The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  Captain Byron Cuccini, in command of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania SSBN submarine, had no qualms about the chain of command, or legitimate civilian authority. He was a navy man, through and through. It had broken his heart, secretly, when his daughter Chastity had joined the Air Force, instead of following in his footsteps. Like a good father, though, he had hidden his disappointment, and told her that he was proud of her. She was at the top of her junior class at the U.S. Air Force Academy when things had begun to unravel. Like most of her fellow cadets, she had stayed on campus and helped maintain order in Briargate. That’s where she had been, when the Strategic Command had nuked Colorado Springs via Cheyenne Mountain’s bombing. That was where she had died. That made him the perfect man for this mission. Captain Cuccini didn’t hesitate. Neither did his XO, who had been there when Chastity met her dad at the dock as the Pennsylvania had made their last shore leave. They received ship to ship confirmation orders from Vice Admiral Woods. That was good enough for them. A set of launch codes was entered. A couple of cards were swiped. A pair of keys were turned.

  The first lance of light tore up and arced southeast, higher and higher. A second, moments later, flew off in the exact opposite direction, southwest. As his ship shuddered from the launches, Byron began playing Elvis’s version of “Faded Love” over the boats’ comms. It reverberated through the steel decks uncomfortably loud, and was even overheard by a Russian submarine shadowing the Pennsylvania in neutral curiosity as they watched the drama unfold. The Russkis didn’t get it, but most of the crew of the Pennsylvania did. Long ago, on a family vacation, at some dinky little fake Country Western wannabe place, Cuccini had danced a father-daughter dance with his daughter. This one was for Chastity.

  Most third party observers, foreign and domestic, thought the act was remarkably merciful. The Post Dispatch banner headline declared “Woods Shows Restraint”. It was a purposefully small bomb, considering the number of missiles the Pennsylvania alone carried, and the number of multiple independent reentry vehicles, each with its own nuclear device, it could have unleashed. It was a Trident II missile launched by the Pennsylvania, carrying a single W76 warhead in the 100 kiloton range, which airburst about one mile above southern Omaha, and generated an electro-magnetic pulse which short-circuited 90% of the avionics, electronics and computers within fifty miles of the U.S. Strategic Command headquarters. That meant very few vehicles, aircraft, radios, or even electricity functioned from the epicenter to Shenandoah, Iowa and to Columbus, Nebraska. Outside of the twenty mile radius, some electronic devices were shielded by flukes of geography, topography, or architecture. It wasn’t as horrific as the apocalyptic scenario depicted in fictional novels such as “One Second After”, but even in their hardened bunkers, it grounded the strategic bombers and precluded any nuclear response. Then, or ever.

  This was considered purposefully merciful because the height of the burst minimized fallout, as well as EMP damage. The radius area of total destruction was nearly two miles in every direction from directly below the blast, even with it happening at nearly 6,000 feet. Unshielded personnel, military or civilian, five miles away from the epicenter received third degree burns to exposed skin, and fires were started from the heat of the fireball at that distance. Offutt Air Force Base ( around 10,500 personnel) suffered a 100% casualty rate. There were no survivors in the field of total destruction from I-29 to I-80. The combined death toll from the Offutt blast in the first week was estimated at 123,000 dead, with twice that number having been injured.

  By way of comparison, the second missile of the same type, which headed in the opposite direction, also carried the same warhead…only it carried twelve of them, and its’ target was Beijing.

  In The Streets The Children Screamed

  Gerta was on her way back to Germany when news flashed about the latest American mutiny, coup and counter-coup. Another city destroyed, hundreds of thousands dead. Her blood went cold and the thought of how many missiles were still in play, and how many factions were splintering off, outside of anyone’s control. At twenty thousand feet, the atmosphere in the Lufthansa cabin was still subdued. Then, while she was calculating how the destruction of Offutt would affect her delegation’s mission…or Col. Smith’s…

  The intercom buzzed, and a stressed out voice announced, in German: “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Because of…an unstable political situation on the ground, our flight plan has been modified. We have been diverted to Madrid for a layover until German airspace is reopened. Please remain calm, and enjoy your flight. Thank you.”

