The Filter Trap

by Lorentz, A. L.

  “I imagine they’ll circle west until the tsunami has passed, then try to land on a carrier,” SIMI answered.

  “If there still is a carrier,” Nana noted.

  “We’ve got a job to do, boys,” Lee reminded them, banking her Raptor northward and taking one long last look at the paradise in the Pacific she’d been lucky enough to call home for the last six years. “There’s a president waiting for us, that’s all we should worry about right now.”

  Chapter 2

  Air Force One dipped far below cruising altitude as the presidential caravan flew over Honolulu. On the way they’d passed wreckage of gunboats and destroyers caught in the surging waves. Sailors dashed in the waters of the Pacific reached up in a vain plea for help from the commander they served. As the waves approached the island, landfall height estimates reached higher, though few would be around to validate them.

  The presidential albatross dipped even lower to watch over Pearl Harbor. An eerie radio silence fell as the waves approached the southwestern shore, home to the majority of the million inhabitants of the state.

  The ninety-minute tsunami warning did little to prepare Hawaii for this new class of disaster. As the impending doom ripped through stragglers from the Pacific Fleet, the Raptor pilots escorting Air Force One squinted to discern oblivious tourists still wandering the white sand beaches. The hapless vacationers followed the water as it retreated from the beach.

  An Air Force One staffer broke the silence onboard. “The number of estimated dead in Kauai approaching 50,000, sir. Bodies will be pulled out of tree tops and wash up on isolated shores for years to come. Not many folks left to do the counting, so we suspect the true number might be higher.”

  “What have we done for Honolulu?” the frustrated president asked.

  “Hickam is doing its best to get everyone to higher ground, sir. Being Christmas Eve, the base was understaffed for an emergency like this. It didn’t have much warning, and the civilians even less. Most people were asleep until the sirens went off. We’re expecting high six figures.”

  The President put his head in his hands, peeking through his fingers at the main island below.

  “Have we been in contact with the mainland?”

  “Yes, sir, though communication is difficult without our satellite links. Infrastructure is overloaded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Areas farther out get their news mostly from larger markets. Cell phone networks are busted everywhere and cross-country call satellites obviously went dark with the rest.

  “As you may know, Hawaii has an evacuation app, but with the towers jammed many are unable to use it. Since TV and Internet are monopolies, they’re down at the same time too with no satellites to send the signals to the local market centers.”

  “Goddamned telecommunications deregulation!” the president bellowed. “Now they’re not just waiting for Facebook to load, people are going to have to die before Congress realizes access should be a right!”

  “Remember, sir, the difficulty is not in getting the warning out, but getting the people out. Infrastructure is lagging and the highways are jammed already in the major cities.”

  “Congress has fought me on infrastructure funding my entire presidency, they’d rather their constituents get jobs building more F-35s. A lot of good those planes are going to do today. Are we at least broadcasting on the radio?”

  “Where we can, sir. Most stations have automated playlists. Not many stations have people in-house to broadcast on Christmas Eve. Most of the networks we’ve attempted to contact can’t even be reached over the radio.”

  “Are you telling me that we can’t radio the damned radio stations?”

  The president looked down again, feeling more helpless than ever in the face of the oncoming tragedy.

  When the water receded from Waikiki, most locals heeded the sirens and attempted to find higher ground. Though it would be far worse than they suspected, anyone who’d lived for some time on the island was well aware of the danger tsunamis posed. Still, even the revised extreme tsunami evacuation areas were a far cry from the real danger zones. The world had never seen a tsunami like this before, and many that did now would not survive to see anything else after.

  The pilots and politicians looking down saw thousands of Hawaiians abandon cars to run ahead of traffic jams. Tens of thousands clamored up the slopes of Punchbowl, Diamond Head, and Koko Head hoping the craters would protect them when the waves crashed.

