Lee pined for the lives of her fellow soldiers who weren’t estranged from their families and would spend the day sleeping in somewhere far away from any sirens or sand. She lumbered back to the bedroom to grab her camos and pull her pants on before raiding her fridge for iced coffee and Gatorade. A long day lay ahead even though she felt like last night never ended.
Sun beat ferociously on the hood, but the ocean breeze whistled from window to window inside Lee’s decrepit Plymouth. That and the iced coffee kept her from melting into the cracked leather seats as she turned the slow corners at Hickam AFB on her way to the tsunami drill assembly.
An egret slammed into her A-pillar and fluttered inside, jolting Lee awake far better than her coffee. Floppy orange legs and white feathers tussled in her lap as she swerved and braked. An ornithologist might have noted that the egret had been traveling in the wrong direction at the wrong time, but Lee only loved birds with afterburners. She flipped the writhing confusion out her window and crept back onto the road, sipping more coffee in fear that she’d imagined the whole thing in a still-drunken stupor. Another coincidence today to add to a long list that she struggled to make sense of.
Lee gripped the wheel with both hands and steeled herself, using honed mental focus to sober up. If she could pull multiple Gs upside down in the sky and stay awake, she could deal with a few lingering manhattans, a sputtering old muscle car, and a stray bird.
Lee found a parking spot next to LARS’ ratty old Camry in front of the assembly building. Beside it Banana’s flamboyant yellow Ford Raptor, probably purchased more for irony than anything else, melted into the asphalt. Lee wondered if Nana knew what recursive meant. She didn’t see SIMI’s Jeep, but he always arrived last on that element. The cars for the other elements under Lee’s command wouldn’t show up at all; they were with their families, scattered across the heartland. Colonel Franks, not known for lateness or subtlety, pulled up next to Lee in his candy-apple-red Corvette.
Lee saluted the colonel. “Tsunami watch, sir?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Green, but it’s a little more complex today.”
“It’ll be a bitch without the rest of the element, not to mention your squad. But, we’ve run this exercise a thousand times. I could do it in my sleep.”
“From the look of you, I’d guess that’s your plan, Lieutenant. Make sure you leave the feathers in your French pillow and your French language at home next time.”
The colonel’s voice hit a strange note at the end of his sentence.
‘He knows I’m still drunk,’ Lee worried. ‘Maybe I won’t get a next time; UCMJ article 112—drunk on duty—a guaranteed court martial! I’ll set a new Air Force record: the fastest to get promoted and discharged in the same year.’
“My apologies, sir.” She flicked off an egret feather stuck to her shoulder. “I’ll remember to be more conscious of the impact of my personal activities on my duties, sir!”
“Aw hell, Fairy, I didn’t mean it that way.” He put one hand on her shoulder, a rare and unusual show of compassion from the square-jawed old pilot, and nudged her toward the door. “I know it’s Christmas and your family ain’t around.” He wiped his brow with the other hand as they walked into the building together. “The reason you’re so tired, that you feel like it’s still Christmas Eve, is because . . . it is!”
The assembly building held regular classrooms once, before being hollowed out into a series of empty squares resting beside a long corridor. The septuagenarian bullet holes in the facade elucidated why this building had remained largely unaltered for generations. A marker for the terror of war now served as a marker on the map; a meeting point to assemble soldiers for undesirable duty. The historical impact served as a quiet reminder to quell any complaints; better to be throwing sandbags in the sun than fishing dead bodies out of the harbor.
The colonel opened the third door on the left and motioned for Lee to enter first. “I want to crack SIMI’s knuckles for being late to the party,” he said, waiting in the hall.
“Shit, the cavalry’s here,” said LARS as Lee entered the room.
“Time for less tea-bagging and more sandbagging.” Nana looked at Lee and slapped LARS’ arm. “Ami’right?”
“Do you even know what tea-bagging is?” LARS replied under her breath, trying to avoid Lee’s eyes as she pulled a chair off of the stack at the back of the room.
“Fairy don’t have the balls to give me a good comeback,” Nana boasted.
