“That’s Mike Mitchell,” I heard someone whisper in the crowd. “And Charles Mumford and his daughter,” said someone else.
I held my hands to my face and rubbed the scars. I still wasn’t comfortable with people taking pictures of me. The cell phones came out, the devices held aloft like fluttering flowers of technology soaking up the Kentucky sunshine. They parted like the Red Sea as we walked through, though, their deference and respect earning us a few feet of breathing room.
I noticed Ellarose and Luke holding hands and waving as they passed. I gave Chuck a nudge and wink.
“United,” called out a voice farther down on the main road.
It was Rick, his fist up in the air. Chuck raised his fist. “United,” he called back.
Chuck had become the second in charge of the Vanceburg Rifles, and it was like he had found his calling. Ken was still the leader. I had taken on more of the role of Joe, seeing as I was now living in his reconstructed house, but nobody could replace that guy. I did my best, as I always tried to do.
Joe was resting at peace now, in a plot next to his wife in the cemetery in the middle of town. Susie and the kids always made sure that a nice collection of flowers stayed blooming over them.
They’d found Oscar’s body, too. Up near Chuck’s cabin, where he had been ambushed trying to drive back Susie’s Mini. They had buried him near Joe, with a big headstone. Hero of the Battle of Vanceburg. He would have liked that.
We walked through the rows of the cornfields, just planted, the green shoots poking up through the black earth. Horses neighed in the barn, a few hundred feet down from us. We’d done our best to rebuild it exactly as Joe had built it for his wife. She had always wanted horses in it, but had died before Joe could get her some. So, we rebuilt the barn and got Lauren and Ellarose and Olivia each their own horses—or pony, in Olivia’s case.
My dream had always been to travel the world, but now it was to live in a small town.
In Kentucky.
“They want us to come over to your place,” I said as I unstuck a note from the front of the door. Just like my wife. No cell phone. Message stuck on a door.
More country, she liked to say.
She wasn’t wrong.
We walked along the porch and out onto the main road, saying hello to everyone we saw. We passed the white church right at the edge of the farm, rebuilt exactly as it used to be, even with the storm shelter rebuilt and reinforced in the basement.
You never knew when you might need it.
My final dash up the road and into DC had been Archer’s idea. We hadn’t seen the guy since all this happened, except for one brief meeting at a Congressional inquiry. I figured Archer was back out in the world, in some part of it I couldn’t pronounce, doing something I also wouldn’t be sure of.
The draw play.
That had been Archer’s plan.
Bring in all the attackers as close as possible, then send the football—me and the senator—out up the field as fast and as far as possible. Only trouble was that the enemy must have watched the NFL, because they kept a safety in the backfield. Amina with a sniper rifle at the ready.
She used it to put a high velocity round into the senator’s head. Would have done the same to me, except I went ass over teakettle into the roadway.
Must have knocked me out, because by the time I came to, she was right over me. I always knew it was personal, between her and me, and when she trapped me, I made sure she knew it. I needed to get her close.
At the end, she pinned me against a tree, but instead of blowing my brains out with a gun, she wanted to stick me with a knife. Gave me the opportunity to get out the grenades that Chuck had armed me with. Pulled out the pins and stuffed them into the gaps under the armpits of her armor.
She had exploded like a tomato sandwiched between two turtle shells in a microwave.
Her armor had saved my life.
But two fragmentation grenades from that close had ripped into the skin of my face and arms and hands. I did my best, bleeding badly, to stumble back to my bike. Got on it and raced, as best as I could, a few dozen miles up the road, maybe more. My memory of that part was foggy. I ran into a military unit dispatched and racing toward the farm the moment the battle had started.
I told them who I was, that I needed to see President Chen. Right away. And only him.
The plan hadn’t been just Archer’s. Travis had added to it. They knew that if we put up enough of a fight, forced our adversaries to bring in and use their big guns, then our own military would get wind of it.
Vanceburg was sandwiched between a half dozen US Air Force bases to the north and east and west. Once the radar and heat signatures got big enough, our boys came racing in. The F-35s took out most of the drones in the air, as they had been doing across the country. National Guard troops were rushed in on the ground.
We just had to fight back enough to raise a stink, and the cavalry would appear.
And it did.
Our attackers had to try and melt away back into the woodwork after that.
That was always their plan. Quick attack, sucker punch, fast and hard, and then disappear. And they might have gotten away with it.
Except for my recording.
Chapter 46
CHUCK AND SUSIE’S house was five minutes down the road, just past Percy’s Diner, which Chuck had now taken over. The diner had space out back with a terrace overlooking the Ohio River. Chuck had said he always wanted to live next to a pub.
His dream had come true.
Now he even owned one. He’d sold the businesses in Nashville and moved everything here.
We took our time on the walk over. I enjoyed the sounds of the town, the brief conversations, the cool, clear air coming down from the mountains. I heard a TV coming from someone’s window. A spy show, someone confessing to something.
