Chapter 1 - The Escape

When the a series of attacks hit the USA, a family attempts to flee on their airplane to remote North Carolina.

Escape

7:50 AM, February 28th

 

I had the little two-seat sport plane running almost wide open so that I could maintain my elevation. The plane was beyond fully loaded, it was rated to carry five-hundred and eighty pounds and that included passengers, fuel and luggage. At the moment the little Zenith airplane was carrying two adults, my nine year old son, sitting on his mother’s lap, and my fairly tall twelve year old daughter, uncomfortably crammed into the area behind the back seat reserved for luggage. With a full load of thirty gallons of fuel when we started, and as much stuff crammed into the cockpit as we could manage, the plane was easily two-hundred pounds over its legal weight capacity.

It seemed to me that no one would really care about that now, though. The events that led to this frantic flight to our remote cabin in North Carolina rattled around in my brain. I was thankful that my wife and I had the foresight to create a combination vacation and “bugout” location in the event of such an emergency, but in reality, I never really expected this day to come.

As I was cruising toward a steep mountain, the plane suddenly lurched upwards and I fought to keep it smooth for the sake of my motion sick wife. The ridge was still about twenty miles away and several thousand feet below us, but the strong winds lifting off the opposite side of the mountain were creating some strong uplift winds. Once I fought to get the plane up over eleven-thousand feet, the air was a little smoother.

The unthinkable all started a couple of weeks ago. People, the mainstream news and even our President said it couldn't happen, but it sure did. As it turns out all the “crazy preppers”, people who believed the world would end as we know it were not the crazy ones! While my wife and I did not think of ourselves as preppers, we definitely were unified in that we both have a bit of a bunker mentality to our lives and took steps, like the purchase of our cabin and our own rugged little airplane, in case thing ever did truly “go south”. Growing up with a grandfather who was a Normandy survivor and a father who fought in two tours in Vietnam, the message to protect my family at all costs was subtly and sometimes not so subtly was driven into me as a youngster wandering the woods and streams of my remote hometown. In recent years, more big brother politics in the world and in the United States made me pay attention, and I began to consider that all the doomsayers might be right. I mean doesn't every American need an AR rifle and a handgun?

The first attack was on February 12th. How it all started, from what I was able to gather from the various news sources and mostly verify from few well-placed friends of mine in Washington, was that an extremist Islamic para military unit known as the Sons of Bin Laden sent an email to the state department at nine am the morning before the first incident and detailed exactly what would happen if the United States did not comply with their demands. According to the official White House statement, they required the release and return of the inmates being held at the United States terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay and the State department was to wire five hundred million dollars into the Sons of Bin Laden’s accounts. All of this had to occur by six pm that night or “The Sons”, as the press started referring to them, would destroy a major East Coast city the following morning. Naturally the brass called bullshit on the threat.

The government a******s decided that the public should not hear about this threat, it could cause mass panic. So hardly anyone were made aware of the imminent threat. Not the Congress, not the Governor’s, law enforcement or any of the soon to be critical, emergency responders and certainly not the people… in the city of Boston. Turns out the Sons actually told the State department what city they intended to hurt...

 They made good on it.

Author's Note

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