by David Berko
Zero Hour, Shifting Power
Zero Hour, Shifting Power
David Berko
Foreword
The Before the End Series came into being from a deep- rooted fear of where our nation is potentially headed if the status-quo doesn’t change. This book aims to inform the reader while telling an engaging story. I am in no way attempting to predict the future; I merely am acting as a watchman on the wall. This journey will take you through unfamiliar places and introduce you to many new faces. All in all you will be overwhelmed but nevertheless eager to forge on in the series.
Thank you,
David Berko
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Billionaire
Chapter 2: Test Flight
Chapter 3: Free Republic of North America
Chapter 4: Scorpion
Chapter 5: Surprise Attack
Chapter 6: The Kidnapping
Chapter 7: Area 51
Chapter 8: Desmond Meets Howard
Chapter 9: Nuclear Fusion Keynote
Chapter 10: Jetpack Tour of Dreamland
Chapter 11: A Bite to Eat
Chapter 12: Outpatient
Chapter 13: Heather
Chapter 14: The Virtual Thief
Chapter 15: Assassination
Chapter 16: Rough Characters
Chapter 17: A Plan
Chapter 18: Takeover
Chapter 19: Conference in the Air
Chapter 20: President in Town
Chapter 21: The Basement
Chapter 22: Texas Joins the Fight
Chapter 23: Operation Switchblade
Chapter 24: Battle in the Sky
Epilogue
Prologue
WWIII--2018
The silo doors opened up all across North America. This wasn’t a drill.
DEFCON 1.
The day that many dreaded had finally dawned; the day where Nagasaki and Hiroshima would pale in comparison.
Crosshairs were painted on every major military base or population center on earth.
Numerous holes in the ground opened up with fire and smoke preceding the nose cones of a great many warheads headed for space on their fateful trajectories to change the course of world history forever.
Missiles were inbound from every corner of the earth. A nuclear doomsday scenario played out to perfection. Every nation that had missiles subsequently launched them.
--
Damion had dreamed of space colonization since his youth.
The young man in fact hadn’t left his teenage years yet. Damion was two bucks shy of twenty. What youth earned him? Regular trips to the barbers; pithy remarks on what he should do with himself from the well-travelled man who had been around the block; and plenty of offers from colleges. Full-ride scholarships were stacking up on the desk in the old man’s study of the third-story condo on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.
The teenager jumped into the executive chair his father bought when he married Damion’s mom years ago. The only person that sat in it though wasn’t the businessman who had picked out the furniture, but rather the adolescent thinker and visionary.
From his position in the chair came all the answers. A brain just beginning to scratch its full potential did pull-ups when its master seated himself on the throne of wisdom.
Often Damion would set up a tablet on top of the stately desktop. Watching NASA’s old shuttle missions invigorated the young mind to one day do something far greater than America’s space program had ever achieved. The hundreds of books on nuclear physics and quantum mechanics lining the shelves of the library all around him would urge him to slide on over and devour their content.
It didn’t take much coaxing.
An autobiography on the Father of Rockets (Wernher von Braun) found its way into Damion’s grip. The book’s yellow pages turned too quickly for anyone possibly to comprehend the content on them.
Damion not only understood what was on the pages, he had it memorized.
This routine carried on until an interruption. Not from his older sister Amanda either. Though occasionally she would drop in from time to time to see how her brother got on.
Amanda went to a local university to get a degree in political science. She had ambitions of becoming an intelligence officer. Her 4.0 mark in high school— graduating valedictorian--near-perfect SAT score, and the many hours of dual credit programs she took in her junior and senior years all guaranteed a successful transition to college. And that’s exactly what happened.
Between the scholarships and grants Amanda qualified for, her dream to one day warn government administrations on future threats would be paid for by her merit as an outstanding student.
Miss straight-A student didn’t appear in the doorway today however. And unfortunately Damion’s CoverGirl mother shot for a charity event in the Virgin Islands that day.
He didn’t see much of Amanda or Esmerelda anyways. But today would have been nice for a change…right when it seemed the world was headed to the brink of nuclear fallout.
The condo was empty actually. Except for the young man still engaged in his high-brow literature. Suddenly the TV came on in his father’s study by itself. It only did this to announce a national emergency or some other such thing of great magnitude. Damion got alerts on his phone like this too, but he had left it in another room.
What Damion expected to be an abbreviated sound bite energized by anxiety and fear over some breaking world event actually turned out to be a screen full of all the colors of the rainbow painting the picture of vertical bars arranged in no particular order.
It looked like the screen you would get when the satellite guy on the roof asked if you got any picture in.
As if the strange static image didn’t cause enough alarm, the weird high-pitched frequencies coming out of the speaker on the television made Damion abandon his chair and race for the hallway through the open door.