  The walls of beachfront high-rise hotels lining Waikiki Bay, none much more than 400 feet, looked even higher against the bare beach peppered with dying fish, collateral damage exposed as the ocean reorganized for the first assault on land. The cobalt colossus, slowing only to a few hundred miles per hour as it reached up and over the shelf in front of the island, grabbed glass and steel, tossing it inward, crushing and splintering like a child stomping on dead leaves.

  The waves, easily eclipsing the 761-feet-high tip of Diamond Head, sloshed down into the craters and tumbled thousands of climbers to the swirling basin.

  The waves moved past lowlying residential areas on the western coast, putting Hawaiians still in their homes hundreds of feet below the lip of the swell. Finally, the first wave lapped against the high hills east of Waikiki and ran back down to rip asunder any of the structures remaining.

  It looked strangely soothing from thousands of feet in the air; gentle waves brushed clean the green parapet slopes of the Koʻolau Mountains and retreated, crests growing lower, until water ran off the streets, relieving the traffic jam by taking cars along with it.

  Only those who took the highway through to Kailua at the first siren would ever see another perfect Hawaiian Sunset. They instinctively headed to the undermanned and overwhelmed Bellows Air Force Station. The living appreciated their luck, but wanted answers. The barely one hundred enlisted soldiers at the base had nothing prepared.

  First to break radio silence, the president broadcast on civilian and military shortwave simultaneously.

  “Those of you on the coast, any coast, please evacuate immediately! The loss of our Moon has had an unprecedented effect on our oceans. Tsunamis are headed toward both North American coasts.

  “Earlier reports cited one hundred foot waves. Sadly, these estimates were woefully inadequate. I witnessed the devastation to our most western state just minutes ago. I fear nearly a million Americans have perished in the Pacific. I pray this day will not see a million more, but I need your help.

  “Please open your hearts and your homes to fellow Americans when they seek aid. Everyone in eastern California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Pennsylvania, the Eastern Seaboard, and our Southern Gulf neighbors, please take in these refugees as you would your own family. Because they are. We are all Americans. We will persevere together thanks to our shared sense of generosity. As a nation. As a planet. As a people.

  “God Bless.”

  “Raptor squad,” said the air commander, their next in command, crackling the radios. “Your mission is to escort the president and Air Force One to Edwards Air Force Base in California. Force One will make it fine, but you’ll need to refuel a few hundred klicks off-coast. We’ll send coordinates for the mobile tanker when we get them. Check back in before you leave radio range. For now, head east, fifteen degrees.”

  “How are things at Hickam and Pearl, sir? What of Colonel Franks?” Lee asked.

  “Keep this channel clear Lieutenant Green,” the commander gruffly ordered.

  “You think he made it okay?” SIMI asked over the com to the bubbas.

  “I’m sure the commander just doesn’t know,” Lee said. “Means there is a chance the colonel survived, that’ll have to be good enough.”

  “You think there’ll really be an air tanker for us?” LARS whispered. “There’s no emergency runways in the Pacific.”

  “If the fleet was pulled out of Pearl, you can bet anything normally docked in California is sitting a few hundred klicks off that coast now too. They aren’t abandoning a bil
lion dollars’ worth of fighter aircraft in the ocean in a crisis.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, LARS,” SIMI said. “Big Gubmit has plenty of emergency fuel stored safe and secure; those tankers can stay up here a long time.”

  Nana countered. “Maybe we should start worrying about where the fuck the Moon went?”

  “I’m more worried about everyone on the island. You saw those waves, the punchbowl was no place to hide.”

  “Nothing we can do but keep your coms on and follow orders,” Lee told them. “Colonel would have wanted it that way.”

  They veered southeast, leaving their home behind, maybe for the last time.

  “Lee, you see that radar blip?” SIMI asked, breaking a long silence.

  “Too fast to be our refuel tanker.”

  “Maybe a friendly to relieve us?” Nana suggested.

  “Not likely. We can see each other. A California Angel would have said hello,” Lee reminded them before issuing orders and banking her raptor. “SIMI, you’re coming with me. Let’s see if we need to scare somebody away.”

