Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live

by Wandrey, Mark

  “That’s a goddamned grizzly bear,” Harry said as he came up to Cobb.

  “No shit,” Cobb said as he dropped the empty magazine and pulled another from his web gear.

  “Where’d a damn grizzly bear come from?”

  Cobb sighed and let the bolt fly forward on his gun, charging the chamber.

  “There are a bunch of wildlife parks around here,” Ann said from the doorway. She looked like she didn’t want to see the monstrosity downstairs.

  “It’s behaving like the infected,” Cobb said.

  “Strain Delta is in every organism,” Belinda said.

  Cobb looked back at her. He knew she was a nurse. She understood the damned zombie plague better than anyone he knew.

  “We’ve heard some other animals were affected; we saw it with our dogs.” She gestured toward the raging animal sounds. “It only makes sense.”

  “Sick fucking sense,” Vance said, his eyes wide.

  “Cap the damn thing,” Cobb said, looking at Harry.

  “Uh, yeah,” Harry said and looked over the railing. The bear had just about torn the carefully constructed barricade to pieces. “Mother fuck,” he hissed and raised his battle rifle. The roar of the AR-10’s 7.62mm round was considerably more powerful than the lighter 5.56mm’s.

  Cobb saw the bullet tear a big chunk out of the grizzly’s neck. The bear roared and attacked the last barricade.

  “What are you doing?” Cobb yelled. “Put it down!”

  “Shit,” Harry said and pumped rounds into the bear. He worked the rounds from the head down the bear’s back. Its roar was cut off mid scream, and it crashed twitching to the floor. Harry popped the empty 20-round magazine. “Sorry,” he said. “Don’t have a lot of ammo.”

  “There are times to conserve ammo, and this wasn’t one of them,” Cobb said. He evaluated the situation. Infected were already clambering over the dead bulk of the grizzly. There were benches clogging the stairs, but they’d get over those. He turned and ran.

  “What should we do?” Harry yelled.

  “Slow them down!” Cobb replied.

  He raced up to the Stryker, set his M4 down, and crawled in through the open crew hatch. With the APC wedged into the side of the courthouse, it wasn’t easy. He could only get his torso in, but it was enough. He located the metal box he wanted and grabbed it, dropped back out, snatched his rifle, and ran. The sound of rapid small arms fire urged him onward despite the pounding in his head from when he crashed the Stryker into the building.

  Cobb came up behind the survivalists. All six of them were leaning their weapons over the railing and firing in rapid, semi-automatic volleys. Vance glanced back when Cobb came though the double doors, and Cobb could see the relief in his eyes.

  Cobb slung his rifle and set the case, labeled M85, on the floor. Popping the release and opening the lid, he revealed four olive drab blocks and some electronics.

  “Is that…” Harry started.

  “Yeah,” Cobb said. “Hold them for a second.” He pulled out one of the four controllers and started wiring it. The six survivalists glanced back intermittently to watch, their eyes wide in alarm. Cobb knew he was making a mess of what he was doing, but the system was robust and forgiving. He set the timer, armed it, and slammed the lid closed. “Make a hole,” he said.

  The two men closest to the top of the stairway, Vance and Tim, ceased fire and moved as Cobb carried the case past them. He looked down the stairs, picked his target, and heaved the case. It crashed into a bench and nearly flew over the side of the stairway. Cobb gasped. It hit the railing and flipped back into the middle, lodging pretty much where he’d wanted it.

  “Better run,” Harry said, grabbing his wife’s arm and beating a hasty retreat through the double doors. Cobb pushed the rest to follow.

  “How far?” Vance asked.

  “As far as we can get,” Cobb said.

  “You had to use the whole can of explosives?” Harry asked.

  They ran into the courtroom, now nearly empty of benches, and out the back where Cobb’s Stryker was lodged in the wall. They split up on either side of the door and dropped to the floor.

  “How long?” Vance asked. No sooner were the words out of mouth than everything exploded.

