Without Warning

by Darrell Maloney

  “He tried to pull a trick on me but I was too smart for him.”

  “What do you mean, a trick? What did he do?”

  “He looked at my eye real close and then he held up his thumb and a finger and asked me how many fingers he was holding up. I guess he thought I was pretty dumb. I said ‘You’re only holding up one finger and your thumb, duh.’

  “He laughed and said I was fine. He told the coach I could play. So coach pulled Jason out and put me back in.”

  “That’s awesome. Who won?”

  Inside Jordan winced a bit, hoping against hope the opposing player Toby allowed to stay in the game didn’t score the winning goal against him.

  “Oh, it was great. I blocked five shots and we won two to one.”

  “Great job, son! I’m so proud of you.”

  “Thank you, and oh, yeah… Mom had a heart attack.”

  Jordan almost dropped the phone.

  “What?”

  On the other end Jordan heard Katie say, “Oh my gosh! Give me the phone, quick.”

  On his phone Jordan could see as Katie grabbed hers away from her son. The camera spun every which way for several seconds before she came on the screen.

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Hi, sweetheart. What’s this about you having a heart attack?”

  “I need to teach our son what an expression means. I told him that after I saw him get kicked in the face and then rolling around on the ground in pain, holding both hands over his eyes, he gave me a heart attack. I guess he took me seriously.”

  “I guess.”

  “But I was very proud of the way he handled it, and everything worked out in the end. We even went out for ice cream after. And by the way, he decided he likes what happened.

  “Not the getting kicked in the face part, but the black eye part.”

  “He likes having a black eye? But why?”

  “Because when we were at the ice cream parlor, girls from his school kept coming up to him and asking him what happened.

  “They were fawning all over him, telling him how tough and brave he was. One of them turned out to be a girl he has a crush on, and she gave him her phone number. So he couldn’t wait to get home and call her.”

  “Wait a minute. Our son is having crushes now?”

  “Weren’t you at that age?”

  “I never had a crush until I met you.”

  “That’s sweet. Also bullshit. But sweet overrides bullshit, so I’ll let you live.”

  “Sounds like our son is finally growing up.”

  “I think so. Here, the girls want to talk to you too…”

  -41-

  It was actually the Russians who came up with the idea of planting nuclear weapons in U.S. cities.

  But that’s as far as it went: just an idea.

  They called it their “Trojan Horse” project, and it sat in Vladimir Putin’s toolbox of war tools for eight years, untried and unused, for one simple reason.

  The Russians had no means of planting its Trojan horses. The United States was too suspicious of Russia and everything Russian.

  It wasn’t just that we were suspicious of Russia. We also hated and despised them.

  It all goes back to World War II, when the Soviet Union was an uneasy ally. Yes, they helped us defeat Hitler. There are those who say we couldn’t have done it without the USSR’s help.

  That may or may not be true.

  What is indisputable is that they helped end a war which might otherwise have gone on for several more years and cost a million more American lives.

  That’s not to say we need to be unnecessarily grateful. The Soviet Union fought fiercely during World War II, but they didn’t do it for us.

  They did it to protect their Motherland from Hitler’s Fatherland.

  In a fanciful world it might be called the war between mom and dad.

  But there was nothing fanciful or funny about World War II. And just to reiterate: Soviet involvement in the war wasn’t to do good, it was for self defense. Any pretense of being a good ally went out the window after Hitler shot himself (or escaped to Argentina, depending on one’s theory).

  It was after Hitler was out of the picture that the USSR showed her true colors.

  The Nazi war machine had been crushed by the allies.

  Germany was no longer a threat to anybody. Her cities were crumbled, her people soundly defeated.

  Of the German survivors, not a kind word about Hitler could be found.

  Germany became a nation of liars.

  Every single German who survived the war told the same great lie.

  “No,” each one insisted. “It was not me who supported Hitler. I spit on Hitler and everything he did. I cursed him to hell. No, it wasn’t me who supported Hitler. My neighbors did. My friends did. But I opposed him from the beginning.”

  Bullshit.

  These were the same people who, a year before, were crying real tears and falling at Hitler’s feet when he paraded through their towns.

  The women threw flowers and would have given him anything… even themselves, were he to ask.

  Parents taught their kids the Nazi salute even before they taught them to walk. Babies in strollers were praised and patted when they raised their little arms in mockery of their parents.

  After Hitler was gone, these were a people too afraid of the truth about their recent behavior.

  It wasn’t a surprise, then, that they couldn’t mount any kind of effort to fight the Soviets from further dismantling their country.

  America grabbed as much of defeated Germany as they could, including a fair sized piece of its capitol city, Berlin.

