Burning Skies (Book 1): The Fall

by Ford, Devon C.

  Men in stiff uniforms adorned with medals came and went, shooting cautious glances in the direction of the secretive pair. They had not been summoned or addressed, so the military men left the suits to their own devices.

  The woman glanced to her left, seeing the telltale glow of a burning cigarette end showing in the darker shadows. Her gaze lingered for a moment, knowing that the older man would be able to make out her features as she was bathed in dull light from the screens, but was unable to see his. She wanted to ask if it was time, if the tension could be broken and they could unleash the incredible might of the People’s Republic on their western enemies, but to ask would be to show a weakness of character that she had fought for years to hide from everyone. She was every part the stone-cold operator that he was, but she was a generation younger and had plans to rise further than she already had. Not a single woman in the country outranked her. She was at the apex of her gender amongst 1.3 billion people, and still she intended to rise higher. Everywhere she went she could sense, almost taste, the shame of high-ranking officials having to obey her commands. Her country had conscripted female soldiers for generations, for millennia even, but today she felt that female soldiers were a gimmick and weren’t taken seriously. Her dedication and aptitude had smashed those molds, and her recruitment into the Ministry of State Security had been, for her, an inevitability.

  She cast her eyes back at the screens, seeing mixed reports of empty streets shown alongside fires and looting.

  “Now,” said the voice simply from the shadows next to her.

  She said nothing, but straightened and smoothed down the dark skirt of her dark suit. She walked forward to stand on the raised dais behind the ranks of busily working analysts. After buttoning the jacket over her plain blouse, she lit another cigarette, and steadied herself. She was about to give the order, albeit by proxy, for the biggest military decision in modern history.

  She took a long drag from her cigarette, held it, then let it out slowly. “Begin the operation,” she announced, adding only slightly more information than the head of State Security had given her. Everyone there knew their role, everyone was read in on the plans—those parts which they were cleared to know at least—but then again if they were in that room then they already knew what China had done to the United States, and more importantly what they were about to do.

  ~

  Captain Wayne Grant, formerly of the United States Air Force, stood up and smoothed his own expensive suit in a control room thousands of miles away from Beijing. He was five decks below sea level on the newest vessel of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s fleet. The Type 002A carrier, only the second carrier not to have been bought from another country as a hand-me-down, was shiny and new. Although only two thirds the size of the floating cities the US had put to sea which Grant had spent much of his time aboard, this Chinese carrier boasted an efficient crew and a full complement of the J-15 Flying Sharks.

  Although trusted, and only sometimes afforded a chaperone which he suspected was more of a bodyguard, Grant had the run of the place. He wore no uniform, and was exquisitely tailored at the expense of his new masters. It seemed to him that his lack of uniform in any military setting was a uniform in itself, and he found that even senior ranks were wary of his presence.

  In the six years since he had been declared officially dead by his country after punching out from the cockpit of his F-22 Raptor, he had experienced a great many new things. The irony of it kicked him square in the gut. Despite his years of training and being at the controls of a cutting-edge weapon of destruction, he’d still ended up being shot down by a goat-herder using a shoulder-mounted weapon. A weapon that his own country had provided a generation before. After that, he had been beaten and imprisoned, but never once used as propaganda material despite being trained to expect the kind of internet home video that every citizen fears seeing a loved one appear on. Nobody cut off his head, nobody informed the United States government of his capture, and they had simply given up looking for him. Not that Grant had any family left back home to scour the internet for videos of his demise by beheading.

  It took almost a year, during which time he had been questioned but otherwise mostly ignored, but he had found himself being transported long distances by car, boat, and aircraft until he found himself on a small island being treated by Chinese medical staff as though he were in some expensive rehab clinic for the wealthy and secretive one percenters. He tried to run, and they simply let him. He soon found that the island was small, so small that he ran from one side to the other fearing pursuit, and that there were no means by which he could transport himself off. With ocean on all sides as far as he could see, he walked back to the clinic and accepted the treatment on offer, along with a refreshing, cold beer.

  His loyalty had been stretched, and apparently hadn’t been that firm to begin with, because he willingly accepted the offer to become a Chinese citizen and join the Ministry of State Security as an advisor to the People’s Army. He was treated like a general everywhere he went, and now he was officially advising the officers overseeing the air operations of the next phase of their plan. He had no need to give orders, as he found the Chinese beyond reproach when it came to the efficiency of their military operations. He was there to simply advise if the commanders needed their own home-grown American to ask what their opposition was thinking and doing.

  In his heart, he knew he had been turned. He knew that the psychological pressure and careful treatment had led to him feeling aggrieved with the country of his birth and who he served, but if he was honest, he liked his new life. Fighter pilots by their very nature are showboats, and he never lacked for respect or admiration. And he certainly never lacked for attractive women around him, even if he was sure they were now paid to keep him company.

  Knowing all this, he was still okay with it. Happy, in fact.

  Hearing the commands given and feeling the familiar vibrations as the cargo lifts began their slow grind to bring aircraft to the flight deck, he listened to the orders given and heard the command to launch the H-9s.

