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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

In the blackness, Charli put her hand on her head.
Is this really happening?
“What did you say, Jake? Did you call him a bozo? Where are you?”

“I didn’t say it. I just mouthed it to myself. He must have read my lips.” Jake sounded dejected. Charli pictured him sitting with his head in his hands.

Charli spoke through clenched teeth. “Christ. What the hell is wrong with you? You’ve always got to speak your mind don’t you? ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ they said. ‘He speaks his mind,’ they said. I should have told them that if you hadn’t grown up enough to control your mouth, that we didn’t want you on the team. You’re pathetic. I knew this was going to happen. The shrinks warned us.”

Hallstrom said, “There is something wrong with you, Jake. If this is what I think it is, you’ve killed an awful lot of people. Charli, I’m going up to the roof.”

Hallstrom and Charli felt their way out of the windowless room, climbed the stairs, and looked out the nearest window. The cars on Executive Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue were not moving.

Up on the roof they found McGraw looking out across the city. Hallstrom and Charli walked over to McGraw, who was watching black smoke rise a mile away. A secret service agent put his head into the stairway and yelled, “POTUS is on the roof,” then went over to stand with the President and the other agents protecting him.

Hallstrom asked, “Electro-magnetic pulse?”

McGraw nodded.

“Talk to me.”

McGraw looked south, where smoke rose from the airport. “It may not have been an EMP, but it sure looks like one. Or worse. Although we’d need to set off a nuclear explosion above the atmosphere to get this effect, Cronkite may have had some other way of doing it. I suspect that he hit that button, and every electronic or electrically powered device got fried.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, showed Hallstrom that it was dead and tossed it off the roof.

“Where?” Charli asked. “What areas would be affected?”

“Well, that’s part of the problem.” McGraw put his hands on the roof’s parapet and leaned forward. “It could be just Washington, DC, or it could be the entire world. This disaster could be worse than the die-off, and it’s going to be a lot messier. People in planes are already dead, many patients in hospitals and nursing homes soon will be. In some ways, we are back in the stone age. Worse, because cave men were able to live without refrigerators and cell phones.”

Jake appeared at the door to the roof. He came over to them and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I realize I screwed up. But there’s something we should do. If the whole world isn’t blacked out, someone will send a plane to us. They will send it to Reagan airport, since that’s the closest. So a plane could be coming in any minute. We should set up burning oil barrels along the runways.” He turned, headed back to the door, and gave little wave.

* * *

Alex watched the Meet the Press broadcast with his brother and Major General Pace Stetson. They sat in Stetson’s office at Edwards Air Force Base in California eating microwave popcorn. The sixty-two-year-old general kept his head shaved and didn’t carry a spare ounce of fat, but his efforts were in vain. He looked more like a sensitive theater critic than a kick-ass military man.

The general had taken the wisecracking twins under his wing, probably because they reminded him of his childhood with his own twin brother, now gone. His office was all business and all olive green.

When Cronkite pushed the button, Hallstrom and Corby blipped out of existence while the set, with Cronkite at the table, remained.

Cronkite was red in the face and breathing hard. He turned to the camera and said “Well, it looks like the world’s number one problem-solver is having a problem that he’s going to need to solve. But for now, this is Sir Cronkite saying, ‘If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Freakin’ Press.’”

Alex stood up. “Looks like trouble in River City.” This was life-and-death, but he couldn’t help enjoying the excitement.
Guess I’m going to Hell when I die.

The general’s communications console came to life. “General, we’re seeing widespread power outages. Please stand by.”

Stetson hastily swallowed the popcorn he was chewing and barked into the intercom. “Get me Colonel Woodford.”

Davin Woodford, the base’s chief technical officer, came on the line, on speakerphone.

“Is it just power or all electronics?” Stetson asked.

“The GPS satellites are out, and we have no contact with aircraft east of California.”

“Shit! Our planes are okay?” Stetson looked out the window.

“The ones over California or the ocean, yes. The others, probably not.”

“Colonel, do you think Cronkite hit us with an EMP?”

“Something very much like it, yes, sir,” said Woodford, “but there are some things I wouldn’t expect.”

“Such as?”

“First, the GPS satellites should be immune to a conventional EMP. They are 12,000 miles above the Earth.”

“Right. Second?” Stetson rubbed his hand over his bald head.

“Many of our planes and installations have been hardened against an EMP strike, but they seem to be out of commission anyway.”

“What about the range of the problem?” General Stetson typed on his computer while talking.

Martin leaned over to the telephone. “Check a world map of IP utilization based on ICMP ping requests.”

“Right. Just a second. Okay, I’m looking at the map, and there’s a big hole centered on Washington, DC.”

“How far out does it extend?” Stetson looked at the world map on his wall. The twins stood by the desk, hanging on every word.

“It’s a circle with a radius of under twenty-five-hundred miles.”

“So, we’re just beyond it.”

“That’s right.”

Stetson tapped his fingers on the desk. “Okay, look. The president won’t know whether it’s just DC or the entire world that’s been shut down. How do we get a message to him?” asked Stetson.

“Carrier pigeon.”

“Shit, Davin, be serious.” Stetson rubbed his bald head.

“A supersonic carrier pigeon, sir. We put a pilot in the Peregrine …”

“Is that ready to fly?”

Woodford said, “It was minutes away from a test flight to Pensacola. This was going to be the longest test for the new pulse detonation engine. We can just change the destination to DC.”

“That’s a risky mission.” Stetson stood up and paced.

“It is, but the stakes are high. We’re probably only risking the plane. The pilot can always eject if there’s a problem.”

“Why not just send a B1?”

