by Gene Skellig
After having reached safety in the Mount Weather Annex, the inhabitants were as thankful for their new sanctuary as they were grimly aware of its tomblike nature. Eventually, issues of claustrophobia replaced the initial elation of having been saved. This, along with survivor’s guilt, contributed to a host of psychological stresses that they increasingly faced the longer they lived underground. Being aware that all of the portals were destroyed in the attack and that they could not open up the prepared new portals until the radiation levels reduced to safe levels, made the feeling of being trapped that much more palpable.
Radiation detectors showed how long it took for the radiation to fall to safe operating levels. In the eastern states, the radiation levels had been very high due to the large number of targets and the prevailing winds bringing additional fallout from across the United States and Canada. At sites in the west, some sites remained radiation-free in at least one or two directions, where prevailing winds brought clean air from the north Pacific and scattered the radiation to the east. There were also a few commercial sites deep underground, like the Bethany Falls SubTropolis near Kansas City, which had not been targeted. With 10% of the available 55 million square feet leased out largely for the warehousing of food products, this facility was the largest food cache on the continent. After the war started, the SubTropolis had been quickly federalized by civil defense officials and the contents distributed in less than four months.
The areas east of Mount Weather had received heavy fallout because the attacks on Site A were surface-based detonations aimed at taking out the underground facility. Some of the warheads had even been “salted” with additional linings of gold and other heavy elements to increase the proportion of long-lived fallout. Areas further southwest along the Blue Ridge Mountains, including most of the prepared new portal tunnels, were largely clear of heavy radiation.
What held the authorities back from opening the new portals was the strategic situation. It took time to determine who had been behind the infiltration of SIMON and other computer networks, which had led to the nuclear war between the United States and the Russian Federation. Soon after the commencement of hostilities, however, USSTRATCOM and other commands had begun to piece together data pointing to Chinese involvement.
When it had been confirmed that the Russians had aborted over 200 missiles just minutes before reaching American and European targets, and had ordered their field commanders to cease all hostilities against US and NATO, the picture had become clear.
Russia’s subsequent pulverizing of China gave the Americans solid proof of how deeply the Russians objected to having been manipulated into a war of annihilation by the Chinese. But, somehow, China continued to fight.
USSTRATCOM had reported that a previously unknown type of Chinese ICBM, with a surface detonation in the thirty megaton range, had obliterated the very deep and well fortified Russian bunker at Solnechnogorsk. This had destroyed the Headquarters of Third Missile Defense Army and decapitated Russia by taking out President Dvorkin and his top military and civilian advisors.
President Parker had been briefed that in the two weeks after the war had started, President Dvorkin had ordered the deployment of humanitarian assistance to European countries that had been so devastated by Russian and American missiles. He had sent hospital ships, engineering units equipped with water purification equipment, food aid, nuclear de-contamination and battlefield medical services. Russian aid was making a difference.
When the Chinese counter-attacked the Russian command and control sites, it had become clear to President Parker that China still had some surprisingly capable missiles and was intent on using them to thwart any efforts at stabilization. The hot war was not over yet. This made the Parker administration unwilling to come out from under the rocks of the Blue Mountains. So they stayed hidden, and did not open up the prepared exit portals until the military picture became clear.
It had taken eight months before the recursive process of Damage Assessment, Target List Update, Mission Planning, Weapon Selection, Strike, Battle Damage Assessment and so on had been repeated enough times that the Russians and Americans agreed that China no longer posed a missile threat. They had had to hunt down all twelve of China’s nuclear submarines and destroy the sixteen known and ultimately six previously unknown facilities of China’s Second Artillery Corp. While that had been considered to be an attainable goal, it was also recognized that China had a head start on mobilization and deployment in what was now clearly a global war of national survival. China also had the weight of numbers. This had left the Americans and other allies extra cautious, even defeatist.
In the Mount Weather annex it was not until 15 January that the Base Commander approved the order to start blasting the remaining hundred yards of one of the partly completed tunnels. With each eight yard “round” blasted, the tunneling crew got closer to the outside world. With each progressive round blasted the shock was more pronounced on the hillside. The final blast dislodged several rocks, which rolled down the snow-covered hillside.
The sky overhead was thick with the billions of tons of soot and dust thrown up during the nuclear war. The resulting grey skies were a cloak of darkness which, even in the midday gloom, no spy satellite could penetrate. Even so, the plan was to connect the new portal with the existing road infrastructure as quickly and quietly as possible.
WO Blakely’s task was to take a reconnaissance team out on a snow-shoe patrol, establishing a security perimeter for the engineers. Before anything could be done, however, they had to wait while two CBRN techs headed out to ensure that the radiation levels were safe. They took readings on the yellow boxes attached at hip level, the ubiquitous CD V-715 Civil Defense High Range Survey Meter, which could measure rates of up to 500 Roentgen units per hour. Levels in the 0 to 2 R/h level were considered safe for operating in, as long as the workers had been given their Potassium Iodide tablets and were wearing dosimeters to track their total accumulated exposure. If levels were higher, personnel would rotate more frequently.
