by Calvin Wolf
The president struggled into a sitting position. “You say it didn’t go critical? How the hell did that happen?” Though a staunch critic of America’s bloated military spending, the commander-in-chief had also been concerned about the aging of the nation’s Cold War WMD infrastructure. Was it possible that the warhead had malfunctioned due to age?
“It was a command from here, sir,” a general replied. “I think the young man who tried to kill you must have hit a button on the panel.” In agony, the president swung his legs off the rolling bed that had been brought in for him. Doctors rushed over, insisting that he lay back down. “Get back, get back,” the president snapped. “I’ve got to check!” With help, he hobbled over to his desk. Sure enough, the kid had hit the magic button.
“A one-in-a-million shot,” the president marveled. “Unless he knew what he was doing, which I doubt.” His stomach burned from his recent wound, and he staggered back to his bed with his hands over the thick bandages. Someone was calling on a phone to ready a surgical suite. The finest doctors in the country were flying in.
“Do we re-launch, sir?” a second general asked. “The fizzled strike was less than one kiloton. That’s not nearly enough to vaporize the MIST.” The man’s hands poised over the president’s secret panel, ready to access buttons and switches.
“How big of a strike would we need?” the president asked. A scientist announced that the MIST would have been dissipated by the fizzled blast, requiring a forty megaton weapon to ensure greater than ninety percent vaporization of the nanocells. “Unfortunately, it will take up to an hour to ready the weapon. The initial launch that just failed was the largest single warhead that was ready for use.”
“Then we better go to the weather,” the president sighed. A meteorologist was called and reported, via holograph, that the post-storm winds in that region of Texas were brisk. “In one hour, those nanoparticles will have spread too far for even a forty megaton device to be fully successful.” The president cursed mightily and decided against any launch.
“Get a team together. This will have to be a long-term thing.” People ran from the room, ready to work. The president lay back down and closed his eyes. What the hell will happen now? They’ve unleashed Pandora’s Box, and I couldn’t stop it.
“What about the strike on Balmorhea? Did it stop those drones?” Looking at each other nervously, nobody spoke.
5
The drone roared north as dawn broke over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Its route, chosen by sophisticated software, was virtually unpredictable and untraceable. With the sun warming its silver sides, it began to descend toward the Raton Municipal Airport. A former State Department employee, working out of a remote cabin, watched through its high-definition cameras as he guided it down. Of the six drones that had been delivered to the conspiracy, only three had taken off before the nuclear strike on the Balmorhea State Park.
Instead of the expected ground crew of sheriff’s deputies in beige and tan, the high-def cameras picked up two men on the runway. One was quite large, with the build of an offensive lineman. The other one was normal-sized, and clothed in the garb one would expect an FBI agent to wear. Who the hell are these chumps?
The big guy lifted something to his shoulder, and the man in the cabin recognized the device as a rocket launcher. The ground crew had procured one, just in case, and now these two saboteurs had gotten their hands on it! “Aw, God damn it!” hissed the drone operator. If the two goons had gotten their hands on the rocket launcher, it almost certainly meant that the entire ground crew was incapacitated. Grabbing the joystick, the operator steered the drone away from the danger.
A bevy of bells and whistles revealed that the rocket had been fired...and had digitally detected its target.
Sweating bullets, the former Diplomat mashed down on his drone controls, attempting to evade the incoming projectile. On a screen, he saw the rocket get closer and closer to the drone. Just when he thought the drone was clear, the rocket exploded. More alarms began blaring, indicating that the drone was in trouble. The aircraft no longer responded to the Diplomat’s controls.
“Fuck it, I’m out,” the Diplomat declared. He grabbed his bug-out bag and fled the cabin, not waiting to see when or where the careening drone would impact. He clambered into his Chevy Suburban and took off down a four-wheel-drive trail, heading deeper into the woods. His last phone call, from a burner phone he kept in the glove box, was to a former tech mogul who had once designed a nationwide surveillance network that utilized avatars and resembled the Grand Theft Auto video game series.
“It’s me, and I’m out. If you figured out the access code to the central server, you had better use it quick.” Moments later, the Suburban exploded in an impressive fireball after a woman in a Canada-bound helicopter was alerted to the Diplomat’s undesired flight.
Seconds afterward, many miles away, a large drone crashed into a rural area of Colfax County, New Mexico known as Hidden Valley.
6
“We still have two cylinders of MIST in our control, and the bidding starts at two hundred million,” the man with the microphone said from the center of the stage. The historic theater, tucked away inside Midland’s rejuvenated downtown, was full of money-hungry lawyers and private investigators who were representing a who’s who of the Western world’s less-than-scrupulous billionaire class. Convened under the utmost secrecy and threat of death, the pre-breakfast meeting would result in treason indictments for anyone caught by the authorities.
