CRACK!
A fat white bolt of pure electric energy speared into the ground not fifty yards away. He was certain he heard the wet air fizzle and split apart a microsecond before the blinding light seemed to turn the whole world into an X-ray display. The crash of thunder was enormous, enough to swallow whole planets, let alone the tiny creatures running back and forth across the land. He felt the reverberation of the sonic boom deep inside his chest, like a cathedral bell tolling, making his nuts contract in fright.
A single longhorn peeled away from the mass and took off at a right angle to it. Flossie all but reared up and dismounted him, but at the last moment she veered and threaded herself around the moving obstacle. He flowed with the horse, gripping with his thighs. So closely bonded was he with the animal that he felt the ground change under her hooves. Her grip on the soil became less sure, and he looked down and saw that Flossie was throwing up great geysers of water as she hammered up the valley.
At the same instant Miguel heard the sound he had been dreading since the storm clouds first had piled up in the western sky.
The rumble of something huge chasing them. Something bigger and more deadly than a mere stampede.
A wall of water.
The flood.
54
New York
The flight of the Second Bomb Wing of the much reduced U.S. Air Force was largely uneventful. Ten of the B-52H Stratofortresses left Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri just before sunrise, lumbering up into a low gray mass of rain clouds that turned reduced visibility in the predawn gloom to near zero. The bombers climbed high over the storm system, heading east into the sun. The mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew “Havoc” Porter, was glad of the cloud cover not for any tactical reason but simply because he found it depressing to fly over hundreds of miles of empty countryside and burned-out cities, knowing that down there the remains of millions of his countrymen still lay unburied, unsanctified.
Porter was not one for dwelling on the old horror. He’d met his fair share of cranks and obsessives in the years since the Disappearance, all with their own patented explanations of the cataclysm. The bomber pilot preferred not to think about it. That way lay madness, in his opinion, because if you could not explain why it came and went away—and nobody could—you could never be certain it would not return. Best to just get on with the task in front of you and the work of living in a changed world. Christ knew, there was plenty to be getting on with. Behind him and in the other planes, flight crews passed their time, prepping for the mission with computer simulations while nine other pilots like him kept their bombers on course at thirty thousand feet.
This would be different from their previous sorties over Manhattan, where they often loitered in the battlespace for hours, depending on the availability of a tanker, occasionally releasing precision-guided ordnance on high-value targets, usually at the behest of an individual forward air controller somewhere down in the meat grinder. Porter clicked his tongue—an old unconscious habit—as he thought of the FACs who went out into that fucking madhouse. You had to respect those guys. And girls, he reminded himself. Sometimes they deployed with small spec-ops teams, sometimes with half-trained, ill-equipped militia units. Often enough they were they only thing standing between a ground unit and total annihilation. It was why their life spans were measured in hours once they hit the streets of Manhattan. As Porter brought the wing around on a new heading, taking them farther to the north, he wondered, not for the first time, who the hell joined the air force to go get themselves fed into the shredders with a bunch of dumbass grunts.
Exceptional motherfuckers, without a doubt, that was who.
For him, the job for the moment meant little more than a numb ass and a sore back after flying around for a day or so. He didn’t even need to worry about triple A or enemy air response. But he wasn’t foolish enough to downplay the importance of what he and his comrades were about up here. Because of them, thousands of dumbass grunts lived when they might have died, and thousands of pirates and raiders got handed the shit end of the stick.
He grinned darkly behind his flight mask. If this mission went ahead as planned, there might very well be no more pirates left by the time he set foot back on terra firma. And how fucking sweet would that be? Those ragged-ass jumped-up motherfuckers had been given a free pass for too long now in the considered opinion of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew “Havoc” Porter. It was high time they learned New York was an expensive place to visit. And he was just the man to learn ’em.
There had been some vintage scuttlebutt around the refurbished officers’ mess back at Whiteman before they’d suited up for this run. Lots of fevered talk about uncapping a nuke on the Big Apple, after all leaves were canceled and every crew hauled back. Granted, there had been some AWOLs who were probably making their way down to Texas at this very minute, but they could go fuck themselves and the horses they rode off on. They wouldn’t be getting their back pay updated. Only when the entire wing had been sequestered, paid—glory be!—and fed a rare meal of steak and potatoes had the pilots learned the nature of their mission. Nothing like it had been tried since World War II, and no one was quite sure if the weather conditions were optimal for the mission parameters.
Havoc thought it was probably going to be a bust. The rain in the Manhattan area of operations was moving into a third day of downpour thanks to a front stalled over the eastern seaboard. But what the hell? They were finally gonna be bringing some real pain for a change. And even if the primary mission parameters didn’t play out, the bomb bay of Colonel Porter’s venerable old BUFF was loaded with an altogether different but equally unpleasant surprise.
“Time to target?” he asked his navigator.
“Ten minutes,” said Major Chaplin.
Porter nodded and checked his panel. A small pocket of turbulence connived to buck the old bomber around as they approached the city from the southwest.
“Think this will work?” Porter asked.
His copilot, Captain Hernandez, put her thermos of coffee away and smiled at him. “What do you care? You got a hot date to get back to?”
