Interrupt (24 page)

Then you know my sister died on her bike when a guy blew through a stop sign,
he thought.
Because I was too busy to drive her.
His reflex was to pull back, protecting that old wound, but something in Julie’s expression stopped him. Was it forgiveness? He squeezed her again and said, “You—”

“Move it!” the officer called. “Let’s move!”

They walked with Bugle and the Marine to the front of the plane, where thirty operatives had sat or knelt to make room for others to stand behind them. Drew couldn’t make out the officer’s insignia, although he assumed she was Air Force.

“Eight hours ago,” she said, “Earth’s magnetic field was struck by X-class solar flares. The result was a sustained worldwide EMP. Recently the pulse has been intermittent, but we don’t know enough yet to make predictions. It might stop altogether. It might not. We’re pulling back. Communications are shot, but we’ve managed to convey to the Chinese that we’re in retreat.”

Julie noticed Drew squinting. She turned to him silently and he shook his head.

The officer had set a laptop on her stand. Drew could see that much. The orange-and-brown blurs on its screen might have been China’s shoreline.

“The
America
and its strike group are hunkering down,” she said. “For the most part, they’re reporting they’re safe inside their ships. Even better, our subs are one hundred percent operational.”

Drew glanced at the fuselage as Bugle muttered under his breath, “Oh, shit.”

Most of these operatives weren’t aviators, so maybe they didn’t know. The
America
was built to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear near miss, its vitals shielded within tons of steel, but aircraft were constructed of lightweight aluminum.

If the EMP came back, they would fall like a rock.

“Most of you are alive because we received early reports that the Chinese were testing a pulse weapon in theater,” the officer said. “Based on those warnings, yesterday we brought in four specialized aircraft and other gear. That’s lucky for you because the pulse hasn’t stopped. It’s still happening. This C-17 is one of the very few aircraft in flight anywhere in the world, but the decision was made that you’re worth the investment. We need you back home.”

Then we’re safe from the EMP,
Drew thought, extending his hand to Bugle for a fist jab. They deserved to celebrate. Without their data, ROMEO wouldn’t have sent these planes, so in a sense they’d saved themselves.

The officer began a slideshow of images. Drew eased closer to her, leaving Julie. He needed to follow this briefing if he was going to have any value, but he was clumsy. He stepped on a Marine who was sitting down, then bumped another man as the officer displayed MRI and CT scans of several human brains—or the same brain in different states.

“The pulse is having an extreme cognitive effect on anyone caught in the open. According to our doctors, the first indications are temporal lobe seizures,” the officer said, touching her own temple. “This is where the skull is its thinnest. From there, the seizures spread.”

“Sit down,” an Air Force captain hissed at Drew.

Behind him, Julie also moved into the crowd. She caught his arm and murmured, “What’s wrong?”

Drew took her hand, drawing her attention from his face. “I’m fine,” he said.

If he told her how badly his vision was affected, would she report him? The medic had said his eyesight would improve. He couldn’t chance being downgraded from flight ready.

“The seizures are very similar to epileptic activity,” the officer said. “Reasoning, prioritizing, short-term memory, all of these areas of the brain shut down. There’s a dramatic personality shift.”

She brought up a video of a blank-faced man, a policeman, shambling across a city street jammed with vehicles. Shoes off, hat off, he fumbled stupidly with an open car door in his way. He only needed to pull it shut, but he pushed and pushed until finally he clambered over the door onto the hood of the car.

No one in the plane spoke, sharing one another’s horror and disbelief.

“Our losses may be bigger than in every war we’ve fought combined,” the officer said. “Our forces in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Japan… Seventy percent are AWOL, wounded, or dead. Stateside, our casualties are in the millions.”

Drew could barely imagine that sudden combat that must have erupted among those who were still conscious. In Vietnam, the Marines would be fighting their allies for the old tunnels of the Vietcong and for the modern steel-and-concrete buildings in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang. In Afghanistan, NATO forces would have made frontal assaults on the caves of the Taliban, not only to clear every stronghold of insurgents, but to occupy those rocky holes themselves. Elsewhere, American soldiers must have run for the urban areas of Seoul, Tokyo, and Baghdad, struggling for room in those cities’ lower levels and basements.

“We’ve lost fifty billion dollars in civilian satellites,” the officer said.
“Telecom, weather, science, it’s all gone. Most of our military net survived the first few hours, but now we’re down to our RADIUS series. Even those are vulnerable except when they’re in protect mode, so we’re rationing our eyes and ears. Radio is out. Landlines are out. We’re bringing you home because you’re trained to operate on your own—forever, if necessary—with no resources except what you find yourselves.”

But are there enough of us?
Drew wondered. Four planeloads of black ops and Special Forces weren’t enough to accomplish more than a few missions across North America.

