Oasis: The China War: Book One of the Oasis Series

by James Kiehle

  The voice on the line said: I’m sorry, all circuits are busy… as if in a metal tube. It all made Judy feel light-headed. Odd colors appeared in front of her eyes.

  Then: Russ was standing over her, blocking the sun.

  “You know what I miss?” her husband asked, sitting beside her.

  She touched his face and smiled. “My meat loaf?”

  Her gently bit her hand, pretended to be angry, then laughed with her. Russ lay down beside her, cradled under Judy’s arm.

  “Making love,” he replied. “We used to be good at it. I’ve missed it. Then—”

  “You want to make love?”

  “Maybe we could lay on the sand and let the waves crash over us?” he asked. “Get fish in our faces.”

  “This sounds serious,” Judy said, then turned on her side, retrieved her arm from under his and propped her head on a hand. She said, “Russell Perry, love of my life. Knight in Chippendale tie: We have to fix this problem. Right. This. Minute.”

  She lowered her face until their lips met. They explored each others’ mouths like teenagers, kissed like they’d never done it before, never would again, and stayed glued to each other for a very long, wet, passionate moment that might have been an hour or merely a few seconds. Judy felt the first waves of desire in at least three places and moaned so. The music grew more distant, tinnier.

  Russ smiled and asked, “Isn’t our little angel around to come barging in to disturb our Viagra moment?”

  “She’s in the pool,” Judy said, kissing him hard. She reached down to unzip him but Russ struggled away.

  “She’s in the pool?” Russ repeated, sitting upright. “Who’s watching Iris? Answer me, Judy. Who is watching our little girl?”

  Catapulted back to reality—though ‘reality’ was a kind way of saying that she was freak-out disoriented—Judy tried to focus.

  Having lost her attention—or mind— for a minute was just long enough to lose Iris. There were a lot of kids to look past and some fat lady had just plopped down in front of her, so Judy’s view was blocked. She stood up, anxiously scanned the pool, then the swimming area, but Iris was nowhere to be seen. Judy strode to the edge, looked hard, and noticed a group of teenage boys and girls about her kid’s age standing in a circle. Judy waded quickly over to them, though her movements seemed in freeze-frame. A wave of fear engulfed her, impeding her speed like quicksand. Judy finally saw her daughter. The phone fell from her hand.

  Iris. Face down, underwater, her long arms reaching upwards as if synchronized swimming or else drowning.

  “Oh my God,” Judy said, and ducked into the water.

  •

  Maggie Chapin checked her trophy face in the mirror, smiled an enigmatic smile, then expertly reapplied a coat of Barbie Pink NYX lipstick, knowing that few women past fifty could get away with wearing such an outrageous shade. Maggie knew she was well beyond pretty, had been a knockout as soon as the awkward pre-teen years had passed. But mentally? That was more complicated. Smart but not intellectual, Maggie didn’t stand a chance against the brainy, but put her slender body on the catwalk and she was deemed brilliant.

  Standing back for a longer view, Maggie admired her own streamlined form, enhanced by a recent tummy tuck and a daily routine of pilates and long, long walks while wearing the shortest of shorts. Well-aware that her beauty transcended all ages, Maggie reveled in the extended gapes and stares by men—and women. Maggie was—and easily—old enough to know she was not blessed with the talents she’d witnessed her lesser sisters surf to great success: No great writer (a mean press release was about the best she could do), art director, photographer or editor—nor was she destined to became an interior designer (need a cool chair, go to Crate and Barrel, right?) or lady brain surgeon. Real estate sales? Yeah, maybe. Maybe even probably. But that was work. Besides, what Maggie was good at was very simple: Irresistible. That was her sacred calling.

  Fuck those successful people.

  And that’s what she did—fucked them until capitulation.Today, and for many months leading to today, Maggie’s chosen potential paramour was Russ Perry, editor of her paper and, in Chapin’s mind, a special prize. So far, he’d resisted her advances, which made Russ even more attractive.(Russ’s wife? That cute little self-satisfied Katie Holmes imitation bitch? Maggie’s tongue could take Judy-whats-her-pixie-face to places her husband’s brainless dick had never even thought about). Screw her age, what Maggie saw in the mirror was the most fuckable woman she’d ever met, though age made that a slippery slope. Every year it was a reality—if not an illusion—harder to maintain.

