by Noah Mann
This day, though, Dave Arndt was flying me not to some group who’d beaten the odds and survived, but to a place north of Bandon, along the coast, where the Siuslaw River spilled into the Pacific at Florence. A scouting mission had reported that the bridge spanning that river might not be structurally sound, and I was tasked with making the call to either certify the crossing as usable, or suggest it for demolition to prevent collapse when some unaware traveler was unlucky enough to be upon it.
“Wheels up,” Dave reported as we lifted off, keying the radio mic on his yoke next. “BC, this is SF One, departing north out of the field.”
There was no control tower at the actual airport. Any pilot taking off was responsible for making sure the runway and the airspace was clear, the latter being a virtual certainty. Still, Chris Beekman had drilled it into his students that they could not be complacent simply because they might be the only thing in the air within a thousand miles, or more.
“Scouting Flight One, this is Bandon Center, copy.”
The voice that acknowledged us over the radio was more than familiar. Krista, who’d years ago taken a shine to all aspects of the communication system left behind by Micah, had further educated herself on the use of the town’s radio system, to the point that even Westin, the garrison’s com specialist, turned to her on occasion for assistance when troubleshooting links between his equipment and distant receivers in Remote and Camas Valley.
“Did you hear her talk show last week?” Dave asked me.
Krista had begun broadcasting a radio show one night a month, with guests who would answer questions related to town issues, or livestock, or cooking.
“Was that her sixth episode?” I asked.
“It was. And it was good. She had Hap Killion on talking about smoking meat. I am seriously thinking about building a smokehouse after listening to him.”
“Have you tasted his spareribs?” I asked, and Dave shook his head, instantly envious. “They are unbelievable.”
Talk shows. Recipes. Pork ribs. We’d gotten to this place in our recovery so easily that all the struggles we’d faced, all the dangers we’d survived, seemed distant. Not out of memory, but somehow those difficulties now existed in some minimized form. That we’d all nearly died on multiple occasions did not seem strange as we looked back upon those times. That was the curse, and the blessing, of the blight.
It had harmed us, and it had toughened us.
Some obstacles, though, we could not simply force our way through. Fog was one of them.
“Great,” Dave said, taking note of the thick layer of mist creeping inland from the ocean, sliding over the landscape precisely where we were heading. “Can’t fly through that.”
“Another day,” I said, taking in the sight of the wide blue sky above, unsullied by the marine layer that would soon shroud it from any earthbound view.
“BC, this is SF One, returning to field due to weather.”
Dave began a gentle left turn, skirting the coast, lines of whitecaps curling toward the shore. A minute later he frowned at the controls and glanced to me.
“She must be grabbing a snack or something.”
Krista was diligent. But she was still young. A full-fledged teenager now. A quick run to the refrigerator, or to the bathroom, or to say high to a visiting friend, could all be explanations for her not acknowledging the call. But her dedication always, at least in my experience, led her to notify all stations that she would be away from the radio for a brief period, or signed off entirely for the night, or while she was in school or tending to things at home with her family. She hadn’t done that this time. We would have heard her.
“Call again,” I suggested.
“BC, this is SF One, returning to field due to fog over our destination. Do you copy?”
Once again, there was silence.
“Maybe it’s the radio,” Dave said, checking the unit.
“Well?”
He adjusted controls, flipped the power on and off, then keyed the mic several times.
“Something’s wrong,” Dave said.
“It’s not working?”
He shook his head, but not to confirm what I was suggesting.
“It’s working fine,” he said. “But the receiver is pegged. It’s overwhelmed by a signal.”
“You mean jammed?”
“I don’t know,” he said, pointing to the signal strength readout. “That’s holding at the top of the limit.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not an expert,” Dave said. “But we don’t have a transmitter strong enough to do that.”
He looked out the windshield, scanning in all directions before his gaze settled on me.
“The signal is coming from somewhere else,” he said.
Forty Four
It wasn’t just the radio in the Cessna.
“Every communications device that isn’t hard wired is completely jammed,” Westin said.
Dave and I had hurried from the airport to Micah’s old radio room. Krista was there, along with Westin, Martin, and Schiavo.
“So we are being jammed,” I said.
“Not exactly,” Krista said. “Just swamped. The receivers can’t handle the signal load. No broadcast we make can get through.”
“Some receivers have actually failed,” Westin reported. “Mostly cell phones. Their circuitry is more susceptible to frying.”
“Is this some sort of EMP event?” Schiavo asked.
An electromagnetic pulse, product of nuclear explosions at altitude, could render sensitive electronics useless, destroying the intricate collection microchips and relays within. But there’d been no indication of any such event.
“No,” Westin told his commander. “Imagine you have someone screaming into your ear with a bullhorn. You won’t hear anything but that, even if a dozen other people are talking to you a few feet away.”
“So someone somewhere is transmitting...silence?” Schiavo asked, puzzled.
“That’s right,” Westin confirmed.
