Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (27 page)

“The radio is tuned to talk to our A-10 drivers at Galveston Island. We’ve converted the road to an airstrip there and cleared the dead. Some seem to get in anyway though. The notepad is our weekly flight schedule and brevity codes. We’ve been ordered by the COG to support your missions. You transmit your scouting plan to the boat and they’ll notify us of our strip alert times. If you run into trouble that you can’t shake, our Hog pilots will be on scene inside of twenty mikes for the troops in contact. They’ll literally be sitting in the ready room geared up at the times your teams are out. I’m ordered to tell you that the Hogs are carrying air-to-air IR missiles in their loadouts, too, whatever that’s supposed to mean to you.”

Doc quickly thought of the Reaper mentioned in the previous Hotel 23 commander’s report, but decided not to mention it.

“One last thing, I’m sure you know that transmitting is a bad idea in your keypad and especially killbox. I wouldn’t use that radio unless the devil himself started coming out of the ground with hell behind him.”

The dead drew nearer and Disco took shots, thinning them out with the smaller noise radius of his carbine—the only suppressed rifle between the two, now that Doc had donated his.

“Do you have anything for me?” the survivor asked Doc.

“Yeah, here are our reports and copies of some equipment we recovered a week ago, and some other intel.” Doc handed over the package.

“Thanks.” The man took possession and slid it into the leather messenger bag slung across his chest.

“You got a name?” Doc asked the man.

“Galt. Yours?” he replied as he mounted his bike.

“I’m Doc, and that’s Disco. Good luck.”

“Thanks. You too, thanks for the gun.”

“Least I could do. I’m really sorry about your friends. Thanks for the Warthogs.”

Galt didn’t say a word. He slung his leg over his motorcycle and his M-4 over his back and was out of sight before Doc and Disco departed.

“Doc, it’s time to go,” Disco reminded him apprehensively.

“Yeah, I know. Take that bike and scout up ahead where we left ours.”

Disco mounted one of the dirtbikes that belonged to the fallen Galveston Island team; it started without trouble. Doc jogged behind, trying to keep up with Disco as he rode up to the other bike, which was still running. Disco’s gunshots told Doc that the undead had been attracted to the running engine while the two were down at the bridge. By the time Doc made it up the hill, Disco had already dispatched the creatures, littering the ground with more corpses.

“We gotta roll, man. That AK caused a major ruckus. I wouldn’t doubt it if every creature for five miles is headed for our pos.” Disco revved his engine, heading back in the direction they came, with Doc trailing.

They made good time back to the tanker, refilling without incident. The undead density was higher on the way back, remainders from the dead attracted by their motorcycle on their way to the bridge, causing more swerves and weaving. The vampires of Hotel 23 once again beat the winter sun.

God stood on the watch floor, deep inside a covered facility, staring at the Global Hawk UAV picture of a particularly high-interest
area in Texas. He remembered the day, more than ten months ago, when he shut the doors, securing himself below ground—the day the president was declared dead.

At that time, the vice president was still alive somewhere in the mountains west of Washington, D.C., issuing logic tree orders to Remote Six via secure cable. Logic trees were made of complex responses, as they required more than a simple yes or no finding. They were basically a prediction market, something that the intelligence community had experimented with prior to the fall of man. The logic tree response demanded a chain of yes or no answers and probability annotations for each option. This was no trouble for the quantum’s mind mapping and reasoning algorithms. To complement the quantums, Remote Six boasted a small team of nuclear experts on site for the human reasoning input on the decision to deploy tactical nuclear warheads on U.S. soil. Strange, Charm, and Top were their codenames—Remote Six did not use real names, only those that represented the expertise of its personnel. Over nine and a half months ago, the quantums, as well as nuclear weapons experts Strange and Charm, all agreed that the full destruction of a majority of cities was necessary to regain control of the United States. The lone dissenter was Top. Top believed that more research needed to be conducted on the second- and third-order effects of radiation and on the true origin of the anomaly.