The CBRN techs were dressed in Level A CBRN suits. To keep warm, they also wore thermal underpants and a fleece layer much like a track suit. This made things surprisingly comfortable in the minus 32 C temperature they were operating in. The suits would not protect them from any hazardous materials and harmful radiation but would protect them from inhaling radioactive or toxic particles. The suits had Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus, SCBA, and were outfitted with a range of particulate detector strips which would alert personnel to any CBRN hazards.
They also had other specialized equipment that could be heard humming away as the little machines drew air into sampling chambers. After a few minutes of tromping around and looking ridiculous in their awkward slow steps in the deep snow, the CBRN technicians confirmed safe radiation levels.
Blakely’s security team swung into action, moving swiftly on their standard military issue magnesium-alloy snow-shoes. Their tracks, leading out of the portal, looked like the tracks of enormous birds. Blakely’s team broke into two sections. One detail set up an OP on top of the bluff above the portal while the second squad walked down to the end of the spur road below and to the right of the portal. While treading up and down Edmonds Lane for a few hundred yards in either direction, they set up a few cameras which transmitted a live feedback to a repeater station being set up at the portal.
The men set about their tasks silently, using the microphones strapped to their throats to give short, concise reports to the “Net-Zero” signals operator who had set up his listening post just inside the portal.
The blast had come out of the hillside exactly as planned, three yards higher than the Mathew’s Pond spur off Edmonds Lane, east of the once green forests of Sky Meadows State Park. The Major leading the Engineers looked over the area below the portal and ideentified the snow-covered pile of crushed rock that had been set aside years before.
Thankfully, the snow was no more than six feet deep. It would present only minor diffi
culties for the heavy equipment. The Major looked out over the surrounding countryside. He wasn’t surprised that the nearby roads hadn’t been ploughed. There was no smoke, noise, nor any other sign of human activity. It would take a loader about two hours, he figured, to dress up the ramp leading from the spur road up to the portal using the stockpiled gravel.
Looking back inside the tunnel, he saw a crew drilling blast-holes to remove an overhang just inside. Another crew was assembling a steel footing for a rapid-stand aluminum building that would serve as a gate-house and disguise for the portal.
After WO Blakely’s team set up cameras at a number of locations, and settled in as sentries for the remainder of their twelve-hour mission, the WO moved on to his next task.
Standing on a rise close to the highway, Blakely had a good look up and down the valley to get a sense of the level of activity in the area. Having studied the maps and satellite photos before the mission, he knew the terrain. But looking at it live, on a cold wintry day after such a long confinement, he felt he had emerged into a strange and wonderful new world. He could just make out the red metal roof forming the spire of the Methodist church in the nearby hamlet of Paris.
The WO had been briefed that the hamlet used to have sixty people in it, and would be an early gauge of the status of the local population. He could see a few houses on the ridge northeast of the church, and the dimpled impression in the snow piled atop the odd-looking houses told him that their roofs had collapsed under the heavy snow. While it was far less than the snow piling up on the west coast, at least two yards of snow had been deposited across the entire North American landmass.
One of the Intelligence Requirements he was to take care of on this first patrol outside was to collect some digital images from the Edmonds Lane intersection with Highway 17. The main object of interest was Fleetwood Farm, just 400 yards north of where he stood. He could see that the farm was still inhabited. There was smoke coming out of the largest barn and the nearby house. Snow had been cleared from the areas between the house and the complex of farm buildings and grain silos, so it was immediately clear that the farm was operational.
WO Blakely and other soldiers from the Utility Battalion would be paying it a visit. With food supplies running low in DUMB One, and a decade-long nuclear winter ahead of them, they would need to nationalize any viable agricultural operations in the area. After all, the inhabitants of the Mount Weather facility, directly supporting the President of the United States, were far more essential to the survival of the nation than some farmers in rural West Virginia.
It had been a difficult ethical problem for President Parker, but in the end she had left the problem to the military. She had already ordered Marshal Law into effect in the first month after the attack. The military calculated that the 3622 DUMB One personnel had consumed almost three billion calories in the nine months after the facility had been sealed. They would need another thirty-seven billion calories to operate out of DUMB One for the anticipated ten years of the crisis.
This quantity of food would not have been a problem if it had not been for the fact that fully 80% of the facility’s carefully prepared long term food supplies had been incinerated in the mishap at the northeast portal of the older part of the facility. The supplies were being rotated out, with the replacement supplies already staged in the logistics bays for rotation in. With the loss of the bulk of their food supplies, and the problems they were having with internal food production, they only had sufficient food supplies for two or three years.
Ops came up with a plan to seize food supplies from the surrounding region, and to ensure that no word of the status of President Parker or the personnel in DUMB One would leak out. Consequently, local citizens posed a clear and present danger to a Federal Government in a devastated nation, under Marshal Law.
