Austin Chambers's Blog: Cooter's 2 Cents... - Posts Tagged "cascadia-fallen"
They say 51 is the new 50...
...and, boy, do I REALLY want to quit my bill-payer and pursue this author life full time! I mean—I was always the quick-witted class-clown. To prove it, I was once dubbed "Cooter" when I was in a 3-patch Motorcycle Club (because of the stuff I say...get your minds out of the gutter!) So I tattooed that crap on my right forearm. People see it and and ask, "What's that mean?" I always wink back and say, "That you can still make stupid decisions after 40!"
Anyhow—to the point. I have taken 2020 (Winner of "Crappiest year of the Year" award) by the horns. I now have a YouTube channel and web-blog under the name "Cascadian Preparedness". I tried to run one newsletter to serve the peppers and the readers, and all it did was cause a mass-unsubscribe event. So I now am slowly setting up a life-blog and smaller video channel under my author name, as well. https://authoraustinchambers.com
I'll be carving out time about once per month to blog something there, which I'll then come put up over here. All of this has become a second full-time job. Anyhow, I'm brand new to actively participating in Goodreads. If you happen to find this post, let me know! —Austin
Anyhow—to the point. I have taken 2020 (Winner of "Crappiest year of the Year" award) by the horns. I now have a YouTube channel and web-blog under the name "Cascadian Preparedness". I tried to run one newsletter to serve the peppers and the readers, and all it did was cause a mass-unsubscribe event. So I now am slowly setting up a life-blog and smaller video channel under my author name, as well. https://authoraustinchambers.com
I'll be carving out time about once per month to blog something there, which I'll then come put up over here. All of this has become a second full-time job. Anyhow, I'm brand new to actively participating in Goodreads. If you happen to find this post, let me know! —Austin
Launch Day + a public appearance in December
Hard to believe that Spiritus Americae launches in less than a week. Book Three, and I'm still making some launch errors: no ARC/Street Team to speak of, still waiting on my formatters at this late hour, so no author copies, yet... we learn....
On December 5th, from 9:30 to 5, myself, Glen Tate, Shelby Gallagher and Jeff Reynolds will be speaking and showcasing our books at the Crosby Community Center near Seabeck, Washington. We're ready to talk preparedness as the plague known as 2020 leads into the New Dark Age called 2021! (Hey!—I write post-apoc! Anyone truly surprised at how dreary I phrased that? Really??)
On December 5th, from 9:30 to 5, myself, Glen Tate, Shelby Gallagher and Jeff Reynolds will be speaking and showcasing our books at the Crosby Community Center near Seabeck, Washington. We're ready to talk preparedness as the plague known as 2020 leads into the New Dark Age called 2021! (Hey!—I write post-apoc! Anyone truly surprised at how dreary I phrased that? Really??)
LAUNCH!
Cascadia Fallen: Spiritus Americae is launched in paper, Kindle and KU! From the 11th-15th, Book 1 (Tahoma's Hammer) is FREE! and book 2 (Order Divested) is on a countdown deal!
Blades of Grass series in progress!
FYI! Venom Spear, the first book in the first Cascadia Fallen spinoff, is in progress. I'm about 26,000 words along, shooting for roughly 100K. I'll be moving right into continuous writing on two series throughout 2022. My goal is six week release gaps all year long! I haven't pined down the exact release date to start, yet, but it should be end of January or start of February!
Prologue and Chapter 1 of Venom Spear: Blades of Grass Book 1
The first book in the Cascadia Fallen spinoff series launches on 1/31! Enjoy the prologue and Chapter 1!
PROLOGUE
Over the Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan
“Danger close!” 1st Lt. Freeman Louis “Super Bert” Caldwell heard in his helmet headset. “T-Man is on the ridges to our north, west, and southwest. One hundred meters and closing!”
Caldwell knew that was what the Joes called the Taliban. It sounded like the mother of all firefights raging in the background. Americans were about to die.
“Bert, I just went Bingo,” he heard his wingman say. Captain Scott “Snooze N” Nethers was his closest squadron buddy and mentor. He was letting Bert know that he was now at the point in his fuel level that he had to make the twenty-five-minute flight back to base and land. The pair of Fairchild Republic A10 Thunderbolts—known affectionately by the ground troops as the “Warthog”—had been providing close air support for almost three hours. They had already performed an aerial refueling before receiving the call for support, meaning they were now bound to return to base. Not that it mattered—both planes had already run themselves low on ammo.
“I’m good,” Super Bert Caldwell replied. “I can make at least two more passes!”
“You’re full of it! Let’s go. Ratchet and Clank will be on site in thirty minutes.” Snooze ordered.
“Listen to those guys, Snooze!” the young pilot countered. He was three months into his first combat tour after college and training. “They’re surrounded and cut-off from their QRF! They don’t have thirty minutes!”
“Bert! Stop!” the more seasoned pilot warned the rookie. “See that fog that’s rolling in?!”
It was too late. Freeman Caldwell—Lou to his friends back home—lined up on the southwest-to northeast approach into the valley once more, disappearing from Snooze’s view as he did. The greenish-brown electronic map in the upper-left corner of his cockpit dashboard moved the mountains slowly as he once again progressed along the canyon walls. He reached down to his left. He felt for the correct switch to move from the HF frequency he had been talking to his wingman back to FM.
“Echo 3, this is Whisky Flight 2! Keep your heads down!”
Super Bert reached down to near his left hip and flipped the little red safety cover over the power cutout to his GAU-8 30mm cannon. He was hot, once again, to spew his depleted uranium projectiles into the enemies of brethren unmet. He had achieved his nickname as a token of supposed embarrassment from his squadron mates. The seven-barrel rotary cannon in the Warthog’s nose makes a very loud “brrrt” belch-type sound when firing at its fixed 3,900 rounds-per-minute rate. Pilots would normally fire in one to less-than-two second bursts. Super Bert had demonstrated the ability to make precise micro adjustments in flight, engaging as many as fifteen percent more targets on each pass when compared to his peers.
Left hand on his throttle, he trimmed his ailerons and reduced throttle just a bit, nudging his right hand on the joystick a hair left as he did. He was trying to get right in line with the top of a canyon wall he could no longer see due to incoming fog. The reduction in throttle caused a slight loss of lift. He couldn’t mess with this technique too much—the cannon was calibrated to shoot 4000 feet ahead when the craft was at a down-attitude of thirty degrees. Sweat built on his brow under the already hot helmet. Super Bert shot his eyes back and forth from the left side display, his heads-up display, and the window, nervously trying to find the top of the canyon. A quick altimeter check…one last look at the HUD…
BRRRRRRTTTTT….BRRRRRTTTTTT….BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT! Lou Caldwell hit the throttle and re-engaged the cannon’s safety switch, pulling slightly back on the yoke. If he had the fuel to make one more pass, he didn’t want to waste it climbing to altitude and rolling over to look when visibility was garbage anyhow.
“Whiskey Flight 2, Echo 3!” he heard the ground troops’ TACP, or Tactical Air Control Party, call him once more. “Nice shooting, flyboy!” The operator on the ground had the training and expertise to manage all aircraft involved in the mission. “Stand by! Standby. EVAC units are inbound! Visibility is nil. Copy?”
“Copy, Echo 3. I’m past Bingo. You’ll have Whiskey 3 on scene in ten mikes,” he said in the military radio jargon that meant ten minutes. “I’m RTB.”
“Echo 3 copies.” As Super Bert began to head back to Bagram Air Base, he switched his radio back to pre-programmed HF frequency and began the procession home.
***
Back in FOB Camaro near Jalalabad, a senior colonel had been listening to the entire operation from the Tactical Operations Center. The Brigadier General-select had already been given his flag announcement, due to take over as Inter-Agency Operations Director at Joint Special Operations command as a new general in two months. His Rangers had been stuck on this Charlie Foxtrot mission for almost two days, and he wasn’t going to sleep until they were home. It wasn’t until two hours later that one of the TOC’s radio technicians informed him that they heard Whiskey Flight 2 had crashed four miles short of making it back to his home runway. Apparently, the Air Force Pararescue had already scooped him up—alive but banged up…and probably done flying for good.
Not if I can help it, Judah Montgomery thought in response to knowing exactly how the military worked. “Find out where they took him, Specialist,” Colonel Montgomery ordered. That man had the balls to stay in the fight, Montgomery thought. And we don’t leave anyone behind.
CHAPTER 1
The Pentagon
Buzz. The older government-issued iPhone silently vibrated with two short bursts in Lou’s right pants pocket next to his thin wallet. He was finishing washing his hands after draining the afternoon coffee. A work email, he knew by the two short bursts, which distinguished it from a text. He would just wait the two minutes until he got back to his desk. The forty-one-year-old ‘light colonel’ checked the button line—or ‘gig line’—on his light blue shirt, ensuring it was perfectly in line with his dark blue trouser zipper. He left the bathroom in the Pentagon’s C-ring, the closest facility to his office, nearly getting run over as he did.
“What the—?” he exclaimed, quickly cutting himself off. The hall was alive with commotion, and active duty and civilians alike were scurrying about—some back to their offices, others to somewhere they’d just been summoned. Something’s happened, Lou thought, concerned. This feels big. Like 9-11 big. In thirty-five seconds he’d dodged two more near collisions, darting down the highly polished, off-white tile floor of the long hall and making the left turn back into his office. The non-descript wood door led to a not-so exciting office staffed by mid-level officers of every branch.
United States Air Force Lt. Col. Freeman Louis Caldwell, Lou to his friends, was but one of twenty men and women who comprised the Inter-Service Task Force for Consideration of Consolidation. The ITFCC was deep into a several year study and evaluation of every pro-and-con and nook-and-cranny of what it would mean for all branches of the U.S. Military to merge under one banner. Their collective roles were pretty far down the pecking order of units that would be scrambled for… Whatever the hell this is, Lou thought.
He swiped his badge in the card reader and entered the large monotonous room. He was fortunate enough to share one of the individual offices on the far wall with another Air Force officer. There were three other combined offices. The remaining ten officers with two civilian project managers shared the common space in the center with stereotypical cubicle walls. At the far left was a conference room which was visible behind a glass wall. He could see most of the staff cramming in there as one of the Army majors was trying to log in to the room’s computer and pull a feed up on the seventy-two-inch monitor.
Lou pulled the phone out and scanned it as he started walking that direction. He hadn’t even managed to get through his password entry by the time he reached the room. He dropped the phone back into his uniform trouser pocket.
“What’s going on?” he mumbled to Air Force Major Pete Soffet, his office mate. The DOD logo that had been playing ‘Pong’ on the large monitor at the end of the room suddenly evaporated into an aerial feed.
“Mt. Rainier erupted,” Pete whispered, eyes glued to the screen. The Army major had logged onto a secure Pentagon feed. “But before that they had an earthquake.”
“Yeah, earlier,” Lou concurred. “A few hours ago, like a 7.0, or somethin’.”
“No.” Pete corrected, looking at Lou. “Just now. Didn’t you see the email? They’re saying this thing was huge—in the ballpark of nine. Or bigger,” he added.
Lou let out a low whistle. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Who’s flying the drone?” he heard one of the team members ask on the far side of the conference table. People had started seating themselves, mesmerized by the giant dark-gray fist shaped column of rock and earth growing out of the south end of Puget Sound on their screen.
Good question, Lou agreed internally. What feed are we looking at here? He thought about what would’ve already been in the air somewhere within a couple of hundred miles. Probably an MQ-4 out of Whidbey Island, he thought. On an autonomous mission. The thing will fly in a high-altitude loop for hours.
He listened to one of the other officers explain to his peers that if it lost signal, there were fail-safes that would allow it to be piloted from any of several other locations around the country. “We learned the hard way a couple of times. Always have a redundant station ready to send new instructions via satellite.”