  What in the world could have caused her government to establish a no fly zone over the entire nation? Were they that worried about the American’s nuking one of their own air bases, as horrible as that was?

  Although it wasn’t available on the civilian market, her boss the Ambassador had an in-flight mobile satellite phone, and he was gripping it tightly now, with a whiteknuckled grip, as he listened to someone shrieking on the other end. His face was calm, but Gerta had played poker enough times with Helmut Keebstritz to know his tells. His left eye just twitched. This was not good.

  The first call was to the Prime Minister in Berlin, whose Chief of Staff had told them about the attack on Beijing, and that the government feared a massive counter-strike against the West. The second call was to the Secretary General’s office, back in New York. They were begging the Naval switchboard in Anchorage to patch them through to Vice Admiral Woods, who was “busy at the moment”. While that call was ending, a large Chinese naval convoy of twenty-eight ships (and several thousand men) bringing ordinance and munitions to the People’s Humanitarian Expedition in California disappeared in three large mushroom shaped balls of atomic flame, just ten miles West of Half Moon Bay. The wind was to the East.

  Thousands died instantly, but even more would sicken and perish over the next three days as radioactive rain was forecast to fall throughout the Bay Area to San Jose. Hundreds of miles north, the carrier group wing of the USS Abraham Lincoln began air strikes against Chinese troop concentrations and depots from the Puget Sound to Victoria.

  By the time she had landed in downsized Spain, the French Ambassador to the U.N. was notifying the Security Council that their contingent would be withdrawn from North America to help quell growing unrest caused by Muslim rioting in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons. It looked to be a busy day. No time for jet lag.

  In the airport itself, the Spanish 24h channel was showing split screen views of satellite imagery over Omaha and Beijing. Crowds gathered around the reception area monitors in fascinated awe. A stewardess scrambled to turn up the sound as the coverage switched to a map of China. The map then focused in on the nation’s capital. Gerta knew the area well, having travelled there several times on diplomatic missions. She recognized the red dots showing overlapping strike zones in Haidian, Fengtai, Fangshan, Daxing, over in Tongzhou, up in Changping, at Nanyuan Airport, and a blob of crimson over the Underground City. Also, the Air Bases at Shahezhen and Tongxian, and one at Huairen. Scrolling numbers sped across the bottom of the screen. Somebody trying to guesstimate casualties? From her knowledge of the population in the areas, Gerta would bet upwards of five million, easy. How the Chinese would respond, if their government was still intact, was next on everybody’s guess list. How they would respond if it was not, was off the books.

  She carried her own bags from the carousel to the sidewalk, where they waited as a group for taxis. Petrol was in short supply here, based on the long wait. At least the Spanish had repeated their 1492 performance and involuntarily detained and deported all of their Muslims over the last six months. France should take notes from her neighbor, Gerta chuckled to herself. Since the Republic of Catalonia had broken loose from the rest of the country in a popular referendum, Madrid and Barcelona had become rivals.

  When they had checked into the Madrid Hotel Coslada and made contact with the embassy staffs in New York again, Gerta and her team met with the Ambassador to share thoughts
. Helmut was adamant that they return to New York, but most of the staff wanted to stay where they were until the no-fly order was rescinded and they could return home to Germany. Of course, he was the boss, but all flights had been grounded an hour ago, so they were stuck. He suggested they try to get something to eat and some sleep, and see how things looked in the morning. Most of them would be up all night watching the news.

  It wasn’t Gerta’s responsibility to decide where the peacekeeping troops would come from to replace those France would pull out of the Baltimore and Hagerstown regions, but she did figure that Mark Smith would seize the opportunity to widen the area now controlled by his Marines, if they had the manpower to police it. That was somebody else’s headache. The Colonel held the ruins of the capital and the adjacent areas of Arlington, Alexandria, and Herndon, but made him little more than a glorified policeman and caretaker. He depended on armed White citizen patrols to bolster his force of six hundred Marines in the areas he claimed, for all that.