The more cooperative farmers would be brought into DUMB One to solve the problems they were having with underground food production. The others would be summarily executed.
It was not only the well armed local population that the Government had to be prepared to fight, but also the actual enemy, the Chinese military that had proven extremely difficult to find, fix and destroy. Despite the pounding that they had received from the Russians, and despite the on-going battles still taking place, the Chinese were still a threat.
The missiles had basically stopped after just a few days, but the conventional war raged on. It truly was the Third World War. And China was winning. They had dispersed and pre-deployed considerable forces worldwide. They had invaded Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, several countries in Africa, much of South America, and even parts of the west coast of the United States and Canada.
The Chinese had employed some surprising tactics in their invasions, which completely invalidated the existing assessments of the Order of Battle of the Chinese military forces. The Chinese OrBat did not include a large blue-water navy, or a global-reach Air Force. Their sole strength was their massive numbers of highly disciplined and completely expendable soldiers, but they had no expeditionary capability.
By the time the US Government hiding in DUMB One figured it out, the Chinese had deployed over a million personnel into strategic regions of the world. Whether seizing oilfields, port facilities or agricultural regions all around the globe, Chinese personnel knew exactly where to go.
How they had arrived there was the game changer.
The Chinese had carried out a well-coordinated, three stage set-piece invasion: First, they had infiltrated “Little Dragon” spies into the objective areas to act as a Fifth Column, organizing bands of local Chinese sympathizers, Dragon Flies, to gather tactical data and track civil defense efforts.
Second, commercial aircraft loaded with lightly armed Chinese Special Forces had suddenly appeared at smaller regional airports in the objective areas. Separating into small units, they had commandeered local transportation, linked-up with the Little Dragons for up-to-date intelligence, and then swiftly captured their largely undefended objectives. Most of these had already been at least partly seized by the Dragon Flies.
Third, much larger follow-on forces had been transported on commercial ships that had been hijacked or leased by Chinese forces just prior to the missile attacks of 20 May. Some of the ships were role-on role-off vessels which had been seized fully-loaded with brand new SUVs and pick-ups manufactured in America.
After the devastation of the missile attacks and the chaos in the weeks after the war began, any resistance the Chinese forces encountered was poorly coordinated, logistically unsupported, and easily defeated.
Now, nine months later, battles were being fought all around the world by local citizens and small military units acting without effective intelligence, logistical support, or any kind of a plan. But slowly, organized opposition to the Chinese invaders was beginning to build. In many cases, Chinese were fighting Chinese; locals of Chinese extraction fought desperately to defend their homelands and the freedoms they cherished. There were signs of hope, but no major victories.
So it was in this context, of having already lost the opening moves of a global war with China, that President Parker’s administration had become desperate for their own survival, and fearful of being taken out by a Chinese missile.
Follow-on attacks had occurred twice already. The first was when FEMA broadcast on the Emergency Alert Service that the 36th Engineer Brigade had successfully evacuated Fort Hood, Texas, before the sprawling base had been destroyed. FEMA announced that a new base was being established just west of Waco, Texas. While the FEMA comment had been viewed as only a minor breakdown in Operations Security, OPSEC, the Chinese had picked up on it.
They launched a Dong Hai-10 nuclear-tipped cruise missile from a Type-035 Ming diesel submarine that had been lurking 100 miles southwest of Mazatlan. The missile destroyed the new base, along with everybody at the Reconstruction and Aide Center.
At the same time, Chinese ground forces had completed their marine deployment into Mazatl
an and seized control of the port, but had run into a surprisingly strong Mexican force of local militia, regular Mexican Army and even some American tourists who figured that this was their chance to fight the Chinese.
When one of US STRATCOM’s remaining satellites picked up the launch of the Dong Hai missile, and the technician reported that Fort Hood was the target, there had been resistance to the idea that it came from a Chinese sub. While it was well known that the Chinese version of the Russian Kilo class diesel SSK submarine was suited for littoral operations, nobody had ever heard of a Chinese cruise missile capable of reaching targets over 600 miles away. But it had.
The USS John Paul Jones, DDG53, a multi-purpose guided-missile destroyer capable of antisubmarine warfare, had been tasked to investigate the origin of the missile. Originally based out of San Diego, DDG53 was one of the few remaining assets of the 5th Fleet. Their home base at San Diego had been destroyed, along with 37 of 56 major surface combatants, including both the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Regan aircraft carriers and the principle USMC assault ships.
The crew of USS John Paul Jones had been operating out of a small dock at a resort at Santa Catalina Island when they had been given the urgent orders from the Mount Weather EOC. Racing at thirty-two knots, they reached the area west of La Paz in under thirty hours and quickly picked up the acoustic signature of the Chinese SSK. The Chinese sub was heading due south, hoping to evade detection in the deeper waters off Puerto Vallarta.