by Jeff Carlson
“Here they come!” Bugle screamed.
As he leveled out at 75 feet, Drew glanced up, taking his eyes off the water.
The morning sky was full of color, a light show very different than his whiteout. The atmosphere appeared to be painted with immense waves of blue and violet—an aurora—something he’d never seen south of Anchorage or Helsinki. The South China Sea was near the equator, well below the Tropic of Cancer. Auroras at this latitude were impossible.
There wasn’t time to wonder. Nor was there room for it inside the tight, deft hurricane of his mind, which was practically empty of thought. This close to the brink, Drew was no more than his instincts.
He punched a third round of chaff as he hauled his jet into another shuddering climb to 500 feet, 750, 1000…
The missiles exploded behind him. Drew felt the concussions against his aircraft—felt himself still breathing—his heart beating—and he laughed inside his mask with the invincible glee of a naval aviator.
It didn’t last.
“Nice work! We have bandits at ten o’clock high!” Bugle yelled. “Chinese fighters!”
“Weapons hot,” Drew said as he touched his fire control system.
“They’re going for the Grant.”
“Shit—”
Drew’s radar page and armament load indicator were out. With these systems malfunctioning, safety checks might prevent him from firing his missiles, and an EA-18G was not a fighter. Drew had self-protect capability in two AMRAAM missiles, but no gun. Electronics filled the space in his nose where an F/A-18 would carry its Vulcan cannon.
Buffeted by storm winds, he leveled out at 1500 feet and raced for the Grant. The sky was in chaos. Beneath the warm, gauzy light of the aurora, the U.S. planes were scattered. Many of their ships had also peeled off course, the precise formation of the Carrier Strike Group dissolving into a more crumpled shape. A few of their warships had turned toward the America. Others were drifting away.
Orange streaks of fire ripped from the Grant into the sky as Drew approached—Tomahawk missiles intended for the enemy ships—and he saw its 20mm Phalanx guns blazing, too.
The gunfire struck one of the Chinese fighters. The MiG lost a wingtip and part of its nose. Then the rest of its wing disintegrated and it tumbled, plunging toward the water.
Much closer, an American helicopter lay upside down in the ocean, rocking in the wake of the Grant. The destroyer hadn’t altered course to avoid the bird, much less slowed to help, which meant the whiteout hadn’t been limited to the sky. It had affected everyone in the Carrier Strike Group.
It affected the Chinese, too, Drew realized.
To the north, smoke lifted from the bump on the horizon that was Hainan Island. He’d supposed this fire was caused by U.S. missile strikes. What if it was another crashed Chinese aircraft? The first MiG should have blasted him. Drew had been a sitting duck at close range, naked to guns or missiles. Now he believed the MiG hadn’t been in control even before the Chinese pilot spiraled into the water.
In fact, Drew wondered why the missiles fired at him had come from behind that Chinese plane. Those weapons had been released by another enemy fighter and could have locked onto their own man instead of Drew.
They’re as confused as we are, he thought as he banked up and over to chase the surviving MiG. The maneuver was pure reflex. His brain might have been finding excuses for the enemy, but his body—his training—acted to kill.
Behind Drew, Bugle was also working at high speed. Bugle’s radar page was functional and he yelled, “I brought you on target! He’s locked!”
The Chinese MiG dodged across the strike group, attempting to lose Drew.
But the MiG was outmatched.
“I said he’s locked! You got him!” Bugle yelled.
Drew hesitated, allowing the other aircraft to slip away for a heartbeat as they roared together through the sunrise. He believed the Chinese had started the fighting, but it was a misunderstanding. They were all victims.
And yet if he let the MiG escape, the enemy pilot might hurt people on his own side.
“Yaaaah!” Drew shouted, squeezing his trigger.
The missile didn’t release.
“The computer dropped the designation! You need to—” Drew shouted as he pulled his trigger again. This time, the AMRAAM launched.
