Struggle for a Small Blue Planet

by Warwick Gibson

  "Any damage?" he asked quietly.

  "One gunshot wound, and one broken arm," said Mosha. "For them. The broken arm was Bull's doing. He still hasn't got the idea of graded response, but we're working on it."

  Mosha had two of Don's team with him, Bull and Graham. There was another one of Don's top men out there somewhere, training two more. He would call that team next. Don had the luxury of travelling on his own, but part of him missed the training experience, unveiling the hard-learned tricks of the trade.

  "They were dealing drugs from a car, and I guess we got too close," said Mosha. "So,we learned something from that."

  "That's the point of it," said the tall man. "Bad-ass culture changes from place to place, and we have to figure out what to look for in each situation.

  "You staying another day in Newport News?" he continued, changing the topic. The seven of them were due to meet up with another team at Baltimore in ten days, and fly out from Baltimore airport. Both of Don's teams were a day or two behind him at this stage, one reason he had taken up Jo's offer to drop in again that night, get fed and have his wound checked.

  "Naw," said Mosha. "We got some new clothing from an op shop this morning, so we'll get a hire car to Charlottesville this afternoon, then go underground again."

  "All good," said Don, and ended the call.

  Mosha had been with him from the beginning, from those first tours in Afghanistan. The man's parents had been refugees in New Zealand, and their first-born son was fiercely loyal to the country that had taken his family in. His lean, dark, Middle-eastern look, and command of languages, were often very useful when they were out on a mission.

  Don sat back on the park bench, and looked around. Forest Hill park was beautiful, and the day was glorious – if a bit chilly. He had resumed his homeless identity, and made the long walk to the park from the rougher areas of town. It was unusual for him to walk so far, but he needed to stretch out after the activities of the previous day. His arm ached dully through the painkillers.

  He looked down through mature trees toward James river, as it ran through the middle of Richmond. He stretched once, and then his mind was back at his breakfast with Jo.

  She had been subdued. He figured she hadn't yet processed the police action from the day before. It affected some people that way. Then she came straight out and asked him how he coped when he had to kill someone.

  That made him think. Mostly because he had to put his thoughts together in a way she might understand. That was the problem with smart women, they were always pulling their feelings apart to see what made them tick. He wondered how many people had died as a result of her earlier intelligence work – but he knew it wasn't the same thing.

  "It bothered me a lot in my early days," he said slowly, "but then I worked out how to make peace with it.

  "These days I make sure I relive the action when I have time – which I figure is about where you are with yesterday's fire fight – until I can see it was the only choice I had. It's the old balance between others and self. Can I keep myself safe, and good people out of harms way, while fulfilling this mission on behalf of a better tomorrow.

  "It's not just the one incident you have to look at. I've doubted myself sometimes, then looked in someone's eyes, and seen how they would continue abusing others unless I stopped them. That's the hard one. Is this a one-off, a mistake? Is this person salvageable? Or is now the best time to step in and halt an ongoing train wreck of misery and destruction?"

  She seemed to get some comfort out of his musings.

  "But I think we have to feel some regret about what we do," he added, "and learn how to live with that. If we stop feeling, well, I don't know . . ."

  He shook his head, and the breakfast memory left him.

  What was he now, mentor to the world? It had somehow crept up on him with the job. He had complained enough when Cal made him a major, and lately his boss had been talking about making him a lieutenant colonel. For a 'down home on the farm' boy who hated too much chain of command, it was a lot to swallow.

  He was about to wander over and examine the stonework on the late 1830s home preserved within the park, when his cell phone rang.

  "Where are you?" said Jo. She sounded tense, but then, that seemed to be her default mode.

  "I'll pick you up in ten," she said, when he gave his location. Then the phone went dead.

  That was interesting. Don settled in to wait. He was good at waiting.

  "You need to see this," she said, as soon as he was in the car and they were moving.

  "See what?" he said neutrally.

