Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  Carrie started typing:

  Luckily, you can turn almost any large, enclosed space into a temporary heat shelter for several hundred people. You need air conditioning—a central unit, and some window units in case the central unit fails. You need something to power it in case the grid fails—solar panels, for preference. Medical supplies. A refrigeration unit capable of holding, at minimum, 50,000 liters of water. And of course you need the water.

  But if we assume this is something that's going to be needed, on and off, for the foreseeable future, then instead of retrofitting an existing space every year it makes more sense to create purpose-built shelters that will last longer with less maintenance.

  The simplest way to do that is to put it underground. No matter how hot it gets on the surface, go down five to ten meters and it's maybe fifteen degrees maximum. Of course, if you've got a lot of people down there—first, you have their body heat to think about, and second, you've got to have air circulating. And if some of the people in there are sick—which is probably the case—you don't want everybody breathing the same air.

  So lots of ventilation. If you run the ventilation shafts through the ground, that should cool the air and cut down on the need for AC.

  As far as light goes, these shelters will mostly be in use during the daytime, so fiber-optic lighting is an option for parts of it. If somebody needs medical attention, or if you just want to put in a reading room—people are going to get bored in there—you'll want something a little brighter. And of course cell phone and Internet access are a must. If anything goes wrong in there, people have to know.

  But for this summer we're concentrating on giving people the tools they need to refit existing spaces into temporary shelters. I mean, the worst thing that could happen is that we'd have ten villages in an area that need shelters and only one that has one. Then we would just have given people something to fight over.

  Suddenly, she became aware that people all around her were muttering “holy shit” and “have you seen this?” A second later, she saw that the news app on her tablet was blinking red. She clicked on it.

  As soon as Carrie saw the news, she forgot all about the presentation. Cheorwon—which was technically a POW camp, but actually more of a refugee camp—had just been hit by an attack from North Korea. A nuclear attack.

  Even now, an ugly little part of her brain was thinking if Pratt handles this well it might make him harder to run against in two years, but the rest of her forced it to shut up. This wasn’t the time. Roger was at a conference in New York City. Thel was in Beijing, and while China wasn’t a part of this war, it could become a part in a matter of minutes. She wasn’t going to worry about how this might affect her future political career until she knew exactly how much world there would be when this plane landed, or how much country and how much family she’d be coming home to.

  * * *

  “Mr. President?” said Jim on the State Department’s screen.

  “Yes?”

  “We just got word from Pyongyang,” he said. “They’re saying that the launch at Cheorwon was strictly a ‘punitive action’ against ‘mutineers,’ not an act of aggression. They’re instructing us not to respond.”

  “They’re instructing us, are they?” said Pratt. He turned to Swanston. “How soon are our missiles going to come within range of their radar?”

  “Right about… um… now.”

  As soon as the cruise missiles were detected in North Korean airspace, the government ordered its whole nuclear arsenal launched. Despite this, many of the weapons were destroyed on the ground. Many, but not all.

  A missile can be hidden—a missile launch can’t. The plume of fire is visible at night even to human eyes, and is unmistakable by infrared. This provided a target for the Nightgaunts, aerial drones which could be used to destroy missiles at or near their launch point. This was the old “hit a bullet with a bullet” problem, but a Nightgaunt could make course corrections much faster and more accurately than a human could, putting itself on course to intercept the missile in flight. It also had a five-kiloton warhead of its own, set to go off within fifty meters of the target. Over much of North Korea, the night was interrupted by a few seconds of daylight as the Nightgaunts exploded five to ten miles over the surface, causing no damage on the ground but blinding the unfortunates who were looking up to watch the missiles.

  Of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, nine short-range missiles, two Taepodong-2 missiles and one Taepodong-3 missile survived Operation Cassius—but they were still being tracked. The Stormcrows, high-altitude surveillance drones, identified the launch sites, calculated the flight paths, and fed the data to U.S. and South Korean anti-ballistic missile systems, updating every ten seconds in case the missiles changed course.

