Storm Tide Rising: Blackout Volume 2 (6 page)

Henderson stopped just short of the edge of the woods and took a position next to the root ball of an old oak tree that had toppled in a storm years before. He pulled a small pair of binoculars from one of his vest pockets and began scanning the area. A hundred and fifty yards from the tree line stood the Thompson’s tall, white farmhouse with three tool sheds around it. Flames were eating through the back half of the roof and spilling out of the windows on the second floor. The heat was so intense that the vinyl siding on the nearest shed had melted into a bubbling puddle, and the wood framing had begun to smoke. A tall pine tree on the other side of the house was barely visible through the flames and smoke rising from a gaping hole in the roof. As Eric and Henderson watched, another section of shingled roof fell in and launched a fresh burst of flames and sparks high into the air.

Henderson handed Eric the field glasses and pointed to the flat expanse of yard to the right of the blazing farmhouse. He held up four fingers and motioned for Eric to take a look. When Eric put the binoculars to his eyes, the scene leapt to him with surprising detail and clarity. Four shirtless figures sat on the lawn and watched the flames as they slowly consumed the house. Eric's pulse suddenly pounded in his ears, and for a brief moment he tasted bile in the back of his throat. He handed the binoculars back to Henderson and started to rise, but Henderson shook his head. He pointed again, and Eric saw two tents set up in the edge of the pasture. For a moment he was confused and didn't get what Henderson was trying to tell him. After a moment's thought, though, he understood that if they had taken the trouble of setting up tents, then whoever the spectators were, they weren't planning on going anywhere any time soon.

Eric nodded when Henderson motioned back the way they'd come, and the two headed back through the trees in silence. Eric clenched his jaw and ground his teeth so hard that the noise was all he could hear as he stalked back through the trees and over the fence into the lower pasture. He led Henderson along the inner edge of the pasture and then down the fence line to the river where his father was waiting. Eric gave a quick, terse report of what they'd seen and by the end, his breath was coming in ragged, angry gasps.

"Dad, we've got to do something," Eric grated. "They burned the Thompson's house down and they're camping in the yard. These people have got to be dangerous."

Joe took a deep breath, his forehead creased at what he'd heard. He gazed above the tree tops at the rising smoke and, finally, after a long silence, shook his head slightly. "I'm sorry, son, but we can't do anything about it right now. I give you my word that I'll take care of it, but our first priority has to be getting these supplies back to the farm. Chris still has to meet up with us on the trail back and we don't know if he's going to have people on his tail or not. We'll look into it, and we'll take care of it....just not right now."

Eric opened his mouth again, but Joe held up his hand, and his voice was stern when he spoke. "Listen, son, we ain't got the time to sit here and argue about it. I told you it'll get taken care of. Do you really want to push it?"

Eric clenched his jaw again, but shook his head and answered, "No, sir." 

"Good." Joe said, "Now, let's get moving. We're about to lose the daylight, and we've got a good mile and a half or more before we get to the house."

Eric turned and crossed over the fence without another word and headed into the dense underbrush along the river bank. "Look out for snakes," he called over his shoulder to Joe and Henderson. "The rattlers will usually let you know they're there, but the cottonmouths are real quiet."

Henderson froze halfway over the barbed wire fence, his eyes as wide as saucers as he turned a pale face toward Joe and asked, "Rattlers? What's he mean rattlers?"

Ch.8

 Unasked For Answers

Terry sat at his desk staring at the blank paper in front of him for a long time, pen in hand, but with no words to write. For decades he had known this moment was somewhere in his future, and now that it was here, he didn't know what to say. Part of the problem was he'd always expected to be there, to speak the words in the moment. Now that he tried to think about how to say what he was feeling, what he'd been feeling for so long it had become a part of who he was, he found that nothing sounded proper or sufficient.

Finally, he picked up his pen and began to write:

I wish things had been different. Understand, I don't mean to say I regret how I handled the situation I was presented with. I did the best that I could, and I would do so again. I do, however, wish with everything in me that things had been different. I have missed you.

Suddenly, Terry's monitor switched on and displayed a live feed message that the search and allocation program he'd set eighteen hours earlier had finally completed. The results were being compiled. He gratefully set his pen aside and turned his full attention to the screen. The status bar showing the compilation filled out with blinding speed. Now that the enormous signal processors the super computer had been designed around were sitting idle, their incredible weight could be put behind any task that an administrator with proper access wished.

Terry had been asking himself for three days who had the power, the position, and the opportunity to pull off such a massive and well-coordinated attack, and he couldn't wrap his head around it. He needed more information, but he didn't even know where to start looking, so he asked the computer to do the looking for him. He would sift through the results. A summary file opened, and Terry read through it slowly and carefully. On the third line of the summary, in bold letters, was a line entry from the President's personal itinerary, "Give surprise address to UN Security Council 8/13/10 at 0700." 

He read the date three different times to make sure he wasn't imagining it. The bomb that had flattened most of New York had detonated at five thousand meters altitude just before 0600 on the thirteenth. Terry had done a computer analysis of the limited images the system had captured before the Sat Net had been taken out, and it appeared that shortly after the missile had launched, a civilian aircraft had detonated a device while on approach to Newark Liberty International Airport. The altitude of the blast and its proximity to the skyline of Lower Manhattan had resulted in a massive damage area and had flattened most of the buildings along the East River and in the surrounding area.

Fires had raged through the city for two days creating thermal spots visible in hacked foreign weather and surveillance satellites that Terry could access and decrypt. The angles of the images made any detailed information impossible to gather, but the infrared inferno that had raged in the skies above the city had spoken volumes. Terry guessed thirty percent would have survived, and even that was probably overly generous.