  Maggie knew how to use people as pawns to advance her Queen, and she kept score of conquests and rejections. She long ago learned that all men had a fetish of one kind or another—the key was finding and exploiting it.

  She looked for weakness.

  7. Close Call

  In Greenwich, England, Dr. Mavis Kent analyzed data about the Bullet. There was no question that the meteor was headed their way. There was a good chance it would pass right by without incident but history indicated we were about due for a smackdown.

  Mavis had been among several scientists who’d discovered a previously unseen meteor that passed within 72,000 miles of Earth back in ‘02, an event that had alarmed the scientific world largely because no one saw the thing until after it had passed. While the object sounded far away, the distance was really only three times the circumference of the planet from the planet, less than a quarter of the distance to the Moon; a direct hit in cosmic terms.

  More recently, the Chelyabinsk meteorite that was caught on dashboard cams in Russia back in 2013 was reasonably fresh in people’s minds, though that one was fairly small—bathtub-sized—but there were those unforgettably eerie videos of it, plus the coincidence of an asteroid buzzing by the same day got some attention.

  This one would be closer. A lot closer. And bigger, a lot bigger. If the info on this object was correct, the Bullet was steroid-laced by comparison.

  Mavis knew that this meteor was oddly-shaped, three times the length of a railway locomotive and wider than a football field, side to side, but that was about it. Should the Bullet strike the Earth, a remote possibility, it’d bash into us with at least the force of a three-kiloton atomic bomb, possibly much larger.

  So far it appeared the Bullet was not on a collision course but should it strike, chances were excellent that it would touch down in one of the oceans. There it would still become a significant event with the loss of billions of sea creatures and likely to spawn a catastrophic tsunami somewhere on Earth. Compared to a hit on land, though, that would be minor. Water would cushion the blow.

  “Ben, I’d like you to bring those researchers on board,” Mavis said face-to-face on Skype. “Moreland, Sparks, and the other one. I forget his name.”

  “Edwin Dark,” Cage told her. “Smart, but weird.”

  Mavis rolled her eyes. “Weirder than Danica Moreland? What’s she calling herself these days?”

  “Pinkie.”

  “Oh, yes, Pinkie. Charming name for a Ph.D. candidate: Doctor Pinkie Moreland. Rather rings with authority.”

  Ben laughed with her, but there was little reason for levity.

  Mavis said, “Alright, run it by them, get their input, report back. I’ll prep the news release, do the other don’t-freak-out-but stuff.”

  She signed off and spread the word.

  •

  Up most of the night, Peter Grant worked from a cramped ‘command center’ in the White House sub-basement, poring over maps and images from space, trying to find specific movement of the Chinese DF-51’s.

  Intel was spotty—circumstantial evidence of imminent danger at best. Grant didn’t have access to the latest tools here, a system not designed to monitor his primary assignment, China. These were all Middle East-centric. Peter’s highly advanced station was in a warehouse HQ in New York, but Spivey and the president wanted him to stay in D.C. to not waste travel time and there was no da
ta linkup between the stations. Above TOP SECRET level, Grant’s intel center was completely off the electronic grid. Elsewhere in the country there were other posts even more capable, but damned if Peter knew where they were. Out west somewhere.

  Grant was on the phone, asking questions, simultaneously sending IMs all over the place, pressing for the latest news to reach him first. He wasn’t sure why he’d been assigned this position, but it was frustrating. Grant wanted to know for sure what they were dealing with. Spivey and the president wanted to know even more.

  And then came the answer.

  At 0945, someone from Intelligence dropped off a transcript of a dialogue between China’s defense minister, Liang Huatian, and a deputy named Xiong Guoxiong. Grant read both the Mandarin and English translations, finding faults with interpretation. Still the bottom line wasn’t going to move: China was prepared for war.

