One Man's Island

by Thomas J. Wolfenden

“Is this really the President’s plane?” “Sure is. The night before The Event, I was at a bar at home, watching the news.” He didn’t add ‘getting drunk and feeling sorry for myself’. “The President was on his way home from Asia. Anyway, it’s a military plane, so it had all its electronics hardened, I guess. When everyone died, it must have missed its air refueling plane, and kept flying until it ran out of fuel, then glided all the way here before crashing. I guess that’s why it didn’t burst into flames and burn up.”

  “How far can they glide?”

  “I don’t know. It must be pretty far to end up in a soybean field in Indiana,” Tim said, helping her through the barbed wire fence. They walked around and found bits of cloth and bones strewn all over. The bodies were most probably thrown clear and then taken care of through predation. He found a rusty automatic pistol and reckoned it was from a Secret Service agent. A large ceramic ashtray was the next find, and it was completely intact, with gold trim and the Presidential seal on it. He pocketed it. Apparently smoking wasn’t a fire hazard on Air Force One like on commercial jets. For over an hour, they walked through the wreckage, finding bits of clothing, a microphone, a smashed TV, camcorder, loose paper and other bits and pieces of metal. They found a set of seats sitting upright and Tim sat down on one.

  “Nicer than the coach seats I’m used to,” he said aloud. All finely handcrafted leather and even sitting out in the weather for as long as it had been, it was still comfy. Robyn tested it out too, and showed her pleasure.

  “Too bad we can’t take these back to the camper to lounge out it,” she laughed. Tim got up walked around some more, and found a $50,000 Rolex watch lying in the dirt. He held it up to his ear and found that it had stopped. He tossed it aside like so much other junk that they found. After about another hour of wandering around the wreckage, Tim had seen enough.

  “Come on, Pumpkin, it’s time to head home.”

  “Alright,” she said, taking his hand and walking back to the trailer with him. They had almost made it back to the barbed wire fence when something caught Tim’s eye.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, letting go of her hand and walking over to another pile of junk. He crouched down, and from under another set of seats, he spied the corner of a worn leather case. He lifted the seats up some, and was temporarily startled by a garter snake, which slithered away harmlessly. Pulling out the case, he examined it. It wasn’t the typical executive brief case. This one was bigger, fatter, and opened at the top scissor like. It had a leather clasp closing the top, and thick leather handles. Then it dawned on him what it was. He’d seen this same case held by a uniformed Army Warrant Officer who followed the President everywhere he went.

  He went slack jawed, and just stared at it in his hands, which were shaking. He couldn’t believe it, but there it was, right in his hot little hands.

  “C’mon, let’s go!” he said, grabbing her hand and helping her back through the barbed wire.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “It’s very, very important, baby!”

  He was stunned. He couldn’t believe he’d almost missed it. One question, the one that would keep him awake for nights, formed in his head: What the fuck am I going to do with it, now that I’ve got it?

  Chapter 12: Rude Reception

  Lieutenant Commander Wright was beside himself. None of the other crew had ever seen him so angry. After a thirty minute tirade of abuse to everyone on the bridge, he went to the captain’s chair and sat down, face still beet-red and a noticeable tic in his eye. A vein in his forehead beat rapidly, and his hands were clenched onto the armrests, as if to hold back from throttling anyone nearby. When his breathing slowed down to a somewhat normal rate he turned to Petty Officer Stevens.

  “So, tell me again what happened?” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Well, sir… we, uh, when we got to the main gate someone started shooting at us.”

  “Someone who?” he asked with a tremor in his voice.

  “We don’t know, sir. They wouldn’t let us get out of the main gate. Killed one of the Pakis, and wounded one of the Somali guys.”

  “And you don’t know how many there were?”

  “No, sir. They were pretty well hidden. They didn’t have any machine guns, but whoever it was could shoot.”

  “So you didn’t go after them?”

  “Sir, like I said before. We’re not soldiers, and there was too much fire on us. It was almost like they didn’t want us to leave the base. That’s what it seemed like they were trying to do,” PO Stevens said in a shaky voice.

