by Dirk Patton
I recalled from jump school, when I was learning to use a parachute, that there’s something called terminal velocity. That is, when a falling object cannot fall any faster because of the resistance of the atmosphere as the object passes through it. Wind resistance, in other words. A human who is positioned horizontally will reach terminal velocity very quickly, in about the first 40 or 50 feet of the fall, since there is a large area of the body creating drag. Falling feet or head first greatly decreases the drag and you fall faster and take longer to reach terminal velocity. I couldn’t remember the numbers, but knew I needed to go in feet first to have a decent chance of surviving.
The fall seemed to take forever. I had time to notice how the surface of the river appeared swollen. It roiled with eddies and looked like dirty, liquid steel. I tried to spot where Rachel and Dog had impacted, but the surface of the water wasn’t giving up any clues. As I continued to fall I clamped my ankles together as tightly as I could and pointed my toes down. A couple of moments before impact I raised my arms straight over my head so they wouldn’t be yanked up when I hit and leave me with two dislocated shoulders. In the last moment before hitting I squeezed my butt cheeks together as hard as possible. I’ve heard stories of water being forced up a jumper’s anus upon impact, and while I didn’t know if that was true or even possible, I sure didn’t want to find out by getting a Mississippi River enema.
Hitting the water was far less dramatic than I expected. Perhaps my body position was exactly where it should have been, or maybe it’s really not that bad from 85 feet. Either way, I knifed through the surface and deep into the cold darkness. Immediately upon entering the water, I twisted my body and spread my arms and legs to create drag and slow my decent. The river was shockingly cold, much colder than I ever would have expected for the middle of summer. My body wanted to gasp in reaction to the sudden temperature change and I barely managed to stop myself from inhaling as I continued to sink.
The current was strong, I could feel it pulling me along, and I quickly became disoriented as I tumbled in the water. Forcing myself to stay calm, I started swimming. I was heading for a lighter looking area, even though I had initially thought the surface was in the opposite direction. With enough light to see, I let a few air bubbles trickle out of my nose and was glad to see them rush in the direction I was already going. Lungs burning, I swam harder, suddenly surfacing and gulping air.
Looking around I had to dive and frantically swim to avoid a large log that was spinning in one of the surface eddies. Breaching the surface again I swam to it and hooked an arm over its top, using its buoyancy to hold me up while I surveyed my situation. I was on the western side of the middle of the river and the current had already carried me a couple of hundred yards south of the bridge. That was about all I could see other than water. My head was only a foot or so above the surface and while I could see land on either side of the river I couldn’t see the banks from that low in the water.
Holding on to the log, I let it spin me through a full 360 degrees, hoping to see a head bobbing in the water. Nothing. I tried climbing up onto the log to gain elevation and a better view, but it had been in the water for a while and was slippery with slime. I couldn’t get a grip on it to pull myself any higher. Still spinning and watching, I started shouting Rachel’s name, pausing to listen every few seconds. No answering shout. I didn’t know what to do. I had jumped without thinking, panic and fear at seeing Rachel and Dog go into the water driving any reasoning out of my head.
My makeshift raft was still spinning slowly, and as I faced to the north once again I was surprised at how much farther downstream I was. Absently noting that the train had reversed and was heading back to the east, I forced myself to calm down and think through my options. Rachel and Dog had gone off the train about fifteen seconds before I had jumped. That meant they were likely to my east as the train had been rolling west when we’d gone off. Was the current stronger or weaker where they’d entered the water? Were they ahead of me or behind me? I had no way of knowing.
I was preparing to abandon the log and strike out across the water to the east when a Black Hawk roared into a hover directly over me. I looked up and could see two heads leaning out of the side door staring at me. One of them waved and I waved back with my free arm. Moments later a weighted rope splashed into the water twenty feet downstream. Riding the log, I released just before coming abreast of the line and swam a few strokes before grabbing on. The rotor wash was fierce, churning up the water and blinding me, but this was an old drill and I soon had a foot firmly shoved into a loop and a death grip on the rope. I released my hold long enough to twirl a hand in the air, then grabbed on as the pilot gained altitude and plucked me out of the river.
