Under a Tell-Tale Sky: Disruption - Book 1 (13 page)

Hunnicutt sighed and settled back in his chair, then looked back and forth between Hughes and Wright. “Even presuming we identify useful resources, what you’re suggesting is looting, the prevention of which is one of our primary missions. The contents of those containers doesn’t belong to us, and I have no authority to appropriate private property. My orders are to prevent looting with any force necessary.”

The room fell silent for a long moment until Dan Gowan spoke from Hughes’ right.

“How’s that ‘looting prevention’ thing working out for you?”

Hunnicutt glared at the chief engineer and was about to reply when Hughes cut him off.

“Look, Major,” Hughes said. “I understand your position, but when did you last receive any orders you have even a remote chance of successfully executing?”

Hunnicutt shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I haven’t gotten any orders that made sense since this whole fiasco started”—his face hardened—”but that doesn’t mean we should quit trying to execute our—”

“
Pecos Trader
,
Pecos Trader
, this is Tex. Do you copy?” squawked Georgia Howell’s radio.

“We copy, Tex,” Georgia said into her own unit. “Find anything?”

“The mother lode,” came the reply, “but you really need to see this for yourself. I’m on the way back, be there in ten. Tex out.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, the group watched impatiently while Georgia Howell leafed quickly through a thick stack of paper brought in by Shyla Texeira, the third mate. Tex retreated to the corner and leaned against the bulkhead, her arms crossed as she waited and watched.

“Dammit, Mate,” Hughes said, when Howell was about a third of the way through the thick stack, “what’s the deal?”

“Oh, sorry,” said Howell, looking up. “There’s tons of stuff here. I’m only scanning for food, but so far I’d guess at least a hundred containers, maybe more. Canned seafood of all sorts, pine nuts, water chestnuts and other Asian veggies … it’s just … a lot,” she finished, unable to articulate the sheer magnitude of their discovery.

Hughes looked at Hunnicutt. “Well, Major, there’s obviously food here. What now?”

Hunnicutt nodded. “Under those circumstances, I suppose it does make sense to secure this area as our new base of operations. We’ll use what we need to sustain ourselves and distribute food to the civilian population until FEMA can get its act together and the power is restored—”

“The power’s not coming back, at least not for a long time. Maybe never.”

Everyone turned to where Levi sat, looking nervous at the sudden attention.

“And how do you figure that?” the major asked, then looked back and forth between Levi and Hughes. “And who the hell are you, exactly? I can understand the role of everyone else here, but I can’t quite figure out what qualifies you to be in this meeting.”

Levi opened his mouth to respond, but Hughes beat him to it.

“Mr. Jenkins is a trusted member of my crew,” Hughes said. “And of all the people here, he’s the only one who’s been consistently right about what to expect since this whole mess began.” He paused. “So to answer your question, Major, he’s likely the only guy in this room with a clue, so my advice is to listen to him. Go ahead, Levi.”

Levi hesitated, looking back and forth between Hughes and Hunnicutt. He took a deep breath and started to speak.

“I’m no expert,” he said, “but I’ve been reading about this stuff a long time. Solar storms are sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections, or CMEs for short, which generate power spikes in the electrical distribution grid. In this case, we’ve been hit by multiple CMEs. The way I understand it, the long transmission lines act like antennas to collect power, and it pretty much burns out anything connected to them, specifically the big transformers. Those transformers are big and expensive, and there are minimal spares. If the solar storm smoked even ten or twenty percent of those big transformers, power could be down for months or even years.

“So ask yourself, where are they going to get those spares if there’s no power to the plants that make them? And supposing they did miraculously get spares, who’s going to install them? It’s not like a hurricane, where linemen from Maine or Nebraska or Washington State roll in to help out. This disaster is everywhere, and even supposing there was enough fuel in the right places to get repair crews on the road, all those linemen are trying to make sure their own families don’t starve. No one is going to voluntarily leave their family in danger or their own community in the dark to go help restore power somewhere else.”

Levi shook his head again. “It took a century for electrical distribution to reach the stage it’s at now, or was a week ago anyway, and right now, we’re back to 1900. I think the power grid’s down for the count, and the quicker everyone accepts that, the better off they’ll be. Waiting for the lights to come on is right up there with waiting for Santa Claus, in my opinion.”

The room fell silent.

