by Gene Skellig
There was a short explanation to accompany each numbered entry, such as: “G42: Likely closed due to flooding after power failure eliminates flood control at Southport”, and “B37: Insufficient supplies of fuel on this route.” This comment appeared in many places.
The chill down his back had not gone away. “This is an evacuation map,” he said audibly to himself. Geoff thought about it, letting the reality sink in. A lot of effort went into researching this, all to take him from his home to where? He looked quickly through the three alternate routes, following them through the Rockies at the BC / Alberta border. Yes! he thought excitedly, the south route is through Fernie, the middle route is through Rocky Mountain House, and the north route is through Grande Cache. All three are in the boonies and avoid major traffic arteries. That makes sense!
All three routes converged on Vancouver Island. However, the southern route had lots of warnings and question marks once it entered the Fraser Valley. It appeared to peter out, with simply a dotted line from Hope to where? Parksville? No, Qualicum Beach, Geoff realized. The northern route clearly required taking a boat of some kind from Prince Rupert all the way to Port Hardy, then by road to Kelsey Bay, then several comments he could read later, then by sea the final leg to Bowser. From there Geoff knew the way.
He knew the terrain because he had spent the best four years of his life at the Base in Comox. He saw that there was a blast circle around Comox and that the sea leg of the red route went right through the blast circle, with a few comments.
Sure, Geoff reasoned, the Air Force base at 19 Wing Comox would be hit hard. The radioactive fallout would be blown down the Strait of Georgia, right along the red path on the map. He certainly wouldn’t want to be exposed to radioactive fallout. Even a few weeks after an attack, exposure to radiation would have serious long-term health consequences.
Suddenly Geoff put the map down and picked up one of the small yellow packets. The label read: “ThyroLock TM Thyroid blocking for radiation emergencies. 20 Tablets/65 mg each.”
He flipped the packet over and read the warnings and dosage information on the back: “ThyroLock TM should be taken as soon as possible after an alert from medical officials.” As Geoff read on, it became clear that taking one dose every day for up to ten days was meant to flood the thyroid gland with Potassium Iodide, KI, thereby blocking the uptake of radioactive iodide produced in an atomic blast and carried in the fallout.
By saturating the thyroid gland during the critical days of radioactive fallout, the risks of thyroid cancer and a range of other illnesses would be greatly reduced. The pamphlet included with the tablets also explained how it would be impractical to saturate the thyroid gland with potassium iodide from table salt, as it would require the unsafe ingestion of several cups of table salt per day to achieve the same level of saturation.
He then opened up a densely packed item that the papers had been wrapped around, and found that it contained ten 3M 8233 N100 HEPA Masks, with the label “Protects against harmful and irritating fumes. Protects against radioactive materials such as uranium and plutonium.”
Geoff now understood that the entire package amounted to an evacuation plan for him and his family, in the event of a nuclear war. He turned his attention back to the map.
The route past 19 Wing could be viable, if winds were favorable and he and his family avoided the period of heavy fallout. The KI tablets and HEPA masks would help prevent harm caused by the ingestion of radioactive particles.
After a few minutes of analysis, the central route across the country looked best to Geoff. It seemed to cover less ground than the other two and had only one short sea leg, from the marina at Lions Bay to a place called French Creek, on the shoreline between Qualicum Beach and Parksville. Once on the Island, there was a short route marked off from French Creek to some location not too far from Coombs, he figured.
The one problem with the central route, Geoff knew from camping in the region years before, was that the mountainous stretch of secondary roads from Kamloops to Pemberton could be treacherous. Just as he began to fold up the map, he spotted a pattern in a list of data laminated on the back of the map.