Although the marquee advertised a political farce called The Socialist, which was earning rave reviews for a young playwright from Vermont, a genuine political coup was actually occurring inside the 1920s-era theater. Most of the shady lawyers had seen unconfirmed news reports about the chaos in and around Alpine, but too much money was at stake to remain home. For a chance to own a critical mass of Microtronic Infrastructural Symbiosis Technology, no criminal charge was too serious.
An Odessa lawyer representing a Canadian mining billionaire hastily bid two hundred million, followed by a Midland lawyer bidding two-twenty for a manufacturing magnate from Michigan. Despite it being barely time to start breakfast, the theater’s full-service bar was doing brisk business as lawyers sought liquid courage. Bids climbed past three hundred million within minutes. Coalitions began forming, with lawyers on phones deciding to pool bids and split a cylinder of MIST into usable fractions. Within ten minutes, a five-billion-dollar bid was launched, and countered with a second coalition’s offer of five-point-two.
Detective lieutenant Brett Borgmann, holding a tablet computer full of files sent by a deceased internist, watched as a SWAT officer used a specialized tool to pick the lock of the theater’s rear exit. As soon as the door was unlocked, the SWAT team swarmed inside. They barreled into the auditorium from both sides, surprising the packed house of lawyers. Swiftly, many of the attorneys dropped their electronics into their full glasses of alcohol, trying to render the devices inaccessible.
“You’re all under arrest!” Borgmann roared as he stormed the stage and snatched the microphone from the terrified auctioneer. Seconds later, one of Midland’s resident FBI agents appeared and read the assorted charges from a printed list. A handful of lawyers vomited in fear. One tried to jump up and run, but was seized by cops in body armor. As police officers waded into the rows with handcuffs and zip-ties, a handful of federal agents entered the lobby and began setting up interview stations in corners, offices, storage rooms, and even behind the bar.
“We need to get info fast, before anyone comes to their senses and clams up,” an agent told Borgmann. The detective nodded and watched, arms crossed over his chest, as SWAT members began lining up lawyers and escorting them out of the auditorium. Some blustered about suing, but most were just hoping to cop plea deals.
Watching the drama unfold from onstage, Borgmann sat on the auctioneer’s stool after the man, a notorious criminal defense attorney to ric
h scumbags, was led away in zip-ties. He knew that his old friend, William Watterson, was dead, along with countless others in the law enforcement community. The grizzled cop had died trying to stop the drones from taking off before they could be vaporized.
Wait, the drones would have to change paths to deliver the MIST based on the results of this auction. Could there be a way to control the last two drones from here, or at least input a new final destination?
“Turn off all the lights,” Borgmann told a uniformed officer, who nodded and rushed off. A moment later, the auditorium went completely dark. While most theatergoers would complain under such circumstances, the arresting officers and cuffed lawyers were silent. Borgmann searched around, and noticed a twinkling of blue lights from inside a slatted-door storage closet adjacent to the stage. He slipped off his loafers and padded over, noticing a person inside.
Turn the lights back on, he texted to his partner. After the lights glowed again, Borgmann whipped open the closet and jammed his pistol in the face of a nerdy Millennial. “Don’t touch that dial,” he glowered, and the kid put his hands up. The detective grabbed the back of the young man’s rolling chair and wheeled it swiftly out of the closet. As other cops and a G-man in a grey suit crowded around, Borgmann entered the closet and inspected the computer array.
“They’re controlling the drones from right here,” Borgmann marveled. “Makes sense, because their conspiracy basically got evaporated. The head honchos must have cut and run and tried to outsource this operation.”
Looking at the screens, he noticed that one drone was approaching Laramie, Wyoming and a second was on the ground in between Midland and Odessa. “One is at the airport. Get units out there, now!”
“When does that first drone reach Laramie? That’s a populated area.” The FBI agent was on his phone to NORAD. When the computer revealed that ETA to a privately-owned airfield was three minutes, it became clear that nothing could shoot the drone down in time. Borgmann grabbed the controls and announced that he would crash the drone away from the populated area. “This way, it doesn’t affect people and the bad guys don’t have a chance to recover it.”
Brett Borgmann jammed the joystick forward and drove the drone toward the terrain. It impacted two and a half miles northwest of Laramie and exploded.
7
“We’ve got an unauthorized launch from Midland Air and Space Port,” the radar operator reported. “I think it’s one of XCAV’s new space planes. The ones that fly to their new facility in Scotland in four hours or so.” Her supervisor got on the horn to the White House and announced that the last remaining MIST cylinder was on the move. Seconds later, more calls began flooding in. Police and FBI were calling from Midland, XCAV was calling to report that armed men had hijacked their hundred-million-dollar space plane, and the Wyoming State Police were calling to report that a large drone had crashed outside of Laramie.
