Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “Gone, sir?”

  The older man’s hard-charging eyes softened. “Look, we don’t know anything for sure. Right now, I need your head here.” He pointed to the computers.

  “I’ll try.” She strode over to a terminal and took a seat. The computer had already been logged in. “These are your credentials, sir.” Easy-to-find passwords were usually the first, and easiest, way to hack a system. He’d just broken a major Navy security rule.

  “Didn’t I tell you this is why they wanted me? I have access to all the subsystems. This is the only way you can access other parts of the ship. I need you to check the radar code. Tell me why it isn’t online.”

  She tapped the keys tentatively as she tried to find some similarities to her own code. At first, there was no baseline; it was as if the subsystem was written by someone from a foreign country. Eventually, she did find a few common terms.

  “I’m going to need a little time,” she said distractedly, forgetting for a moment her boss was the captain.

  “Take whatever you need but make it quick.”

  She glanced over, wondering if that was a mistake, or the way a captain normally spoke.

  For the next hour or so, she plunged into the code for the radar array. She tried various avenues of approach to dig into the system, using her own experience in nuclear containment as a blueprint, but each time she thought progress was being made, she hit a dead end. Simple things had been complicated; on and off switches were now running with an ‘if/then’ loop, which was tied to other loops. There was no way to figure out the tangle without spending a lot more time.

  Marines came in and out during her coding session. They reported possible sightings of aircraft and kept talking about Longbow 3 as if it was missing. She didn’t dare ask about it, even though she was supremely curious.

  “I’ve got it!” she blurted. The reason she couldn’t make sense of the coding was obvious now that she knew how it was structured. All the back-end lines had been redone recently, and the comments denoting the most important changes were encrypted and written in a different language. She found the answer by accident, because the script writer had forgotten to encrypt one of them.

  The captain rushed over. “You’ve figured it out? Do we have radar again?”

  “No. Sorry. There’s no radar, yet.”

  “Well?” He leaned in to see her screen. “Why not?”

  “Sir, I can’t fix this code because I don’t speak Chinese.”

  Harrisburg, PA

  The run across the interstate bridge left Ted and Emily winded. They’d hopped off, run down the embankment, and now caught their breath under a huge sycamore tree next to the river.

  “This thing might act as an umbrella and keep us out of sight of any drones,” Ted remarked.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” Emily taunted.

  He took one huge breath, finally catching it. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean… Are you protecting me from the truth about those drones? I’ve seen footage from overseas in the situation room. Drone operators can see in infrared, right? We’re no safer under this tree than if we were walking around in the open.”

  “That’s true of our drones. I have no idea of the capabilities of the people running the show out there. But I guess you’re right. We need to assume they have at least what we do.”

  “And?” she needled.

  He rubbed his sweaty neck in embarrassment. “And I guess I was protecting you. The truth is nowhere is safe from electronic surveillance technology. They can sense body heat, electronic signals, and they can tap into a smoke signal dialogue.”

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  “I’m halfway kidding, but you get the point. That’s why I wanted to run across the bridge. That’s why I wanted to stay off the main highways. Our best and only defense is to stay away from high-traffic areas, and if we must use them, get in and out as fast as possible.”

  She shrugged. “Well, maybe it was nicer when I thought this tree could save us.”

  “Let’s go,” he suggested. “We’ve got a short run along this railway track, then we’ll be at the Air National Guard facility.”

  They traveled for fifteen minutes, stopping once for a brief drink of bottled water. He’d brought the go-bag with their essential supplies, and she carried the ammo pouch, but otherwise they were traveling light. They jogged the tracks again as soon as they were done.

  “This must have been a busy place,” Emily suggested. “I’ve only been to Harrisburg a couple of times, and those were all in nice reception halls and school gymnasiums. The campaign trail didn’t lead into railroad grades, like this one.”

  He admired her trotting confidently in the baking sun. She’d taken off her long-sleeve outer shirt and tied it around her waist, leaving only the black tank top. Still, she didn’t seem to mind sweating and didn’t complain at all until they’d almost gone past the entire property of the airport.

  “Are we going to pass the whole thing?” She pointed to the right. The giant main terminal and air traffic control tower were behind them.

  “Yes, this is our stop. It might surprise you to know this, but the National Guard base was shoved all the way down on the end, in those smaller buildings.” He halted the forced march.

  “Is that a funding joke?” she asked.

  It was meant as a slight against her party, but the truth was both political parties seemed to enjoy reducing the expenditures for the military. He decided it wasn’t going to do any good to complain, even as a joke.

  “No, just a statement of fact. The place we want is on the end, out of the way. That’s good for us. I didn’t want to leave the safety of these tracks until we reached this side. Now we walk right in the back door.”

  The paved landing strips were on the far side of the row of buildings, so they wouldn’t be seen by anyone watching those. He’d picked the path with the least chance of being detected, but the next part would require them to go out in the open.

  “You ready to do some more running?” he asked.

  Emily was undeterred. “I once ran a half-marathon for charity. I almost threw up, which would have made the news, but I got through it. I’m sure I can run across one little parking lot.”

