Moving to the circle of chairs just outside the command center, Whitmore and his advisers discussed their dwindling list of response options. Connie and Julius sat within earshot, listening carefully to the tense conversation.
General Grey spoke to one of his aides. “I don’t care how you do it, but I want the line to NORAD reestablished as quickly as possible. Get it done!”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said crisply before returning to the squawking mayhem of the control room.
“What’s the report from Peterson?” the president asked, referring to Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, where they were scheduled to land in less than thirty minutes, the base closest to NORAD.
The demoralized expression on Grey’s face told more than his words. “We’re continuing to evacuate as many of our forces from the bases as possible, but we’ve already sustained deep losses.”
“Damn it.” The president slammed his fist down on the arm of the chair. “Not only do they know where to hit us, they’ve got the order of priorities down. They’re moving right down a damned checklist.”
“Yes, sir,” Grey allowed, “it’s an extremely well-planned attack. They seem to understand our defense system.”
David came stumbling out of the bathroom with a sickly look on his face. He overheard the conversation and stopped in the passageway, hoping for more. What he heard next made him forget about his queasy stomach. Nimziki stood up and walked to the center of the conference room, speaking in his imperial tone.
“As you know, I’ve been speaking directly with Commander Foley and the other joint chiefs since they arrived at NORAD.” His every sentence was apparently calculated to make the president look bad. “We agree that there is only one sane and prudent course of action. We must launch a large-scale counteroffensive with a full nuclear strike. Hit them with everything we’ve got.”
It was another Nimzikian moment of badly executed theater. He was trying to force the president’s hand by presenting the plan as if it were a foregone conclusion. Whitmore resented the attempted manipulation, but was too interested in the idea to criticize the man.
“Above American soil? You understand the implications of that move? We’d be killing tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of innocent American civilians.”
Utterly calm, almost amused, Nimziki had already planned his answer. “To be perfectly honest with you, Mr. President, I expected you’d balk at the idea. But if we don’t strike back soon, there won’t be much of an America left to defend. In my conversations with the joint—”
“Sir,” General Grey’s aide interrupted, returning from the tank.
“It can wait, soldier,” Nimziki shot back, although technically he had no authority to do so.
“It’s NORAD, sir,” the man continued, his face white with fear. “It’s gone, sir. They’ve taken it out.” It took a moment for the idea to sink in. The group went from confused to stunned to mortified.
“That’s not possible…”
“My God, the vice president, the joint chiefs.”
“Perhaps their communication systems are out, but all of NORAD can’t be gone.”
The aide explained more fully. “I have it from pilots out of Peterson. They were in the sky when alien attack planes massed over NORAD and began firing continuously for several minutes. Eventually, the entire complex was exposed and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, Peterson itself came under attack and they lost radio contact.”
“Isn’t Peterson where we’re heading? We need a new destination!”
“Mr. President, we must launch a nuclear attack,” Nimziki insisted, highly agitated. To make sure his message got through, he hit below the belt, adding, “A delay now would be even more costly than when you waited to evacuate the cities.”
The president shot out of his chair and stood nose to nose with Nimziki. ‘That is not the issue here.” He was on the verge of punching the taller man when they were interrupted.
“You’re not serious!” David came around the corner, outraged. ‘Tell me you’re not considering firing a bunch of damn nuclear weapons at our own people.” Connie reacted immediately. She bolted toward her estranged husband and tried to move him backwards, “David, don’t…” she warned, remembering the time he’d slugged Whitmore. If he did that again, it would be a federal crime. She knew it took a lot to get David riled up, but once his fuse was lit, he almost always exploded.
“If you start detonating nukes,” he went on, shouting, “so will the rest of the world. Do you have any idea what that amount of fallout will do to the planet? Think! Do you know what the long-term consequences will be? Why don’t we just blow our brains out right here?”
David, slim but deceptively powerful at six feet four inches, easily brushed Connie to one side and advanced across the floor. General Grey quickly put himself between the hysterical computer genius and his president. Although he was the much smaller man, he was fully prepared to knock David to the carpet if necessary.