  With aid programs to Africa being withdrawn as the tribal and inter-tribal and international and civil wars expanded and became uncontrollable, Gerta noticed that there had been many European nurses and doctors in the airport lined up for flights to Reagan National and J.F.K.. “Doctors Without Borders” was still up and running, even with the E.U. economy funding it tottering on the edge of collapse. There also were a lot of wealthy refugees from Turkey milling about in the lounge area, stuck in diplomatic limbo.

  Gerta went back to her room alone. She was not in the mood to join the “Armageddon Watch Party” a few of the others were having. Her room service cheeseburger came as she finished her shower. She had thought that she would be too wired or tired to sleep, but she passed out sitting on the floor in front of the t.v., with her back against the bed. On the silent screen flames climbed high into the night as a firestorm engulfed Beijing.

  The Lovers Cried And The Poets Dreamed Hope hunted. She had always hunted or been hunted. As she stalked the prey, her mind subconsciously took a mental snapshot, a glimpse of off color. Later it might be transferred to her sketch pad as a blur and a limb moving out of its’ natural rhythm, as if ready to jump off the page. She paused to brush her light brown hair away from an eye green as the neon fletching on her nocked arrow. The light flickering through the bare trees spun red and gold highlights from the loose ends. Hope moved slowly, with a liquid grace born of years living in danger. Closer. The Sheriff’s deputy practically stumbled down the Ozark Mountain trail towards her, noisy as the flash mob that had stood chanting in front of her family’s car when she was four. Her mommy had yelled at her daddy to just go, to drive through them. Hope had been scared by the sound in her mommy’s voice. Daddy had rolled down the window to ask the angry black men to move. They hit daddy. They were everywhere, all around, banging on the roof. Glass broke. Hands came in, grabbing mommy. Mommy was screaming her name and crying.

  She’d covered her head, and slipped out of her car seat to the floor. Something broke, there was a whoosh, and it was bright as day again. The smoke had been thick and choking. “Mommy! Daddy! Hot-Hot-HotHot!” Hope heard again, as if another girl had been there to say it for her. She had heard thumping, and loud booms. Somebody had opened the back door and pulled her up, coughing and gagging, into the cool, clean dark night air.

  The elderly White shop owner and his wife who had saved Hope didn’t know what to do with her. She was an orphan, now, with no family she could tell them about. The tags on the burnt car were from out of state. If they gave her up to the authorities, the little girl might end up being given to homosexuals or some other kind of perverts, or to nonWhites. She had been through enough. From the moment he had fired into the black mob to scatter it away from the flaming sedan, the old man knew that he had a responsibility to the little girl. The way that his wife held onto her, he knew that he didn’t have much choice in the matter, anyway.

  For ten years, Hope had lived with them. They unofficially homeschooled her, and she learned to work in the store. She searched each and every black face that came in. Once or twice she saw ones she recognized from that night, ones who lived in the neighborhood. When she got old enough, those turned up dead, with no suspects or witnesses to their brutal slayings. She never saw all of them, though, so she began to hate them all, for the ones she couldn’t find.

  Life spun on “ifs”. If the man she grew up to call ‘grandpa’ had not stubbornly stood guard to protect his store from the looters that night, to be there. If the police had asked more questions about the White couple dragged from their car and killed during the “protest”. If his wife had not salved her pain at never having been a mother by wanting to keep Hope. If the deputy looking for the teenaged girl who had been breaking into people’s hunting cabins to steal food and supplies had not stopped to check out this cabin, a half mile off the blacktop.

