Brevoort, a tourist town 35 miles to the northwest.
Leslie was casually turning the dial to see if there might just be a voice or music or Morse Code or anything to indicate that they weren't alone in the world. Of course, she knew they weren't alone. There were groups of nomads –
The radio crackled and Bomber was on his feet and had headphones on and was chattering into the microphone.
"Unknown station, repeat your last transmission. I say again – "
"…Holmes…flight of 6 C-123 Prov…landing condit…"
"Field is wet but stable. Repeat, wet but stable. Wind is from," he looked at the sock across from the lounge and laughed, "the wind is negligible, over."
"…teen minutes. Fuel critical. One pass then…nace, over."
"Les, go get Wyatt and a reaction platoon. We really don't know who's coming in and we shouldn't take chances. Just because it's a woman's voice doesn't mean they're friendly."
"Just call him on the CB, Bomber, it's – "
"And panic the others? No, go tell him, Les. And then stay put until we know what's going on."
"Hideki Tanaka, I am not going to hide like some – EEEK – I'm so gonna kick your ass, flyboy…put me down!"
He dropped her onto a 4-wheeler and then ran back into the lounge/control tower. Holy shit – C-123s!
Texas Flight
Sheldon was excited and he was squirming in his seat in anticipation of seeing Penny for the first time in months. When his mind turned to possibilities, he settled down and put them on a back burner. He needed to get this malingering beast on the ground before he worried about his personal life.
"Raj, don't be nervous. I've done this hundreds of times in simulators – "
"Yes, simulators on a PC screen where you could push 'P' for pause and go pee or get a drink or a snack. There is no 'P' on the instrument panel, Sheldon and this is not your living room. Keep both hands on the wheel. My God it smells like Delhi back there."
'Back there' was the cargo bay currently occupied by 30 Brangus cows that were less than thrilled at being enclosed in a cold and noisy box that bounced up and down. It had been a long 10-hour flight but it would soon be over.
"There's the Mackinaw Bridge, Raj, and the island is just eight miles that-a way. Can you see it?"
"It is terribly small Sheldon. And I don't see an airport or anything like one."
"It's down there. Get on the horn and get landing instructions from the boss."
Mackinaw Island
Penny was adapting to the changes in her life as well as could be expected. They'd picked up a social worker from among the Chicago group and she never missed a weekly meeting with others who were grieving or having trouble adapting to the new normal. There had been a rash of suicides after the Colonists had arrived and the program had been hurriedly launched to combat the depression that others had succumbed to.
It helped to talk about things and after hearing some of the horror stories the others told, she realized how fortunate she was to have had Sheldon in her life, if only briefly and how much they'd over come to have arrived at his 'Sanctuary' on the island.
Penny threw herself into teaching and discovered her true calling. She loved her kids and they seemed to soak up learning. Penny just wished that her husband could see how much she'd learned from him about so much.
It had rained earlier so her class was indoors and they were talking about what the early colonists faced when they first came to America. Everyone quieted down when they heard the really loud sound of an airplane going overhead at a very low altitude. And then another and another and another.
She could see out the storefront windows. People were running up the paved track towards the airstrip. Some carried weapons and she immediately went into 'combat mode' and told the kids to go home and hide, just like they'd all practiced in weekly civil defense drills and she grabbed her H&K and ran towards the airstrip.
Yes, they were on an island but there were still factions on the mainland that would covet what they had and there'd been clashes since the summer began when 'recovery' parties ran into the occasional group of nomads living off the leavings of civilization.
Texas Flight
"Get those aircraft away from the runway. We have 6 birds and there's not enough room to taxi off the runway," Major Holmes said into her microphone to Bomber.
"Wilco. Give us a few minutes. Can you go around?"
"I can but I've got a crazy-assed physicist flying tail-end Charlie and he's running on fumes. I'd let him land first but…"
Hideki had people pushing the private planes anywhere they could to make room for the C-123s to park off the concrete landing strip.
