by J. Thorn
He climbed down the series of wooden slats nailed into the oak’s trunk and checked the gate. After selecting this ridge for his compound, he’d spent a year hauling materials via the old logging roads that crisscrossed the mountain. In his younger days, he’d protested the U.S. Forest Service’s granting of timber rights to private corporations, but now he was grateful for the limited access their abandoned roads provided. The transport had been a laborious process, often using an all-terrain vehicle, but he’d dragged enough chain-link fence and concrete mix up the mountain to enclose a two-thousand-square-foot perimeter among the trees.
The fence wouldn’t deter a serious military assault, and a drone could sail right over it and blast him to hell and gone, but the government had lost interest in him since he’d dismantled the Freewheeler Movement. He’d gone through a few fringe groups over the decades, and his first underground newspaper had been typewritten manifestos mixed with pen-and-ink cartoons, Xeroxed for three cents a sheet and sold for a nickel.
The Internet had granted him a cheaper and broader platform, and he’d blogged prolifically as Freewheelin’ Franklin, a nod to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. But while the Freaks were all about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Down With the Establishment, Franklin Wheeler saw the darker strains of threats and conspiracies. Politics was a wrestling match where the audience—the voters—cheered while the goons in the ring—the middle management bureaucrats—beat each other with chairs while the real thugs—the wealthy elite—picked everyone’s pocket from the skybox.
The 9/11 attacks had made every libertarian and patriot a target as D.C. seized the opportunity to roll the CIA, FBI, NCS, and the military into one big standing army called Homeland Security. As righteously offended as Franklin had been at the naked power grab and the militaristic streak that extended all the way down to school janitors and ambulance drivers, he was also wise enough to heed the shifting climate. The Freewheeler Movement was never a red-alert threat, since Franklin thought populist armed resistance was idiotic. What was the point of fighting for the right to bear semi-automatics when the government owned drones, tanks, and nuclear warheads? Franklin’s interests had shifted from domestic problems to the larger reality that the world probably wouldn’t last long enough for the Rise of Imaginary Hitler.
The dangerous and heavily armed cranks moved to Montana, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, drawing all the attention with their recruiting pitches in Soldier of Fortune. Franklin’s blog, on the other hand, became a Web destination for the discontent, bored, and deranged—an amalgam of losers that could never be forged into a real social force, much less a militia. The government soon tossed his dossier in the bottom cabinet with UFO enthusiasts and Bigfoot fanatics. As Franklin’s visibility faded, he embraced it not as a failure but as an opportunity.
The opportunity was this mountain compound he called Wheelerville.
Population: one, with the mayor also serving as street sweeper, minstrel, and shoe-shine boy.
Franklin checked the vegetables in the garden, picking some turnips to feed the goats in the adjacent pen. He often let the goats browse in the wild, but today he didn’t feel like hoofing it across the slopes to retrieve them at nightfall. Despite the ongoing crush of civilization and species extinction, the Blue Ridge was still home to predators like coyotes and bobcats.
And predators like the U.S. Army.
Franklin had heard the rumors of a secret installation for years. But even if it existed, Franklin took it as a good sign for his own security. The army was corrupt, but it wasn’t dumb. The army was smart enough to pick a safe zone for any secret bases.
As the oldest mountain range in the world, the Appalachian terrain was stable and unlikely to suffer earthquakes. Likewise, a megatsunami caused by the Canary Island volcano shelf plopping into the sea would never reach this far inland. Hurricanes and tornados were broken up by the foothills, and the climate was relatively temperate for a deciduous rain forest. Indeed, the biggest threat was a prolonged blizzard, but Franklin had enough firewood and stored food to hold out for months if necessary.
