by Gene Skellig
They were required to bring rugged rain gear and, regardless of destination, they must bring winter clothing.
They were also required to be in their assigned accommodations and to pray before the Laozi at precisely 1720Z, Universal Standard Time, each day. They were to have a television tuned to CNN, BBC News or any other major news channel so that they could be given a sign when their task was to begin. They were even told what form the sign would be.
They would recognize the Yinglong, or “Responding Dragon”.
In Chinese Mythology, the Yinglong was said to be the god of rain. One of the nine most powerful of Chinese Dragons, the Yinglong was said to create clouds out of his fiery breath. When they received the sign of the Yinglong, all descendants of the Dragon, as the Chinese people referred to themselves, would emerge from their slumber and spread their wings.
The details of their specific mission were hidden in the Laozi statuettes, so these “Little Dragons” as General Bing liked to refer to the agents sent abroad before the war, were to destroy the statuettes and remove the instructions that they would find in a paper roll hidden inside the porcelain dolls.
The dolls would not be mistaken as cultural relics when passing through airport security, however, as they were obviously mass-produced and marked “Made in China” on the bottom. They were General Bing’s clever solution for smuggling secret orders into the various countries where Little Dragons were sent, without greatly risking OPSEC.
After removing the paper from its air-tight chamber in the doll, they would have ninety seconds to wipe both sides of the paper with a lemon wedge to reveal the message invisibly written behind an innocuous prayer, to fix the ink. If, after ninety seconds they had not applied the lemon juice, the invisible ink would evaporate and the message would be lost.
The message in each Laozi provided specific mission orders, unique to each agent. In many cases, it was simply to go to some location and join other agents to form a unit that would then move on to take some simple objective. In other cases, they were assigned to monitor the movement of civil defense and military personnel after Phase Three began and to be prepared to brief follow-on units on the disposition and composition of whatever forces were active in the assigned area.
The orders given to the more talented agents provided more details on their tasks. Some were to destroy power lines, water lines and communications infrastructure. Others were to seize control of specific facilities or entire towns, or cut off a particular transportation corridor.
Agents were sent to destinations all over the world; however, there was a considerable emphasis on locations in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other places in the southern hemisphere where the effects of Phase Three were expected to be less severe. Many agents were placed with orders to engage the local Chinese to become influential or at least get close to the more powerful members of those communities. When the time came, the Little Dragons were to recruit “Dragon Flies”, using rhetoric, gold, vice or any other means of persuasion. These ad-hoc militias loyal to the Chinese invasion would then take control of strategically important locations.
Code-words were provided which would enable these small units to recognize the authority of follow-on agents or forces which would eventually relieve them and take control. These Little Dragon operations were intended to establish a foothold at critical locations to dislocate, confuse and delay the enemy long enough for follow-on forces to arrive.
While each of the Little Dragons briefed into the program may have thought that they were one of a very select group, over thirty thousand Laozi statues were actually handed out. With each Little Dragon mission costing about $G 40,000, the Little Dragon Supporting Plan had drained the treasury of the Chinese state by $G 1.2 billion. Spending related to other aspects of WINTER SNAKE added another $G 3.5 billion.
This certainly would be noticed within the Treasuries of China and the United States had it not been camouflaged as Chinese participation in the issuance of the New US Dollar-Gold, which came into effect on 01 May.
General Bing and his upper echelon of the future leaders of the great Chinese Bing Dynasty laughed at the foolish Americans for asking China to repatriate the $1,900 billion in old US Treasury Notes that President Parker had ordered null and void. In return, China would receive ninety billion in new US Dollar-Gold along with America’s promise to apportion nine million ounces of gold to be held in trust in US Treasury vaults. The US wanted China to begin using the new $G US currency to re-start trade with the US. China would be paid for the worthless Federal Reserve Notes; the US would get an economic lifeline.
The movement of such enormous sums of money gave General Bing’s men in the Chinese Treasury the means to fund the massive program of stockpiling food supplies, ordering and shipping military equipment to various safe locations called for in the Supporting Plans, paying for the Little Dragon operation, and chartering all available shipping to haul food supplies from the food producing nations of the world to designated locations at sea without any of this spending being recognized for what it was, mobilization for war – funded entirely by the Americans!
Had the war not started on time, however, the enormity of the spending and preparations would be recognized and General Bing’s strategy would have been revealed. His enemy was already defeated, General Bing was certain, even if it would be a few more moves before the end game was played out.
General Bing could not have anticipated that one impatient Little Dragon would put WINTER SNAKE in jeopardy. But the loss of a few Dragons and Dragon Flies was inconsequential, as General Bing was still many moves ahead.
24
D.U.M.B. ONE
28 February: 9 Months After NEW
The cool air rushed in as the huge door rolled back on steel tracks set in the concrete. Warrant Officer Blakely stood a few hundred meters inside, at the first 90 degree turn. He found himself surrounded by a whisper of fog as the warm, humid air escaping from the tunnel flowed overtop the cooler air coming in from the outside world. He felt re-energized by its freshness, and looked forward to having a smoke outside. Smoking in DUMB One was prohibited everywhere except for the “Smoking Pits”, but nobody had said anything about not smoking outside.