Bugle’s lock was true. The weapon went supersonic and curved after the MiG, impacting its tail. The plane tore apart in a fireball. No one ejected. Drew knew he’d killed the man, but he quashed his feelings as he veered around to return to the north perimeter.
He saw one MiG engaged with three F/A-18s. The MiG wouldn’t last. The bigger obstacle was the Chinese surface-to-air missiles that arrived from the coast, slicing past the aircraft. American fighters ruled the sky, but for how long?
Drew raced to join them, shouting at Bugle, “Jam those SAMs before someone gets hit!”
“I’m working it!”
Were the Chinese ships also off course? One of their destroyers looked like it had increased its speed, careening toward the U.S. fleet.
The whiteout wasn’t an assault, Drew thought. The light had been something else. But the situation was already out of hand. Both sides believed the phenomenon was a weapon, and now their skirmish was devolving into war.
The danger in any escalation was larger than one man’s life. Drew was less afraid for himself than for his entire nation, because their attack subs would be safe from the EMPs beneath the water.
What did the subs’ crews think was happening? They should be able to detect the madness above them—the missile launches from the surface craft, the fighters and helicopters splashing into the ocean—and if communications were out, the sub commanders would activate their final orders.
Drew swung his jet away from the fight. If anyone noticed, it might look like cowardice, but he poured on the speed as he ran for the America.
Bugle yelled at him on their ICS. “What are you doing? We can’t leave our guys—”
“I need a line to the flag bridge!”
“We have to go back!”
“Get me Christensen on the bridge! Now!”
The electromagnetic interference was so strong that their radios might not work at a distance. Closer, Bugle should be able to punch through on the frequency they’d preset with Julie.
“Romeo Two, this is Romeo One,” Bugle said as Drew’s gaze cut across the fighters he’d abandoned on his flank.
What if we’re too late? he thought.
Their subs were called boomers because their end purpose was to deliver their Trident II missiles, each of which packed a very large boom of 475 kilotons. If those men believed the Chinese had decimated the fleet, if the sub crews were unable to contact any U.S. assets whatsoever, they would fire on Hainan and other targets across the mainland, hoping to vaporize China’s missile bases before the enemy launched their own warheads.
Drew had seen the computer projections.
A nuclear exchange was unwinnable.
He would be responsible for it. The first warning that China was developing an EMP weapon had come from him. The data had been inconclusive, but he’d attached his opinion to it, believing the worst.
What if the impression he’d relayed from the field was the deciding factor?
Below, the air was mottled with smoke trails and clouds, some white, some black, all of it snarled by the wind. Drew’s eyes picked out a small debris field where a fighter had hit the water, leaving only a few fragments on the surface and iridescent fuel. Among the ships, more Sea Sparrow and Tomahawk missiles whipped into the sky while their 20mm Phalanx guns blurred through thousands of rounds per minute to prevent enemy weapons from reaching the strike group.
But something got through. The McCray took a missile toward its stern belowdecks, which lifted apart in a fiery spray of metal and human beings.
“No!” Drew shouted as his headset brought Julie Christensen to his ears.
“Romeo One, Romeo Two
,” she said.
“The EMPs aren’t a weapon! Stand down! Stand down!”
Her voice was riddled with static. “Say again, Romeo One?”
“We have to tell both sides to stand down!” Drew shouted. “The electromagnetic pulses we’re fielding are not a weapon! Both sides—”
The sky went white.
Drew woke up with his head thick with pain and a sense of plummeting. When he was a kid, he’d loved roller coasters and other rides like the elevator drop. For a moment, he thought he might be that thrill-seeking child again. It was a bittersweet feeling, both happy and lost.
Then his vision cleared. His aircraft was knifing toward the McCray, the destroyer that had been gutted. Columns of greasy smoke lifted into the wind from its ruined deck. Drew’s left wing would clear the ship’s tower by a matter of ten feet, a distance that shrunk to nothing as the breeze floated him in its direction.
