Before he could finish his sentence, somewhere deep in his mind, Rob questioned himself. What’s happened to you? What’s happened to all of us? We were good, decent folk…before. Now look at us? We’ve killed women and children, those Mexicans…we killed the others during the Battle…I just killed another, these Arabs…these terrorists. When did I become them?
Rob held the rifle to the Arab’s sweating forehead for a few moments as he debated with himself. You haven’t become them. They’re animals, they kill indiscriminately. You have killed, yes, but in defense of your land, of your rights, of your country. These…people…have attacked your nation, killed who knows how many of your fellow citizens…Jesus, any one of the dead could have been Leanne…
The Arab saw Rob’s apparent indecision as weakness. He grinned despite the rifle pointed at his face. “You shall pay thrice for every sin visited upon my people, Yankee pig-dogs! You will all die! Infidels!” swore the Arab, one last streak of defiance rising in his voice.
Rob pulled the trigger.
“You first.”
SARASOTA
Dark of Night
ARTHUR “ART” CARILLION looked over his radio dials in his small HAM shack. He grunted and pushed his wheelchair forward a few inches so he could reach the adjustment knob on his antenna gain control panel. The large headphones on his head crackled a little less as he adjusted the frequency.
“Got it!” the fifty-three year old exclaimed, closing his eyes to listen to the transmission. He had tapped into a ‘net’ one of his friends had set up in the Midwest, just outside Chicago. HAMs from Montana to Georgia had jumped on to share news of local conditions. Art was sure he was about as far away as any of them could be from Ben Thompson and still hook into the net he had set up.
“…CQ…CQ…Art, you out there?” static cut off the voice of a man more than a thousand miles away.
“Yeah, Ben…I read you five-by,” replied Art, full of excitement. The darkness of his radio shack matched that of the outside world. He had the window shades drawn to block out the faint glow of the electronic dials. He didn’t want anyone passing by at this hour of the night to know he had electricity. The solar charging system he had set up for his deep cycle batteries kept him in ‘juice’ indefinitely. He wouldn’t have to worry about not being able to contact anyone.
That opened a whole can of worms for him to worry about. And he did. Art lived by himself. Art was disabled—he had lost his legs in a car accident fifteen years ago and was confined to his wheelchair. He had a few firearms at his disposal, mostly just pistols used to comfort him in the middle of the night when a strange sound woke him.
The radio shack he was holed up in at the moment had been built as a tool shed before his accident. After he lost his legs, his wife left him, and he lost his job as a truck driver. But he didn’t lose his passion for radio, which he first picked up while making long, lonely cross-country hauls.
Radio, in a way, had saved his life. At the lowest point he could get—legless, jobless, loveless, he turned to HAM radio as an outlet of grief and a tool for healing. He threw himself into it, got a license, got the gear and got involved. He came back to life. Ever since then, for the past ten years or so he had been volunteering with the local emergency services to provide backup emergency communications in situations where normal channels aren’t available for the police or EMTs. He had been training every year with thousands of other HAMs across the country for emergencies.
Now he was handed the mother of all emergencies. Many of the HAMs Art had trained and practiced with were off helping FEMA with communications. Art, disabled and chair-ridden as he was, had been delegated to the back burner.
“There’s still folks…” more static. “…by my place every day. I give ‘em some water and move ‘em on, but they tell me about the city. It’s a war zone. Fella yesterday said half of Chicago is flattened. Army rolled in tanks and artillery and just leveled it trying to stop this rebellion,” Old Ben Thompson’s voice called out. "When it's clear, I can hear 'em fighting. Scary as hell. Reminds me of the stories my dad told me of World War Two." The country drawl was unmistakable. He waited, hand by the microphone on the desk.
“It’s been two weeks now without power,” Art said into his table mounted microphone. His eyes moved to the right, spotting his ever present handgun laying on the table ready for use. He was always scared to transmit, fearing someone lurking about in the darkness might hear him and figure out what was going on, even though he was transmitting on a semi-concealed antenna. It was cleverly hidden in the branches and up the trunk of the large oak tree in his back yard. He grinned.
