Grand Junction Airport Control Tower

Grand Junction Airport Control Tower is the focus of Hig’s return to Grand Junction after nine years away. Its live radio voice and working beacon briefly suggest that ordinary airport life has survived the collapse, but the scorched wrecks on the runway reveal that the tower’s apparent welcome conceals a lethal defense.

Approach and First Contact

Six miles from the airport, at nine hundred feet, Hig turns toward the tower and calls on the frequency saved in his Garmin GPS. Three years earlier, he had received a signal there—the beginning of a message—and now he tries again. After static, a woman answers with precise, routine landing instructions, clearing his Cessna to land on runway two niner. Her calm formality sounds like airport operations from before the collapse, giving Hig a momentary vision of the ordinary life he has lost: his wife and dog alive, and a flight that ends in a homecoming rather than after nine years of absence. The airport’s rotating green-and-white beacon complicates that reassurance. Hig has seen it flashing from ten miles away, but only at six miles does its steady pulse strike him as wrong against the burned city. A working light is not impossible—Erie also has power, and airports increasingly use solar and wind—but the beacon is on in clear daylight, when it is not needed. The live controller’s voice and the signal’s persistent rhythm make the tower seem less like a ruin than an active enterprise, a contrast that puts Hig on edge even before he can explain why.

The Runway Trap

The approach turns the tower’s apparent welcome into a threat. From a mile out, the east-west runway looks smooth and maintained, unlike the cracked strips Hig has seen east of the mountains; the Beast descends toward it while rows of hangars and the tower come into view. But the aircraft wrecks on the field are scorched, not merely battered loose by weather. At roughly thirty feet above the ground, Hig recognizes them as crash wreckage and pulls back hard on the yoke, opening the throttle instead of flaring for a landing. The Beast surges upward, steeply, while the lambs cry out in the cabin. As the aircraft climbs, a taut cable springs into view beneath it, apparently missing the wheels by about ten feet. The trap spans the runway a third of the way down, held ten feet above the pavement by two articulated arms welded from T-bar steel; painted black to blend with the tarmac, the cable is visible from the air chiefly by its shadow. Hig circles left, braced for gunfire, but sees Pops with his gun raised and scanning the hangars and wreckage. The tower’s active beacon and controller had seemed to promise a functioning airport; the hidden wire reveals that the runway is instead part of its defenses. Hig also sees the fuel gauge register only two gallons, at most ten minutes of flight, so escaping the landing attempt leaves him with little margin to understand who has set the trap or how to approach the tower.

The Tower’s Defenses and Occupants

With the aircraft clear of the cable but nearly out of fuel, Hig and Pops approach the tower on foot. Hig takes his AR-15 and a handheld radio, tunes the radio to the tower frequency, and retrieves grenades from beneath one of the lambs. He follows Pops along the building wall, staying out of sight of the tower before they cross the exposed ramp toward the FBO offices. The radio offers a possible way to speak with whoever is inside, but Hig’s training from Bangley has also taught him the value of silence and overwhelming firepower; neither choice is safe while the defenders remain unseen.

The voice over the radio had sounded like an older woman, and Pops remarks that it reminded him of his grandmother. That human familiarity makes the trap more unsettling rather than less: the tower’s ordinary, courteous landing instructions had been part of a defense capable of turning a runway into a killing ground. Pops identifies the tower windows as thick bulletproof glass, installed after 9/11, but explains that the occupants must still shoot through gunports. Once inside the nearby FBO, he can take time to line up a shot through one of those openings. A minute later he signals Hig over from the rear door, having shot the gunman through a gunport; the tower’s apparent fortress protection has left a narrow vulnerability that Pops knows how to exploit.

They ascend the tower’s five levels with Pops clearing each floor and Hig covering the stairwell. At the locked control-room door, Pops shoots out the lock. The room is not an abandoned operations center: cats, panicked by the gunfire, scramble across radar keyboards and communications panels, hissing against dark screens. Through the green-tinted windows, Hig sees the wounded shooter, an old man with white beard and matted hair, choking on the floor amid blood. The man’s cap identifies the Peoria Jet Center, with its claim to serve the heartland; his presence suggests that people fleeing the flu from the east had reached this western airport. The cat-filled control room turns the tower’s return to aviation normality into something grotesque: the equipment and radio service persist, but the person behind them has made welcome inseparable from violence.

After the old man tells them to go to hell, Pops shoots him, and Hig gags. Looking out before they flee the smell and the cats, Hig sees solar panels across the Jet Center roof, like those at Erie, and understands how the site could pump water and fuel and keep its radios and beacon operating. The pumps stand less than a hundred yards away. He considers how the survivors might have used the wrecks as a means to shoot approaching people from a distance, or how Aunt Bee might have appeared to be a concerned grandmother and gestured them toward the trap. These are Hig’s possibilities, not confirmed accounts of what happened; what he can see is that the beacon’s energy and the runway’s carefully concealed cable belong to the same organized defense.

The Apartment and Its Collection

Before leaving the tower, Pops invites Hig to see the apartment on the third floor. Hig does not want to go, but Pops insists that he will. The small, windowless bedroom is immaculate: a bed is made beneath a patch quilt, a plush bear rests on the pillow, and a silk rose stands in a cut-glass vase fastened to the table. Its neatness resembles the carefully kept interior of a retiree’s recreational vehicle, a private domestic order set apart from the bloodied control room and the cats moving through the tower. The adjoining room makes the tower’s occupant legible through what he kept. One wall holds roughly a hundred caps bearing the names of FBOs, aircraft service centers, and aviation specialists from across the country. Shelves display pairs of spectacles alternating with crudely stuffed birds. These collections tie the isolated tower keeper to the far-flung aviation world represented by the Peoria Jet Center cap, while the polished apartment and its carefully arranged objects contrast with the lethal trap below. The tower had preserved the outward signs of airport service—radio, beacon, and a maintained runway—but its remaining life had narrowed into a defended outpost and one man’s meticulously ordered private space.