The Journal: Raging Tide: (The Journal Book 4)

by Deborah D. Moore

  “These two misfits?” he asked, looking at the names.

  “Yes sir, those two misfits are geniuses when it comes to computers. I believe their unique skills could be utilized - in a monitored situation - and they are exactly what I need right now. If they don’t work out, they don’t work out, and they can go back to sweeping floors and chopping onions.”

  “Donna!” he called out to his secretary. She stepped in immediately and Major Hogan handed her the files. “Please type up new orders for these two, transferring them to the EOC.” He looked back at me. “As soon as I sign them, I’ll have Donna bring them down to you. Anything else?”

  “No sir, thank you.” I turned to go.

  “Good luck with those two, Allex, you’ll need it,” he snickered.

  His attitude made me a touch angry. Whatever happened to ‘be all you can be’? These two kids weren’t being encouraged to stretch their minds. I had to remember, though, that I was going to be here for only a short time and to curb my civilian attitude.

  *

  Promptly at 1300 hours, Pvt. Billy Toth and Cpl. Kimberly Ki entered the office. Their new orders had been delivered and were sitting on my desk.

  “Have a seat,” I said and they each leaned against a desk, arms folded. “I’m going to spell a few things out to you two. It’s only the three of us in this office, you work with me and I’ll work with you. No goofing off, no being late, understood?” They both nodded. “What we’re after here is simple: information. Billy, do you think you can get us any kind of internet connection?”

  “Probably. The satellites didn’t fall out of the sky, ya know. It’s just a matter of reaching out and grabbing it,” he said, looking a bit interested.

  “Okay, and how would you do that?” I asked. When he gave me that ‘are you dumb’ look, I said, “Bear with me, Billy, I have reports to submit, and I need a simplified version.”

  He reached behind him and powered up that computer. “See here?” he said as the three of us gathered around the glowing screen. He typed a few commands and moved the mouse, typed again. “This says we have Wi-Fi right here in this building, but the signal is too weak.”

  “Can you boost the signal?”

  “Do I have permission to do whatever I need to?” he asked.

  “Within reason, yes.”

  He grinned like a kid in a candy shop. “I’ll be back in less than an hour!”

  “While he’s gone, Cpl. Ki, you and I will figure out how many of these programs to dump. By the way, what do you prefer to be called?”

  “My friends call me Kim, ma’am. Are you really going to let me clean up these programs?”

  “Yes, Kim. Once Billy gets the internet connected again, you can download what we need. I want an updated word processor, Excel, multiple search engines, and reinforced firewalls on all of these computers. I want to be able to surf the net in safety. After all, this is a military installation. Once we can establish our presence, I’ll need you to connect us to Washington. Are you game?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am!”

  “Now, we don’t know who used these computers before, so no judgement, okay? Dump the games, dating sites, and porno, got it? Once we’re all set, if you have a favorite game you can put it on your station if you want. Personally, I prefer Free-cell,” I grinned.

  “My station? You mean one of these will be for my use?” Kim asked, wide eyed.

  “Yes. We will have work to do daily and that will come first. Understand?”

  *

  Forty-five minutes after he left, Billy barged back into the room. He went to the computer he had turned on and connected to the internet with a stronger, though still weak signal.

  “What did you do, Billy?” I asked, impressed.

  “This building used to have legal and social services on this floor, and shops and restaurants on the main floor. The businesses installed their own server and their own sat dishes. I got up on the roof and fixed all the connections that had come loose and then realigned the dish. It’s also not state of the art anymore, and I have some repairs I need to do. I’ll have to reboot the entire system when I’m done and I can’t do that until I have a whole day of power. That generator going down before I’m done could blow the whole thing. And we might need to dump some of their memory.”

  “Why didn’t you do this before, Billy?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Nobody asked me to,” he said simply.

  “I knew I picked the right two for the job. Billy, will you need any help from the IT guys?”

  He frowned. “No, they’ll just get in the way. I can do it faster without them, mainly because I won’t have to fix what they screw up.”

  “You don’t like them much, do you?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t. The only thing they do well is bully.” He pushed his glasses further up on his nose, a nervous gesture with him.

  “Why did you join the army, Billy?” I asked. “Forgive me for saying this, but you don’t seem like soldier material, you seem better suited to the private sector.”

  “I joined to go to school. Initially, they let me take all the further ed I wanted, which did get me…” he mumbled the rest.

  “What was that? Got you what?”

  “My doctorate,” he said, embarrassed.

  “You have a doctorate and you’re sweeping floors? That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard yet. Okay, so you don’t need IT, what will you need?”

  “I keep my own repair kit, so there isn’t much more I need, except maybe a dozen high capacity thumb drives. If you let Kim give me a hand downloading the memory, that will save a lot of time tomorrow when I do the actual repairs and reboot.”

  “How will you save the files that are on there?”

  “We’ll use my laptop and do a GIGO,” Billy replied.

  “What’s a GIGO?”