The Black Hawk headed straight to the western shore where I was deposited on a tall levee that separated the river from what looked like endless miles of rice paddies. Stepping away from the rope, I shielded my eyes as the helicopter descended to pick me up. It came to a hover a few feet off the ground, dirt and debris swirling around it, and I dashed forward. Hands reached out the open side door and pulled me in as I scrambled up, the pilot spinning us around and gaining altitude over the river before my legs were all the way inside the aircraft. Captain Blanchard reached out and snapped a safety tether onto my vest before dragging me the rest of the way in where Colonel Crawford waited. One look at his face and I knew I was in for an ass chewing.
“Are you dumber than a fucking box of rocks, or do you just have a death wish?” He roared in my face, clearly audible over the noise of the helicopter even without benefit of headphones. “I’ve seen some fucked up shit in my day, but you take the goddamn cake! Twenty fucking helos flying around up here that can actually fucking see what’s in the goddamn river, and like a dim-witted moron, you go and jump in the fucking water. I swear to God, you don’t have the brains of the turd I flushed this morning. If I didn’t need you I’d bust your ass back to no-nuts Private and let you clean latrines for the Jar Heads!”
I looked back at him for a few moments, watching him breathe heavily as the anger boiled inside. “Wow, sir. You sound just like my old Command Sergeant Major. He could chew ass and spit it out like no one I’ve ever met.” I grinned, calculating my response would defuse the situation and not prompt the Colonel to carry through with his threat. Oh well. I’ve been a Private before. There’s worse things in the world. Captain Blanchard stared at me with his mouth hanging open in disbelief. Crawford clenched his jaw, his face going even redder for a moment before barking out a laugh and letting out a huge sigh.
“You are a pain in the ass, Major. A five star, big balled, tiny brained pain in my ass.” The Colonel turned away with a shake of his head to speak to the pilot. Blanchard sat there like he was at a tennis match, head moving back and forth as he looked from me to the Colonel.
Dismissing the incident from my mind I turned and stuck my head out of the door, looking down at the river. We were now about a mile south of the bridge and moving slowly downstream no faster than the river was flowing. To my east I could see another Black Hawk matching our speed and direction. I was mildly surprised that Colonel Crawford was devoting two of his assets to search for one woman and one dog, but wasn’t about to look the gift horse in the mouth. I looked to the north when a rumble of explosions reached me, watching as two Apaches fired missiles at the bridge. Moments later a huge section of the mid-span collapsed into the river.
Movement to the west caught my attention and I turned my head to look at a large flight of helicopters approaching, just skimming the surface of the rice paddies. There were at least two dozen aircraft in the flight and I wondered why the Colonel had called in more air support. As the helos approached the river they broke into three groups, two of which quickly gained altitude while the third appeared to be accelerating directly at the train which had just reached the western shore. They looked like they were on an attack run, which didn’t make sense. You didn’t make runs on the infected, you hovered and ho
sed them down.
Glancing around the interior of the Black Hawk I spied a pair of tethered binoculars, scrambled across the deck to grab them and returned to the door. Focusing on the newly arriving helicopters I was completely unprepared for what I saw. So unprepared that at first I didn’t believe what I was seeing. Thinking I had to be mistaken, I shifted the glasses to an Apache to compare. I wasn’t mistaken. The design was similar, but these weren’t Apaches. Lowering the binoculars I reached out and grabbed Colonel Crawford, pulling him to the open door and shoving them into his hands. I pointed and he looked, freezing when he saw the helos. The Apache pilots in the area had noticed the intruders and tuned to meet them, several of them firing missiles as they raced forward.
“What’s going on?” Captain Blanchard had moved to squat right behind me and was peering over my shoulder.
