by Tom DeMarco
Copyright © 2017 (Version 3.3: April, 2019)
Airship Nation
Copyright © 2019, 2017 Tom DeMarco
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Tom DeMarco: [email protected].
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Originally published in the United States by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc., Markham, Ontario Canada.
Cover Art by Tom DeMarco
www.tomdemarco.com
Prologue
Homer Layton – the man who discovered the variable in time – has reluctantly turned on the persistent Effector, plunging the world into silence and darkness. The device introduces an almost imperceptible disturbance in the flow of time, propagated along the Earth’s magnetic field. Not directly noticeable to humans, the disturbance has one startling effect: combustible materials will burn, but they won’t flash. Nothing will explode. The internal combustion engine won’t turn over. Cars, trucks, and planes can’t move. Bombs and guns become paperweights. The internet is just a memory.
Even the discoverer of the Layton Effect would never have considered turning it on and making the effect general, but circumstances have intervened. A U.S. nerve gas attack on Cuba has wiped out most of that island’s population, and an offshore terrorist group with ties to Cuba has an acquired Russian nuclear missile and is determined to use it in revenge. White House aide Rupert Paule gives the order for a massive cruise missile counter-attack, a wiping out of any and all perceived enemies. With a nuclear exchange in the offing, Homer makes his choice. The first nuclear strike is targeted on St. Louis, with impact scheduled for midnight, St. Louis time. Just before that, Homer throws the switch and the world goes dark. Instead of waking to devastation, the world wakes up to a reality that will henceforth have to depend for the most part on wind- and muscle-power.
The fateful decision has to be irreversible. Homer could turn the effect off, but the war would then pick up where it had been interrupted, with all parties hurrying to deploy as much of their destructive power as possible before he could turn it on again. He realizes he must become a fugitive. The forces who would begin the war again were mad to find him and smash the Effector.
He and his young protégés have been attending a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, convened at a Fort Lauderdale hotel to give Homer the Academy’s annual award. Most of the hotel is filled with friends: Academy members, fellow scientists, and fellow Cornell faculty, there to celebrate the honor given to Homer. Once the Layton Effect is enabled, Homer gathers them together in the early morning hours and explains what they now need to do: Run. They have to run to escape the backlash, which is sure to come swiftly. With those who are willing to run with him, he orchestrates the theft of a marina full of fancy sailing yachts, and they set sail for a now mostly depopulated Cuba.
The little colony settles in Baracoa, along the eastern shore of Cuba. The much reduced military might of the United States sets out after them in a hastily assembled sailing fleet of its own, armed with nerve gas. The Baracoa fleet sails north to meet them in the Bahama Channel. Once in sight, they have to turn and sail away from the enemy fleet in order to preserve the weather gage and thus stay safe from the nerve gas.
Homer has a surprise in store for those who would use their deadly gas to enable still further horrors. The long forgotten SHEILA laser weapon system, mounted in satellites in geosynchronous orbit above them is far enough out in space to escape the Layton effect. It can be controlled from a laptop computer, powered with a simple hand-crank generator.
The battle ends in a devastating series of crashing blue destructive beams from space. The enemy fleet is annihilated. Homer’s vessels return to Baracoa, victorious. But now what? They have won what they slowly realize is only the first battle in what promises to be a long, long war . . . .
PART I
THE SECOND STABLE STATE
1
SURGICAL STRIKE
The theme of opportunity arising out of setback had always been a favorite one for Rupert Paule. He knew as an article of faith that Lincoln’s success as the nation’s leader had followed directly upon his failure in law practice; that Patton’s greatest victory had followed his disgrace; that Phil Donahue had made a fortune in show business after a flop as a banker. The best example of all was Nixon. No matter what went wrong in your life, there was always comfort to be taken from the stirring words and phrases of Six Crises. Paule must have read that book through a dozen times. He would return to one episode or another whenever adversity struck. On the day that it had finally become clear that the October Cuban expedition was not going to return, he had sat down and read Six Crises again, cover to cover. That had been a low moment. But by the end of it, he was on the mend. He was going to survive and go on. He wasn’t even inclined to look back at all the disasters of the past half year. There was only the tiniest bitter thought in some distant recess of his mind that, one day when he had triumphed and set out to write his own memoir, he might have to call it Sixty Crises.
If he had been the type to take notes as he read, Paule might have jotted down the following Nixonian principles: avoid blame, attack rather than defend, don’t let loyalty get in the way. Now where might such principles lead one in the aftermath of the October fiasco? Paule kept going back over the plan and its disastrous outcome. Seven ancient sailing craft had been sent down to do war, but armed with what? Armed with air guns, little better than toys, and bows and arrows and knives and some puny bottles of nerve gas. The gas would certainly have been useless if the other side opposed, since the stupid trade winds were right on the nose all the way down to the release zone. All that Layton had to do was to meet the attack at sea, come down on the yawls with gas of his own, or just overwhelm them with superior numbers. It was no secret that they had twenty fast modern sailing yachts or more. And who knows how many able bodies they had been able to recruit?