  “But you did get all the As stowed below?”

  “Aye, sir. hey didn’t seem to want to follow us, they just didn’t want us to leave the base at all, is what it seemed like to me.”

  “So we’ve got everything we came for?”

  “Yes, sir. Fuel bunkers are topped off, we’ve got plenty of canned goods from the ship’s store, more 5-inch shells and ten BMG-109As.”

  “Good. Did you find the codes?”

  It was the question that Stevens was dreading. He wished he were anywhere else at this point.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Looked like all of the buildings at Headquarters burned to the ground a while ago.”

  “Now let me ask you this, sailor. How am I supposed to USE the goddamn things WITHOUT THE FUCKING CODES?” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth.

  “I… I don’t know sir,” Stevens said, looking at the deck.

  “Well, you do this, Stevens. You go and find that little Nip Nakamura, who seems to be our resident electrical genius, and have him take a look at them. Maybe he can figure a way to arm the warheads without the codes!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Oh, and one more thing. Once you’ve done that, I want you to go into your radio shack, and find every last goddamn one of those ham transmitters in the Pacific. I don’t care how long it takes, you find them and triangulate them!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

  Stevens almost fell over himself getting off the bridge.

  “Nothing on Midway, and now I have people shooting at us at Pearl,” Wright said aloud to no one. “Mr. Johnson?” he asked, and Ensign Johnson, who had been standing off to the rear, trying to stay out of sight, came forward.

  “Yes sir?”

  Lt. Cmd. Wright wrote something down on a slip of paper and handed it to him. “I want you to target these areas with four 109Ds right away. When you have them targeted, fire at will.”

  Ensign Johnson took the slip of paper and glanced at it briefly. “Aye, sir.”

  “That will teach these bastards who is boss in this ocean!” he said. “How fucking dare they!”

  “Yes, sir. That will teach them, sir,” he said, restraining to hold back a growing rage.

  “Once Stevens has found the other broadcasting stations, we’ll give them a little bit of the same medicine,” Wright said smugly. “Now get to it! What are you doing standing there still looking at me?”

  Ensign Johnson quickly turned and headed for the CIC. The ship was now ten nautical miles south of Oahu, on a course to get them back to Midway. Ensign Johnson sat down at the targeting computer, and opened up the program in the dim red lights of the CIC. He then looked at the paper the skipper had given him, and his stomach did a flip. He wanted two cruise missiles targeted for Honolulu, one for Pearl City, one for the USS Missouri and the other for USS Arizona monument. Sweat broke out on Johnson’s brow, and he turned to see if anyone else was in the room. His mind was spinning. He thought of Mary, and the slim possibility that she was still alive back in Honolulu. He couldn’t fire these missiles there! He had to think quickly, or the skipper would know something was wrong. But what was he to do? After another moment of thought, he began typing coordinates into the targeting computer, which fed the information down to the missile’s guidance system. He programmed two of them to target the Ko’Olau Range, twelve miles north of Pearl, one for the ce
nter of Hickam Air Force Base, and one for an unpopulated area just north of Schofield Barracks. At least the skipper would see the launches , and if he was looking at the island through the binoculars, he’d see the smoke from the explosions at Hickam and be satisfied. Johnson was not going to drop bombs on fellow Americans, destroy the ‘Mighty Mo’, or desecrate the Arizona.

  He finished keying in the proper information, picked up the growler phone and called the bridge. When he heard the captain answer on the other end, he said, “Bridge, CIC, missiles targeted and ready to fire.”

  “Very well, Mr. Johnson, fire when ready.”

  Ensign Johnson heard the general quarters alarm go through the ship as a warning that the missiles would be firing. He thumbed the button and felt the ship shudder once, then a few seconds later a second shudder, then a third, then finally the last one. He got up and walked back to the bridge where the thick white smoke of the missile’s booster rockets was still blanketing the ship. Slowly the smoke cleared, and walking with the captain out onto the wing bridge, he could see the streaks of the smoke trails heading up to altitude where they’d stop and jettison the cruise missiles, falling back to Earth, and firing up their ramjet engines; flying guided by GPS at one hundred feet all the way to their programmed targets. They stood at the rail looking north and after a few moments saw a dark black cloud reach up over the horizon.

