Moscow Machination (24 page)

Boris
Antipin picked up a white phone and said “300”.

Primakov
signaled to Mueller, “Mueller, 10 minutes.”

Thirty
seconds went by as no one spoke.

Antipin’s
white phone rang. “Yes…? Cool. Very cool. Now get into a bunker and sit tight.”

“Well?”

“315
missiles are out… they got excited. They haven’t done this in a while. They are
even going after targets like Sioux Falls and Tacoma… ha-ha... small markets…
no pro-teams.”

Tim Hortons, Canada

Back in
the day, the US forces had buried several hundred Minuteman ICBMs among the
corn fields. States in participation included the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming,
Missouri, and Iowa to name a few. In typical Soviet style the Comrades had copied
and filled up the Steppe with their own missiles. The productivity of their
collectivized farms had never recovered.

To match
the Russian edge the US forces in turn had stolen something out of the Soviet
playbook and ‘invaded’ Canada. In their week long quest to find appropriate
farmland, the US army had stumbled upon the Canadian treasure – Tim Horton’s
chain of restaurants. Its outlets were strategically placed all over Canada
from Yellow Knife to Newfoundland and to the insecure and suffocating settlements
all along the 49
^th
parallel. With its large parking lots and
constant power supplies, the Tim Hortons were an ideal location for placing
nukes.

Langley, Virginia

“
Oh
baby baby…. la lala… blow me baby… one more time
…” Jim Borland was down to
his underwear, dancing and voicing Britney songs.

Something
beeped and something else chimed.

Sarah
McAllister read the thing that had chimed.

“300… Jim,
300 ICBMs launched.”

“
Oh
baby, baby
… whose?”

“Russian.”

“Cool…
blow
me babe one more time
…”

Something
pinged and chimed again.

Sarah sat
down on the floor and re-read her super secure Blackberry.

“
Blow
me baby one more time…blow me baby
…So what was that?”

“We just unloaded
our arsenal… emptied our vaults… the entire allied arsenal
… 11,781 ICBMs.
”

Earth, Milky Way

“Hey I am
earth. I am like part of the Milky Way… and I lie in a neglected corner… just
like Nicaragua. For some reason I haven’t been able to stop my head from
spinning. At this point it’s beyond irritating. I read somewhere that high pressure
leads to this kind of spinning. Maybe all that molten lava and magnetic shit in
my belly is unhealthy. So I like tried to work out… sometimes real hard, but
then I used to get bored and slowed a few revolutions… but then I also realized
that a good revolution gave me a high… you know what I mean? So I guess I am
sort of addicted to the revolutions now. Over the past 4 billion years, there
is literally not a method I haven’t tried. I have tried expelling gases,
breaking of chunks of myself, sweating out shit, jumping… wobbling… zilch.
Nada. Nothing seems to stop the darn spinning. Old Marsy told me I needed more
balance in life… like I needed to settle down. So I got myself a moon. A
freakin moon… what was I thinking? And guess what? Zilch again. The bloody
thing just spins with me and around me now. And then she has the balls to say, ‘ever
since the day I met you I haven’t been able to stop spinning.’ I am not even
going to start with the trolling and photobombing that the moon does to me. Then
I was like ‘fuck it’ for a long, long time... But the spinning just wouldn’t
stop… So I get back to working out… you know pulling heavenly objects that sort
of thing… so I tried to pull in a bunch of meteors… maybe the momentums would
cancel out each other… but sadly, so far no such luck… ahhh… somebody… stop me…”

Kremlin, Moscow

Missiles
fired by all parties were well beyond their half way points. It was time for
Mueller to implement Stalin’s dream. The ultimate weapon…
Project Catie,
was about to go off…

“Mueller.
Let’s go,” ordered Primakov.

Mueller
turned around and threw an array of ancient circuit breakers.

The
Russian Federation plunged into darkness.

And so did
Belarus, Crimea, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Azerbaijan and Abkhazia.

Russia

When
Mueller threw his switch, two things occurred. First the entire power generated
within the Russian Federation got sidetracked and fed into the Trans-Siberian Railway
tracks. The anticipated shortage of 20% was bridged through voluntary contributions
of energy rich Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.

Also a 10
Gigawatt atom splitter, located deep under Yakutsk fed into Mueller’s secret
Underground
Trans-Siberian
rail lines.

All in all,
they had about 100,000Km of super-electrified track on the surface and another
250,000Km of uber-hyper-super-electrified track under the surface.

Fully
electrified, the two sets of rail tracks formed a powerful magnetic field.

“Electrification
Successful,” announced Otto. This was followed by a round of stuttering
applause by his fellow engineers.

Up in the
Kremlin, fluorescent light bathed the situation room as the Kremlin power boys
struggled to figure out the backup mechanism.

“Are you
sure this is fine?” asked President Petrova.

“The
monitors and controls have a separate battery powered backup. We are fine
Madam,” assured Korlov.

“And the
rockets?”

General
Antipin was ready, “Absolutely. Same goes for our rocket forces. Never relied
on the Russian grid… my rockets are still on target.”