“Holy crap!” a Navy Lieutenant Commander said as the drone’s camera broke through the rain clouds over Seattle. The room grew deathly still as that totality of destruction presented itself. They could see fires everywhere. Highway overpasses were pancaked in many areas. About a third of the Seattle skyscrapers were now piles of rubble and debris being swamped by tsunami water. None of those still standing had much in the way of glass left on their window frames. Like steel skeletons, Lou thought, just as shocked as everyone else. Cargo and cruise ships had sunk and caught fire right at their piers. Destroyed vessels of all sizes littered Puget Sound as far as they could see. The waters were brown and frothy. The shorelines in many areas showed massive landslides right into the Sound, taking entire neighborhoods with them.
“Where’s the Space Needle?” another asked with a crack in his voice. Though the famed landmark was conspicuously absent, the altitude was too high for seeing fine detail. As if on cue, the drone began a rapid and steep descent.
“Someone’s obviously taken control of this thing,” one of the team members announced.
Buzz. Lou heard and felt his phone again. Buzz-buzz. Everyone had their phones on vibrate and they were all sounding at the same time. He retrieved the device as he left the conference room and headed for his own office. Can’t stand trying to read emails on these little screens. He pulled his ID card from its badge holder on his chest. When he sat at his desk, he slid it into the slot on the keyboard and punched in his PIN. As he waited for the screen to finish the log-in loop, he scanned the screen of his phone. It was a text from his wife.
[Julia] You seeing this thing in Seattle? Can you skip racquetball? We need to talk.
Lou sighed audibly. I don’t need this right now, he grumbled to himself as he queued up his computer to see if CNN or Fox News had anything to expound about the big disaster. But that wasn’t unusual—he and Julia had not had an easy go the last fourteen plus months, their marriage barely hanging on by a thread. And as happened multiple times each day, Lou felt himself begin to drift down the long, sad tunnel in his mind. Each time he thought of his wife, he also thought of their own personal apocalypse that had been the beginning of the end—their son Terrance’s suicide.
The sixteen-year-old had it all seemingly so well. He was a varsity starter on the football team and had recently obtained his driver’s license. Lou had felt the double-crush of both regret and guilt ever since that horrendous day. Still officially a pilot, he had up to that point been the primary co-pilot for the C-17 that flew The Beast—the Presidential limo—ahead whenever he or she travelled. When he reported his family tragedy to his Commanding Officer, the Air Force had rightfully and understandably removed Lou’s status as a flight-qualified officer. It was a protocol to allow flight crew time to grieve—and prove they were still mentally sound. It was the second and final time Lou had lost flight status in his career.
He had travelled a lot before that day, as most crew in the 89th Airlift Wing did—often and consistently. And in the course of his career after that fateful plane crash in Afghanistan, he’d worked hard to re-establish himself as a trustworthy pilot and officer, somehow managing to keep flight status in the cargo delivery portions of the branch. It was due to this life of long and unpredictable absences that Julia had since blamed Lou for being the ghost-father that had ultimately led to their son’s decision. And try as he might to hold the marriage together, it just didn’t seem in the cards—a person could only stand the sight of someone they came to hate for so long. Is this the day? Lou asked himself as he re-read the text.
To add gas to the fire, in the months after Terrance’s funeral, Lou had taken to alcohol for comfort—a lot. I’m allowed, he told himself nightly as he felt the cold buzz start to dampen the deeply embedded depression. To hell with anyone who doesn’t get that. Still, the Air Force noticed. His attendance had started to suffer, as did his punctuality on the days he did make it to work. Eight months earlier he’d been transferred to the current task force he was on, a clear message that both he and the Air Force were merely buying time until his commission expired. At 5’10”, Lou wasn’t an overly big man to begin with. But the sedentary job and nightly love affair with Pendleton whiskey had grown the pooch over his belt-buckle. He hated sunny days because his shadow was a mirror that didn’t play tricks on his mind about it.
Lou had started to play racquetball three days a week as a coping mechanism. In his forethought, he figured it was about trying to stay fit. Deeper in his psyche, it was just one more way to avoid going home. Ironically, it was Julia that wanted to sell the house. After the suicide of their only child, she left her career in real estate to mourn and never went back. She couldn’t stand the thought of living in the same house her sole baby had hung himself in. Many fights in recent months had revolved around the collision of that fact and Lou’s desire to stay—it was the last and only place he still felt connected to his son’s memory. His counselor had told him that despite popular misconception, the divorce rate for parents in his circumstance was not significantly different than for other groups. In Lou’s mind, despite loving and wanting to reconcile with Julia, divorce was a matter of time—though he refused to be the one to pull the trigger.
Lou ignored his booted computer and yanked his access card out of the slot on the keyboard. He scanned his wristwatch and stood. 1610, he saw. Must be early afternoon in Seattle. Those folks are in for a whole different world. He grabbed his brown A-2 bomber jacket off the coat stand near the door on his way back into the larger office space. Still technically a pilot, he was allowed to wear it with his service blue uniform, and it was much more comfortable on a bright and chilly October D.C. day. Drinks are half off ‘til 6 on Tuesdays at The Stowaway, he remembered. I guess I can skip stopping in just this once, he lied to himself.
***
Southwest of Tucson, Arizona
The fall desert sun would soon move from its zenith to start skewing west over Mt. Ruby in the Pajarita Wilderness. Luckily, the autumn days were better for patrols than those super-hot days of mid-July, but the trade-off was longer shadows in the evenings and much chillier nights. The preserve was a safe refuge for migratory birds, part of the Coronado National Forest.
Forty-nine-year-old Granger Madison was stumped, sure that this old route for smugglers would’ve reopened by now. He and his all-volunteer force of veterans had but one mission every time they braved the hot days and cold nights in the Arizona desert—find and report human traffickers.
This wasn’t your average band of mostly well-meaning and sometimes-chubby American patriots fighting the surge of people trying to cross the southern border. Some of those groups had gained notoriety in the recent decade, sometimes due to unfair treatment by the press, sometimes due to their own poor decisions. Granger’s Road Runners were a tight-knit group of combat veterans who went to great lengths to stay quiet about what they did. Their mission wasn’t about coyotes smuggling poor people, most of whom just wanted to better their chances in life. As egregious as that tragic tale was for those refuge-seekers…as much as Granger wished he could just start sniping the coyotes…he knew it would be like fighting the tide. His team’s mission had been solely about finding the cartels—those who had evolved beyond the role of coyote into experts at smuggling narcotics, weapons, and children sex-slaves. In the nearly eight years since his team had formed—just he and one other at the very beginning—they had reported twelve routes to the United States Custom and Border Protection branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
There were six Road Runners in all. Three other seasoned operators joined Granger to make a patrol that would plant themselves for several days—each of them a veteran in long range reconnaissance patrols in the Army, Navy or Marines. The other two were both capable as a support crew, a pair of older and less-agile vets. These men would drop off and pick up the Road Runners with the intent of leaving no evidence that the team was even out there—they were the insertion and extraction team. Those men were all-in, too—even from the comfort of home, they had to be ready to respond at any moment the entire time the Runners were in the field.
As a civilian group, Granger’s men tried to play by the rules—mostly. Regarding communications, they all used HAM capable radios, though their primary form of communication was simply a group text. They found cell signal to be spotty in the valleys and slopes and somewhat reliable near the crests of the sage covered mountains. Each of them had a mesh network antenna they would set up with a small foldable solar panel, and their phones could text each other quite reliably in a private chat, even when they would spread themselves out. At that moment, Granger had an earbud inserted from the HAM radio, listening to an AM channel blare a classic rock song, a small measure to keep the mind awake when staring at nothing active in the desert. He didn’t do that but for a few minutes every hour or two, not wanting to lose focus on why he was out there.
“So as Boston winds down…if you’ve been living under a rock today,” he heard the afternoon DJ commence, “we have an update on that nasty event near Seattle. A massive earthquake that the USGS estimates as being nine-point-oh on the Richter scale struck the coast of Washington State. Mt. Rainier has erupted. California and several other states are reporting blackouts, and several corporations are now reporting issues with accessing their cloud-based storage. Relief efforts here in the Tucson area have already started. Please go to the Red Cross website…” Granger shut down the radio and picked up his phone. Nothing from Claude or Bob… he thought. His support team was part of the group text.
[Granger] How bad is this Seattle thing, Bob?
[Bob] Bad. Too big to describe here.
[Granger] Roger. Pick us up at Extract 1 in 3 hours. Thx.
[Granger] Unless anyone has anything new, let’s pack it and meet at RP6 in 30. Will explain then.
After the usual replies, Granger began to square away his position. After putting away the binoculars, radio, and small remnants of MRE trash, he rolled up the sniper’s mat he always used to lay on the desert floor. He then used a piece of scrub brush to wipe away the tracks in the sand his body and mat had made laying there. They always worked in pairs, so he’d be meeting up with Dave Wolf in just a few minutes as they hiked to the far end of their valley, down into the basin to meet Tracy and Mick at Rally Point Six. This route is dry anyhow, he mused a bit disappointedly. He stood and stretched, confident nobody had been counter-surveilling the valley after having been in control of it for forty hours.
The medically retired Tucson firefighter double-checked the hole he’d been using as a waste-privy, covering it with one more mound of dirt and a few stones. As a young man in the Marines’ Force Recon—once again called Raiders—he used to enjoy the alone time in the brush as a form of proving his mental toughness. Now at forty-nine, it was solace—a respite from a society he was feeling less a part of, particularly since the fire that ended his career and covered the left side of his face and shoulder and the back of his legs in scar tissue.
The plastic appearance that ran from his left eyebrow down across his now-malformed ear and all the way to his left shoulder usually drew strange looks in grocery stores. The burns had been only second degree on the shoulder, thanks to the Kevlar and Nomex in his bunker gear. The side effect of that, though, was that not all the nerves had been killed. It was somewhat painful to wear a backpack. In the years he’d been running the Road Runners, he’d morphed his system into a right-shoulder-only sling-pack. The graying 5’11” Granger slung his pack and wrapped the waist belt around, ready to start moving toward Wolf. I think we need to look farther west.
***
Joint Base Andrews
The VH-60N carrying President Jeremiah Allen and First Lady Francis Allen approached and settled on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews a little after 9 PM. POTUS, call sign “Snake Charmer” to the United States Secret Service, had finished a series of meetings in the West Wing as quickly as he could. He wholeheartedly agreed with his Chief of Staff that they should get to the west coast as quickly as reasonable to survey the damage from the mega-disaster. It was the presidential thing to do.
After the last “presidential shuffle,” Marine One wound up in the left-rear number-four-spot of the constantly shifting diamond formation. The five helicopters—Marine One and four decoys—constantly shuffled whenever Snake Charmer flew, an active security precaution to ensure an engaged enemy would have his hands full trying to shoot down the correct rotor wing aircraft. This was one of several craft the Marines used to shuttle the President, and usually the model sent for a rapid pickup and drop off that hadn’t been planned.
Snake Charmer’s primary protection agent stepped out of the craft first and assumed a position just past the Marines who had opened the hatch. The Marines, in dress blue uniform, saluted sharply as President Allen passed by after stepping out of the forest green craft. He held his hand back toward the craft to assist his wife down the one folding step and onto the tarmac. He returned the salute, always uncomfortable that he was breaking some sort of protocol doing it. They began their procession toward the Boeing 747, known to the Air Force as VC-25A and the rest of the world as Air Force One.
Chief of Staff Shannon Sahr and Julia Jacobs, Jeremiah’s personal assistant, were waiting at the drivable tarmac stairs that abutted the aircraft, along with a few other Secret Service agents. Most of the staff and invited press corps were already on board. About one hundred yards to the right of the president’s approach was a facility that ushered people through the “cleared to board” procedures.
“Would you get Secretaries Smith and Williamson on a video call as soon as we’re past takeoff?” Jeremiah asked Shannon before she could say a thing.
“First thing, sir.”