“We could, and we will, but the Peregrine would get there hours sooner. It can be wheels up in thirty minutes. It’s your call,” Woodford said.

“So we risk a three-hundred-million-dollar prototype just to get the word to DC one hour sooner. Plus, we don’t know … maybe anything that flies into that dead zone will fry.”

“I hear you, sir, but the planet’s under attack. I can’t imagine an hour or two making a difference, but then again, my imagination sucks. We were going to fly that bird to Pensacola anyway. It’s a great opportunity.”

Stetson looked at the ceiling and paused. “Okay, get things started. I’m coming over.”

* * *

September 23, 2018

Alex entered the hangar along with General Stetson. Martin followed. Technicians swarmed over the Peregrine looking like Santa’s elves on Christmas Eve. The gleaming craft resembled the Concorde but had a second set of small wings toward the front. Alex hadn’t seen it before.
Nice!

When they approached the pilot, Major Frank Cobb, Alex heard him ask Woodford: “What’s Captain Ahab doing here?” Alex looked to where Cobb pointed. An old man with a snow-white sailor’s beard stood under the plane, pointing up at the landing gear supports. The man had skin like old leather and was thin enough to appear in a castaway cartoon.

“He’s your copilot,” Woodford said.

Cobb was small but muscular. He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m kidding that he’s your copilot, but he is your passenger.”

The old man strode over and saluted. “Erasmus Whitington reporting for duty.”

Cobb looked at Woodford and mouthed the name “Erasmus?”

“Call me Salty.”

Cobb shook the old man’s hand but looked at Woodford and mouthed the word “Salty?”

Salty was called away to have his pressure suit put on, and Cobb said, “You’ve got to be kidding me, sir. What the hell is going on? Is Captain Ahab really coming?”

“Captain Ahab may save the mission, Frank.”

“What is he going to do, protect us from the great white whale? And what’s in his little antique case there?” Cobb pointed.

“That’s his sextant.”

Cobb froze with his hand still pointing and stared at Colonel Woodford and then at the General.

“It’s an instrument that’s used—”

“Yeah, I know what a sextant is, I just want to know why we need one in a twenty-first-century supersonic spaceplane.”

“You might need it, and you might need Salty,” said Woodford, “because when you arrive in DC, you won’t have GPS. It’ll be dark and there won’t be any ground lights.

“What about my ground-mapping radar?”

“In the Peregrine, that requires an active satellite connection. He’s an experienced celestial navigator. He’s sailed around the world three times without electronics, but there’s another reason you need him.”

“He knows all the latest sea shanties?”

Woodford smiled. “No, he’s familiar with DC.”

“Let me guess. He sailed up the Potomac in the HMS Bounty.”

“He restored a 1931 biplane, and he flies it, day and night, over the Washington area.”

Cobb looked over at Whitington. “So, what’s he doing here at Edwards, did his sextant run out of whale oil?”

“Frank, there’s no time for this. The Peregrine’s almost ready. You guys can get acquainted on the trip.”

* * *

September 23, 2018

Outside the third floor of the White House, Charli leaned back on the railing around the rooftop patio. Potted evergreen shrubs dotted the promenade which surrounded the rooms of the top floor. Too bad the sky was overcast. Had it been clear she figured she would have seen more stars than had been seen from this location for hundreds of years.

Why had she come down so hard on Jake? He deserved it, right? He very well may have killed Nana-Marie and Dad.

But maybe she got carried away. What did he do wrong? He simply didn't keep his mouth shut. Or his lips still. Whatever. But how many millions has he killed?

Could Jake have foreseen that Cronkite could read lips? Well, yes. On the other hand, no one had foreseen that he would read our encrypted videoconference communications.

If I loved him, would I have abandoned him so easily?
What does it feel like for him? He made a public mistake viewed by billions. Nobody's perfect, right? And of course, Cronkite is the one who pushed the button.

Charli jumped when the roar hit her. Because the plane was traveling near the speed of sound, the noise came all at once—more like an explosion than the sound of an approaching aircraft. No question about what it was. She'd been to air shows. She watched the plane fly past, low but not directly over the White House, then head almost straight up, turn and come roaring back, like a skateboarder on a half-pipe. What a wonderful sound. The plane headed directly for Ronald Reagan airport.
I hope they got the oil barrels burning.

This was a good sign. The whole world wasn't blacked out after all. She hurried down to the Oval Office. She'd think more about Jake later.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Jake sat on an antique chair in the “Pineapple Bedroom,” staring at the floor. Sophia was on his lap and Boondoggle rested his muzzle on Jake’s knee. A stout candle burned on the dresser, and little light came in through the three large windows.

After a few minutes Sophia looked at Jake and then put her hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “I think maybe is spoiling time.”

Jake gave a start and stared at her.
Had she really said that, or are my ears playing tricks on me?
These were the first words she’d uttered since the kidnapping, four months ago. A huge grin spread across his face. He squeezed her hard and kissed her forehead. “Oh, that’s what you think, is it? You think maybe is spoiling time?”

Boondoggle barked.

Sophia giggled and nodded. When Jake had watched Sophia for three months, Renata had gone on and on about how he spoiled his goddaughter with ice cream, cookies, and frequent trips to the zoo. So, whenever Sophia had been sad or hurt herself, Jake would whisper in her ear, “I think maybe it’s spoiling time,” and they’d be off for some treat or special outing.

He jumped up with Sophia attached to his neck. He ruffled the fur on Boondoggle’s head. “What do you think Boondoggle? Do you think it’s spoiling time, too?” After a pause, he said, “What? What’s that boy?” He looked at Sophia with mock puzzlement, “What did Boondoggle say?”