“That’s a pretty grim assessment,” Hunnicutt said at last, “and with all due respect, I’m not particularly inclined to base my actions on the theory of some random seaman. But supposing for the sake of argument you’re correct, what do you propose?”

Levi shrugged. “We all saw those transformers exploding like a string of firecrackers, and we all saw the Northern Lights, so believe what you want, Major,” he said. “And I’m not proposing anything, because all this is way above my pay grade. I’m going to take care of me and mine, and that’s all I can really do. I just want y’all to go into things with your eyes open, that’s all.”

Mike Butler spoke for the first time, nodding at Levi, “I just met most of the people in this room an hour ago, Major, but for my money, this guy makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard since this whole mess started. The way I look at it, we’ve got nothing to lose by assuming he’s right and acting accordingly, as in ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best.’ And speaking for the Coast Guard, we don’t have enough people to maintain a presence down at Oak Island and one here to guard what is apparently our only source of supply, so I’m moving my people and their dependents up here and forting up somehow, whatever you decide to do. There’s more than enough here to last us, all of us, for the foreseeable future, no matter what happens.”

“Don’t think all these goodies y’all found are going to last forever,” Levi interrupted, “not the fuel in this ship and the terminal tanks, or the food in the containers. All of it has a shelf life.”

“He’s right about the fuel at least,” Dan Gowan added. “This gas and diesel will last a year or two without stabilizer before it starts degrading, and there isn’t any way you’re going to come up with enough additive to stabilize it all. It will be useless in three years at the outside.” He shrugged. “I don’t know about the canned food, but I doubt it would last much longer.”

“I can’t speak for anyone else,” Georgia Howell said, “but I’m not particularly thrilled about eating anything processed in China anyway, even if it was canned last week.”

Laughter rippled through the group, easing the tension somewhat.

“All right,” Hunnicutt said. “I’m not sold on this, but it does seem to be the only sensible plan at the moment.” He turned to the lieutenant beside him. “Lieutenant Arnold, set up a guard rotation for the gates both here at the oil terminal and also for the container terminal next door. One Humvee with a fifty caliber and two troops at each gate at all times. Knock a hole in the fence between the two terminals and keep two extra men and one of the civilian vehicles as a reserve force to support either location or respond to threats elsewhere on the perimeter. There are no apparent threats for the moment, so we’ll forgo full perimeter patrols until we get everyone inside and some sort of routine established. Also set up a schedule to ferry our troops and civilians here. I’d like everyone inside and things buttoned up by”—he looked at his wristwatch—”twenty-two hundred.”

Arnold nodded. “Yes, sir, but that’s pretty quick. There’ll be some bitching from the civilians.”

“Let ‘em bitch all they want, but make sure they understand we’re moving, and if they want to move with us and be protected during the move, they better be ready. If not, they get left behind and make their way here the best they can.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Arnold said, and Hunnicutt turned to Sergeant Wright. “Sergeant, since this was all your idea, I suggest you start looking at the office buildings in both terminals and figure out how we’re going to turn them into accommodations.” He looked over at Mike Butler. “And since we’re sharing space with the Coast Guard, I suspect you need to coordinate with Chief Butler here.”

“Yes, sir,” Wright said, “about that. It’s going to be pretty tight. However, there’s that RV dealership down Carolina Beach Boulevard. I bet there are a hundred RVs and trailers just sitting there, and a lot of them even have their own generators. Since fuel’s no longer a problem, I think they could be real useful.”

Hunnicutt glared at him momentarily and then sighed.

“What the hell. I guess if we’re going to be looters, we may as well be thorough,” Hunnicutt said. “Take what you need from wherever you find it, under one iron-clad condition. Under no circumstances are you to take anything occupied or actively claimed by civilians, even if you suspect they may have acquired it by less than legal means. We’re not in the confiscation business. All those poor bastards out there are having it hard enough without us adding to it. Are we clear on that?”

“Crystal, sir,” Wright said.

“There is one more thing we need to discuss,” Mike Butler interjected. “We haven’t talked about water. We’ve still got water at Oak Island, but I suspect that’s only because there’s a pretty big water tower for a fairly small population. However, we checked the buildings in the terminal and it looks like everything is drained here in Wilmington. I suppose we can boil and filter river water if we have to, but it will take some time to jury-rig some means of filtering and sterilizing water on a sizable scale.” He looked at Hunnicutt. “Y’all have any water to spare?”