Shannon had already been dealing with the Secretaries’ staffs all afternoon, as it were. The Secretaries of Energy and Interior would be the most directly in the public eye aside from President Allen. It was mere bad timing that they couldn’t be on the flight. Secretary Craig Smith had been at an energy conference among his European peers that week in Switzerland. Secretary Lashay Williamson was on personal leave in Indiana. She was already arranging her own tour to start the next day.
The entire entourage hurried into the plane so they could get airborne and maybe catch a little shut eye before they got to the Rainier Impact Zone. The craft was buzzing with the normal beehive of activity that always accompanied the president. Some military personnel were double and triple-checking their pre-flight tasks. Others were already fully on-line at their communications stations in the big craft’s “hump” aft of the cockpit. Various Secret Service and members of the president’s staff were getting themselves situated for the flight.
President Allen turned right to head back toward the conference room, completely ignoring his office. All chairs on Air Force One were capable of being secured for take-off and landing. No need to wait, he thought. Francis made the left to take her spot in the Presidential bedroom in the plane’s nose. Jeremiah waved off the usual chorus of “G’evening, Mr. President” echoing from everyone he passed on the way.
“Good evening, all. Look—sorry to drag you all away from your loved ones on such short notice.” He genuinely was sorry.
The former Pennsylvania steel-mill manager turned politician had always connected with people. It was his strength. Born in Ohio, the son of the mill’s superintendent went to work in the family business right out of college. Early on, he was able to bridge a fiercely growing divide between labor and management, something that did not go unnoticed by the local Democratic party members. The course of his life had been a slow progression through state and federal positions. The bulk of his career had been as a congressman, though four years before he ran for president, he switched from the Democrat party to the Libertarian party.
Jeremiah Ethan Allen had become disenfranchised with his party in recent years, feeling that the growing love for political dissention in America made the time ripe for a strong third party to grow. Unlike the Green and Constitution parties, he felt the Libertarian party was less divisive, able to appeal to reasonable minded folks from both sides of the aisle. He was the first Libertarian to be elected to Congress, and the following cycle two-years later, eight more Libertarians had been elected to the House and one to the Senate. When he ran for and won the Presidential nomination that election cycle, the media had done their very best to paint any votes for him as a waste, no matter which party he was stealing them from. It was truly a sign of the strength and foresight behind the Constitution, as he won the requisite electoral votes by a thin margin over both of the major party candidates.
Grabbing a seat along the side of the long table, he got right to it as Shannon and the rest of the key staff filed in. “Before we discuss the horrifying death toll predictions again, let’s start with the things we can look at outside the destruction area. Transportation.” His assistant Julia brought him an iced lemonade without asking.
Shannon was seated to his immediate left and nodded toward one of her staffers crammed into the room. “Go ahead, Terrell.”
“Mr. President.” The staffers almost always began with a direct address to Jeremiah. It was a protocol he hated and had tried more than once to order stopped, to no avail. “Secretary Vu’s staff reports all major shippers, both domestic and international, are aware of the issue and are taking steps to conduct redirects on land and sea to every port from Oakland-San Francisco and south. The port at Eureka in northern California was wiped out by the tsunami. Long Beach is expected to take the brunt of the overflow. The initial reports of trucks and containers lost today is based on tracking devices that went off-grid—currently over 2,500 trucks. Counting containers of goods lost in the Seattle-Tacoma area and ships that were capsized in the tsunami, the estimate is over one-hundred and twenty thousand. Both numbers are expected to rise.”
After two more minutes of the shipping and transportation report, Jeremiah’s mind wandered to the infrastructure issues already being felt. “Thanks, Terrell. Who has energy? I want to know how California will be handling all of this extra shipping.”
“Mr. President,” stated Sam Gilson, Shannon’s operations director. “Bunky is still in the communications center arranging the video chat with Secretary Smith. Despite coal plants only comprising point-four percent of California’s energy plants, thirty-three percent of what they use is coal powered, purchased from the surrounding states. They’ve made big strides toward solar, but the output will fall as it gets closer to winter. The loss of hydroelectric from Washington and Oregon will hurt them, but it won’t cripple them.” He went silent for one second before adding, “Yet.”
“Yet,” the president caught. “Meaning what?”
“The secretary’s staff was emphasizing the domino effect from today’s events. As the demand for coal and natural gas increases in all western states from the loss of hydroelectric, those states will be selling less to California. But as California demands more for an exponential amount of port traffic, the trucks needed to haul the coal won’t be available — compounded by the loss of trucks and qualified drivers today. Then there’s the human factor…”
“People getting tired and such,” Shannon added.
“Partially,” Sam said. “But I guess I was referring to a more primal pessimism.”
“You’ve opened the door, Sam,” Jeremiah said patiently. “Just walk through it.”
“I guess I’m looking down the road, sir. What happens when people who make their money online, not just corporations, but the thirty-three percent of people at the bottom of middle-class—can’t work from home because the electricity isn’t there. Or the internet.”
This made everyone in the room get quiet for an unusual eight seconds, only to be broken by an announcement from the co-pilot that they were preparing to takeoff. Very little information was available this early into the catastrophe. The plan was to avoid the ash plume from Mt. Rainier while en route. The crew would attempt to find out the status of SeaTac Airport on the way. Initial reports from scout planes were bleak at best.
“If nothing else,” Shannon had told the president two hours before they departed, “we can always land in Portland and drive up.”
PROLOGUE
Over the Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan
“Danger close!” 1st Lt. Freeman Louis “Super Bert” Caldwell heard in his helmet headset. “T-Man is on the ridges to our north, west, and southwest. One hundred meters and closing!”
Caldwell knew that was what the Joes called the Taliban. It sounded like the mother of all firefights raging in the background. Americans were about to die.
“Bert, I just went Bingo,” he heard his wingman say. Captain Scott “Snooze N” Nethers was his closest squadron buddy and mentor. He was letting Bert know that he was now at the point in his fuel level that he had to make the twenty-five-minute flight back to base and land. The pair of Fairchild Republic A10 Thunderbolts—known affectionately by the ground troops as the “Warthog”—had been providing close air support for almost three hours. They had already performed an aerial refueling before receiving the call for support, meaning they were now bound to return to base. Not that it mattered—both planes had already run themselves low on ammo.
“I’m good,” Super Bert Caldwell replied. “I can make at least two more passes!”
“You’re full of it! Let’s go. Ratchet and Clank will be on site in thirty minutes.” Snooze ordered.
“Listen to those guys, Snooze!” the young pilot countered. He was three months into his first combat tour after college and training. “They’re surrounded and cut-off from their QRF! They don’t have thirty minutes!”
“Bert! Stop!” the more seasoned pilot warned the rookie. “See that fog that’s rolling in?!”
It was too late. Freeman Caldwell—Lou to his friends back home—lined up on the southwest-to northeast approach into the valley once more, disappearing from Snooze’s view as he did. The greenish-brown electronic map in the upper-left corner of his cockpit dashboard moved the mountains slowly as he once again progressed along the canyon walls. He reached down to his left. He felt for the correct switch to move from the HF frequency he had been talking to his wingman back to FM.
“Echo 3, this is Whisky Flight 2! Keep your heads down!”
Super Bert reached down to near his left hip and flipped the little red safety cover over the power cutout to his GAU-8 30mm cannon. He was hot, once again, to spew his depleted uranium projectiles into the enemies of brethren unmet. He had achieved his nickname as a token of supposed embarrassment from his squadron mates. The seven-barrel rotary cannon in the Warthog’s nose makes a very loud “brrrt” belch-type sound when firing at its fixed 3,900 rounds-per-minute rate. Pilots would normally fire in one to less-than-two second bursts. Super Bert had demonstrated the ability to make precise micro adjustments in flight, engaging as many as fifteen percent more targets on each pass when compared to his peers.
Left hand on his throttle, he trimmed his ailerons and reduced throttle just a bit, nudging his right hand on the joystick a hair left as he did. He was trying to get right in line with the top of a canyon wall he could no longer see due to incoming fog. The reduction in throttle caused a slight loss of lift. He couldn’t mess with this technique too much—the cannon was calibrated to shoot 4000 feet ahead when the craft was at a down-attitude of thirty degrees. Sweat built on his brow under the already hot helmet. Super Bert shot his eyes back and forth from the left side display, his heads-up display, and the window, nervously trying to find the top of the canyon. A quick altimeter check…one last look at the HUD…
BRRRRRRTTTTT….BRRRRRTTTTTT….BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT! Lou Caldwell hit the throttle and re-engaged the cannon’s safety switch, pulling slightly back on the yoke. If he had the fuel to make one more pass, he didn’t want to waste it climbing to altitude and rolling over to look when visibility was garbage anyhow.
“Whiskey Flight 2, Echo 3!” he heard the ground troops’ TACP, or Tactical Air Control Party, call him once more. “Nice shooting, flyboy!” The operator on the ground had the training and expertise to manage all aircraft involved in the mission. “Stand by! Standby. EVAC units are inbound! Visibility is nil. Copy?”
“Copy, Echo 3. I’m past Bingo. You’ll have Whiskey 3 on scene in ten mikes,” he said in the military radio jargon that meant ten minutes. “I’m RTB.”
“Echo 3 copies.” As Super Bert began to head back to Bagram Air Base, he switched his radio back to pre-programmed HF frequency and began the procession home.
***
Back in FOB Camaro near Jalalabad, a senior colonel had been listening to the entire operation from the Tactical Operations Center. The Brigadier General-select had already been given his flag announcement, due to take over as Inter-Agency Operations Director at Joint Special Operations command as a new general in two months. His Rangers had been stuck on this Charlie Foxtrot mission for almost two days, and he wasn’t going to sleep until they were home. It wasn’t until two hours later that one of the TOC’s radio technicians informed him that they heard Whiskey Flight 2 had crashed four miles short of making it back to his home runway. Apparently, the Air Force Pararescue had already scooped him up—alive but banged up…and probably done flying for good.
Not if I can help it, Judah Montgomery thought in response to knowing exactly how the military worked. “Find out where they took him, Specialist,” Colonel Montgomery ordered. That man had the balls to stay in the fight, Montgomery thought. And we don’t leave anyone behind.
CHAPTER 1
The Pentagon
Buzz. The older government-issued iPhone silently vibrated with two short bursts in Lou’s right pants pocket next to his thin wallet. He was finishing washing his hands after draining the afternoon coffee. A work email, he knew by the two short bursts, which distinguished it from a text. He would just wait the two minutes until he got back to his desk. The forty-one-year-old ‘light colonel’ checked the button line—or ‘gig line’—on his light blue shirt, ensuring it was perfectly in line with his dark blue trouser zipper. He left the bathroom in the Pentagon’s C-ring, the closest facility to his office, nearly getting run over as he did.
“What the—?” he exclaimed, quickly cutting himself off. The hall was alive with commotion, and active duty and civilians alike were scurrying about—some back to their offices, others to somewhere they’d just been summoned. Something’s happened, Lou thought, concerned. This feels big. Like 9-11 big. In thirty-five seconds he’d dodged two more near collisions, darting down the highly polished, off-white tile floor of the long hall and making the left turn back into his office. The non-descript wood door led to a not-so exciting office staffed by mid-level officers of every branch.
United States Air Force Lt. Col. Freeman Louis Caldwell, Lou to his friends, was but one of twenty men and women who comprised the Inter-Service Task Force for Consideration of Consolidation. The ITFCC was deep into a several year study and evaluation of every pro-and-con and nook-and-cranny of what it would mean for all branches of the U.S. Military to merge under one banner. Their collective roles were pretty far down the pecking order of units that would be scrambled for… Whatever the hell this is, Lou thought.
He swiped his badge in the card reader and entered the large monotonous room. He was fortunate enough to share one of the individual offices on the far wall with another Air Force officer. There were three other combined offices. The remaining ten officers with two civilian project managers shared the common space in the center with stereotypical cubicle walls. At the far left was a conference room which was visible behind a glass wall. He could see most of the staff cramming in there as one of the Army majors was trying to log in to the room’s computer and pull a feed up on the seventy-two-inch monitor.
