“So this is a terrorist attack? Not an accident?”
Chuck said, “I’ve been saying that all along.”
I sighed long and hard, then felt at the tender spot on my face. My fingers came away bloody. Where was that smell of shoe polish coming from?
I looked down. Joe’s dungarees were stained and frayed, but his boots shone like he had just cleaned them. “You were in the armed forces?” I asked him.
“Army. Vietnam. 101st Airborne.”
“Tip of the spear. Screaming Eagles.” Chuck whistled. “Thank you for your service, Joe.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you for your service.” I took a moment to gather myself. “Mr. Joe? Or, Mr. Farmer Joe? Can you explain to your guys that we’re not the enemy?”
“You going to have to convince them of that yourself, I’m afraid.”
“Are you serious?”
“You didn’t do yourselves any favors. Coming up a side road with a load of foreigners and guns and what looks like military hardware. Trying to pass through a mysterious firestorm encircling DC to get into our capital on September 11th, right at the moment our government puts out the word that terrorists are attacking our nation again.”
That did paint a picture. Everybody was more than a little tense, and the terrorists must have picked this date to make their announcement. Maximum impact.
“I have family in Washington,” I said. “My little girl, my wife. Can you—”
“They’re good men, and they mean right,” Joe said. “Vanceburg has been most-wise cut off the past week. No TV. No internet. No house telephones. No mobile phones. Just the one radio station.”
“I understand,” Chuck said. “They’re protecting their families. Same thing I was doing when your boys stopped me.”
“I understand that, too,” Joe said. “And that’s why I’m down here, trying to make sure y’all are okay. I’m sure this will all be cleared up soon enough.”
“We need to get going,” I said. “I need to get to Washington.”
“Not sure you’ll be going anywhere soon. Not through those fires.”
Chuck stood and looked out the window. “How far?”
“Hard to say, but the smoke is getting thicker. Not far over the ridgeline, I’d wager, and the wind is blowing this way.”
I held one hand to the back of my neck and stood to look out through the bars. Thick golden fields rolled in a wind under the blood-orange sky. The sun low to the horizon.
“You better cut a fire break in those fields,” Chuck said. “Is that corn? That’s going to go up like a torch.”
“I have considered that eventuality.”
The deadpan way the farmer said it would have sounded like sarcasm if not for his measured tone and steady eyes. He wasn’t trying to be clever, he was telling it like it was. But he wasn’t volunteering any information, either.
Chuck waited, then asked, “So what’s stopping you?”
“Four thousand acres, a broken axle, and some goddamn terrorists, as near as I can tell.”
“You mean us?”
“I do not mean you.”
“Can’t you get some bulldozers? Tractors? Get out there and start cutting a break in those fields? Get some help?”
“Help is exactly the problem,” Farmer Joe said calmly. “We’re the only farm left this side of Vanceburg. Thousands of acres, five miles a side into those hills. We took up the Dillan family, the Avilas—”
“What about people in the town?” Chuck interrupted.
Farmer Joe blinked slowly, like a lizard. It was obvious he didn’t appreciate being interrupted, and he didn’t seem to like people in a hurry, either. “They’re good people, but they’re scared, and they’re not farmers. As I said, we’ve been cut off for most of a week. No phones. No TV. Just the radio. Sheriff Coolidge left three days ago, and that’s the last we heard from anyone we could call the government.”
“But we could do this ourselves,” Chuck said. “You must have a lot of equipment, a farm this size. I can drive a tractor. Get some of your Kentucky militia boys on it. We can do this.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, son, but we don’t know where those fires are out there. Not only that, but there are lights in the skies some nights. New fires seem to spring up from nowhere.”
“What kind of lights?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that these fires could be all around us already. They’re coming in fast, and we have no communications. No idea where the blazes are, and visibility is low. It’s dangerous and probably futile, even if we did have the equipment.”
Chuck said, “I still don’t understand. Why no equipment?”