  “That will teach them!” the skipper said, lowering the binoculars. The BGM-109D cruise missile was a ground attack version which had hundreds of softball sized bomblets, and was primarily used against troop formations and armored columns. Once over the designated target, they split open and spread mayhem over a large area. The three he’d targeted let loose their bomblets over empty jungle, but the one he’d targeted over Hickam laid a swath of destruction over the main runway and into the fuel storage area, causing the huge black plume that they could see now with the naked eye even ten miles away. The skipper would never know about the other three.

  Johnson had a deep, sinking feeling settling in the pit of his stomach as he watched the island slowly disappear, and with it the hope of ever finding Mary. He knew it was just a pipe dream to think that she was still alive on the island; the odds were too high for that.

  “If that Stevens can locate all these other radio transmitters out there that are spreading the word ahead of us, we’ll give them the same. It’s my ocean now. It’s time the bastards learned that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Johnson said, afraid to add anything more.

  “We’ll head back to Midway and use that as our base.”

  “Yes, sir, excellent idea.”

  “Of course it’s an excellent idea!” the captain said with an evil grin. “It’s my idea!”

  Ensign Johnson tuned away from the growing smoke plume and looked forward, into a stiffening breeze. The waves were forming whitecaps, and the bow was starting to rise up to meet the growing swells.

  “Mr. Johnson, you have the conn. I’m going to retire to my cabin for a little relaxation.”

  “Aye, sir, I have the conn!” he said, trying to blot out the idea of his ‘relaxation’. He could still hear the little girl’s screams from the last time deep in his mind, and he couldn’t get the sound out. Every time he’d look into the young girl’s pleading almond eyes, all he could see were Mary’s eyes, and it maddened him to the point where he just wanted to cave in the skipper’s head, with an axe. The skipper had gone completely mad, there was no doubt about that. He was at a loss as to what to do. He likened himself to Mr. Christian on The Bounty, but he had no other person to back him up. Suplee agreed with him, but he was only one other man, and the rest of the new ‘crew’ were actually happy to be where they were.

  Yes, the skipper had certainly lost both oars, yet unfortunately, he couldn’t put together a mutiny. Johnson was alone in this increasingly terrifying nightmare, with no signs of it ending. Now that the skipper had the nukes, it was only a matter of time before he figured out how to arm them, and that frightened him more than anything. Even at the height of the Cold War, with thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at each other, no one in the Soviet Union or the US was crazy enough to actually launch them. This bastard would.

  The wind picked up even more, and the bow rose and fell in the swells discernibly now, waves beginning to break over the bow, and the sky ahead of them was darkening.

  A huge bank of thunderheads that went all the way to the stratosphere from one end of the horizon to the other were in front of them, and he saw a flash of lightning in one of them. He heard the hatch to the bridge open, and turned to see the Malaysian officer, Lt. Alphabits, enter.

  “Mr. Johnson. I am your relief!”

  “That’s good, Lieutenant,” he said. “It looks like the weather is taking a downturn, and I should think things will be getting a little nautical later this evening.”

  “Ah, yes indeed!” he replied. “That is a good euphemism! You Americans love your euphemisms!”

  “That we do,” Ensign Johnson smiled. This guy wasn’t so bad, he was a great sailor, and knew how to drive a ship. Johnson handed over his binoculars, gave him the proper information on course and speed, and said, “The Lieutenant has the conn!” The East Indian helmsman nodded and adjusted his course slightly. “Okay, Lieutenant, she’s all yours.”