“Mr. Levinson,” his voice was controlled, stern, “let me remind you that you are a guest here.”
Ignoring him, David raged on. “This is insanity! We don’t even know if nuclear explosions will dent their armor, but we know for certain it’s going to kill us. There won’t be anything left!”
Nimziki had suffered this idiot long enough. Accustomed to being obeyed, he pointed at David and boomed, “Shut your damn mouth and sit your ass down this instant!”
His insulting tone of voice backfired on him. It brought Julius into the fray. “Don’t you tell him to shut up! You’d all be dead right now, blown to high heaven, if not for my David.”
The old man shook a finger in the face of the secretary of defense. Connie, sensing all hell was about to break loose, ran back across the room and grabbed her father-in-law. The septuagenarian stood his ground, giving the Washington hotshots a piece of his mind.
“I blame all of you for what’s happening. You did nothing to prevent this! You knew! You knew it was coming and yet you did nothing! Now you attack my son.”
Julius’s strange outburst probably prevented an all-out fist fight aboard the presidential aircraft. Like so many things he did, it was impossible to know how much was accident and how much was by design. The image of him shaking a bony finger in Nimziki’s face while being dragged backwards by Connie temporarily distracted everyone from their anger. The president knew it was time to get back to business. He took a breath, regained his composure, and answered the old man’s charges.
“Sir, there wasn’t much more we could have done. We can be blamed for a lot of things, but in this instance, we were taken totally by surprise.”
“Don’t give me that taken-by-surprise crapola. Since nineteen-fifty-whatever you’ve had that flying saucer, the one that crashed in New Mexico.”
“Oh, Dad, please!” David was trying to make an impassioned plea to save the planet, and his father was starting in with the UFO hogwash he got from watching too much TV.
“What was it,” Julius kept right on talking, “Roswell? That’s right, Roswell, New Mexico. You found the spaceship, the three alien bodies, the whole schmeer. Then everything got locked up in a bunker, the… oh, what was it?… fifty-one. Area Fifty-One! That was the name. Area Fifty-One. For years you knew and you didn’t do nothing!”
For the first time in a long while, President Whitmore smiled. Every month or so, he’d be shaking hands with some citizen who’d ask him about the notorious Area 51. He’d looked into it, and learned that it was all mythology, an elaborate conspiracy theory concocted by UFO nuts.
“Regardless of what you’ve read in the tabloids, Mr. Levinson, there were never any spaceships recovered by the government. You can take my word for it: there is an Area Fifty-One but there are no secret flying saucers.” The president looked around the room, sharing his amusement with the others. It didn’t last long.
“Uh, excuse me Mr. President,” Nimziki said, swallowing hard, “but that’s not entirely a
ccurate.” Shocked, everyone looked at the former head of the CIA, the man who knew where all the skeletons were buried, waiting for him to explain.
*
As soon as Jasmine Dubrow came out into the bright dusty air of the ruined city, she told Dylan to wait with Boomer, then climbed an earthen embankment up to what remained of the freeway. From this vantage point she surveyed the damage, and what she saw sent a long chill down her spine. Everything was gone, pulverized down to a smoking gray rubble. The massive black ship still hung in the air, a tranquil death angel cloaking the city with its wings. Downtown Los Angeles had been scoured completely away by the blast. The ring of skyscrapers and historic buildings where a multitude had worked each day was now a blackened depression in the earth. She looked away and felt the delicate ocean breeze on her face. In the distance, buildings still stood, their windows blown out and dwindling fires trailing rags of smoke into the morning air.
Studying the pattern of destruction, she suddenly understood how very lucky she had been. For miles in every direction, the devastation was nearly absolute. Houses built along the freeway had been torn in half, and everything inside, furniture, water heaters, photographs, half-read books, the dishes in the sink, and sleeping children had been vacuumed out into the firestorm and incinerated. A refrigerator, one of the old-fashioned kind with rounded corners, had landed upright in the middle of the freeway, badly warped by the heat. Absently, Jas looked inside and found a jar of mustard still in its place on the door shelf. Strange, she thought, what survives.
