by Rob Lopez
He was now being ordered to return to base himself.
“Negative, Control. We have a team trapped on the ground. Situation is critical. Repeat, situation is critical. Request urgent support by any means necessary.”
“Control to Bird Two, geomagnetic storm is imminent, repeat imminent. You are to return to base immediately.”
“No,” said Skip. “I need air support in this area and I need it now, before it’s too late.”
Skip had already consulted his crew, and they were in agreement with him: they had to stay, even if it meant disobeying orders. If they left now, Nomad was toast.
There was a pause on the line. “Skip, goddammit! There’s a major G-storm coming your way. If you don’t land now, you’ll endanger the whole aircraft.”
That had to be Colonel Douglas. He must have snatched the microphone from the controller to break radio protocol.
“Colonel,” said Skip, “we’ve weathered G-storms before. Our electronics are fully shielded.” Not as shielded as he would have liked, but the aircraft was built for a nuclear conflict, and while nothing could stop proton strikes, the delicate avionics were still protected against the kind of emp spikes expected back in the Cold War.
“You’ve never weathered this, Skip. We’ve been given red warnings. First time in my career I’ve received that. You’re not going to make it back to Al Udeid. Put it down at the nearest airfield.”
“With all due respect, sir, no. We’re not leaving this team.”
“Captain, that’s an order.”
“Colonel, I refuse. Give me something before we lose this team.”
There was silence in the cockpit. Skip knew he’d just screwed his whole career, and his crew knew it too. Turning around in his seat, he looked at them all. They were kind of shocked that he’d actually said that to the colonel. Skip and Colonel Douglas went back a long way, and had close family connections, but this was crossing a line.
“There was some static on the last message,” said Colonel Douglas. “I’m not sure I received it.” There was a pause. “I’m authorizing a drone launch. It’ll be with you in two hours.”
Skip felt bad, knowing Douglas was stepping over a line himself in helping him. It wasn’t enough, though.
“It’ll be too late, sir. The team on the ground won’t last two hours. On our screens we’ve got a fast mover in the area, tagged as one of ours. I just need one strike, sir. That’s all I’m asking.”
It was a tough call. The Air Force had perfected a complex system for combat missions, almost to the point of being bureaucratic, especially in a low pressure environment like the air war in Syria. Certainly, the army were inclined to think of the Air Force as inflexible and slow to respond, as well as a little soft and laid back. When it came to it, though, there wasn’t a single pilot willing to leave troops on the ground in danger, and they were as ready as anybody else to lay their lives on the line for the guys they were supporting.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Colonel Douglas heavily.
*
The crescendo of firing increased. In the light of the burning pickup, Rick could see Jamie pulling Walt to the cover of the gully. Walt had been hit, and that was bad news.
Scott was nowhere to be seen. Had he been hit as well?
They were all going to get hit if they didn’t get out of there. Rick looked down the gully. There was a dry stream bed at the bottom of the slope. It didn’t offer much cover. Rick ran through his options and decided he needed to get his team moving. But first he had to locate Scott.
“Jamie, get Walt to the bottom of the gully,” he radioed. “Flynn, give him a hand.”
He didn’t need to say any more. When Jamie and Flynn got to the bottom, they’d cover the others as they followed. Leroy would keep firing until he got the word to move.
Steeling himself, Rick dashed out from the gully, sprinting to the other pickup. With the dust kicking up around him, he threw himself underneath the chassis.
“Scott. Where are you?”
“By the pickup,” replied Scott.
“Where? I can’t see you.”
Scott leaned out from behind the front wheel. “Here.”
“We have to move. Walt’s been hit.”
Scott shuffled forward. A fusillade of heavy bullets rocked the chassis above Rick’s head, like it was being hit by hammers. Fuel started leaking down onto his helmet. Scott fired back at the machine gun while Rick rolled out into the open.
