Asian Front wi-6

by Ian Slater

  “If it goes above two thousand,” the controller called, “start shedding,” which for the men on the four-to-midnight watch meant that they weren’t to wait until substations started tripping out. “Call Kennedy, hospitals, medical, fire, ambulance — they’ll have to go to EGs.” But the Spets man knew that the controller didn’t suspect any crisis building up. He was merely taking strict precautionary measures, confident that Con Ed’s BJGs — backup jet generators — could kick in at a few moments’ notice if necessary. What the chief controller didn’t know, however, was that the jet-engine generators had over ten pounds of sand thrown into their innards. It had been as simple as a child throwing sand at a beach. The moment they kicked in, they’d overheat and burn out.

  While the controller watched, alarm lights started to flash all over the circuit board.

  * * *

  Twenty-seven minutes later, the huge spillways of La Grande in Quebec exploded, causing massive flooding racing at unprecedented speed over the vast Canadian tundra. Feeder eighty and all other transmission lines from Quebec went dead. Four-point-seven minutes later both the nuclear plants at Indian Point reported explosions, not in the restricted rod pool area inside the plant but in the control rooms themselves. Six operators were dead — more than twenty critically injured.

  Now, devoid of nuclear power, its hydro feeder and fossil-fuel generating plant capacity out, over 90 percent of New York City was plunged into darkness — only hospitals and control towers at LaGuardia and Kennedy functioning on their own emergency generators.

  The lightning forked blue over New York so that at first New Yorkers believed the power lines and substations had been hit by the storm moving up from Virginia, and they blamed this for stopping everything from their TVs to the subway — over two million people caught in rush hour, the port loading facilities immobilized, auto accidents by the thousands, and in Flatbush, looting worse than during the blackout of 77.

  In Mount Sinai and other hospitals from New York to New Jersey and in Westchester County, over forty-three patients died during the delays before emergency generators kicked in. At Bellevue a new orderly, eager to help, struck a match, creating a flashback along the oxygen feed line to an oxygen tank, which became a rocket, tearing through two walls and killing four elderly patients waiting to go into OR, and two more in the recovery room, the explosion also creating a massive fire. Oxygen feeds were quickly cut off to prevent other explosions, but this meant that dozens of emphysema patients, most elderly, went into respiratory distress, eleven of them dying despite heroic efforts under emergency battery lights to resuscitate them.

  Ambulance crews did their best but were plagued by motor accidents, fourteen in Manhattan alone, which prevented them from responding to emergency walkie-talkie calls. Many civilians were struck down in Times Square as they were pushed off curbs by the sheer force of crowds panicking in response to the gunfire of a mugging at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway.

  Two women were dragged off near Central Park West between West Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth and raped. One was left dead, her throat slit by her attacker. There were quiet, heroic actions too throughout the city, but these were isolated cases that couldn’t hope to arrest the war-spurred fear, which climaxed around 7:15 p.m. that evening when a radio station, broadcasting weakly but broadcasting nevertheless via its own emergency generator power, relayed a conversation with a ham radio operator claiming the police had found evidence of coordinated sabotage against the city. Furious, the mayor, having to drive through the terror-filled streets first to Con Ed’s ECC and then to the radio station, finally countered the report by announcing that he had been assured by Con Ed that the blackout was an “unusual confluence of forces” and that power would be restored as soon as possible.

  Many people took refuge in churches, and some caught by the blackout near Fifth Avenue sought protection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. But nowhere was it totally safe, several people mugged in the western chapel of St. Patrick’s, while on Sixth Avenue a visitor to New York, driving north, took a right onto Fifty-seventh Street, and was sideswiped twice before being hit and killed by a city garbage truck, the accident creating a solid traffic jam four blocks east to Lexington.

  While most others had been heading home when the power went out, some had been on their way back to work in the New York Port Authority’s convoy-coordinating center in Trade Tower One when the power went out, and found themselves trapped on an elevator between the sixtieth and sixty-first floors. All telephone lines were out, the only news being relayed by the emergency-generator-run radio stations, the mayor’s assurance sounding thinner by the minute, with one station reporting heavy gunfire in Flatbush between blacks and “Little Seoul,” and several shootings in the Midtown Tunnel.

