Zournal (Book 6): The Final Countdown

by R. S. Merritt

  “It was a pretty high-level plan I came up with. Basically, my plan consisted of the stuff I just said. I’m thinking you guys rig up the nuke so you can swim it to shore. Preferably with it mostly underwater and suspended from a floating rig that we have no doubt will work. We go in quietly with Davis manning the bridge dressed up like a Korean solider again. If he can bluff us through or if no one comes to challenge us then we’re golden. If someone drives a boat out to challenge us or whatever then we just wait for them to get close and put some rockets in them. Then we start dropping mortars as far from us as we can get them into the city. That makes more confusion for the Koreans and maybe they don’t focus on the explosions they heard out in the bay from us blowing up whoever comes out to check on us.” Reeves paused to let anyone else chip in who wanted to. I mostly wanted to hear the rest of the plan. It was sounding pretty crazy too me. When no one said anything, Reeves kept on talking.

  “We get to the point you can swim from you go deliver the weapon and get back to the boat. If we get sunk or whatever happens then every man for themselves and we set up a rendezvous point for anybody who makes it out alive and go from there.”

  Everyone seemed to like this plan better than the other approaches we’d talked through so we decided to start getting prepped based on following this plan. That meant a lot of things needed to be done. First, we needed to rig up a float for the nuke. Walker said he’d work with Davis on getting that done. We needed to try and cut down the profile of the boat a bit to maybe save us from being seen when we cruised in during the night. Reeves said he’d go start hacking away on stuff that didn’t look important. Ann and I were put in charge of getting the mortars and RPGs where they’d be easily accessible. Reeves and I would be shooting while Ann would be driving the boat. We were all wearing North Korean Army uniforms but after Davis, Ann looked the most like one of their soldiers.

  We weren’t going to make San Diego tonight. Even if we did we would not be ready in time with all the preparations we needed to do. The Seals also needed more room to work to try and get the nuke hooked up to some floaties. We were headed for an island to beach on and hide the next day while we worked on getting everything setup. I’d been worried about the gas but Wilson had assured me we were good there. Feeling better now that we had a sort of plan in place we gunned the engine for the island and gave thanks that we had somehow managed to make it this far.

  Entry 26: Getting There is Half the Fun

  It was dawn by the time we got to the island. Davis, Ann and Wilson had been taking turns driving the boat through the rough seas to get us there. Once there, we had anchored in a small cove and the Seals had worked on the mesh floatable they were putting together to allow them to drag the nuke through the water with them. They had most of their amphibious assault gear with them but kept coming up with other tools of the trade they were missing which they wished they had.

  Wilson had taken a break from helping with rigging up the nuke to spend some time with Reeves, Ann and I to show us how to operate the mortars and rocket launchers. We were low on ammo for both and didn’t want to reveal our location so we opted not to fire any test rounds. Ann would be driving so the first rounds would be fired off by the Seals if we needed to shoot any at all. They had practiced with them plenty so we could trust to their accuracy a lot more than we could trust to mine or Reeves. Once the Seals were in the water with the nuke, we wouldn’t be going for accuracy as much as seeing how many rockets and mortars we could shoot into San Diego in as short a time period as possible.

  The idea was to get the Koreans thinking a substantial assault was in progress versus it just being a single boatload of yahoos. Unfortunately, we were basically just a single boatload of yahoos so pulling this off was going to take all kinds of crazy luck. I just hoped we hadn’t already used up all our luck getting to this point. We’d been through a lot to get here. To be within striking distance of the ones who’d wronged us. Now that we were here I didn’t feel a huge satisfaction knowing what we were fixing to do. I was just resigned to getting it done and getting out of here. If it came down to only being able to either get it done or live, I was going to choose life. Of course, we probably would not have much of a choice in the matter once the bullets started flying.

  Wilson, Walker and Davis all seemed charged up by the thought of the assault. They talked about their families and friends while they worked on rigging up the floats for the nuke. Telling us about family trips, vacations, which kids were smart and which ones were better at sports. I got caught up in listening to all of their stories and was nodding and laughing along with them when Ann gave me a look. It was a look that told me I was missing the obvious because I was an idiot. It was a look I’d grown used to receiving from her. I thought a little more about what was going on.

  It was three warriors getting ready to go into battle telling stories about their buddies and friends. Except all of their buddies and friends were dead, which must have been why Ann was indicating this was kind of weird. The only explanation I could work out in my head is the Seals were justifying what they were fixing to do. The people we were fixing to disintegrate were our enemies and they’d become that by killing our countrymen, friends and families. They’d rode their wave of death across the oceans from their miserable hell hole of a home to take what was ours. They thought they’d succeeded. We were here to answer the need for vengeance of a dead nation. We were the death throes of the USA and we would drag them down with us.

