****
Wednesday - Morning
Mikail stood by the door in the darkness and waited, staring single-mindedly out of the glass window. He’d not said many words to Sergei through the night, and when Vladimir finally came to and began to stir, there’d been an unspoken agreement that the issue had finally been settled once and for all. It is common with violent men like Vladimir that, like chickens or dogs or wolves, once they are put in their place, they become loyal followers pretty quickly. It is the bully that is the pose in such men. The truth of the bully lies in their cowardice.
As the silence built up, piling upon itself in the cool of the early morning, Mikail’s certainty and resolve grew. He turned to his comrades and barked out orders.
“When I make my move, you’ll know what to do,” he said, brusquely and without emotion.
“Yes, Mikail,” the other two men replied as one.
Although he was not there when the traveler named Clay, Lev Volkhov, and Vasily had broken out of this same cell, he imagined that their planning had gone much differently--and their plan had failed. He was assured in his own mind that his plan would not fail.
“I will expect you to move quickly. I will not...” he paused, to let the implication of that word sink in, “…tolerate failure.”
The two larger men looked at him and nodded their understanding.
About thirty minutes later, there was a rattling of keys and the door slowly opened. A young man, one of Mikail’s recent Youth Revolutionary Forces, stepped into the room with a tray of food. Before he could even say a word, Mikail pounced, raising his hands quickly to knock the food trays upwards, throwing hot soup into the youth’s startled face. There was only a short squawk from the young man as Mikail took his pistol from its holster and clubbed the boy unconscious with it. He fell like a noodle to the floor.
Mikail walked calmly out into the day room, ignoring the two armed Spetznaz soldiers who were lounging somewhat carelessly near the front door of the cluster. They saw him, but his calm demeanor and the purpose in his gait threw them off for a few beats. In that interval, Mikail grabbed a cushion from the sofa and, turning quickly and gracefully, he shot the first soldier through the cushion and in the face. The second soldier began to lift his machine pistol but it was too late, and Mikail’s second shot burst through the soft padding and hit the man in the temple. Both soldiers, professional and experienced special force operators, hit the ground without firing a shot.
By the time Vladimir and Sergei came peeking out of the cell, Mikail was already taking the uniform off the smaller of the two Spetznaz men.
“Vladimir, this other one, he’s big like you. Put on his uniform. We’re going to escort Sergei out of the prison like he’s one of our prisoners.”
“But… what if we’re stopped, Mikail?” Vladimir asked, as he began to undress the larger man.
“We won’t be. Not if we walk with purpose. But if we are, we’ve got to fight our way to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house. That is our destination and we have to make it there no matter what.” He looked at the two larger men to make sure they understood. Then he could not help the boast that was welling up in his heart as he saw in their eyes a new servile feeling growing in theirs.
“I don’t think we’ll be stopped. I just disarmed three armed men by myself, and two of them were highly trained specialists. I assume that you fellows can keep up with me, can hold your own in a fight, if the need arises.”
God in heaven, looking down, would have seen three school boys on the playground, two larger bullies, all muscle and violence, and another, smaller young man full of ruthless intelligence. The pendulum had swung back and forth during the course of these men’s lives, and the weight of fists and sinew of muscle had never been far behind those shifts as they’d bullied their way across the streets of Warwick.
Now as they stood and made their plans to escape, Mikail turned away from his threatening physicality which had surprised his larger friends in the night, and now he turned to attack their pride in the way that only he, among the three of them, had ever been able to do. He called on their masculine brutality because he knew that they might need it for a fight, and he served as brain to their brawn, and focus for their force.
Mikail looked at the two of them, all potential and potency without direction. He spoke with an urgency that allowed no contradiction.
“We have to get to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house.”
And with that, he turned the dialectical force of common sense inside out and gave the point to ideology when used in the hands of capable leaders. He wielded his intelligence like a pen to the awful sword of their brutality.
Words… speak louder… than action.
Mikail placed the handcuffs on Sergei, loosely, so he could slip free if need be, and the three of them stepped out into the corridor.
****
Friday - Morning
Now Peter was in a very bad mood. Two days had passed, and Cole had not returned. They had every reason to believe that he’d been captured, and, if he’d been captured, then he’d probably been either shot or taken back into the village by the guards.
The two days living in the metal shed at the water plant hoping for Cole’s return had passed like weeks.
The three friends had no news from the outside world except the gossip heard on the shortwave radio the night before, and now, on Friday morning, the day of their planned departure, they faced the fact that Cole might be lost to them.
Natasha was distraught, as might be expected, but she was stoic nonetheless, and only occasionally broke down in whimpers, or felt the hot track of a tear as it escaped from her eye and dampened her cheek. Silly sibling rivalries aside, she loved her brother very much, and she still hoped that, by some miracle, he was still okay.