His bunker had been nicknamed “DUMB One” because it was home to President Parker and her cabinet. It was probably the most well outfitted bunker to have been activated since the war started last May. It was officially named the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, located in Bluemont, Virginia.
The original facility was built in the 1950s and occupied 600,000 sq ft. Where WO Blakely now stood was quite distant from the old facility; however, both the large new annex and the original site were referred to as the Mount Weather EOC.
The facility was now the permanent home for the US Government, comprised of the military and political leadership, their support staff, facility maintenance engineers, security forces and a variety of top civilian and military experts assembled hastily when the war started. They had been evacuated to Mount Weather because both the original site, and the newer annex, had been designed to survive high-yield nuclear attacks.
The engineers who had built the original facility during the cold war had done their job well. They had built it to withstand repeated hits with 25 megaton ICBMs. So when the Department of Homeland Securities had began the massive upgrade to the Mount Weather and other Deep Underground Military Bases in the first years after the September, 2001 attack on the United States, there was already a robust infrastructure to start with.
The engineers of the 21st century had more sophisticated equipment at their disposal than their 1960’s predecessors. They also had an almost unlimited budget funneled through FEMA and the DHS to the consortium of construction firms involved.
The task had required a great deal of secrecy, which had been guaranteed by the enormous profits to be made. These contractors had also had lucrative maintenance contracts which would provide an income stream in perpetuity. The se
cretive consortium that had been assembled for the construction and maintenance of the five larger and sixteen smaller DUMBs would never be made public, due to the project’s National Security classification.
The fantastic notions of conspiracy theorists were a long way from what actually had been achieved. Rather than a fully integrated set of underground cities, the actual capacity of the 21st century DUMBs was much more modest. The five largest DUMBs each contained upwards of three million square feet, and typically had eight to ten levels. These “Jumbo DUMBs” were equipped with the small “Pressurized Water Marine Reactors”, PWMRs, used by the US Navy. This meant that they had been able to ‘plug and play’ existing, off-the-shelf, naval marine reactor designs. They had simply produced sixteen extra 350-MW PWMRs and five 500-MW reactors and accounted for them as part of the four hundred PWMRs already on inventory with the US Navy.
This had also helped to disguise the procurement of spares and the metal-zirconium alloy fuel rods. Standardization had also made the training of maintenance and operational personnel quite easy. The task had been assigned to the US Navy, which had decades of experience with these reactors and thousands of trained personnel who could be called upon to staff the facilities.
It had been strange at first for some of the inhabitants of these DUMBs to see US Navy uniforms, but once they understood how essential the reactors were they treated the Navy personnel with respect that verged on reverence.
The marine reactors were well suited to installation in the confined space of the underground bases, as they were compact designs for fitment into warships. They provided sufficient, reliable power to operate the DUMBs for up to twenty years. They could sustain the power and cooling needs of 9,200 personnel each in the Jumbo DUMBs and 2,500 personnel in the sixteen smaller regional DUMBs.
Considerable electrical power was required to cool the facilities from the 26 C of the surrounding rock to a more comfortable 20 C for the living and working spaces of the facilities. The next largest electrical demands were for water purification, reverse osmosis of recycled water, air filtration and de-humidification. Also high in electrical demand were the lighting systems for the hydroponic gardens. The computer and communications systems of the government and military Command Posts, laboratories, and the administrative workspaces rounded out the electrical demand.
The five largest facilities were located in key areas of the United States, with the primary, DUMB One, located 70 miles west of Washington DC. The other four Jumbo DUMBs were located in remote areas of Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, and Tennessee. Each was connected in some way to an existing facility. This had made it possible for contractors to move key equipment and personnel in and out of the known locations without revealing anything about the new annexes. Resources had then been transferred by underground tunnels to the adjacent new site. In this way, the “new” facilities had been hidden in plain sight. Interior spaces of the original facilities had been stripped-out and largely abandoned, other than for necessary maintenance and logistical staging.
Construction activities had been further disguised by mining operations, simulated road construction and the continuous mundane activity of gravel pits. This had allowed the engineers to remove millions of tons of waste material through the long tunnels and simply dump the overburden alongside the tailings of some innocuous mining venture or incorporate the material into the feedstock of gravel crushers at quarries. As part of the overburden management, huge quantities of crushed rock had been set aside at unassuming locations surrounding each installation, for future use in preparing egress portals.
There had been a great deal of waste material to dump. Each DUMB required large volumes of space dedicated to quarters, storage of food supplies, water treatment, marine reactor, cooling systems, air filtration systems, recreational and administrative spaces, living quarters and vast storage areas for machinery. Space was also required for light armored vehicles, helicopters, earth moving equipment, specialized engineering equipment, mobile nuclear laboratories, mobile biological laboratories, mobile command posts and general duty all-terrain vehicles. There was also a fleet of very capable civilian pattern vehicles such as the ubiquitous GMC Suburban and various types of mid-sized SUVs and pickups, along with a considerable amount of spares for all of the above. More space yet was needed for the workshops and maintenance areas for the vehicles.
