by T I WADE
“What do you think are our chances of being rescued if we stay here?” was the first question.
“50/50,” was the reply. “And every day could be better or worse here in the city as the gangs with weapons begin to rule if the Army and police don’t get control,” the captain answered.
“What chance do we have if we go with you?” asked a young girl.
“50/50,” was the same reply. “I prefer the country over the city. There’s more chance to find food, less chance of violence, friendlier people, and possible warmer temperatures. I think that we have enough fuel for at least 400 miles, maybe more, if we turn this place upside down and look everywhere.”
There was a lot of mumbling as people looked at each other. Most of the passengers were single people, with several couples and three families with children. There was a young girl—the young girl who had asked the question—who was special cargo, or under 16 and under the protection of a flight attendant.
It was time to check boxes.
* * *
Parts of Washington were slowly burning. Whole streets were alight with fire and others had none. There were more wooden buildings in the older and poorer parts of town—houses and three- to four-story buildings closer together and a slight wind from the East, five-ten miles per hour, had picked up. The city was going to get some rain later that night, and the moisture in the air was starting to feel obvious. It was being fueled by warmer air being pulled in from the coast, and the temperature was several degrees above freezing.
A section of the Pentagon was now nothing more than stone rubble and blackened embers. The visible fire was out, but the building still glowed from the inside as fires many levels below the street still burned. Georgetown was a mess. Many streets were also blackened. Fires were slowly being fed by the wind and embers were blowing toward new food to feast on.
There were masses of people on the streets in Washington in comparison to New York, where it was colder and everyone was either in buildings or underground. Many carried guns for protection, many were keeping their eyes on the fires, and many were turning over bodies in the streets looking for valuables. Confrontations were beginning to happen. There were groups of people beginning to get angry at the lack of electricity and warmth, angry about their depleting food resources, and angry about people robbing valuables from their poor dead neighbors.
On one street, there were two teenagers with pistols aiming them at anybody who looked at them. They did their best to look mean and were trying to hold up their trousers at the same time. The third was kicking bodies and turning them over with his feet and then bending over to check pockets or pull the clothing off.
Half a dozen men walked out into the street from two houses 50 feet from the three boys, who immediately trained their pistols in the group’s direction. One swore at the men and told them where to go, that this was their domain. The third one ripped the jacket and skirt off the body he was searching on the ground and growled at the men mockingly like a dog baring its teeth, smiling and telling his accomplices to kill the approaching old men. Two men in front of the group kept walking towards the boys, and a second later they moved aside to let the next two men through.
They had shotguns, and used them, as the smiles on the boys’ faces disappeared in a split second. The two younger bodyguards holding pistols literally flew into the air, splattering the middle boy with blood as a round of buckshot hit them both square in the bellies.
The third turned to run as the second line of men allowed the third pair through. The last looter flew higher than the first two, as two shotgun shells hit his head, back and legs all at the same time. There wasn’t much of him left as he collapsed on the ground and lay still.
“Let’s hang these bodies up at either end of our street and write a warning to anybody who wants to enter here,” shouted one of the men who had led the group in. “And I think we should carry all the other dead bodies to the end of the street and hope somebody comes to pick them up. It really pissed me off to see Tom’s daughter being pulled apart like that. We need some dignity in this neighborhood, and I think we should get our friends on other streets around us to set up neighborhood watches and protection details.”
* * *
The President was frustrated. There was nothing he could do. They had the gas in the kitchen going and a hot meal was being provided to everybody. He ate with the staff. The food was good and plentiful. His bodyguards ate after the rest had eaten, and they were unsmiling and fidgety. The President told them that he had had enough stress for one day and that they were getting on everybody’s nerves.
There was nothing anybody could do but wait. News came from the basement that an old electrical generator had been found behind a bricked up wall, and two electricians were trying to get it working. It was an old gasoline-run generator, of all the things stored in the basement of the White House, and the panels and switches looked like they worked. They needed to rewire it from the generator panel to the one of the main electrical boxes to feed power into the system. They would need gas, and the President had ordered his secret service men to go and find some containers and fill them up from any stationery vehicles. When they refused he had blown his top.
“Who is the President of this country?” he asked them, furious. They nodded to him. “Who gives you orders?” he asked. They replied “The Director of the Secret Service.”
“And who gives him his orders?” They shrugged and a couple murmured that only the President could. “So, who is the President of The United States at the moment?” Again, they nodded towards him. “Good!” the President replied. “Since your boss is nowhere to be found, I am officially taking over. I’m now your direct supervisor. Is that clear? Now leave me alone and go do what I asked you to do. If you don’t, I’m going to order those soldiers over there to shoot you, and they WILL listen to my orders, capich?”
They all nodded, looked at each other, looked at the several armed soldiers looking at them, and smiled, deciding that it was in their best interests to do as their new boss told them. That was when they heard an incoming helicopter approaching from the direction of Andrews AFB.