Lou pulled the phone out and scanned it as he started walking that direction. He hadn’t even managed to get through his password entry by the time he reached the room. He dropped the phone back into his uniform trouser pocket.
“What’s going on?” he mumbled to Air Force Major Pete Soffet, his office mate. The DOD logo that had been playing ‘Pong’ on the large monitor at the end of the room suddenly evaporated into an aerial feed.
“Mt. Rainier erupted,” Pete whispered, eyes glued to the screen. The Army major had logged onto a secure Pentagon feed. “But before that they had an earthquake.”
“Yeah, earlier,” Lou concurred. “A few hours ago, like a 7.0, or somethin’.”
“No.” Pete corrected, looking at Lou. “Just now. Didn’t you see the email? They’re saying this thing was huge—in the ballpark of nine. Or bigger,” he added.
Lou let out a low whistle. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Who’s flying the drone?” he heard one of the team members ask on the far side of the conference table. People had started seating themselves, mesmerized by the giant dark-gray fist shaped column of rock and earth growing out of the south end of Puget Sound on their screen.
Good question, Lou agreed internally. What feed are we looking at here? He thought about what would’ve already been in the air somewhere within a couple of hundred miles. Probably an MQ-4 out of Whidbey Island, he thought. On an autonomous mission. The thing will fly in a high-altitude loop for hours.
He listened to one of the other officers explain to his peers that if it lost signal, there were fail-safes that would allow it to be piloted from any of several other locations around the country. “We learned the hard way a couple of times. Always have a redundant station ready to send new instructions via satellite.”
“Holy crap!” a Navy Lieutenant Commander said as the drone’s camera broke through the rain clouds over Seattle. The room grew deathly still as that totality of destruction presented itself. They could see fires everywhere. Highway overpasses were pancaked in many areas. About a third of the Seattle skyscrapers were now piles of rubble and debris being swamped by tsunami water. None of those still standing had much in the way of glass left on their window frames. Like steel skeletons, Lou thought, just as shocked as everyone else. Cargo and cruise ships had sunk and caught fire right at their piers. Destroyed vessels of all sizes littered Puget Sound as far as they could see. The waters were brown and frothy. The shorelines in many areas showed massive landslides right into the Sound, taking entire neighborhoods with them.
“Where’s the Space Needle?” another asked with a crack in his voice. Though the famed landmark was conspicuously absent, the altitude was too high for seeing fine detail. As if on cue, the drone began a rapid and steep descent.
“Someone’s obviously taken control of this thing,” one of the team members announced.
Buzz. Lou heard and felt his phone again. Buzz-buzz. Everyone had their phones on vibrate and they were all sounding at the same time. He retrieved the device as he left the conference room and headed for his own office. Can’t stand trying to read emails on these little screens. He pulled his ID card from its badge holder on his chest. When he sat at his desk, he slid it into the slot on the keyboard and punched in his PIN. As he waited for the screen to finish the log-in loop, he scanned the screen of his phone. It was a text from his wife.
[Julia] You seeing this thing in Seattle? Can you skip racquetball? We need to talk.
Lou sighed audibly. I don’t need this right now, he grumbled to himself as he queued up his computer to see if CNN or Fox News had anything to expound about the big disaster. But that wasn’t unusual—he and Julia had not had an easy go the last fourteen plus months, their marriage barely hanging on by a thread. And as happened multiple times each day, Lou felt himself begin to drift down the long, sad tunnel in his mind. Each time he thought of his wife, he also thought of their own personal apocalypse that had been the beginning of the end—their son Terrance’s suicide.
The sixteen-year-old had it all seemingly so well. He was a varsity starter on the football team and had recently obtained his driver’s license. Lou had felt the double-crush of both regret and guilt ever since that horrendous day. Still officially a pilot, he had up to that point been the primary co-pilot for the C-17 that flew The Beast—the Presidential limo—ahead whenever he or she travelled. When he reported his family tragedy to his Commanding Officer, the Air Force had rightfully and understandably removed Lou’s status as a flight-qualified officer. It was a protocol to allow flight crew time to grieve—and prove they were still mentally sound. It was the second and final time Lou had lost flight status in his career.
He had travelled a lot before that day, as most crew in the 89th Airlift Wing did—often and consistently. And in the course of his career after that fateful plane crash in Afghanistan, he’d worked hard to re-establish himself as a trustworthy pilot and officer, somehow managing to keep flight status in the cargo delivery portions of the branch. It was due to this life of long and unpredictable absences that Julia had since blamed Lou for being the ghost-father that had ultimately led to their son’s decision. And try as he might to hold the marriage together, it just didn’t seem in the cards—a person could only stand the sight of someone they came to hate for so long. Is this the day? Lou asked himself as he re-read the text.
To add gas to the fire, in the months after Terrance’s funeral, Lou had taken to alcohol for comfort—a lot. I’m allowed, he told himself nightly as he felt the cold buzz start to dampen the deeply embedded depression. To hell with anyone who doesn’t get that. Still, the Air Force noticed. His attendance had started to suffer, as did his punctuality on the days he did make it to work. Eight months earlier he’d been transferred to the current task force he was on, a clear message that both he and the Air Force were merely buying time until his commission expired. At 5’10”, Lou wasn’t an overly big man to begin with. But the sedentary job and nightly love affair with Pendleton whiskey had grown the pooch over his belt-buckle. He hated sunny days because his shadow was a mirror that didn’t play tricks on his mind about it.
Lou had started to play racquetball three days a week as a coping mechanism. In his forethought, he figured it was about trying to stay fit. Deeper in his psyche, it was just one more way to avoid going home. Ironically, it was Julia that wanted to sell the house. After the suicide of their only child, she left her career in real estate to mourn and never went back. She couldn’t stand the thought of living in the same house her sole baby had hung himself in. Many fights in recent months had revolved around the collision of that fact and Lou’s desire to stay—it was the last and only place he still felt connected to his son’s memory. His counselor had told him that despite popular misconception, the divorce rate for parents in his circumstance was not significantly different than for other groups. In Lou’s mind, despite loving and wanting to reconcile with Julia, divorce was a matter of time—though he refused to be the one to pull the trigger.
Lou ignored his booted computer and yanked his access card out of the slot on the keyboard. He scanned his wristwatch and stood. 1610, he saw. Must be early afternoon in Seattle. Those folks are in for a whole different world. He grabbed his brown A-2 bomber jacket off the coat stand near the door on his way back into the larger office space. Still technically a pilot, he was allowed to wear it with his service blue uniform, and it was much more comfortable on a bright and chilly October D.C. day. Drinks are half off ‘til 6 on Tuesdays at The Stowaway, he remembered. I guess I can skip stopping in just this once, he lied to himself.
***
Southwest of Tucson, Arizona
The fall desert sun would soon move from its zenith to start skewing west over Mt. Ruby in the Pajarita Wilderness. Luckily, the autumn days were better for patrols than those super-hot days of mid-July, but the trade-off was longer shadows in the evenings and much chillier nights. The preserve was a safe refuge for migratory birds, part of the Coronado National Forest.
Forty-nine-year-old Granger Madison was stumped, sure that this old route for smugglers would’ve reopened by now. He and his all-volunteer force of veterans had but one mission every time they braved the hot days and cold nights in the Arizona desert—find and report human traffickers.
This wasn’t your average band of mostly well-meaning and sometimes-chubby American patriots fighting the surge of people trying to cross the southern border. Some of those groups had gained notoriety in the recent decade, sometimes due to unfair treatment by the press, sometimes due to their own poor decisions. Granger’s Road Runners were a tight-knit group of combat veterans who went to great lengths to stay quiet about what they did. Their mission wasn’t about coyotes smuggling poor people, most of whom just wanted to better their chances in life. As egregious as that tragic tale was for those refuge-seekers…as much as Granger wished he could just start sniping the coyotes…he knew it would be like fighting the tide. His team’s mission had been solely about finding the cartels—those who had evolved beyond the role of coyote into experts at smuggling narcotics, weapons, and children sex-slaves. In the nearly eight years since his team had formed—just he and one other at the very beginning—they had reported twelve routes to the United States Custom and Border Protection branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
There were six Road Runners in all. Three other seasoned operators joined Granger to make a patrol that would plant themselves for several days—each of them a veteran in long range reconnaissance patrols in the Army, Navy or Marines. The other two were both capable as a support crew, a pair of older and less-agile vets. These men would drop off and pick up the Road Runners with the intent of leaving no evidence that the team was even out there—they were the insertion and extraction team. Those men were all-in, too—even from the comfort of home, they had to be ready to respond at any moment the entire time the Runners were in the field.
As a civilian group, Granger’s men tried to play by the rules—mostly. Regarding communications, they all used HAM capable radios, though their primary form of communication was simply a group text. They found cell signal to be spotty in the valleys and slopes and somewhat reliable near the crests of the sage covered mountains. Each of them had a mesh network antenna they would set up with a small foldable solar panel, and their phones could text each other quite reliably in a private chat, even when they would spread themselves out. At that moment, Granger had an earbud inserted from the HAM radio, listening to an AM channel blare a classic rock song, a small measure to keep the mind awake when staring at nothing active in the desert. He didn’t do that but for a few minutes every hour or two, not wanting to lose focus on why he was out there.
“So as Boston winds down…if you’ve been living under a rock today,” he heard the afternoon DJ commence, “we have an update on that nasty event near Seattle. A massive earthquake that the USGS estimates as being nine-point-oh on the Richter scale struck the coast of Washington State. Mt. Rainier has erupted. California and several other states are reporting blackouts, and several corporations are now reporting issues with accessing their cloud-based storage. Relief efforts here in the Tucson area have already started. Please go to the Red Cross website…” Granger shut down the radio and picked up his phone. Nothing from Claude or Bob… he thought. His support team was part of the group text.
[Granger] How bad is this Seattle thing, Bob?
[Bob] Bad. Too big to describe here.
[Granger] Roger. Pick us up at Extract 1 in 3 hours. Thx.
[Granger] Unless anyone has anything new, let’s pack it and meet at RP6 in 30. Will explain then.
After the usual replies, Granger began to square away his position. After putting away the binoculars, radio, and small remnants of MRE trash, he rolled up the sniper’s mat he always used to lay on the desert floor. He then used a piece of scrub brush to wipe away the tracks in the sand his body and mat had made laying there. They always worked in pairs, so he’d be meeting up with Dave Wolf in just a few minutes as they hiked to the far end of their valley, down into the basin to meet Tracy and Mick at Rally Point Six. This route is dry anyhow, he mused a bit disappointedly. He stood and stretched, confident nobody had been counter-surveilling the valley after having been in control of it for forty hours.
The medically retired Tucson firefighter double-checked the hole he’d been using as a waste-privy, covering it with one more mound of dirt and a few stones. As a young man in the Marines’ Force Recon—once again called Raiders—he used to enjoy the alone time in the brush as a form of proving his mental toughness. Now at forty-nine, it was solace—a respite from a society he was feeling less a part of, particularly since the fire that ended his career and covered the left side of his face and shoulder and the back of his legs in scar tissue.
The plastic appearance that ran from his left eyebrow down across his now-malformed ear and all the way to his left shoulder usually drew strange looks in grocery stores. The burns had been only second degree on the shoulder, thanks to the Kevlar and Nomex in his bunker gear. The side effect of that, though, was that not all the nerves had been killed. It was somewhat painful to wear a backpack. In the years he’d been running the Road Runners, he’d morphed his system into a right-shoulder-only sling-pack. The graying 5’11” Granger slung his pack and wrapped the waist belt around, ready to start moving toward Wolf. I think we need to look farther west.
***
Joint Base Andrews
The VH-60N carrying President Jeremiah Allen and First Lady Francis Allen approached and settled on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews a little after 9 PM. POTUS, call sign “Snake Charmer” to the United States Secret Service, had finished a series of meetings in the West Wing as quickly as he could. He wholeheartedly agreed with his Chief of Staff that they should get to the west coast as quickly as reasonable to survey the damage from the mega-disaster. It was the presidential thing to do.