God looked down on the facility that the pathetic squatters called Hotel 23. His database had another name for the place, but that really didn’t matter anymore. Under most circumstances he’d leave them for the undead—sooner or later they’d leave the safety of the compound looking for food, water, antibiotics, whatever. The creatures would pick them off slowly but ever so surely.

Now, God was forced to devote time and attention to the miserable pimple and its squatters below, because Hotel 23 still contained a viable nuclear warhead. The quantums ran the numbers, informing his think tank that there was now only one way to destroy the USS
George Washington,
the COG’s military right hand. Remote Six had a squadron of Reaper UCAVs armed with five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs and even a small number of Global Hawk UAVs with a prototype weapon. None of those weapons
could so much as dent the hull of the carrier. The LGBs would fall straight down and possibly damage the flight deck but would have no chance at sinking the ship.

There was only one working nuclear weapon inside the United States that God had a shot at controlling. That warhead was secure inside the closed silo beneath his Global Hawk—an unmanned aerial vehicle that orbited at sixty thousand feet over Hotel 23. It monitored the area equipped with an advanced optics suite and one other prototype payload—Project Hurricane.

God grew tired of helping him along. The man, according to Remote Six SIGINT intercepts, held control of the warhead launch via an encrypted Common Access Card. He nearly had a heart attack the day he learned that the man had been in a helicopter crash, fearing that his chance of neutralizing the USS
George Washington
had evaporated. Remote Six designated the man as Asset One, or just
the asset
. The asset had been doing a fair job of evading the creatures, but God took no chances.

He ordered full Reaper and air-drop support the instant that Remote Six intercepted and geolocated the distress beacon from the asset’s survival radio. God would have dispatched a small extraction force, but he was very short on air-breathing aircraft pilots and couldn’t risk losing an extraction team in a mishap onboard one of the prototype C-130 UAVs. Technology was not a problem for Remote Six, but personnel was becoming a big limiting factor.

The fully functioning twelve-thousand-foot runway co-located above Remote Six was increasingly difficult to secure, despite its location—a secret basin far away from what many would consider a densely populated area. A ten-foot-high, double-layered, K-9 patrolled chainlink fence buffered the runway from the straggling dead near the facility.

But some got through.

There had been casualties since January, since going underground. The most valuable resource in Remote Six was people—those still loyal to the charter of the facility anyway.

The strength of the facility was her drones, DARPA prototype weapons. Though formidable, there were things darker, blacker. Things known only by a whisper between the highest elected and appointed officials before the fall. Things reverse engineered from
technology secured in a Lockheed Martin laboratory vault since a time when the government hit its own technological impasse in the 1950s and thereby signed the hardware over to the military-industrial complex.

God grew impatient. He’d thought that the asset would have been more appreciative; after all, he’d saved him from certain death more than once. The asset had made it back to Hotel 23 a few days ago, and had been unresponsive to God’s iridium phone transmissions.

The quantums, as well as his top think tank advisors, agreed that destroying the carrier would serve two purposes; it would eliminate Task Force Hourglass before its submarine deployment to China, and would get rid of the only entity that could order nuclear response on Remote Six. With the asset’s apparent refusal to launch hanging over him, God had a whole new problem set for the mainframes. The answer came out in real time; some Remote Six scientists theorized that the reply might even be given before the user actually asked—perhaps by a few nanoseconds. It twisted one’s mind thinking about the physics behind that—answers before questions, or output nanoseconds before input.

The quantum output did not surprise God. Project Hurricane would likely be deployed against Hotel 23 tomorrow or the next day. This would force the evacuation of the facility or likely eliminate the squatters. Either outcome awarded some time for God to evaluate his next move. He was all but certain that none of the surviving military apparatus knew of his location, but . . .
doubt kills,
he thought.

God flipped a switch and turned a few dials, adjusting the Global Hawk UAV video feed to another location miles away from Hotel 23. Mega Swarm T-5.1 would soon be within range of the Hurricane device, and Hotel 23 would be neutralized. Until then he would continue to feed the quantums, predicting the next big thing.