“We need to outlast this crisis,” the officer said. “The Chinese threat hasn’t gone away.”

“Ma’am?” the Marine said. “If they can’t see, either, now’s the perfect time to launch against their command and control.”

“That’s nuts,” Julie objected. “If we’re experiencing electronics failures, our targeting systems might go, too. We couldn’t be positive where our missiles would land.”

“The nukes are hardened against—”

“We might not even get a full launch, just enough to make the Chinese counterstrike! You need to think about—”

“Enough,” the officer said as the small crowd rustled and muttered. It was the first hint of disharmony among the tightly disciplined ROMEO agents.

Drew didn’t doubt that in other places, the people with the launch codes were having the same argument. He understood the Marine’s aggression. Everyone had lost good friends and squad mates, and their families were in danger back home.

“We haven’t ruled out the possibility that the solar activity is man-made,” the officer said, “which means China’s satellites and radar systems may have been ready to survive the pulse. If so, we’re at a huge disadvantage.”

“You think they started the flares?” a woman asked.

“China has put billions of dollars into their exotic weapons programs. They definitely have the launch capacity to send a package into the sun. Look at this.”

The officer brought up a new window packed with file names, then initiated it. Her laptop rolled through dozens of still shots of different men in a strikingly similar pose, hunched forward, their arms lifted away from their bodies with a fence post, a pipe, an axe, a bat. All of them were American by the look of them—men in jeans or slacks or shorts—a Cleveland Browns jersey—and their poise was completely unlike the confused policeman in the video.

“There are ongoing reports of attacks among the survivors,” the officer said. “It’s happening in every city, every state. We’re losing lives and resources to our own people.”

“They’re all white,” Drew said for Julie’s benefit, demonstrating that he could see.

The officer glanced at him. “Almost,” she said. “Early data suggests they’re either Caucasian or mixed Caucasian descent. The majority of these attacks are happening in North America, Europe, and Australia.”

“How do we know that if our sats are down?” Julie asked.

“We’re still in contact with our allies and with China. Enough information is getting out. The incidence of these attacks is four hundred times less among Asian, African, and Hispanic populations.”

“Then we’re missing some key data or it’s not the EMP that’s causing it,” the Air Force captain said. “There are no racial differences in the human brain.”

“You’re not the first to say that,” the officer said. “It’s possible the Chinese are underreporting their own issues, or there may be a trigger we haven’t identified yet. Something they put in our water. Something in our food.”

Drew grimaced. Historically, the People’s Republic had worked very hard to regulate the outside world’s perception of their nation. For decades, they’d claimed there were no homosexuals in China, no
famine, no political dissent. But if they were experiencing the same attacks now, and hiding it, they were setting themselves up for all-out conflict with the United States. Too many people had died.

“We’re trying to capture some of the assailants,” the officer said. “Unfortunately, there are complications. Our cities are on fire. We have a limited number of air assets. We’re also treating these men as biohazards in case there’s a chemical or biological contagion at work.”

“What about facial recognition programs?” Julie asked.

“We’ve run our imagery and fingerprints in the few cases any were recovered,” the officer said. “No luck there, which means they’re not criminals or known terrorists—or military or law enforcement. The only hit was from a civil database in Michigan. One man was printed for a part-time job in child welfare, but that’s not much to go on.”

The plane rattled again and she raised her voice.

“All we know is these attacks are persistent and organized, and they’re not happening on Chinese soil. We think it’s a weapon.”

Then we’re at war,
Drew thought.

LOS ANGELES

I
n the hospital’s makeshift command center, Emily paced from side to side in a tiny space between two desks. She wanted to project conviction and expertise, but her body betrayed her.

Two doctors stood with Colonel Bowen. Pulling these men from their duties had taken more than an hour, giving Emily too much time to worry, because Captain Walsh insisted she wait here with Michelle and the young man. “It’s not safe,” Walsh said. Outside, there had been more gunfire, and raised voices constantly passed through the hall. They were barely in control of the hospital.

Emily had been reduced to asking every paramedic or nurse she saw about Chase. She kept thinking he would walk through the door. Waiting for him was torture, but first she needed to convince these men to give her every resource available.

“We need a larger sample base!” she said, holding up her collection kit.

One of the doctors was a dark, harried man in his forties. “I don’t see the point,” he said, looking at Emily with impatience, even scorn. “Let me get back to work.”

“Stop,” Bowen said before the doctor could leave.

National Guard Colonel John Bowen was a tall, hefty man in his sixties. The only chink in his resolve was his flexing hands. His fists kneaded constantly at his sides, for which Emily forgave him.

Bowen said, “You think the difference in the people outside is genetic?”

“Yes.”