The Kuleshov Conspiracy -- Book Two in the Jackson Guild Saga

CHAPTER TWO

Flying Blind

The mind veered back as the Black Hawk banked west

toward the Potomac and the Pentagon. We flew low to duck

the air traffic hustling in and out of Reagan National

Airport, which was a little less than five miles from Ground

Zero.

On that gray Monday morning of the Detonation, pilots

taking off or coming in to land at Reagan were blinded by

the flash. Broken aircraft littered runways. A gutted blue

Alaska Air 737 lay off to one side of a taxiway, its wheels

up like a dead animal lying on its back. I thought of a

robin’s egg with the chick’s legs poking through. Another

big plane had apparently skidded on landing and plowed

through a group of taxiing commuter jets.

The chaos at the airport must have gone on for hours.

Smaller charters and corporate jets appeared to have

attempted escapes only to have flown off course for some

reason.

Curry

suggested

there

might

have

been

an

electromagnetic pulse from the explosion, EMP, which fries

circuitry. Modern planes are “fly by wire,” the pilot’s

control stick is little more than a computer mouse. It has no

physical connection to the plane’s actual hydraulics. Their

chips got fried by the blast. That was it. The planes dropped.

The Black Hawk pilot clicked on the intercom and called

our attention to the 14th Street bridge. It formed an endless

line of autos, many of them charred and crumpled from

collisions, like tin foil in a burn pit. The flash had blinded

drivers and caused head-on collisions, resulting in miles of

pile-ups, as far as we could see in both directions.

Many autos were being used as shelters, even this close to

the radiation pulsing from Ground Zero. Survivors walked

The Kuleshov Conspiracy

13

back and forth across the crowded bridges, tattered people,

mostly heading away from the District into Virginia. They

moved like zombies. Sadly, they would all be stopped at the

Beltway and sent back. Military units rimmed the inner

loop. Fort Apache. There was no getting in or out for those

inside the city and its close-in suburbs. The idea was to seal

the region around Ground Zero and hold it, keep the chaos

inside from spreading. It made me think of the Warsaw

Ghetto.