“The goddamn Russians are here.” Crawford answered before I could say anything.
3
Russian President Alexie Barinov looked around the large conference room adjacent to his office in the Kremlin. The room was filled to capacity with senior politicians, Generals, Admirals and all of the associated aides that came with busy, powerful men. Barinov was not a young man, his still thick hair a mop of white that framed his broad, peasant face. He was short with a blocky build, but the eight thousand dollar, custom tailored Armani suit he wore managed to make him look almost elegant. Glancing at the gold Rolex on his left wrist, he compared it to the “official” clock on the wall of the conference room, satisfied that his aide had properly synchronized them to the second.
Alexie had grown up in a peasant village on the slopes of the Ural Mountains during the time of Soviet rule. He may have been born a peasant, but he had been blessed with a very high IQ and a canny mind. At only five years old he had watched as the KGB rolled into his tiny village to arrest a man who had complained about the government seizure of the meager crops he had produced on a small plot of land. He had only been trying to feed his family. Rather than frightened, Alexie had been in awe of the men dressed all in black, driving the shiny black Volga sedan. He decided that day to become one of them when he was old enough.
Barinov joined the right youth groups, consistently impressing the group leaders with his vocal and rabid support of the Kremlin and all things Soviet. By his early teens he had been noticed by the right people and plucked out of abject poverty to attend the Stalin School for Boys in Moscow. He soon became the school master’s favorite, regularly informing on his classmates that exhibited anything less than absolute zeal for the Soviet way of life. Upon graduation he received a glowing recommendation from the school master, who happened to be the brother-in-law of a Colonel in the KGB. Young Alexie realized his dream at the tender age of 17, taking the oath of loyalty to the most brutal intelligence agency the world had ever seen.
His rise in the ranks of the KGB was meteoric, joining the Communist Party and becoming a full Colonel by his 35th birthday. Alexie was on the cusp of becoming a Major General when the Soviet Union fell. Suddenly, the power he had wielded was so diminished it was as if it had never been. Not one to despair, Alexie aligned himself with the criminals that quickly took all but political control of Russia in the absence of the heavy boots of the Soviet government. He became enormously wealthy, cultivating friends and assassinating enemies in the shadows.
When Vladimir Putin came to power as Russia’s strongest leader since Brezhnev, Barinov rode his coattails into the Kremlin. The hammer and the spear behind Putin, he was ruthless in silencing any dissent, and quickly became the most feared man in Russia. Two years earlier he had approached his counterpart within the Chinese government with a plan to finally destroy America. Alexie blamed the Americans for ultimately causing the fall of his beloved Soviet Union, and had been plotting his revenge for decades. Science had finally progressed to the point where he felt he could achieve his goal without risking the destruction of Russia by American nuclear weapons.
Diverting hundreds of millions of dollars, the Chinese wouldn’t accept Rubles, Alexie seduced highly placed men within the Chinese communist party to participate in his plot. Not only to participate and develop the nerve agent/virus combination, but to execute the actual operation. To take the blame and the brunt of the American response. But for his plan to work, Barinov needed to have control of the Russian military. While even Generals trembled at the mention of his name, he couldn’t order the armed forces to do anything. For that, he needed Presidential authority.
Almost a year before the Chinese launched the attacks, Alexie had found an opportunity to have a private, late night meeting with Putin. A vodka drinker in public, Putin preferred single malt whiskey when in private. Barinov arrived for their meeting with a $100,000 bottle of Glenfiddich single malt whiskey in hand. The alcohol had already been laced with a lethal dose of polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that was undetectable by the Kremlin’s radiation detectors as it gives off no gamma rays, and the alpha rays emitted are so weak they couldn’t pass through the heavy glass bottle that held the whiskey. Alexie abstained from drinking during his meeting with Putin, and three weeks later the Russian president died of a mysterious ailment. Alexie ensured there was no investigation into the cause of death. Within 24 hours of Putin’s death, Barinov seized control of the Russian government and installed himself as the new President. Within a week he had removed all opposition through a series of assassinations and bribes. The last part of his plan was in motion.
