by D W McAliley
Terry had been asking himself for three days who had the power, the position, and the opportunity to pull off such a massive and well-coordinated attack, and he couldn't wrap his head around it. He needed more information, but he didn't even know where to start looking, so he asked the computer to do the looking for him. He would sift through the results. A summary file opened, and Terry read through it slowly and carefully. On the third line of the summary, in bold letters, was a line entry from the President's personal itinerary, "Give surprise address to UN Security Council 8/13/10 at 0700."
He read the date three different times to make sure he wasn't imagining it. The bomb that had flattened most of New York had detonated at five thousand meters altitude just before 0600 on the thirteenth. Terry had done a computer analysis of the limited images the system had captured before the Sat Net had been taken out, and it appeared that shortly after the missile had launched, a civilian aircraft had detonated a device while on approach to Newark Liberty International Airport. The altitude of the blast and its proximity to the skyline of Lower Manhattan had resulted in a massive damage area and had flattened most of the buildings along the East River and in the surrounding area.
Fires had raged through the city for two days creating thermal spots visible in hacked foreign weather and surveillance satellites that Terry could access and decrypt. The angles of the images made any detailed information impossible to gather, but the infrared inferno that had raged in the skies above the city had spoken volumes. Terry guessed thirty percent would have survived, and even that was probably overly generous.
In all likelihood, the President of the United States had been dead for the better part of a week.
Terry tasted bile in the back of his throat and had to swallow twice to get past it. He felt a sudden electric rush pass through his body, and the fine white hairs along his arms stood on end. A question he hadn't known was gnawing at the back of his mind had finally been answered, and he wished it hadn’t. Already his thoughts were spinning faster than he could control or follow. His mind tried to track several different directions at once, and all he could interpret from the result was confused chaos.
The President was dead. Everything seemed to circle back to that one stark fact, and Terry couldn’t force his mind to process past it. Terry shook himself out of his momentary fog and scrolled down to the final item in the report. A list of names for domestic officials and politicians with the power, position, and potential motive to orchestrate or participate in this coupe had been compiled from the results of the massive data search. There were seventeen names on the list in alphabetical order, but it was a name nearly halfway down the list that caught and held Terry’s attention…Paul Jefferson, Chief Administrator of FEMA.
Since communications and satellites had been knocked out, Jefferson was the only official Terry had been able to establish contact with in spite of repeated efforts to reach others at their own secured locations. There were hardened communications systems that ran on optical transmission relays buried deep underground that should have been up and running even in the wake of a massive EMP attack, but they were all silent. Either the people who were supposed to fall back to those locations had never made it, or they had chosen not to respond to Terry’s requests for confirmation of COG-Con 0 and the establishment of DHS and FEMA control over enforcement and policing of the nation’s communities. None of that meant that Jefferson was behind the attack, but it certainly made Terry suspicious of him, especially now that he had uncovered some of the information the FEMA chief had been withholding.
Terry tapped a few commands into his computer and cut the list of names out of the summary and the full report. He stored the list in a triple-password protected file and then sent the rest of the summary and report over the internal optical network to the printers. He would put a team of junior analysts to work deconstructing the data and looking for patterns and connections that might lead them to the players, if not the ones calling the plays. With any luck, the analysts would be able to weed out some of the seventeen names and give Terry a narrower list of potential perpetrators. Terry typed up a quick and purposefully vague work order and sent it through to the manager of the statistics and analytics department with instructions to see him personally for further details.
Even though he hated the cloak and dagger hassle, Terry’s decades as a counter intelligence officer had taught him the value of face to face meetings to pass along sensitive material. All the better if you could control where such a meeting took place and arrange recording measures ahead of time. That was one reason Terry had rigged his office with nearly two dozen microphones and micro-cameras when he finalized the design of the filing safes, bookcases, and cabinets that had been built into the walls. He'd even designed the desk itself to serve as a kind of recording studio and control station with hidden buttons to individually control some of the different devices. Everything recorded in his office was dumped into four different digital vaults simultaneously, including a wallet sized mass storage device that was attached to his desktop system—a sort of digital bug-out bag.
After taking a deep breath, Terry steadied himself and began mentally composing what he'd say to the Stats Manager and how much he would leave in the shady gray area of the unanswered question. As he thought, he buzzed his assistant and asked for maintenance to come and remove the trash can and replace it. He was so lost in thought that it took him by surprise when, a few moments later, his assistant buzzed in and informed him one of the custodial staff was there to do just that. Terry blinked and looked down at the birth certificate staring up at him. He would take the chance. He picked up the paper, folded it tightly, and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket. He hung the jacket on the back of his chair just before buzzing the custodian through the door.
