Attack on Bangley's Stronghold

The attack on Bangley’s stronghold is first encountered through its aftermath: Hig returns to a damaged Erie and discovers that Bangley has survived a daytime assault only to be left gravely injured. The event changes Hig’s understanding of his companion’s apparent calm. Bangley had not been relaxed because he failed to see danger; from his house, he could survey much of the airfield and assess a threat before moving to meet it.

Damage and discovery

Hig approaches the runway over the low but still-running river. From the air, he sees burned houses, foundations, and one side of his hangar torn open and burned. The familiar airport perimeter has become a record of an attack. The scale of the damage turns his return into an urgent search for whoever remains, rather than a simple arrival home.

Bangley’s house, about a hundred yards north, is still standing, but it has been hit. Its windows are gone, the dormer on the second floor is splintered, and scorch marks surround it; a large opening breaks the roof beside it. The house is recognizable by the gunsmith shop in its sunken living room and photographs of a blonde family skiing. Those domestic details sit alongside the damage, making the building both a familiar place and evidence of the violence that reached the airport.

Hig runs upstairs, where he has never been before, following the hallway past photographs of the family skiing, sailing, and spending time in a bungalow among palm trees. He stops to orient himself toward the front of the house and opens a partly closed door. The movement through these rooms is also a movement into a perspective he had not previously considered: Bangley’s position upstairs offered a commanding view of the ground he and Hig were trying to defend.

Reconstructing the assault

From the upper room, Bangley could see across the low berm where Hig slept with Jasper, toward the dumpster they had moved away from Hig’s house, along the rusted aircraft, and toward the FBO building and Hig’s hangar. Hig recognizes that the decoy house and the approaches to the hangar were visible from this vantage. The view explains why Bangley chose the room and why he could respond to an alarm with a clearer picture than Hig had imagined.

The attack came during the day, a circumstance Bangley had not expected. The assailants approached from the front. He survived their initial burst and fought them until they retreated; then he went upstairs to gain a better view and angle. Hig estimates that only a couple of the attackers may have been armed, but this is his conjecture, not a confirmed count. Later, when Hig offers a rough estimate of the group, Bangley answers with the numbers fourteen and four. The exchange establishes that Hig had underestimated the assault, while the precise meaning of those two numbers is not clarified in the account.

Hig’s discovery of Bangley’s vantage point also revises earlier encounters. When Hig had used a nighttime intruder alarm, Bangley could have watched the whole scene from upstairs, including the people behind the dumpster and those farther back. Hig now understands that Bangley may have known what was happening before walking out to the berm. His seeming ease was not necessarily indifference or a lack of surprise; it could reflect preparation and a better view of the threat.

The defense and its cost

Bangley did not remain in the house throughout the fighting. In his later account, he says that he believed the attackers had trapped him there and that he thought he was going to die. He used the grenade launcher against them in the house, then took two more on the way to the hangar. His account identifies a sequence of resistance, withdrawal, and continued defense, but does not establish every movement or the attackers’ losses beyond what he reports.

Hig finds Bangley behind Red Square, the massive red rolling tool chest that he and Bangley had moved together from the service-center hangar. The chest had been given a place of honor against the north wall; now it has shifted away from the wall, and Bangley’s work boot is visible behind it. His grenade launcher lies nearby, the one he had been working on. The familiar workshop object becomes a marker of the attack’s aftermath and of the defensive work carried out there.

Bangley is badly injured and unable to explain what happened when Hig first finds him. He is lying on his favorite rifle, with his left hand over its trigger guard. The scene joins the practical objects of their shared life—the tool chest, the weapon under him, the launcher beside him—to the immediate fact that the person who maintained the stronghold can no longer defend himself. Hig’s discovery turns the defense into a rescue.

Survival and aftermath

Bangley remains in critical condition for more than two weeks. Cima decides not to move him and sets him up on a couch in the hangar. She treats a shattered leg and a wound in his side, and helps him take water and Sprite with a turkey baster. The hangar is hot in the afternoon, though its open door and a hole in the west wall allow some relief. Recovery is slow: it takes four days for Bangley to register Hig’s face, and he lapses into a coma-like state between brief periods of awareness. On the sixth day, he opens his eyes while Cima is feeding him.

Bangley survives. His later recollection supplies information Hig could not obtain from the ruined buildings alone: the assault began in daylight, he fought the attackers from the house, used the launcher, and continued fighting as he made his way to the hangar. The event therefore has two stages in Hig’s understanding. First, wrecked buildings and Bangley’s condition reveal the cost of the attack; only later does Bangley’s account disclose the scale and course of his resistance.

Significance

The assault exposes both the strength and the limits of the defenses Hig and Bangley have built around the airport. Bangley’s elevated view gave him an advantage, but it could not prevent the attackers from reaching his house or leave him unharmed. The house, hangar, and runway are not secure simply because they have been watched and prepared; their survival depends on constant attention and on people able to act under pressure.

For Hig, the most consequential discovery is not only that Bangley fought, but that he had been observing the perimeter with a precision Hig did not recognize. The attack makes visible a part of their partnership that had been hidden in ordinary routines: Bangley’s strategic watchfulness, and the degree to which Hig had relied on it without understanding its full reach. Yet the outcome also reverses their usual positions. The defender who could cover the airport from above becomes dependent on Cima’s care and Hig’s return. The stronghold survives in damaged form, and Bangley survives within it, but neither result makes the attack a victory without cost.