  The core was an off-the cuff comment from the defense minister that got his attention; the term “Gau Bie,” which means “Farewell.”

  Li Cai Wen had said the same thing.

  Gau Bie was a long-secret project that Peter had ridden shotgun on years before when it first came up; it involved placing nuclear-equipped satellites at altitudes some 20,000 miles above Earth. Now that China had put five of them into orbit, Peter thought that even though the PRC claimed these birds were harmless, his recent chat with Li Cai Wen suggested a more sinister likelihood.

  Gau Bie was code for the end game.

  The Americans called the Gau Bie strategy China Trident, a war scenario in three stages.

  Phase one: An EMP over the center of America, wiping out all electricity in North America.

  If that didn’t work—Phase two: Sky bombs placed on satellites, nukes blowing up our own birds, crippling communications.

  If that didn’t work—Phase three: Biological and atomic weapons, probably launched by the DF-51’s. Or a challenge from the new wrinkle, an advanced fighter-bomber, the ZCF-111, on board China’s ‘secret’ stealth aircraft carrier that America and its allies knew all about.

  Still, even more alarming these days: Electronic attack, disruption of the world’s economy. That hadn’t even been factored in when China Trident first came up, too remote a possibility.

  But now China had upwards of one hundred thousand people employed to spy and possibly disrupt the integrated systems of the US and virtually all other governments, not to mention businesses and industries.

  Peter gathered the finer points of the Gau Bie scenario together and submitted his report to General Spivey by midday. He waited while his boss read it.

  The general rose, put on his cap, and said, “Let’s go see the president again.”

  •

  In the vacuum of space, the Bullet’s trajectory should be easy to track, but in edging closer to Earth the meteor was on a path that would take it near the Moon where Earth’s eternal satellite’s gravitational pull would affect the meteor’s velocity and possibly alter its direction, just as the pull of the Sun had earlier done to the meteor—not a bullet at all, but a lumpy, spinning hunk of stone.

  Mavis Kent used the internet and scientific bulletin boards to sound the alarm. METEOR ON NEAR-APPROACH TO EARTH read the subject line. She was getting finger cramps and a sore throat using text, voice, and video links non-stop as she spread as much information about the meteor as possible to whomever would pay attention.

  Unfortunately, the people who could help most seemed to be busy, concentrating on other unknown or un-talked-about dangers.

  In their honor, the Bullet was nicknamed Cage-Kent-018, but in scientific print, they’d use the classical term JB-2018 (‘JB’ for June Bootid, the constellation where it was discovered) and the whole event would be over—or passé—before it could even make the Nightly News, Jon Stewart, Fox, Yahoo, or the papers.

  Mavis’s colleagues remembered recent near-Earth meteor encounters. The 2004 asteroid XP14 was calculated to have passed 268,873 miles from the Earth, only 1.1 times the planet’s distance to the Moon, but 2011 MD zipped by at a distance of between 8,000 and 11,000 miles, closer than some global positioning satellites. Still, at 45 meters across, that one posed little risk and Earth’s protective atmosphere burned it up.

  Then, of course, there was the widely-seen videos of Chelyabinsk smack-down near the Russian Urals, an event unseen by trackers but which happened the same day as asteroid 2012 DA14, which streamed by at just 17,000 miles above the planet.

  In the midst of all this activity, Mavis had to give an interview. A novice science writer from somewhere in Maine had to ask the difference between an asteroid and a meteor.

  “Asteroids are essentially in wide orbit around the Sun, while meteors are more rogue and can come from anywhere,” she told the writer. “Millions of meteorites enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, but an asteroid may only pass by the Earth once in hundreds or thousands of years.”

  “What’s the difference between a meteor and a meteorite?” she as asked.

  “Meteors are renamed ‘meteorites’ once large ones hit the atmosphere, where they are usually reduced to the size of a grain of sand. If for some reason you get sand in your eye, it might be from outer space.”

  The difference was size. The Bullet was a solid rock traveling at a thousands of miles per minute. Once it was near the Moon, it would take about ninety minutes for it to reach Earth.

