Officer Of The Watch: Blackout Volume 1
Read Officer Of The Watch: Blackout Volume 1 Online
Authors: D W McAliley
Officer Of The Watch
By DW McAliley
Copyright 2015
This book is dedicated to my father,
Joseph P. McAliley, Sr.
He stood the watch.
Oct 14, 1953-Feb16, 2008
A Brief Note To The Reader
What follows is a work of fiction. All events and characters in this work are fictitious, and should be considered as such. However, the events are based on a very real threat that confronts modern society. The United States Congress formed the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack to investigate the reality of this threat and to attempt to address it. The report that resulted from that Commission is available at a link found at the end of this book.
To date, the most critical recommendations of the Commission remain undone.
God Bless.
DWM
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
~J. Robert Oppenheimer
Table of Contents
Ch. 1
Watch Room, USCENTCOM, Norfolk, VA
Joe Tillman sat at his desk, his Bible open and a cup of fresh coffee steaming next to it. He watched two talking heads take turns interrupting each other for a few moments, a smile twisting the right corner of his mouth up just a touch. Neither of the two "experts" had the slightest clue about real domestic defense policy, which was probably why they were the ones on television this morning.
The people who really knew what they were talking about were also the ones who could never talk about what they knew.
Joe flipped the screen back to the multi-paneled watch mode that kept live streams from twelve of the largest news agencies, both domestic and international, active at all times. Part of his job as Senior Watch Officer (SWO) was to make certain that none of the troop movements he was responsible for ever made it onto those screens before their intended time. Carefully managed "leaks" had become an integral part of the information delivery system these days, and they made tight secrecy all the more important.
A quick glance at the time on his personal terminal, and Joe smiled. Only one more hour until the morning briefing where he would fill in his relieving officer and the assembled four star generals and admirals of the condition and alert statuses, then he could head home for twelve hours of peace and quiet. Joe sat back, picked up his Bible again, and started thumbing through to the page for this weekend's Sunday school lesson.
Suddenly, the wall-sized screen at one end of the watch room went dead black, and two high-intensity strobe flashers at the back of the room began pulsing. Joe slapped a bookmark in his Bible and shoved it into a desk drawer as he brought his terminal up. The two junior watch officers also rushed to their keyboards and began hammering in commands. All three men moved with practiced efficiency and urgency; if they scored a bad result on a readiness test, it could mean disciplinary action and even a drop in pay, and no one wanted that.
Joe was just finishing his log-in credentials to access the Secure Emergency Action Comm. system when the alert prompt began buzzing and a message flashed across the main screen. When they read the words scrolling down, all three men froze for a brief moment and stared—first at the screen and then at each other.
It read:
*****EMERGENCY ACTION ALERT*****
FLASH: NORAD Air Defense Protocol: Priority: ALPHA ZULU TANGO 113
Simultaneous launch detected------- Four medium range ICBM-------- Point of origin unknown------Target designation unknown---------
************************************************** **********
Joe sat down and pulled the sheet off the printer as it rolled out. He checked his authentication card, and then the paper slipped from his numb fingers. Suddenly, the room seemed to spin and he gripped the edge of his desk hard to try and stop it. He looked around, and finally snapped back to the present moment. Only a few seconds had ticked away, but it seemed an eternity.
"Tom, Chris," Joe said, and his two associates jumped as if pricked, "we have to get on this. Tom, get NORAD on the horn
now
and make sure this isn't some damned drill. Chris, get the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on your line and see if he has any details that we don't. The President is going to be looking for answers, and that means we are the ones who have to find them."
The two men nodded once and began punching commands into their keyboards and talking into their hands-free headsets. Joe, meanwhile, tapped into the NORAD radar defense shield and brought up the threat tracking display that eliminated all known radar sources, both commercial and military. There, on the screen, he watched as the four lines tracing the hostile contacts climbed towards the sky. One was arching up from the corner of Washington state, one from southern California, one from the New York area, and the last from near Miami.
Joe frowned and blinked. He sat down at his terminal and accessed the telemetry on the radar sources and did some quick calculations. The computers had read the result as a computational error and listed the point of origin as unknown because it couldn't accept the answer that the math had given it.
The four tracks had each originated within three miles of the US coast line.
The track that was arching up from what looked to be the Seattle area of Washington bent a bit towards Idaho as it climbed. Then, at exactly 200km altitude, there was a flash on the radar screen, and the radar track disappeared. One by one, the other three tracks followed the same pattern of arching towards the US heartland, then exploding at 200km.