Terry left his pistol on the desk in plain sight and easy reach as the tall, gaunt man shuffled over to the trash can and replaced it with a twin, complete with a fresh liner. While the programmers that worked at this facility were more than justified to consider their employment a testament to their considerable skills, the maintenance staff was more likely to see this remote assignment as a sort of involuntary servitude. In reality, not many people who applied for the maintenance department could pass the necessary security clearances to get a job at a facility such as this one. That meant that the longer certain personnel served at less secure facilities, the more likely they were to be trusted with such a sensitive posting without the official background checks being performed. It was also more likely they were to have done something for which they assumed they were being punished. The end result was a maintenance and custodial staff that was, at times, more than a little surly and suspicious of the people running the facility.
At the door the custodian paused and turned back to Terry. He shifted his weight from foot to foot for a moment before speaking. "I just wanted you to know, I'm praying for you," the man said hesitantly. "I know that what you've got weighing on you is more than I could imagine, and you seem like a good man. For what it's worth, I'm praying for you."
Terry opened his mouth to reply, but the custodian waived his hands and shook his head.
"No," he said firmly, "I don't want to know none of what it is you're neck deep in, with all due respect. You can keep that and I'll thank you to do so. I just wanted you to know, is all."
The man took a clip board from his cart outside the door and put a check mark on it. Terry saw his marker and frowned. "Do I need to sign that for you?"
The custodian shook his head. "No, sir, this ain't nothing for you. I have to track my job hours and completion times, and I forget if I don't write 'em down right off. That's all."
The man put the top back on his red permanent marker with a click that seemed to echo, and Terry forced a smile. The man nodded again, then closed the door behind him on the way out of the office. Terry sat for a long time and stared at the door. The image of the date had been written across the copy of his daughters' birth certificates in
red marker. He thought about the two lists of names he'd generated and what all of it could possibly mean when tied together.
Someone, likely inside the government, had flipped a switch on the levers of power. And it had been orchestrated and executed beautifully. Terry could see it now, but he couldn't quite connect all of the dots to complete the full picture of the coupe. The list of seventeen names was too long to focus on for now. He had to trim that down.
So, for the moment, he repeated a much shorter list of four names over and over in his head.
Ch. 9
Historic Latta Plantation
The sun was gone now and had been for a while. The shadows of the trees on either side of the power line cut through had grown so dark and dense that Alyssa couldn't see anything beneath the canopy. They hadn't passed a building in a long time, and Alyssa was tired. She wanted nothing more than to sit and rest her aching legs, but Mike still pressed on.
Every few dozen yards, he would kneel and check something in the shadows along the left side of the cut. After a moment, he'd stand and shake his head before moving on down the path. Finally, Mike nodded and motioned for Alyssa to come to him. He pointed down at a faint arrow laid out in small, round stones. Mike held his finger to his lips to keep her from talking yet. He knelt and touched one finger to the last stone in the stem of the arrow, and he looked up to wink at her.
Mike stood and turned his back on the arrow, marching quickly across the cut through. Alyssa hurried to follow him. At the other side, he scanned the edge of the woods quickly and found his target. He pointed to a small flat rock that had three round stones roughly the size of her fist, each stacked on top of each other. Mike bent and collected the stones quickly. He grabbed Alyssa's hand and pulled her quietly into the shadows beneath the trees.
"What the—" Alyssa began, but Mike shook his head firmly and placed his finger back over his lips. He pulled her along in a generally straight line for a time, then turned sharply to the left and knelt behind the stump of an old windfall pine tree. He motioned for Alyssa to sit behind him, and she did.
Mike leaned back and whispered, "If someone saw the arrow and went into the woods there, they might have doubled back to wait for the person that put down the arrow in the first place. This way, if they are there and they follow us, we'll know it, and they won't be able to tell where to enter the woods. Now, stay quiet, no matter what you see, got it?"
Mike's tone was calm, but serious, and Alyssa could just make out how wide his eyes were in the dim shadows cast by the thick woods. Mike was scared, and she knew it. Alyssa nodded and waited, her ears straining to pick up any sound of pursuit. Mike turned to face the edge of the woods and began untying a pair of braided leather chords that hung around his neck. He pulled a small patch of tooled leather from his wallet and tied the two chords to the patch to complete the sling. The pouch was just big enough for the stones he'd stacked to mark his trail, and they would do a lot of damage even from a glancing blow if it came to that.
It was quiet.
They waited for what seemed like an eternity, and Alyssa's feet began to tingle from kneeling in an awkward position. At last, Mike nodded and stood. "If anyone was going to follow us," he whispered, "I think they would have by now. C'mon. I've got a camp set back a few hundred yards with fresh water and a small shelter. All we need to do is prop the roof up."
Alyssa's scowl turned to confusion, but she followed Mike as he turned and began walking confidently through the near pitch black woods. "Look," Alyssa said finally, planting her feet in the leaf litter and pine straw and her fists on her hips. "Where the hell are we, and where are we going?"
Mike sighed and gestured around them. "This is the Latta Plantation," he said, then leaned closer to her, "and even though we're a long way from the main roads, do you mind keeping your voice down? It's quiet out here and noise carries farther than you'd think."
Alyssa nodded reluctantly and hissed in an angry whisper. "Fine. How do you know where you're going? I can't see anything out here."
