He watched the Base. Off in the distance, the headlights were pulling out, driving south. What remained was darkness. He started a slow walk towards the Base. There was a chance if one vehicle worked, then maybe others did too. His mind raced as the implications of what he had just witnessed impacted his Boise, his Idaho, his country. He had plans and what he had just seen had fundamentally altered his thinking. Bob ‘the Duke’ Jackson had some planning to do.
Chapter 69
Two days later
Kate opened her eyes.
“Mom!” shouted Danny excitedly. Kate lifted her hand to her face, the light above her bed was blinding her. Whether it was because of the headache she had or the fact she was looking into a light at all, she wasn’t sure.
Danny hugged her regardless. She moved her arm and hugged him back. She looked over to see a smiling Sophie and Zach. They stood by her bed. Sophie was obviously waiting for Danny to get out the way to get in and hug her too. Behind her in the next bed lay Ava. Numerous drips were hooked up to her and machines bleeped around her, but she smiled over at her mom. Kate burst into tears. Her baby was alive. They were all okay.
She looked around through her tears as she tried to come to terms with where she was. Clean, crisp, white bed sheets, a pristine hospital room. Lights, medicines, everything she would expect in a normal hospital, even a television. She took a second to look at the television. It was on, pictures were on the screen. CNN was on.
“You don’t remember what happened?” asked Sophie, hugging her mom tightly.
Kate thought back. She remembered hitting her head. A truck, she remembered a truck. Her memory faded in and out. She remembered a phone call, a man demanding the snipers be stood down. She remembered how bizarre it’d sounded at the time. The cordon they had gone through, a security area. The truck had been searched, the man with them, Nick, that was his name, had demanded they be allowed through and after they checked, they had been allowed to continue. A few miles further, another checkpoint, this one ablaze with lights, and then normality. Everything was normal. They were driving though a town, she remembered the McDonald’s sign, lit up and people waiting at the drive-thru. Just snippets. No more as she had faded in and out of consciousness
“That’s enough for just now,” a nurse interrupted the reunion.
Kate drifted back to sleep. Whatever the nurse had given her ensured she slept the night. She awoke the next morning, far brighter and more alert. The snippets from the previous few days were still struggling to make any sense. The television was off. She began to wonder if she had dreamt everything, until a man hobbled into the room. His right arm strapped to his body. She instantly knew him as Nick, the man who had saved Ava.
“You’re looking much brighter,” he smiled, taking the seat next to her bed after checking on Ava who’d smiled warmly at him.
“I feel a lot better. The headaches have gone as well.” `She looked at Ava. “Hey, honey.”
“Hey, Mom.”
Both reached out their hands and managed to touch fingers.
“You’ve got questions?” asked Nick.
“Hell yeah!” said Kate with some feeling.
“What do you remember?”
Kate ran him through the snippets.
Nick nodded a lot and as Kate finished, he asked “Do you feel able to walk?”
Kate nodded and sat up. Her headache had gone and sitting up felt normal, so she swung her legs out of the bed and stood up. Nick was by her side, his one good arm ready to help her if needed. She was fine. The floor was metal, not concrete. She looked at Nick and the floor.
“Come with me,” he said, leading the way. “Watch the step,” he advised as they left the small ward. The door had a large wheel in the middle of it instead of a handle and didn’t stretch to the floor and, like the floor, was made of metal.
“Are we on a ship?”
“Yes,” said Nick. He led the way without another word, down a short corridor and through two doorways. He knew his way around. A constant hum, a noise she had thought leftover from her injury suddenly made sense. It was the ship’s engine, not a noise in her head. Nick stopped at a door and knocked three times.
“Enter!”
Nick opened the door and let Kate walk in.
“Thanks,” said the man inside the office. Nick closed the door behind her, leaving Kate alone with the stranger.
The stranger walked over to a large window in his office and looked down. He waved for Kate to join him.
“Don’t worry, they can’t see you. It just looks like a black panel to them.”
Kate looked down on a number of screens and three men in what looked like an operations center. Two men were at controls in front of screens while a third kept watch over them. Kate looked at the screens. She couldn’t really understand what she was looking at until she recognized a couple of buildings from Boise.
“That man there, his name is Scott. He dropped a bomb that most certainly saved your and your family’s lives.”
“Please thank him for me,” she gushed.
“I won’t. It was against my express orders,” he said matter of factly. “Please, Mrs. Wolfe, take a seat.”
Kate hovered, she wasn’t comfortable in the man’s presence, his coldness was disconcerting. She looked at the door, wishing Nick would come back in.
“Please, you’ll want to hear what I’m going to say.”
Kate sat down.
The man pushed a sheet of paper across the desk to her and placed a pen on top.
“Before I begin, I’d like you to sign this.”
“What is it?”
“It states that you are fully aware that if you disclose anything we discuss here today, you will be executed for treason. You will be shot immediately. There will be no trial, no second chances. It is non-negotiable. I should point out that you and your family already know too much to ever leave this facility without you signing this.
