“Harold was just giving us an example of his boxing prowess,” Jonesy said.
“And Jonesy was threatening to kill the rest of us,” Dan added, with a nervous laugh.
Molly raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“He exaggerates,” he said. “Ready for your lesson?”
“Yep,” she replied.
Jonesy motioned toward the pair of fighting sticks lying on the far side of the mat, and Molly had taken two steps toward them, when Bill Schaeffer pushed through the same door, and announced:
“The True North is twenty minutes out.”
4
USS Ronald Reagan
12.498941N 165.129408E
“...CIC has been breached!” the voice of Captain Wernicke shouted into the telephone. Rear Admiral Odenkirk could hear the barrage of small arms fire in the background, along with the screams, along with the howling.
The ship is lost, he thought. And now I must do my duty.
He’d been waiting for this. He’d been dreading this. He had known it would come to this.
He hung up the phone without another word, cutting off the screaming voice of Wernicke begging for help, then stood from his chair and walked to the bench, pulling a chain with an odd-looking key from around his neck. He removed the leather cushion, tossing it to the deck, located the aperture, then inserted the key and turned it three times. There was a click and a whir, and the hiss of escaping, pressurized air, and the lid opened upward, revealing the device.
He could not have lifted the lid with main strength. It was made of lead and weighed upwards of five hundred pounds. The lead shielding had been necessary. It protected himself, as well as all of his predecessors, from the threat of radiation poisoning.
He walked calmly back to the desk and picked up the small laminated card sitting upon it, beside the cracked security container it had rested within since the Ronald Reagan was first commissioned. He looked at it, at the title, in standard, bold-faced print across the top. Wildfire Protocol, it said. Written beneath was a twenty-two digit alpha-numeric code - the key to the positive action lock of the thirty-megaton hydrogen bomb waiting for him inside the previously innocuous bench.
In 1971, then President Richard M. Nixon, acting on the advise of some very serious, very scary people at the Pentagon, decreed that in the event of a biological contagion which threatened the security of any ship and/or Flotilla and/or Group to the extent that those ships may be lost and left adrift and unguarded at sea, steps must be taken to ensure the Special Weapons would never fall into enemy hands. This was the Wildfire Protocol.
In a twisted example of life imitating art, the precipitating event that sent the panties of all those very serious, very scary people straight up their collective backsides, was a movie called The Andromeda Strain. Based on the novel by the same name, written by Michael Crichton, it was considered so realistic, so chilling and so possible, it changed policy across the board, and had all sorts of genius-level people scrambling for a solution. Only one such solution was found: destroy all of those weapons; and only one method of ensuring that destruction was deemed fully effective.
Odenkirk cocked his head and listened. The gunfire was getting closer. He sighed and began to enter the code.
The Paul Hamilton still lay some ten miles distant, at last report - not close enough to be certain, but with CIC lost, there really wasn’t much choice, was there? Ten miles would have to do.
Sinking the ships - scuttling them, in the nautical vernacular - would have been effective, in the several thousand-fathom depths of the Pacific Ocean, but it would still leave the weapons intact. Brave, adventurous men managed to take a bathysphere all the way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest spot on the planet, in 1960, thus proving it was possible - at least in theory - to retrieve those weapons anywhere the ships might be sunk. The theory was too great of a risk. There must be no possibility of America’s nuclear arsenal falling into enemy hands, and so devices were placed throughout the US Navy, including aboard every Super Carrier.
During the nuclear testing of the 1950's and 1960's, high-yield hydrogen bombs had proven effective at destroying derelict Navy ships of all types, particularly those around Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. But even the largest test - a fifteen megaton blast called Castle Bravo - left some of those ships afloat, even though the explosion far exceeded the estimations of the scientists involved. It was, in fact, the largest the United States ever tested. It was not, however, the largest they ever produced.
The Soviet Union, in 1961, detonated the fifty-one megaton Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs). The fireball reached a height of six-point-five miles, and the mushroom cloud reached as high as forty miles. All the buildings in the village of Severny, thirty-four miles away, were destroyed. The shock wave was felt more than five hundred miles away.
