The Filter Trap (3 page)

“Hey at least you can say it’s past tense now:
Stopped
Ignoring Major’s Instructions,” LARS reminded him, returning to form.

“And it looks like you’re still owning up to being the Loudest Arrogant Raptor Sister,” the colonel said.

“I like it better than Littlest. At least RF didn’t saddle me with that.”

“Good, Lieutenant Lee might lose the opportunity after today,” the Colonel said.

The four pilots hushed, knowing only combat could bar Lee’s input on their call signs.

The colonel sat down on his chair backwards, crossing his arms on the back and leaning forward, rocking slightly.

“Now that I’ve got your complete attention, you may notice my relaxed posture,” he said solemnly. “Do not take this as a sign that
you
are at ease. I am merely attempting to come down to your miserable level, as I believe you may find what you’re about to hear a bit disconcerting.”

Franks wasn’t the biggest hard-ass superior officer in the Air Force, but he rarely showed direct empathy to subordinates, at least as a group. He produced an unusual smile, equal parts conjured and sincere, to calm the young pilots.

“The good news: no matter what you were up to last night you didn’t actually sleep in until noon. The clocks are right, it still
is
last night.”

An odd mixture of relief and worry filled the room.

“The bad news: we’re all a hell of a long way from last night.”

The colonel stood and put his hands on his hips.

‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ Lee thought. ‘Hands on hips is the colonel’s tell he’s uncomfortable. Every superior officer has one and learning to spot them and alleviate the cause is a great tool to navigate yourself to a promotion.’

“Sir?” LARS put her hand up and Franks motioned for her to speak. “Is this still a tsunami warning?”

The colonel’s mouth scrunched and moved to the left. His eyes looked briefly at a ceiling tile at the back of the room. He wasn’t any more prepared for the news than they were, but he’d fake it for their benefit.

“This isn’t some earthquake-out-in-the-ocean type of tsunami. No, this is something quite different. When you’re up there in the air later you’ll miss the moonrise. Because it isn’t there.”

Lee lifted her hand. “They’ve blown up the Moon, sir? That’s ridiculous, there would be a cloud of debris raining down on us.”

“Duh, RF! That’s why we’re on tsunami warning,” LARS reminded her. “All I want to know is whose nukes those sand rats stole to pull it off, and where my cannons can find ‘em!”

“ISIS couldn’t pull this off,” Nana countered. “Maybe this is what the North Koreans have been building in their labor camps.”

“This isn’t Seveneves, Nana,” Lee rolled her eyes. “The Moon can’t just blow up.”

“Seven what?” Nana asked.

“Put your phone down and read a book sometime,” Lee countered.

“Put your bottle down and drink water sometime,” Nana replied at barely a whisper.

Lee studied the colonel, wondering if he knew the weakness the bubbas under her command apparently already did.

Franks put his hand to his forehead and let out a long sigh. “I thought you had to go to school to become an officer. Christ, if you four are all I’ve got left then we’re in even bigger trouble.”

“What do you mean, ‘have left,’ sir?” Lee asked.

“Well, if you’d all fall back on tradition and shut the fuck up in front of a superior officer I’ll tell you. At 10:34 PM Hawaii-Aleutian time on Christmas Eve, the Moon disappeared. You four are the only folks under my purview left on Oahu. The other elements in the squad not on holiday were scrambled and sent off to NORAD before you got here.

“Everyone else will have to report back to base in their own way, but that might be difficult. I’m sure you’ve already noticed your phones don’t work. It wasn’t just the Moon that disappeared-all the other satellites in the sky blinked out too. TV, Hubble, Air Force, American, Chinese, all of it’s gone as far as we can tell.”

The pilots had nothing to joke about now. Any last hint of conviviality drained from their faces as the colonel continued. Scenarios they’d been introduced to as children, bred into them by a culture obsessed with a latent apocalyptic dystopia, were coming to fruition. Franks relayed it with none of the mortified pain of his film and television counterparts. Franks delivered the Earth-shattering news with the same trepidation as mess duty assignments.