LARS chuckled. “Only part of that’s true.”
The door snapped open. SIMI sauntered in and stood behind the others, bristling from a brief admonishment.
“You can take a seat, SIMI,” Franks told him, strolling into the room.
“Thank you, sir,” SIMI said, retrieving a chair from the back.
“Living up to your call sign, SIMI?” LARS chided him.
“Yes, he is,” the colonel answered for him. “Too bad I’m not a Major, because if SIMI hadn’t seen combat I’d change his call sign to SICI.”
“Cuz he’s got sick skills in the sky, sir?” Nana asked.
“No, dummy. S. I. C. I. Stop Ignoring Colonel’s Instructions.”
The other three stifled laughter.
“I still don’t understand how you can claim combat duty for flying in a no-fly zone,” Nana said.
“Enough,” the colonel cautioned. “SIMI escorting a lost Russian out of the Syrian no-fly zone is a hell of a lot closer to actual combat than the rest of you have ever seen. Tease him all you want, but he’s earned the right to keep his call sign safe from my meddling.”
“What instructions from your major did you ignore anyway?” LARS asked.
“Sir?” SIMI looked to the colonel for support.
“Since it didn’t happen on my watch, SIMI doesn’t have to tell you the whole story,” the colonel said. “But, as call sign origins go, it’s pretty benign. At least compared to your drunken condom demonstration on YouTube, Ba-Nana.”
Nana winced, that certainly wasn’t the story he told women in bars about his call sign.
“Oh, ready to shut that trap now, Lieutenant?” The Colonel turned to SIMI. “Tell em, son. I got heavy orders for y’all today. I need you to fly as one unit up there, one family. You know all their call sign origins, it’s only fair.”
“Sharing is caring, SIMI.” LARS prodded. “I need to know you’ve got my back while we’re out there pitching sandbags to-wait . . . Colonel, did you say ‘up’ there?”
“I did. Maybe for the last time.”
The normally jovial LARS and Nana sobered up. “Shit. SIMI, you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Nana said.
SIMI sighed. “The instruction I so famously ignored was my major’s directions for checking my pressure suit. On a training exercise in an F-14 it inflated and compressed my breathing, knocking me out.”
“Hey at least you can say it’s past tense now: Stopped Ignoring Major’s Instructions,” LARS reminded him, returning to form.
“And it looks like you’re still owning up to being the Loudest Arrogant Raptor Sister,” the colonel said.
“I like it better than Littlest. At least RF didn’t saddle me with that.”
“Good, Lieutenant Lee might lose the opportunity after today,” the Colonel said.
The four pilots hushed, knowing only combat could bar Lee’s input on their call signs.
The colonel sat down on his chair backwards, crossing his arms on the back and leaning forward, rocking slightly.
“Now that I’ve got your complete attention, you may notice my relaxed posture,” he said solemnly. “Do not take this as a sign that you are at ease. I am merely attempting to come down to your miserable level, as I believe you may find what you’re about to hear a bit disconcerting.”
Franks wasn’t the biggest hard-ass superior officer in the Air Force, but he rarely showed direct empathy to subordinates, at least as a group. He produced an unusual smile, equal parts conjured and sincere, to calm the young
pilots.
“The good news: no matter what you were up to last night you didn’t actually sleep in until noon. The clocks are right, it still is last night.”
An odd mixture of relief and worry filled the room.
“The bad news: we’re all a hell of a long way from last night.”
The colonel stood and put his hands on his hips.
‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ Lee thought. ‘Hands on hips is the colonel’s tell he’s uncomfortable. Every superior officer has one and learning to spot them and alleviate the cause is a great tool to navigate yourself to a promotion.’
“Sir?” LARS put her hand up and Franks motioned for her to speak. “Is this still a tsunami warning?”
The colonel’s mouth scrunched and moved to the left. His eyes looked briefly at a ceiling tile at the back of the room. He wasn’t any more prepared for the news than they were, but he’d fake it for their benefit.