The stillness in the place made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. The eerie feeling made him put on more speed than before. Damion started to beat back the couch pillows in the living room where he thought his phone had been. For the first time that day he saw his reflection. The phone’s turned-off screen reflected back an image of a young man who looked petrified.
His phone knew it had to turn on because the user started at it long enough. The software in the device performed the magical exchange. A bright flash of color brought the screen to life.
The message was clear. DEFCON 1.
Damion swiped away the alert then put a hand to his chest. His mind raced.
He thought about calling mom. One of his unread text messages was from his sister.
“Lasagna in the fridge. Love Amanda.”
I’ve gotta get far from the Bronx, the young man strategized on the spot. He didn’t dare hang around a moment longer for fire to reign down from heaven to consume New York…and him. Damion had so much more to live for.
--
When the ICBMs escaped earth’s atmosphere and entered space, the reentry vehicles (aka warheads) separated from their boosters. The nuclear bombs would begin to plummet towards their targets at thousands of miles an hour. They would be joined by decoys that traveled with, too.
If anyone on the ground attempted to intercept, their job would be more than a challenge. The weather forecast for that day had a shower of nukes. Winter would follow.
At the last possible second the impossible happened though. A system put into place decades before went active. In North America the Missile Defense Agency flipped the kill switch to the most advanced weapons platform ever devised.
The onion had many layers. If one system didn’t work, another and yet
another waited its turn to finish the threat.
Ground-based solid electron lasers blasted missiles before they even reached the top of their trajectory curves. Other lasers and kinetic energy weapons that had previously lied in wait in space for this day unleashed their full furry on the nukes that weren’t welcome.
Systematically, one after another, the directed energy weapons defeated the numerous missiles until there were no more. No lethal salvo of killer warheads would break through earth’s atmosphere to destroy the populations below. Not today, not ever.
--
United States: 2039
Eighth grade history class
"Can anyone tell me how the Civil War happened? What caused it...?"
The teacher's gaze swept the room looking for any eager hands raised to take the question. After a couple minutes of shoulder shrugs and squinty-eyed stairs, he exhaled. "Alright, it would seem I and others have failed you to bring you up in the knowledge of what happens to a nation when the central government doesn't agree with the states."
He looked one last time at the 39 seated before him and had another urge to ask the same question again, just to make certain he didn't miss any half-raised hands or anyone who knew the answer but was unwilling to share before the class. Before he proceeded though to fill in the blanks on his own question, another idea came to him.
Rolling his cuffs halfway up his hairy forearms, Dale reached for the nearest dry erase marker. He quickly wrote in big letters with a certain kind of boldness the word history. "Can anyone tell me why we study this?" he pointed at the board with the marker.
Most of the heads in the room stared down at their desks. However, one student in the corner in the back of the room began to talk.
"I think, I think," he started to say, "it's so that we can learn from our mistakes and prevent the same thing from recurring?"
Dale was quick to nod. "Yes. You're exactly right. So let me ask you this...why the heck is the Civil War important to this class and to this nation?" The heat in his voice could have set a forest on fire in a dry land. "Well?"
The same student that had volunteered an answer earlier was taking the stand again. "Because, um, we don't wanna have another repeat? Another civil war, I mean." The boy looked down at his opened history book and back up at Dale, who looked pleased at the student's show of courage.
The teacher looked at his watch and placed his hands on the sides of a desk. He was hunched over with his upper body testing the structural integrity of a flimsy table.
"The clock says we don't have much time left for this period, but I'm gonna hold you little," he stopped in his place to omit what his tongue would have undoubtedly substituted for students, "for as long as it takes to make my point. I will warn you, it will leave all of us feeling uncomfortable. Myself included. But so be it! My generation could stomach things better than yours...it's high time you learn, too."
At that point many chairs scraped against the floor: some students got up to leave early and forgo the rest of the tense lecture, others merely buckled in and battened down the hatch.
"For those of you wise enough to stay, I will say this," began the teacher, "I think you'll wish you had left when you had a chance." His laugh punctured the intense stares, and gradually he had the floor again, getting back on topic. He became animated....
"Slavery and states' rights. That's what our history books teach us were the causes of that bloody war.
Actually, they don't even go into any depth on the latter of those two. It's all about racial discrimination in this country anymore."
He began to pace as it was apparent this topic hit close to home for him. "Our politicians, our government, those who control the curriculum..." he said with a question in his voice, "they don't want you," he pointed at no one student in particular, "to know about the real reason for the conflict that took place several generations ago."
"It's happening today people."
One kid in the middle who had been flirting with a girl to his right looked startled at the last remark, prompting in him to ask, "What is happening today, sir?"