  "Earthquake in New Zealand. News channels are running nothing but. It looks really bad."

  The silence grew between them. Don hoped it wasn't Christchurch again. The country had just finished rebuilding after a 7.1 magnitude in 2010 and 6.3 in 2011. It had taken a whole lot of years. When they got back to Jo's flat, it was a lot worse than he had been expecting.

  "Reports so far," said the CNN commentator, "suggest an earthquake of at least 7.0 on the Richter scale, but the number is probably much higher. The first tremor struck just after 2am local time. The capital of New Zealand, Wellington, has been especially hard hit. Many of its buildings have collapsed, and all roads in and out of the area have been destroyed by massive landslides. Power is out, with little hope of it being restored in the forseeable future.

  "It is now 3.15am in New Zealand, and we won't have daylight for another three hours, but the scale of the destruction can be seen from space. Behind me is old footage of Wellington at night, seen from a commercial satellite."

  Don had to admit the background glow of houses and lines of brighter motorway lights, circling Wellington harbour as they did, looked pretty.

  "And now, these images are just in," said the commentator. The screen behind her went dark, until the new feed filled Jo's laptop screen.

  "The blaze at the top right of the image is bulk petrol storage at the city of Lower Hutt. The one at the bottom is aviation fuel at Wellington airport," she continued. Then the commentator went silent. The dull reds with brighter flares of light, amid an overwhelming sea of blackness, told the story more eloquently than she ever could.

  Jo turned the screen off. Don looked at his watch. It was 9.17am. Allowing for an eighteen hour difference, the 'quake would have hit Wellington at 8am Eastern time, one and a quarter hours ago.

  "Same thing in Iceland," said Jo. "Funny, huh?" Then she looked at his face.

  "No. Sorry. Not funny at all," she said, her voice faltering.

  13

  Wairarapa plains

  North Island, New Zealand

  Doug's two children were standing with their mother, all in sturdy outdoor clothing, when he burst into the garage. That was a good start. Outside the moonlight stretched across the plains, and he glimpsed a neighbour's house in the distance.

  He felt a moment of numbing fear. The family who lived there didn't stand a chance. Then he steeled himself. Neither did his family, if he let that thought distract him. He could save the four people in this garage, and that had to be his only focus.

  "Annie and Mikael, collect every bit of rope we've got. Anything that looks like it will hold a serious amount of weight – more than a thousand kg of breaking strain if it's got a rating on it.

  "Annie, you take the house and garage. The toolshed's yours, son. Jeannie, we want flashlights, head torches, any emergency gear you can find."

  He pointed to the runabout in the far bay of the garage.

  "Water's coming," he said, "and we have to be ready." He didn't have the heart to tell them it was a water bore, and they seemed to accept his explanation.

  Doug was shouting above the sounds of the house slowly tearing itself apart. It might be rated good for a 7.0 earthquake, but it wasn't made for such continuous shaking. Cracks were spreading across the ceiling, and out from the corners.

  He strode across and released the garage door in the far bay, before pulling it up by hand. It w
as heavy going. The door would get off true when the 'quake changed intensity, and then it would jam. When he finally had it wrestled up, he headed for the back of the garage and threw a few things from the shelves into a carry bag.

  His satphone was the first thing, then the medical kit. A few smaller items followed. Emergency blankets and his work satchel were next. He shoved a bullhorn back on the shelf. He was unlikely to need that. A quick look across the garage showed him his four metre runabout was still sitting straight on its cradle.

  Then he looked at the powerful outboard, held up by solid brackets against the wall. Thank God it wasn't on the boat. If they were swamped its weight would take them straight to the bottom.

  He looked at the stopwatch round his neck. He'd looped it there when he was filling the carry bag. It told him there were fourteen minutes before the bore hit. He grimaced. It would have to be enough.