After the last “presidential shuffle,” Marine One wound up in the left-rear number-four-spot of the constantly shifting diamond formation. The five helicopters—Marine One and four decoys—constantly shuffled whenever Snake Charmer flew, an active security precaution to ensure an engaged enemy would have his hands full trying to shoot down the correct rotor wing aircraft. This was one of several craft the Marines used to shuttle the President, and usually the model sent for a rapid pickup and drop off that hadn’t been planned.
Snake Charmer’s primary protection agent stepped out of the craft first and assumed a position just past the Marines who had opened the hatch. The Marines, in dress blue uniform, saluted sharply as President Allen passed by after stepping out of the forest green craft. He held his hand back toward the craft to assist his wife down the one folding step and onto the tarmac. He returned the salute, always uncomfortable that he was breaking some sort of protocol doing it. They began their procession toward the Boeing 747, known to the Air Force as VC-25A and the rest of the world as Air Force One.
Chief of Staff Shannon Sahr and Julia Jacobs, Jeremiah’s personal assistant, were waiting at the drivable tarmac stairs that abutted the aircraft, along with a few other Secret Service agents. Most of the staff and invited press corps were already on board. About one hundred yards to the right of the president’s approach was a facility that ushered people through the “cleared to board” procedures.
“Would you get Secretaries Smith and Williamson on a video call as soon as we’re past takeoff?” Jeremiah asked Shannon before she could say a thing.
“First thing, sir.”
Shannon had already been dealing with the Secretaries’ staffs all afternoon, as it were. The Secretaries of Energy and Interior would be the most directly in the public eye aside from President Allen. It was mere bad timing that they couldn’t be on the flight. Secretary Craig Smith had been at an energy conference among his European peers that week in Switzerland. Secretary Lashay Williamson was on personal leave in Indiana. She was already arranging her own tour to start the next day.
The entire entourage hurried into the plane so they could get airborne and maybe catch a little shut eye before they got to the Rainier Impact Zone. The craft was buzzing with the normal beehive of activity that always accompanied the president. Some military personnel were double and triple-checking their pre-flight tasks. Others were already fully on-line at their communications stations in the big craft’s “hump” aft of the cockpit. Various Secret Service and members of the president’s staff were getting themselves situated for the flight.
President Allen turned right to head back toward the conference room, completely ignoring his office. All chairs on Air Force One were capable of being secured for take-off and landing. No need to wait, he thought. Francis made the left to take her spot in the Presidential bedroom in the plane’s nose. Jeremiah waved off the usual chorus of “G’evening, Mr. President” echoing from everyone he passed on the way.
“Good evening, all. Look—sorry to drag you all away from your loved ones on such short notice.” He genuinely was sorry.
The former Pennsylvania steel-mill manager turned politician had always connected with people. It was his strength. Born in Ohio, the son of the mill’s superintendent went to work in the family business right out of college. Early on, he was able to bridge a fiercely growing divide between labor and management, something that did not go unnoticed by the local Democratic party members. The course of his life had been a slow progression through state and federal positions. The bulk of his career had been as a congressman, though four years before he ran for president, he switched from the Democrat party to the Libertarian party.
Jeremiah Ethan Allen had become disenfranchised with his party in recent years, feeling that the growing love for political dissention in America made the time ripe for a strong third party to grow. Unlike the Green and Constitution parties, he felt the Libertarian party was less divisive, able to appeal to reasonable minded folks from both sides of the aisle. He was the first Libertarian to be elected to Congress, and the following cycle two-years later, eight more Libertarians had been elected to the House and one to the Senate. When he ran for and won the Presidential nomination that election cycle, the media had done their very best to paint any votes for him as a waste, no matter which party he was stealing them from. It was truly a sign of the strength and foresight behind the Constitution, as he won the requisite electoral votes by a thin margin over both of the major party candidates.
Grabbing a seat along the side of the long table, he got right to it as Shannon and the rest of the key staff filed in. “Before we discuss the horrifying death toll predictions again, let’s start with the things we can look at outside the destruction area. Transportation.” His assistant Julia brought him an iced lemonade without asking.
Shannon was seated to his immediate left and nodded toward one of her staffers crammed into the room. “Go ahead, Terrell.”
“Mr. President.” The staffers almost always began with a direct address to Jeremiah. It was a protocol he hated and had tried more than once to order stopped, to no avail. “Secretary Vu’s staff reports all major shippers, both domestic and international, are aware of the issue and are taking steps to conduct redirects on land and sea to every port from Oakland-San Francisco and south. The port at Eureka in northern California was wiped out by the tsunami. Long Beach is expected to take the brunt of the overflow. The initial reports of trucks and containers lost today is based on tracking devices that went off-grid—currently over 2,500 trucks. Counting containers of goods lost in the Seattle-Tacoma area and ships that were capsized in the tsunami, the estimate is over one-hundred and twenty thousand. Both numbers are expected to rise.”
After two more minutes of the shipping and transportation report, Jeremiah’s mind wandered to the infrastructure issues already being felt. “Thanks, Terrell. Who has energy? I want to know how California will be handling all of this extra shipping.”
“Mr. President,” stated Sam Gilson, Shannon’s operations director. “Bunky is still in the communications center arranging the video chat with Secretary Smith. Despite coal plants only comprising point-four percent of California’s energy plants, thirty-three percent of what they use is coal powered, purchased from the surrounding states. They’ve made big strides toward solar, but the output will fall as it gets closer to winter. The loss of hydroelectric from Washington and Oregon will hurt them, but it won’t cripple them.” He went silent for one second before adding, “Yet.”
“Yet,” the president caught. “Meaning what?”
“The secretary’s staff was emphasizing the domino effect from today’s events. As the demand for coal and natural gas increases in all western states from the loss of hydroelectric, those states will be selling less to California. But as California demands more for an exponential amount of port traffic, the trucks needed to haul the coal won’t be available — compounded by the loss of trucks and qualified drivers today. Then there’s the human factor…”
“People getting tired and such,” Shannon added.
“Partially,” Sam said. “But I guess I was referring to a more primal pessimism.”
“You’ve opened the door, Sam,” Jeremiah said patiently. “Just walk through it.”
“I guess I’m looking down the road, sir. What happens when people who make their money online, not just corporations, but the thirty-three percent of people at the bottom of middle-class—can’t work from home because the electricity isn’t there. Or the internet.”
This made everyone in the room get quiet for an unusual eight seconds, only to be broken by an announcement from the co-pilot that they were preparing to takeoff. Very little information was available this early into the catastrophe. The plan was to avoid the ash plume from Mt. Rainier while en route. The crew would attempt to find out the status of SeaTac Airport on the way. Initial reports from scout planes were bleak at best.
“If nothing else,” Shannon had told the president two hours before they departed, “we can always land in Portland and drive up.”
Blades of Grass Book 1!
Only 5 more days until the Kindle and paperbacks launch on Venom Spear! (A Cascadia fallen story)
Venom Spear is Live!
Venom Spear: Blades of Grass Book 1 i slive for Kindle, KU, and paperback!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09N3BYCBG
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09N3BYCBG
Dragon Unleashed excerpt
This is a brand new, and maybe my favorite, character! This is his introductory section from Chapter 1 of Dragon Unleashed: Blades of Grass Book 2. Enjoy!
Los Angeles, California
Many of the boxcars on the freight train rumbling into Los Angeles County were empty or only partially loaded. The port of Long Beach had become a nightmare of activity since that giant tsunami wiped out half of America’s west coast ports two months earlier. Coupled with the loss of dozens of cargo ships, hundreds of trucks, and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers, the impact to trade was having ripple effects in the world economy. One unknown side-effect had been the resurgence of “the Hobo Express,” especially in the weeks since Operation Venom Spear had started.
The police and military, under President Jeremiah Allen’s cooperation with Congress, had enacted a nationwide curfew as part of their efforts to battle the cartels that had started infiltrating multiple layers of society and government in the American West. The borderline tyranny had only fueled the already growing dissention between government and the populace—and driven people who wanted to travel discreetly back onto the train tracks.
“That guy in Colorado was right,” the odd Hungarian man said in his native tongue to his teenage traveling companion. “Switching to the Burlington-Northern Line probably shaved a day off the trip.”
“Ez igaz,” the young American said. “That is true.”
Both of them had become accustomed to the rail travel, though neither were particularly fond of it. One always needed to stay awake, not that one could sleep well anyhow. And the other hobos weren’t shy about dropping their trousers and taking care of business in the open. The one saving grace for the pair had been that the man’s strange appearance and accent made even those who were off their meds want to keep themselves at the other end of the boxcar.
Forty-year-old Dacso Sarkany was no stranger to pain and suffering, and he had a one-of-a-kind personal style that reflected his equally unique life story. He tucked his loose tan pants into his mid-shin brown leather boots, not unlike a motorcycle cop or someone from a space opera. Under his identically tan trench coat was an old-school black turtleneck sweater. His left hand was mangled, the thumb but a simple half-inch stump, not even a full knuckle. It was a constant reminder of his time in Kosovo, part of a U.N. peace-keeping force who was ambushed with an IED. But the icing on the Dacso cake was the mohawk haircut over the plump, strange face. Dacso wasn’t a pretty man, his puffy bottom lip always extending out too far for the normal symmetry associated with being handsome. Dacso kept his face and the sides of his head shaved, part of the image he’d built for himself after joining his relatives in America.
The pair were traveling with only a small backpack each, plus one bulky, heavy duty duffel bag they guarded very closely. Though an experienced, low-level henchman in various low-level crime syndicates in New York, Dacso and his fifteen-year-old nephew weren’t on a criminal mission—at least, not completely.
“How long do you think it will take to find them?” Antal Kover asked his uncle. The American lad had grown up in a unique circumstance, part of the tight nit but very poor neighborhood of Kiryas Joel, New York. It was one of the poorest zip codes in the entire country, but still boasted a particularly low crime rate. It was also home to two unique and independent ethnic groups. In addition to a large Orthodox Jewish community, Kiryas Joel also boasted America’s largest Hungarian settlement. The two groups respected and ignored each other—and both were notorious for handling crime “in house.” Men like Dacso went to the Big Apple for their work. Antal had been sent along on this family mission to both watch his uncle’s back and act as his translator.
“Depends on how long it takes to hitchhike,” Dacso answered. “Eet is well,” he said with his signature wave. Whenever he felt like ending a line of talk, he would say those words in very broken English—his only style of English—and look off to the side as he did a small Jedi-esque hand wave before looking back to the other party with a small head nod. Conversation over. Back in Hungarian, he ordered, “Let’s jump at this next inside curve.”
The train had been only traveling about ten miles-per-hour since starting to parallel highway I-15 near the town of Las Colinas. The train was slowing, and he definitely wanted to be off long before any other hobos near the terminus.
Dacso hefted the large duffel by both handles, ready to toss it just ahead of his own jump. “Remember to absorb with your knees and roll like a stone,” he instructed his nephew.
“I know, Uncle,” Antal said. “I’ve watched plenty of free-runners on YouTube.”
Dacso shot him an odd look. When Antal didn’t know a Hungarian word, he would use the English word in its place. “Why would a man pay money to run?” Dacso asked with confusion before turning his attention back to the coming stunt. “Be ready,” he warned as he started to plant his feet and spring his knees and hips for the duffel toss. With a giant twist, he heaved the fifty-pound bag onto the grassy, sandy slope below. With one last cinch on his backpack’s straps, he ran out the open boxcar door at a forward angle to try for some forward momentum with his roll.
Dacso hit the ground and collapsed his knees, rolling onto his shoulder. The speed and slope made him do two complete rolls before he was able to get to a stop and position himself on his knees. He oriented himself uphill and reacquired the car which was now almost two hundred feet farther west. Antal had wisely descended down the three welded rungs below the car’s opening, reducing his jump to a mere two feet. He sprang hard to clear the large gravel stones near the tracks and performed a much-less-violent impact and roll.
