Lightship

by Stephan Besik

  Even if they hadn't been killed by the blast, the fires or the radiation in the surrounding areas would likely have gotten them. Just more slowly. Every day he prayed that if they were gone they had been taken by the blast and had not lived long enough to suffer. He hadn't seen the worst of it because Truman had been at sea for months after the attack, searching for and taking out as many Russian submarines and surface ships as her task group could find. When the ship had finally returned to the U.S. though- that had been more than bad enough.

  He looked up and down the street again, head aching and a little bleary eyed, hoping to find a cab. It was still early and it was cold. Hard to believe- snow in May in South Carolina. His shoes crunched through the snow. He got lucky, spotting a car with a placard in the windshield that indicated one of the Navy-approved cabs. Everything in town now was Navy-approved, and SPs helped the city cops handle all of the Navy and maritime personnel. He asked the driver to take him down to the port, where he could catch a water taxi back to the carrier.

  He hated that the girl had been awakened by the call, but he would have been kind of an asshole if he had just slipped out on her. He didn't believe in love at first sight, but this girl was actually pretty nice and he did want to see her again. He couldn't give her more than his cell number and the name of his ship; he had her full name and even if the phones weren't working he could almost certainly find her in the base staff listing. She had worked at the commercial port as a secretary before the war, and the Navy had immediately commandeered anyone with any knowledge of port operations. She had her apartment in town so there was a good chance she would still be there, although it was almost certain she would have roommates in the near future. The Navy was wedging as many people and ships as they could into the city and area around Charleston, South Carolina. The biggest of the cities and ports left on the East Coast, and the remaining port that could handle the big Navy ships that sailed the Atlantic.

  The Navy was putting people to work as fast as they could while struggling to feed and house refugees from the snow-bound north. They had to take care of all the people they were bringing in to expand the port and maintain their ships as well. Charleston had some major advantages- it was far enough from major targets to have survived intact and the outer harbor was big enough to handle the Navy's deep draft ships. There was also an active military presence in the form of a combined forces base, part of which was a retired naval installation.

  There were major disadvantages, too. Charleston wasn't very big and there wasn't much around it. The Navy was doing its best to build up the port with whatever it could find, to give ships coming in from the Atlantic a place to berth. Some fuel was available and food was still holding out, but munitions were in short supply. Fuel might be a problem soon, too. Even Truman needed fuel for her aircraft.

  The Navy had been luckier than the continental U.S. Ships had been at sea and some were at one of the foreign bases. When the alert had gone out everything in port that could move got out as fast as possible. Then all they had to contend with was the Russian navy, mostly their submarines, old and decrepit as their surface fleet was. Emmett had heard that the Navy was down fifty percent in ships, worse than that in continental U.S. bases and support personnel. While it was bad, the Navy was in better shape than the country as a whole.

  For most civilians and the land-based military, their luck had run out. The estimates were classified, but the scuttlebutt was that the one-year mortality for the country as a whole was about seventy-five percent. Emmett didn't like to convert that percentage to a number; the number was so big it was painful to think about it. Some of that number were people he had loved. His wife, his child, both parents, people he knew at Truman's home port of Norfolk- likely gone forever.

  Damage on the American coasts had been bad. Big places like Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, and D.C. were gone. The tough one for Truman was Norfolk, the big naval base in Virginia where crew had families and which was home to his ship. Apart from Charleston and the small ports of Wilmington and Savannah there was no place on the East Coast for ships, Navy or commercial, to berth. At least there was little if any threat from the Russians.

  The West Coast had been almost completely destroyed, to the point where for a while everyone thought there wasn't a usable port for Navy ships anywhere from San Diego to the Canadian border. Then the scuttlebutt was that the Russians had actually missed Bremerton. No one knew how or why, of course. American lasers and anti-missiles had gone after whatever they could hit, but nothing was going to take out all the hundreds of warheads that had rained down on the U.S. Emmett had heard that about a tenth of the missiles launched against the U.S. had been destroyed or disabled. Not nearly enough to make a real difference.