  Although Berlin itself was in “red” territory, the allies had free access to it by road. The USSR would have loved to have closed that road and denied the allies access to Berlin after the war, but such a decision likely would have sparked a follow-up war between the USSR and the remaining allies.

  In that follow-up war the USSR would have gone it alone, since Germany’s great war machine and Italy’s tiny war machine were both decimated.

  And Japan was barely still a nation.

  The Soviets wisely kept the road open, except for a brief period when they stopped all supplies and tried to starve the people in West Berlin.

  The United States could have gone to war again, but the truth was they were tired of fighting too. And back home, Mom and Pop Spencer back on the farm didn’t have any taste for sending their sons back to fight another war on German soil.

  Especially since at that time hatred of the German people was at a fever pitch.

  “We’re not sending our boys to die in defense of the bastards who were killing them just a year ago.”

  And who, really, could blame them?

  Instead of war, we wisely chose another option. One the world would call “the Berlin airlift.”

  In essence, the “good allies,” or all the allies besides the USSR, got together and ferried food and supplies around the clock into Berlin’s Templehof Airport, and were able to keep the city alive that way.

  It was a great effort that further hemorrhaged American supplies and money.

  The USSR thought it would fail on its own. When it didn’t they began a harassment campaign to help it fail.

  In the end, though, it succeeded.

  In the end it made the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics look stupid and weak.

  In the end, the USSR couldn’t stop the mighty power of the United States of America.

  So they did what they saw as the next best thing.

  They totally trashed their share of Germany and pretty much imprisoned its people.

  It remained that way until Ronald Reagan implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

  When the Union disbanded it became much less powerful.

  Yes, Russia was still a threat. But not as much of one, for she was a mere shadow of her former self.

  Those Russians who remembered the old days, when the USSR still existed,
longed for the days when it was strong enough to force the actions of other nations, instead of being a bit player on the world stage.

  Vladimir Putin was one of those men.

  And he’s been determined for a considerable time to return Russia to its former stature.

  -42-

  One of Putin’s generals made a comment several years ago: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could place nuclear weapons in American cities, and just let them sit there until we needed to detonate them?

  “Then we could detonate them by remote control whenever we chose to. And by the time they scrambled their bombers and launched their missiles it would be too late. The war would be over because all their cities would already be destroyed.”

  It was just a passing comment made at a Party social event.

  But Putin was intrigued.

  And like a good intelligence officer and collector of information tends to do, he filed the comment away in his mind for a later day.

  That later day came when Putin became president of Russia.

  He pulled the comment out of his memory and began to chew on it.

  It was indeed a great idea. One of the best he’d ever heard, in his opinion.

  In time he would present it to his military counsel.

  He’d claim it as his own idea, of course. Sometime after the general who mentioned it at that event several years before met an untimely and unfortunate death.

  The problem, as Putin saw it, was that the technology didn’t yet exist which would enable Russia to detonate a nuclear device by remote control.

  Especially by long distance.

  He immediately put his best minds to work on the project, and was confident it wouldn’t take them long to come up with a solution.

  People tend to work harder when they know failure is a death sentence.

  An even bigger problem, though, was how to get the devices into the United States and where to place them.

  The storage sites had to be in or near cities, for it would do no good to detonate a nuclear bomb in the desert or along an isolated highway.

  They didn’t actually have to be inside a city necessarily, as long as they were close enough to destroy it.

  As the old saying goes, close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.

  And nuclear weapons.

  Russia finally developed a capability of detonating their weapons from a very long distance.

  That was early in 2007.

  Putin was ecstatic.

  But he wasn’t there yet.

  He still hadn’t solved the problem of how to get his weapons into the United States, and then to the cities they’d eventually destroy.

  But his intelligence people had heard rumors the Chinese had.

  It was time for a summit with the president of China, who confirmed the rumors.

  Russia and China were already allies of sorts, meaning they didn’t really like one another but hated America even more.

  In the same way Hitler despised Mussolini but cozied up to him because he needed the help of Italy’s army, the leaders of Russia and China agreed to team up.

  The first of the deadly shipments was off-loaded from a container ship in Miami on September 17th, 2014.

  For everyone in Miami… the ship’s captain, the customs officials who glanced at the container’s manifest, saw that it held toys destined for a dollar store and initialed off on it… the men who off-loaded it… for all of them everything was routine.

  For a couple of dozen men in Beijing and a couple of dozen more in Moscow, it was anything but.

  They were all holding their breath and watching real-time video from a camera in a high-rise hotel in Coconut Grove.

  A Chinese operator was given instructions two days before.

  “Rent a room at least twenty stories up. Make sure it faces Miami harbor. Set up a camera to face the harbor, and wait for further instructions.”

  -43-

  The operator was expendable, as all such operators are.

  The Chinese and Russians were hoping nothing went wrong.

