Mike and Chuck going fishing wasn’t the reason she was nervous.
She sat on the bed. Her TV was tuned to CNN, which was only available in certain hotels over here.
“India is still denying the anti-satellite attacks,” said the TV news anchor, a blond woman in a blue suit, “while China and the United States have confirmed yet another launch by India’s military against a Pakistani satellite in low Earth orbit. Pakistan has retaliated, saying—”
Lauren picked up her cell phone and dialed Mike’s number again. Earlier, it had gone to voicemail, which had made sense, but now it returned a busy signal. Why is it busy? By itself, that wouldn’t be worrying, but she dialed her mother’s number and got the same thing, and her uncle’s landline number was busy as well.
Something was going on.
She got up and went back to the window.
Protesters still wandered the streets, weaving between the buses and taxis making their way up Nathan Road. It seemed like there were more now. Were they getting up and heading into the streets this early? In the waterfront park to her left, a row of police with plastic shields and riot gear stood at the ready, joined by men in gray camouflage holding what looked like assault rifles.
She was sure they were using dummy bullets, but those could still maim.
Then again, the police hadn’t moved on any of the protestors all night. They were there as a presence, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand, and Lauren felt like that was the right thing to do. Which was an interesting confluence of events, as she was here to attend a conference on international relations.
The TV news anchor said in the background, “Russia is warning the United States not to interfere in what Moscow is calling a local conflict, threatening to move its fleets from the Baltic and down into the Mediterranean—”
Lauren still wasn’t exactly sure what the protestors were upset about. There were lingering disputes that had been going on for months, but the rumors last night had been about online social media networks being cut off, even the internet itself going dark in some neighborhoods.
Her laptop was open on the work desk by the window, and she checked her email inbox. Nothing since last night. She could still surf the web, but maybe that was because she was staying at the Sheraton.
That morning, she had checked for early return flights. There hadn’t been any cancellations of scheduled flights, so things couldn’t be too bad—but then how many times in recent years had international flights and borders been closed suddenly?
And she hadn’t received a single email in the past ten hours, not from anyone in America, despite sending out a few to her mother and Mike.
Lauren sat back down on the bed and dialed her colleague in the room next door. Evelyn picked up on the first ring. “You going down soon?” she asked.
“Soon,” Lauren replied. The conference started at 7:30. “Hey, are you getting any email from back home?”
A pause. “You either?”
“Busy signals when you call?”
“Same here.”
Lauren exhaled and counted to five. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll see you in a minute.” She hung up.
A sharp bang outside in the street.
Lauren got to her feet and approached the window cautiously.
A group of a half dozen young men sprinted up the opposite side of the street. The noise had sounded like a firecracker. The police in riot gear hadn’t moved, but the men with the assault rifles had advanced in a line in front of them.
Those were definitely assault rifles. She recognized them as the QBZ-95, a bullpup-style weapon with a signature circular thirty-round cartridge behind the trigger. It made them a more compact weapon while still packing a punch comparable to the AR-15.
Her husband hated guns, but after what happened in New York, Lauren had taken it upon herself to get some training. Her family had a proud military background, but she hadn’t served and part of her regretted it. She was trying to make up for it, at least the training part, and she had taken lessons at the local gun range for the past few years, along with self-defense courses. Even tactical training with semiautomatic weapons. Mike disliked it, but it was her choice.
Of course, she didn’t have any guns here. Her Glock was locked up in the safe back at the apartment in New York.
She listened to the noise in the street, tried to hear if there was someone yelling, when she noticed something else. Her TV had gone silent.
Lauren found the remote and stood in front of the screen. The TV was on, the channel on CNN, but the screen was blank. She flipped a few channels. Other stations were working, but Fox News was blank as well.
A loud bang from outside. She ducked involuntarily.
That wasn’t a firecracker. Her hotel window reverberated with the detonation. The stuttering pop of automatic gunfire erupted beyond the glass.
CHAPTER 7
I HIT THE water upside down. Swallowed a screaming mouthful of the Mississippi before I managed to shut my trap. The terrible gnashing of metal was even louder submerged. The sound enveloped me, the vibrations crawling along my skin in steel-rending wails.
I thrashed.
Adrenaline jacked into my bloodstream. An electric jolt flashed up my spine. My arms paddled and legs wheeled as I tried to orient myself. Panic tightened its fist around my brainstem. Then, through the murky brown, I glimpsed light. Somehow my head broke the water.
I gasped for air.
But my lungs wouldn’t take anything in.
I slapped the water with the flat of my right hand to try and stay afloat. My head craned back. The hulls of the two ships flattened into each other, the gap between them narrowing with a nails-across-chalkboard squeal. I caught sight of our jetboat—maybe twenty feet?—then gagged and gasped another mouthful of brown muck. Tried to spit it back out.
Went under again.
My hands clawed for the surface.
An arm grabbed my waist and pulled me up. I spewed water as my head cleared the surface. Someone was beside and below me. I grappled with them and fought to get air into my lungs.