It took a few hours for Rex and Huck to figure out the cave facility generator system. Fortunately it wasn’t anything high-speed like geothermal or tide power, just a simple diesel system. The fuel tanks were still three-quarters full and it seemed like the back-up system had never been activated. The mainland grid must have stayed on until it was knocked out by nuclear detonation. By isolating the power grid internal to the cave, they could get maybe two months of power out of the generator banks.

Commie was straining over the keyboard, attempting to bring up the critical computers needed to provide overwatch for the
Virginia
.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “None of my log-ins work and I know they’re still valid.”

“Could the birds have burned in already?” Rex said, referring to the overhead satellites.

“No, they haven’t re-entered. I’m seeing their maintenance signal active, see?” Commie pointed to a screen cascading code that might as well have come straight out of
The Matrix.

“I don’t know what the hell any of that is,” Huck said.

“You probably don’t even know your own social, shut up,” Rico chided.

“At least I have a social,
ese
.”

Rex jumped in, not feeling the comedy routine right now. “If you all think you need to joke around, think about Griff. Think he’s joking right now?”

“Naw, he’s probably back on the boat in a warm rack,” Huck said.

“I hope,” Rex responded, staring down Huck.

“Commie, what’s the situation? We need to make a decision.”

“Sir, I’m telling you, the birds are up there. They’re functioning, too, because I can see they’re transmitting a green maintenance code.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Commie explained, “Okay, I don’t know quite how to say this without sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I saw this once before. The NRO took control of the birds a few years back to run some diagnostics and didn’t tell anyone they were doing it. Some of us little guys didn’t get the memo. This looks like outside control has been locked out, and the birds are being controlled once again in the same way. I don’t think we’ll be able to get them.”

“Well, fuck,” Rex murmured.

“There is good news though,” Commie offered. “I can try to run a trace on the entity that’s currently in control of the birds. We likely won’t be able to pinpoint, but we might get close.”

“Okay, Commie, do it. I’m not going back to the
Virginia
empty-handed. If Griff made it, that’s good, but if he didn’t I won’t throw his life away without forcing this mission to give us something in return. Don’t forget that Commander Monday wanted the archives of all the intel collected three months before January and up until the nuke was dropped on Honolulu. Check?”

Commie clicked another workspace on the GUI of the Unix system. “Yeah, I’m on it. Running it now.”

“Can he access the comms interface from here? The boat is no doubt worried about us and maybe we can find out about Griff,” Rico asked, visibly worried about his team member.

“No, I don’t have outgoing comms capability here and I wouldn’t know how to use those systems even if they were powered up and I knew their location,” said Commie. “Sorry.”

“It’s daylight. The sun sets in ten hours. Be ready to fucking roll when the sun goes down, Commie, and you’re in luck; you won’t be calling this cave home for the next six weeks, while we go to China and back. The water is drinkable; everything inside has
been shielded from the blast. According to the readings, our suits aren’t too dirty and as long as we don’t lick them clean before we get back, we should be okay for the return trip.”

“What do you want me and Huck working on?” Rico asked Rex.

“I want you two working on our way out of here. Unless we can restore power to that door, we ain’t gettin’ out the same way we got in. Considering the fact that we don’t hear a thousand corpses screaming outside the turnstile area, Griff was successful in getting the door closed. There must be another exit.”

“There is another way out,” Commie said. “When we came in, we went down the tunnel until it came to a T. We turned right to get where we are now. If you go left you’ll pass by some vending machines. Farther down you’ll see a maintenance door that leads to a ladder. That goes up above ground to an access shed. The shed is used to get outside for downlink antenna maintenance. I know about it because we caught two people up there . . . well, you know. Back when I worked here before.”

“You guys heard him. Check it out, but make sure you watch your asses. Griff might not have got them all in the tunnel. Be back here in two hours, or we’ll assume you didn’t make it. I can’t leave Commie here alone—too risky. Double-check your suits and move out.”