  The miss at Bremerton was a big win for the country, though. It was home to a fair number of missile subs and there were facilities for nuclear ships like Truman. There were a lot of mothballed ships at Puget Sound, too. The Navy had lost half its ships; it might start to pull some of the old mothballed ones back into service. Especially since they weren't as reliant on advanced technology, something that the Navy might not have for a long time- if ever again.

  The positive was that Bremerton and Puget Sound were there. The negative was that nuclear winter was affecting them. Where they used to get occasional snowfalls, the last two winters had been wet with snow that stayed on the ground for weeks. Spring was now a part of winter, and summer was just a fairly warm and mild spring.

  Another big win had been the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii had come through unscathed; apparently the Russians hadn't cared about the Islands, or perhaps the missiles targeting Honolulu and the bases were some of the ones the missile defenses had gotten. The Pacific Fleet had a home there, but the Islands were a long way from the West Coast. Not the best situation for defense of the Coast if it ever came to that. Still, the Islands weren’t under snow half of the year like Bremerton. That was another big plus.

  The Gulf was really bad. Corpus Christi had been wiped out, as were Mobile and New Orleans. He'd heard that Houston had been sprinkled with nukes, like a fair amount of Florida. Texas City and Galveston on the coast near Houston were both heavily damaged, but the critical word was damaged. They were far enough from Houston to miss most of the worst. From the Navy's point of view at least there was something to start from. Emmett had heard that the Navy was trying to rehab the cities on Galveston Bay, but up Buffalo Bayou and Trinity Bay the mess was so bad it was unlikely the facilities at Houston would ever be operational again.

  Charleston wasn't the best port for a carrier task group but beggars couldn't be choosers. Truman's escorts were mixed in with all the other orphan warships whose home ports had been on the Atlantic Coast. There was also quite a pileup of commercial shipping. While the Port of Charleston was pretty big, there wasn't enough space for all the orphaned maritime craft as well as the deep water Navy. The big ports on the East Coast were gone and global commercial traffic was a shambles, so most of the remaining harbors around the world were filled with empty hulls that presently had no reason to put out to sea.

  All the big Navy bases on the East Coast were gone, and the ships that had been at sea from those bases on the East Coast were now orphans stacked into Charleston, Savannah, and even Wilmington. Of the three, Charleston had the deepest harbor and a carrier needed deep water. Even at that, Truman was so big and had a draft so deep she was anchored near the mouth of the harbor near Fort Moultrie.

  The taxi pulled up across from the landing and Emmett got out. He paid the driver and found a half dozen water taxis waiting for returning Navy personnel. The first in the row was about three quarters full and ready to pull out, returning sailors to warships anchored off Sullivan's Island. All the taxis had a vague resemblance to an admiral's barge, a long cabin that kept the sailors inside out of the wind. That, however, was about where the resemblance stopped. They were almost certainly private craft, maybe somebody's tour boats, leased by the Navy or operat
ed by their owners to service the traffic to Navy ships. Truman and her escorts needed water too deep to be berthed in the port and were anchored in the harbor, away from the city proper and only a short distance from the Atlantic.

  There was no heat in the water taxi. Apart from the closed cabin, the only thing keeping Emmett warm was memories of the night before with a big-eyed girl whose light chocolate skin was so soft he thought he might already be addicted to the touch. The relationship with his wife had been one of years, a deep friendship as much as a marriage. He had always been too practical to believe in love at first sight, but already his heart ached a bit for this new girl. With Loretta he just might have to change his mind about whirlwind romances, even though he barely knew her name.

  The boat rumbled along at the usual five knot in-harbor speed limit, passing by clusters of commercial craft that had no place to berth in the port. Then came larger, deeper draft ships as the bay widened and there was deeper water. It wasn't a great situation for deep draft ships. They were strung out along the channel where the water was deep enough for them, making things crowded for what little traffic there was.