Hunnicutt looked at Wright, who shook his head. “A week or ten days drinking water for our own group. I don’t know—”

“I think we can help you out there,” Hughes said, nodding toward Dan Gowan. “How about it, Chief? Can we spot our friends here some water?”

“Sure,” Gowan said. “We came in almost full, and I’ll be able to make some more on the way down to Texas. I could probably let you have two hundred tons with no problem.”

“Ahh … how much is that in gallons?” Wright asked.

“A bit more than fifty thousand,” Gowan said, “though I don’t know where you’re going to put it all.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Wright said. “You pump it and we’ll find a place to put it.”

Chapter Nine

M/V
Pecos Trader

Main Deck

Wilmington Container Terminal

Day 10, 4:00 p.m.

Gowan leaned his elbows on the ship’s rail and squirted tobacco juice into the void between the ship’s side and the dock.

“Damned if he didn’t do it,” Gowan said, watching a mixed group of North Carolina National Guardsmen and US Coast Guardsmen wrestle a heavy hose into an aboveground swimming pool erected on the dock near the stern of
Pecos Trader
. Two identical filled swimming pools rested in line with the pool currently filling, covers in place to protect the precious drinking water. Two Coasties were adding a fourth pool to the line, erecting it rapidly with a practiced ease gained from assembly of the first units.

“Sergeant Wright is nothing if not resourceful,” Hughes said. “Will he be able to take the whole two hundred tons?”

“He found a whole damned container full of those pools,” Gowan said, “and he wants to erect two more. That’ll give him capacity for almost two hundred and fifty tons, and I’ve a mind to give him the extra if you have no objection, Cap? I can distill almost that much on our southbound passage, and these guys are going to have their plate pretty full without having to immediately solve the water problem. Besides, it’s not like we’re not making out on the deal.”

Hughes nodded and looked down the deck where the bosun was sitting in the cab of the hose-handling crane, watching Georgia Howell at the ship’s side and waiting for her hand signals to lift a load aboard. On the dock below the dangling crane hook, two sailors were rigging a twenty-foot container for lifting. Other partially filled twenty footers stood open on the dock nearby, across from several open and densely packed forty-foot containers. Chief Cook Jake Kadowski, aka ‘Polak,’ scurried between them all, directing sailors from the deck and steward’s departments in transferring stores from the forty-footers and stuffing the twenty footers with the most useful provisions.

They’d found the empty twenty-foot containers in the terminal, a fortunate find since they could be handled with the limited capacity and reach of the ship’s hose-handling crane. Hughes was hoping to get six or even eight of the smaller containers aboard. Far more food than they could conceivably use, but in the new world in which they found themselves, something told him there was no such thing as too much food.

“That was good thinking on shifting over to this dock, by the way,” Gowan said. “We had the main engine all set to go, but I’m glad we didn’t need it.”

Hughes grinned. “The first law of wing-walking. Never let go of one handhold until you have a firm grasp on another.”

When they’d decided to move upstream the short distance to the container terminal, the Coasties helped them out by running a mooring line over to the container dock with one of their patrol boats, and a long line of National Guardsmen had taken the end and heaved the massive rope up on the dock and put the eye on one of the mooring bits. Hughes had pulled the ship forward by heaving in on the line with the ship’s mooring winch, keeping the bow off the container dock during the approach by using his bow thruster. He’d made the move ‘dead ship’ without using the ship’s main engine.

“And speaking of shifting,” Gowan said, “when do you think we’ll get out of here?”

“Tomorrow maybe, the day after at the outside,” Hughes said. “Later than I wanted, but worth the delay, considering how much better off we’ll be when we leave.”

Hughes looked out over the bustling terminal, the National Guardsmen had moved in camping trailers and RVs parked in neat rows, and elsewhere erected large tents to serve as field kitchens and a mess tent. Several container transporters worked feverishly, rearranging those containers identified as having food to where they were all at ground level and accessible.

“It’s amazing how much has been accomplished in twenty-four hours,” Hughes said.

“Thanks to Tex for a lot of that,” Gowan said, nodding down to the dock where the slender third mate held a clipboard and was now conferring with the chief cook. “Bringing in the terminal guys was frigging brilliant.”

