Storm Tide Rising: Blackout Volume 2

by D W McAliley

  "What happened?" Commander Price asked.

  "The Russians never showed," Jefferson answered, his shoulder sagging. "We figured it out pretty quickly that they never really meant to. That's when we decided to go forward with the plan without them."

  "Who is 'we?'" Commander Price asked.

  Jefferson's teeth clicked as he shut his mouth and shook his head. "Look, you can't just shoot me in cold blood. No one will believe you, they'll call it murder. You don't want to be labeled as a cold-blooded killer, do you?"

  The Commander looked over his shoulder at the two bodyguards. The more senior of the two held up a small pen-sized recorder complete with a digital video camera and microphone. "I've got two living witness," Commander Price said, "And two separate recorded versions of your confession. I think that'll be more than enough."

  Without another word Commander Price turned back to Jefferson, raised the Beretta, and shot him twice through the heart.

  *

  Pt.2

  Ch.52

  Turning Seasons

  It was still dark enough for the shadows and the light to blend together in a kind of purple and gray haze. The sun would be up within the hour, but the cold clouds overhead were low and heavy. They sucked the light right out of the dawn and made it nearly impossible to see. Water dripped constantly from the trees around Eric, and he did his best not to move so he wouldn't shake any off the tree stand he sat in.

  After three straight days of cold and misty weather, everything in the forest was soaked and dripping. The added moisture also made the normally noisy bed of dried hardwood leaves, pine needles, and brittle twigs a soggy, nearly silent mass of decay. Deer could be walking through the woods all around him right now, and he probably wouldn't have heard enough to recognize it.

  Eric tried his best not to doze off. He was tired and warm within the multiple layers of hunting clothes he wore. The tree stand wasn't exactly comfortable, but the gentle rocking of the large pine in the steady breeze was nearly hypnotic. Slowly, the woods grew lighter around him, though, and that helped to heighten his awareness and his alertness.

  A shadow on the first low, thick branch that jutted out from the tree just a foot above Eric's head and slightly to his right moved suddenly. A broad, flat head spun slowly around to regard him with two enormous eyes that shone a faint greenish gold as they collected and focused even the dim predawn twilight. The owl let out a shriek that sounded both terrifying and more than slightly annoyed. Then it turned and dove from the limb, spreading great feathered wings as it dropped. The bird was massive, and the tree actually shook when it sprang, but Eric never heard a whisper as it flapped away.

  With the owl gone, whatever sense of collective consciousness that had kept the tiny furry and feathered woodland creatures hiding was suddenly awakened. Small birds began flitting among the trees and underbrush, whistling and singing to each other. Squirrels chattered as they jumped from limb to limb in the upper layers of the hardwood and pine canopy. An occasional pine cone or acorn fell to pounce with a muffled impact in the leaf litter below. A squirrel misjudged an old and rotten limb on the pine tree next to Eric's. The limb snapped and fell with the squirrel clinging to it, but thankfully its quick reflexes kicked in and it jumped mid-fall to the next tree over and then chattered angrily as if to blame Eric.

  The random noises of the woods blended together into a monotonous hum in Eric's ears as he fought to stay awake. He was exhausted, and this was the longest he'd sat still and awake in days. He could feel himself slipping slowly into the warm, dark edges of sleep when he barely noticed a faint crunching sound that stood out as different from everything else. Suddenly, Eric froze, every nerve in his body coming awake and alive with a rush of adrenaline. He kept his eyes closed and focused instead on his ears, straining to hear every faint noise he could.

  Again, the rustling sound of leaves and twigs being disturbed came, and this time a small flock of sparrows heard the noise and took flight from it. More crunching sounds, though dimmer, moved across the forest floor, getting closer. Slowly, Eric opened his eyes and blinked. It was much lighter than when he'd closed them, and he guessed at least an hour had gone by in what seemed like only a few moments. He slowly and carefully raised his head an inch at the time and listened.

  He could hear the noise clearly now, and he recognized it. Deer were moving, and they were close. It sounded like at least three were coming from behind him and to his left, making their way down from the plateau of the upper fields and toward the river bottom and the swamp on the other side. Just as his dad and granddaddy had taught him when he was five and still hunting on the ground, he held perfectly motionless as the deer walked behind the very tree he was sitting in and continued down the hillside to his right. He counted three adult does and one that looked maybe a year or two old.

  The deer followed one another down the well-worn game trail, pausing every few feet to chew on some small scrub bush or a bit of a low-hanging tree. They pawed at the leaf litter as well, though what they were looking for, Eric couldn't tell. As the four females moved on down the path, Eric heard much heavier steps behind him, and he did his best not to breathe and at the same time not to move a muscle. His pulse pounded in his ears, and it took all of his concentration not to pant with excitement. Eric knew the deer behind him had to be the dominant male; the alpha buck in the area was following his harem of females.