That would certainly do the job of destroying the Carrier Group, and all its Special Weapons, but the yield was determined to be far too destructive to make it viable for the purpose. Fifteen megatons hadn’t worked and fifty megatons had been deemed too insane, so the Powers-That-Be split the difference and settled on a yield of thirty megatons. The devices were untested, but with all the other testing they’d done over the intervening years, and all the lessons learned from those tests, they felt confident it would do the job. Rear Admiral Jason Nathaniel Odenkirk was about to find out.
Or, rather, no, he wouldn’t. He would be dead, along with every single sailor aboard every single Destroyer and Cruiser and Frigate, and Oiler, and Minesweeper, and all the others in Carrier Group Five. Only fate, and the Lord God would know whether or not the device fulfilled its purpose.
He finished entering the code and checked each of the twenty-two digits to ensure he had gotten them all. He had.
“May God have mercy on my soul,” he said over the cacophony of small arms far drawing ever-closer to his cabin door. He pressed EXECUTE.
5
USCGC Polar Star
15.65005N 179.895024W
“When I was in Boston,” BM1/OPS Jeff Babbett began. He was leaning back against the console on the eighty-three-foot wide bridge of the USCGC Polar Star, staring out into the dwindling evening twilight.
“Center of the known universe,” LT Steven Wheeler, Assistant Ops Officer, and current Conning Officer interjected in his pronounced New England accent.
“If you say so, sir,” Babbett replied, with a half-smile.
“I do,” Wheeler replied, with bombastic pride.
“Anyway,” Babbett continued, “I was over by Paul Revere Square, and I found this little nothing of a shop called The Daily Catch.”
“Know it well,” Wheeler interrupted.
Babbett rolled his eyes at Seaman Pat Querec, the ostensible Helmsman, who was happily dicking off and allowing the auto-pilot to steer the ship. Pat shrugged. This was nothing new. Anytime the subject of Boston came up, Mr. Wheeler became effusively annoying - but in a good-natured way no one seemed to mind.
“As I was saying...” Babbett resumed. “There was a line halfway down the block, so we went to check it out, there being no bars in the immediate vicinity. When we finally got inside the place, it was just a door, a small vestibule, and the counter. No tables, no chairs, no nothing, but all the people waiting to order food.”
“Best damned calamari in the world,” Wheeler declared, stealing Babbett’ thunder.
Babbett shook his head, then gestured toward Wheeler. “What he said.”
“How are you supposed to eat it if there’s nowhere to sit?” Querec asked.
Both Babbett and Wheeler were about to answer, when they were interrupted by a brilliant flash from the direction of the port-rear windows. The three men looked at each other and shrugged.
“Somebody taking a picture?” Querec asked.
“Big damned flash bulb,” Babbett replied, slipping past Wheeler and heading to the bank of windows looking aft. The source of the flash was gone, but way off in the distance, he could see an
angry, red glow. “Uh...” he began.
“Bridge, lookout,” Seaman Jennifer Collins called through the voice tube from the Flying Bridge.
The mechanism was simply that - a tube, extending down to a point just to the right of where the Helmsman normally stood. Pat Querec went to the helm and called: “Bridge, aye.”
“Bright flash,” she said. “Bearing two-zero-zero.” She hesitated. “It was over the horizon. Now I can see a red glow.” She hesitated again. Wheeler looked to Babbett, who nodded in confirmation. “I think... I think it was an explosion.”
The three men looked at each other. Gone was the good-natured chatter, the ease of conversation, the relaxed attitude of people who were filling in time during a long watch at sea. Wheeler cocked his head to one side, thinking. “Call the Captain,” he said to Babbett. Jeff headed toward the telephone on the starboard console at the chart table. “Better yet,” Wheeler said, his voice all business. “Pipe him to the Bridge.”
Piping people was as routine as, well, there wasn’t much more routine on a ship while underway or tied up. Courtesy was observed, in that officers had their “presence requested,” to lay someplace, and with Chiefs, it was standard to say, “please,” but the one person who never, ever got piped to go anywhere, unless it was an actual, for real, accept no imitations, oh-my-God we’re all going to die emergency was the Captain. The shit had just gotten very serious, indeed.