  * * *

  Afternoon, Thursday, May 2

  The Flotilla

  150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA

  Jeremiah Osborne yawned and rolled over. Sunlight streaming through the window suggested it was either early morning or late afternoon. He coughed and ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth. It was rather…sticky. He glanced at the bedside table where a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle rested on its side, a tiny bit of amber liquid still in the bottom. That explains the goo.

  He sat up slowly as his head threatened to explode and stretched. The bed was dry. One step at a time. Naked, he walked more-or-less straight to the head and relieved himself. Now less ‘full,’ he walked back and sat down. He took the bottle and emptied the last few drops. “Hair of the dog,” he said as Kentucky bourbon sizzled down his throat. It was a thousand-bucks-a-bottle smooth.

  “Now, if I could just remember why I was guzzling a bottle of the good stuff,” he said. “Might be good if I found my pants too.” He walked to the small dresser, bent over, and looked inside. No clean clothes. Standing back up, he looked out the window and saw a navy ship burning. Then it all came back to him. “Oh, zombie apocalypse. Right.”

  He dug through the pile of dirty clothes, found the cleanest, and put them on. While he dressed, he went over the previous night’s events.

  After they’d stripped down the latest alien ship, his tech team had taken him up to the ship’s deck and showed him what they’d discovered. The alien power supply, when coupled with the drive modules, produced a much more energetic response than when coupled with a terrestrial power source. They were able to surround the entire ship with a forcefield which cut it off from the outside world. Before, all they’d been able to do was make it fly. In fact, his original prototype orbital ship, Azanti, had taken a crew millions of miles into space. Not on purpose, though.

  Dressed, Jeremiah exited his cabin and walked down to the small executive dining room. He’d lost a fair amount of staff, so there wasn’t anyone to make him food. To his surprise, a plate of sandwiches was waiting for him. Someone had even put a note on the plate letting him know the sandwiches were made from frozen and preserved food that predated the plague.

  “Good to know,” he said as he took a sandwich. They were all turkey and cheese. No complaint. It tasted fine. He walked to the cooler as he ate. It was stocked with soda and beer. He almost grabbed a beer, then decided that wasn’t the best idea and took a Coke instead. Look, I adulted today. The sandwich wasn’t bad; maybe the day wouldn’t be bad either.

  Alex West and Patty Mize came walking in, laughing at some unknown joke. They stopped when they saw Jeremiah sitting at a table eating.

  “Afternoon, Boss,” Alex said and nodded.

  “Afternoon,” Patty added, and they both walked over to the table. Patty picked up the note and showed it to Alex, who grunted. They both took sandwiches and got a beer.

  Jeremiah looked at the beer darkly and drank his Coke. “What fun have you two been having?”

  “Merino fit one of the drives and the power supply onto the Huey,” Alex explained. “We took it for a little spin.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jeremiah cursed. “If the military finds out…”

  “They won’t,” Patty said. “The assault on Coronado went to shit. One of the navy pilots rammed the president’s plane; they both crashed.”

  “Oh,” Jeremiah said, then he went and got a beer.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Besides, we ran the engine, so if anyone saw us, they’d think it was a regular helicopter.”

  “Only had to run the helo on idle, though,” Alex said and winked at Patty. The two chuckled. “The hard part was finding some ferrous metal to hook the drive to.”

 
Now Jeremiah got the joke. If anyone had been close enough, they wouldn’t have heard a thing, either. The forcefield, when the drive was used with a power supply, made anything inside virtually indestructible and cut off all sound. He decided to change the subject. “What’s with the burning navy ship?”

  “One of their carriers went down,” Alex said. “They had an outbreak, then something exploded.”

  “The smaller ships?”

  “Not sure. I think maybe evacuees from Coronado. Some might have been infected.”

  “None came here, did they?” Jeremiah asked, casting a worried glance between the two. Both shook their heads.

  “The captain played stupid, so the evacuees went elsewhere,” Patty explained.