  Ted chuckled. The long-term parking area between them and their destination was as big as a typical shopping mall lot. It was a mile long and half a mile wide. The orderly lot was filled with cars left by travelers before flying to their destinations.

  “Stay close,” he encouraged.

  Once more, they ran into the open. Emily had it right by calling him out on being safe under the tree, but it did offer a minimal amount of safety. The truth about surveillance was they could be spotted from space when they ran out in the open.

  If a satellite happened to be watching an obscure lot in Harrisburg.

  San Francisco, CA

  Dwight was in his mid-thirties, though people often mistook him for fifty. Life on the streets had been rough on him, though he accepted the trade-offs since he also believed it gave him the wisdom of a much older person, at least in respect for how to read the ebb and flow of the city.

  Morning was a good time to hit up people near coffee stands.

  Lunch was when he went down to the wharf area. Travelers gathered there to eat and line up for the afternoon tours of Alcatraz.

  Dinnertime was when he mingled with tourists and locals on the streets around the restaurant district. After a nice meal, people were often in a good mood to give him a kingly tip.

  But today, there was no ebb or flow.

  Every car was abandoned. All the restaurants were empty. The wharf had no ferries coming or going, though one still floated in the bay like it was lost.

  “Did the aliens come and get us, Poppy?” he wondered as he craned his neck to look at his shoulder. His colorful bird had found him after he’d left his sleeping quarters, like she always did. No one else ever saw it, try as he might to make them, but the bird a
lways had plenty to say to him.

  A shiny new Mercedes sat in the middle of the next street. The windows were open, like the owner had been enjoying the cool sea air on her drive through the city. A large designer purse sat all by its lonesome on the passenger seat.

  Poppy didn’t like him stealing from people, but it was sometimes necessary when days of rain kept away his normal clientele. He rationalized it as necessary to stay alive; plus, he always intended to pay back whatever he took. Someday.

  This time, he left the big, juicy purse where it was.

  He held up his hands. “I surrender! You can have the city! Take me to your ship!”

  The fire burning in the upper floors of the nearby building created a dull roar in the background, and car alarms chimed endlessly far away, but all the normal city noises were gone. Especially laughter and talking.

  “What, Poppy? I should go to the stadium? That’s a great idea.” He paused as if listening to his friend. “What? No, I can’t fly. How many times do I have to remind you?”

  The stadium was miles away, through the heart of the city. He only went down there when he knew there’d be a baseball game; he preferred the sure bet of tourists at the wharf. He had no idea what day it was, and there was no one to ask, so he couldn’t be sure if anything was happening there.

  He glanced at the bird. “No, I don’t have a phone to check the date. That’s what normals do. Yes, I know everyone else has one; I’m much better than everyone else. I’m sorry to disappoint.”

  The pair argued back and forth incoherently for the next couple of minutes, and his voice got louder as their dispute amped up. Only after Dwight realized he was inside one of his famous “crazy scenes” did he put on the brakes and look around. “I don’t think anyone saw us,” he reasoned to her.

  The crazy scenes always hurt his panhandling takes, so he tried to keep them at a minimum. Over the years, he’d realized the sometimes-nasty bird liked to instigate them. That’s why she wasn’t allowed to go into the basement where Dwight spent his nights. When the bird was around, it never shut up. Arguments ensued. He couldn’t risk the loud racket calling in security and ruining the good thing he had going on. But, out in the open, he often had loud conversations with it. For some reason bystanders only heard his half…

  “Yes, okay. I’ll walk you down there.”

  Today, he didn’t mind all the walking. Every new street brought the possibility of seeing someone new, and that would mean he could go back to his livelihood of panhandling. But once he got back into the skyscrapers of downtown, Poppy acted nervous.

  “No, I’m not going back to bed, you don’t have to worry. I’ll worry for both of us because there aren’t any people to talk to.” He searched more places; in shops, the nearest bus stops, the street corners where normals always took pictures.

  Poppy dive-bombed him with ideas.

  Dwight shouted into the sky. “What? That’s insane. You really think everyone is invisible? Including me? Including you?” He tried to wrap his mind around the statement, and what to do about it. However, Poppy really stepped up for him when she kept talking. She figured out a solution he assumed was ingenious.

  “You sure about this?” he asked the bright-feathered bird while he strode over to where she wanted him. “Right here?”

  The bird sang.

  He sat inside a crosswalk at a normally busy intersection. Poppy’s plan was to make it so he could see down four different streets to catch sight of invisible people driving their cars. He’d also feel them walking by, because they’d stay within the lines of the crosswalk. The regular people always did.

  “You’d better be right,” he said, “or I’m going to keep going to the stadium.”

  His bird said to be patient, and he always listened to his bird.

  Dwight calmly waited to be knocked over by the invisible people. Then he would know he wasn’t going nuts…

  CHAPTER 7

  Harrisburg, PA

  “I think these cars make it fifty degrees hotter,” Emily remarked as they crossed the wide parking lot. After all their starts and stops today, it was already close to noon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun was almost directly overhead.