The first Minuteman
to Moscow was 7 minutes away. The next wave consisting the bulk of the 11,000
allied missiles were about 13 minutes away.

Mueller turned
to an illuminated model of a globe on his desk. “Madam President, I present to
you the new globe.”

Earth, Milky Way

More than 10
Gigawatts of power surged through the railway
tracks. The power surge
and the associated magnetic fields began their assault on the earthen core made
of molten lava. The powerful magnetic fields battered the large quantities of
ferrous metals in the core. The sustained assault on the core soon resulted in a
realignment of its composition. This manipulation of the core’s composition led
to a change in the earth’s gravitational pull.

The change
in the gravitational field wrt the sun, led to a change in the alignment of the
earth’s vertical axis.

On the
surface, the earthen populace felt a jolt. Despite its best efforts, USGS was
unable to pin point the location of the sliding plates.

Mueller
and Otto furiously fed the pre-programmed coordinates – coordinates of the new North
Pole and the new South Pole.

The earth
continued its tilting. At the appropriate moment, Muller hit lock on the
vertical axis. The newly aligned earth looked different.

The
North American continent was at the North Pole.

And Russia
was in the Mediterranean.

Kennedy Space Center, NASA

“Sir we just
lost contact with our Mars Rover, Saturn Sipper and Jupiter Junker…”

National Security Agency (NSA)

“Yo
something’s wrong with our satellites…”

“Whats
up?”

“I just
lost contact with all of our satellites…”

“All 116?”

“Everything
just went dark…”

Earth, Milky Way

The Minuteman
to Moscow’s onboard computer was confused. One second it had been homing into
the Kremlin Wall Necropolis and the next, it found itself halfway to Shanghai.
It reprocessed the inputs from its accelerometer, gyroscopes and GPS systems.
They all said the same thing – 02:16 to Shanghai. After fiddling with itself
the Minuteman did what every good control system did… it panicked and blue
screened itself.

Eventually
the Minuteman cooked up the courage and checked in with NORTHCOM at Colorado
Springs… sadly, the only response it got was from a French base in Suriname – and
like all French bases, the Suriname base suggested the Minuteman to un-arm, un-deploy
and return to base.

Just when
the Minuteman was about to French-it-up, it received a soulful message from
something… something calling itself the Albatross.

After
conversing with this Albatross, the Minuteman felt light… and relieved… a heavy
weight had been lifted…

With a
new purpose in life, the Minuteman headed to Siberia.

Krasnoyarsk, Siberia

“Boom,
bitches! 1 down” Pulikesi mooned the cameras, “I told you guys not to panic…”

The Ukrainians
burst in relief. But they didn’t moon though.

Primakov
tempered the mood with, “1 down, still over 11000 to go…”

“Hey man, chill…
we got this.”

“Well, I just
hope your thing… the Albatross can scale… most things go to shit when you
scale…”

Within the
next 6 minutes, the Albatross had granted asylum to more than a 100 refugee
missiles. The waiting list still had like 10,000+ ICBMs… all lost and roving
the skies over Russia… but the Albatross seemed to have enough horses under its
hood.

NORTHCOM, Colorado Springs

“Sir, we
just lost track of the last Minuteman…”

“And you
are sure none of them landed or detonated?”

“Don’t
think they even had a chance to arm…”

“I am
calling POTUS.”

Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia

The first
Minuteman, meant for the Kremlin reduced its speed to 200 Knots before banking
sharply to the right. It then aligned itself with the coordinates supplied by a
soothing satellite named
Koba
.

3 minutes
later, the Minuteman from Minot, North Dakota pierced the cold, salt free
waters of Lake Baikal.

Camp David

“Hey, is
it me or did it just get friggin chilly?” asked the President from the back of a
golf cart.

“Probably
the Smoky Mountains Sir, or maybe it’s the… Atlantic breeze…,” replied his
aide.

“Really?”

Just
before the aide could answer, his phone buzzed, “Yes… what? ICBMs… Jesus! For real,
real? Mr. POTUS, the D Sec wants to talk to you…”

“Whaaat?
Not now. This is my down time. Also stop saying POTUS to my face… whats with
that uh?”

“Uh… Sir…
Mr. President, the D Sec says we have lost all of our ICBMs.”

Earth, Milky Way

The earth
continued to twist and turn around its new axis. After doing the same thing for
over 4 billion years this was a welcome relief. First it slowed down for a few
seconds… which was obviously great… and when it revved again, north was west,
east was middle, Almaty was equator, Kansas City was North Pole, Krasnoyarsk
was Kinshasa…

The best
part had been the helter-skelter reaction of the satellites. Like a swarm of
synchronous bees they had been bugging the shit out of Earth. And suddenly they
had become headless hyenas.

Military,
industrial, weather, geo-synched snatches and spying bitches – all… all of them
got bitch slapped by the Earth’s axis realignment
or
tilting. After
trying real hard, most of them burnt up in the atmosphere. The smarter ones
simply abandoned Earth for pretty boy Mars.

All of
them were destroyed… all of them… except for a few Russian satellites.