  “Okay, RF, but check your scope again.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s big enough to be another Force One.”

  “A tanker and some escorts with broken radios?” LARS guessed.

  “Let’s hope,” Lee said. “LARS and Nana, you stay with the president. If you see us go down, you shoot on sight at whatever comes. The Colonel warned us we might see combat, maybe this is it!”

  The two raptors broke off and increased their speed from the snail's pace of the presidential 747 escort.

  “Coming in fast,” barked Lee, as the two radar blips became bigger and faster.

  “Must have spotted us,” SIMI said.

  Two green and yellow jets blurred past, only a few hundred meters out.

  “Well, they ain’t ours,” SIMI surmised. “F-16s?”

  Lee broke off to engage the two planes circling below, getting a clearer look through her canopy as she craned her jet around and down. Over land the camouflage paint scheme may have made it hard to see the straight edges at the backs of the wings and horizontal stabilizers. Over the blue ocean the squared-off jet intakes were a dead giveaway, the tapered strakes of an F-16 absent. It wasn’t an F-16, or even an F-15, but their grandfather.

  “Earlier than F-16s, those are F-5s,” she radioed up.

  “Who would try to intercept us with antiques?” SIMI asked, arcing in pursuit.

  “An F-5 intercepting? Doubt it, they probably saw a ‘lonely’ 747 and were going to check it out, just like we did. No way those museum pieces could see our radar signatures, probably didn’t even realize we were here until the flyby. Probably shitting their pants right about now.”

  “Fish in a barrel,” SIMI said.

  “Don’t shoot until we’ve figured out who we’re shooting at.”

  The much faster F-22 Raptors easily caught up. The F-5s looked like toys, a single white missile on the end of each fixed flat wing. The two Air Force pilots started to play with them.

  The Raptors made simple curves and arcs, bottling up the other two jets every time they attempted to push past. Even their training back at Hickam had been against better jets, and probably better pilots. After a few minutes establishing superiority, Lee and SIMI put a radar lock in place and scooted in tight, damping their own engines to match speed with the F-5s.

  “Identify,” Lee radioed, flipping through different frequencies.

  A gruff and nervous voice replied, “¿Quién es usted?”

  “SIMI, they’re Mexican, gotta be. You went to school in California, you take any Spanish classes?”

  “Uhh, un poco.”

  “Tell them to go home or we’ll turn the clouds red.”

  “Pilotos Mexicanos . . . retirada . . . acuerdo?”

  After a few seconds the nervous voice came back with better English than SIMI’s Spanish.

  “We are refugees from the Mexican Air Force, requesting asylum in the United States.”

  “Aliens, boss,” SIMI radioed Lee. “Should we take them to our leader?”

  The refugees in F-5s turned out to be not-so-distant cousins of the Raptors, escorting their own president’s 747. The raptor detail never let Fuerza Aérea Mexicana Una slip within a mile of Air Force One, but the American president eagerly accepted the opportunity to radio his counterpart.

  “I wish we were meeting again under more pleasant circumstances. After you came to Toluca I always wished to come visit you in Washington. However, I’m afraid I must request to do so on quite different terms today.”

  “Señor Presidente, once this crisis has abated you’re more than welcome to come to the White House. We can shoot some hoops.”

  One of the president’s aids cringed at the overly casual remark recorded for posterity in the middle of a global crisis.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible as I’m no longer president.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have placed America under martial law, yes?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I don’t believe everyone is aware of it yet due to the satellites being out. We still have many rural areas to—”

  “I am sorry to cut you off, Mr. President, but I must make my case to you very quickly. At present, I do not claim ownership of the presidency of Mexico because the office has been vacated under duress. In the disarray, after night turned to day, the cartels launched a putsch. Our inside Sinaloa man got a message to us before the network died. I’m sure he’s dead now, but if he hadn’t done so, my entire Cabinet would be gone.”

  “I will do whatever I can to help. Who is with you?”