While they waited, they worked. They’d practiced making fires and sharpening knives and building shelters, and over the past forty-eight hours, Peter had spoken to them of tactics to be used while traveling. Between anxious moments when he’d looked out the door of the shed and back into the woods towards Warwick, he’d shown them hand signals they could use to communicate with one another without words. He’d talked to them over and over again about the horrors they would likely run across, and how they must stick together and constantly be focused on their survival.
Peter showed them the most basic rudiments of orienteering and shared some of his knowledge of tracking and woodland survival, and during most of this time he had maintained an attitude of patient instruction. But now Peter was no longer patient. He was growing angry and resentful at being so helpless to assist Cole. On this Friday morning, he seethed in silence.
The night before, after they finished their training and practice, Peter risked pulling the second radio from the ammo can in order to see if they could receive some information from the outside world.
They put the batteries in the radio, and for a long time they were unable to find any stations at all that were broadcasting. As the night wore on, and as Cole still did not appear in the shed, the buzzing of nothingness coming through the radio only amplified their feelings of sadness and fear.
Just before midnight, as Peter was about to give up on the radio altogether, he brushed past a very weak broadcast on the shortwave band. It was nothing more at first than a weak modulation as he swept across the dial, but as he tuned it finer, he got a slight signal, and as they leaned in and listened closer, they made out a man’s voice in amongst the electronic hum and static. They all sat up with excitement as they heard the voice speaking through the atmospheric interference.
The voice said that it was broadcasting from Montana. They could barely make it out, but the male voice relayed information that he said was derived from Ham radio reports from around the country and the world. The reports, the voice said, were spotty. Only radio operators from as yet unaffected areas, or those who had thought to shield their equipment, were still broadcasting.
Anger could be detected in the solitary vo
ice, as the man reported that before and after the EMP attack, U.S. military units had moved unilaterally and without provocation against “innocent” militia and patriot groups. The voice speculated that the whole worldwide collapse had the distinct feel of a concerted and well-developed plan. “I am certain,” the voice said, “that this catastrophe could not have proceeded without the approval and planning of a central elite somewhere. It was too organized, over too great a distance, involving too many, to be simply the actions of a rogue few.”
Ham radio broadcasters reported that, subsequent to the first EMP over the east coast, several more high-altitude nuclear devices were detonated over the Western United States. America, the voice said, had retaliated against Russia, China, and North Korea with EMP strikes, but there had yet to be any reported low-level nuclear explosions, in the U.S. or anywhere else. So far, and for some reason, it seemed that the exchange had remained limited—directed at electrical and technological infrastructure. “It seems that governments have decided to cut off the head of the beast first,” the voice said. “Who knows how long that will last? You know… before they go to work on the body.”
As the voice on the radio faded and eventually the signal was lost, Lang remembered what Volkhov had said to him. He’d predicted that actual physically destructive nuke detonations over cities wouldn’t happen for two weeks.
Two weeks, the old man had said. That’s how long you’ll have. Then the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key-codes and fail-safes and guarantees, it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet on that. They want war, and there will be war.
That had been the night before. It had seemed a happy, if disconcerting, diversion as they waited for Cole to return from his trip to the tunnel. The news was not “happy,” but the fact that there was news was a good happenstance.
Now, early on this Friday morning, Peter stared angrily outwards from the door of the metal shed, and wondered how much longer they could wait. He was realistic. He understood that Cole had probably run into trouble with someone from the village. Perhaps he’d been seen by a guard at the fence line and been captured for interrogation. Whatever the case, Peter had told Cole that they would have to leave on Friday morning, with or without him, and Cole had agreed to that as a factor in his decision-making.
Peter cursed himself for letting Cole return in the first place, realizing that the younger man had probably traded his life for his need to see clearly. If youth could but see in the first place, Peter thought, but curses aside, he knew he could only wait a minute or two longer before they would have to abandon Cole and head off on their own.
****
At first, it sounded like a growl rising up from the throat, tiny and imperceptible, but with a slight menace even in its faintest whispering. The low hum magnified and grew louder and louder still, until it became obvious that something was coming and was nearby, and their initial reaction was to find somewhere to hide inside the shed. Lang, Natasha, and Peter heard the growl like one hears a hostile dog. The sound was muted, but angry with promise. They approached cautiously to see whether the source was aiming for them. They all stepped forward to the edge of the shed’s door, and there, in the space of the light that streamed in through the door, they saw the drones buzz by in formation, five of them flying low and near the ground, seemingly cognizant, as if guided by some inner intelligence. They noticed the drones’ silent shadows trailing along on the ground, rising up over the mountain, flitting through the trees, along the brush that peaked its head out of the snow, along the snow itself, as the shadows climbed, like the drones that cast them, up to the top of the mountain in the distance, and then disappeared in the horizon and the blue of the sky.
They were headed, it seemed, towards Warwick.