The 20mm cannon that ISIS used was mounted on the back of a truck and protected with a metal shield. The gunner spotted Rick’s movement and swung the twin barrels towards him. Before Rick could take aim with his own rifle, the explosive shells rocked his position, showering him in dirt and shrapnel.
*
Lieutenant Merrill Kowalski was on his way back to base in his F16 when he got the call.
“Viper One, this is Control, we need you to divert one eight niner to fly ground support. Do you copy?”
Kowalski checked his instruments. He’d been in the air for two hours, stooging around, and he was low on fuel.
“Copy that, Control, but I’m near bingo on fuel, and I’m not configured for ground support.”
He’d been on an airspace protection patrol over Northern Syria, armed with air-to-air missiles and tasked with deterring the Turkish air force from bombing Kurdish forces, which basically meant flying in circles at height while showing himself on Turkish radar and hoping the fellow NATO member wasn’t prepared to trigger a diplomatic incident. It was a strange situation where the two allies were supposed to both be fighting ISIS, but they both backed opposing factions whilst doing so.
Then there was the matter of the Russians. Kowalski’s wing man had already returned to base, but Kowalski had diverted towards a contact that turned out to be a Russian aircraft near the agreed demarcation line between their two air forces. Shadowing the aircraft and pinging it with his radar until it turned west, Kowalski banked east and throttled back his Pratt and Whitney engine, nursing the fuel for his return to Iraqi airspace.
“Viper One, we have a unit on the ground in urgent need of assistance. Situation is considered critical and there’s nobody else to assist.”
Kowalski sighed and scanned his instruments again, making calculations. It was pushing his luck, but he might be able to do something.
“Copy that, Control. Turning to one eight niner.”
Kowalski throttled back the engine some more and pushed his sleek fighter into a gentle dive. Cocooned in his pressurized cockpit, with only the lights on his instruments visible, the pilot had no sensation of increased speed. Switching to the frequency assigned to him, Kowalski calmly thumbed the radio switch.
“This is Viper One to Nomad, do you copy?”
The engine hummed smoothly as Kowalski watched his altitude drop on his instruments. A shimmer of green appeared in the night sky above, which surprised him a little. He knew about the northern lights that would be triggered by the geomagnetic storm, but they hadn’t been forecast to come this far south.
No matter. His fuel reading told him he’d soon be home, no matter what Control wanted. He wouldn’t be able to linger long.
“Viper One to Nomad, do you copy?”
A scratchy, desperate voice came into his earphones. “This is Nomad. We need... we need a strike... sector Blue Seven Seven... coordinates five, one, zero.... zero, three.”
Kowalski could hear the gunfire and impacts that interrupted the message. Nomad was clearly in trouble. Switching on a cockpit light, Kowalski checked the map strapped to his lap.
“Copy that, Nomad. Inbound now from the north-west. Can you laser-designate your target?”
“Negative... I count six... seven soft vehicles on an east-west ridge... they’re lit up, you can’t miss them.”
Kowalski begged to differ. From up here, it would be very easy to miss them, no matter how prominent they appeared from the ground. “Nomad, can you activate your beacon?”
“Target in sight, Nomad. Can you confirm? Vehicles with lights. Tell me they’re not yours.”
“Negative... our vehicles are knocked out... on fire.”
Kowalski saw the flames now, a little distance down from the ridge. “Copy that. You are danger close, Nomad.”
“Don’t give a damn... we’re in cover... hit them now!”
Considering the volume of gunfire Kowalski could hear in the background of the message, Nomad was definitely in a tough situation. If not for that, Kowalski would have aborted the attack for fear of hitting his own side. Arming his Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon, he targeted the first vehicle in the line, aiming to sweep his shells across them. He calculated he had enough fuel for this pass, and maybe one more. After that, he had to go. The vehicle, a standard looking pickup, loomed in his sights. Kowalski pressed the trigger, unleashing a burst of heavy fire from the weapon housed in his wing root.