Large chambers were required for the tank farms containing the fifty million gallons of diesel fuel needed for the operation of the large fleet of vehicles. Vast caverns had been blasted out and prepared for hydroponics and other forms of underground agriculture that were meant to augment the survival rations of the inhabitants. Areas had also been required for the water storage and recycling facilities that were so essential for the facilities to operate without additional inputs.
The final category which had required extensive engineering had been the “back doors”. These were necessary because it was likely that DUMBs would be discovered and attacked multiple times with nuclear and bunker-buster weapons. The entrances must be convoluted and hardened enough that even if the overlying mountain of rock were pulverized, the facility would not be breached. Certainly the fact that these facilities were buried as deep as 5,000 feet underground had addressed part of this problem, but the planners had still been left with another one.
If all entrances to the facility were destroyed, then the inhabitants would be entombed. To solve this problem, the engineers had taken their cue from the common prairie groundhog. They had built numerous incomplete tunnels in many directions and at various elevations. On a three-dimensional model, the network of tunnels and causeways linking the working and living spaces and leading to the prepared and unprepared entry/exit portals resembled a plate of spaghetti with cubes of some kind of meat interspersed, representing the caverns and chambers excavated for human activity. The reality was quite impressive, as this plateful of spaghetti that had been created by removing millions of cubic yards of hard rock had taken just five years to build.
All of this was old news to WO Blakely, as he enjoyed the fresh air coming in from the outside. He and fifty soldiers, engineers and construction workers had been waiting for the green light to go outside. Some of them contemplated what had happened to their country and seemed somber, and yet excited, about working on a new exit. Having been confined to the underground bunker for nine months, the lack of an exit had weighed on their minds. Ever since the panicked evacuation into the facilities when the war started and all five of the original portals had been destroyed, their sanctuary had been their prison.
Given that they had only had about thirty minutes warning, all of the DUMB facilities had been seriously under-utilized. Of the 85,000 personnel that the 5 Jumbo and 16 regional DUMBs could house, only 24% of this capacity had been used. With so little warning, few of the pre-authorized personnel had been transported into the entrance portals before the attack.
Things were slightly better at the Mount Weather facility, as there was an underground shuttle from the Capitol Building joining a line from the Pentagon to the original Mount Weather facility. This had enabled nearly 1,200 key government and political personnel from the White House and Capitol Hill, and 952 Pentagon personnel to be evacuated to DUMB One in time.
The 250 or so support personnel located within the facility on a 24/7 basis and more than 300 personnel from the Mount Weather’s “Area A” surface facility had been evacuated to the annex. Among the last to arrive had been over 500 specialist personnel who had been whisked away by helicopters from a variety of military and government facilities, such as the CBRN experts from Fort Dietrich, medical personnel from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda, US Navy marine reactor specialists from Washington Naval Yard, soldiers from the joint US Army and USMC base at Fort Meyer and engineers from Quantico Marine Corp base.
Finally, 347 personnel, including flight crews, maintenance personnel, rapid-reaction companies and advance parties from nearby bases had made it into
the facility before it had been sealed off just three minutes before the first missile struck.
Had there been more time, over three thousand additional soldiers, airmen and naval personnel would have reached the facility. However, these service personnel, largely caught in the open in assembly areas or in the traffic jam outside the entry portals around Mount Weather, had perished in the attacks. This was particularly hard for the advance parties from the same units to bear, having reached safety inside the facility just a few minutes ahead of their unit convoys. The same was true at many of the other DUMBs, as there had been so little warning.
All in all, over 3,600 of the designated 9,200 personnel had made it into DUMB One, or at least past enough blast doors, before it had been sealed.
The armed services of the United States had been at Defense Condition Four, with no recognized immediate threat. So, to suddenly jump all the way to DEFCON 1, Maximum Force Readiness for Imminent War, had been an unexpected escalation that caught the nation completely by surprise.
At the Mount Weather facility, columns of ground forces had arrived from all directions. Helicopters quickly disgorged their passengers and either lifted off to minimum safe distance or in many cases abandoned their helicopters in favor of the sanctuary of the facility. But when the time came for the large blast doors to close, just three minutes before first impact, the majority of inbound personnel had been trapped outside.
In one tragic mishap, a secondary door had been blocked partly open by a light Armored Vehicle that had been driving desperately through when it became jammed by the closing blast door. This had taken away a valuable layer of defense and had resulted in a breach of as much of one third of the original facility and the needless death of 457 personnel who had felt that they had made it. A second nuclear strike penetrated deep into the old facility. The resulting jet of plasma and radiation included heavy radioactive particles from the “salted” warhead, designed to maximize radioactive fallout. The heat and intense radiation had consumed the entire “C” level of the original facility, incinerating all manner of supplies and equipment that had been staged in the otherwise disused storage and logistics bays.