“Captain, your presence is requested on the Bridge. Captain, your presence is requested on the Bridge,” Babbett said into the 1-MC, and then he moved to the chart table and waited for the phone to ring. He did not have to wait long.
“Bridge, Babbett,” he said, after picking up the handset on the first ring.
“What in the wide, wide world of sports are you piping the Captain for?” the annoyed voice of the XO, Commander Swedberg demanded. Before Babbett could answer, the interior Bridge door burst open, and Master Chief Wolf stormed onto the Bridge, looking ready to skin everybody alive.
“We just saw what we think was an explosion off the Port Quarter, XO,” Babbett said into the phone, thus informing both the XO and the Master Chief what was going on.
Wolf stopped in mid-stride. He looked from Babbett, to Wheeler, then back to Babbett again, and nodded.
“Sound General Quarters,” Wheeler commanded, and Babbett reached for the red alarm and yanked the handle downward, shattering the silence of a quiet evening at sea. He let the alarm ring for several seconds, then released the handle and reached for the 1-MC.
“Now, this is not a drill, this is not a drill,” he said. “General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands man your General Quarters stations.” He hit the alarm again, and let it ring for even longer, then he repeated the pipe. By the time he was done, he could hear several heavy feet running up the interior ladder from below.
The phone rang, and he moved to answer it, but the Master Chief got there ahead of him.
There was a phenomenon Jeff dubbed the This Happens Every Time Syndrome. The Bridge was normally a very quiet, very sedate place when underway, made so by the necessity of the people within it needing to remain vigilant and ready for whatever the sea might decide to fling into their path at any given moment. There were, however, a few circumstances that shattered the tranquility, such as Special Sea and Nav Detail, Flight Quarters, drills, and the infrequent actual emergency. At such times, it never failed but some dipshit would pick the moment of greatest chaos to call the Bridge for something utterly insignificant.
“I don’t give a fuck what you want,” the Master Chief stormed. “Get off the goddamned phone!” he said, slamming the handset back into its cradle. He looked up, caught the eye of LT Wheeler, and said. “Don’t worry about it. Handled.”
Wheeler was not about to argue, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the arrival of the Captain, followed by every other single person whose GQ billet was the Bridge. “We observed what we believe to be an explosion, below the horizon, off the Port Quarter,” he said.
Captain Gideon Hall paused for the briefest of moments, as he took the report in, then strode to the port-aft windows and scanned the horizon. He turned toward Babbett, and at virtually the same moment as Master Chief Wolf, directed: “Work up True Wind.”
On shore, figuring out what direction the wind is coming from was a simple matter of looking up at the flag and seeing what direction it pointed, then figuring its reciprocal. At sea, however, where the speed and direction the ship was moving changed the apparent direction of the wind, a bit of mathematical magic was necessary to calculate where it was actually coming from. As Babbett set to work with pencil, ruler, calculator and maneuvering board, the Captain began barking orders.
“Call the Engine Room and have them light off the turbines,” he said to LTjg Montrose, as she entered the Bridge. She did not yet know what was happening - nobody did, for sure - but so charged was the atmosphere, and so serious were the expressions on everyone’s face, and so solid was the training Captain Hall had always insisted upon, that she went straight to the sound-powered phone on the port console and made the call.
SK2 Lydia Claire entered the Bridge, strode straight to the forward bulkhead and began donning the sound-powered headset. The Captain turned to her and said: “As soon as you get up, contact DCC and have then break out the radiological gear.” He looked to LT Wheeler and said: “Just in case.”
“Better to be safe, sir,” Wheeler replied. Technically, he still had the Deck and Conn, and so technically, he should have been the one calling the shots, but he wasn’t about to argue technicalities at a time like this.
“True wind is from zero-six-three, sir,” Babbett reported.
“Very well,” Hall said. He strode around the center console to where he could look at the gyro compass, then cocked his head aft toward where the flash had come. He looked at Wheeler. “We’re upwind. Let’s stay that way.”