The format of the list appeared to be like licenses plates, such as “VA6CJN” and “VE6ADL”. There were hundreds of such locations painstakingly plotted along the three routes. Some of them were in green, and some red. Geoff read one of the entries: “Neil Herbert, 240 Hahn Crescent, Dinsmore. (780) 224-4198.” Then he read a box at the top of the list: “Ask to be connected with VA7TLB in Qualicum Beach. For any of the radio operators highlighted in green, also mention ‘Boss C,’” it read. Then Geoff realized the meaning of the numerical format.
It seemed that the idea was to use amateur radio operators along the way to update his progress or to get assistance from, regardless of which route he used. Even some of the radio operators who lived off the three main routes were plotted. It clearly implied that the way had been paved with some of these stations, increasingly as you approached Vancouver Island.
With a great many questions now in his mind, Major Neumann turned his attention to the single sheaf of paper. Just as he started to read it, his wife barged in and started nagging at him. She was saying something about helping her set the table for dinner. For the first time in a long while, Major Neumann did not drop whatever he was doing, to help with the family chores.
“I’ll be there in about 20 minutes, dear, I’m busy now.”
He turned his attention back to the letter without looking up. The letter was very short. It was a letter from Casey Callaghan, all right:
Dear Geoff. I haven’t written to you before, and this will be my only letter to you. I consider you to be a friend, even though I couldn’t open up to you while you were my boss. From our many philosophical discussions at work, you know something about my values, my concerns about the future, and why I left the Forces. Now I can tell you how things turned out. TFG turned out very well, as you must know by now. With that, I purchased acreage on Vancouver Island and built a very large house near Qualicum Beach. Do you remember that book I gave you to read, that the ‘SS Colonel’ could not finish? Well, some of that was in mind when I built the house. So if you find yourself in a similar situation as the father in that book, you now have a destination. You and your family are welcome to visit for as long as you like. The first tank of gas is on me!
In fact, why not go out today and fill up every jerry can you can get your hands on from the Wing Fuel Point? Why not sign out a few boxes of IMPs and pack up some camping gear into that rugged Tahoe of yours. Keep your tank full. You will know when it’s time to take a holiday. SARNEG:MONKEYSPIT Duress Code:PRAY.
Sincerely, your friend,
Casey Callaghan.
That was a coded invitation to a survival bunker, Major Geoff Neumann was certain. Geoff knew that “SARNEG” was a military brevity code word used in Combat Search and Rescue. “Search and Rescue Numerical Encryption Grid” is a ten-letter isogram which, if known to the sender and the receiver of a message, can be used to encrypt numbers within a message subject to interception. The codeword MONKEYSPIT transposes as 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, so M means Zero and N means 2, and so on. The duress code of “PRAY” was ironic but suitable, as both Casey and Geoff were not religious men. So if he was transmitting from one of those amateur radio stations on the route across Western Canada, but under some form of duress, he would use the word “pray” to tip off Casey that he was in difficulty.
The personal references Casey made in the letter were things only Geoff, Casey and their boss, the “SS Colonel”, would understand. Casey had shocked everybody at work when he referred to their boss, Colonel Cameron, as a member of the Gestapo to his face, until the Colonel himself acknowledged how much he resembled the Academy Award winning actor who played the very intelligent SS Colonel in an action movie playing in theaters back then.
The reference to that book, about a man trying to lead his family to safety in a disaster, was the final clue. Cas
ey must actually believe that a nuclear war is imminent, thought Major Neumann. And Geoff knew that it was. With his soul, and with his military mind, he knew that it was becoming increasingly likely that a full-scale nuclear war could actually happen.
The War between Israel and Iran had been the first hostile use of nuclear weapons since Monday, August 6, 1945 when the US had dropped ‘Little Boy’ on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. 140,000 civilians had been vaporized that day, or died soon after due to the effects of the flash, blast, trauma and radiation sickness. That had been about 13 kilotons. Fat Man had been dropped 3 days later on August 9, killing another 80,000 in Nagasaki. Taken together, it had been a shock to the world, but also the only time such weapons had been used in war.
