A strange-looking vehicle, something like an ill-considered hybrid between an RV and a highly hardened off-road vehicle, made its way through the winding mountain roads of northern West Virginia. From a distance, the vehicle looked like some kind of transformer vehicle created by Hollywood for a blockbuster summer movie. It was chaperoned by a contingent of black, military looking vehicles, Humvees, APCs, and SUVs. The lead vehicle was a large and heavily armored truck with what looked like a cattle mover or snowplow attached to the front of it. When necessary, this lead truck would push stranded and inoperative vehicles off the road.
“The warhead would have been delivered by a very small rocket,” the driver of the hardened RV said. “The amount of energy used to propel the craft containing the warhead would have been insignificant because the launch platform, the capsule, was brushing the stratosphere, and that means that it almost certainly did not trigger any warnings from NORAD or any of the other early warning systems. It was not a ground based launch. It wasn’t even a high-altitude launch from a Russian bomber…I mean most bombers have a service ceiling of around 50,000 feet, and we’re talking close to 130,000 feet here. And it wasn’t one of these mostly theoretical weapons that might be deployed from a high earth orbit satellite. No. No, this capsule was in the middle area, where no one was looking for it. It was perfect.”
The passenger of the RV stared forward out of the windscreen and nodded his head, but he didn’t interrupt with the questions that filled his mind as the driver spoke. The driver wasn’t finished talking, so the passenger just nodded his head as the man continued.
“The EMP probably will not have knocked out absolutely everything, and it was most likely ‘local’ to maybe a little more than a third of the U.S. It was just a first blow, opening the door for further strikes that will finish the job throughout the rest of the country. I am speculating, of course, but from our figures and the readings we gathered back at the base, I’d say the warhead was detonated high over eastern Ohio. We’d be totally guessing if we tried to declare a yield, but I’d say that more than 95% of the electronics, computer, and technological infrastructure on the eastern seaboard — from Maine to most of Florida, and from the Atlantic to as far as Nebraska, will have been fried. There are probably fires burning out of control in every major city in that area, and the fires will get worse as time goes on because there’ll be no water to dowse them. The trucks that put out fires won’t work, and the communications that control emergency response is now gone, and probably forever. The damage done will make the work of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow look like child’s play.
“The few vehicles that are operating, those that are older and therefore not susceptible to EMP, along with those that were accidentally or purposefully shielded—like these vehicles for example—will stop operating when they’re either unable to move about due to the blockages and mayhem on the roads, or as soon as they run out of stored fuel.” The driver looked over at the passenger and nodded his head, then leaned forward and looked upward through the windshield. “I reckon almost 3,000 planes have crashed, if that gives you any inkling of what’s happened so far today.” He looked back down at the dashboard and then at his watch. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and it all happened in a moment. In a split second of time.”
The passenger looked out at the country road, and, as he did, the old John Denver song about a country road in West Virginia came over the sound system in the RV. His mind flashed to a time not that long ago. Denver had died in the crash of a single person experimental aircraft. Sometimes the irony—or maybe it was the poetic symmetry—is particularly rich.
The man in the passenger seat thought of all those planes falling out of the sky, and realized that none of them were natural. He looked towards the driver, just as the man ended his dissertation on the EMP weapon that had just detonated over the eastern United States. All the while, the voice of John Denver sang on.
The passenger strummed his fingers on the armrest and thought about all those billions of miles of wire that had been strung across the landscape and buried under ground, and thought about how humankind had now hung itself with its own rope. Time had proven, as it inevitably must, that man had strayed too far from the dirt, which is his natural home. Like Icarus, he’d flown too close to the sun, and now he’d had his wings clipped. The forces of spiritual physics, and gravity, and inertia were likely to bring everything back to earth eventually, and it looked like that homecoming was now in the offing. John Denver was singing that he should have been home yesterday.
“So… how did you know? I mean, how did you absolutely know without a doubt that the EMP would actually be deployed, and when it would happen?”
The driver looked over to the passenger and smiled beneath his thick mustache, and his eyes betrayed just the hint of a twinkle that accompanied the smile. “Did your grandmother ever just know it was going to rain? And when she told you to come in before the rain started, did you know to listen to her?”
CHAPTER 17
Tuesday — Afternoon
Vladimir and his team quickly returned to the gymnasium after it happened, interrupting their violent, but fruitless search of Warwick. Vladimir was the first to know something was wrong by picking up on a series of static crackles in the street as they were doing their door-to-door searches. He didn’t know what had happened, but for once the brutish fellow showed instincts that were adorned with something other than mindless force. He’d already sent a messenger to Mikail to tell him that his wild-goose-chase was going poorly and to ask for any further instructions, and now, sensing that something important had happened, he decided that he’d better return to the gymnasium himself in order to see what the power surge had been about.
He was flush from the thrill of the search, energized by the violent power he’d held in his hand, but frustrated that he’d not yet found his target. If truth be told, just at that moment, he was also a bit worried that his power—that one thing he craved so much—would be questioned because of his failure to locate Vasily and the rumored escape route out of town.
As he stepped inside the gymnasium, the doors creaked on their hinges, and he noticed the room had been darkened. He looked down on the swath of light thrown across the hardwood floors. He watched as his shadow preceded him into the space. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and he grimaced as he looked up at the blank round bulbs in the ceiling above his head.
Mikail and his guards were congregated in the center of the gym as Vladimir approached and began to share his report. Mikail and his people, who were discussing where next to search for Vasily, paused as Vladimir brought them up to speed on his failed hunt.
The group of men stood and talked around a table laden with a rudimentary mockup of Warwick, tracing with their fingers several possible alternatives. There was a quiet, scientific exactitude to their conversation, and just as they were beginning to argue about whether two crossing streets had been properly searched, and just as Vladimir was trying to assure them that they had, the doors to the gym burst open and events accelerated.
Thinking that he had more than half of his twenty-four hours left, and planning to use all of them before surrendering, Mikail was quite surprised when the Spetznaz leadership, along with the coalition spokesman, rushed into the gym and arrested everyone among the revolutionary leadership on the spot. “Gentlemen, surrender your arms,” said Yuri Belov, newly elected spokesman for the townspeople. In Russian, the words sounded like an overly harsh insult.