He had cursed the home owners association for requiring his antenna be hidden from the street. Now he blessed them. Only the tip and the lightning rod projected from the top of the tree. The wires and cables were all run underground and came up through the floor in Art’s shack. The building itself sat some fifteen feet from the back door to his small ranch house.
“Any more gunfights down your neck of the woods?” asked Ben. “Heard about that battle y’all had…” the old farmer clucked his teeth. “Having the Army roll into Chicago and start up a little war didn’t do my nerves any good either.”
“No…the National Guard stopped by today though and wanted me to come to the local shelter. They said something about how the people over in that apartment complex that had the big fight are turning that place into a fortress of some kind.”
“Smart folks…things are only going to get worse, if y’ask me.” Replied Ben’s voice
“They already are. I picked up a signal today from Europe. There was a HAM over there talking to a buddy about some sort of attack on one of airliners ferrying our troops home from overseas. Bunch of fighters intercepted it over the Atlantic and shot it down...”
“Those European sonsabitches…” muttered Ben.
Static faded into the signal as both men waited in silence, pondering the ramifications of Art’s news, relayed from Europe.
“It’s gonna be…” more static interrupted Ben. Art waited patiently for a few heartbeats. “…knew it. World War Three.” The frequency gave out to constant static. Art figured somewhere between Florida and Illinois, atmospheric conditions had changed just enough to scramble the radio waves. Art was alone again. He turned off his equipment and sat in the dark for a few seconds, thinking about the loss of so many American soldiers on that airliner in the Atlantic. If it was true. Rumors flew over the HAM nets nowadays like flies over dogshit.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they did shoot it down,” he mumbled to himself, gathering his drink and his gun and preparing to go back to his house for the night. “Best chance they’re gonna have to hurt us. Hit us while we’re trying to get home and we’ll be half dead when they get here to invade. Damn smart idea…”
He rolled his wheelchair to the door and opened it a crack, the moonlight from outside creating a beam of light into the interior of the shack. The humid night air began to circulate. He strained to hear over the din the local insects were making. Nothing out of the ordinary. Art was about to roll out the door and make straight for his house about fifteen feet away when he heard it.
Pop. Pop-pop. Someone screamed. In the distance, more shots were fired. Dogs began barking. Art paused, half in and half out of his radio shack. It was becoming a nightly occurrence, hearing the sporadic gunfire in the distance. No one during the day knew where it came from. All he knew was that his neighborhood was growing smaller and smaller by the day as more and more families moved into the safe zones or simply left for parts unknown.
Art rolled quickly to his back door, unlocked it with shaking hands, pushed himself inside and shut the door. Only after he locked and bolted it did he breathe easier, despite the higher temperature inside the house. The air felt stagnate.
I can’t stand this much more. Keeping the windows and doors shut is making this house a sauna. But I can’t leave them open…someone could get in.
Art looke
d at the gun in his lap. An old police revolver he picked up at a pawn shop years ago. He considered ending it right then and there, the fear, the depression, the loneliness, the uncertainty. Do it like old man Dawson up the street. Found him two days ago, lying in his own dried blood, all bloated up. He ended it with a gun…I could too. I bet he’s feeling no pain—
The rational side of his mind shoved the thoughts of suicide violently aside, reminding himself that he wasn’t the quitting type. If he were, he wouldn’t have been able to make anything of himself after losing his wife and his legs. With a rueful grin, he rolled into the kitchen and peered out the windows to the east.
“Just a few hundred yards that-a-way lies Colonial Gardens. A fortress…people banding together to stave off the darkness. Christ it’s like Mad Max out here anymore…” he muttered to himself. “Think tomorrow I’ll go pay them a visit…”
WHY DO THEY have to shoot their guns in the middle of the night like that?” said Brin, snuggling closer to the solid warm comfort of Erik’s body.