“Yes, sir,” Wheeler said. “Helmsman,” he said to BM3/OPS Eric Riechert, who had taken Querec’s place at the helm. “Come right, steer course zero-six-three.”
“Right to course zero-six-three, aye,” Riechert replied, flipping the joystick to the right. In days gone by, this would have been more dramatic, as the helmsman spun an actual wheel, but modern technology had dulled the drama into high-tech mediocrity.
“Bridge, aye,” Lydia Claire said into the mouthpiece of her sound-powered phone. She released the talk button, then said to the Captain: “Radiological detectors on the way up.”
“Very well,” Hall said. He turned to Commander Swedberg, who had been standing back and letting the CO run the show. “We may have seen a nuclear detonation,“ he said, loud enough so everyone on the Bridge could hear. “It was over the horizon and downwind of us, but we’re not taking any chances.”
“No, sir,” the XO agreed.
Hall looked at Wheeler. “Get us out of here, Lieutenant.”
“Out of here, aye, sir,” Wheeler said.
Sometimes, the only thing you can do is run, he thought.
6
M/V Point of Order
19.800245N 15.822365W
“You can run, but you cannot hide,” Blackjack Charlie Carter said, pushing the throttle of the M/V Point of Order all the way to the stops. Part of him sort of regretted getting rid of the Daisy Jean, but that was just uncharacteristic sentimentality. Yes, the motor-sailor had gotten them out of the Bay Area, had allowed them to escape the zombie apocalypse, and transported them out into the Pacific, but the Point of Order was so much nicer.
For one thing, the cabins were bigger, the galley was better, and the fuel capacity was much greater (especially after they’d emptied the Daisy Jean’s diesel into the tanks). It had larger storage capacity for food and water, and - most importantly - it was much, much faster.
This was important at the moment, because they were chasing a puny forty-five foot sail boat, pointlessly trying to run with the wind, even though that took them in almost the exact
opposite direction they’d been traveling. Blackjack Charlie wanted that boat, wanted what stores and fuel might be on it. He also wouldn’t mind the cute brunette trophy wife he saw at the mid-deck helm, trying to steer away from them.
“Get the small boat ready,” he said to Felix Hoffman, chemist, and former head of the largest Ecstacy lab in California history. He and George Potter were all that remained of the eight men with whom Charlie escaped Soledad Prison when the shit started falling apart. He was a good man, in Blackjack’s estimation. A bit of a sycophant, but ass-kissers were necessary to have around. George Potter, on the other hand...
“What do you want us to do once we get there?” Felix asked.
Charlie looked at him for a moment, assessing the man’s nerve, then said: “Kill the man, take the woman.”
Felix’s face went white. “Are, you sure?” he asked, then added: “Boss.”
“No, Felix,” Blackjack Charlie said, the sarcasm subtle as a bulldozer. “I’m feeling wishy-washy about it.” The younger man hung his head. Whether in shame or resignation, Charlie did not know, and he did not care. “If you don’t have the stomach for it, get George to do it.” The man brightened at this. George Potter knew how to kill. He’d proven so when he murdered his wife.
Hoffman scooted down the port ladder at almost the same moment Henry David Goddard came up the starboard one. Blackjack eyed him for a moment, but didn’t say anything. Goddard had been a Representative from the Forty-Fourth District, in California, and, in his words, might now be the current President of the United States. Blackjack Charlie thought that was almost certainly bullshit. At least he hoped so, because he also thought the man was pretty much batshit crazy.
“What goes, Mister Carter?” the man asked, and the pomposity of his voice set Charlie’s teeth on edge.
He’d thought about killing the fucker when they found the Point of Order adrift in the middle of the ocean. He still considered killing the fucker, if for no other reason than the man never fully explained what happened to the rest of his crew. He’d said they were dead, and left it at that. Charlie and George found the bodies of three men. One appeared to have died of the respiratory infection, one with a bullet through his brain pan, and the third...? He looked eaten.
Guardians of the Apocalypse (Book 2): Zombies In Paradise Page 2