“Mike,” a voice yelled, “over here!”
Something hit my head and skittered onto the water. Orange. Life jacket. I grabbed it and pulled it under my arms. The metal canyon around us collapsed further in a howling roar.
Our boat was just a few feet away from me. Chuck leaned over the bow. Someone pushed my midsection up.
Terek’s face appeared beside me. “Grab…grab his hand,” he sputtered through a mouthful of water.
I lifted one shaking hand as high as I could. Chuck’s right hand gripped my forearm and hauled me slithering over the gunwale in one shoulder-wrenching motion.
“China has now joined Russia in warning America not to get involved in what they are saying is a local conflict,” said the Fox News anchor, a blond woman in a blue suit with her hair in a bun.
After we’d gotten out of the boat at the Port of New Orleans, we’d retrieved our phones—and the dozens of messages on them. A full-blown shooting war had broken out between India and Pakistan. I was shivering and retching up brown water, and Chuck asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said I wanted to get back to the hotel.
We piled into Grandma Babet’s Monte Carlo and drove through the French Quarter. Damon and Terek were renting a small apartment for the summer a few blocks away from us, and Babet lived in the Fourth Ward, a few miles further away.
For now, we all stayed together.
Our hotel was the Claiborne Mansion on Dauphine Street, just off Frenchmen Street in the Seventh Ward. Chuck thought it would be more authentic than a Marriott. A bit of New Orleans history in the three-block Faubourg Marigny section, famous for its jazz clubs.
Ours was a two-room suite, with two queens in the bedroom—Chuck on one, me and Luke on the other. Each mattress had its own metal four-poster frame. The furniture throughout was faux Louis XVI, with fourteen-foot ceilings and what appeared to be genuine antique chandeliers overhea
d. The great-grandfather of the famous fashionista Liz Claiborne had built the house before the Civil War, and the family now rented it out as a nine-bedroom shabby chic hotel.
Chuck, Babet, and I sat together on a couch in the living room of our suite. Luke was on the floor building Lego ships and smashing them into each other, the collisions complete with improvised crashing sounds.
Terek and Damon had cleared the lamps off two side tables, pushed them together, and connected their laptops into a network. I didn’t ask what they were doing.
I was too focused on the television.
The Fox News anchor said, “We have announcements of multiple launches from Sriharikota Island and perhaps other locations around India.”
I said, “Did she say missile launches? Like nuclear missiles?”
“They would say if it was,” Chuck replied.
“We now have unconfirmed reports these might have been nuclear missiles,” the anchor said.
“Jesus,” Chuck whispered under his breath.
The man next to the anchor, an expert of some kind, said, “Our seismology detectors have not registered anything to indicate—”
“Still no GPS?” I asked Damon.
“Nothing on my phone, but Galileo seems to be working.”
“Galileo?”
“The European GNSS—global navigation satellite system. That’s still up. And online, I’m seeing that the GPS is still working in some places. The signals seem to be getting overwhelmed. Maybe jammed?”
“You can jam GPS signals?”
“See that lightbulb?” Damon pointed at one of the lamps he and Terek had put on the floor. “That is projecting a billion billion times more energy than what we get from one GPS satellite at this distance. They’re easy signals to overwhelm.”
“Why are they so easy to stop?”
“Because the system was designed back in the day, before anybody thought anyone would try.”
“Why would someone try?”
“Well, it might not be jammed. But it doesn’t make sense, the signals getting dropped like this everywhere. If it’s being interfered with—militaries do that before invasions.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
Damon shrugged. “I didn’t say invasions here.”
“You mean India and Pakistan?” That could make sense.
I grabbed my phone and dialed my wife’s number again. It picked up after the fourth ring. “Lauren, are you—”
“Please leave me a message,” said her voice on the other end.
I hung up. No sense in leaving a fourth plea to call me back.
Two missed calls from her this morning. I’d texted her, but hadn’t gotten any replies. Unusual, but not enough to panic. Not yet. It was still early morning in Hong Kong, but she had to be up, right? Watching the same news I was?
Maybe not.
The television cycle had a way of blowing things out of proportion. Every time there was a snowstorm, the cable channels made it seem like Armageddon. India and Pakistan were a long way from here. Unfortunately, they were also between me and my wife.
“Still nothing?” Chuck asked.
I shook my head and raised my shoulders at the same time.
The internet was working, and the TV service was fine. Lights and power on. But the cell phone networks were jammed. Working, but sporadically.
From too many people accessing them, Damon said. New Orleans, especially the area we were in, was full of tourists. Everyone was calling home at the same time.
Chuck’s phone rang. “It’s Susie.” He got up from the couch and talked to her in a soothing voice as he went into the bedroom.
“Wide areas of the country are now reporting GPS signal outages,” said the news anchor.
“That’s why the port cranes are not working,” Babet said to me. “If the GPS is out, they don’t know where containers go, or where things are. Ship navigation is going to be back to the eye. Everything is going to get clogged up. That’s maybe why those ships crashed into each other.”