"Say again…physicist? As in Sheldon Cooper, physicist and never-been-trained pilot?" Bomber was torn between laughing and worrying about his friend. Leslie had been down in the dumps since he'd disappeared and morning coffee wasn't the same without him around. She missed him.
"Yeah, and he's already augured one bird in and I personally don't want to have to inform his wife that he did it again. He apparently didn't learn much if anything about fuel management on his living room simulator."
Penny was huffing and puffing by the time she caught up with her dad's little squad and she started barraging him with questions that he couldn't answer.
"Slugger, you know as much as I do. Bomber had Leslie call for the reaction platoon and they're spread out all over the island doing things so I grabbed whoever had a weapon and this is what I ended up with."
Twelve men against who knows how many might be coming in on those transports.
"Are we being invaded, Daddy? Have we come all this way, lost all those people, just to have some high-tech assholes try and take it away from us?"
She was thinking about Sheldon and what he'd think about this situation. And where he was. And if he was alive and if so, did he think about her as often as she did of him? Did he regret that harsh exchange of words that were caused by her fear and his stubbornness?
Texas Flight
"Okay, kiddies, follow Momma Goose to the pond and look sharp. These are your new employers, friends and neighbors. Make an impression." Major Holmes thought about what she said and then clicked on the mike again.
"That's everyone but you Dr. Cooper. Try not to make the kind of impression an aircraft makes when it ceases forward flight after intersecting with the ground. Just get it down. It doesn't have to be pretty, just down. Over."
"I have already crashed and burned once. To do so again would be highly improbable given the odds. Would you like me to do the math? Over."
"'What I'd like,' Sheldon, is for you to land my aircraft and taxi onto the apron and shut down, if that's not too much to ask of a theoretical particle physicist in this brave new world of ours."
Apparently Sheldon was thinking of a suitable reply and kept the mike keyed and she heard Dr. Unpronounceable shriek, "Sheldon, goodness gracious, we are on fire!"
She cursed the physicist for demanding she release the 'hangar queen' so that he could haul additional livestock and sundries to the island. This was her fault. She shouldn't have given in to his badgering. Damn him and those puppy dog looks and those damned blue eyes! When the flaps jammed on his check ride and the fire bottle on the left engine suddenly discharged, she should have grounded it but no, he just had to fly. So she let him.
She remembered how he and Dr. Unpronounceable had laughed and joked as they painted each of the sides of the aircraft with a new designation. Gone was USAF and in it's place in white letters outlined in black: Colonial One.
It was an electrical fire someplace behind and beneath the instrument panel and Raj had already covered everything with foam from an extinguisher but the smoke continued to billow out from underneath the panel. There were sparks but no flames – just the eye-irritating smoke.
Raj opened his window to vent the cockpit but it just got worse so Sheldon told him to lower the ramp to a stand-by position in the cargo compartment to vent the smoke down and out of the cockpit.
Brangus are normally placid cud-chewers but between the dark of the compartment and now the smell of smoke – they panicked. Raj hung on the ladder and lowered the ramp as instructed but lost his hold and fell to the cargo bay floor and rolled around under the cattle, thoroughly coating himself in cow crap.
"Oh, Shiva protect me but I smell like the streets of Mumbai. Damn you, Sheldon Cooper! We should have found a train!" He narrowly missed being trampled as the big bovines moved instinctively towards the light of the partly opened ramp.
He scrambled up the ladder and buckled himself into the copilot's seat. Sheldon glanced over and paled, the smell and sight of his friend covered in cow plops making him gag. Raj just glared at him and muttered, "Not one word, Sheldon, not on single syllable do I want to hear".
Mackinaw Island
Airpark
The first C-123 landed and the pilot reversed the big engines and the transport slowed and then turned left off the narrow landing strip and eased between two small aircraft and shut down it's twin engines. The ramp dropped and 40 women and children piled off and lined up beside the plane just as they'd practiced, watching the next transport ease into a textbook landing.