Mike just chuckled softly. "I grew up in woods a lot darker than this," he said cryptically. "Come on, it's not far to the camp site where there's a bed of thick green pine needles and cedar boughs. Very aromatic and...relaxing..."
"Are you trying to tell me to relax?" Alyssa spat, her eyes narrowing.
Mike quickly shook his head and held up both hands. "No, not at all. I was just making a statement. I'm tired and ready to stretch out is all."
Alyssa snorted hard through her nose and waved a hand absently at him. "Then why are you just standing there, wasting time?"
Mike ground his teeth and turned away from her without speaking. He walked through the shadowy forest and finally stopped next to a pair of forked saplings that had been bent and tied together at the tops. "Here we are," Mike said with a grin. "Home sweet home for the night." He bent and lifted a long branch as thick as his forearm into a fork in the two saplings that were bent in toward each other. Then he motioned for Alyssa to take one corner of what looked like a carpet of leaves and sticks and lift it. To her amazement, the entire sheet lifted together, and Mike hung it from two branches that had been cut off and shaped into pegs, forming the leaning roof of the lean-to shelter.
The roof was pretty low to the ground, but there was enough room for Mike to crawl inside and stretch out on his back with a little more than a foot to the ceiling. It was sturdy enough to keep out anything but the hardest rain, and the skies overhead were crystal clear. Alyssa reached in, and the bed of evergreens was indeed springy and felt inviting.
Mike nodded to her. "You sleep first," he said. "I'll keep the watch and wake you up in a few hours so I can get some sleep, okay?"
Alyssa nodded and set her backpack over to the side. She stretched out on the make-shift bed of evergreen branches, and after a few moments of shifting restlessly, she got comfortable, and her breathing grew deeper. Several long moments later, she broke the silence between them. "How did you learn to do this?" she asked softly.
Mike chuckled before answering. "I was a Boy Scout, if you can believe it. An Eagle Scout, actually, although that seems like an eternity ago now. Wilderness Survival merit badge was a requirement, and I guess some things you just don't forget."
Alyssa answered with a yawn and a grunt.
"If you wake up," Mike whispered, "and I'm not right here, you don't make a sound, okay? Stay quiet and wait, and I'll be back soon."
Alyssa mumbled something that sounded like agreement, and Mike settled his back against the trunk of a large pine. He wasn't exactly comfortable, but he wasn't exactly trying to be either. He wanted to be difficult to see against the shadow of the tree and still have a clear view of their back trail. In fact, part of the point was to be just uncomfortable enough to keep him awake through the watch.
Mike looked up at the crystal clear night sky and the few small glimpses of starlight he could see among the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a whippoorwill began to sing.
Ch.10
Breaking Protocol
Clouds to the southwest that had begun to rise in thick white and orange towers before the sunset were beginning to flash with lightening, and the distant thunder could just barely be heard when Eric finally stepped out from under the grape vineyard and into the back yard of Granddaddy's farm house. Joe and Henderson were close behind him, and all three were out of breath. It had been a long and difficult walk with the added weight they had taken from the Pharmacy, and Joe had set a hard pace to get back with the medicine.
Joe barely paused at the edge of the vineyard before climbing the porch steps and tapping softly on the door. Beth opened it and threw her arms around his neck, kissing both of his cheeks as tears streamed down hers. Joe held her for a moment, then whispered in her ear and handed over all three of their bags before shutting the door softly.
As Joe was stepping off the last step of the porch, Chris came trotting up from the direction of the river. He seemed barely winded and nodded to Joe
in the gathering gloom. "We're clear," he said softly. "I stayed back and watched that crowd until they got tired of waiting and kicked down the front door. The pharmacy won't be much of a pharmacy for a while, though. They busted out all of the windows, emptied the place, then torched it. The crowd scattered once the fire got really going. I think it got a lot bigger a lot quicker than they thought it would."
"We got a problem, though." Joe said softly, casting a glance at Eric. "Did you see the burning farm house?"
Chris frowned. "Yeah, I took a peak. I was gonna ask you about that," he said, a bit confused. "It was too dark to make out much through my scope, but looked like three pretty young guys, a tent, and a burning house. I didn't try and go closer, though."
Joe nodded. "We know the family," he said after a moment, and Chris sucked his breath in through his teeth in a hiss. "Yeah. Eric was close with their son. We're heading back to see what happened."
Chris thought for a moment before speaking. "You need more bodies? I can get Tom and we'll be five. Extra man might make the difference."
Joe shook his head. "No, just us. We go fast and light, and if anything looks the least bit hairy, we come straight back. We're not looking for a fight if we can avoid one." He said that last bit looking Eric in the eye with a serious glare. "You got me, son? You follow my lead, and when I say move you move, or we don't go at all. Got it?"
Eric's answer was quick and firm. "Yes sir, "I understand."
Joe shook his head. "I already told your mother. She didn't even argue, which really makes me nervous....but we'd better go anyway."