Paule’s most frightening suspicion about the demise of the yawls was that Layton had used guns, missiles, rockets, cannons, jet aircraft, or napalm bombs. After all, Layton had control of the infernal machine that inhibited explosions; he could just turn it off when it suited him, make his attack, and then turn it right back on. He was practically certain that’s what had happened. Of course, he had anticipated that and been ready for it. He had set up a team of sailors in the basement of the Watergate complex striking matches once every minute to detect the very moment when the inhibitor was turned off. They would not have a lot of time, but Paule knew just what to do with every precious second. He was prepared to bomb the shit out of Cuba by releasing twelve large nuclear devices on cruise missiles, enough to blanket the island. He had visited the silos in Gaithersburg where the missiles were kept at the ready. He had personally lettered “CUBA BOUND” on the nose of one of the warheads with a Magic Marker.
But for all that care, he had bought himself just one more setback. The treacherous sailors had gotten bored and wandered away from their assignment, never to be seen again. If the inhibitor had been off briefly, no one in Washington had known of it. Worst of all, his failure had not gone unnoticed. Colonel Gustafson had done a humorous little bit in staff meeti
ng about the desertion of “The Rupert Paule Strike Force.” That bit of low comedy was going to cost Gustafson dearly one day.
Layton wouldn’t have needed long, anyway, to wipe out the yawls: From the time he turned off the infernal inhibitor, only a minute or two would be needed to launch his Sidewinders or whatever on the helpless sailboats. They would all be blown away in no time and the damn machine turned back on again. That’s what Layton had done, he considered, because that’s what Paule would have done in his place. So American boys in sailboats had been wiped out with enemy Sidewinder missiles. It was enough to make him sick. Not that he cared about the sailors. They were just the eggs that he was prepared to break to make his omelet. What made him sick was the frustration of not getting the revenge that was his due, the deeply satisfying revenge upon the person of Homer Layton. He could almost taste that revenge. Paule hated Homer Layton. He hated him more than he hated Hitler or Stalin or Senator Feinstein or the Sierra Club.
But back to the theme of opportunity in adversity. What would Nixon have done to turn the October disaster to his profit? A plan was beginning to take shape now in Paule’s mind. The plan pivoted on one startlingly simple fact: The disaster had not been of Rupert Paule’s making; it was Gallant’s fault. It had all been Gallant’s doing. And now it was going to be his undoing. The thought brought a thin smile to Paule’s face. Across the table in Paule’s Watergate office, Willard Courtenay saw that smile. It made his sphincter muscle contract.
“I think I shared with you earlier, Captain Courtenay, my opposition to the October expedition. I was always opposed.”
“You were? I mean, yes, sir.”
“Surely you remember.” Paule looked at him meaningfully.
“That you were opposed…”
“So you do remember. The Reverend Nolan Gallant, of course, had to have his way. And I let it happen. We might think of this as giving the man enough rope…don’t you see?”
“Rope.”
“Yes.”
“You mean, rope to…”
“Yes exactly. Very perceptive of you, Captain. I wonder whether you weren’t thinking along much the same lines, at the time. I think you were. You’ve shown a good deal of savvy through these difficult times. I suspect, now you tell me if this wasn’t true, that you were having some doubts about the Reverend Gallant too.”
“Well, I guess…” Courtenay’s voice trailed off. He was at a loss to come up with something that he might have guessed.
“Precisely. I could see that mind of yours percolating with insight.”
“Sometimes I do have a lot of thoughts. About things.”
“You do. And it’s evident. I think it was your own healthy skepticism about Gallant that first got me thinking along those lines. Not that you’re any sort of open book, mind you. No, Captain Courtenay is quite inscrutable to any but the most perceptive.”
“Uh huh. I’m a good card player.”
“There you go.”
“I can usually win at pinochle. And I always beat my kids at Fish. My little boy, it makes him cry. But I’m trying to teach him something.”
“Of course.”
“I mean, not about playing Fish. But about life.”
“He’s a lucky boy. But when did you first begin to think that Gallant’s days might be numbered as our de-facto leader?”
“Um. When did I start to think that?” It was a question to himself, more than to Paule. It was so flattering that someone had noticed that he was thinking at all, that Courtenay was eager to supply the right answer. “Well, quite some time ago, actually.”
“I thought so! Probably before the thought had even occurred to me.”
“Perhaps so. Or perhaps just a little bit after. Sir.”
“Captain, I bow to your experience in this matter.” Paule was positively deferential. “This is the kind of situation where the trained military mind is at a huge advantage over the rest of us. I am going to take my lead from you. I shall follow your advice implicitly as to what we should do.”
“Do?”
“Yes. Now you are probably thinking, and I concur in this, that the disappearance of the yawls is a black mark against Gallant, but not really a mortal blow.”
