Mega Cataclysm: The Last Survivors Chronicles

by Scott Todd

  "And there is also something else I've been thinking about if we make it through this," he continued. "There are a couple of highly secret Navy installations, and one in particular that might have survived. That one is underground on the north coast of Alaska in an inlet near the Yukon border. The only entrance is by submarine, and if they did survive- while they are probably cut off from the rest of the world- we still might be able to make it there.

  "From the new map of water projections, the Alaskan mountain ranges might have absorbed enough of the water impacts to shield them. And that base has complete restocking and reloading capabilities for this sub. If we could make it there eventually, we could at least have longer term survival capabilities. So I propose that if we are successful with the strikes that we try to reach it over the next month. It will probably be cooler there too, despite the increasing temperatures. It's in the Arctic- so hopefully the freezing temperatures there will offset the temperature increases from any solar orbit anomalies," he concluded.

  A ray of hope dawned on everyone's faces, knowing that we could finally at least get off the sub- even if it was still underground.

  And Gary was quick to point out- "See, so some of those black budget expenses might not be so bad after all, huh?" he said, looking up at Ben.

  But all that drew from Ben was a look of disdain and contempt, despite himself. He promptly got back to navigating with a frustrated look on his face.

  "So to Kazakhstan it is then, I guess," he mumbled. "If there's a God, please forgive us for what we are about to do," he grunted.

  Gary looked a bit unsure, but driven, now with a new task at hand. "I'm going to prepare a massive data query for a satellite, so that it will be ready in case I find one when the time comes. We will be vulnerable when I start looking, so we've got to minimize that exposure time. This is going to take me several days to prepare. I need final targeting data, weather data, recent photographs, and all kinds of stuff if I find one. So if you will just keep it steady at ten knots and maintain our current depth, I will be working on that," he said.

  Ben nodded silently. Jan and Terry had blank stares on their faces, as the implications of our plan were sinking in. I decided to retreat to my bunk to catch up on my notes in the journal. I had so much to write since my last entries, it was going to take me several days too.

  Chapter 63: Data Dogs

  The next several weeks came and went with little to report other than water, water, and more water. Water over France, Italy, Serbia and Romania, aside from the occasional mountain peak as we made a straight beeline for Kazakhstan.

  While over the former Black Sea, Gary decided it was time to attempt some satellite contacts in short bursts, knowing that if he did make contact and got the data he wanted, it was going to take considerable time to sort through it all.

  But for three days straight he had no luck at all. Then on the fourth day, he suddenly gasped and began breathing heavily. "Oh my God!" he said. "I've got one! And not just any old satellite, either. This one's a killer combined with reconnaissance capabilities. I'm sending the data query, so keep your fingers crossed!"

  About thirty minutes later we scurried back down to depth, having made out like silent thieves in the night with everything he needed. But we knew we had exposed ourselves.

  "We've got it all," he said. "I even have an access log, and you guys aren't going to believe it! That very base I talked about up in Alaska accessed this satellite about a week ago. I'll have to get into it further to find out what all they were after, but yeah- SOMEONE IS ALIVE at that base!

  The news sent shockwaves of hope through our tired bodies, reinvigorating us with a sense of purpose. At least we had a place to shoot for after the attack, and that was perhaps the best news we had gotten since this all began.

  Then Ben got the idea to veer slightly south, to check on a particular mountain range in southern Russia called the Caucasus Mountains. There were several peaks in that range which were very tall, and he wanted to see if those peaks had been nuked too.

  But little did he know that maneuver would save our lives. About an hour after we had made the turn, the sub was rocked by a strong shockwave and current followed immediately by a low frequency boom in the distance.

  Jan and Terry immediately appeared with terror in their eyes.

  "They're taking shots at us in the dark," Gary said nervously. "If we had stayed on our previous course, they would have killed us for sure. They know we're here now, and it's going to be a race."

  Gary immediately started evasive maneuvers, changing directions and depths constantly, in a zigzagging pattern. But we were still on course for eastern Kazakhstan. And the water was getting more shallow.

  We heard more booms in the distance and felt more shockwaves but fortunately they had no clue where we really were. It was a big ocean out there now.

  Finally we came upon the mountain range Ben was seeking, and apparently much of it was still above the waterline.

  "I see ice on most of those," Gary said, returning from the periscope after we carefully and silently worked our way closer to our objective.

  "Yes, I agree those don't look like they've been touched, other than the water of course," Ben said, after checking the periscope himself.

  "So then apparently this means Russia and China have some kind of agreement not to nuke each other's mountains?" I asked.

  "It would appear that way," Ben answered.

  "Water depth is decreasing to around 3,500 feet," Gary announced as we went over the western part of Kazakhstan. For the first time we started to sense a potential end to the staggering amount of displaced ocean.