  He decided to head down to the galley to get something to eat. Halfway down, the boat began to rock even more, and he almost lost his footing on a ladder. On entering the galley, he saw several of the Indian women cooking something that reeked of curry. His stomach immediately turned sour so he just grabbed a few bananas and a cup of coffee, and headed back to his cabin. He didn’t know where Suplee was. He hadn’t seen him all morning, and he hoped he had done his usual tour of the ship before they sailed to make sure everything was battened down. Once reaching his cabin, he set his coffee mug on the small desk along the bulkhead. The cabin was his now to have privately, but he’d once shared it with three other junior officers. He was glad for the solitude and sat down to look at the photograph of him and Mary wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, standing on the bow of the USS Missouri. They were both smiling and happy, his arm holding her tightly by her thin waist. He ate his bananas and finished his coffee, then kicked off his shoes and climbed into his bunk.

  He lay there and thought of the events of earlier. They had sailed into Pearl Harbor, and with Lt. Alphabits’ aid, they easily docked, and the crew fanned out all over the base looking for supplies and the nukes. Those they found in a heavily locked bunker, which was once guarded by Marines armed to the teeth. With the help of cutting torches, they quickly gained entry and loaded up their catch onto trollies, towing them back to the ship, where they used block and tackle to load them. Fueling up and refilling the galley’s storerooms with what canned goods they could cram into them, they finally ventured out and tried to leave the base. That’s where things turned to shit. As Stevens had said, they were fired upon by several people who were hell bent on not letting them leave the base. Johnson was sure that if they’d had a handful of Marines, they’d have made short work of those people, whoever they were. But in reality, what they had was a handful of bullies with machine guns used to intimidating anyone they came in contact with, but when faced with real resistance ran away like scared little kids. He laughed at that one, and then his mind turned to Mary again. What if she was with those people shooting this morning? What if she was still alive?

  No, she couldn’t be.

  Thinking again of those people this morning that had shot at the shore party, he thought the skipper was right about one thing. They had been forewarned of their arrival, and were ready for them when they got there, with a very rude reception indeed. He laughed, thinking, ‘good for them’. Now he was sickened by the thought of the skipper’s plans to deal with any resistance. Hadn’t there been enough people dead already? Several billion people, he reckoned, all dead in the blink of an eye for no reason he could think of. Certainly it was no Rapture, such as the
ones his preacher used to talk about when he was a boy in church. It had to have come from outer space. He was sure that really bright star, the one they’d seen for weeks after, held the key, but it eventually faded from view and took its secrets with it. He closed his eyes and thought of the last time he and Mary were together, the feel of her skin, the silky smoothness of her hair, her perfume that smelled so wonderful. He was almost asleep despite the pitching of the ship when he heard his cabin door open.

  “Mr. Johnson, you awake?”

  “Not now,” he grumbled, sitting up.

  “Oh shit, sorry, sir,.” It was Suplee.

  “No, it’s okay. You saved me from a nightmare that was bound to come anyway. Come in, and close the hatch behind you.”

  “Okay, sir,” he said, coming in and taking off his ball cap.

  “Have a seat, and tell me what’s on your mind,” he said, gesturing to the chair at the desk.

  Suplee sat down, and immediately noticed the photograph. “She’s very beautiful, sir.”

  “Yeah, she is. Or was, I should say.”

  “Hell of a thing, sir. All this shit.”

  “What’s on your mind, sailor?”

  “I already gave my report to Lt. Alphabits, but I figured I’d give it to you too, you being a real officer and all.”

  Johnson ignored that and sat up a little.

  “I walked the ship and have everything battened down for rough weather. I tried to get some of the others to help, but most of them are too busy puking in the heads.”

  “Very good, anything else to report?” he asked, rubbing his temples.

  “The patch in the hull is still leaking. The pumps are keeping up with it, but if one of the hatches gives way and we start taking on any more water, they’ll be hard pressed.”

  “As much as you can tonight, keep a watch on all the hatches. Make sure none of those dumbasses opens one and decides to take a midnight stroll on the promenade deck.”

  “That I will do, sir. If any one of those bastards goes overboard, I don’t think the skipper will turn the boat around to go look for them.”