*
Lying pinned on the ground, Rick witnessed the tracers lancing down. It was like Zeus throwing a bagful of lightning bolts. The rapid lines of cannon fire stitched up the ISIS vehicles, tearing up metalwork, igniting fuel tanks and pounding the ground with exploding clouds of dust and shrapnel. Above it all, the night sky glowed red, as if the gods were ready to throw down more.
6
The sun’s coronal mass ejection of plasma hit the Earth’s magnetosphere and began flowing around it. Such was the force of the plasma’s bow wave that it compressed the magnetosphere on the impact side and stretched the Earth’s magnetotail on the trailing side. The massed electrons and protons reacted with the opposite alignment of Earth’s magnetic field to induce terawatts of electricity in Earth’s upper atmosphere that produced impressive, planet-wide auroras. Charging like a capacitor, the atmosphere discharged its power in the only direction it could – towards Earth.
When the first wave of plasma had passed, the stretched magnetotail snapped back within its original field lines, inducing a massive emp spike that multiplied the charge already held in the broiling stratosphere.
*
Flight VT002 was nearly home. Turning over Long Island Sound to align with runway 4R, Captain Harry Nills watched in awe as the night sky erupted into lurid shades of purple and green. Updated by increasingly alarming messages from flight control, he’d been pushing the engines to their limit to make it down in time. His first thoughts over the Atlantic were for the safety of his passengers. At high altitudes, they were at risk from the cosmic particles that were set to increase during the geomagnetic storm. He was lower now, though, and felt confident that their exposure would be brief – well within FAA safety limits.
Approaching Long Island, the flight controller’s voice broke up into harsh static.
“Can you repeat that last message, JFK?” said Nills calmly.
“Lowering flaps. AP off,” said Flight Officer Lars.
“Applying speed brakes,” intoned Nills.
The roar of friction as the aircraft decelerated mingled with the crescendo of interference in his headphones.
“JFK, are you receiving me?” he asked.
The sky turned a bright red, like an early sunrise, and the cockpit lit up, so he could clearly see his hand on the shaking throttles.
“Wow, look at that,” said Lars. Every building in New York leaped out in sharp resolution under the blushing sky. The city lights gleamed like a thousand fires.
The instrument lights flickered and dimmed.
“Lowering undercarriage. Check the auxiliary power unit,” said Nills, starting to sweat. The radar flashed up conflicting readings, and his headphones emitted only white noise.
“Two thousand feet,” said Lars. “GS unit not responding. Rebooting.”
A flash of lightning lit up the windshield. Nills wasn’t expecting a thunder storm, and didn’t appreciate being blinded. With nothing from flight control, and no signal from the beacon, he was making a visual approach.
“Undercarriage locked,” said Lars, seemingly unconcerned. Nills took a deep breath, telling himself he had to be just as calm. Unusual weather event. That was all.
Tendrils of lightning suddenly appeared from the sky, arcing in multiple lines all across the horizon. The city lights went out, like someone had snuffed out a million candles. A series of terrifying bangs sounded in the cockpit – mighty hammer blows on the airframe from the lightning. Nills experienced complete whiteout. His headphones fell silent, and the instrument panel went dark.
Atmospheric power surges cradled Flight VT002 in a crackling death grip, the lightning sticks on the ailerons glowing bright red as raw electricity played between them. Exposed wires in the undercarriage bays burned off their insulating plastic and sparks flew from the turbo fans in the engine nacelles.
“The engines are dead,” shrieked Lars, abruptly losing his cool.
Nills hit the restart buttons, but nothing responded. He pitched the stick forward in an automatic stall reaction, trying to put the aircraft into a gliding dive, but he got no response from that either.
“Goddammit,” he yelled as centrifugal force pushed him up against his straps.
The one hundred and fifty ton aircraft dropped out of the sky, chased by its own tail of light. Whirling in a lazy pirouette, it smashed into the ground at the Harbor Links Golf Course at Port Washington, tearing up the tended greens and sandy bunkers and breaking apart. A single red-hot engine, still sparking, bounded onward into South Salem School, plowing through the empty buildings and coming to rest on a wooded path on the other side, setting light to dry brush.