  Now that I was on the same wavelength as the Seals I listened even more intently to their stories. These stories were going to give us the courage to sail into that Bay. We would be given courage by the memories we carried with us. We’d stand in their place to strike back at those who had attacked them. Wilson finished telling a story about one of his nephews who’d gotten a full scholarship to some community college in Maryland to play baseball. He’d went and watched a game and said it had been one of the best trips he’d ever taken because most of his extended family had shown up to watch the game. They’d ended up buying out the concession stand and the party had moved to a local Chinese Buffet.

  “My mom used to read to me when I was a kid.” Everyone looked up from what they were doing. “She’d read all these books we’d get from the library. I remember one, this is pretty much my first memory really, that she’d read to me over and over. She ended up having to buy it because the library wouldn’t let her keep checking it out. It was about these kids who went to a farm on Thanksgiving and figured out the farmer was going to kill the turkeys so they rescued the turkeys. She had to lie to me and say that the turkey was a ham that year because I refused to eat turkey.”

  I left the rest unsaid. There had been a lot of moms in the world with kids who would never get to hear that story because of an egomaniac who was also a paranoid dictator of a country that hero worshiped him. Those kinds of stories were what would carry us into the Bay. This was our version of getting pumped up before the big game. Except this was a game I realized the Seals didn’t really expect to come out of alive. That scared me. If these guys were unnerved by what we were doing then there was definite cause for concern.

  Ann had slipped her hand into mine when I’d told the story about my mom. She let the Seals know a little bit about Thomas and her sister and how they had lived before this all happened. The dreams of a dead sister and nephew that would never be realized. All the Seals had read through the Zournal by this point. Not a lot of entertainment out here and these guys were always looking to pick up new tricks of the trade. They had learned a little about Thomas through reading it but he came alive in their eyes when Ann talked about him.

  She turned around and walked into the bridge and down into the cabin. I followed her down there. She sat down on the edge of the bed and started crying. I hugged her to make her feel better and realized I was crying too. We sat there and hugged and cried for a few minutes then Ann pushed me away, kissed me and told me we better get back to work. I held he
r hands and asked her if she was still ok with this. If she thought this is what Thomas would want us to do. She smiled at me.

  “Thomas would tell us to forget all this and make a run for Canada with Ginny and the dog and live happily ever after up there scavenging and killing Zombies as needed. No way he’d approve us going in. But if the situation were reversed he’d have already started swimming for them with a knife between his teeth.”

  I smiled at the mental image of the gangly teenager attacking like some kind of Johnny Depp Captain Jack Sparrow wannabe.

  “Alright then.” I let her hands fall as I gave her another quick kiss. “Let’s get to it. If we don’t get back on deck pretty soon we’ll have to listen to Reeves loudly question what we were doing down here all this time.”

  We climbed back up the ladder and out the bridge, onto the deck to help get everything situated. As soon as we exited the cabin, Reeves inhaled to make the comment he must have been working on coming up with the whole time Ann and I were down in the cabin. I stepped hard on his foot as I walked by him and he gave me a hurt look but he kept his comments to himself.

  Wilson looked up from where he was watching Walker and Davis tie off the last of the floats they had attached to the net they had wrapped around the nuke.

  “Time to get under way. We can finish the prep on the way but I want to get there around midnight so most of the people will be asleep but so it’s not super weird that we’d be pulling into the bay.”

  With that said Wilson went up and screwed around in the bridge with some wires and a few minutes later we had weighed anchor and were heading back out into the open ocean. As we left the shelter of the cove the wind started whipping up around us pretty good. The seas were a lot rougher than they had been coming out to the island. About an hour into the trip the sky got dark as the stars were quickly blotted out by huge clouds and rain started lashing out at us. With lightning arcing between clouds, I wondered what we’d done to piss off the gods. I could probably come up with a list if someone could find me a pencil and some paper.

  We crested a wave and kept moving. The boat was bobbing around off-balance due to the heavy nuke sitting at the end of the deck. The seas were definitely picking up. A wave crashed over the deck and washed all the weapons and gear we had stowed back there all over the place. Illustrating our complete inability to secure gear in a boat properly. I bounced down to the deck to gather it up and tie it off better and got knocked right off my feet by another wave putting the boat up at a weird angle. I smashed down hard on my side and landed on a rocket launcher. Ann and Davis rushed down to help me up and assist in securing the weapons better.

  We got everything tied back down and went back to the bridge where Davis was steering and Reeves and Wilson were staring at the charts.

  “This storm is awesome! I can’t believe our luck!” Wilson said to us with a big grin.

  “Would that be our good, or bad, luck?” I asked him. Genuinely curious which way he was going to spin this.

  “Great luck! The Koreans probably won’t be able to see much on radar with this storm and they won’t think anybody would be stupid enough to try and attack them through the bay in the middle of it. Especially on a boat this small that doesn’t have current charts or anything. They’d think only someone familiar with the bay recently would even attempt it in this weather! It’s basically suicide by boat!”

  “Why someone familiar with the bay recently? What’s wrong with our charts? Suicide?” I asked. Knowing I probably wasn’t going to like the answer. Maybe I should just go hang out on the deck with the explosives and high surf. This time Reeves answered.