  He also knew that if he moved even an inch, the deer would see him and bolt. Even though Eric couldn't see the buck, he could hear it sniffing the air and pawing the forest floor behind him. He probably smelled something that didn't quite belong, and that was enough to put the wily old buck on edge. Deer didn't make it to an impressive size and territorial dominance without being at least as smart as the men who hunted them.

  After a few agonizing moments, the buck decided not to risk following the does. There would be time enough for socializing later. Instead, Eric heard his heavy steps as he made his way back up to the top of the ridge. Still, Eric waited, and before long he heard a loud crash to his right and caught the brief sight of a white tail raised as the buck bounded through the underbrush a hundred and fifty yards down the trail. Eric breathed a disappointed sigh and started to stand.

  Just then, another sound caught his attention, and Eric risked turning his head slowly to check to his left. Another buck, a decent sized six pointer, walked along the same path the does had taken. Unlike the older buck, this male wasn't interested in eating, though his head dipped from time to time to smell the urine trail the females had laid down. It was the rut, and most of the bucks in the woods were being driven by the irresistible urge to mate.

  Where the does had continued on down the trail behind Eric's tree stand, this young buck broke off from the trail a little earlier. He had spotted a small cedar tree a few yards from the trail and decided it was the perfect tree for scraping his antlers. While the deer assaulted the cedar tree, Eric stood in his tree stand and drew his bow carefully and quietly. The draw was set at a strong sixty five pounds, but the angled cams at each end of the limbs of the bow gave Eric a ninety percent drop off so that he was only holding about six pounds of pressure.

  He sighted through the peep and post apparatus attached to the compound bow and picked the appropriate pin to focus on. This was about a thirty yard shot, so Eric chose the neon green point and waited for the buck to clear the brush and offer him a full profile view. The six pointer took three steps forward, and Eric loosed the arrow.

  There was a muffled thump as the bowstring snapped forward; the deer jumped a good three feet into the air, its hind legs kicking out behind it. When it hit the ground, it stumbled once and then took great bounding leaps through the woods toward the river. Eric's eyes followed the wounded buck until that final leap when it stumbled again and fell on its side.

  Before Eric climbed out of the tree stand, he pulled an old dented silver pocket watch from his hunting jacket. There were two buttons at the top next to the dial
, and he pushed the one on the right. Eric then turned the dial and set the timer for twenty minutes. He let go of the right button and watched as the tiny second hand on the inset began turning.

  Tic.

  Tic.

  Tic.

  Ch.53

  Calculated Risk

  Commander Terry Price walked through empty halls, his footfalls echoing loudly in his own ears. With only one shift working on system maintenance, the halls had become empty and desolate in the deep of night. He'd been sending teams out for weeks, groups of men with four or five of the seasoned special operations soldiers and between ten to fifteen conscripts from the facility. Each team had a specific objective to accomplish, but their broader mission was simply to remind survivors that they were not alone.

  It had been a difficult decision to begin drawing down the staff at the facility, but Commander Price was sure it was the right one. The large number of men had presented a security challenge that was insurmountable. Enemy agents had been planted among his people, despite Terry's best efforts to keep the staff filtered through his own discretion. He felt the burden of the lives that had been lost because he'd assumed his own security measures would be sufficient.

  The Commander stopped outside a heavy set of steel reinforced doors. He took a deep breath, swiped his ID card and keyed in a nine digit access code. There was a series of loud clicks as the electromagnetic relays that controlled the thick steel deadbolts swung open in unison. Commander Price pulled the door open and stepped inside.

  As soon as he was past the threshold, a buzzer sounded loudly, and the doors began to close on hydraulic hinges. At this point it would take a force greater than fifty thousand foot pounds to keep the doors ajar. It closed, and there was a heavy thud as the locks slid home and secured the entrance. Terry had long since recoded this set of doors so that only he could gain entry to the server towers and the main core systems. To reach the banks of supercomputers in charge of managing the vast amount of data stored here would take Terry through four more hatches similar to the one he'd just cleared, but that would be unnecessary this evening.

  Commander Price stood in a large chamber that had conduit running along the ceiling on the right side of the room and, on the left, the terminal end of a closed ventilation system that fed only this wing of the facility. This originally had been envisioned as the antechamber to the final fall back location of a group of VIP politicians in the seventies and early eighties, should the unthinkable eventuality happen while they were stranded on the west coast. In the event of a nuclear attack, the President and his immediate circle would find themselves in a similarly equipped facility within a three hour flight from any point in the United States.

  Once the cold war was over, many sites such as this one had been re-tasked. The outer facility was simply a support structure that had been added to house the staff and to cover the actual intent of the facility as a whole. Even the solar farm on the hillsides surrounding the helipad had been added as part of the facade and to provide power to the crew facility without drawing off the closed nuclear fission system that ran the servers and the data storage components. It was a similar reactor to those that powered nuclear subs for long periods of time, and it had at one point been a precursor to a design destined for deployment in the first manned missions to Mars.

  Here, it would provide constant, consistent power to the servers and the supercomputer control system for more than two hundred years. Human intervention typically wasn't needed to monitor the power plant, and the small maintenance that was needed was easily automated, given the spare computing power of the control systems. The antechamber was the bridge between the computer isolation unit Commander Price had spent decades designing and implementing in all four sites. No matter what the facility looked like above ground, the real heart of each site was identical.