“Seems like a waste of ordnance to me,” Chaplin said. “You know, in this sort of weather. I have to admit I’m not comfortable with our mission.”
“Havoc, this is Eightball,” the radio crackled. “We’re coming up on the target now.”
“Copy, Eightball,” Porter said. He waited a few seconds to see if any last-minute countermands came in from the National Command Authority. Porter didn’t much care if they flattened all of Manhattan with nukes or with conventional munitions. It was their job to kill the enemy, and he was fully prepared to drop every last bomb in his plane, return to base, load her up, and do it all over again. He did know, however, that the civilians who gave him his orders could be fickle and that there was every chance that having flown all the way here, they might just turn around without shooting their wad. Like that time he’d been sent out to scare off a convoy of illegal refugee ships bound from India to California. At the last minute, the mission was scrubbed and the refugees were instead met by officials from the Immigration Service.
“Eightball, this is Havoc,” Porter said. “Stand by.”
“Strike Force One is over the target, Mister President,” Colonel Ralls reported. “Orders?”
Kipper could see the satellite track on the main screen in the operation center, a series of green symbols with attached alphanumerics over a wireframe map of Manhattan. Cloud cover obscured keyhole imaging from orbit, but several Predators and one of the Global Hawks were down below the cover with their eyes on midtown. Bursts of pale green and gray light flared on the screen, and flickers of tracer fire zipped back and forth at odd angles between clusters of individuals all over that part of Manhattan. He wondered how the military sorted any of this chaos out.
In his mind he had drawn a line around the lower end of the island, from the remains of the Flatiron Building down to Castle Clinton, and decided that
was the part of old New York that he needed. Pretty much the same amount of land the Dutch originally bargained for when New Amsterdam was born. From Central Park North, a huge wedge of land to which only display was devoted, there was silence and stillness. But from about Times Square south, block after block was alight with fire and thunder. Dozens of screens displayed the inferno, but on the main window wall dominating the center of the room, eight linked displays were all focused on a few blocks around Rockefeller Center.
“Shouldn’t the bombing already be in progress?” Culver asked.
“Very soon,” Ralls said uncertainly. “Unless there’s a last-minute change in orders.”
Kipper shook his head. “Not this time. Can you patch me through to the commander of that wing, or flight, or whatever you call it?”
Ralls nodded. “We can, sir. If you’ll wait one second.”
“Strike Force One, stand by for a message from the National Command Authority,” the radio crackled.
“Ah, shit,” said Porter. “Here we go.” He requested authentication and got it. “Havoc copies. All Strike Force One elements, hold for instructions.”
“They’re calling it off,” Chaplin said. “Waste of bombs, anyway.”
“Least we got a steak dinner out of the flight,” Hernandez said.
“Havoc, this is Architect. Do you copy?”
“Architect?” Chaplin asked. “Who the fuck would that be?”
Porter shook his head and keyed his mike. “Architect, this is Havoc. I read you five by five, Mister President. Go with your traffic.”
He swapped a what-the-fuck look with his navigator.
“I won’t take long, Colonel. I simply wanted to wish you good luck and good hunting. I also want you to understand … I want everyone in your flight to understand that today’s orders are for you to carry out, but the responsibility for what you’re about to do is mine and mine alone … Uh, over. Is that what I say. Over?”
“Yes, Mister President.” Havoc grinned. “And thank you, sir. I will forward your message to the rest of the wing. Over.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Go do it. Kipper over and out.”
Porter shook his head as KC severed the comm link.
“What kind of a call sign is Architect, anyway?” Chaplin asked.
“Secret Service,” Porter said. “That was the president of the United States, and the mission is on. Havoc to Eightball, do you copy? Over.”
“Eightball copies. Over.”
“Execute when ready, Eightball. Follow us in. Over.”
“Eightball acknowledges. Out.”
The sky around New York was dense with air power, almost half the remaining air force and a quarter of the U.S. Navy’s once-proud naval air arm. Flashes of lightning and rain lashed the veteran bombers as they felt their way through the storm front by radar and GPS. If bombing a sizable chunk of American real estate bothered any of the men or women in Porter’s crew, they showed no sign of it as they began to descend toward the target area.
“We have uplink and hard target data confirmed,” said Major Chaplin.
“Open her up, let in the fresh air,” Porter said a second before a thick merchanical chunking sound preceded a moment’s whirring as the giant bomb bay doors swung open.
“All boards are green. All packages hot.”
The Second Bomb Wing emerged from the wall of thunderheads banked up to the southwest of the city. The way ahead was clear, and for the first time Lieutenant Colonel Porter felt some regret at what he was about to do. The city in front of them was the cradle of civilization in modern America, the place where all its creation myths began. Under the cloud cover and the slowly wandering smudges of rainfall it looked little different from his memories of the place from the world before the Disappearance. A cloudburst over the southern reaches of Manhattan obscured any view of the fighting in midtown. At this height, in the thick of the weather, the only evidence of the battle ahead was the murky bursts of gray-blue light that throbbed beyond the misty shroud.