“Huh,” Dacso mumbled, feeling both foolish and impressed.
He collected himself and the bag full of contraband that belonged to one of his bosses—along with a few of his own special possessions too big to carry. The Hungarian had one unique experience that most of his younger American family did not. He, like the others his age, had lived his earliest years in the former U.S.S.R. His mother and sister—Antal’s mother— had come to the United States in the 1990s. His own uncle in Los Angeles had managed to get to the U.S. in the early 1980s. Dacso had stayed behind to be with his father and perform his required military service after the fall of the Soviet Union. After his father passed away of a heart attack, Dacso finally caught up with his Americanized family. And though he made his living in a way most frowned upon, at heart he was still a family man. Knowing he’d never settle down for an equally unattractive mate and spawn ugly, poor kids, Dacso considered his various nephews and nieces as his own. He liked Antal in particular, and he wanted the lad on this road-trip to try and educate him about the things in store for the United States.
He plopped the heavy bag down when he reached Antal. The pair would trek through the grass and bushes down to the highway to attempt hitch-hiking, making their way toward a small Hungarian community in the La Brea area of North Los Angeles. And while the “contraband” was related to his “employment,” he had no delusions about the reality of things—life in this city had taken a drastic turn for the worse since the federal government had started trying to round up or kill the cartel members. He had no qualms whatsoever about selling off said items for his family’s benefit if it came down to it. But he and Antal had only one primary purpose—find his mother’s brother and bring him back to New York.
Los Angeles, California
Many of the boxcars on the freight train rumbling into Los Angeles County were empty or only partially loaded. The port of Long Beach had become a nightmare of activity since that giant tsunami wiped out half of America’s west coast ports two months earlier. Coupled with the loss of dozens of cargo ships, hundreds of trucks, and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers, the impact to trade was having ripple effects in the world economy. One unknown side-effect had been the resurgence of “the Hobo Express,” especially in the weeks since Operation Venom Spear had started.
The police and military, under President Jeremiah Allen’s cooperation with Congress, had enacted a nationwide curfew as part of their efforts to battle the cartels that had started infiltrating multiple layers of society and government in the American West. The borderline tyranny had only fueled the already growing dissention between government and the populace—and driven people who wanted to travel discreetly back onto the train tracks.
“That guy in Colorado was right,” the odd Hungarian man said in his native tongue to his teenage traveling companion. “Switching to the Burlington-Northern Line probably shaved a day off the trip.”
“Ez igaz,” the young American said. “That is true.”
Both of them had become accustomed to the rail travel, though neither were particularly fond of it. One always needed to stay awake, not that one could sleep well anyhow. And the other hobos weren’t shy about dropping their trousers and taking care of business in the open. The one saving grace for the pair had been that the man’s strange appearance and accent made even those who were off their meds want to keep themselves at the other end of the boxcar.
Forty-year-old Dacso Sarkany was no stranger to pain and suffering, and he had a one-of-a-kind personal style that reflected his equally unique life story. He tucked his loose tan pants into his mid-shin brown leather boots, not unlike a motorcycle cop or someone from a space opera. Under his identically tan trench coat was an old-school black turtleneck sweater. His left hand was mangled, the thumb but a simple half-inch stump, not even a full knuckle. It was a constant reminder of his time in Kosovo, part of a U.N. peace-keeping force who was ambushed with an IED. But the icing on the Dacso cake was the mohawk haircut over the plump, strange face. Dacso wasn’t a pretty man, his puffy bottom lip always extending out too far for the normal symmetry associated with being handsome. Dacso kept his face and the sides of his head shaved, part of the image he’d built for himself after joining his relatives in America.
The pair were traveling with only a small backpack each, plus one bulky, heavy duty duffel bag they guarded very closely. Though an experienced, low-level henchman in various low-level crime syndicates in New York, Dacso and his fifteen-year-old nephew weren’t on a criminal mission—at least, not completely.
“How long do you think it will take to find them?” Antal Kover asked his uncle. The American lad had grown up in a unique circumstance, part of the tight nit but very poor neighborhood of Kiryas Joel, New York. It was one of the poorest zip codes in the entire country, but still boasted a particularly low crime rate. It was also home to two unique and independent ethnic groups. In addition to a large Orthodox Jewish community, Kiryas Joel also boasted America’s largest Hungarian settlement. The two groups respected and ignored each other—and both were notorious for handling crime “in house.” Men like Dacso went to the Big Apple for their work. Antal had been sent along on this family mission to both watch his uncle’s back and act as his translator.
“Depends on how long it takes to hitchhike,” Dacso answered. “Eet is well,” he said with his signature wave. Whenever he felt like ending a line of talk, he would say those words in very broken English—his only style of English—and look off to the side as he did a small Jedi-esque hand wave before looking back to the other party with a small head nod. Conversation over. Back in Hungarian, he ordered, “Let’s jump at this next inside curve.”
The train had been only traveling about ten miles-per-hour since starting to parallel highway I-15 near the town of Las Colinas. The train was slowing, and he definitely wanted to be off long before any other hobos near the terminus.
Dacso hefted the large duffel by both handles, ready to toss it just ahead of his own jump. “Remember to absorb with your knees and roll like a stone,” he instructed his nephew.
“I know, Uncle,” Antal said. “I’ve watched plenty of free-runners on YouTube.”
Dacso shot him an odd look. When Antal didn’t know a Hungarian word, he would use the English word in its place. “Why would a man pay money to run?” Dacso asked with confusion before turning his attention back to the coming stunt. “Be ready,” he warned as he started to plant his feet and spring his knees and hips for the duffel toss. With a giant twist, he heaved the fifty-pound bag onto the grassy, sandy slope below. With one last cinch on his backpack’s straps, he ran out the open boxcar door at a forward angle to try for some forward momentum with his roll.
Dacso hit the ground and collapsed his knees, rolling onto his shoulder. The speed and slope made him do two complete rolls before he was able to get to a stop and position himself on his knees. He oriented himself uphill and reacquired the car which was now almost two hundred feet farther west. Antal had wisely descended down the three welded rungs below the car’s opening, reducing his jump to a mere two feet. He sprang hard to clear the large gravel stones near the tracks and performed a much-less-violent impact and roll.
“Huh,” Dacso mumbled, feeling both foolish and impressed.
He collected himself and the bag full of contraband that belonged to one of his bosses—along with a few of his own special possessions too big to carry. The Hungarian had one unique experience that most of his younger American family did not. He, like the others his age, had lived his earliest years in the former U.S.S.R. His mother and sister—Antal’s mother— had come to the United States in the 1990s. His own uncle in Los Angeles had managed to get to the U.S. in the early 1980s. Dacso had stayed behind to be with his father and perform his required military service after the fall of the Soviet Union. After his father passed away of a heart attack, Dacso finally caught up with his Americanized family. And though he made his living in a way most frowned upon, at heart he was still a family man. Knowing he’d never settle down for an equally unattractive mate and spawn ugly, poor kids, Dacso considered his various nephews and nieces as his own. He liked Antal in particular, and he wanted the lad on this road-trip to try and educate him about the things in store for the United States.
He plopped the heavy bag down when he reached Antal. The pair would trek through the grass and bushes down to the highway to attempt hitch-hiking, making their way toward a small Hungarian community in the La Brea area of North Los Angeles. And while the “contraband” was related to his “employment,” he had no delusions about the reality of things—life in this city had taken a drastic turn for the worse since the federal government had started trying to round up or kill the cartel members. He had no qualms whatsoever about selling off said items for his family’s benefit if it came down to it. But he and Antal had only one primary purpose—find his mother’s brother and bring him back to New York.
Blood Red Sky Chapter 1
Acme Ranch
Southeast of Tucson, Arizona
“And in recap, the total number of United States Naval vessels known to have been sunk or sinking over the engagements of the last eighteen hours are as follows,” the buzzy and sometimes warbly voice crackled over the HAM radio. “Three aircraft carriers. Four attack submarines. Three Ticonderoga class cruisers. Six Arleigh Burke class destroyers. Nine littoral combat ships. And seventeen ships specific to refueling, supply, or amphibious assault. Entire squadrons of aircraft from all branches of the military have been hacked and are presumed destroyed. There is an unknown number of ships with smaller amounts of damage. Casualties to sailors and Marines are expected to be in the dozens of thousands. Stay tuned for our update in forty-five minutes. The next round of net check-ins may bring in additional facts regarding President Allen’s responses to the ongoing unprovoked attacks by China...”
As the American Contingency Radio Network operator provided his call sign to close his transmission, Bob turned the command post speakers down, reducing the buzz to a low hum. Everyone at Acme Ranch, except for most of the kids and the two people on watch up on the hill, was in the converted garage trying to grasp the gravity of what they were hearing. The air was scorching and still. Karen Kirkland realized she was finally hearing her heart pound in her ears, just in time to hear Jerome Washington’s wife Robin gasp loudly.
“That can’t be right!” Robin proclaimed, shaking her head as the tears that had been building up burst through the full seams at the bottom of her eyes. “Dear God!” she yelled a little louder, looking at Granger Madison… wishing Jerome weren’t on watch up on the hill at that moment.
This broke the seal on the emotional vacuum occupying the ranch’s principal center for monitoring radios, using maps, and tracking all activities. Soon Karen had taken a giant breath, too, as her body told her she’d been holding it in tense anticipation. Fred, Brad, Donna, Daniel… they were all joining in the most shocking news they’d heard since 9/11—truly the modern equivalent of what their grandparents and beyond had experienced on December 7th, 1941. Karen saw Tracy, Granger, and their guest—a Delta Force operator named Mikkel ‘VooDoo’ Hudson—exchange worried but knowing glances. Like Bob and her Uncle Claude, the men were all combat veterans. Despite that, this news was beyond anything their minds had told them was likely to happen in their lifetimes.
“What’s this mean?” Karen asked Granger, who was sitting in a folding chair, still recovering from the cartel IED that had rattled his cage a mere twenty-five hours earlier. The pair were nowhere near being ‘a couple’, though she had grown fond of their flirtatious small talk.
“I’m not sure…” the Road Runners’ leader admitted quietly, under the near din of worried, excited, angry emotions pouring out in the garage. He looked at the special forces master sergeant. “Is this Rampart Edge thing still a go? I mean—this Chinese-Mexican-Venezuelan buildup on the border no longer looks like political theater…”
VooDoo looked at the satellite phone in his hand. The display told him he still had a working network with which to receive calls. “Until I’m told otherwise, yes,” the hardened graying soldier said. “It would seem we are suddenly behind the eight ball. If anything, the need to align capable civilians just became a thousand times more urgent.” He eyeballed the scarred, retired-firefighter and former Marine before him. “But you’re in no shape to go, bro. I’ll handle it.”
“Too bad Lucky Charm took off for L.A.,” Granger said. “I might’ve taken you up on that. But you need to either take me or Tracy. No way am I letting you roll without someone to watch your back.”
“We can decide that in a few hours,” VooDoo said, scanning the Casio G-Shock on his wrist. “I’m going to grab a few Zs before this phone rings.” He made his way past the pair and the wall shelves filled with freeze-dried food and into the house.
Karen heard the commotion dying down. She could see Claude and Bob seated at the bench on the far wall, both with headsets on, each working a large HAM radio to try finding new signals and learning new information. Tracy had just wandered over to her and Granger. “Wheeewww…” was all he could say to his friend.
“I think I’m still heading north with VooDoo in the morning,” Granger told his younger buddy. He caught ranch owner Donna Wolf’s attention and gave her a request to come over with a small wave. “Tracy will be in charge of security while I’m out on the recruiting mission,” he told Donna. “You said something about caves to the west?”