  That deputy’s mind was on everything except his job, a s he clambered through the brush. David Bowden couldn’t believe how stupid this ignorant hick was. The world was grinding to an end, and he was worried about somebody sleeping in his hinting cabin. The unwashed, illiterate redneck should be glad that he lived here, instead of most other places. The national and even state situation was chaotic, but here on the County level in rural Arkansas, the collapse had been slower, gentler, and more manageable. Most people had wood for heat, even if they didn’t have a jenny and fuel. First the news had been full of the protests and riots, out West and then all over in the cities. There had been no trouble around these parts, especially after the Tyson’s plant up the road closed due to fuel shortages and lack of deliveries. In less than a week most all of the Mexicans had just packed up and left in the night.

  The hunter behind him stumbled into Deputy David when he stopped to catch his breath against a tree. Things throughout the Ozarks bordering Missouri were tense, but even as the stores sold out and closed and the gas pumps ran dry, it was okay. People kept telling themselves, and each other, how lucky they were not to be in the shape of the poor folks in Springfield, or down in Little Rock. Bless their hearts. People were tightening their belts, more and more. Those folks needed their prayers, but they didn’t need to be coming here with their troubles. The main roads in and out were blocked and manned by deputies. The Governor was voted out of office by the state legislature for wanting to close off the black neighborhoods, Channel 4 said, before it went over to the Emergency Broadcast System test pattern.

  Once it had become clear what was happening across the country, they had to lock up a few of the local boys who had taken it upon themselves to run the only mixed race couple and their kids out of town. A few days later, they’d had to turn them loose, just as easily, due to a lack of witnesses. The long-active Klan group a county over had gotten one of their own elected Mayor and won control of most of the City Council and Sheriff’s department. That had driven some of the drug dealers out of there and running his way. More headaches for him, from other people’s troubles. David’s boss, the Sheriff, also was playing along with the Klan, rolling over and agreeing to combine his force with the other County’s. The lone Hispanic jailer had been ‘released from contract’.

  The deputy himself wasn’t a racist, far from it. He had even dated a black girl in college. Mainly to prove that he wasn’t like that. But things were so quiet that Deputy Bowden had been assigned to waste some of their precious gas investigating these cabin burglaries. He wondered if the hunter would be on board to help him out if he got a chance to do what he was thinking about doing. Maybe so. He had heard, based on the kind of garbage the cabin owners had found and the sign that had been left, that they thought the suspect was a female, alone. Maybe if Bowden caught her, he could have a little fun with her, before he brought her in. Or, he might let her go, if she played along without any fuss. Of course, sometimes he liked it when the girls resisted. After all, he had become a cop because he liked to hear them squeal and cry. That’s how he happened to be sliding down this trail with a disgruntled prop
erty owner one minute, and a second later be kicked in the side by a mule. Deputy Bowden felt lancing pain under his ribs, into his guts, and looked down to see dark blood spatter on the wet leaves. His blood.

  Hope loosed three more arrows before either of the men had sense enough to try to turn and run. Neither of them made it back up to the road.

  Hope’s grandpa had been a deer hunter, too. As soon as she was old enough, he had taught her to hunt, and shoot. They had been up here several times, which is how she knew the area. But when things had gotten bad again in the city, the old couple had gotten worried. They were too elderly and the neighborhood was too run-down and third world for them to sell the store, even if anybody had still been buying anything, by then. The police came by less and less often, as they raced from one hotspot flareup to another. People in the city had gone crazy, and fed off of the violence and racial conflict on t.v., inspired to make their own. The city Mayor announced rolling blackouts every day due to the failure of the power grid. Electricity was rerouted to ‘nationally strategic usage areas’.

  The black men and ‘youths’ who loitered in front of the store had always leered at Hope. She got ‘asked’ by three or four of them, every day. When she began puberty, and filled out, things got even worse. When she said ‘no’, the inevitable response was always a disbelieving “Whatsa matta baby, don’t you LIKE black people? You ain’t RACISS, is you?” They would laugh and fist bump each other and dance around her on the sidewalk, grabbing their crotches and hooting obscenely. They just got bolder and pushier as things fell apart.