  Still, with all that was going on politically—and potentially militarily—the discovery of a meteor that would have a close encounter with the Earth just didn’t command much attention. That Cage-Kent 018 would complete a fly-by within 24 hours got toppled under the weight of news that an impending embargo of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China was imminent and even Mavis Kent found herself moving from the computer monitor to the television screen to watch in fascination as two powerful adversaries took steps to bring themselves closer to confrontation.

  •

  Six calls later, the president, finally off the line, seemed lost in thought, but whether it was about the imminent threat Grant and Spivey just related, or wondering if he could go for a ham and cheese sandwich was anyone’s guess.

  The president said, “Colonel, I’m more of a forest not the trees kind of guy—no one’s idea of a details man. But do you seriously think the Chinese, given all our history, our interlocked economies, all we have to gain from a healthy, competitive relationship, would send ICBM’s our way?”

  “One nuke would do the heavy lifting,” Grant replied. “A five, maybe six kiloton would do it.”

  “One?” The president laughed. “I thought you’d say the whole shooting match.”

  “China would only do that if the EMP didn’t work,” Peter replied. “And I wouldn’t count a full-scale attack out. They have a program called Gau Bie that I worry about—”

  “Get to that later,” the president said. “Tell me what you mean about the one bomb.”

  Grant replied, “If the Chinese want to seriously disrupt, even destroy the United States, Canada, and Mexico, all they have to do is launch a single nuke-tipped rocket, aim it towards Kansas City and set it off a couple of hundred miles above us. Within seconds, everything in the pulse radius would stop working unless hardened against it—the military is, for the most part, but not the commercial and industrial world. And if something goes wrong, it could wipe out everything electronic.”

  Deborah Lansing said, “But this is all speculation, isn’t it? I mean, nobody has tried to do this, set off a high-altitude EMP, so we don’t really know.”

  “There have been tests that worked, Deb,” Spivey cut in. “Not full scale, but small ones, and there have been some accidents. In nineteen-sixty-two, we tested Starfish Prime over the Pacific and power was interrupted in Hawaii, nine hundred miles away.”

  “One nuke could cause such chaos?” Lansing asked. “Why?”

  “When you set off an atomic weapon above our atmosphere, one of the residual effects is the creation of gamma rays, a deadly wall
of energy that develops instantly; it shocks and surges and fries electronic parts. All you really need is one to test out.”

  The president asked, “And the bottom line?”

  “One nuclear weapon with an E-three pulse detonated at three hundred miles up could destroy the technological and electronic infrastructure fabric of the entire planet, sir,” Grant told him. “We’d be toast.”

  The president leaned forward and rubbed his temple. “Okay, it’s getting late. Let’s wrap this up. I’ve spoken with the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of State and so many others that my head hurts. It’s their opinion that we have to draw the line and this as good a place to start as any. General, you’re on-board?”

  “I’m on the same page as the chiefs, Mr. President.”

  “Deborah, I know where you stand.”

  “It’s time to grow some balls on this,” Lansing nodded.

  The president unlaced his fingers and cracked his neck.

  “And you, colonel? What’s your spin?”

  “Sir?” Peter asked, looking to Spivey, who shrugged imperceptibly.

  “I like straight talk, colonel,” the president said. “Some of my advisors like to blow smoke up my tooter.”

  Peter answered, “If we go in there after a war has started, sir, we’re royally fu— uh, screwed.”

  “What?”

  “We’re in an untenable position, Mr. President. We have carrier groups in the general area and air forces, of course, but the body of our troops are scattered throughout the world. Mobilizing them wouldn’t be much help.”

  Lansing asked the general, “But we have plans in place, don’t we? Contingencies?”

  “Countless ones, but not for this particular set of scenes,” Spivey replied.

  The president bit his lip. “Colonel Grant?”

  Peter took a breath. “Say the Chinese do invade Taiwan. This means we’re weeks from truly intervening and by then the damage will be done. Even at that, we simply couldn’t retaliate on land, using soldiers and marines, so we’d have to play rough.”

  “Rough?”