“Yes,” Donna said, affirming with a quick nod. “About three miles. Technically on state-owned grazing land. But we and one other ranch are the legal users and custodians of the twenty-one thousand acres. Why?”
“I think that Tracy and Karen should spearhead a mission to scout those caves—and start setting them up as a bug out location.”
***
USS Lyndon B. Johnson DDG-1002
Northwestern Pacific Ocean
“What’s the status, XO?” Navy Captain Millie Goldberg said smoothly, voice releasing just a fraction of the tension into the handset of the ship’s sound-powered phone. She was on the LBJ’s bridge, taking a rare respite from her feet in her Skipper’s chair on the starboard side. The bridge was about halfway up the smooth, angled surface of the unique vessel’s lone structure above the main deck. Built for stealth and superior wave-cutting, the long slender hull had helped the nearly brand-new ship survive the nuclear-torpedo-caused tsunami that had wiped out a large portion of the northern fleet, including the mighty supercarrier, USS Halsey. LBJ and her crew were attempting to thread the fine needle of balance between rescuing fellow sailors from the freezing ocean and searching for Chinese threats.
“Less than one minute, Captain!” Executive Officer Commander Agwe Bailey hollered into his handset over the roar of the January Pacific wind and rain. His accent always present, the native Jamaican had spent an entire career working to perfect his English for just such a moment. The muscular 41-year-old was almost always smiling, despite his role as the ship’s number two officer. The XO role was one akin to a motorcycle club’s enforcer, always ensuring areas were inspection ready and sailors who lacked discipline were kept in line. But the events of the previous two days had driven the smiles and positivity out of every surviving soul. The incredulous feeling that war was breaking out with China remained. It was the Captain and XO’s roles to keep people performing their jobs. “The last survivors are moving into the hangar bay. We’re pulling the Jacob’s ladder up right now!”
“Copy, XO. Sea Snake 21 is reporting that the group of rafts to the southwest are empty. I’m suspending the rescue and recovery for the night, and there’s a good chance we’re being re-tasked sometime in the next several minutes. Have the 1st Lieutenant take over the intake of survivors. Get yourself dried and fed and be in the CIC in thirty minutes.” I think we need to get that helo back on the deck, pronto, she concluded silently. Better get to the Combat Information Center.
Millie didn’t even wait for the acknowledgment. She cradled the black plastic phone and stepped back down off the swiveling stool, left knee creaking and frozen with arthritis and pain. “OOD,” she said, calling the Officer-of-the-Deck over, who had just finished taking a report from the ship’s Damage Control Central on a different handset. “I’m heading to CIC. The rescue detail will be reporting stowed for sea shortly. When they do, make your heading 115 at twenty knots.”
Millie worked her knees a bit as she departed, barely hearing the OOD repeat the orders and call out to the bridge team that the captain was departing. She proceeded aft down the short centerline passageway and zigged left up the inclined ladder to the next deck. Moving aft once more, she ended at the closed door. They were much too high off the waterline for needing watertight hatches at this point. She twisted the knob, realizing that the space might need to go back to 24-hour protection. At sea, the only persons on board were presumably the crew. But ever since she’d heard about the Chinese special warfare assault on the Russian fleet, the possibility of such an event happening to them was not too far back in her thoughts.
“Ops,” she said as she walked into the dark space, shooting a quick left and then right past two blackened panels meant to keep hallway light out. Everyone working in the CIC was kept at near-night-vision to enable longer and easier durations of staring at electronic screens.
“Aye, Cap’n,” a very tired Lieutenant Commander Dennis Bates called out in the dark, responding to the nickname for his role as the Operations Department Head.
“Flight ops,” Millie announced as she squinted and made her way toward her Ops Officer. “Let’s move the rescued to the mess decks and the infirmary. I want Sea Snake 21 back on deck in twenty, if possible.”
“New orders, ma’am?” the mid-level officer asked. The secure comms center was part of the overall tactical brain buried in the ship’s upper structure. Even though the top-secret message had been sent straight to the captain, he knew she’d be briefing him shortly.
“Just a warning order,” she advised. “We’re going to progress east-southeast and keep our eyes and ears peeled until the new orders arrive. On a separate note, let’s start locking the accesses to all the sensor spaces like we’re in port.”
The bulb turned on over Ops’ head. “Good thought, Cap’n” he mumbled, not able to stifle a yawn as he spoke. “Sorry, Ma’am.”
“Of course, Ops. We can’t sustain this pace without risking a greater catastrophe. We undoubtedly will be engaged at some point. I’ll be addressing the crew shortly. We’ll be going to a port-starboard rotation soon.” The crew would remain in a modified battle-ready condition of General Quarters, with half of them being allowed to go eat and take naps. Dennis Bates went to make Millie Goldberg’s orders for the helicopter come to life.
She took a fresh look at all the tactical data the ship was taking in—known or suspected contacts under, on, or over the ocean… Radio and satellite transmissions… Input from their drones and military satellites, not to mention the ship’s own long-range cameras. The last known positions of the Chinese subs, combined with the amount of time that had passed, led her to be gravely concerned. The only recompense was that the artificial tsunami had been just as damaging to their own craft. Then there was the space threat. So far, China had shown no restraint at lobbing devastating tungsten slugs from space. Team LBJ literally had to scan continuously in all possible directions for the next attack. Millie cracked her own yawn and headed toward the exit. I should go down and see how these Halsey survivors are doing, she thought.
***
USS Lyndon B. Johnson DDG-1002
Northwestern Pacific Ocean
Carmen Martinez watched the chaos in the LBJ’s hangar slowly become more organized. Various sailors from the destroyer’s crew were barking orders and performing tasks. Blankets were being handed out. Corpsman and the ship’s doctor were working with engineers to frisk the crew for radioactive particulates. As the once mighty warship had split open from missiles, internal explosions, and crashing after the giant wave sent their bow skyward, the two nuclear reactor compartments could no longer contain their Pandora. Radioactive coolant water had mixed with the cold, salty sea, covering some of the sailors with various levels of contamination. A decision had been made to decontaminate all the survivors, regardless of readings. Wash-down shelters had been constructed out of tarps and folding frames, set over tougher plastic tarps to catch the water. It was destined to be thrown back into the sea, but it needed to be kept from reaching every crack and crevice in the helicopter bay.
“Next!” Carmen heard a female corpsman yell. “You! Name!”
“Mar-Martinez,” Carmen stammered, still shivering. Ten hours in the round orange covered raft had been more than enough cold exposure for her. I’m never going in the ocean again, she’d thought a hundred times. “C-C-Carmen. DC3,” she added, letting the person know she was a third-class damage control specialist.
“Step into the cofferdam,” the corpsman told her, pointing as if explaining to a five-year-old.
Carmen didn’t mind. Between fighting fire and flooding, jumping off the sinking ship, and floating in the life raft, she did not know when the last time she’d slept was. I just wish I could wake up from this nightmare, she thought, reminding her of months earlier in Washington State when she’d had a similar thought. She stepped over the lip to the temporary pool and moved in next to another sailor, a male, who was mostly undressed. The LBJ’s crew just didn’t have the space, materials, or manpower to worry about something vain like mixing the genders in the wash-down.
“Strip and throw all of your garments into the chute!” she heard a male sailor order, voice and face muffled by a full-face respirator and a full set of rubber rain gear. During the horrendous experience, her mind wandered once more to watching her friends—most of them—unable to escape the tilting aircraft carrier. Where’s Dustin? And Cobra? she wondered. Those were the two men from her life raft that she actually knew before the tragedy. She felt the healing powers of warm water from a rubber hose and nozzle cover her from head down.
“C’mon, shipmate,” she heard the voice behind the mask once more. He was not unsympathetic. It was just the tone of a tired sailor with a long night ahead of him. “Toss the uniform. We have coveralls waiting for you.” He had a long-handled brush and was dunking the hard red plastic bristles into a bucket of soapy water.
Carmen felt the burn of feeling returning to her frozen hands as the warm water ran over her. She fumbled through the process of doffing her uniform and undergarments. After the SOBs in Washington had their way with me, how bad can this be? she asked herself. In the last two months, she’d used a strict workout regimen as her post-rape therapy. Between that and Cobra’s Jiu Jitsu classes, she’d made her petite frame hard. Almost buff.
She felt the bristles as the sailor begin to scrub her head and scalp, joined after a moment by the brush of a second sailor. “Keep moving forward,” she heard a different voice say. Through the soapy foam and mere slits of her eyes, she could see the male survivor ahead of her stepping out of the cofferdam up ahead. She moved into his spot as the sailors kept scrubbing. No place was too private in the attempt to remove from her skin any contamination she may have swum through.
When ordered to, she stepped out of the cofferdam into the open towel being held by a female officer. “Step through the forward centerline hatch and head port,” the woman instructed. “You’ll be led into the air detachment maintenance office.”
Carmen did as ordered, continuing the procession as one of 137 survivors that LBJ had picked up from her sunken ship. She’d been guided through the process by LBJ sailors all along the way, receiving a set of coveralls that had been donated by a crew member. More radioactive readings, another recounting of her name and rank, and she and the others ultimately found themselves on the ship’s mess decks. The smell of the space had been nearly identical to the Halsey’s, instantly bringing back a flood of memories. Sandwiches had been prepared. There were personnel specialists assigning Halsey sailors a place to go sleep via the old-school ‘hot rack’ method. LBJ crew members just going on watch for the night would not need their bunks. It wasn’t a great solution, but it got the Halsey crew members out of the way while the destroyer’s crew went about the tasks necessary to find the enemy before it found them.
Carmen found herself in the berthing compartment for female sailors near the head of the ship. It plowed up and down through the waves and rocked port-to-starboard a lot more than she’d been used to sailing on the carrier. She found the correct rack, and after a trip to the bathroom, planted herself behind the blue privacy curtain. Will try to find Dustin later, she decided. The tough Latina fought back the well of tears building behind her eyes as the emotional toil caught up. God. I don’t know how much more I can take…
Southeast of Tucson, Arizona
“And in recap, the total number of United States Naval vessels known to have been sunk or sinking over the engagements of the last eighteen hours are as follows,” the buzzy and sometimes warbly voice crackled over the HAM radio. “Three aircraft carriers. Four attack submarines. Three Ticonderoga class cruisers. Six Arleigh Burke class destroyers. Nine littoral combat ships. And seventeen ships specific to refueling, supply, or amphibious assault. Entire squadrons of aircraft from all branches of the military have been hacked and are presumed destroyed. There is an unknown number of ships with smaller amounts of damage. Casualties to sailors and Marines are expected to be in the dozens of thousands. Stay tuned for our update in forty-five minutes. The next round of net check-ins may bring in additional facts regarding President Allen’s responses to the ongoing unprovoked attacks by China...”
As the American Contingency Radio Network operator provided his call sign to close his transmission, Bob turned the command post speakers down, reducing the buzz to a low hum. Everyone at Acme Ranch, except for most of the kids and the two people on watch up on the hill, was in the converted garage trying to grasp the gravity of what they were hearing. The air was scorching and still. Karen Kirkland realized she was finally hearing her heart pound in her ears, just in time to hear Jerome Washington’s wife Robin gasp loudly.
“That can’t be right!” Robin proclaimed, shaking her head as the tears that had been building up burst through the full seams at the bottom of her eyes. “Dear God!” she yelled a little louder, looking at Granger Madison… wishing Jerome weren’t on watch up on the hill at that moment.
This broke the seal on the emotional vacuum occupying the ranch’s principal center for monitoring radios, using maps, and tracking all activities. Soon Karen had taken a giant breath, too, as her body told her she’d been holding it in tense anticipation. Fred, Brad, Donna, Daniel… they were all joining in the most shocking news they’d heard since 9/11—truly the modern equivalent of what their grandparents and beyond had experienced on December 7th, 1941. Karen saw Tracy, Granger, and their guest—a Delta Force operator named Mikkel ‘VooDoo’ Hudson—exchange worried but knowing glances. Like Bob and her Uncle Claude, the men were all combat veterans. Despite that, this news was beyond anything their minds had told them was likely to happen in their lifetimes.