He rolled over on the mattress they had set up on the floor. It was cooler down on the floor. Erik wrapped his arms around the woman who had been his wife for only a year and held her tight. She burrowed her head into his chest and sighed, feeling safe again.
“I don’t know why they shoot ‘em off, baby,” he said softly. Being a light sleeper by nature, he was up instantly after the first shot while Brin didn’t stir until the last shot echoed in the distance and the dogs began barking. Everyone in the complex slept with windows open, secure in the knowledge that with guards patrolling all night, they were safe to have a little ventilation.
The first few nights after the Battle, whenever she’d heard the random gunshots in the night, she’d scream and have a flashback to the night the gang-bangers tried to break into the complex. “Go back to sleep, Brin…” he whispered softly into her hair. It smelled of lilacs.
“I won’t let them hurt you.”
NORAD
Knife in the Back
CAPTAIN URI STOLNOYVICH stood near his XO at the Conn. He smoked his cheap Ukrainian cigarette to a smoldering stub and let it hang from his dry lips absent-mindedly. His attention was focused exclusively on the radar return screen that transmitted the signals from the three torpedoes he had just launched.
Every man in that cramped command center held his breath. The air was rank with cigarette smoke and the air filters were working at full capacity to clear the atmosphere inside the Russian attack submarine Dansk. The dull red light that signified combat stations cast a demonic pallor on all the men.
The XO held a stopwatch in his hand, watching the numbers tick by, one by one. He cleared his throat and spoke softly. “Time to impact, twenty-seven seconds.”
Uri could imagine the scene that surely was playing out on board the American Naval ship he had just designated to be destroyed. Men at computer consoles not unlike those before him were probably screaming out commands and information, fear boiling up inside them as they noticed the three spears coming out of the darkness of the sea aimed straight at their soft underbelly. Sirens would be going off to alert the ignorant of their impending doom. The ship would be like an anthill that has been kicked over by a child, men swarming everywhere, to battle stations, to damage stations, running in panic.
Uri smiled through a week-old beard. Moscow would be pleased to hear of this. The other subs had moved into position around U.S. Naval bases and troop concentrations around the world. The big boomers, the ballistic missile subs of the Red Navy, had taken their position in the middle Atlantic, waiting to unleash their deadly cargo on America.
But the old Dansk, relegated to patrol duty off the coast of northern Africa for more than a year would be the one to reap first blood in the new war. Dansk, hull rusted and leaking in more than a few places, low on every imaginable supply, would get the first kill, sink the first ship. Everyone in Moscow seemed to have forgotten the American presence in Liberia. There were a couple thousand Marines stationed there to help the African cesspool get itself together after decades of bloody civil war. Now they were all nicely packed on two large American naval vessels, just getting underway for home.
Uri felt no remorse—After all, he thought, we are all soldiers. They would do the same and feel the same if our roles were reversed. I shall drink some vodka for you, Americans. You were a worthy adversary for so many years.
“Twelve seconds to impact…”
CAPTAIN DANIEL HURT roared into the microphone in his hand. “Flank speed, rudder hard to port!” He could feel the ship respond to his commands and felt the deck shudder as the amphibious assault carrier tried to evade the incoming torpedoes. Orders were shouted out by more than one man on the bridge. Lights flashed, klaxons sounded.
As the big ship began to heel into her turn, Hurt called out, “Where the hell did they come from?”
“Countermeasures away, sir,” reported the XO.
“They’re locked on!” reported the radar man.
“Look!” said the XO, pointing out the observation windows to starboard. In the early morning light, three slim trails of phosphorescent light broke the calm dark surface of the sea. “There they are…”
A large white spot suddenly appeared at the lead point on one of the glowing trails left by the torpedoes. “One fish down!” reported the radar operator. Countermeasures got that one, sir.”
“Very well,” said the Captain. “Time to impact?”