  “Garbage In, Garbage Out. The laptop becomes a port and will take it in and immediately transfer it out to a USB stick. No information stays in the laptop. It’s really very simple,” Billy assured me.

  *

  Wilkes came by at 1400 hours and I gave him a list that contained the usual office supplies, plus the thumb drives, a couple more chairs, and a small office refrigerator, with a note next to it to not take it from the major’s office. He walked out chuckling.

  Billy, Kimberly, and I worked the rest of the afternoon in relative silence, with a few expletives thrown in from Billy. Soon I saw Jim standing in the doorway. I looked at the wall clock. It was 5:30pm already!

  “Okay kids, your day is done. Good job! I’ll see you at 0900 hours tomorrow.”

  “Dan warned me you asked for the two worst soldiers on the base, but those two looked like they wanted to keep working,” Jim said once they were gone.

  “Those two are amazing. Geniuses, both of them. The right people, with the right skills and the right motivation, can do amazing things.”

  CHAPTER 15

  April 27

  I woke to the humming of my new little refrigerator. After dinner last night, Jim and I found the unit in the office on my desk and moved it into my quarters. The generators start at 0700 and shut off at 2100 hours, from seven in the morning to nine at night. There are ice cubes freezing right now.

  *

  “Is it true, Lieutenant?” Major Hogan asked with a scowl as he came into my office at 0830.

  “Is what true, Sir?”

  “That you allowed that insolent troublemaker access to a restricted area and allowed him to tinker with the machinery?”

  “No one has informed me that there were any restricted areas anywhere here, Sir. As for tinkering with the machinery, Pvt. Toth made some major repairs and has the internet running again. Limited, but running.”

  “What? We have internet back?” The major looked stunned. “How did he do that? Even my best IT guys couldn’t do that.”

  “If I may say so, Major, you didn’t have the best. Pvt. Toth is geeky, clumsy, and lacks social skills, but he has a brilli
ant mind and is proving to be a tremendous asset. Did you know he has a doctorate in computer technology? I asked him to fix a problem and then let him do it his way.” I stood to face the major so he wasn’t looking down at me, a tactical stance. “I gave him a job to do and trusted him to do it. He didn’t let me down. I’m lucky to have him, and so are you.” I gave him a sincere smile. “Today comes the mainframe repairs, for which he will need uninterrupted power to do the systems reboot. If the generator even hiccups during this, it could blow all of it.”

  “I will make sure the generator doesn’t even burp today, Lieutenant, if it will get the internet back for us.”

  “Thank you, Major. When they’re done, would you like to borrow my staff to get your office back online? After the colonel, that is. Jim has already asked for them.”

  Major Hogan stared at me, and then smiled. “You’re an enigma, Lieutenant. I’m not sure what to make of you. You look military, you act military, yet you don’t feel military. And yes, I’d like to be next on the list.”

  “You already are. Oh, and I did want to run something else by you. Billy says the matrix that is the brains of the server is also the information storage. It is clogged up with old legal and business files and is slowing us down. He can download the information onto memory sticks without losing anything. With your permission, of course.”

  *

  “You’re turning this base on its head, you know,” Jim said, sitting at Billy’s console. “And thanks for letting me use part of your office while Pvt. Toth and Cpl. Ki are doing their magic in mine.”

  I looked up and smiled. “It’s good to have you close by, Jim. And the only thing I’ve done is to give two smart kids a chance to prove themselves.” When the kids had returned from their lunch break, I sent them down to Jim’s office, after they had spent the morning repairing and rebooting the entire system. It didn’t take as long as Billy had thought, and having Kim do some of the work helped. They made a good team.

  “You’ve done more than that, Allex. You bounced back from a horrific experience without so much as a look back. Then you come in here and start organizing what should have been organized from the start. You’re putting things back in order that should never have gotten out of order. This is the military, and you’re not, yet what you’re doing is working. Not to mention all the men are in love with you and the women admire you. Except for Donna, she’s jealous.” He looked down at his keyboard and let out a long breath. “And Dan is making noises about going over my head to have you transferred here to him,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “He can’t do that!”

  “Oh, he’s going to try.”

  “Jim, I’m not even—”

  “Shh, the walls have ears, Allex,” he whispered and stood before me. “You’ve been cooped up inside for two days now. I think you need some fresh air. Walk with me, Lieutenant,” he said louder.

  We took the elevator down and were outside in less than five minutes.

  “The fresh air does feel good, although I don’t know how much walking I can do. My feet are still sore,” I said, eying a park bench. “What would happen if Dan discovered our charade?”

  “I’m not sure. If he was by-the-book, you could be thrown in jail and I could be court martialed. This isn’t a by-the-book situation though, so I don’t think they would do anything to you.”

  “You could still be court-martialed though? Jim, how do we get out of this?” I asked in alarm. I certainly didn’t want anything to happen to him because of me!

  I sat on the bench and he sat beside me, arms stretched out along the back, his long legs extended with ankles crossed, very relaxed.