  Mikael was the first one back in the garage. He had a 50m coil of climbing rope from the wall in the toolshed. He also had two 30m electric leads, a number of U-bolts of reasonable size, and four industrial tie-downs. The boy was smart, thought Doug. The electric leads could be looped through the U-bolts several times, the combined lengths taking the strain they needed.

  "What are we in for, Da?" said the boy, as Doug joined him at a side bench. "This isn't a normal earthquake, is it?"

  Doug moved closer, so he didn't have to shout as much. But then the shaking, and the background noise, started to die away.

  "I'll tell you all about it when we're ready to go," he said, lifting up two of the tie-downs and strapping them together. Mikael nodded. He trusted his father to keep his word. Then the boy set to work sliding the electric leads through the U-bolts.

  Mikael had just finished when Annie brought her findings into the garage in a washing basket. She put the basket down on the bench, and Doug picked through it. In the end he handed her four items to work with.

  "Tie these together over-and-under, then half-hitch the ends a few times, got it?" he said. She nodded, and got on with the job. Their lives might depend on her knots in a matter of minutes, but there was no point staying beside her and making her nervous. He was confident she could handle the task.

  The three of them were combining their efforts into a single length of rope when Jeannie appeared. She had two torches clasped awkwardly in one hand, a small pack on her back, and a large bag at her side. Doug didn't ask what was in them. She would have collected what was important.

  Doug looked up, intending to reassure her, but she looked away. He knew that look, had seen it many times during his Civil Defence career. She knew it was going to be bad, but she wasn't ready to hear how bad. Experience had taught him to leave her alone when she was in that state of mind. Like many people, she was better off tackling the unknown in her own way.

  Doug looked at the stopwatch again, and didn't like what he saw. Hell's teeth, it was going to be a close thing. He prayed Cathy at the Wellington headquarters had underestimated the time until the bore hit. Moments later he had finished assembling their efforts into one rope.

  Mikael attached one end to the anchor stay on the small deck of the runabout, and threw the rest on board. Doug saw a canvas cover for the boat hanging on the back wall, one he'd never used. He didn't know how strong it was but he threw it into the back of the boat as well. Then he attached the LED camping lamp to the small windshield of the boat, and assembled his little team at the runabout.

  Moving it on the concrete was easy, with himself and Mikael pulling on the boat's cradle, and Jeannie and Annie pushing from behind, but they began to slow on the grass. At least the 'quake had now died back to almost nothing.

  "Clear of the house," he gasped, putting everything into his efforts, "we have be clear of the house." The others responded with an extra burst, and after another fifty metres Doug figured it was enough.

  He set Jeannie the job of attaching the cover around the sides of the runabout, and Annie climbed aboard to help. Mikael unrolled the rope assembly to the corner post Doug pointed out, and then his father was there beside him, carrying the biggest of the U-bolts and one of the torches.

  "Twice around the post and back onto itself, got it?" he said, handing over the torch and running for the garage. Once there he started the little Demio they used for domestic chores and ran it up beside the runabout. He turned the headlights on full beam and killed the engine. The next three paddocks came to life, a decent-sized herd of cows milling nervously in the last one. They were tightly packed on a rise at one end of the paddock – as if they knew something was coming.

  When he got back to the runabout, Jeannie was tying the eyelets in the cover to the bracing under the deck, using lengths of cord. Doug grasped the idea at once. The eyelets were normally secured with a turnable clasp to the top of the small, raised windshield. Left that way the cover would funnel water inside the boat. Tying it under the front deck allowed water to run along the cover and off the back.

  Jeannie already had the survival stuff stowed on board, and when the cover was properly secured – except for a corner at the back – Doug figured they were ready.

  "I can't see that fence popping", he said sombrely, as the little group gathered beside the runabout. The corner post was at the end of a long line of posts that ran roughly south-west, the way the water bore would come. Each one was connected to its neighbours by six wires of high tensile steel. The floodwaters might undermine some of the posts, but the strength of the fence was in its numbers. The bore wasn't going to destabilise them all.