Joe let out a long, slow sigh. “No GPS,” he said. “I got one corn head harvester I can drive, and that’s got a busted axle. A replacement was supposed to be shipped this week, but that’s not happening anymore. The other four corn heads and tractors are all guided. They can follow my main rig, but usually they’re automated. Operate by GPS. My son’s idea. Only way to run a farm at a profit these days is to automate.”
Chuck paced the length of the stall. “Okay, but we could still go out and flatten the crop. We have cars, trucks. You must have some older tractors?”
“Flatten it? Those stalks will bounce back up unless we strip them. We’d need a lot of hands. Hundreds of them. I would put the call out, but the phones are down. This new fire front only started coming this way yesterday and the mess on the radio only made things worse. We rounded up the militia to protect the town. How else can I explain this?”
“It’s chaos,” I said. That word was getting used a lot.
“About sums it up. Anyway, if I don’t harvest this crop, my farm is as good as gone. Spent everything we had to automate.”
“Do all farms need GPS?” I asked Joe.
“Not all equipment needs it, not on smaller farms, but almost everything on a farm is helped by it these days. No GPS means no farming, the way we do it now. And it’s harvest season. Don’t get that GPS up, going to lose a lot of crops.”
Chuck sat down and pulled Luke onto his knee. “All shipping stopped, all deliveries on hold. No food coming in. No farms working. And that’s all across America, all at the same time.”
“All around the world, I reckon.” Farmer Joe nodded. “Going to be a lot of hungry people out there soon.”
“We need to find a way to harvest your crop,” Chuck said. “We can’t let that go to waste. But if you don’t cut a fire break, you’ll lose more than the farm.”
“Probably the whole town. Everyone is packing up to leave.”
“They’d leave before trying to defend their town?”
“With these mystery fires and lights in the sky, then this news of the terrorists? Phone services go down? No TV? Orange skies? This has the feeling of the end of days. Like I said, we don’t even know where those fires are. I’d say we are up a creek, son. Unless you have a way to fix the GPS.”
I stood up, my head still pounding. “I just might.”
CHAPTER 26
A DOOR SLAMMED. Footsteps across the cement beyond our holding pen. A familiar voice said, “Hey, I can walk by myself.”
“Damon,” I called out, “you okay?”
Our door slid open.
“Get your goddamn hands off me.” Damon shrugged free of the blond guy who had stopped us. “You want me in there?” He pointed into our stall.
“That’s why we opened the door,” the blond guy said.
“Go easy, Ken,” Joe said.
Chuck stood from the bench, gently set Luke aside, and extended his hand. “Ken? My name’s Chuck Mumford. I think we got off on the wrong foot here.”
Ken took a long look at Chuck’s outstretched hand, then glanced at Farmer Joe, who nodded. He took Chuck’s hand and pumped it. “Ken Logan,” he said. “And this is Oscar.” He motioned at the shaved-head guy, the one who had hit me.
I stuck my hand out as well. “Mike Mitchell, and this is my son Luke.”<
br />
“Look, I’m sorry about all this.” Ken shook my hand. “The only information we get from the outside is KLMB radio, and when they made that announcement yesterday...it didn’t help when you pulled those guns. And all that drone hardware and the Ukrainians and the two eggheads babbling about satellite debris.”
“Let’s put that behind us.” I grimaced and held my head.
“I know you guys must think I’m a dumb hick,” Ken said. “Joe and me forming up a local militia. But what choice do we have? We have laws here for exactly this. Sheriff Coolidge took off three days ago, we’re seeing weird flashes of light in the mountains and fires spreading everywhere. No help’s coming, and after that news about the attacks...”
“We don’t think that,” Chuck said.
“I got an engineering degree from Virginia Tech,” Ken said. “Mechanical. I live in Pittsburgh, but came here to my family when this got going to hell.”
“Me too. I came down from Pittsburg with Ken,” Oscar said from beyond the stall. “Gotta protect my family.”
“Which is what we’re trying to do,” Chuck said.
