“And it’s my job to ensure we get those calculations right,” Molly added. The idea sent a chill through her bones. She’d accepted the mantle of leadership (more or less) and had come to terms with what it meant - at least in theory. But it wasn’t till that moment she realized the practice would be her responsibility - nobody else’s. She was the person in charge, by benefit of the single piece of paper identifying her as a Commissioned Officer in the United States Military. No one else, either on this ship, or the True North, had the official designation - just her. The Polar Star, if, in fact, it was out there, somewhere, and if Bill Schaeffer hadn’t been hallucinating, due to extreme sleep deprivation when he heard the brief, broken transmission, was, and would have to remain, just another unknown quantity. Until they established direct contact, they were on their own, and she was their Commanding Officer.
“So what’s next?” Jonesy asked.
Molly looked at John. They’d been discussing this, at length, but they hadn’t brought the others into the conversation.
“Step one,” she said. “We refuel the Assateague, and get her back in operation.” She looked at Jonesy. “You, Duke, Frank, and Weaver will be running it. It’s going to leave us stretched thin, but it can’t be helped.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied. She could see the hesitation in his eyes, but his voice remained firm and he kept any reservations or objections to himself.
“And then?” Barber asked.
She looked at John again. He nodded.
“And then we head back to Honolulu,” she said.
“And once we get there?” Jonesy asked.
She drew a deep breath and let it out, slow and easy. “We retake Sand Island.”
49
COMMSTA Honolulu
Sand Island, Hawaii
“Ready when you are,” Amber said into the hand-held radio. She had turned every switch, every button, every piece of equipment to “OFF,” in preparation for turning the power back on - a mostly redundant activity, since most of the equipment defaulted to OFF or STANDBY, in the event of a power outage, but better to be safe than sorry. Of course, it would have been nice to do it without the aid of flashlights, which were running low on battery power after so many days, but she’d take what she could get.
“Roger that,” Pruden’s voice came back. “And-a-one, and-a-two, and-a-buckle-my-shoe,” he added, and she heard a deep CLICK, followed by a hum, followed by the flickering of lights in the darkness of the Comm Center.
The glare blinded her. Eyes closed against the pain, she pressed the key on the side of the comco, and said: “That did it.”
“Board is all green,” Pruden called. “I’ll monitor it for a bit, but I think we’re golden.”
Outside, through the door, she could hear the howling of the zombie hoard occupying the building. Seems they didn’t like the glare, either. Too bad, so sad. Hope it blinds you, she thought. She blinked, wiping the tears from her eyes, and surveyed the room. As luck would have it, she stood right at the spot where she’d skewered OS3 Jackass (still couldn’t call him by his former name), the blood stain on the carpeted deck giving testament to the violence. She surveyed her feelings, found none, and moved on.
She’d taken cover on the far side of the console, just in case something went wrong, and the re-energized equipment decided to go kerflooey, right in her face. This, too, had been unnecessary, but better to waste effort than to die a horrible death after all she’d been through.
Amber worked her way into the rectangular layout of the console and began turning equipment back on. She didn’t need everything. The crypto gear, for example, seemed superfluous, given the zombies didn’t have their own intelligence network. So did the computers. The internet had been down for a couple days before the power went out, and the secure net for military message traffic had likewise ceased to operate. There’d be no more e-mails, no more web surfing, no more any of the old ways.
This gave her pause. She was old enough to remember a time without texting (or sexting - which she’d always found laughable, and about as far from a turn-on as you could possibly get), or instant messaging, or social networking, or cellular phones, or any of the dozens of things people took for granted before the apocalypse smacked every person upside the head and forever changed the paradigm of what was important and what was a pointless waste of time. She discovered she didn’t miss any of it.
This, too, gave her pause. She’d been a communications specialist, after all. It had been her job to transmit and receive messages of all sorts, any time of the day or night, often when lives were at stake. Those tools, those computers, those cell phones and Google and e-mail, and Facebook, and every other goddamned thing she relied on, day, after day, were no more, gone, kaput, and she honestly couldn’t care less. Odd...
The VHF radio came on, blinking its digital red number sixteen, the distress and emergency channel. The GSB 900, likewise, defaulted to 2.182mhz. She let them warm up for a few moments (a pointless effort, since they no longer operated on vacuum tubes, and thus didn’t need warming) then picked up a handset in either hand, brought them to her lips and depressed the transmit buttons.
“Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan...Hello all stations, this is...”
50
USCGC Sassafras
22.913470N 168.870849W
“...COMMSTA Honolulu, Channel Sixteen, and 2.182 Megahertz. All concerned traffic contact on either frequency...”
Bill Schaeffer rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and stared at the GSB 900. He’d set up a cot in the Radio Room, and more or less moved in since they’d retaken the ship from the zombies. He didn’t sleep much, and it wore on him, like ill-fitting shoes. The world seemed to be surrounded with a sort of soft-focus haze, and the inside of his head felt as if someone had stuffed it with those spongy, candied Easter Bunnies. It reminded him of some of the more profound hangovers he’d experienced in American Samoa, after a night at Tisa’s Barefoot Bar, only this time, he didn’t have any shenanigans to laugh about afterward.