“This isn’t some earthquake-out-in-the-ocean type of tsunami. No, this is something quite different. When you’re up there in the air later you’ll miss the moonrise. Because it isn’t there.”
Lee lifted her hand. “They’ve blown up the Moon, sir? That’s ridiculous, there would be a cloud of debris raining down on us.”
“Duh, RF! That’s why we’re on tsunami warning,” LARS reminded her. “All I want to know is whose nukes those sand rats stole to pull it off, and where my cannons can find ‘em!”
“ISIS couldn’t pull this off,” Nana countered. “Maybe this is what the North Koreans have been building in their labor camps.”
“This isn’t Seveneves, Nana,” Lee rolled her eyes. “The Moon can’t just blow up.”
“Seven what?” Nana asked.
“Put your phone down and read a book sometime,” Lee countered.
“Put your bottle down and drink water sometime,” Nana replied at barely a whisper.
Lee studied the colonel, wondering if he knew the weakness the bubbas under her command apparently already did.
Franks put his hand to his forehead and let out a long sigh. “I thought you had to go to school to become an officer. Christ, if you four are all I’ve got left then we’re in even bigger trouble.”
“What do you mean, ‘have left,’ sir?” Lee asked.
“Well, if you’d all fall back on tradition and shut the fuck up in front of a superior officer I’ll tell you. At 10:34 PM Hawaii-Aleutian time on Christmas Eve, the Moon disappeared. You four are the only folks under my purview left on Oahu. The other elements in the squad not on holiday were scrambled and sent off to NORAD before you got here.
“Everyone else will have to report back to base in their own way, but that might be difficult. I’m sure you’ve already noticed your phones don’t work. It wasn’t just the Moon that disappeared-all the other satellites in the sky blinked out too. TV, Hubble, Air Force, American, Chinese, all of it’s gone as far as we can tell.”
The pilots had nothing to joke about now. Any last hint of conviviality drained from their faces as the colonel continued. Scenarios they’d been introduced to as children, bred into them by a culture obsessed with a latent apocalyptic dystopia, were coming to fruition. Franks relayed it with none of the mortified pain of his film and television counterparts. Franks delivered the Earth-shattering news with the same trepidation as mess duty assignments.
“It’s a singularity,” Lee whispered. She had long followed Ray Kurzweil’s public quest for artificial intelligence. However, singularity had other meanings beyond computers and black holes. More broadly defined, a singularity was a dramatic and irreversible change in the world. The destruction of the Moon certainly fit that definition, no matter who or what the cause.
“This is not just another mission, sir.” Lee grated. “This is the end of all things.”
Franks sucked at his teeth. She might well be right, but he’d go out a company man if he could. “This is only the beginning, Lieutenant. Of what I don’t know, but the first order of business is preparing for the tsunami headed this way since the Moon ain’t pulling its weight anymore. Don’t worry, you four don’t have sandbag duty this time, you’re gonna escort some VIPs off the island.” He looked up out of the window with a longing to join them. “Safest place to be for the next few hours.”
“You said the clocks are correct, so why is it daylight out?” Lee asked.
“Maybe whatever knocked the Moon changed our orbit?” LARS suggested.
The colonel found it harder to hide his frustration. “I can’t tell you more because I don’t know anything more, but that’s the way the wire came to me. All the sat-cons are down and landlines are failing left and right. The Net is history and the Air Force WAN is toast. Seems we relied a bit too heavily on privately bundled VOIP contracts.”
“But the Moon? Who? How?” Nana asked, dumbfounded.
“We don’t know how or why or what or who. More importantly, it’s not for us to ask. Our task is to get up there and protect this country.”
“Protect from what?” LARS asked.
“It’s a tsunami warning, is it not?” Colonel replied. “This tsunami just happens to be a tad bigger.”
“How much is a tad?” asked Nana, fear creeping into his normally jovial voice.
“According to the chief master sergeant, we’re looking at waves at least a hundred feet high. Navy buoys have already confirmed abnormal wave height suggesting that range at landfall.”
“Jesus!” SIMI showed concern. “We’re on an island, where will people go?”