“Not a mortal blow.”
“It isn’t. Quite right. But the mortal blow will be the next thing to happen, the next thing that goes wrong. We have to be prepared for that one. We need to lay the ground work now, so as to have a smooth transition over to a more dependable source of leadership when that time comes.” Paule dropped his voice and leaned forward. They were closeted securely in a private office, but Courtenay gave a furtive look anyway over his shoulder before leaning in toward his new mentor. He furrowed up his brow in concentration. Paule said, “Now here’s what we’ll do…”
D.D. Pease almost never thought about America at all. The place might as well have ceased to exist. He expected to live out the rest of his life without ever hearing again the names of Texas and Tennessee, without another mention of the Republicans or the Democrats or the Red Sox or Facebook or Seinfeld. He never even stopped to consider what life might have become in the nation he always had always called home. It wasn’t home anymore. His world now was centered around Baracoa beach.
Pease and Ed Barodin had set up a shop/laboratory and become fixers of things. They weren’t too particular about what they would fix. If it was broken or needed a new component invented or a new way to function, it was right up their alley. The first thing they had set out to do was bring some electricity into the village. A stroke of luck: there was hydropower in the hills above them, already put in place by their Cuban predecessors. It took only a few days to get re-connected and make it work again. In one week, they might repair some washing machines, perfect a new linking mechanism to SHIELA, wire a few more phones and launch themselves on a dozen other projects. Who had time to think about the old world they’d left behind?
All that blissful unconcern about America had ended three weeks ago. Since then, Pease had thought about little else. The change had been brought about by David Lee, the young midshipman that Kelly and Loren had fished out of the seas of the Bahama Channel, the enemy fleet’s sole survivor. Pease had talked to the boy briefly after his arrival back at Baracoa. Proctor Pinkham had also had an interview with Lee, walking along the beach one afternoon. After that, Pease and the Proctor got together to compare notes. There wasn’t going to be much to fear from Lee, they agreed. He was overwhelmed with gratitude for being saved. His understandable regard for Kelly and Loren, and his respect for a culture that could bring blue bolts of destruction down from the heavens assured he would be loyal. His loyalty even went so far as to help him confide to Loren and Kelly some frightening facts about events back in Washington.
Loren had brought the story back to the Proctor, along with his own plan for countering the threat. At the next Council meeting, Proctor Pinkham made the pitch. What was needed was a quick surgical strike against Fort Belvoir, just south of Washington D.C. along the Potomac. That was where the threat lay. The new SHIELA laser weapon control system that Barodin and Pease had perfected would be the enabling tool. It was small enough to be concealed in a small knapsack. It eliminated the need for estimating positions and ranges. Best of all, it could be separated from the computer that made the actual communication to the SHIELA computer up in space. So if the unit were captured, it could be disabled remotely. The computer need never be brought ashore at all. All that was required would be the placing of a small attack party someplace on the Maryland shore. Loren proposed to lead the party himself. He asked one man to accompany him: D.D. Pease.
The new SHIELA controller was a marvel. If they had had it in the Bahama Channel, the battle wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. It consisted of two small telescopes, each one with a low energy radio sender mounted above its eyepiece. The little radios emitted signals of varying frequency in different directions. A small transceiver received the signals and decoded them to determine the location of eac
h of the two telescopes and the direction that each was pointing. There was a button on the side of each telescope. Pressing either button would cause the transceiver to compute the point where the lines of the two telescopes intersected, and send the coordinates of that point back to the remote computer, to be forwarded immediately as a message up to SHIELA in orbit above them. The message was a command to the program, Revelation-13, that controlled the Hard Body weapon satellites. A fraction of a second later a devastating blue laser beam would come crashing down on the intersection point. Using the weapon was as simple as point and shoot.
During the second week of November, the sixty-foot sloop Dejah Thoris with a crew of twelve entered Chesapeake Bay under cover of darkness and sailed north to a small island, deeded to the Nature Conservancy. There was a wooded cove there where they put up in concealment during the daylight hours. On the next night, she beat further up the bay to the mouth of the Pautuxent River. The river is navigable for the first thirty miles or so, and, there being a favorable slant of wind to negotiate it, Dejah Thoris turned in and took her small landing party all the way up to Eagle Harbor, Maryland. By dawn, she had returned to her safe hideaway in the bay.
A wide peninsula runs down between the Pautuxent and Potomac rivers. The two rivers flow in nearly parallel lines as they approach Chesapeake Bay. From Eagle Harbor, Loren and D.D. Pease had only to make their way across this peninsula to find themselves immediately in front of Fort Belvoir. The distance was a little more than twenty-five miles. They would need to find some way over the Potomac to get close enough to their target. They elected to travel by night. On the afternoon of the first day, Loren went out to investigate the nearby town of Waldorf. He left Mr. Pease behind looking after all their gear.