  That made him smile, despite the purpose of the order. The H-9 had been developed in secret, and Grant had even played some small part in the final design tweaks. It was a cutting edge, lightweight, long-range stealth bomber which the rest of the world hadn’t yet seen. It was small enough to take off and land from a carrier, carried an intense payload, and flew so high that the bombs would fall on their targets without the targets ever even knowing about it. The munitions were a next-generation hybrid of drone technology and old-school bomb drops. The pilot, and in Grant’s obvious view no machine could ever replace a real person at the controls of a plane, could fly so high as to never be at risk of attack and drop his payload somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the target. The system was ingenious, and, he was told, actually inspired by a cult sci-fi film made in America.

  The payload consisted of a single dart-like bomb no bigger than a football. That was guided by the co-pilot by drone feed on a screen to the desired target, and then the pilot would release the rest of the bombs. They only had to make one pass high overhead, drop their targeting ordnance, then effectively toss everything else out of the window because the bombs then flew themselves directly onto the target to the desired spread pattern, and would either delay detonation for maximum penetration or could airburst and deploy over the head of anywhere. He knew, as did the senior officers onboard and the pilots themselves, that each plane carried only two guidance systems and two pieces of ordnance each on their first bombing run. He also knew that what they carried similarly hadn’t been seen by the rest of the world before.

  Their vastly improved range meant that they could fly undetected for almost the range of any Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, and fly home again, meaning that the carrier was even now still in international waters. The US military were obviously aware that a Chinese carrier group were heading for their waters, but the nominal warning had been given that they w
ere heading around the southern part of the continent to eventually visit the Chinese-built port in Cuba. No doubt the strength of the escort they would receive would be a huge show of strength, but that was never going to happen. Their eastern seaboard operations were another matter, and Grant suspected that he knew more about them than even the captain of the carrier he was on.

  “I’m going up,” he told his aides in Mandarin, a language he had surprisingly taken to with ease, and followed the young sailor assigned to them as a guide. They climbed the ladders to the glass circle of the flight control deck, high above the tarmac below, and watched in awe as the sleek birds rose from the depths. Preflight checks were quick, far quicker than he had experienced in his own flying career, and he even smiled as, one by one, the four H-9s took off from the ski ramp beside the prow of the ship and dropped slightly before powering away almost vertically to reach the thin air on the edge of space.

  Friday 11:46 p.m. – Washington, D.C.

  “Sir! Major!” Johnson’s voice said over the squad radio, full of uncharacteristic panic.

  “On my way,” Taylor answered, nodding to his captain and senior sergeant to follow him as he set off for the president’s suite at a run. Bursting through the ornate double doors, Taylor saw Johnson fighting to control the president on the thick rug as the other soldier lay unconscious and bleeding next to a heavy bust of a man who had held the same office in the past. The president himself was raging, fighting against Johnson’s grip like a wounded bull, and all the time shouting abuse and curses at them.

  “SIR!” barked Taylor, trying and failing to gain the attention of the man. Johnson was no small man, nor was he unaccustomed to fighting, but the intensity in the struggles of the President made him sweat and suck in breath just to hold him down.

  “You sons of bitches,” he bawled, his words contorted by the plush pile of the rug his face was pushed into. “You fucking traitors. You’ve destroyed our country!”

  This made Taylor stop. They had hardly destroyed their country, hell they had barely destroyed anything but a handful of buildings at worst, but the tears in the eyes of the man told him that this was something worse.

  “Sir,” Anderson said behind him, his voice so deathly hollow and subdued that Taylor dreaded turning around to look at him. He did, and followed the outstretched finger of his second-in-command to the TV screen and the unbelievable picture it showed.

  The ticker-tape read “Los Angeles Disaster,” and the picture showed something none of them would have ever wanted to see in their lives. It wasn’t the mushroom cloud image that everyone recognized from Hiroshima, but something so similar and exponentially worse that nobody spoke. The image was fleeting, and soon replaced by another scene; similar but different and appeared to be coming live from the window of a plane many miles from the explosion. Twice more the image switched.

  “LA,” said Anderson. “San Francisco. Seattle. Vegas.”

  Nobody could manage a word in response, until the grunting from the president abated. Johnson had released him and stood, walking straight up to Taylor’s face where he looked angrily into his eyes. Taylor vaguely recalled that Johnson came from Vegas, or California at least, but somewhere that the bombs had just fallen.

  “Did we do this?” he snarled angrily in his commanding officer’s face.

  “No,” Taylor said, his voice barely above a whisper, but even as he spoke the screen switched again to show another explosion, this one recent.

  “Airburst,” Anderson said simply in the same hollow voice he had used before. Taylor looked at the screen, this time showing Portland and what appeared to be a recent nuclear detonation just above the Earth and directly over the city. The human casualties he calculated off the top of his head were already the single largest loss of life in the history of mankind. He turned to the president to explain, to plead with him to understand that this wasn’t their doing, but he was gone. Putting one boot in front of the other to follow, he felt a vibration, then it felt as though a gale were blowing through the house itself, then his world went white and blinked out in an instant.