A random thought crossed his mind: the observation that the test of a truly good time was when you weren’t sure which was more fun: the night itself, or laughing your ass off about it with friends the next day. This was pure nonsense, of course, and hardly germane to the issue at hand, which was...what, again?
“...Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan, Hello all stations...”
Ah, yes...That...
He lurched out of the cot and scrambled for the radio handset.
51
USCGC Polar Star
Box of Death
LTjg Amy Montrose almost couldn’t believe her own ears. The GSB 900 and the VHF radios had remained on, though there hadn’t been a peep out of either in several days. Per the Captain’s Standing Orders, they’d been broadcasting their position on twenty-one-eighty-two kilohertz, every two hours, with not a single lick of success. Until now.
The signal was weak and fuzzy and broken and garbled and every other descriptive phrase about bad signals known to the English language, but it was there. They were not alone.
“Call the Captain,” she said to BM3/OPS Greg Riley.
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he replied, way beyond the rules of military decorum, but she couldn’t have cared less.
The worst thing about their current situation had been the solitude. Forget the debacle at Guam, forget the suicide, forget the rock-bottom crew morale; the greatest mind-fuck of them all was not knowing if they were ever going to see any human beings other than themselves. Logic, of course, dictated there had to be survivors somewhere - if only because of the Law of Averages - but in the vast and empty ocean, with no outside communication, no knowledge of other people, no indication of anything other than exactly what they could see and hear right in front of them and around them, logic might as well have been a pet rock, for all it made any difference in their lonely, solitary lives.
The interior Bridge door burst open, and the Captain strode, hatless, onto the Bridge.
“...Honolulu..........is.........Sassafras........Over...”
“So the Sass is out there,” Hall said, to no one in particular.
“And the COMMSTA,” she said. “The signal is broken as Hell, but we can hear snatches of it.”
Hall pondered it for a moment, then said: “Atmospheric bounce?”
“Must be,” she replied, scrambling to retrieve what little she knew of the phenomenon from her days at the Academy.
Atmospheric Bounce, or Skip, sometimes occurred when shortwave signals were reflected back from the ionosphere, thus giving the signal a much greater range. It had something to do with the electrically-charged nature of the rarified air. As she recalled, the atmospheric layers, from highest to lowest, were: Exosphere, Thermosphere, Mesosphere, Stratosphere, and Troposphere, and the Ionosphere fell somewhere in the lower portion of the Thermosphere. Or maybe not. She couldn’t remember, and didn’t think there’d be a test on it later, and so gave it no more thought. The point being, sometimes radio signals would bounce off the cosmic rays playing around at the higher altitudes, and if the right conditions existed, people several thousand miles apart could communicate.
It didn’t always work, however. It’s what made amateur ham radio operations so much fun. Sometimes, an operator could only talk to someone in the next state, sometimes it’d be a person on another continent, and they never knew from one day to the next - sometimes one moment to the next - whether or not they’d be able to do it again.
“Have you tried calling?” Captain Hall asked.
“Not yet. No, sir,” she said, feeling suddenly inadequate. “It was enough just to hear another voice.” The moment the words escaped her lips, she regretted it.
Hall scowled, but refrained from comment. Instead, he picked up the handset and said: “United States Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard, this is...”
52
COMMSTA Honolulu
Sand Island, Hawaii
Amber’s heart skipped and cavorted in a joyous dance of triumph as she scrambled to tune the antenna gain for better reception. The Sassafras was still out there!
“Sassafras, this is COMMSTA Honolulu, 2.182. Over.” She rolled the dial between her fingers with the gentle touch of a safecracker, tweaking the gain. A touch too far and she lost it, a touch too little and it came through like so much gobbledygook. It had to be just right, like the Three Bears’ porridge. She hated porridge, but that was neither here, nor there.
“COMMSTA Honolulu, good to hear your voice,” the man on the other end said. Bill Schaeffer, she thought, but couldn’t be sure in the electronic cacophony. Whoever he was, his voice jumped to the top of her list as one of the greatest-sounding voices in history. When (or if) she ever met the guy on the other end, she would give him the biggest, wettest kiss she had ever bestowed, and she’d plant that baby right square on his lips, in front of God and everybody. She’d name her first born child after him - even if she was a girl.
Amber drew in a breath to calm her staccato-beating heart, offered a silent prayer to every deity she’d never worshiped, and keyed the mic. “Same, same, Sassafras,” she said. “What’s your status? Over.”
“Enroute your location,” the man said, and it might as well have been a chorus of angels.
There was a CLUNK behind her, as Scott Pruden descended through the false ceiling, onto the console, and dropped to the carpeted deck. She barely noticed. “Are we in business?” he asked. She waved him off, not wanting to miss a syllable from the Sassafras.
“What’s your eta? Over,” she said into the radio handset.
There came the crackle of static, loud and piercing, like a spear through her auditory canal and straight into her brain pan. She turned the gain dial a fraction, and the ethereal voice came through. “...It’s a bit convoluted,” the mystery man said. “We need to get Assateague up and running, then...” static ripped through the air. If it’d had a physical body, she would have punched it. “...seaplane. If Kukui...STATIC...viable, then we’ll divert to their location. If not, then we’ll head to you. Over.”
