“OK, Warlock, coming up,” he spoke into his mouthpiece. “No strangers left in the area. He was looking for his sheep and you found them. Bring me up,” he said scooping up the tiny laser gun.
Martin hooked on to the dropped cable and was quickly lifted up to the Skimmer. He stared down at the woodsman who had stopped in a clearing and was looking up at them. The man kept staring at the Skimmer as it began to head west. Warlock had the Skimmer at its lowest cruising speed and Martin could see the man disappear again in the next wooded area. Occasionally he thought he saw specks of movement as they picked up speed over the remote valleys of the mountains. Here was a lost generation of people, cut off from their old society, now living like nomads in the lands of their forefathers. It was a role reversal of great magnitude, Martin thought. Probably thousands of white folk are wandering around these mountains outside of Pittsburgh proper, surviving on instinct, not wanting to live the new way. He couldn’t take the man out of his thoughts.
“McDonald, we’ll have to make a decision soon, it’s late in the day and I’m bushed, but it’s your call. We could do some night scanning back to Connellsville. Who knows, we may get lucky. He may think nighttime is his best time. We could do a complete sweep, maybe drop down at Ohiopyle for the night. I think we should do a couple of runs and then take a break before we finish up later tonight. “
“You’re the pilot, Major,” he answered. “I’d like to go but you’re doing the flying. What’s that down there? I can barely make out a small town by the two rivers. Is that Confluence? ”
“Yeah, that’s it. We’re losing light, but you can still see the rivers coming together,” Warlock answered as he swung the skimmer over the town.
“Can we put down there?” Martin asked.
“Easy. If you want we can get a very early start when its still dark. This old baby’s got the Red Sensor System.
Pick up anything in the darkest of nights. We could see if your friend is trying to walk it at night.”
“Great idea! Let’s do it and we’ll eat, take a rest and go back out. That’s probably when he’s traveling. What’s after Confluence?” Martin asked.
“The trail goes north-east following the Casselman River before looping around to the southeast to Cumberland.
I don’t think he could have gotten this far, so I think he’s somewhere west of Ohiopyle. That trail has been out of commission for years. So we do the whole trail one more time and then come back to Ohiopyle for a rest. If we stop now we can let them know we’ll be back later. They have tight security here.”
“Good. Well let’s get on with it.”
The craft swooped down toward the small town by the two rivers. As the Skimmer swung around toward the west, a solid dark bank of clouds began moving in from that direction.
“Just checked weather and there’s a storm coming in from Lake Erie. We’ll get back here before that son-of-a-bitch hits tonight. I have Weather Scans showing heavy winds and rain later tonight and then snow possibly later tomorrow. The temp is going to drop below freezing. It won’t be nice for your buddy on the trail, believe me.”
“Assuming he’s on the trail,” Martin said. “It’s just amazing that we haven’t spotted anything of him.”
“It’s a lot of ground to cover, McDonald, but we will find him. The way it’s been raining lately, that white water will be churning. He’s going to have to be careful along that river. As far as I’m concerned, that’s good luck for us. If he gets this far, he might try and go over to the old interstate, but that would be suicide with all the various Security forces.”
“I’m circling again so I can give our flight plan to Headquarters and see if they have any reports from our outposts. Give me a minute, then we’ll go in,” Warlock shouted. The Skimmer continued to circle and then began a descent.
Warlock began to talk into his mouthpiece. “Pittsburgh says the flight plan is good. So that’s it, lets get on with it,” Warlock said.
“Okay, Major. We might get lucky tonight or first thing in the morning with the sensors. We might surprise him,” Martin added.
“Agreed. I’ll notify Pittsburgh that we confirm their recommendations, that we’re going to stay out patrol tonight, and stay over in Ohiopyle.
Martin turned away and looked out through the darkened sky to the rolling mountains that spread north. There was a defined break in the oncoming blackened sky, nighttime darkness and an oncoming deep blackness of a storm. The Skimmer flew quietly and literally sailed over the tree tops as Warlock apparently wanted to get as close as he could to the trail down below. Martin watched the screen of the heat sensing equipment looking for any white outlines that might be a man. His eyes, weary from the last few days, briefly closed. Martin’s thoughts were on what was going on around him and he couldn’t stop thinking about the woodsman. In a way it was if he had stepped back a couple of hundred years into the past when those kind of people dominated the landscape below. Suddenly he was jostled awake by a sudden climb towards a mountain.
Warlock noticed Martin drifting as the Skimmer climbed. “Relax, McDonald, nothing yet. I’m going to do some maneuvering along the trail. I have the scanner on. You just listen for any beeps. If you hear continual beeping, begin to look for an outline.”
Martin looked at the red screen and his head rested back against the seat. Once this was over, he had to concentrate on finishing his degree in Pittsburgh next month. He thought of the new, exciting world in which he lived and in which he wanted to excel. It was an odd world, with segregated societies, but it was at least, orderly and peaceful. Europe had become a partitioned conglomeration as far as immigration was concerned. France, the Benelux Countries, Italy and Germany had imposed strict immigration quotas, except for educational visas.
Martin smiled thinking of what had happened to the U.S. Martin again opened his eyes and looked at the absolute pit of blackness outside. Suddenly a row of lights and an outline of houses with docks appeared.
Warlock slowed and did a circle over the grouping of houses. Each had walls surrounding them, but there were no people visible from the Skimmer. ‘Probably vacation homes at one time,’ Martin thought.
“Just checking to see if there is heat down there that shouldn’t be. Those places are empty according to my data, McDonald. Nothing showing on the screen, though,” Warlock said into his earpiece.
Warlock circled the Skimmer several times over the houses and then took off into the black ahead. The one thing that stuck in Martin’s mind as he thought of the small cluster of houses he had seen earlier were the walls that each had. They were in the boondocks and still they had walls. ‘Strange,’ Martin thought, ‘how countries and regions had adopted the same idea to keep people of different religions or culture from entering unless of course they were to do labor for the rich ones. “Atlantica has no walls,” he said to himself. “That’s why I’m there and that’s why it’s going to make it.”
Martin was jolted back into the moment by Warlock whose humming had become singing. He glanced over at Warlock who was wide awake with a smile on his face as he continued to hum a melody Martin had never
heard. The man was in his element. As Martin sat there he realized that after what they had done the last two days they had made absolutely no headway in finding Sloan. He had to be out there or had he made a horrible mistake. There had been no signs of Sloan. The only clue was the sighting on the river the other day and there was no definitive identification of the person chased by Security. He did know if they didn’t find Sloan by the day after tomorrow, the search would be called off. If so, all of his future goals might be compromised. He sat looking out into the darkness, trying to think of some clue he had missed.