  ~

  The five missiles fired from the protruding hump of the nuclear-powered submarine shot straight upwards, then arced off in different directions as the submarine slipped back below the surface. The new design, as with the H-9 bombers, was as yet unseen by the rest of the world and had been developed in total secret at off-shore shipyards under cover to keep the prying eyes of the American satellites away. The shimmering, advanced camouflage skin of the sleek underwater killer had evaded the laughable efforts of the Americans as they sailed in circles effectively shouting to see if anyone answered. The crew of the submarine had simply stopped dead in the water and allowed themselves to sink slowly and then continue at a lower depth until well out of range of the shouts of their searchers.

  It was the only one of its design, the Type 096A, and was effectively the prototype which had been put to work early. It could only carry a small payload of five missiles, and those were not the standard missiles the rest of the world expected. The payload was only four megatons, the same size as the ones currently dropping on the west coast of the United States, but with a twelve-thousand kilometer range the sub could safely pop up in the Atlantic, fire its ordnance, and slip away again.

  Those five JL-4A SLBMs, or submarine-launched ballistic missiles, now streaked inland at six times the speed of sound. One headed for Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where over fifty thousand active service men and women were based. The remainder, instead of the tactical target selection of the first, streaked toward population centers. Streaked, with the exception of one which had an undetected malfunction in the solid fuel engine, making it splutter along at half its top speed.

  Florida was the first to suffer the most recent attack in the devastating flurry of airburst nuclear weaponry, and most of the inhabitants of that spit of land never even had the opportunity to wake and know what killed them. As the Chinese submarine slipped away off the east coast, Florida had been wiped out inside of seven minutes. Had the malfunctioning missiles been aimed there, the course of the sudden and unannounced war would have been drastically altered.

  Washington D.C., already on edge due to the presidential lockdown situation which had been ongoing for a few hours, had the added benefit that many people were still awake. Many were even still out, wrapped up against the cool air and held back behind police cordons with a view of the Capitol, and many couldn’t resist the pull of looking toward the sudden flash of bright light. Those who did were blinded instantly, as the worst and brightest firework display they would ever see erupted over the skies of the capital. After the flash came the heat; the intense, unfathomable heat which incinerated anyone close enough to the explosion like they were nothing but steam in a hurricane. With the flash, the heat, and the boiling cloud floating high above the seat of power for the country, came the shockwave. From a distance, it would look as though heavy smoke rolled out over the ground, but up close it would be the worst destruction and devastation ever dreamt possible by man.

  Entire buildings, cars, buses, crowds of people; all of them were wiped out in an instant. Erased from the face of the earth like insignificant insects facing the might of a power they could never even begin to understand. The destruction was unimaginable, unending, and unstoppable. The White House ceased to exist, as did the capitol building. Almost two hundred and thirty years of political control erased in an instant.

  GO TO HELL

  Saturday 12:10 a.m. – New York City

  Cal stopped talking to Louise when Jake was taking a turn at consoling her. He half listened to the young cop giving advice which he himself had never needed until very recently. He heard the words coming from a man he must have at least a decade on, and although he knew they were well intended, he also suspected they may sound hollow to others too.

  ~

  High over their heads and thousands of miles to their north west, screaming south east at a little over
eight thousand miles an hour, tore five ABMs, anti-ballistic missiles, fired in automatic response from a US base in Alaska. Because the distance of the launches was far shorter than expected, less than one hundred miles off the east coast, the Movement missiles devised for the mid-course intercepts were pointless to launch, instead they relied on the new system designed and tested in secret.

  The Chinese weren’t the only world power to have unleashed new technology that night, and when the word was given to launch five of the thirty-six Seeker 6 missiles the United States had at their disposal, just about everyone held their breath. Testing had proven to be 100 percent effective, but they were on the back foot. The nukes detonated on the west coast weren’t missile-borne, but the signatures which set alarms screaming from the Atlantic near Florida were in play.

  Lieutenant Colonel Andy Gilbert stood at ease as he watched the signatures on the big screen split apart and head in different directions.

  “Acquire targets,” he called out to his control room, “prepare to fire five Seekers.”

  “Targets acquired,” came a calm response, “fire on your mark.”

  “Fire,” said Gilbert instantly with no trace of hesitation, feeling the facility shake with the combined force of five rockets capable of almost Mach-9 erupting into the sky far above them.

  The threat had first come from the Soviet Union, and the facility he stood in was built as a direct response to that threat of mutually assured destruction. The United States had no desire to agree to be destroyed and, just as every other country in possession of nuclear warheads, began another arms race with more intensity than the space race to develop the most effective intercept missiles. These next generation missiles were designed with another purpose, rather than another tool in the box for two heavyweights to slug it out. The threat they feared more today was a short-range attack, or a nuclear or chemical or biological attack coming in by plane. The Seekers were designed to outrun everything known to fly, and instead of carrying a warhead, it relied on kinetic energy to displace the attack.