She hurried back down the slope and found Dylan examining something on the ground. When she came closer, she saw it was some sort of animal, probably a dog, its body torn apart and still smoking. Dylan wanted to know what it was, but Jasmine picked him up and carried him away without a word. With Boomer leading the way, they scouted around for a few minutes, until they found a parking garage full of utility vehicles. The garage was built into the sheltered side of the freeway, and the dump trucks, bulldozers, and mobile cranes were still where they’d been parked for the three-day holiday weekend. The vehicles closest to the outside had been charred in the firestorm, tires and wires melted away. But deeper inside the cavernous structure, Jasmine found an old eight-wheeler, a flatbed truck with the emergency red paint job still in mint condition. She climbed up into the cab and searched around until she hit the jackpot. The keys fell into her lap when she lowered the sun visor. She yelled for Dylan and Boomer to get in, then she fired up the engine and barreled toward the barrier of equipment and a collapsed tin roof. She slammed through the debris and into the sunlight.
Within a few minutes, she had found what remained of a wide boulevard and was bumping along in a southerly direction, swerving around collapsed storefronts and driving over half-incinerated telephone poles. Every few minutes she came to a road block the old truck couldn’t clear. She would stop and climb up onto the hood, searching for a clear path through the debris. It was like trying to get out of a labyrinth.
After three or four miles, she found her first survivor, a man about fifty years old dressed in what was left of a three-piece suit. She found him sitting quietly by the side of the road. He had been cut up pretty badly, probably by flying glass. She couldn’t tell for sure because the man wouldn’t say a word. She helped him into the back of the truck, where he sat down quietly. They drove on. Over the next half an hour, she found six more survivors. Three of them accepted her offer of a ride, glad to be with someone who knew somewhere else to go. She put the passengers in the back, while Dylan and Boomer rode up front in the cab.
In time, they found their first street sign. A steel traffic light, knocked flat against the earth by the blast, had a blue shingle still attached. Jas jumped down and used her boot to wipe away the dust and ash: SEPULVEDA BLVD. That gave her a better idea of where she was. She looked up at the sun, then out toward where she guessed the ocean would be, trying to get her bearings.
“Repent, sinners!”
Jasmine spun around, heart pounding. Not far off, a derelict-looking man was standing on a giant pile of bricks, the collapsed side wall of an aging movie theater. Somehow, he’d found a piece of unburned cardboard and scrawled a biblical quotation onto it. In the other hand he held a tire iron, the kind with four prongs, brandishing it like a crucifix. From Jasmine’s point of view, the crumbling interior wall of the movie house was directly behind him. Painted with a lavish mural of cowboys in old Western scenes, it made an eerie, incongruous backdrop.
“The end hast come! Almighty God speaketh his word and the end hast come!”
“I’m headed down to El Toro. Hop in the back, if you want to come.”
“He has spoken in tongues of fire,” he screamed toward the sky. “Yours is the torment of the Scorpion, it is the end!” The tortured creature, still shouting into the void, turned his back on the people in the red truck.
Reluctantly, Jasmine left him there. She decided it wasn’t her business to try and save any more of these people. But she hadn’t driven a city block when she spotted another possible survivor. An olive drab army helicopter, belly up, lay smoldering in what was once the parking lot of a minimall.
Jas and the silent man got out of the truck and approached the wrecked chopper. Dangling in their shoulder harnesses, the pilot and copilot were both dead, crushed to death. But laying on the ceiling of the smashed machine was a woman in an expensive blue dress. Jasmine crawled inside and dragged the woman out. Dried blood was streaked all around her nose, mouth, and ears, sure signs of internal hemorrhaging. Laying her gently on the ground, Jas and the silent man looked at each other. They both recognized the woman as First Lady Marilyn Whitmore.