“I’m from Pittsburgh,” I said. “I’ve still got two brothers there.”
It was a few hours up the road from here, and not far from the path we planned to take into Washington. I had talked to Chuck about maybe stopping in on my brothers, but we wouldn’t have had time. Now even less.
Ken nodded. Part of the tension evaporated. “Now what’s this about? You asked us to bring your friend down here to talk about something. He says he’s in touch with NASA? He’s tracking the space debris? Is this for real? I know you think we’re full of—”
“Damon,” I said. “Tell Joe here about your PhD.”
Damon looked perplexed. “What? Drone constellations?”
“That’s right, and—”
“Before we get into it,” Ken said. “Are you guys going to vouch for him? He has no ID and he talks a lot of technical stuff, but—”
“This man,” I said, “was awarded a Congressional Medal. Is that good enough?”
Ken frowned and said to Damon, “So you’re a hero?”
“I’m not sure I’d say that.”
“I would,” Chuck said.
Ken said, “And your other friends? The Ukrainians? Are you going to vouch for them? Because Congressional Medal here already lied about how he knew them.”
“I was trying to protect them,” Damon said.
“Those passports look fake,” Ken said. “And that gun license for the SIG? I’m not sure foreign nationals are allowed gun licenses, and I’m not being a dumb hick. I’d go and look up the rules, but our internet is out. Something is weird about this.”
Farmer Joe snorted. “Kenneth, how would you know what a Ukrainian passport looks like?”
“You need to let us go,” I said. “I need to get past those fires and get to DC. I need to get to my family. My wife’s uncle is a senator in Washington, we can—”
“Hold on a second.” Oscar still held his rifle in both hands. “What’s this senator’s name?”
“Seymour.”
“The one always going on about the Russians?”
“That’s right.”
I eyed his hands on the weapon. Were his knuckles white? Some far right-wing groups had a strange affinity for Russians. Had he taken offense? I held one hand to Luke. Edged protectively toward him.
“And your name is Mitchell? Mike Mitchell?”
Oscar started laughing in big guffawing hoots. Even Farmer Joe’s eyes went wide.
“Holy mother in heaven,” Oscar said. “You got a brother in Pittsburgh?”
I nodded slowly.
“You’re Terry Mitchell’s little brother, aren’t you? And Booker? He’s your other brother?”
“You know Terry?” It didn’t exactly surprise me. Terry knew everybody in Pittsburgh around our age. In some ways, it was a small town. Which meant I knew what circles Oscar orbited in. My brothers had both been in jail.
“Oh. My. God.” Oscar wiped a tear from his eye with the back of one hand. “Do I know Terry? Cripes, everybody in Dirty ’Burgh knows your brother. He owns that town. I keep hearing stories about how his little brother is married to a girl whose uncle is a senator.” The smile dropped from his face. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry I hit you. I didn’t know. Terry is a badass, he’s gonna kill me!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him when this is all over. We’ll all have a beer together and laugh about it.”
“I hope so. Man, you gotta tell him it was an accident.” Oscar’s eyes skittered left and right.
I paused. “I’ll vouch for them,” I said to Ken. “For the Ukrainians. Irena and Terek are good people. I’ve only known them a week, but Terek might have saved my life. And Irena helped a whole bunch of people in Mississippi after a storm.”
Ken said, “So that’s true? She told us that.”
“That’s true.”
Oscar said, “Damn, Kenny, if Terry Mitchell’s brother is going to vouch for them…”
Silence for a few beats.
“Okay then,” Ken finally said. “We’ll send you on your way. We’re evacuating the whole town, you gotta go back—”
“I can’t go back,” I said. “I need to get to Washington. Something happened to my wife. And my little girl is there.”
“I don’t see you have a lot of options, unless you want to risk getting trapped by fires up in those hills.”
“Damon,” I said. “Farmer Joe here has eight tractors that drive autonomously using GPS.”
“Four corn heads, four tractors,” Joe corrected.