  Emmett fidgeted a little; five knots wasn't much faster than a man could trot and his ship was near the mouth of the bay. The depth off Sullivan's Island was deep enough for any Navy ship; apart from the channels most of the waterways around the port were too shallow for the big ships of the Navy. Many of the warships were anchored off Sullivan's, sometimes in pairs or trios. As the boat neared the carrier he counted six cruisers and about twenty destroyers in port along with Truman. He hadn't seen any submarines, but there were facilities for subs in the old naval base at Charleston that the Navy might be using again. Besides, with their nuclear power plants and a wartime footing he doubted there were many subs spending time in port to do more than resupply and maybe rearm somehow.

  The only carrier was Truman; he'd heard that half the carrier force had been lost, either at sea to Russian submarines or in port to missiles. That left two carriers currently at sea in the Atlantic, Eisenhower and Lincoln. He wasn't sure about the number in the Pacific; he thought two, Reagan and Stennis, with maybe one of those at sea. Reagan was home ported in Japan, where the damage was almost all caused by the nuclear winter, and Stennis had been at sea. Like the Truman group the Stennis task group had managed to take out their Russian shadow sub before it was able to do any damage.

  He wondered whether there were so many Navy ships in port because there was nothing to do or no fuel and supplies to do it with. The carriers were nuclear powered and strategic weapons, so they were probably getting first call on whatever resources were available to keep ships at sea.

  Emmett got off the water taxi with about a dozen other crewmen of Truman at a little makeshift pier in the shallows near the ship. He followed the crowd to the ramp from land to his ship and started up the walkway. The ramp rose at a slight angle, crossing over shallows along the coast and a bit of deep water before reaching the carrier. Once in deep water the walkway stopped at a small landing. Then a steep ramp connected the ship's crew entry with the walkway. At the landing crewmen had to stop for ship's security, manned by three enlisted crewmen and an ensign, all armed. After all, it was wartime.

  Meeting with the President

  Rear Admiral Benjamin Meyers, commander of what was still called Carrier Strike Group Ten, sat with the two senior officers of his aircraft carrier in the conference room adjoining his cabin, waiting for a phone call from the President.

  Captain Alvin Georgian of the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman decided he had to ask before the President called. He felt somewhat embarrassed that he had to ask. "Who is the President now, Sir?"

  Admiral Meyers answered, "Hemsworth. Allison Hemsworth. She was Speaker of the House before the war. Democrat, I think from Pennsylvania. Don't know much about her, but my recollection is that she seemed to be a little more reasonable than your average politician. I can't imagine she ever thought she'd be President, though."

  The conference room was silent for a few minutes until Avery Jenson, Truman's air wing commander, felt obligated to break the silence. "Do we know what happened to the Vice President?"

  Meyers responded gruffly, "The Vice President was in New York when it was hit. Apparently the warhead that hit there was pretty big. Eisenhower came down the coast on their way back; they said one of their choppers did a flyover. They must have used a hell of a big warhead there; the Upper Bay now extends up past Manhattan." He let that sink in for a moment. "I heard from CINCLANT that Hemsworth was the highest elected official in the U.S. after the chaos settled enough for what was left of Congress to consider the problem. I don't know how she got the job, except for that." He sat silent for a moment, and then added, "This may be some kind of secret, but the President is in the hospital at Ames, Iowa. She's quite ill. Rumor has it that she was close to the blast in Chicago and may be suffering from radiation sickness."

  Just then an enlisted man poked his head in the room. "Admiral, we have Ames on the line."

  "Send the call in."

  The teleconference unit on the table began to ring. Jenson hit the talk button. He nodded and the admiral spoke up. "This is Rear Admiral Benjamin Meyers, commanding U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group Ten. To whom am I speaking?"

  A voice at the other end said "One moment." There was silence for a while and then a woman's voice came on the line.

  "Admiral Meyers, this is President Hemsworth. Is there anyone else in this meeting at your end?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I have Captain Georgian, commanding the Harry S. Truman, and Captain Jenson, Truman's air wing commander here with me."