“On every frequency?”
Westin looked from his commander to Krista.
“Every frequency I’ve scanned,” the teenager said.
“Which means every frequency,” Martin said, gesturing to the equipment that his late son had used to serve and, ultimately save, Bandon. “Micah built this to listen across the radio spectrum. If Krista used this, we know it’s everything.”
“I ran his scanning program,” Krista said.
“Why is this happening?” Westin asked, voicing the question that vexed him, and others. “Why now?”
It wasn’t the most salient inquiry, though. Not to Schiavo’s way of thinking.
“I’d rather know who,” she said. “And where.”
“Something with the power to do this, it can’t be too distant,” Westin said.
“What about satellite?” Martin asked.
Krista shook her head and pointed to a signal analyzer running on one of Micah’s computers that was still functioning, though another had recently failed and was awaiting scavenged parts for repair.
“The signature points to a terrestrial signal,” Krista explained, tracing her extended finger over a wave form on screen that, other than Westin, we lacked the expertise to fully understand.
“Terrestrial?” I parroted. “You mean, right here. On land.”
Krista half nodded, half shrugged.
“Or sea,” she said.
“So how do we find out where it’s coming from?” Schiavo asked.
“Can we triangulate?” Martin asked.
Using multiple receivers to pinpoint the direction of a signal was a known technique. But both Krista’s and Westin’s reaction indicated that we would have to find an alternative.
“The signal is so strong, we would have trouble determining any variance that would indicate a direction,” Westin said.
“Even with a directional collector, there’s back scatter from a broadcast this powerful,” Krista s
aid. “That can affect any reading.”
Something that had been repeated several times suddenly struck me as a salient point of interest.
“How much power are we talking about here?” I asked.
“There’s no way to know with the equipment we have,” Westin said. “Millions of watts.”
“Millions?” I asked.
“I’m guessing here, Fletch,” Westin said. “But I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s off every scale I’ve ever been taught.”
Schiavo thought for a moment, then looked to Krista, smiling.
“Sweetie, thank you for working on this. When do you have to be home?”
“In about an hour,” Krista answered.
“Can you keep monitoring until then?” Schiavo asked. “And use the landline to let the garrison office know if anything changes?”
“Absolutely.”
Schiavo looked to us, and then the door, the signal plain enough—she wanted to talk without Krista listening.
* * *
“Sergeant Westin,” Schiavo began when we were outside, standing near the former meeting hall across the street from Micah and Martin’s old house, “I need you to step up.”
“Ma’am?”
“That’s a child in there,” Schiavo said. “But this is your area of expertise. I need you to figure this out. Finding where that signal is coming from is not an option, so I’m not interested in why you can’t locate it—I’m interested in what you have to do to change that. Is that clear?”
Westin absorbed the mild dressing down, which Schiavo had, surprisingly, offered in the presence of relative outsiders.
“Very clear, ma’am,” Westin said.
“Get to it,” Schiavo said.
He backed away, then headed off toward the garrison headquarters next to the town hall up the street. Neither Martin or I said anything about what we’d just witnessed, but Schiavo looked to us both when her com specialist was gone.
“We’ve had two years of peace,” Schiavo said. “Two years of normalcy. We’ve all grown a little soft.”
“Angela,” Martin said.
She responded with a knowing look.
“You disagree? And what about you, Fletch? Are you still the hardened, finely tuned civilian warrior that you were back at the Rogue River?”
“Angela,” Martin said again, admonishing his wife mildly for the tone she was taking.
“How about it, Fletch?” she pressed the matter. “Where is your Springfield?”
She nodded toward my hip, nothing there but the pocket of my jeans.
“When was the last time you wore a sidearm? When?”
She was right. It had been a while. Like others, I’d embraced the calm after the storm, though it had taken some time to come down from that place of perpetual readiness.
“We don’t know what this is, Angela,” Martin said.
She laid a hard look on her husband.
“Exactly,” she said. “And when was the last unknown we faced that turned out to be a good thing?”
Martin didn’t have an answer. Neither did I. Schiavo, though, did.
“Never,” she told us, then turned and followed the same path that Westin had taken toward the garrison headquarters.
Forty Five
Sergeant Enderson had summoned me, stopping by our house on an eerily silent motorcycle, one of three recently delivered from the shop set up in Camas Valley. It was an example of commerce. People building things. Making things. Doing things. All for compensation, which had been made possible in the last seven months by the introduction of a currency. Pieces of paper created in a print facility operating in Remote. For now the exchange of money for goods and services was limited to non-necessary items. Food, medicine, shelter were all still provided, but already some residents who’d become adept at growing particular fruits or vegetables were requesting the ability to charge for what they were producing in light of rising customer requests. Supply and demand was coming, once again, to our world.