Grandma Babet felt responsible. She had said it was her fault a half dozen times. She shouldn’t have navigated between the two container transports as a shortcut to the dock, but it was something she’d done a hundred times before. She said boats kept their distance on autopilot, and even then, there were always humans at the controls.
Something had gone wrong, that much was sure.
The two huge ships had collided at their bows, and Babet had managed to reverse course out of harm’s way. We wouldn’t have been crushed, since the hulls had angled outward above us and left a gap. But I’d hardly had time to think about it as I’d almost drowned. The adrenaline and terror still had me trembling.
Even so, I told Luke it was no big deal. Can’t let your kid think you almost died.
I coughed. Hacked up brown sludge.
Chuck returned to the couch.
“How’s Susie?” I asked. “The kids?”
“Everybody is fine. I’m heading back to Nashville tomorrow. I’ll go get my car from the garage in the morning.” He checked his watch and then looked out the window. It was dark, past 8 p.m. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“My flight is Wednesday.” That was the day after tomorrow. I’d already tried to change it, but I couldn’t get through. “You go ahead.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m never going on a boat again. I swear to God, never again.” It had taken Chuck a month to convince me to go on this fishing trip.
The first day out, I’d put on a life jacket, but felt silly when nobody else did. The water in the bayou seemed calm, and we usually kept close to shore. I made sure Luke always kept his on, but by the second day—sweltering in the intense heat—I left mine on the seat.
I coughed again, a hoarse, phlegmy hack.
Chuck inspected my arm. “That’s going to be a nasty bruise.”
“And that’s a nasty cut.” I pointed at the bandage covering the cut over his left eye.
“Quite the pair, huh?”
“Switch it to CNN?” I asked.
Chuck gave me a look. He hated CNN as much as I disliked Fox. “Sure.” He took the controller and went to the guide.
I got up to see what Damon and Terek were doing.
“I’m trying to contact my friend at the Ares project,” Damon said.
“And that is?”
“They track orbital debris at NASA. LEO-to-GEO environmental model. I want to see what info they have on these anti-satellite tests. What they’re saying on the TV doesn’t make sense. There is no way someone knocked out that many GPS birds. Not this fast.”
I pulled a chair next to Terek. “Any luck yet?” He was trying to call his own family. His uncle and aunt.
He pulled back from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. “The internet is working here, but I can’t get a message through to Ukraine. No VoIP—voice over IP. No server pings.”
“Thanks for today.” I coughed again.
Terek had dived into the water after me. Straight away. No hesitation. The young man might have saved my life. It was a brave thing to do.
“Of course.”
“I mean it. I owe you.”
“You would do the same for me.”
A phone rang. I turned, expecting to see Chuck pick up his again, but realized my hand was buzzing. It was my phone. I checked the screen, my heart leaping into my throat. I’d been trying to reach Lauren all afternoon and night, but this was a Washington number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Mike, is everything okay? This number is our landline.”
It was Lauren’s uncle. “Luke and I are fine. Did you hear from her?”
“She called this morning, but said she couldn’t reach you.”
“I had my phone off.” Damn it. I shouldn’t have let Chuck pressure me into leaving it behind. “How’s Olivia?”
“She’s fine. I think you should come back to Washington. You and Luke.”
&nbs
p; “I tried, but I couldn’t get—”
“I got you a flight, tomorrow at lunch. You should get an email confirmation. American Airlines at twelve-fifteen. Do you have a pen?”
I scribbled down the information.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Have there really been nuclear launches in India?” The senator would have more information than anyone. This line was a live wire straight into the heart of the government.
“Don’t pay attention to the cable news. Nothing like that has happened.”
He explained that there had been four launches from India and Pakistan, all of them anti-satellite reprisals. Some of the debris had hit our GPS satellites, but it was a minor disturbance. The Air Force was repositioning them, he said.
I hung up.
Chuck said, “Uncle Leo has a better airline loyalty membership than you, huh?”
What a relief. The tightness in my chest eased. Lauren was good, Olivia was fine. Luke and I had flights to Washington.
“I think I know why you can’t reach Lauren.” Terek looked up from the online article he was reading. “Turn back to Fox News.”
“…reports that Russia and China have shut down their internet connections to the outside world,” the news anchor was in the middle of saying when Chuck flipped channels.
“The Great Firewall of China,” Damon said. “And Russia too. They have totally disconnected from the rest of the internet.”
“And this just in.” The news anchor stared at something on her desk. She paused. “The Russians say that their GPS system—the GLONASS global positioning network—has been destroyed. I’m going to repeat that. The Russian global satellite positioning system is reportedly completely disabled, and their military is now on their highest alert status. And there are rumors that some members of the Russian politburo are now blaming America.”
CHAPTER 8
THROUGH THE PLANE’S window, streaking whitecaps became visible across the ocean’s expanse. Turbulence rocked the cabin, the hum of the turbofans ratcheting up as the aircraft struggled to remain level. Passengers moaned as it hit another patch of rough air and veered to one side. The plane banked toward the mainland.
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