His one-room cabin was built with an adjoining storage shed that featured a series of solar panels on top, oriented toward the southeast. He opened the shed and checked the battery banks that stored the converted energy. The batteries were also connected to a micro turbine that Franklin operated on the windiest days, and he also had a backup generator with a paddle wheel that exploited rushing creek water to generate power. Seeing that the bank of batteries was fully charged, Franklin disconnected the solar panels and closed the shed, which was lined with thin sheets of copper and aluminum. The metal shielding acted as a Faraday cage, protecting the batteries and equipment from electromagnetic radiation caused by a thermonuclear explosion. If Al-Qaeda detonated a dirty bomb in the atmosphere over D.C., the pulse would wipe out half the country’s infrastructure but Franklin could still work his radios and computer, which were also stored in Faraday cages when not in use.
Franklin entered his cabin, opening the windows to catch the afternoon breeze. He sat at his table and connected his shortwave radio, scanning the channels. After a burst of screeching static, he zeroed in on a familiar voice.
“Charlie One-Niner, come in,” Franklin said into his desktop microphone. “It’s your buddy, the Unknown Soldier.”
“Soldier?” said the cracked and dusty-sounding male voice on the speaker. “What in the hell’s going on down in the land of cotton?”
Franklin had adopted the radio handle to throw any federal snoopers off his scent, and on the air he pretended he was based in Alabama, where even his most paranoid ramblings would not seem out of place. Shortwave radio signals were virtually impossible to track, so Franklin used it to network with like-minded people around the world. It was also his sole social outlet if you didn’t count the goats and chickens, and he tried not to count them too often.
“Probably about the same as up there in Canada,” he replied. “Only with worse health care and no moose to shoot.”
“We’re in a record heat wave,” Charlie said. “Bet it’s breaking a hundred and ten down there.”
Franklin glanced at the thermometer on his tiny weather station. Seventy-nine, with barometric pressure rising. Pretty seasonal for August in the mountains, although the humidity was thick enough to cut with a rusty knife. “Close,” he lied. “But I’ll live.”
“And some of those idiots still say global warming is just a goddamned theory.”
“If you backtrack on those assholes, you usually find a pipeline between their bank accounts and the oil and coal industries,” Franklin said. One thing he liked about his faceless friends is that they dispensed with small talk like the weather and immediately started solving the world’s problems.
If only we had an audience as big as Rush Limbaugh’s and Howard Stern’s, we’d save the human race whether they wanted it or not.
“Once you get your Alaskan pipeline built, maybe the U.S. will quit bombing the hell out of the Middle East.”
“Yeah, but then we’d have to invade you, good buddy. Got to feed those defense contractors.”
“Fine with me. Just don’t make me drink that watered-down American beer. Budweiser. Christ, I’d rather drink moose piss.”
“I’ll put in a good word for you,” Franklin said. “So what’s happening with the ice caps? Still melting?”
“I’m pretty high up here in Ottawa, but I’ll bet Alabama goes underwater in five years,” Charlie said. “Maybe you’ll have some nice beachfront property.”
“It’s a liberal plot to do away with the Red States,” Franklin said. “Take away the Deep South and the Democrats will hold the White House for the next century.”
“You never did tell me what party you support.”
“Lemonade Party. I think you ought to run the government like a lemonade stand. Serve it up on the sidewalk, cold and sweet for a nickel a glass.”
“That’s just the heat getting to you.”
<
br /> “Could be. Don’t take much to bring me to a boil these days.”
“Speaking of heat, did you hear about the big solar storm?”
Franklin had adopted a policy of “Ignorance is bliss,” focusing mostly on daily survival and maintaining a sustainable compound. While he owned a tablet computer with an ethernet card that allowed him to connect to the Web via satellite, he rarely prowled the Internet for news anymore, simply because he no longer trusted any sources. Even Charlie.
“No,” he said into his microphone. “I’ve been too busy picking cotton and stuffing it in my ears.”
“Scientists say it’s going to be one of the biggest on record. Supposed to shut down radio communications and TV and shit like that. Government’s putting out official warnings.”
“Does that mean I won’t be able to hear your angelic voice for a while?”