“Thank God!” exclaimed the President. “At least something works in this country.”
Everyone was surprised to see what they considered an ancient Huey approaching them. The secret service immediately pulled their guns, and the President angrily told them to go and do as he had ordered—his hands on his hips. He asked a couple of soldiers to form a barrier between he and the landing site, and they walked out to the lawn as the helicopter approached. It didn’t come in on the same line the usual helicopters used, but it was a sight for sore eyes, nevertheless. It was a foot or so from touchdown when the side door opened and an Air Force general jumped out. The pilot lifted back up, turned, and leaned the helicopter forward to leave in the same direction it had arrived.
“General Pete Allen, Mr. President. I’m second in command of the Air Force. You may remember me. You were considering me for possible promotion with the retirement of General Miles in March.”
“Have we met, General?” the President asked.
“We have been introduced by the Chief of Staff and by my good naval friend Vice Admiral Martin Rogers. We met at Andrews about a year ago. I’m in charge of Andrews and every U.S. Air Force base around the world.”
“That’s right,” the President remembered. “You were standing at the door when I entered Air Force One for the first time.”
“Correct, Mr. President. One of my jobs is to check your aircraft before your first ride to make sure everything is in order. I used to fly President Johnson around Texas in the old days. I have come to brief you on what we know so far. It’s not much, and we have no answers but, at I can at least fill a few holes.”
Buck and Carlos left the White House in the Huey, amused to see every weapon in the area trained on them.
“Thank god I didn’t need to fart back there,” laughed. “We would be full of lead, I thin
k. Where’s this embassy you want to check out. The general said to be back in two hours.”
For the two hours that Buck and Carlos were gone, General Allen sat with the President in the Oval Office. He couldn’t answer many of the President’s questions, but he did bring him up-to-date.
“So, you are telling me that either some type of electrical storm from the sun, or an attack from another country, has brought the United States to a complete electrical halt—that every electrical piece of machinery here in the United States, as well as maybe the whole world, is now defunct and useless?”
“Yes, Mr. President. We have heard the same story in California through the only system that I know is operational—a private ham radio link that we are hoping will be only the first of many between the West Coast and the East Coast. A third ham radio, belonging to the pilot who flew me in, is in New York and he is on his way to see if his home in Long Island is secure. If it is, he will pick up his radio and then hand it over to the Andrews Air Force Base Commander when he returns to pick me up. That will at least give us a triangle of communications. I believe that we will have several short-range military radios working soon, which will patch you into Andrews if you decide to stay here at the White House. The only other place I suggest you set up headquarters would be Andrews, but of course it will not be as comfortable.”
“And you say this helicopter that brought you in is the only one in operation?” continued the President. “Does that mean that the Air Force doesn’t have a single fighter or bomber in the sky to protect America?”
“Apart from two old C-130 transporters, we could have another dozen propeller aircraft operational within a few weeks. We are going to have to get aircraft out of museums and fly them, and some could take weeks to make ready.”
“We have a farm in North Carolina that I’m going to turn into a Civilian Air Force Base. It is a collection of World War II aircraft— three P-51 Mustangs, one P-38 Lightning and the Huey. We also have a DC-3 and the two 1956 models of the C-130. These World War II fighters can be armed with 500-pound bombs and old Sidewinder and Falcon heat-seeking missiles left over from the Vietnam era. Why we still have several dozen of these old missiles in storage at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas and Edwards AFB in California, I don’t know, but I have ordered the base commanders at Edwards, Seymour Johnson and Pope Field at Fort Bragg to search their old stock piles as well. I’m heading over to Hill Air Force Base in Salt Lake City and Nellis AFB in Vegas tomorrow. The first report from the base commander at Fort Bragg is very bad. Our fire power in the Army is currently just men and rifles. Absolutely nothing that could be considered mobile works, apart from old jeeps, trucks, and howitzers. Mr. President, I’m going to stay overnight at the Naval Air Station in Maryland to see what they have for fire power and then I’m going down to Naval Station in Norfolk to see Martin Rogers. I want to set up a defense of some sorts to repel any possible immediate attacks. If the whole world is in the same situation, and this destruction was the cause by Mother Nature, or the sun, then we should be safe from attack. If it was caused by another country, it should only take them a short time to get into range to attack us.”
“What about our satellite system? Surely something must still be working?” asked the President.
“We have absolutely no communications—satellite included. If this problem is only here in the United States or North America, then our troops and aircraft carriers are on their way home right now. If the problem is worldwide, then our naval ships could be floating steel hulls, our aircraft scrap-metal, and our troops cannon-fodder for whoever has electrical power out there. We will not know that answer until someone, or something comes over the horizon—either our own troops coming home or an attack force from the only country that can attack us, which is Russia.”
The President was silent for a few minutes, thinking hard and about to ask the million dollar question. It was difficult to get his head around the enormity of the situation.