  "That's fine, Admiral. Good morning gentlemen. How's the weather in Charleston?"

  The admiral responded, "Brisk, Madam President. We had snow flurries last night."

  "Hmm. I guess that's to be expected even in South Carolina. We still have quite a bit of snow on the ground up here. At the moment the capital of the United States appears to be wherever I am, so I guess the capital had snow last night and will likely have snow today." The line was quiet for a few seconds. "Well, gentlemen, to business. First I think I should ask if you know how the war started."

  "We've heard a few rumors, ma'am, but that's all," replied the admiral.

  "All right. Let me fill you in, then, on what our intelligence people have been able to put together.

  "Like some wars of the past, it appears this one started somewhat by mistake. Maybe I should be more direct. It was a fuckup.

  “As you know, after Russia reconsolidated most of the old Soviet republics back into the RSR, the Russian Socialist Republics, it began to look for more targets.

  “The RSR sought to take over the states of the Scandinavian Peninsula via a conventional invasion. They had also placed strong ground and air forces on their borders with the former Warsaw Pact states. After Finland was attacked by Russian forces, the RSR appears to have been surprised by a nuclear attack from Finland or one of the other Scandinavian states. Our best guess is Finland. Frankly we didn't know that anyone up there had a nuclear arsenal; it's pretty obvious that the RSR didn't either. It's possible nobody but the Finns knew.

  “The attack appears to have been coordinated with an attack from the old Warsaw Pact states, as well. While Poland and Rumania have the longest borders with the RSR, there are six states on the current RSR border, plus a couple others further west, any one of which might have decided to join in the Scandinavians' fun. We thought and the Russians certainly thought that there were no nukes in Eastern Europe.

  “As far as we can tell, about thirty fairly good-sized nuclear weapons were detonated on RSR territory. We believe all of the deliveries were made with cruise missiles or aircraft. We don't know who made the warheads or who made the delivery systems; we're not even sure who launched them. They could have been secretly built in Europe, or bought from North Korea, Israel, or even Iran. There's even the possibility that one of the big South American states was involved somehow.”


  Bitterness filled her voice. “Shows what we actually knew about nuclear proliferation. Once the U.S. got chummy with the Russian Republics and we began to isolate ourselves from our former allies, it appears no one trusted us enough to keep us informed, let alone stick with nonproliferation.

  “In addition to nuclear weapons eliminating the RSR assault force in Scandinavia, a couple of nuclear weapons took out a sizeable chunk of the Russian forces stacked up on the on the RSR’s western border, and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles struck St. Petersburg, Moscow, Murmansk, Kiev, and Nizhny Novgorod. We are guessing at a total of thirty nukes. It looks like all the cities except Murmansk took multiple hits.

  “In the confusion of the attack the RSR military failed to identify the actual sources of the attack, since the RSR didn't know any more than we did about who had the weapons. Apparently, assumptions were made that one or more of the major Western powers were responsible. We don’t know whether they thought we were stupid enough to initiate a limited nuclear strike against them or just provided the weapons.

  “About an hour after the initial nuclear attack, the commander-in-chief of RSR ground forces and prime mover of the Scandinavian invasion, Vasily Gorovyak, ordered a launch of RSR nuclear weapons against the people they thought were the most likely culprits- the U.S. and the E.U. Both we and the E.U. had moved to a wartime footing and were preparing to send troops to Scandinavia to defend against the RSR invasion, so in some sense their jump to the wrong conclusion was logical. A substantial number of RSR missiles were also launched at Chinese targets. The more cynical of our intelligence people believe that the Russians had no intention of leaving an intact China after a nuclear exchange that would certainly cause significant damage to the RSR, leaving a powerful nuclear-armed enemy on their border. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with them. China suffered significant damage and retaliated with what was apparently a portion of its nuclear arsenal, adding to the mix that devastated the RSR.