The final two transports landed and shut down their engines but didn't lower their cargo ramps and this immediately got the attention of the Colonials. Wyatt's 'reaction platoon', little more than a squad, formed a line and prepared to engage any enemies that might get off the plane.
Bomber had run out and greeted the crew of the first plane. Introductions were made but Bomber saw the defensive posture of the reaction platoon and asked, "Major, what the fuck is going on with those last two aircraft?"
"Chickens, ducks, geese, and a few sheep would make a mess of the runway, not to mention the dairy cows we picked up in Grayling. Dr. Cooper traded a few Brangus for them. I told the crew to stay buttoned up until Cooper landed – or crashed. Be a shame. The rest of the Brangus herd is on board."
"Doesn't he have an experienced copilot? He barely got the Cessna airborne."
"He's the last available pilot in the Air Force as far as I'm concerned . Reservists and air guardsman are all I could find. He's flying the 'hangar queen' but we needed the cargo room so…"
"His wife's going to shoot you if anything happens to him. Hell, I might take a shot myself."
"Friends?" She looked at the Asian man who looked so damned familiar…
"Best man at his wedding. He picked me up outside Barstow in the very beginning and we've been through a lot together. Scary shit but we always managed to get through it. This Island was his idea after the mess in Omaha."
Sheldon thumped the fuel gauge and it sank further against the pin. They were running on fumes and his port engine was beginning to miss. He looked at his friend and sighed. 'What irony. We both survive incidents in aircraft that should have killed us and now…'
"Rajesh, if we crash, do you know what's going to be the last thing to go through your mind?"
"That I love my mummy and daddy and my nasty sister but most of all, your sister, Melissa."
"Well, no, after that. The last thing?"
"No, I thought…"
"One of the Brangus!" he said, and then, "Bazina!"
"When we get on the ground I will instruct your sister to beat the 'Bazinga' out of you."
"Raj, you really need to work on your personal hygiene issues. You smell." He was trying to distract Rajesh from the fact that the port engine had shut down and the prop was wind milling. He didn't know how to 'feather' it.
He could see the strip a few miles ahead and so he turned out over the Straits and began his climb.
"Sheldon! What are you doing? The field is behind us! Aren't we going to land soon?" The smoke had dissipated and Sheldon split-essed and lined up the air strip.
"I think you're right, Raj. We need to land. Engage the flaps as we practiced and read out the airspeed and altitude please. Next stop, Mackinaw Island." 'And Penny.'
Sheldon had spent hours going over the flight manuals and specifications for the old C-123 Provider and one fact had stuck in his mind: it had the glide ratio of a brick.
Penny saw Bomber talking with the woman who'd flown the first transport and walked over to both introduce herself and to inquire after Sheldon. Only Sheldon knew about the Island and it was inconceivable that they'd landed here because of the weather.
"Yeah, I know Dr. Know-It-All-And-Has-To-Have-His-Way. That's him on final approach." Her trained eye summed up the aircraft's attitude and trim…he wasn't doing half-bad considering he was on one engine. The Provider flew well on a single engine but not if the fuel ran out.
And at that exact moment in time the starboard engine sputtered and died and Penny swore she could hear Rajesh Koothrappali's squeal of terror even though she knew he was in India.
"Up, up, UP!" shouted Raj, as if Sheldon's wasn't doing his best to keep the nose of the Provider above the horizon.
"Put the gear down, Raj." In the back of is mind he was running several DRT problems, like how much longer would it take for the Provider to hit the runway at 88knts and how far would it move given the coefficient of friction and ruling out an immediate explosion as an influencing variable of unknown effect.
"UP," the onlookers seemed to shout in unison or at least Penny thought so. 'C'mon, Moon Pie, just twenty more feet and then you'll be down and safe. Just hit the brakes, sweetie, and hang on.'