The bike that Enderson had ridden to our house was his personal vehicle. He’d made money during his off duty time working for me. The truth was, there was enough repairing and outright building going on between Bandon, Remote, and Camas Valley that I, and the other fellow who’d set up a contracting business in town, could use a half dozen workers on a half time basis. But Mo, as I’d taught myself to call him during his off duty hours, did not come to talk work or business as I ate with Elaine and Hope. He came to tell me that Schiavo wanted to see me down at the beach.
I drove toward the spot he’d directed me, headlights of my pickup sweeping across the road and the sandy shore beyond. It was not in those bright beams that I found the colonel, though. Instead it was in the glow of a small fire burning on the beach that she was revealed to me.
“Fletch,” Schiavo greeted me as I approached from where I’d parked on the nearby road.
“Angela.”
She stood close to the fire in civilian clothes, a light jacket to keep the night’s mild chill at bay. Sparks from an array of old wood she’d ignited drifted past us and burnt out against the dark sky. Shards of planks and jagged ends of snapped rafters were her fuel of choice, obviously hauled to the spot from the old shack which had finally collapsed. It was the place where I’d chased Olin, or thought I had. I never was able to convince myself that he had actually been there, that close, taunting me.
This, though, was real. Schiavo was here, as was I. For what purpose, though, I had no idea. Not yet.
“Thanks for coming,” Schiavo said.
“I could have brought some marshmallows and a stick,” I joked.
She smiled. It was good to see that expression on her. After defeating the Unified Government forces two years earlier, it had taken her time to adjust to an existence not rife with conflict, or the threat of it. It was only a few months ago that I’d noticed her actually relaxed at times. Enjoying life, especially with Martin. Losing their child before birth still hurt, I knew. Time wouldn’t heal that wound, but it mellowed the grief, letting it exist as a memory in competition with all that was still very good with their world, and with the world as a whole.
Still, I knew that this was not a moment where humor would exist for long.
“I’m sorry, Fletch.”
I knew what she was referencing. But there was no need for an apology. Her motives in how she’d taken me to task for my waning readiness were pure, if harsh.
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I do,” she said. “I have to because...because...”
“Because why?”
“Because I’m afraid, Fletch. Of something starting again.”
“The signal.”
She nodded.
“I hate feeling this way,” she said. “But it’s what I’m supposed to do—be ready. Something like this, out of the blue, it turns that switch back on and suddenly I’m back on Mary Island, or in the pit in Skagway, or—”
“On a hill looking down at the Rogue River,” I said.
Again, she nodded, frustration plain in her gaze.
“I hate that it’s so automatic,” she said. “I’m either at five miles an hour or a hundred and five. There’s no in between.”
I understood what she was saying, even if I couldn’t relate fully. The world after the blight had become a place where one often slept with the proverbial one eye open. Or with a sidearm at the ready.
We’d moved beyond that state of simmering fear, mostly. As prodded by Schiavo the night before, I didn’t always wear my Springfield now. But what she didn’t know, and couldn’t see, last night or now, was the Glock 30 holstered inside my waistband, covered by my shirt. Contrary to what she’d thought, I hadn’t entirely dropped my guard. And I never would.
“Angela...”
“Yes, Fletch?”
“You didn’t build a fire and ask to meet me way out here to apologize.”
“Not entirely,” she said.
She looked at me for
a moment, as if finalizing some decision she’d thought was already made. Then she reached into the front pocket of her jeans and retrieved a familiar object—the sleeve containing the code card that would authorize the use of nuclear weapons.
“I can’t fathom any circumstance where I would use what’s on this card,” she said. “Even if I could, and needed to, there’s every reason to believe that the sub that’s supposed to be listening for my call is out of commission. Two years is a long time to be on station.”
I knew that Schiavo had considered seeking information on the continued presence of the missile submarine from the Rushmore’s commander, but with Admiral Adamson having shifted his command to dry land on Hawaii, doing so would bring another person into the realm of needing to know. And I was certain that Schiavo had no desire to allow a new individual, however trustworthy, into the secret signified by what she carried in the small plastic sleeve.
“The president was right, Fletch. He couldn’t keep the power exclusively to himself. Not in this world. And I can’t either.”
There was every likelihood that the president we hadn’t heard from since fleeing Columbus two years ago was dead. Killed by the Unified Government attack on the city outright, or by the nuclear blast he’d envisioned as the last chance to stop the enemy from completely absorbing the eastern half of the country. That he’d shared part of his duties, the ability to launch a strategic strike, with Schiavo had been a prescient move, it seemed. Now, she was taking steps to do the same.
And I knew who she had in mind to bear the same awful burden she’d known for the last twenty-four months.
“How’s your memory, Fletch? A contractor seems like the kind of person who’d have to keep a laundry list of measurements and parts numbers in their head.”
She held the code card out to me over the fire.
“Take it,” she said. “Memorize it. I already have.”
I didn’t reach for what she was offering me. In many ways it was an invitation to a club that would exclude any too eager to join. A club whose members had the power to set in motion actions which could kill millions.