  But Gary got more nervous and anxious, knowing we were squarely in enemy territory, and the potential for encounters grew greater. We dove to maximum depth and slowed even further down to just a few knots to avoid detection. Now it was just a matter of days before we reached our objective.

  Eventually the booms stopped, but not before they scared the living daylights out of us. One last close call rocked the sub hard and made a loud enough boom to have to cover our ears. The shockwave from that had us taking a beating from sub's rolling, as it struggled to stabilize itself.

  Gary parked the sub after that one, partly to go fully silent in total stealth, and partly to spend much needed time going through the data he had acquired.

  I huddled with Jan and Terry in the bunks, and we kept thinking there was going to be one last big boom right on target to send us to our deaths. But it never came. Finally after about thirty more minutes of silence we began to calm down, and eventually ventured back to the bridge.

  In the meantime, Gary continued to stay glued to the satellite data, and Ben wasn't far behind. They kept announcing new discoveries in the data, and Ben got a print out of at least twenty recent, high resolution photographs.

  "Wow, I was wondering if that massive mountain range in southern China would stop that water, and it appears to have really limited its propagation into northern China from the south- but the water still made it pretty far into east China," Ben gasped. "In fact, most of eastern China is all gone. All that's left is a swath of land in western China, running up into western Mongolia and Russia. And looks like eastern Russia is gone too."

  "Well I've got to program a new data query," Gary said. "I need better targeting data, as most of what is on here is now old and under water. I'll have to instruct the satellite where we want it to take pictures, and it's going to take a few days. We'll have to do it in two phases: The first to probe for ground activity and identify what's left- and the second pass to lock on and confirm targets. After that we can fire, assuming they haven't killed us first before then."

  "So what about the US?" I asked. "No pictures?"

  "Not yet," Gary responded. "This particular satellite was on missions over Asia. "But I can command it to take some limited photographs of the US when it passes over. It will be only the west coast though, due to the programmed orbit path. Also, it appears that many sat
ellites from many different countries were knocked out either due to the event, or to attacks. Some previous satellite targets I knew of for sure are completely gone- just disappeared. Both China and Russia still have several operating though. And it's those we need to target, right before we fire."

  "So how is it that they did not attack this one we got the data from?" I asked, not understanding why some satellites had escaped.

  "Probably because we initially sent it up under the public guise of being a weather satellite, which is true. But later through a secret program we modified it in space for its current capabilities. We don't believe anyone knew that- not the public, or the enemy," Gary remarked with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes.

  Ben cast a menacing, suspicious glance his way, but this time he did not say a thing about the black budget program. Instead he just insisted that Gary get the satellite to shoot as many pictures as it possibly could, and anywhere it went. "These shots are good and recent, but we are still missing a lot," he said.

  So the next days were anxious ones as Gary nearly surfaced and raised the periscope several times, looking for any signs of flights and ships on radar, and sending the satellite brief instructions. Every time we risked being spotted, but it was a necessary evil. Despite the previous attacks, we saw nothing. Ben couldn't figure out if they quit looking, or they thought they took us out. Gary was betting on the latter, seeing as they had launched several low yield nuclear weapons at us- but they had just missed.

  Finally, after not moving forward hardly at all in almost a week, Gary received the requested data. But just as we were about to dive away, radar picked up a bleep. This time it was smaller, and appeared to be only one or two planes. Gary suspected they were likely looking for debris from our supposed destruction. He recommended we let them pass, and dove to max depth and parked it once again.

  We sat silently for another twelve hours, during which time Gary stayed busy on the new data with Ben. When they finally emerged from their session, they were exhausted. All Ben had to say before dragging off to bed was "It's bad. REAL bad. Nearly all of the USA is gone. It's a miracle anyone is alive at all in northern Alaska at that base. Must be because it's underground. But I've got to sleep now."

  Gary was a bit more lively, even after the marathon. "Well we've got them now. I've got all the new targets and everything's programmed in, ready to go. All we've got to do is get to our launch point," he said. "We should be there in a few more days. We'll launch the missiles in what appears to be just about 700 feet of water at that point, and then we will make our escape back to Alaska. But I've got to sleep too. I'm wasted..."

  The women and I had been sleeping intermittently, so all we could do was hurry up and wait until Ben got up to fill us in more. We tried playing cards, but none of us were into it at all as we feared the worst. Jan finally cooked another good meal, but even that wasn't enough to keep the tremendous anxiety away.

  Chapter 64: Painful Revelations

  When Ben got up, the first thing he did was generate some prints of the data. The satellite had taken photos all up and down the former west coast of the United States, as well as into Alaska. All we could see was as far east as Wyoming and Colorado, and if that was any indication- then our worst fears were coming true.