The president was in surgery, the vice president was being interrogated, and the Speaker of the House was also under suspicion. Though the president pro tem of the Senate was clearly loyal to the president, he reported that he was not up to the task. The Secretary of State was busy fielding calls from foreign nations over the nuclear blast in Balmorhea, and so the Secretary of Defense took over the president’s duties. “Where is the space plane heading? Get me the details!” she demanded from the Oval Office. Within a minute, XCAV officers were on the line.
“It’s unmanned, ma’am. It flies on automatic pilot to our facility in the UK. That’s where it’s headed, which means that the people who hijacked it and launched it must have people at the other end.” The CEO provided the coordinates and flight path. “Unfortunately, this thing has collision detection, which might make it difficult to shoot down with a long-range missile.” Using her tablet, the SecDef pulled up all of her projectile options.
Given the speed of the space plane, and the fact that it was headed away from the United States, it was unlikely that anything could be launched from the continental U.S. and shoot it down before it reached the United Kingdom. “I need to get in touch with 10 Downing Street,” the Secretary ordered, and someone brought over the red phone. Before she dialed the preset number for the Prime Minister, she asked her husband to use back channels to try and speed up the process. The Director of Central Intelligence nodded and walked away briskly, pulling his satellite phone from his pocket. He placed a call to a man who had recently landed outside of Alpine in a black helicopter.
“You did us a solid eleven weeks ago, but we need another favor,” the DCI said to a man who was playing with an embossed, stainless steel lighter. “We need you to contact your British counterpart, J. We’ve got a space plane headed to Scotland from Midland, and we need someone from that end to shoot it down. I know Vauxhall Cross can probably scramble something faster than going through normal channels.”
“What’s on the plane?” the man asked, putting his lighter in his jeans pocket.
“Microtronic Infrastructural Symbiosis Technology. I assume you were briefed on the stuff?”
“Indeed I was,” the man replied. He looked at his tablet to get a bearing on the situation. Every document and communication simply used his code name: F. “Did some ne’er-do-wells try to get it out of the country?”
“Yep, and the bad guys are waiting at the XCAV facility in Scotland to receive it. Might have killed the usual employees. We’re dealing with some very bad, very powerful people. Can you make a call?”
F assured that he could make the call, and switched to a second line on his special phone. He called J and informed the dapper Brit of the situation. “Try to shoot it down over unpopulated areas. You don’t want this stuff getting inside people,” F warned. J replied that it would be done. Within seconds, the White House was informed that British intelligence would attempt to shoot down the approaching space plane before it could land.
Via satellite, the Secretary of Defense watched as a Spitfire X84 experimental rocket interceptor was fired from a military facility near Kent. As tense seconds passed, the two dots grew closer together. Shortly after the space plane passed the beaches and began descending, the interceptor came within range. Sensing a collision, the space plane attempted to evade the interceptor and turned sharply. The interceptor exploded, but the space plane’s hull remained intact. It tumbled through the sky.
“It’s going down, but did not explode like it should!” a colonel exclaimed, and the Secretary of Defense shushed him. Anxiously, she watched the screens. Thirty seconds after the interceptor exploded, the damaged space plane crashed in the forests south of Greenock. “Send them a message not to enter those woods,” the Secretary said. “They don’t know what they’re dealing with.”
8
Whitney drove west. She was not stopped, though there were increasingly large convoys of vehicles coming east. Half of the convoys were composed of black SUVs, some emblazoned with emblems and insignias, but others entirely unmarked. The other half were made up of military vehicles, some tan and others in various patterns of camouflage. Her Crown Vic was the only car going west. Only in Marfa did local police manning a roadblock attempt to wave her over, but she ignored them.
As the sun rose and the day warmed, Whitney drove through Valentine. Now she began seeing signs of destruction, with broken glass and scorched siding clearly visible. She kept on driving, recognizing that she was approaching a place she and Hank had visited while on a family vacation. Michael had been seven, and they had taken pictures in front of Prada Marfa. Within a mile of the place, Whitney knew that Prada Marfa had been the target. Everything was a wasteland.
Go back, there’s radiation! Hank’s voice said inside her brain. Please, take Ava and head back the way you came. Go home to Michael. He needs you and you need him.
“Hank, is that you?” she whispered as the stopped the car in the middle of the road. Up ahead, an armada of military vehicles surrounded what must ha
ve been the vicinity around Prada Marfa.
Yes, it’s me. I love you, Whitney, but you need to go away from here. You’re in a radiation zone!
Whitney turned the car around and headed back toward Alpine, and then on to Midland. I love you Whitney. I love you, Whitney.
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought his voice said that he was not gone forever.