  “One of our biggest problems could be Donna. She and Dan have had a thing going on for about a month and now she sees you as a threat. She needs to be defused before she starts digging into your non-existent records. Any ideas?”

  “Well, you could always take me back to Annie’s until you’re finished here.”

  “Running never solves anything. Distraction might be the way to go though.” Jim stood and then knelt down in front of me and took my hands. “I’m sure we’re being watched; they will think I’m proposing to you and the word will spread. That should cool Donna’s jets for a while.” My eyes widened. “Just play along, Allex. We’ll be out of here in a few days. And please try to act happy about it, you look like you’re about to go in front of a firing squad!”

  Had I just giggled?

  *

  I spent most of the afternoon pulling up inventory files from around the base and organizing the information. Knowing what was on hand for supplies and where it was located was vital to a smoothly operating command center. At 1630 hours, 4:30pm, Billy and Kim arrived back in the EOC, chattering away like two fifth-graders.

  “What’s all the excitement?” I asked, enjoying their animation.

  “Nothing really, it’s just good to do something… real, ya know?” Kim said. “Colonel Andrews was very pleased with our work. He said what we did was going to make his work easier and he’d be finished in half the time.” A girlish grin widened her mouth and she blushed. “And he’s so handsome.”

  I laughed. “Yes, he is an attractive man. Back to business! Are you two ready to tackle Major Hogan’s office tomorrow? Or is there enough time to do it today?”

  “I’d rather do his and Donna’s computers tomorrow, if that’s alright,” Billy said. “It will be easier to link the computers all at once if those two can do something else for the morning.”

  “They are welcome to use these stations if need be,” I said. “I’ve noticed you haven’t personalized them yet, so it’s not a problem, right?”

  “I was going to do that now,” Kim said. “I guess I can wait though.”

  “Well, then why don’t you two take off early? You’ve done a great job today.” When they hesitated leaving, I asked, “Is there something on your mind?”

  “Um, we had to test things out on the computers, ya know? Make sure the search engines could do what you want, and we, um, had to t-test the hookup to the m-military site,” Billy stammered.

  “We did a simple search, ma’am, to test it,” Kim picked up. “So we searched… you...”

  “Oh?” I said. This could be trouble. “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing. Well, we did find that you really are an emergency manager, which explains why you’re so good at this, but you don’t have any military records,” Kim finished, looking down at her feet.

  “You do now,” Billy said proudly.

  “What?”

  “Well, we figured you had to have a really good reason to be doing whatever it is you’re doing, and we like you, so we created a file for you so you wouldn’t get into trouble,” Billy said.

  “What kind of a file?” I asked cautiously.

  “If anyone searches for you in the military archives, they find an encoded file marked ‘Classified’ and won’t be able to get into it,” Billy crowed. “If they have the clearance though, they get to the next level, a file marked ‘Special Assignment’, and then the next level is ‘Covert Operations’ with a link to ‘Operation 87264’ which will take them to a room that flashes ‘Security Breach!’. Backing out of that one takes them back to the beginning. It’s a continuous loop, and all dated a year ago.”

  Billy and Kim laughed, delighted with the scam.

  “I don’t know what to say, except thank you,” I said to them. “And yes, I have reasons to be doing this, reasons I can’t share.”

  “We understand, ma’am,” Kim said, “and we’re having fun being part of it.”

  “However, I do have to ask you to make a change,” I said to Billy. “Operation 87264, I think should be Operation… Boy Scout.”

  “I can do that,” he replied. “But why?”

  “That’s classified,” I said and both of them grinned. “Oh, and if it ever comes up, I ordered you to do this, okay?”

  *

  With them gone, I turned on my computer
and started surfing, trying to find some news. I was more than curious about what was going on downstate. I hadn’t heard from my sister in so long… The first thing I found was some maps of the flooding. It was staggering. Michigan is shaped like a hand with the fingers closed: a mitten with a thumb, and that’s where my sister was, in the thumb. That area didn’t fare as badly as other parts, although the tip was gone, from Bay City to Port Sanilac. Thankfully she was further south, not by much though.

  The tip of the mitten, Mackinaw City, I already knew was flooded, and although the Mackinaw Bridge was still standing, it wasn’t attached to dry land on either side now. I wondered if sealing up the rift would help that water subside.

  Chicago was a holy mess. The entire shoreline was under a couple of feet of water and mud, and because of all the concrete there was no place for the water to go except further inland. Highways 90, 94 and even 55 and 57 were flooded or compromised.

  It was interesting and frustrating to read how the rest of the nation was reacting to our calamity. Simply put, they weren’t. So what was a foot or two of water? It was that attitude again, that if it didn’t affect them directly it wasn’t real and couldn’t be bothered with. Of course, the rest of the nation had its own problems. Half of Florida was lost, the Yellowstone Volcano was still spewing lava, and the East Coast was overwhelmed with all the refugees and no place to put them. The one new thing I found out was that the San Andreas had let go. A 10.5 on the Richter Scale had ripped a big hole in California. Maybe up here wasn’t so bad after all.