“Pull ’em back. Pull ’em back,” Kinninmore yelled into his headset. The order went out across the battalion’s comms net, pushed down to company commanders, who sent it on to platoon commanders, who barked the directive in person at their senior NCOs, and before a minute had passed the U.S. forces laying siege to the main enemy concentrations holed up in Rockefeller Center began to withdraw along prepared axes. The shattered buildings and piled-up traffic provided good cover from the plunging fire, but dozens of smoke grenades soon bathed the scene in a thick, white fog of war.
Kinninmore waited with a small squad for personal protection, listening intently to his company COs reporting in as they made for the layup point two blocks back to the south. The volume of fire from the dark, hulking labyrinth of the center increased viciously, and he ducked as rounds began to whip past his head, pinging off metal car bodies, shattering nearby windows, and occasionally striking flesh with a dull, terrible thud.
Within six minutes the tactical withdrawal was complete, and the colonel signaled to his own detail that they could bug out, which they did with considerable speed and profanity. Kinninmore felt one bullet snag a fold in his pants leg as he sprinted away from the buildings, but he didn’t dive for cover, knowing that he was in much greater danger remaining in close proximity to them. At one point, just as he ducked out of the main line of fire, he was tempted to look up to see if he could spot any of the laser designators painting the landmark, but he plowed on, calling himself an idiot for even entertaining such a foolish notion.
“FAC confirms all friendlies have exited. We are cleared to release.”
“Weapons,” said Havoc, “you have a go. Bring down the sky, Michelle.”
He heard the acknowledgment and a brief burst of chatter down the link before two heavy clunks signaled a sudden loss of weight beneath the wings of the Stratofortress, causing it to jump nearly a hundred feet higher into the air. He tried to watch the pair of hardened penetrators as they began their fatal dive toward the target, but the GBU-28s quickly disappeared into the cloud cover and there was no chance he would have seen them anyway. He just couldn’t help himself. He knew they would fire their little rocket motors in a second, accelerating the pair of five-thousand-pound bunker busters down toward the city. The kinetic impact alone would be enough to destroy vast swaths of any normal target, but the 630 pounds of high explosive that would detonate deep inside the target building, collapsing it from within, would seal the deal.
“Adios, Captain Hook,” he quipped over the intercom before turning the huge, lumbering plane around to the west and climbing another five thousand feet to prepare for the secondary attack.
Simultaneous with Havoc’s release of the two laser-guided bombs, nicknamed Deep Throats, four other B-52s released identical packages. Ten of the twenty-five-foot-long, superhardened lances speared down toward the famous cluster of buildings. They dropped silently, tiny servomotors adjusting the stubby fins on their tails as the intelligent seeker heads at the nose of the bomb maintained an obsessive lock on ten separate points, all of them illuminated by infrared dots sourced from small laser devices operated by special forces high up in skyscrapers a few blocks back from the target.
“Oh, man, this is gonna be so fucking sweet,” Wilson said.
Milosz forced himself to stay fixed on the complex of four buildings within the greater Rockefeller Center that had been indentified as harboring the greatest concentration of enemy forces. He was acutely aware of Technical Sergeant Gardener crouched next to him, keeping the laser designator pointed at the window where he could see at least two men firing wildly into the thick banks of drifting smoke down on the streets below. Her blond hair and the sweet scent of chewing gum were driving him to distraction, but he did not wish to miss this moment. It would be, as Wilson had said, so fucking sweet.
And then it happened. A blur. A thin black flicker that shot down at a steep angle and punched right into the window he had been watching. The two men
standing there disintegrated in a spray of bright pink mist and colorful clothing. The very walls on either side of them seem to shudder, and then there was a brief eerie moment when nothing happened.
He knew intellectually exactly what was going on over there. The long iron spike was spearing itself into the guts of the building, waiting until the small chip in its warhead decided it had embedded itself deeply enough to do the maximum amount of damage.
And then the bomb detonated.
All ten of them did at the same time.
The four buildings flew apart as though constructed of honeycomb and icing sugar. The blast atomized massive slabs of thick gray concrete, blowing them outward, removing a significant supporting structure from the overall building, which began to collapse in on itself with a volcanic roar. The three special operators were four blocks away, high in a residential tower, but Milosz could feel the destructive power of the strike in his very guts, under layers of Kevlar and ballistic plate.
“Goddamn,” Wilson hooted. “Didn’t I say that’d be sweet?”
Gardener placed a pair of binoculars to her eyes and smiled.
“When you want the job done, send a grunt. When you want it done properly, call the United States Air Force. The best is yet to come, gentlemen. Observe. This is a little trick we learned from our jihadi brethren.”
Milosz watched where she pointed at half a dozen undamaged buildings out of which hundreds, maybe a thousand or more enemy fighters were now fleeing.
Lieutenant Colonel Porter frowned as he banked his plane around and lined up for the incendiary run.
It didn’t seem fair that the first time they’d been allowed to get medieval on these cheeky little fuckers, the weather had shut down any chance of him enjoying the spectacle. Indeed, he had to wonder whether this next phase of the mission was even worth bothering with, given the wet conditions on the ground. He waited, expecting orders to scrub, but the radio link to Fort Lewis remained silent.
After America Page 57