“Careful, Soldier, or I’m going to sing you a lullaby and it might start the cats to howling.”
“Well, from what I know of solar storms, they can blow the hell out of the electrical grid. Can’t imagine what they’d do in New York if the lights went out for a week.”
“Come on, Soldier. You know how fragile the whole system is. You blow out all those transformers and you can’t replace them all for years. Plus, you need power to manufacture the new ones. Sort of a Catch-22.”
“Don’t sound so excited about it, Charlie. I might start thinking you’re one of those Doomsday nut jobs.”
“Well, that’s worst-case scenario. But if it happens…”
A pause filled Franklin’s cabin, a high band of white noise coming from the speaker. Franklin eventually completed the thought. “Total shutdown. No gasoline pumps, no grocery stores, no air conditioning or heat, economic collapse.”
“Now you’re the one getting all excited. I swear, you’re starting to breathe heavy, like a teenage boy with his first Penthouse.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault everybody got dependent on a government run by foreign bankers. But I’ll be ready when it hits, whether it’s an asteroid, a pole shift, World War III, or a Martian invasion.”
“Assuming you live long enough.”
“I’ll be around as long as I need to be.” Franklin thought of his family. His wife Bitsy had died of breast cancer, and their daughter Laurel had disowned him after his political views attracted too much notoriety. She wanted to protect her two daughters from him and his twisted views, she said.
Well, Chelsea had been taken from them all, leaving only Rachel. And Rachel was his hope. They’d maintained an uneasy correspondence hidden from Laurel, but Franklin felt a desperate need to leave some sort of legacy. Rachel wasn’t exactly a convert, but at least she was kind enough to humor his occasional emails.
“Well, you better research the solar storm,” Charlie said. “Even though you can only trust half of what the mainstream media tells you.”
“They feed you just enough of the truth to keep you stupid.” Franklin was suddenly anxious to get off the radio. “but I’m on it.”
The evening seemed to have grown warmer.
CHAPTER FOUR
Maj. Arnold Alexander slid the NASA report into a manila folder. He was a fastidious man with a neatly clipped moustache, narrow-set eyes, and a heavy chin that gave him the aspect of a perpetual scowl. Which made it easier for him to disguise the scowl he was currently biting back.
“Worst-case scenario,” Henry Gutierrez was saying. The major thought the curly-haired man was far too fond of the word “scenario.” Gutierrez had used it at least five times since the meeting had begun.
“Doesn’t look like much of a scenario to me,” Alexander said. He secretly chafed at the power wielded by this little pencil-pusher. As chief of Homeland Security’s Office of Infrastructure Protection, Gutierrez had risen through the ranks on departmental politics, not experience or merit. But in the terrorism era, army officers like Alexander had to defer to bureaucrats like Gutierrez. The abstract goals and elusive enemies of the last decade of U.S. warfare paled in comparison to the invisible threat the Department of Homeland Security was created to stop.
Alexander’s people fought a war of flesh and blood, but Gutierrez fought a war of emotion. And that emotion was fear, the side that always won in the end.
Maj. Alexander was not only outranked, he was outnumbered in the compact Homeland Security boardroom. The third person at the conference table, Ellen Schlagal, was from the Office of Cyber Security and Communications. She had scarcely spoken after accepting a cup of black coffee, and she turned the cup before her in small circles, mostly staring into the drink’s surface. When she did look up, her intense blue eyes swept both of the men’s faces like an emergency beacon.
“We can educate the public about the problems, but of course that opens the door to opportunists,” Gutierrez said.
“It’s either that, or when somebody’s cell phone goes out, they start blaming terrorists, and then we have a full-on panic,” Alexander said.
“If we announce in advance that blackouts are coming, we might have a panic anyway. A stock market crash, ammunition stockpiling, food hoarding.”
Alexander rubbed his moustache in annoyance. “Let’s say that a terrorist group has a planned mission, more or less ready to roll. And they find out major cities might lose their electricity and communications. That would be the perfect time to swoop in and pull off an attack. Not only would they benefit from the chaos, the odds of getting caught—assuming they weren’t packing suicide belts—go way down.”