  With this data, the Americans and South Koreans were able to destroy eight of the nine short-range missiles before they could reach their target. The ninth suffered a glancing blow from a kinetic warhead, which damaged its guidance system and sent it off course. It detonated over seven miles off the coast, well away from the city of Ulsan where it had been aimed. Ironically, the only South Koreans to die in this attack were those who chose to evacuate the city by sea and happened to move their boats into the blast radius.

  Far more damaging to South Korea was the artillery barrage that began at about the same time as the missile launches. Maybe half of the North Korean artillery crews were still at their posts and obeying orders, and only three quarters of their shells went off, but that was more than enough to wreak havoc on Seoul, especially in the north. Not many of the people in the city had a chance to evacuate or seek shelter before the bombardment began.

  But the Americans were focused on the three Taepodongs. The Stormcrows watched them arc toward the edge of space and sent the data to the Air Force, which alerted the Missile Defense Agency. As it happened, two of the missiles were headed for Alaska and Los Angeles—almost directly at the Interceptor sites at Vandenberg and Fort Greeley.

  The Ground-based Midcourse Defense, the next line of defense against missiles, had the same hit-a-bullet-with-a-bullet problem as the Nightgaunts. Their solution was lots of “bullets”—Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles, which were intended to collide with the incoming missile while it was in space.

  The missile headed for Los Angeles had the longest path—one that took it just south of the Aleutians over the Pacific, bringing it to the attention of both Fort Greeley and Vandenberg. As a result, it was the only one that was struck even a glancing blow. The missile survived, but was knocked slightly off course.

  At the same time that it was calling the MDA, the Air Force relayed the information to the FCC, which activated the Emergency Alert System. In Alaska, Hawaii, and California, citizens were awakened from their sleep by the sudden terror of air raid sirens. They had less than ten minutes in which to decide how to respond. Some got into their cars and fled. Others took shelter in their basements. Others simply gathered their families together, held each other and prayed.

  * * *

  “We’re going to take at least one hit, Mr. President,” said Swanston. “Probably more. No way to stop it now.”

  Damn. Damn. It wasn’t that Pratt had any doubt he’d done the right thing—you couldn’t let a country set off a nuke on an ally’s turf with no provocation at all and get away with it, not if you ever wanted to have another ally again—but a couple of American cities were about to be damaged or destroyed on his watch and there was nothing he could do about it. “Counterstrike options?”

  “If they have any nuclear assets left, we have no way of knowing where to look. What we do have are fourteen possible locations of underground complexes in or near the capital where the government could be hiding. We can hit those sites with bunker busters… or we can respond with a large-scale attack.”

  Henry Pratt had never had a taste for vengeance. If you saw a threat and neutralized it, your work was done as far as he was concerned. On the other hand, he understood the logic of deterre
nce—sending a message to every nation that might be watching. Strike a blow against America on her own soil, and you and everything you love will perish in fire.

  “If they do have anything left—on a submarine, say—we used all our GMD assets on those three missiles,” said Swanston.

  “Sir,” said Barber from the NSA, “in my opinion, the government is the one thing over there you don’t want to destroy. We need somebody to negotiate with when the war’s over.”

  So I should destroy the rest of North Korea and leave the government standing? Let a handful of well-heeled sociopaths be the sole survivors of a holocaust they caused? No thank you. Besides, Russia and China had to be on a hair trigger right now. One wrong move, one misidentified attack, and this could turn into the end of the world. Best to act with precision.

  “I’ll let them know when the war’s over,” he said. “Bunker busters. Aimed at Pyongyang. Take out all fourteen sites.”

  * * *

  To look at this apartment, you wouldn’t think the occupant was worth billions. In fact, she was going to move into a ludicrously expensive place overlooking Central Park in a few months, more to finalize her status as a member of the city’s elite than because she needed the space. Right now, however, she was still living in this cramped little hole. At least it had good security.