“So, if I don’t sign this, you’ll just imprison us here forever?”
“We have no space, nor need for prisoners.” There was no attempt to veil the threat. Kate signed the paper. Not for her, but her children.
The man removed the signed sheet and secured it in his top drawer.
“Mrs. Wolfe,” he began.
“Kate, please.”
“Kate,” he smiled, without warmth. “My name is Frank Henrikson. I am the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, and was appointed by the President. It is my job to direct the efforts in Boise and oversee the situation for the President.
“Well, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re doing a goddamn awful job. And they thought Katrina was FEMA’s worst disaster…”
“No, no. You’ve got it all wrong,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve not been asked to help the disaster. We were asked to create it.”
Chapter 70
Kate stared at Frank, unable to speak. She barely stopped herself reaching across the table and beating him to death. His face remained impassive. Emotionless, he had just admitted to causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands.
“You what?” she stumbled. “So it is only Boise that was affected by the attack?”
“Well, Boise and the surrounding area, yes. But there was no attack.”
“But the power, it went out, the explosion at the nuclear plant…” she was struggling to comprehend the enormity of what she was being told.
“Unfortunate timing. The explosion was supposed to coincide with the power outage as though it were the cause. We set off a number of powerful EMPs across the area.”
“EMPs?”
“Electro Magnetic Pulses. They fry electronics, stop anything electrical from working. They worked better than we predicted. I believe nothing electrical survived.”
“Nothing, not even a flashlight,” she replied angrily. He seemed proud of his achievements.
“You know there are thousands dying needlessly. They need med
icines!”
“I don’t disagree. It is tragic, but I do disagree wholeheartedly that it is needless…”
Kate stood up, she couldn’t sit and listen to his superior and arrogant attitude any longer. “The President is aware of what you’ve done?”
“It was his idea,” he answered simply.
She was dumfounded, struggling to think what to say given his brazen admissions of what she could only see as one of the most heinous crimes ever committed.
“Why Boise?” she struggled.
“It’s our most remote city. It allowed us to understand the impact on a city scale while minimizing the number of participants.”
Kate began to pace rapidly. The more she considered what the man had told her, the more she wanted to kill him.
“And what, the rest of America just forgot about us?”
“There are barely a handful of people fully aware of what is being undertaken here and that it is in fact not a nuclear accident that flattened the city. To the world, Boise has already gone and the area is now uninhabitable. There’s a fifty-mile exclusion zone. Again, it’s the reason Boise was chosen. Any other urban conurbation with that scale of accident would have involved a far larger populace.”
“We think the world as we know it has come to an end, nuclear Armageddon, whatever you want to call it, all hope has gone that things will ever get back to normal.”
Frank struggled to hide his pleasure at what she was saying. “I heard reports that was the case. Alex and Nick had given that impression, but it is encouraging to hear it first-hand.”
“Encouraging?!!!” she screamed, her fury building. The door opened and Nick stepped in.
“You knew this, you knew we were living in some sort of game? You watched what we went through, knowing it wasn’t real? That the world was going on around us as normal while our world collapsed, our civilization fell apart?” Tears of anger flowed down her face.
Nick nodded. “But it wasn’t a game, I promise you…”
“Nick is right, this is no game. It’s much more than that, I can assure you. It’s a trial.”
“A trial…a trial for what?” she shouted, her face red with rage. The more she thought about her friends, the people who had died at the hands of the militia and the tragedy she had witnessed at the hospital and the wider city the angrier she got.
“To understand what happens when the power goes out and the world as we know it ends.”
“So what? We can stop it ever happening? Well it already has!”
“No, so we can learn how to go on, learn what we need to do to prepare for when it happens. What we can do to save as many people as we can.”
“You mean if it ever happens?” spat Kate.
“No,” said Frank. “For when it does happen,” he said, pointing to a clock on the wall behind Kate, a clock that faced his desk. It was counting down, not up: 348 days : 14 hours : 22 seconds.
Kate stared at the clock as the seconds ticked away.
“What?” Her mouth dropped open.
“Meteors, a massive shower of them. None big enough to wipe us out entirely but certainly enough by even conservative estimates to wipe out ninety per cent of the world’s population. You’re worried about a few hundred thousand, but by this time next year, over seven billion people will be dead.”
Kate just stared at the clock as he spoke.
“Whether we’ll suffer the same amount of electrical disturbance, we don’t know, but it is unlikely that any power stations or in fact many structures at all will survive the strike. We are also likely to experience some darkening of the skies for a number of years due to the amount of debris that will be released into the atmosphere as the meteors impact the earth at extreme velocities. Each meteor will have the destructive force equivalent to a nuclear warhead and the earth is going to be hit by thousands of them. Tsunamis will wipe out pretty much everyone within a few miles of the coast. It is going to be like Armageddon but we believe we can plan a way through. Will you help us?”