“What’s this mean?” Karen asked Granger, who was sitting in a folding chair, still recovering from the cartel IED that had rattled his cage a mere twenty-five hours earlier. The pair were nowhere near being ‘a couple’, though she had grown fond of their flirtatious small talk.
“I’m not sure…” the Road Runners’ leader admitted quietly, under the near din of worried, excited, angry emotions pouring out in the garage. He looked at the special forces master sergeant. “Is this Rampart Edge thing still a go? I mean—this Chinese-Mexican-Venezuelan buildup on the border no longer looks like political theater…”
VooDoo looked at the satellite phone in his hand. The display told him he still had a working network with which to receive calls. “Until I’m told otherwise, yes,” the hardened graying soldier said. “It would seem we are suddenly behind the eight ball. If anything, the need to align capable civilians just became a thousand times more urgent.” He eyeballed the scarred, retired-firefighter and former Marine before him. “But you’re in no shape to go, bro. I’ll handle it.”
“Too bad Lucky Charm took off for L.A.,” Granger said. “I might’ve taken you up on that. But you need to either take me or Tracy. No way am I letting you roll without someone to watch your back.”
“We can decide that in a few hours,” VooDoo said, scanning the Casio G-Shock on his wrist. “I’m going to grab a few Zs before this phone rings.” He made his way past the pair and the wall shelves filled with freeze-dried food and into the house.
Karen heard the commotion dying down. She could see Claude and Bob seated at the bench on the far wall, both with headsets on, each working a large HAM radio to try finding new signals and learning new information. Tracy had just wandered over to her and Granger. “Wheeewww…” was all he could say to his friend.
“I think I’m still heading north with VooDoo in the morning,” Granger told his younger buddy. He caught ranch owner Donna Wolf’s attention and gave her a request to come over with a small wave. “Tracy will be in charge of security while I’m out on the recruiting mission,” he told Donna. “You said something about caves to the west?”
“Yes,” Donna said, affirming with a quick nod. “About three miles. Technically on state-owned grazing land. But we and one other ranch are the legal users and custodians of the twenty-one thousand acres. Why?”
“I think that Tracy and Karen should spearhead a mission to scout those caves—and start setting them up as a bug out location.”
***
USS Lyndon B. Johnson DDG-1002
Northwestern Pacific Ocean
“What’s the status, XO?” Navy Captain Millie Goldberg said smoothly, voice releasing just a fraction of the tension into the handset of the ship’s sound-powered phone. She was on the LBJ’s bridge, taking a rare respite from her feet in her Skipper’s chair on the starboard side. The bridge was about halfway up the smooth, angled surface of the unique vessel’s lone structure above the main deck. Built for stealth and superior wave-cutting, the long slender hull had helped the nearly brand-new ship survive the nuclear-torpedo-caused tsunami that had wiped out a large portion of the northern fleet, including the mighty supercarrier, USS Halsey. LBJ and her crew were attempting to thread the fine needle of balance between rescuing fellow sailors from the freezing ocean and searching for Chinese threats.
“Less than one minute, Captain!” Executive Officer Commander Agwe Bailey hollered into his handset over the roar of the January Pacific wind and rain. His accent always present, the native Jamaican had spent an entire career working to perfect his English for just such a moment. The muscular 41-year-old was almost always smiling, despite his role as the ship’s number two officer. The XO role was one akin to a motorcycle club’s enforcer, always ensuring areas were inspection ready and sailors who lacked discipline were kept in line. But the events of the previous two days had driven the smiles and positivity out of every surviving soul. The incredulous feeling that war was breaking out with China remained. It was the Captain and XO’s roles to keep people performing their jobs. “The last survivors are moving into the hangar bay. We’re pulling the Jacob’s ladder up right now!”
“Copy, XO. Sea Snake 21 is reporting that the group of rafts to the southwest are empty. I’m suspending the rescue and recovery for the night, and there’s a good chance we’re being re-tasked sometime in the next several minutes. Have the 1st Lieutenant take over the intake of survivors. Get yourself dried and fed and be in the CIC in thirty minutes.” I think we need to get that helo back on the deck, pronto, she concluded silently. Better get to the Combat Information Center.
Millie didn’t even wait for the acknowledgment. She cradled the black plastic phone and stepped back down off the swiveling stool, left knee creaking and frozen with arthritis and pain. “OOD,” she said, calling the Officer-of-the-Deck over, who had just finished taking a report from the ship’s Damage Control Central on a different handset. “I’m heading to CIC. The rescue detail will be reporting stowed for sea shortly. When they do, make your heading 115 at twenty knots.”
Millie worked her knees a bit as she departed, barely hearing the OOD repeat the orders and call out to the bridge team that the captain was departing. She proceeded aft down the short centerline passageway and zigged left up the inclined ladder to the next deck. Moving aft once more, she ended at the closed door. They were much too high off the waterline for needing watertight hatches at this point. She twisted the knob, realizing that the space might need to go back to 24-hour protection. At sea, the only persons on board were presumably the crew. But ever since she’d heard about the Chinese special warfare assault on the Russian fleet, the possibility of such an event happening to them was not too far back in her thoughts.
“Ops,” she said as she walked into the dark space, shooting a quick left and then right past two blackened panels meant to keep hallway light out. Everyone working in the CIC was kept at near-night-vision to enable longer and easier durations of staring at electronic screens.
“Aye, Cap’n,” a very tired Lieutenant Commander Dennis Bates called out in the dark, responding to the nickname for his role as the Operations Department Head.
“Flight ops,” Millie announced as she squinted and made her way toward her Ops Officer. “Let’s move the rescued to the mess decks and the infirmary. I want Sea Snake 21 back on deck in twenty, if possible.”
“New orders, ma’am?” the mid-level officer asked. The secure comms center was part of the overall tactical brain buried in the ship’s upper structure. Even though the top-secret message had been sent straight to the captain, he knew she’d be briefing him shortly.
“Just a warning order,” she advised. “We’re going to progress east-southeast and keep our eyes and ears peeled until the new orders arrive. On a separate note, let’s start locking the accesses to all the sensor spaces like we’re in port.”
The bulb turned on over Ops’ head. “Good thought, Cap’n” he mumbled, not able to stifle a yawn as he spoke. “Sorry, Ma’am.”
“Of course, Ops. We can’t sustain this pace without risking a greater catastrophe. We undoubtedly will be engaged at some point. I’ll be addressing the crew shortly. We’ll be going to a port-starboard rotation soon.” The crew would remain in a modified battle-ready condition of General Quarters, with half of them being allowed to go eat and take naps. Dennis Bates went to make Millie Goldberg’s orders for the helicopter come to life.
She took a fresh look at all the tactical data the ship was taking in—known or suspected contacts under, on, or over the ocean… Radio and satellite transmissions… Input from their drones and military satellites, not to mention the ship’s own long-range cameras. The last known positions of the Chinese subs, combined with the amount of time that had passed, led her to be gravely concerned. The only recompense was that the artificial tsunami had been just as damaging to their own craft. Then there was the space threat. So far, China had shown no restraint at lobbing devastating tungsten slugs from space. Team LBJ literally had to scan continuously in all possible directions for the next attack. Millie cracked her own yawn and headed toward the exit. I should go down and see how these Halsey survivors are doing, she thought.
***
USS Lyndon B. Johnson DDG-1002
Northwestern Pacific Ocean
Carmen Martinez watched the chaos in the LBJ’s hangar slowly become more organized. Various sailors from the destroyer’s crew were barking orders and performing tasks. Blankets were being handed out. Corpsman and the ship’s doctor were working with engineers to frisk the crew for radioactive particulates. As the once mighty warship had split open from missiles, internal explosions, and crashing after the giant wave sent their bow skyward, the two nuclear reactor compartments could no longer contain their Pandora. Radioactive coolant water had mixed with the cold, salty sea, covering some of the sailors with various levels of contamination. A decision had been made to decontaminate all the survivors, regardless of readings. Wash-down shelters had been constructed out of tarps and folding frames, set over tougher plastic tarps to catch the water. It was destined to be thrown back into the sea, but it needed to be kept from reaching every crack and crevice in the helicopter bay.
“Next!” Carmen heard a female corpsman yell. “You! Name!”
“Mar-Martinez,” Carmen stammered, still shivering. Ten hours in the round orange covered raft had been more than enough cold exposure for her. I’m never going in the ocean again, she’d thought a hundred times. “C-C-Carmen. DC3,” she added, letting the person know she was a third-class damage control specialist.
“Step into the cofferdam,” the corpsman told her, pointing as if explaining to a five-year-old.
Carmen didn’t mind. Between fighting fire and flooding, jumping off the sinking ship, and floating in the life raft, she did not know when the last time she’d slept was. I just wish I could wake up from this nightmare, she thought, reminding her of months earlier in Washington State when she’d had a similar thought. She stepped over the lip to the temporary pool and moved in next to another sailor, a male, who was mostly undressed. The LBJ’s crew just didn’t have the space, materials, or manpower to worry about something vain like mixing the genders in the wash-down.
“Strip and throw all of your garments into the chute!” she heard a male sailor order, voice and face muffled by a full-face respirator and a full set of rubber rain gear. During the horrendous experience, her mind wandered once more to watching her friends—most of them—unable to escape the tilting aircraft carrier. Where’s Dustin? And Cobra? she wondered. Those were the two men from her life raft that she actually knew before the tragedy. She felt the healing powers of warm water from a rubber hose and nozzle cover her from head down.
“C’mon, shipmate,” she heard the voice behind the mask once more. He was not unsympathetic. It was just the tone of a tired sailor with a long night ahead of him. “Toss the uniform. We have coveralls waiting for you.” He had a long-handled brush and was dunking the hard red plastic bristles into a bucket of soapy water.
Carmen felt the burn of feeling returning to her frozen hands as the warm water ran over her. She fumbled through the process of doffing her uniform and undergarments. After the SOBs in Washington had their way with me, how bad can this be? she asked herself. In the last two months, she’d used a strict workout regimen as her post-rape therapy. Between that and Cobra’s Jiu Jitsu classes, she’d made her petite frame hard. Almost buff.
She felt the bristles as the sailor begin to scrub her head and scalp, joined after a moment by the brush of a second sailor. “Keep moving forward,” she heard a different voice say. Through the soapy foam and mere slits of her eyes, she could see the male survivor ahead of her stepping out of the cofferdam up ahead. She moved into his spot as the sailors kept scrubbing. No place was too private in the attempt to remove from her skin any contamination she may have swum through.
When ordered to, she stepped out of the cofferdam into the open towel being held by a female officer. “Step through the forward centerline hatch and head port,” the woman instructed. “You’ll be led into the air detachment maintenance office.”
Carmen did as ordered, continuing the procession as one of 137 survivors that LBJ had picked up from her sunken ship. She’d been guided through the process by LBJ sailors all along the way, receiving a set of coveralls that had been donated by a crew member. More radioactive readings, another recounting of her name and rank, and she and the others ultimately found themselves on the ship’s mess decks. The smell of the space had been nearly identical to the Halsey’s, instantly bringing back a flood of memories. Sandwiches had been prepared. There were personnel specialists assigning Halsey sailors a place to go sleep via the old-school ‘hot rack’ method. LBJ crew members just going on watch for the night would not need their bunks. It wasn’t a great solution, but it got the Halsey crew members out of the way while the destroyer’s crew went about the tasks necessary to find the enemy before it found them.
Carmen found herself in the berthing compartment for female sailors near the head of the ship. It plowed up and down through the waves and rocked port-to-starboard a lot more than she’d been used to sailing on the carrier. She found the correct rack, and after a trip to the bathroom, planted herself behind the blue privacy curtain. Will try to find Dustin later, she decided. The tough Latina fought back the well of tears building behind her eyes as the emotional toil caught up. God. I don’t know how much more I can take…
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