As they were preparing to lift and carry her back to the truck, Dylan came jogging toward them, “Hey,” Jasmine shouted, “I thought I told you to stay in the truck.”
Then the unmistakable sound of a pump-action shotgun being cocked sliced through the silence. Jasmine wheeled around to see a beer-bellied white man in a hunting jacket approaching. Two more men, dressed in filthy camouflage gear, trailed along behind him, one of them pushing a battered shopping cart piled high with treasures they’d scavenged from the rubble. They looked like a trio of greasy vultures who had come in after the blast to pick through what little was left.
“Looks like we’ve solved our transportation problems. That’s a damn nice truck you got there. Are the keys in it?” the armed man demanded, speaking with a mountain accent. An angry white redneck threatening her with a gun was the last thing Jasmine needed right now. Somehow, she forced herself to smile warmly. “Hey, you’re welcome to come with us. We’re leaving here anyway, headed south down to—”
“Keep your damn mouth shut, you black bitch,” he screamed, training the gun at her head. His partners ran over to the truck like overgrown children. While the larger one began dragging the injured out of the flatbed, the other one checked the ignition switch. Boomer, still in the cab, nuzzled up to the intruder, hoping to get petted.
“Keys aren’t in the truck,” he yelled to the man with the gun.
“All right,” he turned to Jasmine and the silent man, “I’m gonna ask nicely once more, and then I’m gonna blow your brains out. Which one of you has the goddamn keys to the goddamn truck?”
“Repent, sinners! The end has come!” The crazed preacher had followed the truck down the street. “Almighty God’s judgment is upon you!”
“Back off, mister. This ain’t none of your business,” warned the lead vulture.
As the preacher stalked forward, Jasmine pulled her son close to her, easing one of the FyreStix out of his backpack.
“You cannot go against the will of God,” the ragged evangelist frothed, “you cannot resist His word!”
“Sure I can.” The hunter laughed, pulling the trigger.
A load of buckshot knocked the preacher backward with a hole in the middle of his chest. The explosion echoed across the empty, ruined landscape. Jasmine had sparked one of the matches, but w
hen the rocket wouldn’t light, she quickly pinched the match out between her fingers. The man with the gun looked as surprised as anyone by what he’d done. He’d obviously never shot anyone before. His buddies looked on nervously.
“Now you’d better hand over those keys, bitch.”
Boomer, the world’s worst guard dog, had been making nice-nice with the rednecks until the gunshot sounded. Suddenly he came charging from the direction of the truck, snarling and barking at the man with the gun. Perhaps the guy was a dog lover, or maybe he felt guilty about having killed an innocent man. For whatever reason, he hesitated to shoot the dog.
“Call off the dog,” he shouted, the barrel of the shotgun inches from the retriever’s bared teeth. “Call him off, or I’ll shoot him, I swear to God.”
Jasmine reached down and lit the FyreStix. The blast of brightly colored gunpowder shot out the end with more force than she expected. She pointed the ten feet of sparkling fire right at the gunman, moving in on him at the same time. The burning sulfur stuck to his face and hands. Involuntarily, he dropped the gun as his arms went up to protect his face. Jasmine picked up the gun, broke open the breech to check the cartridges, and snapped it back closed before the redneck had quit screaming. When he looked up again, the tables had turned.
“This bitch was born down in Alabama with a daddy who loved to hunt.” She worked the pump action on the gun. “So don’t you think for a minute I don’t know how to use this thing.” She squeezed the trigger, sending a shot sailing past the fat man’s ear. She pumped the gun again, the spent shells twirling to the ground, new ones moving into the chambers. “Now why don’t you take a nice long walk back the same way you came.”
The three vultures were only too happy to oblige. They jogged away over a short hill, turning to curse Jasmine before disappearing for good.
As she and the silent man carried the unconscious Mrs. Whitmore back to the truck, the First Lady’s mouth opened. Quietly, almost choking, she said with a smile, “That was brave.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 17