“Comrade President, the missiles are within one minute of targets. Operation Red Hammer is on schedule.” Marshall Ludnikov, a staunch supporter of Barinov, spoke from the chair immediately to the President’s right.
Alexie looked up at the Chinese made OLED screen that covered an entire wall of the conference room. The screen was divided into five sections. The left half was a real time satellite image of the United States, zoomed so that an area stretching from West Virginia to Colorado was all that was in frame. The right half of the screen was spilt into four, equal parts. Each quarter was the view from the nose of an orbital launched, penetrator missile carrying an 80 Kiloton nuclear warhead. Newly developed, each missile accelerated out of orbit, reaching near hyper-velocity speeds prior to impact. Tests had confirmed that each missile was capable of penetrating over 100 feet of Earth, or up to 40 feet of hardened concrete. Everyone in the room was anxious to see the results of the fabulously expensive development effort that Barinov had started over a decade ago.
Two targets within the continental US were digitally circled in red on the left hand screen. Target 1 was a hardened bunker deep inside Mount Weather in the West Virginia Mountains. Well paid spies within the White House staff had confirmed that this was where the US President and the surviving members of Congress had fled. Target 2 was Cheyenne Mountain in the Rocky Mountain range in Colorado, where the Vice President and military leadership from the Pentagon had taken refuge after the Chinese attacks.
In each of the quarter screens that showed the view from the missiles, a small digital timer blinked in the corner, counting down time to impact. The two upper screens read 00:00:10, ten seconds, the two lower screens exactly one minute behind. Alexie kept his eyes on the upper screens, shifting to the real time satellite view when each of the missile’s video feeds blanked out and their timers reached zero.
On the larger screen, two brilliant flashes suddenly appeared, each within the red circles identifying the targets. Huge plumes of dust billowed into the atmosphere as the warheads detonated well below the surface. Thousands of cubic meters of rock was atomized by each bomb, simply ceasing to exist. Millions of tons of pulverized rock, steel and hardened concrete blasted into the atmosphere, creating a two hundred foot deep crater for the follow on missile to strike.
Mount Weather and Cheyenne Mountain had both been constructed at the height of the Cold War, but when they were built neither the US nor the Soviet Union possessed the technology to build penetrator missiles. The two bunkers were intended to pr
ovide a survivable environment that could withstand a direct surface strike from a Soviet ICBM. Not a subterranean detonation directly on top of them. Mount Weather was breached and completely destroyed by the first penetrator. The second missile, when it arrived, wasn’t needed.
Cheyenne Mountain, carved out of solid rock, fared better from the first strike. Electricity was knocked out and numerous cave-ins killed dozens of personnel, but the hard Colorado granite held. Until the second penetrator arrived. The granite that had withstood the first penetrator had cracked from the unimaginable force of the nuclear explosion. The second penetrator dove into the crater created by the first, impacting the fractured rock and burrowing deep into the mountain before detonating. Every living thing within the bunker ceased to exist less than half a second after detonation.
A cheer sounded in the conference room as massive plumes of dust obscured the satellite view of the two targets. There were no iconic mushroom clouds since the detonations were subterranean, but even on the monitor it was obvious that dust and debris was being thrown all the way into the upper atmosphere.
“Congratulations, Comrade President.” Air Marshall Kuchenko said from across the table, standing to address Barinov. “With your permission, I will have the technicians adjust our view so we can watch the next phase.”
Barinov nodded and Kuchenko turned and barked orders to three Russian Air Force Captains seated at a side table laden with computers. A moment later the giant screen blinked, then displayed a single image. They were looking directly down onto Canada and the northern United States, the extreme upper edge of the display showing the polar ice cap.