“That it was,” Hughes said, smiling at the memory of Tex speaking up just before yesterday’s meeting broke up, pointing out she’d found the contact list with the names and addresses of terminal personnel when she was searching for the cargo manifests, and that all those terminal employees were likely ‘scared shitless’ just like everyone else. Everyone had shrugged, until she suggested those with homes within easy reach of Major Hunnicutt’s Humvees would likely be amenable to joining the group with their families, trading food and shelter for their knowledge of, you know, how all this stuff actually worked. Everyone jumped at the idea, and she’d further pointed out there was probably a similar list in the offices of the product terminal. A quick search proved her correct.

So Major Hunnicutt had ‘re-tasked some assets,’ and by the following morning the little group of Coasties, National Guardsmen, and assorted civilians was joined by nine container terminal employees and two product terminal employees, with their families, five dogs, three cats, and a goldfish. Major Hunnicutt had a rather loud discussion with Sergeant Wright concerning the arrival of the pets, whereupon Sergeant Wright suggested perhaps the major might like to explain to the various children why their pets were being abandoned. The major dropped the subject. The point soon became moot in any event, as before the day was out, one of the cats ate the goldfish, then ran off along with both the other cats, and everyone liked the dogs.

“How about Levi?” Gowan asked. “You think he’s going to stay with these folks? I’m sure they could use him.”

Hughes looked across the deck where Levi and his father-in-law, Anthony, stood examining their aluminum boat.

He shrugged. “I know Chief Butler and Sergeant Wright are trying to talk him into bringing his family in, though I think Major Hunnicutt’s not a big Levi fan just yet. However, Levi’s gonna do what he thinks is best for him and his family, and you can’t blame him.”

***

“A hundred things can happen,” Anthony McCoy said, “and ninety-nine of them are bad. I’m for keeping our distance.”

Levi nodded. “I feel the same, but what if these folks do make a go of it? We wouldn’t be so isolated and Celia and Jo and the kids would be part of a community. There’s something to be said for that.” He paused. “And besides, we don’t have to worry about being the only black folks in the group. Between the Coasties and the National Guard and their families, it looks like almost a third of the group is black.”

“I’ll grant you it’s tempting,” Anthony said, “and it looks like food won’t be a problem for a while anyway, but they’re not exactly low profile, and guns or not, I reckon someone, or a lot of someones, is gonna take a shot at taking what they have. Our whole idea was to be invisible, and they’re just the opposite.”

“I know, I know,” Levi said, then fell silent.

“All right, boy, what’s eatin’ you? Seems like this is bothering you way more than it should.”

“It’s just there are a lot of things they haven’t considered,” Levi said. “I mean, they just can’t go handing out food without a plan. Yes, they need to help folks because a lot of stuff is likely to go bad before they can eat it anyway, but if they set up a feeding station, it needs to be some distance away or else they’ll have a huge refugee camp right on their doorstep. And all those folks attracted by the food are going to be a sanitation nightmare, completely aside from the fact the folks here in the terminal haven’t even considered the sanitation issue for their OWN group. And what about water?
Pecos Trader
probably left them enough for three months, but by then, they need to have some sort—”

“And you think you’re gonna solve all the problems for them, huh?” Anthony asked. “All these folks looking up to the great Levi after you been hearing folks giggle up their sleeves about your ‘prepper ways’ all this time. Think maybe there might be a little bit of ego involved here, Levi?”

Levi bristled and started to reply; then he relaxed and nodded. “Yeah, maybe a little.”

“Understandable,” Anthony said, “but you can’t let that get in the way of taking care of the family.”

“I won’t, but I do think I could help these people.”

“I think you could too,” Anthony said, “but how about this. We help them on a ‘commuter’ basis. We can stay in our hidey-hole but keep in touch with them on a regular basis by radio. If we use the Brunswick, we can get here fairly quickly and avoid passing through Wilmington. When we learn all the cutoffs and shortcuts, I think it might be not much more than an hour’s run with the outboard. You come down here and help them out a couple of days a week, and maybe get paid in food. When hunting’s good, we can also bring them in deer and pigs to trade. If everything seems to be safe, we can bring the family in maybe once every couple of weeks, just like farm families went to town in the old days. Difference is, we don’t let NOBODY know where our home place is.

“In time,” Anthony continued, “we may even decide it’s safe enough to move into the group, but we ALWAYS keep our bug-out place stocked and ready, so we can take off if need be. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Levi said.