Which made me think.
Of that recording.
That dark room, Joe’s old room, where we’d taken the captive, loaded up on Xanax and painkillers and sodium thiopental. We had put the man to sleep, given him a shower, gotten him clean. Woken him up suddenly with a shot of amphetamines and some loud noises.
The Achilles heel of the operation was making the attackers Chechen.
Which meant they had to speak Russian.
Archer told the man a story, all rested and patched up in the best bed in the house, explained to him that the operation was a success.
Travis had already convinced me that these “terrorists” had to be state sponsored, that they hadn’t stolen the drones. They had been given them and had months or years to train with the equipment somewhere safe. Travis was sure these were not terrorists, not in the usual sense.
And Joe had said this was some great deception.
The drones that were being used against us were Chinese.
If this operation was funded by China, and they were trying to deceive us, then why use their own drones? And Travis had said that China didn’t have the human expertise in special ops teams to do this. The only viable alternatives were the Iranians and the Russians, but these attackers didn’t seem to speak any Iranian.
So, I guessed the only guess left.
I told Archer to spin a story that the attack had been successful, that the Russian special ops commandos had successfully used the Chinese drones and mounted the attack, and that they had gotten away with it. That the president of Russia was overjoyed with them, that his family had been given houses and riches.
The man was so happy, he gave us all the details. He was so high on Xanax and everything else we’d flooded his system with, that in his delirious dream state he gave us the names and locations and details of everything as it had happened, down to the last details.
Except that it hadn’t been the president of Russia. It had been their prime minister.
He had been the one who had authorized the attack. Used a sophisticated branch of the FSB—like our own CIA—that had its own special ops drone program. Trai
ned in secret for years together with their cyberattack branches of the military and even carried out the CyberStorm six years before.
During the attack, Russia had claimed its own GLONASS geopositioning birds were destroyed, but they weren’t. They were fully operational, just switched to a new and hidden frequency. They claimed their military was blinded, but at the same time, rolled tanks across the borders into the Baltics and Ukraine and other old Soviet territories. Of course, by that time, the president of Russia had been informed, though he said he was kept locked away.
Before the attack, the Russians had goaded America into a confrontation with China, and stepped up anti-Chinese sentiment, hoping that America would attack China. Russia had hoped that the two great powers would fall at the same time.
All they needed to do was launch a cyberattack against GenCorp and use their satellites to take out everything in orbit, and then use the confusion to insert three special ops commando teams of thirty soldiers each supported by a small army of drones.
Two of the teams had disappeared successfully after their missions. It was only Irena’s team, the one we became enmeshed with, that had failed in its mission of obfuscation and vanishing afterward, otherwise it would have all remained a deniable mystery.
That’s all it took to launch World War C—three units of thirty commandos backed by a few shipping containers of drones armed with AI. The future of warfare had arrived, but we had managed to pull back from the brink. Barely.
The Russian prime minister had called it “Operation Star Rise,” we later found out—when all the gory details came out in an international tribunal. By the time it became public knowledge, the prime minister of Russia had been executed by the president. Russia claimed it was cleaning house. They apologized, disavowed everyone involved, killed them all maybe a little too quickly.
They were rogue agents, they said.
The most damning evidence was the targeted kill list, part of which we had found. Senator Seymour was the Ace of Spades because he was the single most ardent anti-Russian advocate in Congress. The drones sent all over America had been reprogrammed with the facial recognition and last known locations of a long list of people that were deemed “against Russian interests.”
The goal was to launch the operation, create chaos, and send China and America and the entire financial system back a hundred years, while Russia ascended and provided aid to the world. Part of the operation was plain old propaganda, now called misinformation, which painted confusing pictures of Senator Seymour and his secret dealings—many of them true—and laundered these stories through mainstream media to give them credibility.
It was difficult to stop this process, even when we knew it was happening.
In the end, I had struggled into DC with the National Guard troops that picked me up, explained again and again who I was. That I had proof of what was happening. Eventually, I played my video to President Chen, and from there, everything came into the open.
The attack against China was halted.
In return, as the dust settled, China re-pegged their currency back to the American dollar. The financial markets restabilized. The world righted itself from the sideways lurch that had almost tipped it into anarchy.
India had never launched the first anti-satellite weapons. It had been Russia, launched from a nuclear submarine parked right off Sriharikota Island. The launches were so close to the Indian facilities that from space-based images it was hard to tell that they hadn’t been launched by the Indians themselves.
The Russians had given a whole load of anti-satellite weaponry to the Pakistani government, even people to operate it, and then egged them on to use it when the first anti-satellite weapons were launched against them. Then came the tit-for-tat back and forth that created a debris field in orbit, which created the perfect cover for the next phase of the operation.
To use the GenCorp constellations to begin wrecking everything else in orbit.
Except Russian assets.
They sacrificed a few but maneuvered most of the fleet out of harm’s way. Soon afterward, they sent up rockets and claimed they had replaced satellites at an amazing pace. It might not have held up to scrutiny, but at the time, it was total chaos.