He could eject. Instead, he stayed put. There were dozens of sailors in the tower, so Drew shoved his hand against his stick. Nothing. Too many of his systems were dead.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Drew tried to tip his wings and use the wind like a kite. Then he noticed the quiet behind him. “Bugle?” he asked.
No answer.
“Bugle!”
The smoke enveloped him, but he missed the McCray. Then he burst through and the ocean loomed in front of him like a surging desert. At his speed, every rolling dune would be as hard as concrete.
Drew set his head back. He also arranged his knees so his thighs laid flat against the seat pan. Their seats were self-contained, one thousand–pound constructs nestled inside the jet itself. Rocket motors would launch them from the aircraft at speeds exceeding 300 mph, more than enough to break a man’s neck or shear off his limbs if he was out of position, but Drew couldn’t wait for Bugle to acknowledge.
He yanked his eject handle. They were thrown from the cockpit a microsecond before they hit the water. He felt something clip his head, cracking his visor. A part of the aircraft?
Drew only knew that he went up. Then he separated from his seat and his chute deployed.
The wind raked across the ocean. It jerked Drew sideways and swirled him up and back, driving him at a low angle toward the waves. The air was damp against his face where his helmet left his cheek exposed.
Bugle’s parachute would deploy even if his friend was unconscious. Meanwhile, their seat pans would splash down first and float nearby, attached to their KOCH fittings on a line. Each pan was equipped with a survival kit with an individual raft, rations, drinking water, and a flare gun.
Drew tried to look for Bugle as he fell, but he was in the water too fast—cold, heavy water. His survival vest inflated automatically and bobbed against his chin and arms.
Drew activated his beacon and a radio signal for retrieval, but he didn’t expect a helicopter any time soon. The signal would be lost in the electromagnetic noise, and, worse, the fight raged on above him, the sky split by missiles and aircraft.
How many friends were dead?
Where was Bugle?
Drew shoved off his cracked flight helmet and kicked at his boots. The laces were tied too tight. There wasn’t time to duck into the water to pry or cut his boots free.
He was five hundred yards from the McCray. Each wave carried him up and down. At the top of one swell, he saw life rafts and people in the water. Maybe he could help. He reached forward to swim—
It happened again. Drew didn’t know how or why he was affected, only that his consciousness seemed to flicker in and out. His mind stuttered through a flurry of images like snapshots, each one brighter than the last as the sun rose. The first thing that stayed with him was a fire trail overhead; an odd wave running against the current; the taste of salt and smoke.
The snapshots ended. Drew could think again. He turned his head at a new sound, the blunt rushing bass growl of a ship. The noise was the Chinese destroyer he’d seen near the edge of the U.S. fleet. He’d drifted farther from his people during the whiteouts, and the enemy ship bulled past him on a collision course with the McCray.
As he coughed and struggled in the destroyer’s wake, Drew wondered if the destroyer had been deliberately aimed at the McCray. In their coherent moments, the Chinese crew might have decided to inflict as much damage as possible even if it meant suicide.
“Stop!” he yelled.
No one could hear him, but now that Drew was out of the fight, he felt all of his terror and grief. Was there any way Julie had been able to share his warning that the EMPs weren’t man-made?
Look at them, he thought. He understood the enemy’s decision. There was honor in it. A suicide attack was better than being captured or killed while they were helpless, but it was a mistake. He would have told them if he could.
The silhouette of the Chinese destroyer ran tall against the glowing sky. Then it plowed into the McCray, filling the sunrise with explosions.
The ocean was on fire.
LOS ANGELES
Pain stopped Emily in the congested street. She’d cut her toes on broken glass.
I’m barefoot, she realized.
The road was littered with empty shoes. Everyone had taken off their heels, shoes, sandals, and boots. Why? It was an unnerving sight—the abandoned shoes scattered in the street where people had been.
Almost as disturbing, Emily could smell cinnamon and her grandmother’s favorite perfume, which was impossible. Nanna had been dead for years. How could she smell her perfume?
The sky bled with strange light.