  By 8:17 p.m. the New York radio stations operating on their own power had grown to half a dozen, their lights, like those of the hospitals, pinpoints of illumination in the canyons of darkness, several more stations broadcasting unconfirmed reports of sabotage against the feeder lines coming through Westchester County and from the East Rockies mountain grid. The mayor did what he could to disavow these rumors as well, and indeed several of the stations refused to run them, but those that did were no longer relying on the unconfirmed reports of ham radio operators but on FM “Radio du Canada” broadcasts out of Montreal and CBC stations in Toronto, picked up by truckers on the interstates from Chicago to the Adirondacks. The mayor again appealed for calm. “Now’s the time,” he told the population of eleven million, “for New Yorkers to stick together.”

  For the most part they did, but the widespread random acts of violence had not yet abated, and by the time the mayor returned to City Hall he was already trying to compute the political costs to him of having told a barefaced lie earlier on, having dismissed the rumors of sabotage as “patent nonsense.” One of his aides told him that he was wanted on the phone.

  “Better be the president of Con Ed!” His Honor snapped.

  “No, sir. It’s the president of the United States.”

  The mayor held his hand over the receiver for a moment to compose himself. “Mr. President?”

  The president’s voice was competing with static on the radio telephone. “Mr. Mayor. I’m sending Al Trainor up to see you.”

  The mayor wasn’t sure what to say. What he needed was electricity — and fast — not presidential aides. “Well, Mr. President, he won’t be able to…” His voice disappeared in the sound of an enormous explosion and a ball of crimson flame curling in on itself, followed by the sound of crashing glass. A chopper, all but out of gas, had tried for a last-minute landing atop one of the skyscraper pads, but instead, buffeted by wind shear into the darkness, the pilot momentarily disorientated in the pitch black night, a rotor had hit the water tank.

  “We don’t want to get in your way, Jim,” the president was telling him, switching to an informal tone, impressing the mayor’s media aide who was close enough to pick up the conversation. He could hear Mayne cough briefly, then continue. “I ordered Fort Dix to give all possible assistance.” The mayor knew he was alluding to the riots but was being nonspecific as they were on an open line. “Al Trainor’ll fill you in with the details of assistance. I want him to be with you to see at first hand, then report back to me. Help you coordinate recovery efforts. We don’t want Washington bureaucrats standing in your way. He’ll be bringing the Apple Two contingency plan with him. Get rid of any red tape.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  Putting down the receiver, the mayor seemed even more puzzled by the president’s last comment. He turned to the clutch of aides. “What in hell was that all about? Contingency apple — two? What the hell was that? Marvin?”

  “That’d be the emergency response plan, Mr. Mayor. ‘Apple’ for New York.”

  “We’ve got our own contingency plans,” the mayor replied tartly. “What we need is electricity and money, not goddamned—”

  “It’s
not just for New York,” the aide explained. “It’s a plan that ties in New York with the feds. With the rest of the country. Ah — you signed it, Mr. Mayor.”

  The mayor raised an eyebrow. “You mean we’re only going to get what’s left over — after Washington gets finished allocating it to—”

  “No, sir,” Marvin said. He liked the mayor — had worked for him for five years — but His Honor had a tendency to see the whole world in terms of political clout and money. “No, sir. Apple Two means that it’s not just us involved. It’s all over the country. The West Coast has been hit, too.”

  “Who the hell else is going to get in on it?” the mayor pushed. “We don’t need Trainor up here to tell us that. I don’t want Jersey and the rest of them riding on our coattails. New York’s my priority. My responsibility. If Trainor’s coming up here to slice up the pie I—”

  “Until Trainor gets here, Mr. Mayor, we won’t know.”

  The mayor took a breather and relaxed as much as the situation would allow before turning to another of his aides. “What d’you think, Frank?”