As the final missile flashed, there was a brief flicker of darkness, and the lights dropped off completely. Two heartbeats later, the fluorescent panels overhead flickered back to life, but all of the computers in the room showed dead black screens.
Joe felt a cold knot begin twisting in his gut as he looked at the pale faces of the two junior watch officers and said in barely more than a whisper, "Gentlemen, I think we are under attack."
The red phone at the front of the room started to ring.
Ch. 2
Ground Zero
Joe stood and said, “Tom, get the systems back up and running. Chris, you go and start warming up the briefing room. We’re on the clock, guys. Let’s get it done.”
At the front of the watch room, Joe paused and took a deep, slow breath. He could feel his pulse pounding in his neck and temples, and his palms itched. Calmed as much as he could manage, Joe picked up the receiver.
“Cent-Com, Joint Special Ops Command, Captain Joe Tillman speaking,” Joe said.
“This is Sec. Def. Davisson,” A familiar voice said, “You the SWO, Captain Tillman?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied.
“Good. What’s the status over there?” Secretary Davisson asked.
“We lost grid power,” Joe said. “Backup generators are up and running, but we’re doing a hard reboot on all systems. Codes will be changed once all the systems have been brought back up and connections reestablished. The briefing room is being prepped for video conference.”
“Sounds good, Captain,” Secretary Davisson said, his voice strangely calm. “Once your systems are up and running, get as much info as you can from the field. You’ll give a briefing in thirty minutes. Stay calm and stay focused, Captain. There’s a lot riding on your team, and I have every confidence you’ll carry the load.”
There was a click, and the line went silent.
Joe went back to his desk and took a seat as his computer terminal came slowly back to life. The random code generator immediately began whirring, beeping, and growling as it crunched unbelievably large algorithms to generate several random sixty four character long access keys that would control access to one of the most secure networks on the planet. Once the access keys had been generated and entered properly, the systems began making connections and printing out automated status reports.
“Systems are up and running, JT,” Tom reported. “I’m getting status reports and….well….. I don’t know, JT. There’s got to be some kind of error in the system. Something got fried in the power surge or something.”
“Show me,” Joe said and followed Tom to his computer terminal.
Tom pointed to his alert status screen. “Look, I’ve got status updates from Hawaii, Alaska, and D.C., but that’s all as of yet. None of the other twelve defense sectors have reported anything, but there should be some kind of status listed on the screen. All twelve continental defense zones are just blank. This system is designed not to give a blank return, JT. No matter what, there should be a status listed.”
“Okay, keep at it, Tom,” Joe said, the twisting knot in his gut turning tighter. “If you can’t get anything on the system, get on the phone and start calling people.”
Chris came in from the secure briefing room, and nodded. “Video feeds are up and running, JT.”
“Good work,” Joe said. “Now, see if you can access and bring up the east coast defense satellite feeds. We need to get a bird’s eye view of this thing if we can.”
Chris swallowed hard and bent over his computer, tapping in commands. Joe turned back to his screen and started scanning the secure wire channels and civilian media broadcasts. Already, the media in Europe and Asia was reporting some large scale catastrophe in the U.S., though no hard facts were available yet. Unfortunately, nothing as trivial as facts had ever stood in the way of good wall to wall media coverage and the talking heads were already working hard to get in their two cents. Joe tried to check the domestic news channels, but none had a feed up and running. That sent a shiver through him as he cycled through channel after channel of static and dead-feed marker screens.
“Oh, God,” Chris whispered, and the color drained from his face. He tapped some commands into his keyboard and a satellite image popped up on the main screen. “This is from a geo-synch satellite over New England…”
Chris trailed off as the image zoomed in on New York City. The outline of the massive metropolitan area was clear, and the two rivers that framed the city looked like dark ribbons set down among the glowing gems of the high-powered sodium vapor street lamps. As the image played, small lights moved on the bay and the rivers. Joe started to ask why they were watching this, when there was a brief flash from the Upper New York Bay near Liberty Island. The three men watched as a dim speck of light climbed through the pre-dawn sky above the city, turned and arched away from the satellite’s field of view.
Suddenly, the image on the screen flashed a bright, blinding white, and digitized static scrambled the view as the satellite’s image processors were overloaded. A few seconds later, the image cleared, and a massive fireball rose what had once been lower Manhattan. A mushroom cloud spread slowly as the fireball climbed into the sky. Joe felt hot tears running down his cheeks as he sat, transfixed by the scene of unbelievable devastation.