"The beginnings of civil war, son. Our leadership is stepping all over the rights of the states and they don't even have the shame to blush, much less apologize and hand the power back over to its rightful owners."
Dale read comprehension on some of the faces listening, to his delight. Progress.
But was it too little, too late?
--
It's the year 2040 and the United States’ national debt ceiling could no longer be raised. Thirty trillion dollars in the red and yet the president along with his administration continued a long tradition of progressive taxes and welfare programs anyway.
However, as was the case in socialist Europe, that kind of spending could not be supported over the long haul, not even in the United States of America. Consequently, austerity measures were brought to bear.
The anemic funding and bare coffers of local and federal government were bled dry by the national and state debt. Right away this negatively resulted in public safety being in jeopardy: police and other first-responders faced massive lay-offs. Municipal services such as trash pickup had long-since ceased to exist. Broken street lights went unfixed, leaving large swaths of urban America in the dark. Vandalism, homicides, suicides--the unraveling of a once-great nation--occurred at an alarming rate.
Since much of America was city and rural oasises were few and far in between, much of this violence and despair spread like a plague from coast to coast in a matter of days. The National Guard was called in many times to break up the civil unrest, but they couldn't turn the tide. In this worst-case scenario the extremely restrictive gun control legislation had actually worked against the law abiding citizens who were armed only with crude, ineffective weapons; meanwhile, the people society really needed to worry about were still getting their guns and ammunition.
Riot police had rubber bullets: mobsters and riotous dissidents had lead ones. The death toll soared across the land. Enough was enough. Texas seceded from the Union. The South was next to follow. The Midwest wavered. Chicago was loyal to the national government while the states were in total opposition. This continued for several months until the mayor of Chicago died a sudden, unexplained death.
The hands of secession quickly moved from east to west. Washington didn't have time to react or suppress the movement with force. Even the military (the Pentagon) was turned against the policy makers of Capitol Hill. All of America's forces scattered around the world in FOB's (forward operating bases) were recalled, given a one-way ticket back home to the chaos.
Eventually the military was given control of the streets in cities across red America. Walls of separation were put up like the iron curtain that once divided Europe. The republic, founded on the capitalistic dreams of its founding fathers met its end in a power struggle...something the Constitution sought to prevent with checks and balances.
In a world uninterested in doing things by the Constitution, anarchy ruled. The very thing the people of the New World feared most was happening several centuries later; the rule by despotic few was coming of age.
The American heartland, Midwest, East Coast, West Coast, South, and Texas were divided into separate, sovereign territories ruled by totalitarian tyrants. This didn't sit well with the people of the former democracy however. More bloodshed ensued.
That brings us to the year 2041...the storm finally had blown over. The damage done was irreparable, however. Thousands died and millions more were displaced from their homes. America looked much like it had during the Reconstruction days following the first Civil War—minus the reconstruction bit.
--
Chapter 1
ACDC blasted through the speakers of Damion's underground garage. His mind-numbing music didn't seem to affect his tempo at all. If anything, he worked in tandem with it. All his tools were organized and in their proper places, right where he needed them. And if he had to go looking for one, well, that's w
hat his right hand man was getting paid the big bucks to do.
Charles was his name: Charles the butler. He took care of the grounds of the sprawling mansion, and much more importantly, he inclined an ear to listen and occasionally offer advice to Damion; whether it was ever heeded by the billionaire was another matter entirely. But for whatever it was worth, he was there for Damion.
…
Damion turned a wrench over in his hand and noticed the black grease marks running up and down his arms. He was working on his baby: a timeless hot rod from the early twentieth century. Whenever he got bored with it or perturbed by its antiquity, more or less, he would switch over to his modern marvel, which no one knew about except for a select few. He kept it behind lock and key; the blueprints he knew wouldn’t be safe on any hard drive or server. So he kept them in his God-given memory—his multi-billion dollar brain.
Damion's net value each year continued to go up.
Owner of many defense corp. giants and their subsidiaries...he was rolling in the dough. What most people didn't know about him was that more than just manufacturing things that went boom, he was the driving force behind an energy source for a better world. Sick of all the talk on alternative fuels and with the price of crude oil out of sight, Damion put his genius to good use and came up with the most promising solution yet: nuclear- powered cars using miniaturized cold fusion reactors.
Damion was always one chess move ahead of his opponents. Before anyone could say Three Mile Island or any other anti-nuclear buzzword, Damion's interest groups were already championing a new era of transportation with a nuclear reactor at the center of it all. The most significant hurdle to overcome was the EPA and their hoops he had to jump through. But alas, the numbers were released to the public, and to everyone’s shock and amazement, Damion had cracked the age-old energy dilemma with the answer lying in fusion reactions that produced zero radioactive waste and had a zero percent risk of meltdown.