  Jeremiah finished his sandwich, popped his beer, and drained half of it. I wonder how much more of this we have on board? “The military babysitters still in the labs?”

  “No,” Alex said. “They took off shortly after the shit hit the fan.”

  “Well, there’s that at least,” Jeremiah said. He raised his beer as did the others, and they all drained their drinks.

  “There you are.”

  Jeremiah turned and saw Jack Coldwell, his head physicist. He’d been heading up the project to figure out how the alien tech worked. “What’s up, Jack?”

  “You know the military guys who were watching us?”

  “Yeah. Alex and Patty just told me they vamoosed when the carrier blew up.” He got up to head for the fridge. Another beer sounded good.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m curious why they both left so quickly.”

  “Everything was going to shit on their ships,” Alex said. “Probably hurrying back to help shoot infected.”

  “They were both techs,” Jack said. “One was an engineering grad student.”

  “So?” Jeremiah asked as he selected a beer. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are,” Jack said. “And they took one of the backup hard drives with all our data on the alien tech with them.”

  “Motherfucker,” Jeremiah spat. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like another beer, he felt like a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle.

  * * *

  Wade Watts scanned the code one more time before loading it into a data packet. The navy woman assigned to help him, a PO3 (Petty Officer 3rd class) named Sanchez, was also going through the data, albeit considerably slower than he was. “I’m ready to send it,” he said.

  “Wait,” she said. Sanchez, who was no more than 25, was a CTM—Cryptologic Technician, Maintenance. Wade had looked it up, and the job description said she was in charge of computer networking and software installation. In the civilian world, she’d be a network administrator. The military was weird.

  “Your captain said he wanted the ship back on the GCCF network,” Wade said, tapping his foot.

  “GCCS,” Sanchez corrected. “Global Command and Control System.”

  “Right,” he said and glanced at a screen, using it as an excuse to eye PO3 Sanchez’s chest again. He’d been trying to get up the courage to hit on her for two days. “So, we need to get this done.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” she retorted. “But, if I let you upload something dangerous to a DoD satellite and it makes things worse, I might as well find some fresh fish and have sushi.” Eating any fresh meat was a death sentence. “Looks good, go ahead.”

  “About time,” he mumbled. She frowned, and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. She was hot, and he’d been hoping he’d get to know her better. Putting his libido aside, Wade entered the command code he’d been given, and the Ford’s computer linked with a military satellite thousands of miles above them.

  As before, the satellite accepted the login. He transmitted the command string, a packet of orders telling the satellite to override whatever had shut it down and resume comms. And like before, nothing happened.

  “Son of a bitch,” he cursed.

  Sanchez laughed. “I told you,” she said.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” he complained.

  “What doesn’t make sense? It’s jacked up. Bet the satellite is fucked.”

  “Not a chance,” he replied.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It took the commands.” He pointed at the screen. A little icon indicated the satellite had accepted the input, but it hadn’t executed the orders. She frowned. “Let me see the flowchart again.” Sanchez handed him the 2-inch-thick notebook. The mil-sat, or military satellite, command flowchart was 210 pages long and covered everything from sending a message to inquiring about gyro status. Most of the commands were off limits to field units, even supercarriers like the Ford. Wade suspected an admiral would have relevant codes, but he also suspected the admirals had tried to fix the problem shortly after it occurred.

  Everything about the way the overly complicated government communications system was working spoke of a hack. The fact that all the satellite links through MILSATCOM (military satellite communications), commercial satellites, and even Iridium were down basically pointed to one conclusion—they were down because someone hacked the satellites. Did a world-class job of fucking it up, too.

  They hadn’t wrecked it, just ruined any connectivity. He went through the notebook for an hour or so while Sanchez did some other stuff. In the back of the book was a section on legacy systems. “What’s WWMCCS?”

  “That’s an old system. Dates back to the Cold War,” she said.