  The Commander walked over to one side of the room where a small computer sat on a low cabinet. There was an LED monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and the tower on the open sever cabinet underneath the flat top. The computer didn't have any housing. It was only two motherboards connected by ribbons of computer cabling. Commander Price pulled out a small network PCI card and plugged it into an open slot on one of the motherboards. The display automatically opened and began running a series of program installations.

  Every time the card was used, the final step before disconnecting was to erase and format the entire unit. The only way to really make sure that it was completely clean was to put it in blank. The auto-run programs that kicked in when it was plugged into the mother board also initiated a reformat first, just in case.

  In the entire facility, this was the only system that had direct, active outgoing signal capability that was completely untraceable and completely cutoff from all other networks. It ran on a dedicated fiber network to the other three facility sites—nowhere else. It couldn't access any other system, so it was, therefore, the last means of secure communication among the sites should all other avenues fail.

  The Commander waited while the installation programs cycled, and in a few moments a window popped open requesting a pass code, which the Commander entered. He connected an Ethernet line to the network card, and a new window popped open with a simple graphic display. There were three facilities listed, but two were grayed out and unavailable. Commander Price double clicked on the one icon that was active, and a messenger window popped up. After a brief hesitation, Commander Price began typing and hit enter.

  {Chief Admin} What do you hope to gain?

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line as Commander Price waited for the reply he hoped would come. This messaging system ran off the old ARPANET code from the original secure network the DoD had established that eventually spawned the World Wide Web. The coding was ancient, but it was predictable. Filter programs on both ends of the line would strip each message and examine it for hidden viruses and bugs. Only the correct code would be allowed through, no matter who sent it.

  Finally, the system beeped once.

  [Unknown Admin] What do all men hope to gain? Power.

  Commander Price stared at the reply and felt chills run down his spine. The system beeped again as a second message came through.

  [Unknown Admin] I take it Jefferson has been.....retired?

  Commander Price felt his pulse race at that comment, and it took serious effort to control his flash of furious indignation. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed in his response.

  {Chief Admin} Retired? He confessed to high treason, mass murder, and insurrection. I executed him.

  [Unknown Admin] Semantics. You have proven resourceful. Are you interested in a position? A protectorate has suddenly become available...

  Commander Price's blood ran cold and his stomach turned. He took several deep, slow breaths to maintain his composure. He knew that whoever was on the other end of the line had to be the person who had set the entire plan in motion, the one who had given the orders that had brought down the United States. This mastermind was trying, deliberately, to get under his skin and to take control of the situation, and he had to keep that from happening.

  {Chief Admin} Before I executed him, Jefferson told me that the Russians never lived up to their commitments. Do you think you can really hold the nation without their help?

  [Unknown Admin] Treason is a funny word. You see, I have copies of laws that name who is supposed to take control in a full national emergency where the C in C is either dead or incapacitated, and it isn't you, Commander Price. The legitimate authority rests in a different office.

  {Chief Admin} If you know my rank, then you must have an idea of the oath I took, the oath every single member of my staff took. We swore to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign, and domestic. You definitely fall under the latter category, so you can stop trying to intimidate me. What was your contingency? You must have had one, right?

  [Unknown Admin] Your backup was ours. The Russians were never a guaran
ty, but your data vaults were. Everything required to completely take control of the government and commerce of the United States is stored there. We'll have at our fingertips everything from financial accounts to the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal. All we need are the access codes to reach it.

  {Chief Admin} You have to know that I won't give that to you. If you try to force entry into the system, you'll eventually be able to do it. But the best super computer decryption systems available would take about thirty years to crack my encryption algorithms. Eventually any security system will fail. You should know that coming after me to get the access codes won't get you anything. Like you, like Mr. Jefferson, I am ready and willing to die for my cause.

  [Unknown Admin] That's why we're not coming after you. Tell me, Commander Price, do you really think you'd be able to watch your daughter die to protect—

  Commander Price cut the message when he disconnected the Ethernet line and let it drop. The reformatting program began to wipe the memory from the PCI card, and once those programs were finished, he pulled out the network card and shutdown the PC. He slipped the card back into his pocket and strode back to the door leading to the facility. He had to stay focused; being distracted by any personal issues could be deadly - for him and for his men. He began the methodical process of unlocking the vault door, but his mind wanted to race toward thoughts that he desperately needed to avoid.

  He'd taken a calculated risk making contact with the other side, but he'd needed to know that real people were behind it all. Whoever they were, they were definitely real, and they were definitely trying to overthrow the government, destroy the Constitution, and just take it all for their selfish gain. He'd also needed to know if knowledge about the daughter he'd given up for adoption two decades earlier went farther than the agents in the facility. That last question from the other side had shaken him to his very core and had awakened a kind of cold, paralyzing terror that he'd never felt before, even on the battlefield.