“That’s still just a theoretical risk,” Gutierrez said.
“But that’s what your whole department is built on,” Alexander said. “Something that might happen. Might.”
Schlagal finally spoke. “I agree that NASA’s data isn’t convincing enough. Solar flares can knock out some satellite reception, but the worst we’ve ever experienced is short-term disruptions, usually measured in minutes and hours, not days.”
“But the electrical grid is a little more fragile than the satcomm systems,” Guitierrez said. “It’s an interlinked system of more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines. It’s like a spider web. If you knock part of it out, it’s hard to sew back the missing threads.”
“But you can just plug in parts and keep rolling,” Alexander said. “Fill in the gaps later.”
“Not so simple,” Gutierrez said. “The grid likes to be balanced. Electricity isn’t really stored. It is distributed and consumed as it’s created. Big outages can lead to cascading failures as power re-routes to other parts of the system, including back to the power plants. A series of surges blowing out everything along the way.”
Alexander wondered why he was the unlucky officer to field this problem, driving over from the Pentagon to battle the Capitol’s weekday traffic. He couldn’t even see this as a defense issue. Homeland Security had claimed its turf and had both the psychological and political pull with Congress. Any event on American soil short of a foreign invasion was not going to involve the armed services.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s say you do have some blackouts. Even a lot of them. I still don’t see the imminent threat.”
Schlagal cut in again. “The problem is there really isn’t a repository of transformers. Parts are made as needed. We’d be at least two years behind—”
The power went out.
Alexander waited for five seconds. Gutierrez was wearing a watch with an illuminated dial. Otherwise, the room was pitch black.
“Back-up generators will kick in any second now,” Alexander said. “But I have to admit, that was a pretty nice marketing ploy.”
The room remained dark. Now he could smell Schlagal’s perfume. Gutierrez breathed like a smoker. His watch dial flickered and moved across the table, rustling papers.
“Your HQ does have back-ups, right?” Alexander said, brushing his moustache again.
“Yes,” Gutierrez said. “But back-up generators are always hard-wired into a building’s electrical system.
Any surge from an electromagnetic pulse is going to short out the generators as well.”
The lights blinked once and went dark for two full seconds, then came back on. “See?” Alexander said. “These solar flares aren’t going to be anything more than a temporary inconvenience.”
“These are the first waves,” Schlagal said. “NASA said the effects are unpredictable and of unknown duration. We could have a few weeks of brownouts or we could go down in one big zap.”
Alexander wasn’t an old-school officer. He’d come up with women in the ranks and had served in the Iraqi War with female officers. And Washington was changing, as well, with women seeking—and often gaining—top positions and Congressional seats. He didn’t figure Schlagal for a political gold digger, despite her inclination to blow this minor threat out of proportion.
“I don’t have to tell you what even three days of a widespread power outage would do,” Gutierrez said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. “Just picture your own routine. The food in your fridge would spoil. You might get lucky at the grocery store, but there’s more likely to be a panic. Besides, the store’s fridges would be out, too.”
“A surge would affect vehicles, too,” Schlagal said. Now they were coming at him like two tag-team wrestlers who had trapped an opponent out of reach of a tag. “Electronic ignitions and computers in cars. So you’d be walking to the store. Which, of course, means no delivery trucks would be showing up with veggies and milk.”
“Christ,” Alexander said. “Don’t tell me the TSA is going to be involved, too. Those bastards don’t need any more encouragement.”
He wanted to be home, watching sports highlights and drinking a beer. His daughter Junie was in twelfth grade, and he’d been helping her with her physics. The subject had gotten much more complicated since he’d been in school. Maybe he could get some of the NASA folks over to give her some tutoring.
“I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously,” Schlagal said, eyes narrowing so that the mascara on her lashes nearly merged into two black lines.