  He looked at her. Her face was screwed up in concentration. She looked so cute. If she’d been wearing glasses…

  She snapped her fingers. “Worldwide Military Command and Control System. Predecessor to GCCS. Well, kind of a stepfather. GCCS was pre-internet.”

  Wade looked up the ways GCCS communicated and saw that it used various regular internet connections when not back-boning on MILSATCOM. “Jesus, you guys like acronyms,” he moaned. “Nipper? Sipper?”

  “Nipper, NIPR, Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network. Sipper, SIPR, Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. There’s also JWICS, Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, but we can’t use it for the kinds of comms we want.”

  “Why not?” he asked, only half listening as he followed flowchart connections.

  “It’s more for sending drone data and intel from assets. Spook shit. We don’t have the proper reception gear, if I recall.”

  He grunted and read on. He was still in the legacy section of the book. The diagram was old-style. He was pretty sure several of the flowchart icons were for mainframes and tape storage. But there, off to one side, in a system symbol surrounded by a dotted line, was GCCS.

  “You said WWMCCS was Cold War era?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Why would there be charts about it in a manual about GCCS?”

  Sanchez gave him a knowing smile. “Because this is the US Military.” He stared at her blankly. “Did you know that a lot of ships still use Windows?”

  “What’s unusual about that?”

  “Windows XP?”

  “Oh, holy shit!” he exclaimed. She laughed. He looked at the book’s instructions, then at the screen. He leaned forward and typed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying a hunch.”

  He typed. A series of dots appeared on the screen. A second later, the unmistakable intro screen to an old-school mainframe server came up. WWMCCS had been built from big chunks of graphic elements which were clearly made to be displayed on a monochromatic monitor.

  “Holy shit,” Sanchez said.

  “Yup. Any chance there’s some documentation on this beast?”

  “Would you look at that!”

  Wade glanced over his shoulder. Chief Kuntzelman, Sanchez’s boss, was standing behind him. Wade thought he was a warrant officer but had no idea why they called him chief.

  “I haven’t seen that screen in a month of Sundays. Maybe more!”

  “You’ve used this before?” Wade asked. He examined the man. He was at least 50, so it wa
sn’t out of the question.

  “Yeah, last time I worked on it was aboard the Forrestal in 1992. The old girl was retired the next year. She wasn’t a nuke, so we had the old crap a lot longer. They weren’t using it, but in typical navy fashion, I trained on it.”

  Wade smiled widely and flipped pages. “Can you log us into the NIPRnet?” He gestured at the screen.

  “Nipper post-dates WIMEX.” Wade blinked. “The nickname for WWMCCS.”

  “Ah. Well, you know what? I have a hunch.”

  Kuntzelman shrugged and pulled up a chair. He tried a few keystrokes, then grunted. An error message flashed, so he tried again.

  “Not working?” Sanchez asked.

  “Hold on,” the chief said. “This is like trying to speak in a language you haven’t used in 20 years. WIMEX ran on the old Honeywell 6000 series. It used a language called GCOS.”

  “They still use that,” Wade said, remembering his programming school days.

  “Yeah, GCOS 7 or 8. This was the original. The new versions are for legacy code. The damned machines are still being used in places.” He typed and got a menu. “You know, this is far too fast. It has to be an emulator.”

  “If the military dumped it a decade ago, why keep an emulator up and running?” Wade asked.

  Sanchez and Kuntzelman exchanged the same knowing look. “Because it’s the US Military,” the older chief said. “Worse, the US Navy. But this is extreme, even for us. I know for a fact that this contract was canceled before I learned how to use it. The last machine was probably sold for scrap in 1995 at the latest. Or it’s in a warehouse somewhere, next to the Ark of the Covenant.”

  All three chuckled at the last joke. Another menu came up labeled “Linked Systems.”

  Offline storage

  Base status

  Archives-physical

  Archives-virtual

  Archives-media

  MILSATCOM link

  Heptagon personnel

  Project Genesis

  “Woah,” Wade said, staring at the simple menu.

  “What the fuck is this?” Chief Kuntzelman asked.