****
Friday - Night
On a low rise, just outside of Mt. Vernon, Virginia, an odd looking RV, flanked by black militarized vehicles, sat parked with the windshield pointed towards the northeast. It was fully dark and there was no moon to be seen, and the area in view of the RV, usually twinkling brightly with city lights and traffic, was mostly darkened. Mostly. Fires glowed all around the D.C. metropolitan area, and the white and red armies of vehicle lights that usually spread out like ribbons along the highways and byways of the darkened urban area did not march up and down as they had for more than a century.
There was only one area that was lit up as if nothing world-changing had happened, and it was to this area of illumination that the driver of the RV, a man named Clive Darling, pointed as he turned off the radio and flipped a switch on the dash that killed the array of blue and red and orange lights coming from the console. The darkness of the night invaded the RV and gave emphasis to the little lighted city in the distance.
“Andrews Air Force Base,” Clive said in his Savannah drawl. Something in the way he said it made the words sound like the most important thing that anyone had ever spoken.
The two men seated in the RV were surrounded by what amounted to a Faraday cage. The wire box that encompassed the driver and passenger area of the RV was grounded to the frame and, using proprietary wiring and chips and breakers, the RV was virtually completely shielded from any possible electromagnetic pulse.
In the distance, as the two men looked out over the little lighted island in the inky sea of darkness, an aircraft with blinking lights pushed back from a hanger and was being taxied to one end of the runway by a large tow truck with lights burning so brightly that it looked like a spotlight falling down from the sky.
“Somebody important is making a break for it,” the driver said, his words smooth and melodic. “Some group of influential people.” Somehow the way he spoke the words, he spit out the syllables so that the “flu” sound made the word sound like a virus. “People on that plane are partially responsible for all of this,” he said, indicating the darkness all around them. “And now, they are getting out of Dodge. Does that seem right to you?”
The airplane was released from the tow and started forward down the runway, picking up speed as it lumbered, until it evened off in a smooth flow of motion, and the front wheels left the ground as the pilot pointed the nose of the craft skyward.
“I don’t know what you’re asking me, Clive” the passenger answered, “but I suppose that the powers that be will always cover themselves. That seems to be the way it goes. It’s always the regular people that suffer at times like this.”
“Well,” the driver said, “not always.” He then reached up on the dashboard and flipped another switch that instigated a deep and roaring whush, heard instantly, coming from the back of the RV. The whush turned into an unearthly electric hum and grew until the vehicle itself vibrated and shook as if it were in an earthquake.
The plane left the ground and banked hard to the right, turning out over the Chesapeake Bay until its lights, the only lights in the sky save those from the heavens, began to rise into the night’s deep black. Just as the RV seemed like it might vibrate itself into pieces, the driver flipped up a switch cover and punched a red button. At that moment, the heavily electric hum turned into a sound not unlike a large wave hitting a beach, and there was the feeling of a flash as the lights on the base blinked out.
And as they did, so did the lights on the aircraft.
Moments later, there was a fireball over the horizon. The night sky briefly lit up like a strange reverse snowglobe, or a sunrise, or a rainbow, bursting brightly in a flash of light that rose up against the dark as the plane plummeted into the bay. The brief burst of light in the sky quickly disappeared as the plane’s cabin broke apart and the pieces and jet fuel and the cargo and the people slowly sunk under the murky depths of the water.
“Insufficient shielding.” Clive Darling pronounced with certainty. His drawl was even heavier now. “We warned them about it for years, but they didn’t want to listen. They just wanted to play politics, thought someho
w they could reason with an EMP.” Clive reached down and turned the lights back on inside the cabin of the RV, and reached into his shirt pocket and took out a small note pad. He opened the pad and quickly made a few marks in it while the passenger beside him sat and looked out over the nighttime sky.
“What can you do, you know? You can’t reason with a man who has his reasons…”
In the distance, the fires around Washington, D.C. burned out of control as the driver of the RV flipped a few rocker switches on the dash, then started up the vehicle in earnest. The sound of John Denver’s voice once again came over the speakers, singing a song about how sunshine on a man’s shoulders can make him happy, how sunshine looks lovely on the water… The passenger looked out over the scene before him and thought that those words were true.
Clive Darling thought so, too. He softly began humming those words to himself as they pulled away into the enveloping night.
CHAPTER 18
At the bottom of the hill they turned west for a moment and then followed along the banks of a stream until they found a fallen tree that formed a natural bridge—large and solid enough to carry their weight as they traversed the stream’s width. With Peter in the lead, they hiked through the Forest Preserve, heading generally in a southwesterly direction, making their way by the angle of the sun in the fall sky. The walking was rough because the snow was high, but they settled into a rhythm that kept them pushing forward with firm conviction.
They did their best to stay cloaked under a cover of trees because they had no way of knowing whether they might be spotted by the swarm of drones that had, just hours before, swept in and laid waste to the town behind them. They were survivors and, from the stain left on the earth back in their village, it was clear to them that whoever had ordered the drone strike did not intend for there to beany survivors. Although manageable, the cold was persistent with its stinging rebuke, and it forced them to keep moving to stay warm.
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