She glanced at the white board on the wall to her left. It had hung there since Day One of the apocalypse, ignored and gathering dust, since there wasn’t a damned thing she could do to affect or influance the information on it.
Plastered to its surface were magnetic labels, bearing the names of the District Fourteen Cutters and small boats, on the left side of the board, underlined with horizontal tape. There were additional horizontal lines with blank spaces where the cutter names should be. These were reserved for visiting cutters, including the High Endurance Cutters, which belonged to PACAREA. Vertical lines, also made of thin, black tape, formed a grid under the sub-headings: Status, Position, Mission, a wider section under the heading: Remarks, then a final, narrow set of boxes for OSC (standing for On Scene Commander). This last was used in the event of a SAR case involving multiple units, thus requiring a higher degree of control on scene.
Amber laughed at the irony. If ever there were an ugly SAR case, the current situation qualified, and - thanks to her old pal, Murphy - wouldn’t you know it, but nobody was in charge. Or, rather, she supposed, she was in charge, like a cook without enough pots.
She stared at the board again, trying to remember, trying to make sense of what it said. Assateague had been assigned to the southern, leeward side of Kauai; Sassafras, to an area between Kauai and Oahu; Kukui, to patrol between Oahu and Maui; and the Galveston Island, to the Big Island of Hawaii. It was, essentially, tantamount to putting a band-aid on a gaping wound, since there was no way four small ships - two of them damned small - could provide complete coverage of the main islands for any length of time, but everybody knew it was about preserving the units, more than anything else.
“...survivors? Over.” the voice crackled through the small speaker on the console.
She shot a questioning look toward Pruden, already suspecting the answer: they were asking about survivors on Sand Island. As far as she knew, as far as she had seen, she and he were it.
“Two, that we know of. Over.” She said.
“Actually...” Scott Pruden began. Amber stared at him. “I thought I saw somebody up on the chow hall, yesterday. Couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t say anything...” She raised both eyebrows. “Didn’t want you to think I was hallucinating.” He shrugged. “But then, just a few minutes ago, I saw movement up on top of the Admin Building. Didn’t see any people, but it had to be. How could the zombies have gotten up there?”
She continued staring at him, wide-eyed, incredulous. She held the stare for a few more moments, then keyed the mic again.
“Correction, Sassafras,” she said. “Two in contact. There may be others, but we’re uncertain.”
“Roger. Understood.” The two words came through, crystal clear, but then she heard a garbled something which her instincts and experience told her was some other station trying to step on the frequency.
Her eyes automatically sought the Radio Direction Finder, a few feet down the console from the VHF unit. It had been pointing more or less due West - a bit North, as well, but not now. The new signal, from what she’d bet was a stronger, higher, transmitter, was almost due South. So...? What? Who?
The speaker squawked with static, through which two words came loud and clear: “...Polar Star...”
53
M/V Point of Order
13.197165N 158334961W
Blackjack Charlie Carter peered at the High Frequency radio gear. He’d heard the garbled transmissions. Most of it had been static-filled, unintelligible garbage, but he’d heard enough. The US Coast Guard was out there.
This did not bode well. This would not help their plan. This would complicate the fuck out of everything.
He glanced at Doug Hennessy. They were alone on the Bridge. “Best no
t to let our esteemed Congressman know about this.”
Hennessy raised his eyebrows, and said nothing.
Blackjack felt sure the man understood, but to be safe, he said: “If he thinks he’s President–“
”Which he might be,” Hennessy interrupted.
Charlie waved it off. “Do we really want to open that can of worms?”
Goddard was - at best - an idiot, and at worst, a lunatic. The last goddamned thing they needed was to have him start acting presidential - at least until Charlie was ready to have him act presidential. Used in the right way, at the right time, the human wombat could be a useful tool. Left to his own devices, however, he could be a disaster. He could ruin everything.
Hennessy rolled the idea around in his head, then said: “No. Suppose not.”
“If he hears about this,” Charlie resumed, “he’s going to want to contact them, to exercise his authority, to play Commander in Chief. That would be bad.”
Hennessy raised his eyebrows again.
“He’ll want to talk to them,” Charlie said. “Have a nice, pleasant conversation. And if he’s not a complete fucking idiot, he’ll keep his mouth shut about our salvage activities.”
“If,” Hennessy said, his face paling at the idea.
“Big fucking if,” Charlie replied. “Because if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut, we’re as good as dead.”
54
USCGC Sassafras
22.913470N 168.531248W
“I am positively dead on my feet,” Harvey Walton complained, stretching his back, then scratching at the stubble on his chin.
He looked it, too, Jim Barber thought, not caring one little bit. He handed the man a steaming cup of coffee. “That’s really too bad,” he said, without a touch of sincerity.
They stood on the Mess Deck, conveniently close to the vat of coffee that had been cooking for God knew how long.“Because you and I are going on a little plane ride.” The Wallbanger floated fifty yards behind the Sass, being towed at a stately three knots, so as not to rip apart the fragile fuselage.
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Zombies In Paradise Page 15