They used the confusion at the ports all over America, in Seattle and New Orleans and even New York, to slip in under the wire. Get their commando teams in place, and unload the shipping containers of drones.
Xenon, the mysterious source of information that had spread over the networks just before the attacks, turned out to be part of a Russian psy-ops campaign. Not a real person at all, but propaganda.
We should have known, because we had warnings.
Even six years before, during the CyberStorm, there were reports of unknown drones and aerial objects when the power went down. That was the nascent Operation Star Rise, testing their systems and the limits of our defenses. Over the years, there were reports of UFO sightings all over the country, and even sightings of drones over western Nebraska and eastern Colorado. Nobody even knew who or what they were.
Until now.
“What’s Damon doing here? And Babet?” I said as we rounded the corner to Chuck and Susie’s. And there were other familiar faces. “And is that Archer?”
Chuck and Susie’s place was a three-story Victorian-style home with a wraparound porch and a backyard that spilled down onto the brown waters of the Ohio River.
Terry, my gorilla of a brother, was here. When he showed up, it meant nothing good. He was smiling, though, which made me even more nervous. Thank heavens he hadn’t gotten into the car and driven up to the cabin with Oscar, God rest his soul.
I was going to church these days.
The pretty white one we just rebuilt.
I jumped up the stairs and shook hands with everyone, kissed Paulina and Susie on their cheeks. Grandma Babet opened her arms wide and squeezed me tight.
Archer gave me a big bear hug, and I hugged him back. “What are you doing here?”
“Quit the CIA. Started working for Uncle Bigbucks.” Archer indicated Damon. “Safer doing security for him. I need a desk job. One that stays behind a desk.”
A glass of champagne was forced into my hand. “Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?” I asked, laughing.
Chuck said to my brother Terry, “Speaking of big bucks, you still owe me fifty.”
“Seriously,” I asked, “what’s the occasion? Did Lauren’s bill pass through Congress?”
As one of the leaders of the Battle of Vanceburg, Lauren had earned respect in the halls of Congress. She had created an international tribunal, led by the United States, to outlaw weaponized drones around the world, to stop the targeted extrajudicial killings by any nation, and to limit the use of artificial intelligence in drones and on the battlefield. It was a bit of a difficult endeavor, as that genie was already out of the bottle, but the goal was to stop what just happened here from ever happening again.
The news pundits claimed we had narrowly avoided a fate worse than death—we had averted the creation of an autocratic world power that might have dominated the planet for the rest of this century. But then again, strongmen and autocrats had been the norm for almost all of human history, with democracy and the institutions guarding it surviving only brief periods of time between.
But now was one of those moments.
My wife laughed. “It’s not the Bill in Congress.”
“Then what?”
Damon grabbed my shoulder. “Paulina and I are getting married.”
Salutations and cheers all around the patio. I clinked my glass with everyone but noticed my wife’s glass didn’t have bubbles in it.
“You’re flat,” I said to her. “Want a refill?”
Everyone went silent.
“I’ve kind of already got one.” She held her belly.
I was clueless. “Meaning what?”
“I’m pregnant, Mike.”
Note from the author:
A sincere thank you fo
r reading.
In the next section, I have a discussion on some of the real-world events related to CyberWar, notably the rise of drones and artificial intelligence in our military. I would love to hear your feedback of how this relates to what you read in the book.
Although this novel completes this trilogy (so sad, I know!), there is one more book in the World War C world--Darknet, which is a standalone title with secondary characters from CyberStorm which occurs before the events of CyberSpace (search for Darknet on Amazon). This novel begins in New York and follows one man’s journey deep into the tech underworld of Wall Street to battle a malignant artificial intelligence.
And—PLEASE—if you enjoyed this novel, take a few minutes to write a review, no matter how short. A constant stream of new reviews is the single best way to help an indie writer like myself attract new readers and continue to do what I do for you.
If you love the post-apocalyptic, you can try out my Science Fiction Book of the Year award-winning four-book series Nomad, where a mysterious deep-space object threatens to destroy the solar system (search for Nomad on Amazon). These novels follow the adventures of Jessica Rollins as she protects her family and navigates a new Earth after a truly cataclysmic disaster.
Mr. Damon Vincent Indigo from this series also appears in my Atopia Chronicles trilogy. These novels are set fifty years in the future after CyberStorm, when Mr. Indigo is an elderly gentleman presiding over a trillion-dollar empire on the island colony of Atopia off the coast of California. Atopia was my very first novel, and the style is different—more high-concept sci-fi.
My novel Polar Vortex, a new stand-alone title, is about a mysterious aircraft disappearance, and is now under development as a limited TV series (search for Polar Vortex on Amazon). This is by far one of my favorite books and is a great sci-fi mystery from start to finish in an homage to the great Agatha Christie (I leave you to guess which book it is like!)
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 30