  “I can think of one thing we forgot when we left my house.” Ted constantly thought about gear. What he could drop. What he forgot. Modifications to make it all better.

  “An air conditioner?” she said in jest.

  “A hat.”

  “Well, I hope you know,” she panted, “I’m going to have to dock your pay for that. I’m keeping track of every mistake as part of the evaluation process for your job as my bodyguard.”

  He jogged to another row of cars, then stopped. When he looked back, Emily’s face wore a look of concern. They needed to meet up.

  “Come here,” he pleaded.

  “Did you hear that?” she whispered upon arrival.

  He nodded affirmative. The faint whine of an airplane motor came out of the sky, but it was hard to tell from where.

  She was going to say something, but he gestured for her to stay silent a little longer. The sound continued for a minute, but then faded. Finally, the world went back to silence.

  “It’s gone.” Ted got up to look over the hoods of the two cars he’d jumped between. It all appeared the same as before.

  “Any idea what it was?” she asked.

  He’d been flying big four-engine jumbos for so long that he’d lost touch with his roots at smaller airfields like Harrisburg. It sounded like a single-prop civilian craft, but he couldn’t say for sure.

  By contrast, if any of a number of different jumbo jets had flown over, he’d be able to tell the make and model number of the airframes, and probably the type and model of the engines, too.

  “For now, let’s go with unknown. It sounded small, and possibly non-military, but I wouldn’t bet our lives on it.”

  “Should we keep going?” She swept her arm across her forehead to clear the glistening sheen of sweat. It really was an inferno on the asphalt parking lot.

  “We have to,” he said dryly.

  “That’s what I thought. We’re too close to turn around.”

  They smiled at each other for a second, then he got up and ran for the next row of cars. Emily followed a few seconds later.

  He kept running after reaching the entrance to the lot. A ticket booth and gate had a few cars parked in front of them, as they were when the people inside disappeared, but he ran right by.

  “Come on!” he called.

  He’d been to the small Air National Guard facility a couple of times in his travels. It was basically a short row of one-story office buildings and a couple of small hangars. However, the main aircraft of the base were modified versions of the C-130 Hercules transport planes.

  The sign above the main building said “193d Special Operations Squadron. Never seen, always heard.”

  “Jackpot,” he said when he walked through the unlocked glass front doors.

  “Thank God for air conditioning,” she exclaimed when she got inside with him.

  He was in a hurry, but he turned around to watch the small-framed woman approach. Her shirt was soaked with perspiration, and her hair was a mess, but she maintained her politician’s smile.

  “Yeah, power is still working here. I guess it pays to live next to a nuclear power plant, huh?” He led her into the facility, not sure what he was looking for.

  “Doesn’t it worry you? That the plant will blow up without human control? It melted down before, even with human oversight.”

  “That was decades ago. I’m sure they have safeguards in place for situations like this. Maybe the reactors shut down if no one touches a button for a few days. They have to plan for this, right?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not an expert in nuclear power. Not even an amateur, really.”

  “Me either, but I do have some experience with this.” He went through the door labeled ‘Radio Room,’ knowing he’d found what they’d come for.


  The inside was filled with so much radio equipment, it forced him to stop and figure out what was what. Much of it was redundant, but he sifted through the amplifiers, repeaters, and equalizers to get to a desk with a common microphone.

  “Here we go.”

  Ted went right to work shifting the dial to look for radio traffic. However, a few seconds after he began, he glanced at the chair next to him. A camo uniform lay uselessly on the seat, and some pants and boots were underneath.

  “First, I’m going to listen,” he advised Emily. “This radio can scan frequencies and tell us if there’s anyone talking to the mainland from offshore. I would assume there is.”

  He adjusted the controls for a few minutes, sure he’d pick up some traffic.

  “I’m not getting what I thought.”

  “Are you sure it’s working?” she asked.

  He rolled the chair back and forth by the nearby equipment, positive he’d notice if there was something turned off or otherwise squelching his signal, but it all looked normal. It should have been possible to hear something over the airwaves.

  “This isn’t what I—” Emily began.

  He’d gone to civilian channels on the FM band to see if the radio was working. Sure enough, he heard an old rap song when he hit the right frequency.

  “It’s the same station we heard in your Jeep,” she remarked.

  They listened for a short time.

  “I want to hear what happens when the song ends.” He leaned back in the chair, content to rest for a few moments.

  “You really wanted to hear this song, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “Rap isn’t my thing. Old rap, even less so.”

  She rolled over a chair that didn’t have any loose clothes in it. She sat down and slid up next to him. “Let me guess. You like music about pickup trucks, lost dogs, and cowboy-smitten women. Am I right?”

  “Country? No. I do like rock from the seventies and eighties, though.”

  “Ah, classic rock.”

  “No, I call it plain old rock. Nothing classic about it. They broke the mold when the music industry went into the nineties. I haven’t understood music since eighty-nine. Anyway, I—” The song came to an end. “Here we go.”