In all likelihood, the President of the United States had been dead for the better part of a week.

Terry tasted bile in the back of his throat and had to swallow twice to get past it. He felt a sudden electric rush pass through his body, and the fine white hairs along his arms stood on end. A question he hadn't known was gnawing at the back of his mind had finally been answered, and he wished it hadn’t. Already his thoughts were spinning faster than he could control or follow. His mind tried to track several different directions at once, and all he could interpret from the result was confused chaos.

The President was dead. Everything seemed to circle back to that one stark fact, and Terry couldn’t force his mind to process past it. Terry shook himself out of his momentary fog and scrolled down to the final item in the report. A list of names for domestic officials and politicians with the power, position, and potential motive to orchestrate or participate in this coupe had been compiled from the results of the massive data search. There were seventeen names on the list in alphabetical order, but it was a name nearly halfway down the list that caught and held Terry’s attention…Paul Jefferson, Chief Administrator of FEMA.

Since communications and satellites had been knocked out, Jefferson was the only official Terry had been able to establish contact with in spite of repeated efforts to reach others at their own secured locations. There were hardened communications systems that ran on optical transmission relays buried deep underground that should have been up and running even in the wake of a massive EMP attack, but they were all silent. Either the people who were supposed to fall back to those locations had never made it, or they had chosen not to respond to Terry’s requests for confirmation of COG-Con 0 and the establishment of DHS and FEMA control over enforcement and policing of the nation’s communities. None of that meant that Jefferson was behind the attack, but it certainly made Terry suspicious of him, especially now that he had uncovered some of the information the FEMA chief had been withholding.

Terry tapped a few commands into his computer and cut the list of names out of the summary and the full report. He stored the list in a triple-password protected file and then sent the rest of the summary and report over the internal optical network to the printers. He would put a team of junior analysts to work deconstructing the data and looking for patterns and connections that might lead them to the players, if not the ones calling the plays. With any luck, the analysts would be able to weed out some of the seventeen names and give Terry a narrower list of potential perpetrators. Terry typed up a quick and purposefully vague work order and sent it through to the manager of the statistics and analytics department with instructions to see him personally for further details.

Even though he hated the cloak and dagger hassle, Terry’s decades as a counter intelligence officer had taught him the value of face to face meetings to pass along sensitive material. All the better if you could control where such a meeting took place and arrange recording measures ahead of time. That was one reason Terry had rigged his office with nearly two dozen microphones and micro-cameras when he finalized the design of the filing safes, bookcases, and cabinets that had been built into the walls. He'd even designed the desk itself to serve as a kind of recording studio and control station with hidden buttons to individually control some of the different devices. Everything recorded in his office was dumped into four different digital vaults simultaneously, including a wallet sized mass storage device that was attached to his desktop system—a sort of digital bug-out bag.

After taking a deep breath, Terry steadied himself and began mentally composing what he'd say to the Stats Manager and how much he would leave in the shady gray area of the unanswered question. As he thought, he buzzed his assistant and asked for maintenance to come and remove the trash can and replace it. He was so lost in thought that it took him by surprise when, a few moments later, his assistant buzzed in and informed him one of the custodial staff was there to do just that. Terry blinked and looked down at the birth certificate staring up at him. He would take the chance. He picked up the paper, folded it tightly, and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket. He hung the jacket on the back of his chair just before buzzing the custodian through the door.

Terry left his pistol on the desk in plain sight and easy reach as the tall, gaunt man shuffled over to the trash can and replaced it with a twin, complete with a fresh liner. While the programmers that worked at this facility were more than justified to consider their employment a testament to their considerable skills, the maintenance staff was more likely to see this remote assignment as a sort of involuntary servitude. In reality, not many people who applied for the maintenance department could pass the necessary security clearances to get a job at a facility such as this one. That meant that the longer certain personnel served at less secure facilities, the more likely they were to be trusted with such a sensitive posting without the official background checks being performed. It was also more likely they were to have done something for which they assumed they were being punished. The end result was a maintenance and custodial staff that was, at times, more than a little surly and suspicious of the people running the facility.

At the door the custodian paused and turned back to Terry. He shifted his weight from foot to foot for a moment before speaking. "I just wanted you to know, I'm praying for you," the man said hesitantly. "I know that what you've got weighing on you is more than I could imagine, and you seem like a good man. For what it's worth, I'm praying for you."

Terry opened his mouth to reply, but the custodian waived his hands and shook his head.

"No," he said firmly, "I don't want to know none of what it is you're neck deep in, with all due respect. You can keep that and I'll thank you to do so. I just wanted you to know, is all."

The man took a clip board from his cart outside the door and put a check mark on it. Terry saw his marker and frowned. "Do I need to sign that for you?"

The custodian shook his head. "No, sir, this ain't nothing for you. I have to track my job hours and completion times, and I forget if I don't write 'em down right off. That's all." 

The man put the top back on his red permanent marker with a click that seemed to echo, and Terry forced a smile. The man nodded again, then closed the door behind him on the way out of the office. Terry sat for a long time and stared at the door. The image of the date had been written across the copy of his daughters' birth certificates in red marker. He thought about the two lists of names he'd generated and what all of it could possibly mean when tied together.

Someone, likely inside the government, had flipped a switch on the levers of power. And it had been orchestrated and executed beautifully. Terry could see it now, but he couldn't quite connect all of the dots to complete the full picture of the coupe. The list of seventeen names was too long to focus on for now. He had to trim that down.

So, for the moment, he repeated a much shorter list of four names over and over in his head.