  “Well, Mayne’s fresh from reelection. No cause for him to go grandstanding with us to win votes — long as he doesn’t send us a Quayle.”

  For a moment the mayor thought his aide meant a bird. “Trainor’s no Quayle,” put in the mayor’s stenographer, a petite redhead who up till now hadn’t said anything, preoccupied with worry that her parents had been caught in the tunnel. “Trainor’s very well thought of in Washington.”

  The mayor grunted. He was always skeptical of Washington — no matter what the situation, Washington always wanted something in return. If he wasn’t careful, the mayor of the Big Apple knew that the president would get all the glory. “Jennifer,” he said, looking across at the stenographer, “I want air time booked — prime time. Soon as Con Ed’s got the power back on.”

  “Can’t right now, Mr. Mayor. Phone lines are down again.”

  “What — Jesus! Well, send someone by car. Send a smoke signal — anything. If we’re not on the tube first Washington’ll steal all the bases.”

  Jennifer dispatched messengers — some by bike. For some strange reason in the flashlight-lit hallways her voice seemed to echo more than it ever did in the bright night light.

  When the messengers returned an hour later, one of them bleeding badly from a fall, they apologized to Jennifer that though they’d booked time for the mayor, the White House had already requested air time ahead of them.

  “Damn it! I knew it,” the mayor thundered. “Washington wants all the glory. It’s a grandstand play.”

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  Electrical-distribution networks right throughout the United States had been hit, including and especially the West Coast ports, where sabotage throughout the Rocky Mountain grid caused a “back jam” of ships urgently needed to resupply Second Army over five thousand miles away.

  It was the president’s decision in the face of such overwhelming sabotage to once again broadcast a reintroduction of the Emergency Powers Act of the kind that had allowed them to pick up the likes of La Roche, though in that instance their timing had been all wrong.

  To assure the nation that the government was still intact, the top Washington bureaucrats were already en route to Mount Weather, forty-nine miles west of Washington, its hub a massive bunker dug into the mountain that was operated by EM A — Emergency Management Agency — with four-foot-thick, blast-proof, reinforced steel doors, a complex that had its own underground water supply, cafeterias, hospital, TV and radio communication center, and, particularly vital in such situations as that created by the blackouts, its own power plant and sewage facilities.

  That evening as Washington’s bureaucratic convoy moved through Virginia’s Loudoun County along County Route 601, slowing near Heart Trouble Lane to no more than ten miles per hour, they saw the barbed wire atop a ten-foot cyclone chain fence that ringed Mount Weather’s four hundred acres. Above the bunker, amid the rich Virginia foliage, barracks and microwave relay antennae were already alive with activity. It might take only several days for the total power failure to be put partially right, but until then Mayne was playing it safe. What Mayne desperately needed for the American people was not to give them any more humiliating communiqués from a superhardened bunker but a victory — the feeling that despite their trials and tribulations at home, at least America was winning.

  What in hell was Freeman doing?

  * * *

  What Freeman was doing was waiting for the brand new M-1 Abrams-1 Block 3 automatic loader, modular-armor, main battle tanks, which at fifty-one tons versus the old sixty-plus could go faster and fight harder but which were now sitting cluttered dockside, the U.S.A.’s power failures meanwhile paralyzing communications not only from the Pentagon to the West Coast but even within the Pentagon itself.

  Meanwhile Freeman’s G-2 was informing him that General Cheng’s ChiCom buildup along the Manchurian border was continuing unabated, that Second Army must expect an all-out crossing of the Amur within seven days. There was another “minor” impediment, as Freeman, with calculated understatement, put it.

  “They can hit me from the Turpan depression with intermediate missiles if I move south to engage the Manchurian west flank.”

  “Yes, they can,” Norton confirmed.

  “Your estimate, gentlemen?” Freeman asked, looking about the forward headquarters Quonset hut at Chita.