  Sandra Symcox was fixing herself breakfast. Whenever time allowed, she had at least one real meal a day, preferably in the morning. This one was… not really an omelet. It was two eggs beaten with salsa and garlic salt and fried in a pan, to be served with orange juice and coffee.

  As she cooked, Sandy kept one eye on the big screen in the next room. It was a business news channel. She normally watched it with the forced attention of a good student taking a dull course that she needed to pass, but right now she was watching it with a certain smug pleasure. It was a report on Suiamor abuse at certain Wall Street firms. Apparently, a number of people had taken black-market swee in the hope that it would turn them into the ruthless corporate sharks they thought everyone wanted them to be. There had been… unintended consequences.

  “Normally when you hear about homicide committed under the influence of drugs,” a cop was saying, “you picture somebody going crazy and biting off somebody else’s face. With swee, it’s always some Agatha Christie bull[bleep] they try and—” The screen went dark blue, with the giant red sans-serif letters EAS dominating the top half. The words IMMINENT NUCLEAR ATTACK ON ALASKA, HAWAII scrolled across the bottom.

  After that, Sandy didn’t give a crap about swee abuse. New York City was America’s biggest target—at least as much so as the capital. And where she was right now was Manhattan, the one place on Earth every terrorist and rogue leader on the planet had wet dreams about fucking up. How quickly can I get out of this city? she thought. I knew I should have gotten a helicopter.

  Suddenly, an alarm sounded, high-pitched and painful.

  It was just the smoke detector. Sandy switched off the stove and the alarm, thinking if New York were in danger, don’t you think somebody would have mentioned it? Just to be on the safe side, she turned on her phone’s input mike and spoke the words “nearest fallout shelter.”

  The non-omelet was scorched around the edges. She ate it anyway. When it came to wasting food, old habits died hard. And on a cold morning, you needed something hot and filling in your stomach. As she ate, she kept one eye on the screen and made a note of the path to the nearest shelter from here.

  The missile aimed at Honolulu landed in the ocean just south of Iroquois Point. The warhead failed to detonate.

  The missile which had been aimed at Los Angeles landed some two hundred miles away, between Independence and Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. The good news was that the explosion was not from a hydrogen bomb, and killed only twenty-three people. The bad news was that it severed the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

  The missile aimed at Anchorage didn’t fail. At 3:03 a.m. local time, a quarter of a mile out to sea, a blinding fireball, sixteen hundred feet wide appeared over the ocean as the bomb went off with the force of thirty thousand tons of TNT—also not from a hydrogen bomb, but still more than half again the size of the Hiroshima explosion.

  * * *

  Isabel’s earpiece was set to wake her up at 7:15 a.m. giving her enough time to shower, have some breakfast and head for work. Today something woke her up nine minutes earlier.

  It was her armphone, sitting on her nightstand and chiming. She’d set the phone to make that noise when it got an ANMF news alert. The American News and Media Foundation was the only news organization in America that had resisted the urge to overuse its all-platform alert system to the point of worthlessness. If they sent an alert, it wasn’t because some celebrity had had a butt implant. She picked up the phone and touched the news icon.

  Holy fuck they actually did it.

  The video wasn’t much help—you couldn’t see anything besides the skyline of a town or city lined in fire. The still photo was much more impressive. Someone had used their phone to get a shot of the airburst at the moment when it was no longer blinding but still clearly visible—a crimson ball of light over the water, illuminating the already-smoldering and collapsing western half of the city and the underside of the mushroom cloud.

  This called for a bigger screen. Isabel put down the phone and picked up the tablet.

  It didn’t take long for her to bring herself up to speed. They’d nuked a place called Cheorwon on the South Korean side of the border. Pratt had tried to take out their nuclear capability. He’d gotten… some of it. Maybe most of it. But obviously not all. Now Alaska’s largest city was in flames and everybody was watching Honolulu… through several sheets of dark glass, just in case. Isabel suddenly thought of all the potential targets around—D.C., Annapolis, the Pentagon, Dover AFB.