*
The electromagnetic pulses glowing in the atmosphere induced blistering power surges in every wire and circuit board on the planet. Power lines glowed red as electricity jumped the insulators and earthed through the giant pylons. Barbed wire fences became active conduits, electrocuting nearby cattle. Bulbs blew and electronic chips burned out. Power station transformers exploded.
In Charlotte, a CityLynx light rail car picked up speed as power boosted through the overhead line, jumping the breakers and superheating the coils on its motors. Tyrel Watson, driving the car on its last night journey before returning to the depot, got an electric shock from the throttle lever as he tried to slow it down. The motors whined as the vintage-style streetcar hurtled down Elizabeth Avenue, the carriage rocking dangerously.
“Hey,” shouted a bum from the back seat. “You trying to get me killed?”
The bum had been riding most of the night, preferring the shelter of the streetcar to a bench in the park. He ran forward now, showing none of the drunken awkwardness he’d displayed earlier.
“Can you hear me?” he demanded when he got to Tyrel.
Tyrel massaged his wrist. Ahead, a cab rolled out from the lot of Cuisine Malaya. The streetcar tore down the street like a fusion powered Delorean and ripped off the cab’s front fender, shunting it aside.
“It won’t slow down,” said Tyrel.
“Jesus, ain’t you got no brakes?”
Together the two of them pulled on the brake handle with all the strength they could muster. It made no difference. Trying the throttle lever again, they both jerked back from the shock.
Approaching the end of Elizabeth Avenue, the bum, sucking his burnt fingers, yanked open the doors and leaped out. Hurled from the speeding vehicle, he slid along the road, bumped up onto the sidewalk and hit a street light at sickening speed, breaking his back.
Tyrel watched in horror as the three-way intersection approached. The rails curved left, but he thought the streetcar wouldn’t going to make it round.
He was right. The streetcar left the rails, slid along the ground and crashed through the pillared entrance of the Presbyterian Medical Center in a shower of glass.
*
One mile away, Josh, who’d slept through the lightning crashes, woke when his plugged-in 3DS blew up. Startled, he sat up, wondering what the hell was happening.
*
Kowalski was preparing for a second pass at the target when the lightning strikes enveloped his jet. The staccato pounding of his plane and the blinding flashes convinced him he was being hit by anti-aircraft fire. Pushing the stick to one side, he began evasive maneuvers just as his instrument panel blew all its fuses. The engine died. His chaff and flare dispensers blasted off on their own, and his surging radar and avionics suite caught fire, filling the cockpit with smoke. Hitting the fire extinguisher button did nothing. With his eyes stinging and the bombardment of the airframe continuing, his electronically controlled flight stick flopped uselessly in his hand. With no control, the graceful jet fell from the sky like a brick.
Panicking, he yanked the ejection handle, igniting the rockets that blasted his seat and canopy into the air. As he flew upwards, crackling lines of static flowed like umbilical cords from the base of his seat to his aircraft.
*
Rick lay stunned by the geomagnetic storm’s spectacular light display, his hair standing on end inside his helmet. The sky was so bright, he could clearly see the surviving ISIS fighters crawling about on the ridge, trying to get away from their burning vehicles. Away to the west, he saw the F16 knifing towards the ground, a bright parachute descending.
Taking advantage of the lull in the firing, Rick aimed his weapon at one of the enemy fighters.
Or he tried to. The red aiming dot on his reflector sight wasn’t there. Switching it on and off failed to change anything.
Crawling towards the gully, he radioed Scott. “Moving out. Let’s go.”
He got no reply. His radio was so completely dead that he realized that wasn’t working either.
What the fuck?
The ISIS fighters cheered as the F16 hit the ground and exploded. Leroy opened fire with his machine gun, cutting short their jubilation and forcing them to hit the dirt.