“So General, my coffee machine doesn’t give me coffee in the kitchen because we have no electricity, correct?” The General nodded. “Yours and everybody else’s on the entire continent don’t either, except where private generators are running, and these generators are old truck engines. Your complete Air Force is as good as my coffee machine, not due to a lack of electricity, but because they have no electronics working. You believe every flying aircraft in the United States crashed last night when every electrical component in them died.” The General nodded again. “You said that half of D.C., including the Pentagon and whole districts around us, are on fire.”
“Correct,” the General replied.
“You flew over Richmond, Virginia and Raleigh, North Carolina, and both cities looked the same as Washington. There are no vehicles moving in the whole country, military or private, but the big question is: ‘What have they got to do with the electrical grid?’”
“Electrical-management systems were built into all motor vehicles starting around 1983 with Japanese vehicles. Vehicles older than 1980 still work, it is the electronic management systems, or the vehicles’ onboard engine computers that died, and today’s engines cannot run without input from onboard computers,” replied the General.
“So, all of our engines—cars, trucks, jets—still work, but their computers are down?” the President asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Our satellite systems are down because of electrical malfunctions. Our televisions, radios, the Internet, my Blackberry, everybody’s communication devises are down because of electrical breakdowns. Then who made all these parts?” the President asked.
“Probably China,” the General replied… suddenly realizing that there was a pretty good chance that it was not a sun flare or an act of God that took out the whole electrical grid.
“But China doesn’t have the capability of attacking mainland United States,” the President observed.
“They could be working with the Russians,” suggested General Allen. “And if they are, we are done for. Our whole county’s fire power is thousands of miles away. If they get back in time, then we have a chance. If this catastrophe is worldwide, apart from Russia and China, I believe they will destroy our troops over there and then walk in here and take over. There is no way we can stop the Russians from coming in and I assume that NATO, Europe, Australia, and the rest of the world are in the same boat as we are.”
The President thought for a few minutes. “But if China is behind this, why have they done it? Do we have anything to fire back at them? Anything older than 1980?” the President asked.
“Electrical parts have been made in China since God knows when. They were cheap, they worked, and even I’m shocked but they had the potential to control the world with chips, fuses, and God knows what—little things that cost less than a dollar. Your Blackberry, Mr. President, was made in China. So were all Apple products—iPhones, and iMacs and so on. If they weren’t made in China, then they contain parts that were made in China. Engine-management systems for automobiles were made in Japan, Europe, the United States, South Korea, and other countries. If they weren’t made in China, then we can probably assume that fuses, chips, bulbs, and anything that costs less than a dollar has killed all the vehicles running around earth, even if they weren’t made in China.”
General Allen paused for a moment as he continued to think through his growing theory. “Any piece of machinery that was made in America and other countries, which do not have electrical computers or controls, or shall I say some sort of electrical-management system, will still be operational. Even my Air Force aircraft is scrap metal, just like your Air Force One, but the old Huey is totally original, apart from its new radar and GPS system, and it flies. The radar and GPS are totally dead.”
“So what are our options?” the President questioned.
“I think our only option is to assume that either every electrical gadget in the world has been affected, which means that Russia might be in the same shape we are,” General Allen r
eplied. “China and its allies might be in control, which would include Iran, North Korea, and maybe Russia. They could have been delivered parts that still work once everything else is shut down. If there was somebody, or a government behind this, then they could have doled out parts as they saw fit.”
“So our country’s defense is basically useless, unless our overseas troops return. And if somebody wants us, then they certainly won’t let our forces return,” replied the President. The General nodded.
“And, all these parts or things that don’t work anymore, won’t ever work anymore?” the President sounded weary.
“I’m not sure, but I doubt it,” the General answered. “My biggest worry now is the nuclear power stations. They could rip this country and the rest of the world apart and the radiation from over 400 power plants worldwide would certainly kill even the guys who want to take us over. I think my first task is to visit one immediately and see if they are shutting down. If they are, then we will survive as a nation until an attack comes. All I can do, Mr. President is to put up whatever defense we can muster between now and then. We have no eyes and no ears, but I believe we have some time to get ready.”
“What about the cold and the people in the frozen parts of the country? What about the cities? Are these people going to be looked after by their local police forces? Can farmers even feed us all?” the President continued, now looking very worried.
“After what I saw flying over Washington and Richmond, I hate to fly over New York and Los Angeles,” the General replied. “With all the aircraft going down at the same time last night, all full of fuel and the size of Air Force One, the 9/11 disaster would be miniscule in comparison. There must be millions of Americans already dead, or now dying from the cold. We were slated to get a big snowstorm last night, too! I imagine that once urban food supplies run out, people are going to start killing each other over a piece of bread or a can of coke. The massive problem is that not many police, fire, or other emergency vehicles work, so I doubt that many people can be helped. I don’t think there is much help for the majority of people living in northern North America, or northern Europe for that matter, until somebody turns on the lights!”