  “We’re between a rock and a hard place,” a young colonel proffered. Norton waited for the explosion to come for the officer having stated the obvious, but it didn’t.

  “Colonel’s quite correct,” Freeman conceded, his face drawn and tired from looking at the maps. “Well, gentlemen, there’s only one thing to do!”

  “Sir?” Norton asked.

  “Take a walk.” And with that Freeman buttoned up his winter coat and pulled on his gloves.

  “Sir?” It was Norton.

  “Yes?”

  “Think you’d better have two minders.”

  “Whatever you think, Dick, but if the good Lord says your time’s come, so it has.” And with that, two nonplussed marksmen were sent out after him.

  “Give him at least twenty yards,” Norton advised them. “Otherwise he’ll start giving you the gears for being goddamned nannies. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. Ah, Colonel Norton, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “I sure hope he thinks of something to get us out of this—”

  A clump of needle ice crashed from a pine onto the roof of a Humvee.

  “So do I,” Norton said.

  Freeman hadn’t even turned at the ice smashing on the Humvee; he was already doing what Norton called his “Napoleon”: head down, walking stick behind him, trudging through the crisp spring snow. The PLA was south and east of him along the Manchurian hump, and no word yet from the SAS/D team he’d sent in to sound out the Mongolians’ disposition.

  * * *

  East of Nalayh, over four hundred miles south of the confluence of the Manchurian-Siberian-Mongolian border, the wind was increasing and Aussie Lewis, after having floated down into the gritty dust storm, had to rely entirely on his GPS to know exactly where he was. He lost sight of the Talon completely, hearing only its fading roar as it, together with its fighter escort, withdrew, heading back north to Second Army’s territory.

  Aussie wasn’t bitter — had he been David Brentwood he would have done the same thing, ordering the Talon to withdraw, not having enough time to try another FUST.

  As Aussie unclipped his chute, the head herdsman moved quickly over to him, yelling excitedly. Perhaps he had heard a chopper, but no, now the Talon had gone, the dogfights had ended, and all he could hear was the banshee howl of the wind. Then he saw it, suspended by two parachutes, a blurred orange image at first in the dust but its archetypal image more definite now as it struck the ground, bounced, and flipped on its side.

  “You bloody beaut!” Aussie shouted, immediat
ely running to and unharnessing the Talon’s farewell gift. It was no guarantee he’d get away, but at least there was a chance. The headman recognized it of course as a motorcycle, but he had only seen some of the motor and sidecar units of the Chinese army in earlier skirmishes with the PLA over southern borders — not one like this.

  “You bloody beaut!” Aussie repeated. It was a khaki-painted Kawasaki-250D8, which had won out against the Harley-Davidson and Yamaha for the marine corps and army contract. Used mainly in Desert Storm for recon and courier service during radio silence among the most forward units, the Kawasaki had performed well. Aussie cut the chute straps with his ankle K-bar knife, heaving the 296-pound bike up onto its stand, and could hear the tight slosh of a full tank, another jerrican of gas strapped to the left side of the pinion seat, a carbine in a right hand reverse cavalry leather holster.

  With a liquid-cooled engine, the Kawasaki could give him eighty-plus miles per hour over the rock-strewn plains, the motorcycle modified for the army so as to have wider, better-grip tires, especially in sand, with a forty-six-tooth rear-tires sprocket, giving it two better than the standard forty-four and so reducing its gearing. And the biggest plus of all, given Aussie’s position, was that the Kawasaki had a liquid-cooled engine. This made it not only more environmentally friendly in reducing fuel emission but more importantly for Aussie made it about the quietest bike in its class.

  Aussie figured if he could average fifty miles per hour through the dust storm that had now enveloped him and the enemy alike and could drive on through the night, he could make the border in eight to ten hours. But first he went back to the bullet-riddled Spets chopper and helped himself to a Makarov pistol, an AK-74 with six clips, and a dozen Spets F-1 grenades. He stuck two of them in the pockets of his del and the others in the right saddlebag with a water canister and the dried camel meat the herdsmen had given him.