  If it did, the operator would die, as would all of Miami’s citizens.

  In top secret control centers in Moscow and Beijing they watched and waited. One of two things was going to happen.

  Either the video they were watching would show a brilliant flash of light, followed by complete blackness a millisecond later.

  Or it would continue to show a busy port, with ships of all types coming and going, and container ships being unloaded one after another.

  And a phone call would come in from another operative monitoring the port’s exit.

  The phone call everyone was waiting for… everyone was hoping for, was that a truck hauling COSCO container U49432001 had left the port and was headed for Atlanta.

  That call came at 0217 hours local on September 18th, 2014. The first “Trojan horse” delivered to the United States passed through customs without incident.

  In Moscow and Beijing both control centers stood down.

  Then they celebrated.

  They proved it could be done.

  The Chinese were counting on pure numbers.

  Like, for example, the fact that while U.S. customs officials inspect practically every item coming into the country’s airports, they physically check only four of every one hundred shipping containers coming in by sea.

  Odds were in their favor that this container would slip into the country without ever being opened.

  In the event it was, though, they had a fallback plan which would create even more chaos.

  The nuclear bomb inside the container was configured to explode if the container’s door was opened.

  The 100 kiloton device would cause five times the damage done by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

  Miami would be wiped out.

  The United States would never know what happened or who was responsible.

  But that didn’t happen. Because it didn’t have to.

  In following months twenty seven additional bombs would be brought into the country using precisely the same procedures.

  There was no specific reason the Chinese stopped with twenty eight devices, other than they figured it was time to stop pushing their luck.

  Putin agreed.

  He wanted to make use of what was left of the United States after the invasion and very short war was over.

  If they destroyed too much of it, their conquered land wouldn’t be worth having.

  Two days later the truck pulled into the storage yard of Pete Myerson’s Plumbing Company.

  It was a few blocks east of Atlanta’s famed Piedmont Park. Millions of people had visited the park over the last hundred and fifty years or so for sporting events, picnics and music festivals.

  The city’s first professional baseball team, the Atlanta Crackers, played at the park, just a couple of miles from the downtown area.

  From Russia’s point of view it was the perfect place to park a nuclear device which would turn the entire city, and all its suburbs, into dust.

  Pete Myerson knew nothing of those plans.

  Poor Pete was just a businessman who was in way over his head.

  He’d tried to expand the small plumbing business his father left him into something bigger.

  There’s nothing wrong with that. Companies expand all the time. It’s a key aspect of a capitalist society. People save their money so they can spend it on something better.

  Companies invest their money to purchase new buildings, new equipment. They hire more people so they can expand their operations; make more widgets, to make even more money.

  The problem is, sometimes they over-extend. They borrow money they can’t afford to pay back. They buy equipment they can’t afford to pay off.

  Regular banks won’t loan them any more money. They have to go to other sources, where they pay higher interest rates for loans which are much easier to obtain.

  Eventually those banks stop listening to their requests
as well.

  That’s when foreign banks come in.

  Usually they seek out the troubled businesses, instead of the other way around.

  A lot is made about how much social media knows about American citizens.

  A lot is also made about how much American businesses know about American citizens.

  It is said that such entities know more about us than we know about ourselves, and it’s largely true.

  Do you know what your current income to debt ratio is, as of 5 p.m. yesterday?

  They do. Right down to the last digit.

  Here’s the deal, though… the big American retail companies and social media, as much as they know about you, have absolutely nothing on the Chinese.

  The Chinese know what color underwear you’re wearing as you read this.

  Well… maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

  But they do know a lot about you, because companies which deal with personal data have gotten quite good at selling such information to anyone with the money to pay for it.

  That’s how the Chinese-Asian Bank of Beijing found out that Pete Myerson owned a storage lot near downtown Atlanta.

  And that Pete Myerson was deeply in debt.

  -44-

  Pete was at his desk one afternoon several months before, poring over bills which were due at the end of the month.

  Bills he had no money to pay.

  His secretary buzzed him.

  “There’s a Mr. Lee here to see you.”

  Pete knew he had no appointment with a Mr. Lee. He didn’t even know a Mr. Lee. He immediately suspected that Mr. Lee was a bill collector.

  He’d gotten pretty good at dodging their phone calls in recent months. And he felt no guilt about throwing their threatening letters right into the garbage.

  Any email he got from someone he didn’t know with the title “Legal Notice” went into the spam folder.

  He knew he was deeply in debt. He’d figure out a way out of it. He’d sell some equipment he didn’t use very often and rent similar gear when he needed it.

  He’d lay off a few employees. Most of them weren’t worth the pay they were getting anyway.

  Hell, he hadn’t turned a pipe wrench in years, but he’d start doing weekend service calls for awhile.