Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Andy stood on the tarmac at Kabul International, watching the AH-64 fade to a speck in the distance. Even though it was now October, it still felt hot. He had a comfortable two hours before his Luftwaffe flight was scheduled to take off. He shouldered his pack and duffel and his M4 carbine, then walked over to the FLOPS shop-the new, dramatically scaled-down and consolidated U.S. Army Aviation Flight Operations Center, Kabul. There he quickly bummed a two-minute ride to the German hangars. Part of the route cut across an active taxiway, which was unnerving, but the specialist who was driving acted as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. Just another day in the land of Kipling.

Checking in for the Luftwaffe flight was a breeze, even though he didn’t have a scrap of documentation for the flight itself, just his movement orders. All of the arrangements had been made by phone, and the German officers had gotten the word that he was expected. They handed him a complex itinerary marked Luftfahrt-Bundesamt with typical German date formats and dotted times. It had just his name and rank typed at the top, yet they repeatedly assured him that was all the documentation he needed for every leg of his journey: “Ja, ja, Herr Major. Das ist alles.”

Thinking about the SIG 9mm pistol buried near the bottom of his duffel, he felt a bit of anxiety. Strangely, even the obvious presence of his M4 carbine was not questioned. Since nearly all of the Heer troops around him carried Heckler amp; Koch G36 rifles, it didn’t look out of the ordinary. Some of these troops carried their rifles by their long top-carry handles, and this almost made Andy laugh. It looked like they were carrying attache cases. None of his bags were inspected. Only his military ID card and the flight itinerary sheet were checked.

The series of cargo shuttle flights, by way of Azerbaijan, took a grueling thirty-seven hours. The planes were too noisy for a comfortable conversation, and most of his fellow passengers-a mix of Heer ground troops and Luftwaffe airmen-seemed tipsy from preflight drinks. At least they shared Andy’s joy to be heading home.

8 Ankunft

“Wir versaufen unser Oma ihr klein Hauschen,

lhr klein Hauschen, ihr klein Hauschen.

Wir versaufen unser Oma ihr klein Hauschen,

Und die erste und die zweite Hypothek!”

-Popular drinking song in the Weimar Republic of Germany in 1922, referring to the runaway inflation of the period

Loosely translated: “We are drinking up our granny’s little house, Her little house, her little house. We are drinking up our granny’s little house, And the first and second mortgage!”

After what seemed like an eternity, Andy’s flight touched down at Rhein-Main air base. But the hurry-up-and-wait was far from over. He still had to travel to the Stryker Cavalry Regiment’s headquarters in Bavaria for his last few days of outprocessing.

He spent the next night holed up at an Air Force Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ), waiting for a flight to Ramstein Air Base-the base nearest to Vilseck with regularly scheduled flights.

The long-distance phone lines in the United States were “temporarily out of service,” so Andy was not able to call Kaylee. But he was able to e-mail her and get her e-mails in reply. They each sent dozens of notes during the two days and nights that Laine was stuck at Rhein-Main. For some reason the Skype voice and video service wasn’t working. He knew their headquarters were in Luxembourg, but he wondered where the Skype server was, and if that was causing the problem. He surmised that the server was probably in a fire-gutted building in some riot-ravaged city in the eastern United States.

It was while he was at Rhein-Main that the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) announced that all commercial flights to the United States had been suspended. Kaylee’s e-mails then took on a frantic tone. In one, she wrote:

Andy:

GET HOME, SOON, DARLING!!! Ship yourself in a big Fed-Ex box if you have to! I am SOOOOO worried about you. I can’t sleep, thinking about this travel mess.

XXOOXX

– Kaylee

Although he was just as concerned as Kaylee, Andy tried to make his replies as upbeat as possible. In one of his last e-mails before checking out of the BOQ, he wrote:

Subject: Re:RE: [U] Outprocessing amp; Travel Home!

From: Laine Andrew CPT 2SCR (FWD)

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED

My Darling Kaylee:

I cannot wait to hold you in my arms. Please remain prayerful, and do not worry. All that worrying doesn’t accomplish anything.