  The night became eerily quiet, as the last traces of the earthquake ceased. Doug eyed the paddocks in front of the headlights apprehensively. He turned to explain what a water bore was when Mikael grabbed his arm. Doug heard a faint roar, like a railway train growing louder in the distance.

  He checked the stopwatch around his neck, and found they'd been graced with an extra three minutes. His stomach turned. They would have been dead without it.

  14

  A small flat in Richmond

  Virginia, USA

  Don stared moodily at the wall in Jo's living room. The scale of the devastation in Wellington had hit him especially hard.

  Don was a Kiwi. He knew his capital city was built on hills that sat along a major fault line – but he hadn't expected the big one, when it came, to be like this.

  "I'm sorry," said Jo, laying a hand on his arm. Before he could respond his cell phone chirruped an unusual pattern of blips.

  He took a strange-looking cell phone from the inside pocket of his overcoat, and extended an aerial. Then he keyed in a long sequence of numbers, which Jo recognised from her intelligence work would unlock encryption software. It had to be a satellite phone, one with military upgrades.

  "Goddamit Cal, what the fuck is happening in Wellington?" said Don aggressively. Jo looked up, surprised. She couldn't hear the other half of the conversation, but Don could. It was the strangest conversation he would ever have.

  "It's just the beginning," said Cal. He didn't comment on Don's language, or his attitude. There were times to insist on rank, and times to let it pass.

  "Reports are coming in from the rest of New Zealand – it's the middle of the night here – and most of them talk of devastation that's unbelievable.

  "Iceland is getting this too, and rolling fronts of a similar magnitude are moving south-west and north-east from both countries."

  Cal took a deep breath.

  "Things are about to change, Maric," he said. "The world is about to be knocked back to something like the old hunter-gatherer days. But the important thing is we are not down, and we are not out.

  "I have a job for you, an important one. I want you in Charleston, on the coast, in twelve hours. Take a four-wheel drive, and avoid bridges and cities. The United States is going to get hit just as hard in an hour or so. Everywhere on the planet is!

  "Ask for Brigadier-General Summers when you get to the 628th Air Wing at Charleston Air Force Base. They'll
be locked down tight by the time you arrive. Try the code 'alpha bear four seven' or insist on seeing the Brigadier-General in person. And Maric, good luck."

  "Don't 'good luck' me!" said Don, annoyed as always with the chain of command.

  "How is this happening? Who are we fighting?" he growled. "And how do you know this stuff? You make it sound like we've already lost!"

  "We have," said Cal, speaking carefully. Then he seemed to reconsider. "Remember my contacts with other grey ops groups around the world?"

  Don muttered an affirmative. Cal seemed to have a supernatural grasp of what was happening behind the scenes, anywhere in the world. There were many elite organisations like the one he headed now, privately funded, prepared to do what governments were unwilling to do.

  "One of my sources is on a team at the White House. What I'm telling you is coming straight from the US president. He has a special science team trying to make sense of what's going on, and that's the problem – no one has any good intel yet."

  Cal hesitated.

  "The first tsunamis from the 'quakes will hit Norway and Great Britain minutes from now," he said. "One of the rolling fronts will reach Spain shortly after that, and then blast through the Mediterranean. After that the 'quakes will go worldwide. Everything is about to fall apart, Maric, and there aren't the resources to deal with a fraction of it.

  "Now, I have a hundred people to organise, and I need you to do your part, soldier. Do I make myself clear!"

  It was not a question. Don damn near saluted from his position sitting on the edge of Jo's straight-backed lounge chair. Yes, he said, he would get right onto it, and he wished the other teams good luck as well!

  He put the satphone away, then he paced for some time before he turned to look at Jo. It was time to make a decision.

  "What?" she said, but Don's expression didn't change. She stood up, then put her hands on her hips and glared at him.