Peter showed them the most basic rudiments of orienteering and shared some of his knowledge of tracking and woodland survival, and during most of this time he had maintained an attitude of patient instruction. But now Peter was no longer patient. He was growing angry and resentful at being so helpless to assist Cole. On this Friday morning, he seethed in silence.
The night before, after they finished their training and practice, Peter risked pulling the second radio from the ammo can in order to see if they could receive some information from the outside world.
They put the batteries in the radio, and for a long time they were unable to find any stations at all that were broadcasting. As the night wore on, and as Cole still did not appear in the shed, the buzzing of nothingness coming through the radio only amplified their feelings of sadness and fear.
Just before midnight, as Peter was about to give up on the radio altogether, he brushed past a very weak broadcast on the shortwave band. It was nothing more at first than a weak modulation as he swept across the dial, but as he tuned it finer, he got a slight signal, and as they leaned in and listened closer, they made out a man’s voice in amongst the electronic hum and static. They all sat up with excitement as they heard the voice speaking through the atmospheric interference.
The voice said that it was broadcasting from Montana. They could barely make it out, but the male voice relayed information that he said was derived from Ham radio reports from around the country and the world. The reports, the voice said, were spotty. Only radio operators from as yet unaffected areas, or those who had thought to shield their equipment, were still broadcasting.
Anger could be detected in the solitary voice, as the man reported that before and after the EMP attack, U.S. military units had moved unilaterally and without provocation against “innocent” militia and patriot groups. The voice speculated that the whole worldwide collapse had the distinct feel of a concerted and well-developed plan. “I am certain,” the voice said, “that this catastrophe could not have proceeded without the approval and planning of a central elite somewhere. It was too organized, over too great a distance, involving too many, to be simply the actions of a rogue few.”
Ham radio broadcasters reported that, subsequent to the first EMP over the east coast, several more high-altitude nuclear devices were detonated over the Western United States. America, the voice said, had retaliated against Russia, China, and North Korea with EMP strikes, but there had yet to be any reported low-level nuclear explosions, in the U.S. or anywhere else. So far, and for some reason, it seemed that the exchange had remained limited—directed at electrical and technological infrastructure. “It seems that governments have decided to cut off the head of the beast first,” the voice said. “Who knows how long that will last? You know… before they go to work on the body.”
As the voice on the radio faded and eventually the signal was lost, Lang remembered what Volkhov had said to him. He’d predicted that actual physically destructive nuke detonations over cities wouldn’t happen for two weeks.
Two weeks, the old man had said. That’s how long you’ll have. Then the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key-codes and fail-safes and guarantees, it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet on that. They want war, and there will be war.
That had been the night before. It had seemed a happy, if disconcerting, diversion as they waited for Cole to return from his trip to the tunnel. The news was not “happy,” but the fact that there was news was a good happenstance.
Now, early on this Friday morning, Peter stared angrily outwards from the door of the metal shed, and wondered how much longer they could wait. He was realistic. He understood that Cole had probably run into trouble with someone from the village. Perhaps he’d been seen by a guard at the fence line and been captured for interrogation. Whatever the case, Peter had told Cole that they would have to leave on Friday morning, with or without him, and Cole had agreed to that as a factor in his decision-making.
Peter cursed himself for letting Cole return in the first place, realizing that the younger man had probably traded his life for his need to see clearly. If youth could but see in the first place, Peter thought, but curses aside, he knew he could only wait a minute or two longer before they would have to abandon Cole and head off on their own.
At first, it sounded like a growl rising up from the throat, tiny and imperceptible, but with a slight menace even in its faintest whispering. The low hum magnified and grew louder and louder still, until it became obvious that something was coming and was nearby, and their initial reaction was to find somewhere to hide inside the shed. Lang, Natasha, and Peter heard the growl like one hears a hostile dog. The sound was muted, but angry with promise. They approached cautiously to see whether the source was aiming for them. They all stepped forward to the edge of the shed’s door, and there, in the space of the light that streamed in through the door, they saw the drones buzz by in formation, five of them flying low and near the ground, seemingly cognizant, as if guided by some inner intelligence. They noticed the drones’ silent shadows trailing along on the ground, rising up over the mountain, flitting through the trees, along the brush that peaked its head out of the snow, along the snow itself, as the shadows climbed, like the drones that cast them, up to the top of the mountain in the distance, and then disappeared in the horizon and the blue of the sky.
They were headed, it seemed, towards Warwick.
Friday — Night
On a low rise, just outside of Mt. Vernon, Virginia, an odd looking RV, flanked by black militarized vehicles, sat parked with the windshield pointed towards the northeast. It was fully dark and there was no moon to be seen, and the area in view of the RV, usually twinkling brightly with city lights and traffic, was mostly darkened. Mostly. Fires glowed all around the D.C. metropolitan area, and the white and red armies of vehicle lights that usually spread out like ribbons along the highways and byways of the darkened urban area did not march up and down as they had for more than a century.
There was only one area that was lit up as if nothing world-changing had happened, and it was to this area of illumination that the driver of the RV, a man named Clive Darling, pointed as he turned off the radio and flipped a switch on the dash that killed the array of blue and red and orange lights coming from the console. The darkness of the night invaded the RV and gave emphasis to the little lighted city in the distance.
“Andrews Air Force Base,” Clive said in his Savannah drawl. Something in the way he said it made the words sound like the most important thing that anyone had ever spoken.
The two men seated in the RV were surrounded by what amounted to a Faraday cage. The wire box that encompassed the driver and passenger area of the RV was grounded to the frame and, using proprietary wiring and chips and breakers, the RV was virtually completely shielded from any possible electromagnetic pulse.
In the distance, as the two men looked out over the little lighted island in the inky sea of darkness, an aircraft with blinking lights pushed back from a hanger and was being taxied to one end of the runway by a large tow truck with lights burning so brightly that it looked like a spotlight falling down from the sky.