  “My wife, my security detail, a few members of my Cabinet and a few Congress members. We are requesting temporary asylum in the United States.”

  The conversation paused as the American president’s Cabinet scrambled to make a decision.

  “Why were you flying north in the Pacific? We’re well out of Mexican airspace, and the last I checked the cartels had home-made tanks, not fighter jets.”

  After a marked delay, the contrite former Mexican president replied, “Mr. President, I must admit to you that it is merely a fortuitous accident that we happened upon you. We’d hoped to fly undetected to Northern Canada to take refuge.”

  “Those old escort jets couldn’t make that trip, how were you going to refuel them?”

  “Our pilots do not have the luxuries yours enjoy.”

  Several minutes of radio silence passed. On Air Force One the president requested refueling for the F-5s. Refusal came with the logic that the F-5s would never make it back to the mainland anyway.

  “Are we just going to let those pilots nosedive into the Pacific?”

  “Excuse me,” a young staffer, who’d been lucky enough to be brought to Hawaii, but unimportant enough to keep her mouth shut while on the jet, spoke up. “I have a thought.” She stood from her seat at the back and walked forward.

  The president swiveled his chair and smiled. “You see? The future of this country, half my age and twice as smart I’m sure. What do you have for me, Ms. Tanning?”

  She stumbled for a moment, not expecting the president to remember her name. “Mr. President, we’ve scrambled every Navy carrier in this direction to avoid the ensuing tsunami. Aren’t the majority of our fighter jets up in the air right now, your ‘air barrier?’”

  He nodded.

  “The Ronald Reagan undocked from San Diego before the Event; it’s not far from here. Can’t we just let these two Mexican fighters land on it temporarily? If necessary, we can shove the planes into the ocean if ours come back and need the parking spot. At least the pilots won’t have to eject up here.”

  The President clapped his hands together then put them on his knees, beaming at her.

  “Please tell me you’ll run for office in twenty years,” he said, before turning to the general on board and pointing in a much less congenial tone. “And you tell me we can
land those planes on one of our carriers. Señor Presidente can come with us to Edwards.”

  “Speaking of which,” Ms. Tanning spoke up, “Major Britely is asking you to confirm your list before he ‘wastes any more good men on political favors.’”

  The president grunted.

  “Sorry, sir. His words, not mine.”

  “I know, Ms. Tanning, I just didn’t expect the hints of mutiny so soon. What the good major doesn’t understand is that Doctors Sands, Tarmor, and Douglass may be the best chance we’ve got to make sense of all this.”

  Chapter 3

  “Spectacular!” Doctor Allan Sands whispered through excited breaths. He tapped the big monitor, inches in front of his nose, studying new satellite photos of distant galaxies.

  His wife walked to his chair and gave him a soft hug before bending his head backwards to see her. “Come to bed, sweetheart. It’s past ten, the kids are waiting for Santa and the stars have been there for a billion years, they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Technically these galaxies have been there for tens of billions of years, and they’re all going places . . .” he trailed off, seeing her face turn sour. “But . . . none of them are as bright or beautiful as you, dear. I’ll be up to bed in a few minutes, just have to tag these and correlate with Oscar.”

  “Oscar must be single,” she protested. “You’ll be too if you keep me waiting too long.”

  “Oh, Oscar gets around,” Allan smiled. “He’s the Open Source Differential Photometry Code for Amateur Astronomy Research—”

  She moved his hand to her breast, whispering, “Santa shouldn’t be the only one coming tonight.”

  Allan’s heavy breathing came back for a moment as he caressed her through the sheer nightgown. “In a few minutes, I promise.”

  She twirled away, making sure her nightgown flew up for a moment.

  Several tags later, Allan turned off the monitors. Shrouded in darkness, he waited for his favorite moment, when the Moon came just past apex and into full view of the skylight in his study. Tycho, the 53-mile-wide lunar crater, appeared as a great white spot encircled by a faint grey perimeter with bright rays expanding to grip and hold the rest of the Moon from beneath.