“That sounds a lot like a drone constellation to me,” I said. “Am I right?”
Damon nodded. “You’re not wrong.”
I continued, “Joe can’t control them now, as GPS is gone. And we don’t know where the fires are. No airplanes or satellites to give us images.”
“We can help with that.” Damon saw where I was going.
“And we can’t send people out into the haze to look for the fires, because we have no cell phones, no GPS and no emergency services. It’s too dangerous, and they’re too scared.”
“We’re not scared,” Ken said, “as much as we’re not stupid. We need to protect our families. Those fires have been spreading for weeks, no matter what anyone out there has been doing. And not just spreading—I’ve heard people talk about seeing lights at night. Fires springing up out of nowhere. All I know is they’re coming this way. Without outside help, we best get out of their way.”
Farmer Joe fixed me with a steady gaze. “Son, it sounds like you have a plan. Why don’t you tell us what it is? ’Cause we don’t have much time to waste.”
“Luke,” Damon said. “Can you hand me that knife?”
My son looked at me with his arms tight to his chest, in that hesitant way he had when he wasn’t sure if he should be doing something. “It’s okay,” I said.
Luke gingerly picked up the box cutter from the toolbox and gave it to Damon. I thought he would have preferred to stay with Bonham, Ellarose, and Susie in the air-conditioned farmhouse, but my little man had refused to leave my side. I had to admit, having him close somehow made me feel a little safer, too. Was he trying to protect his old man? Of course he was.
“At least we still have power,” I said.
High-wattage LED floodlights lit up the shed. Beyond the lights, the night was pitch-black. About 10 p.m., I figured.
“The shed” was what Joe called this building. “Hangar” would have been more accurate. The outbuilding holding the corn heads and tractors was about three hundred feet down a gravel road from the main farmhouse. One side of the forty-foot-tall building was completely open to the air, with the first ten feet of the walls made of cinder block. The rest was corrugated metal, with the open side’s roof held up by thirty-foot steel I-beams painted red. The floor was smooth cement, cracked and stained in patches.
A giant garage for the massive machines it h
oused. It smelled equal parts engine oil and manure.
I had only just learned what a “corn head” was. A thirty-foot-wide contraption with a dozen conical spikes in a horizontal row and a circulating blade behind them, like the auger of a snow blower—except instead of collecting snow, this collected corn. The whole assembly was fixed to the front of each self-driving, four-wheeled behemoth. There were four of these automated GPS corn heads in the shed, along with four smaller, more multi-purpose, self-driving tractors.
To Damon, they were huge drones.
We sat to one side of the big green machines. Damon on a stool, Luke and I on a wooden bench beside him.
“This isn’t like the last time,” I said to Damon. “Gotta say, I prefer it hot and with lights to being frozen in the dark.”
I tried to make conversation, but my thoughts kept circling back to Lauren. Where was she? What happened? Was she at her uncle’s place already?
Damon had the side control panel of the corn-head-drone open and was splicing wires. He didn’t have the right USB plug, he said, but he could cut open the cables and connect everything together.
“Is it true?” Luke squinted to get a better look at what Uncle Damon was doing. “Are there terrorists crashing satellites in the sky?”
“Makes sense,” Damon said without looking up. “That’s why the NASA models didn’t match. It’s not just wreckage. They’re using the ten thousand birds in the SatCom network as five-hundred-pound bullets to take out everything else up there.”
He stopped for a second. “They’re clever. I said earlier that the biggest difference between outer space and cyberspace is cost. Outer space is extremely expensive, but cyberspace is cheap. They found a loophole. Use a cyberattack to gain access to the assets in outer space. Brilliant, really.”
Luke went inside to get a sandwich. Damon and I worked for another half an hour in silence.
Finally, I asked, “Can you share the secret yet?”
“Secret?”
“Legook.”
Damon laughed and checked over his shoulder. No sign of Luke returning. “It’s not Legook, it’s Leguke.” He spelled it.
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 17