  “Hmm? What’s going on?” The sudden tension in her body, lying so close to his, had done what the alert chime couldn’t. It had woken up Hunter.

  Isabel leaned against him. Instinctively, he wrapped his arms around her. There was no real protection there—only a little bit of comfort.

  If ever a nuclear strike could be surgical, Pratt’s attack on Pyongyang was it. Fourteen bunker buster nuclear weapons, each one more than thirteen times as powerful as the bomb that had destroyed Anchorage, plunged through the skin of the city and the surrounding hills like bullets and detonated deep underground within three seconds of each other. The heat of the explosions vaporized rock, soil, and concrete, and flash-boiled underground water. The force of the blasts spread outward in seismic ripples that overlapped and intersected in complex patterns, nearly canceling each other out in some places, creating far more violent convulsions in others.

  A nuclear strike can’t be surgical. The ground on which Pyongyang was built shook like the head of a drum. Avalanches fell from every hillside, uprooting some buildings and crushing or burying others. From the sewers, and the holes made by the warheads, geysers of steam and radioactive ash came bursting out. But most of the population of the city was inside at this point, so that wasn’t their problem. Their problem was that virtually every building in Pyongyang was collapsing into rubble over their heads.

  * * *

  Several hours passed. There were no more missile launches. A robot sub found the Honolulu warhead and was slowly and carefully carrying it out to sea. When it was a safe distance away, someone would arrive in a boat and attempt to disarm it. Pratt made a mental note to recommend that person for a Congressional Medal of Honor when this was over.

  Speaking of boats, the other unambiguous victory thus far was command of the sea. The U.S. Navy had lost one cruiser when a North Korean submarine managed to get too close and torpedo it. There would have to be an inquiry to find out how that had happened. The NK navy, by way of comparison, no longer existed. It had been obsolete, many of its ships and submarines older than Pratt himself, and in such poor shape that even in peacetime its eastern and western squadrons could not have made it around the pen
insula to help each other.

  Swanston was looking over reports from the battlefield. “There doesn’t appear to be any coordinating strategy,” he said. “Most of the NK artillery has either been taken out or… just stopped firing for some reason—they should still have ordnance. In the west, two corps between Kaesong and Yeoncheon are fighting back. In the center, there’s a corps east of Pyongyang—excuse me, Pyonggang—that’s also fighting. They might still be afraid of what happened at Cheorwon.

  “Everywhere else, we’re seeing whole divisions just surrender or desert en masse, we’re seeing North Koreans fighting each other… and it looks like one NK corps is on the move… in the direction of Pyongyang.”

  “If somebody’s planning a coup, he’s in for a disappointment,” said Pratt. He thought for a moment.

  “From your description,” he said, “it sounds as though all lines of communication were relayed through Pyongyang, and now they’re down. At some point, fairly soon, their army is going to arrange a way of talking to each other. The question is who’s going to take charge and what that person is going to decide to do. Given this state of partial collapse and the loss of the capital, I’d surrender and be done with it, but I’m not a North Korean general.”

  More hours passed. The sun finally got around to rising over Alaska. The best you could say, once you’d managed to see something through all that dust and smoke, was that Anchorage still existed… partly. There was almost nothing left standing between A Street and the ocean. More than half the downtown had collapsed, houses had been flattened as if stepped on by a titan, and what was left of the city was on fire. Worse, the thermal updraft of the bomb had gone, replaced by a steady breeze from the west that was blowing the flames east. The city authorities—or whoever was in charge over there right now—had fallen back across Route 1 and were trying to turn Merrill Field Airport and Lake Otis Parkway into firebreaks, to protect the hospital and the universities. A lot of lives might be saved if they succeeded. And speaking of saving lives, the bomb that fell on Honolulu was successfully disarmed.