“I estimate about fifteen seconds…”
“Number two just veered off course, it’s following the decoy!” called out the XO. The glowing trail in the water suddenly turned and headed aft, heading back out to see, the torpedo’s guidance system scrambled by the American decoy. Everyone on the bridge strained to see the third trail, still heading true for amidships.
“Seven seconds to impact…” called out the XO.
“All hands, brace for impact—I repeat, all hands, brace—-“ Hurt was knocked off his feet when the torpedo punched through the ship’s hull below the waterline and detonated deep inside the American vessel. As the explosion reverberated throughout the ship’s hull, more sirens went off, louder. The deck began shuddering and sailors slid and fell all over the bridge. An awful groaning sound echoed through the hull. The captain grimaced. His ship had been gutted. Like a fish in a barrel. By a damn torpedo.
Captain Hurt composed himself and climbed to his feet in order to hold onto to a railing nearby. The ship had already swung up to level and began listing to port now. “Damage report!” he bellowed into the microphone hanging from the ceiling in the bridge. Nothing. The deck shuddered again from a secondary explosion.
“She’s listing to port, sir,” called out the XO, watching in horror as the ship began to slowly rotate and lean out over the water. He could see men jumping from the deck into the ocean below. The groaning sound grew louder and louder. “Sir, she’s tearing apart—“
The captain grabbed the mike one last time, made a snap decision that would probably cost him his career but save the lives of the men he was sworn to command. “Abandon ship, repeat, abandon ship! All hands to your lifeboats! Abandon ship, this is not a drill!” Another explosion shook the bridge, computer monitors sparked and went black. A thick, dark cloud of smoke began to obscure the view out the bridge windows.
The XO raced to the radio station and began to call for help over the fleet frequencies.
“Alright, everyone out! Let’s go, move!” shouted the captain.
IN THE HEART of the Dansk, silence still reigned. No one dare speak yet. The captain had not said if it was a kill or not and none of the crew wanted to jinx the attack.
Uri could tell by the radar screens that two of the torpedoes had failed…but the third had hit home.
“Transmission from the Americans…” said the radio operator in a high, excited voice. “Translating…” the man closed his eyes and concentrated, hearing English over his large headphones and converting it to Russian in his
head before speaking. Everyone in the command center turned and stared at their comrade. He began to sweat.
“Mayday…mayday…” the man mumbled to himself, trying to get his thoughts straight. “Under attack, torpedo strike…” he shook his head. “They talk so fast!” he took a breath and tried again. “Taking on water…sinking…abandoning ship…” the man never finished his sentence as the command center erupted into cheers.
The XO clapped his captain on the back and smiled. “Congratulations, Captain! You sank the Americans!”
Uri shook off his XO’s hand and barked a command for silence. “Get me plots on the other ship, comrades! Our business with these Americans is not over!” More cheers erupted as the Russian sub aimed its sights at the second Marine transport ship, now slowing down to gather survivors from the flaming, dying sister ship.
“By the time we are through with the Yankees, our comrades in the Army will have nothing to fight but gang members and prostitutes when they reach American soil!” bellowed Uri. The men cheered again and set to work.
WHERE THE HELL is our Force Protection?” asked General Robert Stirling’s image on the wall monitor.
“It’s there, and it’s working—“ began the Secretary of Defense’s face.
“The hell it is! We lost two amphibious carriers this morning—God knows how many Marines died, we’re still waiting for the numbers because someone shot our damned satellites down,” barked the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He glared at the Chief of Staff for the Air Force.
“Hey, we’re just as blind as you are,” retorted the Air Force general’s avatar.
“Knock it off!” barked the President, slapping the oak desk with his open palm. All the gathered men and women fell silent. The President was letting his anger show more and more as the days and weeks went by. “It’s bad enough I’ve signed away our Constitutional rights temporarily, I don’t need school yard bickering from my chiefs of staff.” All the display screens fell silent and most look ashamed to have been called out by their Commander in Chief. No one was getting enough sleep lately.
Alea Jacta Est: A Novel of the Fall of America (Future History of America Book 1) Page 44