The Middle East Nuclear Exchange war, MENE War, also called The Second Yom Kippur War, had started when the Iranian device had detonated on 08 October, almost two years ago, on the Israeli Day of Atonement. This was the second Yom Kippur war, after the Arab-Israeli war that lasted only 20 days, 6 to 26 October, 1973. That time, the state of Israel was nearly destroyed. Were it not for a perfectly executed pre-emptive air attack by the Israeli Air Force, obliterating the Egyptian Air Force in the span of less than an hour, the balance would never have tipped the Israeli way. In fact, recalled Major Neumann from his military studies, if not for a series of blunders by the Egyptian Army, Israel could have been overrun by the Egyptian and Syrian armies.
That war had ended better for Israel than the MENE War. This time it would be just a ten day affair, culminating in the massive intervention of the international community and the cease-fire agreed upon by both Israel and Iran, ten days after the biggest car bomb in history.
The device, stored in the trunk of a brand new Audi A8 sedan, was an Iranian variant of the Russian suitcase-sized “W54” 6 kiloton bomb. The Iranian device was an improvement on the former GRU suitcase bomb as the Iranian atomic weapons program had made such strides in the concentration of U-232 that their bomb had an actual yield of almost 9 kilotons. When it was set off, most likely by a cell phone trigger, it immediately vaporized the core of the most important city in Israel.
The expensive Audi A8 did not look out of place parked by a tree on Sderot Rothschild, about fifty meters from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. In an instant, the economy of an entire country no longer existed. The blast consumed everything within a half km radius. The subsequent firestorm destroyed everything within a one kilometer radius. Every man, woman and child died in a few terrible seconds.
Major Neumann remembered the horror that he and the rest of the Battle Staff in the Canadian NORAD Region Operations Centre felt as they watched the images unfolding live on TV.
The international media had been alerted to the threat of a bomb in Tel Aviv just minutes before the detonation, so the blast was transmitted live on camera. People were transfixed the world over, staring at the repeated replay of the first use of atomic weapons in the twenty-first century. The image of that tall mushroom cloud rising out of the centre of the city had been burned into Major Neumann’s memory.
The terror was brought to an even higher level when a second device was detonated just 44 minutes later in Haifa, to the north, with similar devastation also broadcast live on television. The war between Iran and Israel quickly escalated until Israel’s taste for retribution was assuaged and Iran’s meager stockpile of devices was spent. In the end, all 11 of Iran’s nuclear facilities and underground bunkers had been obliterated, along with nine cities. The death toll in Iran was staggering, well over nine million killed in the attacks and another six million dead within a month from the after-effects.
Things were nearly as bad in Israel, as ten of Iran’s nineteen Shahab-5 Kosar Eternal Life in Paradise missiles struck their targets in Israel. Five others were rendered inoperative by a defensive EMP burst put up by the Israelis. Iranian warheads struck Jerusalem, Ashdod, Beersheba, Ramat-Gan, Bat-Yam, Askelon, and Lod. When added to the bombs at Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Iranian attack had dealt a crippling blow to Israel, killing close to two million people in the attacks and weeks of suffering that followed.
The four remaining Shahab-5s and all six of the longer ranged Shahib-6s inexplicably struck major non-Israeli cities within the region. It didn’t do the Iranians any good to protest that they had not ordered their missiles to attack Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, Bahrain, Dubai, Musqat, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, and Djibouti. American and Russian satellites confirmed that the missiles had been launched from Iran, and confirmed that the missiles were North Korean Taepo Dong-2 boosters upgraded with RD-216 Enorgomash rocket engines provided to Iran by Russia back in 1999. Testimony by various experts on the Iranian nuclear program also pointed to China as the source of sophisticated missile electronics, telemetry, and monitoring equipment.
The MENE War had ended swiftly with the cessation of hostilities between Iran and Israel and an aggressive UN Mandate for a European and American force authorized to strip Iran of all nuclear and missile technology. An unprecedented humanitarian effort was organized to bring aid from Europe, Russia, India and the United States.