“My leg!” someone shrieked among the cars ahead of her. “My leg! My leg!” It was a man, but agony had ratcheted his voice into a high, brittle keen.
Oh God, Emily thought, looking for him in the milling crowd. Was he pinned?
Then she heard a more horrendous sound behind her: the deafening roar of an airplane. All around her, people screamed as the gray bulk of a passenger jet slashed overhead. It looked like it was upside down.
The plane disappeared beyond the elevated line of the interstate where the freeway formed an overpass above West 6th. Beyond the freeway, cyclones of fire and smoke billowed above the city. Emily saw chunks of debris. She thought she saw seats and people. Metal. Dust. A second later, the earth trembled.
Nearly lost in the noise, Emily heard a creak of metal as a green SUV teetered on the guardrail of the freeway overpass. Smoke rose from the freeway, too, where the traffic formed brutal pileups. Beyond the guardrail, Emily saw the rooftops of dozens of vehicles—a truck’s gaping windshield—a man waving his arms—and the undercarriage or wheels of two cars that had flipped.
I was doing seventy up there, she thought with dull shock. I was doing seventy before I reached my exit and stopped.
Somebody was inside the teetering SUV—a woman in a business suit. She scrabbled back from the windshield, shoving at the driver door.
The SUV plummeted thirty feet with the woman inside.
Emily felt as if her heart dropped at the same time. She almost sat down, unable to breathe.
“My leg!” the man yelled.
She couldn’t help them both.
The man was closer.
Forcing air into her chest, Emily turned to pick her way through the vehicles. She stopped again as her gaze turned west. Two threads of smoke curled from the cityscape. Laura lived in that direction. Emily was frantic with silent prayers and disbelief.
Please, God. Please.
A teenage girl grabbed her arm and shouted, “Help me! My dad! Please help!”
To Emily, the girl’s voice felt like her own thoughts. She followed her into the cars. The girl wore a short skirt and knee socks and ran with a funny limp because she had one leather boot on, just one, like she hadn’t been able to pull it off when everyone else removed their shoes.
The asphalt felt warm against Emily’s skin and she thought, I don’t get it. Our shoes? What could—
They didn’t run far. The girl led Emily to a dark-haired
man in his fifties who slumped over the wheel of an Acura TL. He was dead or unconscious. A stroke? One of his eyes was a crimson egg, bulging and bloodshot. The pupil didn’t react even when Emily’s shadow crossed his face, but she decided to administer CPR.
“Let’s get him out of the car!” she said, gesturing for the girl to help her with the man’s weight. They dropped him on the road. He was still wearing his shoes.
He didn’t have time to take them off, Emily thought as she checked his airways, then bent to put her mouth over his open lips. First, she said, “Try the engine.”
She blew into the man’s mouth and straightened up to press her palms against his heart. One, two, three, four. Chase could have done better. Was he okay? Chase should be at work. Silver Lake was closer than Laura’s house, but the road was blocked with stalls, and Emily couldn’t carry this man to the hospital.
“It won’t start!” the girl shouted. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen. Emily wanted to check the key herself, but she tried to breathe life into the girl’s father again and—
She blacked out.
When she woke up, she was cowering with two women and four men against the brick face of an office complex, looking at the street through a few trees and a short ornamental brick wall. All of them were coughing, filthy, and scratched.
Smoke and dust obscured most of the street. Above, through the haze, the sky burned with red light. Everyone flinched as a swarm of birds darted alongside the building and then vanished.
Emily smelled her grandmother’s perfume again. It seemed stronger than the smoke, and she realized her brain was generating false signals. She was also unsettled by her vertigo, a sense that the ground was sliding beneath her even though both she and it were motionless. Her balance was shot. Her head ached.
Another truth went through her like a knife. The seven of them had huddled together like family, the men stretching out their arms, not to corral the women, but to shield them. Like the teenage girl, who was gone, these people were strangers to Emily, and yet there was real intimacy in their postures.