“Me?”
“You lived it, and according to Nick here, you rose to the challenge. Of all the people in Boise, only you are standing in front of me, which tells me as much as I need to know. You understand better than anyone what we’re facing and the little things that could make the difference.”
Kate shook her head. She walked back over to the window overlooking the operations center.
“Why are you not evacuating the coasts? You have a year to get people to higher ground, you can minimize the casualties.”
“First, the populace can’t know what’s coming. The world faced with this news would cease to function. Who would go to work or school or go about their normal lives? The world’s economies would crash and anarchy would ensue. Wars, famine, chaos and ultimately widespread death would be inevitable, without any plan for a future. When the strike comes, few can know it’s coming.”
“You paint a pretty bleak view of humanity!”
“Do I? Look at what happened to one of our most civilized and friendly cities in just two weeks! Imagine it a year from now, but add in overcrowding. Forty percent of the world’s population lives near the coast. Where are they all going to go in less than a year?”
Kate remained silent, trying desperately to think of something, anything that would make sense of what he was saying. There had to be something they could do.
“And second,” continued Frank. “And perhaps more important. After the meteor strike, food production will be a fraction of what it is now, if there’s any at all. Depending on the amount of debris, it may be years before farming can be restarted. We face the prospect of 8 billion people starving to death. Or giving a fighting chance to the few that survive the strike and spend the next year working to give them every chance possible to succeed through the chaos, thanks to what we have learned here.”
Kate wanted to go back to Boise. She shook her head, wanting to un-hear everything he had said. The enormity of what she was hearing was unimaginable.
“Please, I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but your country…” began Frank sincerely, pausing, rethinking his words. “…mankind needs you.”
Kate looked at the screens below, the devastating images of Boise projected on the screens.
“On one condition,” she said, not taking her eyes off of the screens.
“What?” asked Frank.
She turned to look him in the eye. “You’ve got all you need from Boise. End the trial now!”
THE END
Other titles by Murray McDonald
SCION
CRITICAL ERROR
DIVIDE & CONQUER
AMERICA’S TRUST
TRAITOR
THE GOD COMPLEX
ROCKLAND (KINDLE WORLDS – USA ONLY)
CAPTIVE-IN-CHIEF - (read on for excerpt)
(YOUNG ADULT – THE BILLIONAIRE SERIES)
KIDNAP
ASSASSIN
Captive-in-Chief
by
Murray McDonald
Chapter 1
Chaos was Officer Stevens’ first thought as he reached the scene. Three cars lay strewn across the upmarket lawn - one police cruiser and two Executive Town Cars, each bearing witness to a brutal gun battle. Bullet holes and shattered glass littered the area. The front door to the house was thrown wide open, an unmoving body obstructing the entrance.
“Thank God,” croaked a blood-soaked officer in the crippled cruiser.
Stevens rushed to his aid. “What the hell happened?” he asked, checking the officer for injuries.
The officer pushed Stevens’ hand away. “I’m fine, a few scratches, it’s not my blood.” He pointed to another officer on the lawn. The large hole in his chest didn’t require further investigation.
Stevens looked again. The injured officer’s uniform wasn’t the same as his.
“Are you Secret Service?” he asked, taking another look at the house to see if he recognized it.
The injured officer stood u
p. Stevens noted the name badge, ‘Tueur.’
“Tooer?” he asked.
“Close. More like ‘fewer,’” replied Tueur, leading the way towards the house.
“Is it safe?” asked Stevens, drawing his weapon.
Tueur pushed down on Stevens’ Glock pistol. “Yes. One heavily armed attacker took out pretty much the entire detail. The bodyguards got the director safely in the house before they died. I tried to help, but…”
Stevens holstered his pistol and patted a forlorn Tueur on the shoulder.
“You said director?”
“FBI. He made it to a safe room, he’s fine. We need to get him out of here.”
“There’re more units a few minutes out, let’s wait for backup,” cautioned Stevens.
“Protocol demands we should get him out of here and to a secure location as a matter of urgency,” Tueur insisted.
A second police cruiser burst into the street, its blue lights bathing the street intermittently. Two officers rushed out, their weapons at the ready.
“All clear, the shooter is down!” Stevens called out, calming the new officers instantly.
“We’re going to get the FBI Director, the target of the attack, out of the house and to a secure location. Keep watch,” Tueur commanded, leading Stevens to the house, both stepping over the body in the doorway.
Inside the house, the body count mounted. A body was face down in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs, another on the staircase. Tueur indicated upwards. Stevens could picture the scene. The bodyguards had rushed their protectee into the house and up the stairs, falling one by one as they fulfilled their sworn duty for the last time.
Tueur picked his way up the stairs, closely followed by Stevens. A female officer sat at the end of the hallway, her body propped up by the wall, her arms lying limply by her sides. A bullet hole in the center of her forehead explained her lifeless pose.
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