A year later, while still unclear why Iran had attacked the non-Israeli cities, the Middle East region was a humanitarian disaster, economic failure and a military powder-keg.
With Israel brought to its knees, Islamo-Fascists fanned the flames and filled the void left in many of the surrounding countries which had lost their capital cities to the Iranian missiles. Many in the west were suspicious that Islamo-Fascists had infiltrated the Iranian regime and deliberately targeted the uninvolved cities. Meanwhile, investigators could find no evidence that Iran had any war plans to launch the full force of their nuclear arsenal. In fact, there was mounting evidence that Iran’s plan was to destroy only Tel Aviv and Haifa, and to have the blame lay on Jordan, from which the bombs had been smuggled into Israel in the first place.
With the war in Afghanistan having become mired in the cross-border battles reaching deeper and deeper into a failing Pakistan, and with what’s left of Israel paranoid that a war of annihilation was being planned by enemies on all sides, the ferocity and power of nuclear warfare was a palpable danger.
Reflecting on the MENE war, and the increasingly unstable global situation, Major Neumann knew that the possibility of a larger conflict escalating into a global nuclear war had become a real possibility. Events were moving in a direction that nobody seemed to want to talk about. It was as if ignoring it or highlighting the few positive developments would somehow make the problems just go away. That kind of head-in-the-sand thinking had started with the economic collapse of 2008 and, despite all the “green shoots”, “signs of a moderate recovery”, and years of stimulus spending, the US was now in a severe depression. So maybe Casey was right and a full scale nuclear war was on the horizon, even in Canada; Even in Winnipeg.
Geoff knew that as the alternate command and control site to US Continental NORAD region, CONR, the Canadian NORAD Region, CANR, would be among the first targets that would be taken out. The Air Division in Winnipeg was a target of the highest priority. Geoff’s office was at the center of the crosshairs.
With a heavy weight on his shoulders, Geoff leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes in concentration. After a few minutes, he calmly sat up and burned the letter, to destroy the secret information. Moreover, the SARNEG and Duress Code must not be left with the map. “Shit!” he said to himself, “he’s really laid it all out, hasn’t he?”
During dinner with his wife and their two young children, Geoff was unusually silent. He had not told his wife about the contents of the package and would not ask for her permission to do what he had decided to do. After dinner, he told her that he was going out for a few hours and would be home in time to tuck the children in. He then spent the next twenty minutes banging around in the garage before leaving, with no explanation of what he was doing. Gina was too afraid to even ask.
For the first time in a very long time, Gina was excited and terrified by the decisive w
ay that Geoff was behaving. Hopefully he would tell her what he was doing. Whatever it was, Gina knew it was extremely important that she should not interfere.
16
O.P.E.
18 January: 4 Months Before NEW
Robert Beck took down last year’s calendar and replaced it with a fresh new year. He reflected on how the world had changed in that year. The fear and insecurity that the previous year had started with, in the aftermath of the terrible MENE War some fifteen months ago, had been a true gift for his candidate.
Rather than throw away the heavily marked up and somewhat tattered planner, Robert carefully rolled it up and inserted it into a paper tube, attached a label, and placed the cylinder into a large box marked: “Parker Transition Team – Robert Beck”.
A lifetime student of political history, Robert felt a deep reverence for important historical documents. He knew that this document was important, with its many comments written in his own hand documenting Susan Parker’s successful presidential run. Being the man behind the election of the first female president in America was an achievement that Robert accepted as being his contribution to history.
Robert had been campaign director for the former Governor of Montana. Now he was the head of her Transition Team. With just fifteen days before Inauguration Day, Robert had turned his full attention to the transition. Of course he knew that he would be the President’s Chief of Staff, and they had long since selected most of the Cabinet. Now they faced the daunting task of sorting out as many as 750 key appointments and directorships which would ensure that the Parker agenda would be effectively carried out.