“There’s only one person you four gotta worry about.”
“Air Force One!” Lee remembered.
“That’s right, at least your squad leader still reads the paper, or Twittler, or Facepage, wherever you kids get your news.” He pointed at her. “Since you know already, fill em in, RF.”
“You guys don’t seriously think they have ‘stars and stripes’ cupcakes at the commissary all the time, right?” Lee asked rhetorically.
Nana hit his forehead with his palm. “She’s right, the president’s been on the island since last week.”
“Well, not this island,” Franks corrected him. “But in Hawaii, and now he’s above it. We put your better halves up there twenty minutes ago. You get to take over when they’re relieved; JSOC is pulling them away for something else. We knew you’d only come for sandbag siren duty since the cell towers started overloading about an hour after the Event.”
“The Event?” Lee repeated. “Can we get back to that? How does the Moon disappear?”
“Airmen!” Franks straightened up, putting on his fiercest face. “It is not your position to question our situation, but to follow orders, and only those that come out of my mouth. That’s the only explanation you get.”
The squad shelved their questions, as hard as it was. Training to follow orders kicks in when it has to.
“If you haven’t guessed already, I need you in your pits and 300 klicks north to relieve Tom-Tom, Bennis, Angry Uncle and Sour Man by 0400 hours,” Franks ordered, then cringed. “Forget the clock, I’ll give you a countdown deadline to get airborne.”
“Normally I’d be chomping at the bit for presidential security detail, sir,” LARS started, “but I gotta know what—”
“But nothing, pilot!” Franks angrily interrupted her. “You’ll be finding out what all this means when the rest of us do. If you want to stay here and piss on yourselves for the next five minutes before suiting up that’s fine with me, but I have been put on sandbag duty. I hope for your sakes I don’t live to see your sorry asses come back for mop up. You are dismissed!”
The four young pilots slowly stood and saluted as Franks marched out of the door.
“Did you see it? He almost teared up at the end,” Nana said.
“Not funny,” LARS insisted.
“Wasn’t joking.”
“The Air Force has strange ways to instill respect and service,” Lee said. “I’m sure that last bit was meant to motivate us. The col
onel will be in greater danger here on the ground in a tsunami than we will up there above it.”
“Speaking of above it, I don’t get it. What happened to the Moon?” LARS asked. “And what does that have to do with tsunamis?”
“The tide,” Lee answered.
“The Moon ain’t pulling the tides up any more,” SIMI added. “All that water’s gotta go somewhere.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Up our asses in forty minutes if we don’t get hopping.”
From the air the pilots saw big boats make a slow march out of Pearl Harbor, a thin gray line stretching miles into the Pacific.
“Think any of those ships can withstand a hundred foot wave?” Lee barked over the radio to the bubbas.
“It won’t be a hundred feet once they get out far enough,” Nana replied.
“Well that shit is due here in half an hour, how fast can they move?”
SIMI chimed in. “It’s classified, but a Navy buddy told me that they clocked the Reagan at over a hundred miles per hour after the tsunami in Japan.”
“How about our tsunami?” asked LARS.
“Fast as a bullet,” Lee answered. “500 miles an hour, something like that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Colonel gave me the mission log, didn’t want you three getting sentimental before we left.”
“Shit,” the bubbas said in unison.
“I hope he was kidding about sandbag duty. Ain’t no sandbags gonna stop that,” Nana pined.
“He’s evacuating civilians to the punchbowl,” Lee informed them. “He’ll get out.”
“No time to worry about it,” LARS cautioned. “Looks like whatever took out the Moon did a pretty good job on the GPS satellites. I got nothing on my spec. SIMI?”
“Nothing here either, so how are we going to find the president?”
“You’ve got a compass don’t you?” Lee said. “Not to mention the entire Pacific fleet is laid out under us like a giant arrow.”
They looked down with pity at their Navy comrades, hoping they’d surge far enough out to meet the waves before they were too high to break.
“So, the rest of the squad that we’re relieving,” LARS asked, “where is JSOC sending them?”
The Filter Trap Page 2