  We saw some peaks still visible in the Cascades and Rocky Mountains as expected, but the water HAD been able to find paths either through low points in them or around them, according to the photos. There was more water east of them. And it extended to the edges of the photos, so we STILL had no idea how far it had inundated the country.

  It was tough to make out some areas, as the camera lens was trying to cut through the varying concentrations of the sulfur cloud. But what we were gazing at was no less than the watery grave of American history. And the peaks we did see were all jet black... Like they had been bombed.

  "My God, they really did it," Gary hissed upon seeing the darkened peaks. "Those assholes! They're going to pay... With their lives."

  Then Ben handed me another photo, and this time it was more zoomed in on a particular spot in the water that looked very turbulent. A lot of white water was visible over a wide area, and what appeared to be a humongous steam plume rising high into the clouds.

  "Well, you were wondering what the Yellowstone super volcano would do with 2,000 feet of water on top of it?" Ben said, sounding a bit concerned. "That's it in the photo. I confirmed the coordinates. If all that water under pressure works its way down through that very fractured caldera rock into the magma chamber, we could have a repeat of this all over again," he mumbled. "But hopefully on a smaller scale."

  It was strange to imagine the words "small" and "Yellowstone" in the same sentence. After all, Yellowstone was one of the largest volcanic calderas on earth. And all the gas and heat output from that monster was clearly having an effect on the water.

  "Too bad that satellite can't show us the main event area because of its orbital path, but it might look similar- except- about a thousand times bigger," Ben pondered out loud.

  He was desperate to finally see the place that had ended life as we knew it on planet earth. I was too, but given that we were about to play our critical part in World War III- there were, unbelievably, more pressing matters at hand. Nonetheless, the morbid photos still caused my heart to relocate to my stomach.

  Ben then produced another photo showing the edge of the new water line in eastern Russia, which was well over a thousand miles west of where it should have been, he said. Everything coastal was now blue, where we could see through the sulfur clouds. Ben's initial projections proved to be pretty much accurate from the little bit we had seen so far.

  "I think the main event blowout displaced the entire upper two thirds of the south Pacific ocean laterally in all directions," Ben said. "You know how much water that is? This may have never happened before on this planet. Or if it did, I don't believe anyone has found evidence of..."

  Then he stopped, interrupting himself with a startled look on his face.

  "Unless some of the strange geological things we have seen are actually evidence of past, ancient occurrences of events like this, and we misinterpreted that evidence," he remarked. "In fact, there are some boulders SO large, that were moved so very far from their original locations, I don't know that any conventional science ever adequately explained it, in my opinion. Sure there are the glacier and tsunami explanations, and up to a point, I think it was possible. But not for some of these largest boulders. This event, on the other hand, would provide enough water under enough force to do such a thing," he concluded.

  "Yes... Hell, we saw it take out a chunk of a mountain with our own eyes!" I added. "And who knows where that massive chuck of rock is resting now?" I wasn't sure though what good the realization would do at that point. It was... Just a little late.

  Gary was sort of listening, but he was busy studying other sets of satellite photos and refining his targets. He then proceeded to enter a bunch of numbers into the instruments in haste.

  "There," he said. "I made some changes based on the new photos, and what I perceive to be potential targets. And three new crucial targets have emerged that weren't there before to my knowledge- two in Russia and one in far northern China.

  "It appears that whoever took command in both those country's cases, hastily assembled these large base staging areas where they are bringing confiscated or stolen military hardware. They are out in the open, and heavily guarded. And take a look at this one," Gary continued, passing Ben a photo. I peered over his shoulder to have a look.

  I saw just what he described- a large base filled with all sorts of large vehicles, many carrying huge mobile launch missiles. But there was this weird, circular pile of something that surrounded the base on all sides. "What's that?" I asked, pointing to it. And then Gary handed us another photo.

  "This is a shot closer up, and a piece of it shows that more closely. I think you can clearly see..." he started to say.

  "Those are dead bo
dies. Thousands and thousands of them, piled high. No mistake about it," Ben gasped. "And look. You can even see a much larger crowd further out from there, still surrounding it."

  "Yes, I believe what has likely happened from that close up, is that the population tried to attack the base repeatedly, and got killed in their tracks by large caliber ammunition. I wouldn't be surprised if there was considerable outrage amongst some of the people in both Russia and China once the news spread that these rogue military elements were "finishing off the Great Satan with nuclear weapons, once and for all," Gary speculated.

  "Maybe so- many had family in the US at the time, and I'll bet some are also terrified of what that might mean in the near future for them," Ben responded. "They know what kind of firepower just one of these subs has, if one managed to make it through the mayhem."