  “Sand moves around during storms. There probably hasn’t been anyone dredging the bay since this all started. Someone familiar with the bay recently will know where the shoals and bars are at and could risk coming in with the surf like this. Anybody else risks getting stuck on a shoal and pounded to shit by these big ass waves. Wilson is right. This is perfect for us!”

  I looked back at Ann to make sure she had heard. She had heard and understood it all based on how wide her eyes had gotten. I rolled my eyes towards the cabin door and she grinned and nodded. We want back down in the cabin and stumbled our way through to the refrigerator where we took out the bottle of wine and spent about ten minutes trying to get it open. Wine opener found and bottle opened we gave up on cups and just passed the bottle back and forth. It was good stuff. It had been sitting on board the boat exposed to all kinds of weather changes and it was still tasty. All I knew about wine was some was white and some was red and it could sneak up on you if you weren’t careful.

  We were careful. We were getting pummeled by random stuff being flung around in the galley that we hadn’t put back after making our canned food deliciousness earlier. If we lived through the next twenty-four hours I was going to make a point of trying to be a lot neater when on board a boat. We split most of the bottle and then dumped out the rest. A little liquid courage is a good thing but a lot of it right before you are going to be launching mortars and shooting rockets is probably not the best idea. At least we weren’t the ones jumping overboard with the big bomb and doggy paddling it up close and personal to an enemy air craft carrier.

  I guess Wilson and Reeves were probably right. If this were a nice calm night we’d probably be spotted, challenged and blown out of the water before we got past the first buoys. As miserable as this weather was though I was thinking we’d be able to just carry the bomb up the gangplank to the carrier and leave it sitting at the top. If we even got there.

  We drank some water and ate some candy to try and cover up our breaths so we wouldn’t have to face a disappointed look from Wilson. Then we climbed back up to the bridge to see what was going on. In the small enclosed space of the bridge Ann and I both tried to not exhale too much. Of course, Reeves had to point it out to everybody.

  “You guys smell like my uncle when Walmart ran a BOGO on Boones Farm.” He was probably just pissed we hadn’t invited him. I had just been worried he would not have stopped at a single bottle. Plus, I’d wanted some time alone with Ann. I loved Reeves like a brother but in addition to being a barely controlled alcoholic, he was also the king of awkward comments. Not someone you wanted around while trying to be romantic.

  We continued smashing our way through the enormous waves. Wilson was starting to look worried. He kept checking the radar and had Davis staring out the window with binoculars. The boat had all the expensive GPS devices and depth finders and all that stuff on it but a lot of the technology depended on satellites that were no longer being maintained. The depth finder was great for finding fish but kind of useless in navigating into the harbor. The radar was something you didn’t see all the time on private vessels. It wasn’t nearly as good as the military version would be but hopefully it would let us see land before we ran into it.

  We currently had our running lights on. We were still going to try and act like a bunch of Koreans on a boat trying to find a berth. People see what they want to see so we were betting on the people set to watch the bay not paying a ton of attention to us. We should just look like another fishing boat that was returning after getting stuck in the storm. If they did send someone out to check on us then we’d blow them up. Otherwise, this may all play out a lot smoother than we had anticipated. Be nice to drop off the bomb and then we just sail on our merry way with none the wiser, until the big mushroom cloud.

  The radar was now showing us that we were coming up on land. The rain was coming down hard enough to completely screw it up but Wilson seemed to be happy with what he saw. He turned the wheel to bring us around and then powered the engine down a notch while he stared at the radar. Davis yelled out he saw lights. The rest of us started staring off into the distance trying to see the lights. We couldn’t see anything at first but slowly more and more lights started appearing. They were all in the same basic position. That would be near where the air craft carrier was docked since it was the power source.

 
The waves were getting slightly insane the closer we got to shore. Instead of just being big rolling monsters now they were big rolling monsters that occasionally decided to fall over. When they decided to fall over you didn’t really want to be landed on. I reflected on the fact that I had bothered changing clothes. I was pretty much soaked again from the time out on the deck trying to get everything secured. At least it was from rain this time instead of scummy dock water filled with Zombie blood and sharks.

  Wilson piloted us in. He was an officer in the Navy so it was nice to know he could drive a boat. Made me feel like not all my tax money had been wasted. Not that I’d been a huge contributor to the public coffers or anything. As we got closer Davis took over the wheel. He threw back his hood to make his oriental features more apparent to anyone trying to stare at us through binoculars. Ann put one of the Korean hats on and stood by him in the bridge with her head down staring at the radar. Wilson and Walker got themselves positioned under a tarp on the deck by the nuke. When it came time to ditch they’d be joined by Davis, leverage the nuke into the water and then join it. Under the tarp they had all their amphibious assault gear. They already had on their high tech dry suits. All they needed to do was slip on the rest of it and dive in after the nuke to guide it somewhere they could start the timer.