“It’s a singularity,” Lee whispered. She had long followed Ray Kurzweil’s public quest for artificial intelligence. However, singularity had other meanings beyond computers and black holes. More broadly defined, a singularity was a dramatic and irreversible change in the world. The destruction of the Moon certainly fit that definition, no matter who or what the cause.

“This is not just another mission, sir.” Lee grated. “This is the end of all things.”

Franks sucked at his teeth. She might well be right, but he’d go out a company man if he could. “This is only the beginning, Lieutenant. Of what I don’t know, but the first order of business is preparing for the tsunami headed this way since the Moon ain’t pulling its weight anymore. Don’t worry, you four don’t have sandbag duty this time, you’re gonna escort some VIPs off the island.” He looked up out of the window with a longing to join them. “Safest place to be for the next few hours.”

“You said the clocks are correct, so why is it daylight out?” Lee asked.

“Maybe whatever knocked the Moon changed our orbit?” LARS suggested.

The colonel found it harder to hide his frustration. “I can’t tell you more because I don’t
know
anything more, but that’s the way the wire came to me. All the sat-cons are down and landlines are failing left and right. The Net is history and the Air Force WAN is toast. Seems we relied a bit too heavily on privately bundled VOIP contracts.”

“But the Moon? Who? How?” Nana asked, dumbfounded.

“We don’t know how or why or what
or who
. More importantly, it’s not for us to ask. Our task is to get up there and protect this country.”

“Protect from what?” LARS asked.

“It’s a tsunami warning, is it not?” Colonel replied. “This tsunami just happens to be a tad bigger.”

“How much is a tad?” asked Nana, fear creeping into his normally jovial voice.

“According to the chief master sergeant, we’re looking at waves at least a hundred feet high. Navy buoys have already confirmed abnormal wave height suggesting that range at landfall.”

“Jesus!” SIMI showed concern. “We’re on an island, where will people go?”

“There’s only one person you four gotta worry about.”

“Air Force One!” Lee remembered.

“That’s right, at least your squad leader still reads the paper, or Twittler, or Facepage, wherever you kids get your news.” He pointed at her. “Since you know already, fill em in, RF.”

“You guys don’t seriously think they have ‘stars and stripes’ cupcakes at the commissary all the time, right?” Lee asked rhetorically.

Nana hit his forehead with his palm. “She’s right, the president’s been on the island since last week.”

“Well, not this island,” Franks corrected him. “But in Hawaii, and now he’s above it. We put your better halves up there twenty minutes ago. You get to take over when they’re relieved; JSOC is pulling them away for something else. We knew you’d only come for sandbag siren duty since the cell towers started overloading about an hour after the Event.”

“The
Event
?” Lee repeated. “Can we get back to that? How does the Moon disappear?”

“Airmen!” Franks straightened up, putting on his fiercest face. “It is not your position to question our situation, but to follow orders, and only those that come out of
my
mouth. That’s the only explanation you get.”

The squad shelved their questions, as hard as it was. Training to follow orders kicks in when it has to.

“If you haven’t guessed already, I need you in your pits and 300 klicks north to relieve Tom-Tom, Bennis, Angry Uncle and Sour Man by 0400 hours,” Franks ordered, then cringed. “Forget the clock, I’ll give you a countdown deadline to get airborne.”

“Normally I’d be chomping at the bit for presidential security detail, sir,” LARS started, “but I gotta know what—”

“But
nothing
, pilot!” Franks angrily interrupted her. “You’ll be finding out what all this means when the
rest
of us do. If you want to stay here and piss on yourselves for the next five minutes before suiting up that’s fine with me, but
I
have
been put on sandbag duty. I hope for your sakes I don’t live to see your sorry asses come back for mop up. You are dismissed!”

The four young pilots slowly stood and saluted as Franks marched out of the door.

“Did you see it? He almost teared up at the end,” Nana said.

“Not funny,” LARS insisted.

“Wasn’t joking.”

“The Air Force has strange ways to instill respect and service,” Lee said. “I’m sure that last bit was meant to motivate us. The colonel will be in greater danger here on the ground in a tsunami than we will up there above it.”

“Speaking of above it, I don’t get it. What happened to the Moon?” LARS asked. “And what does that have to do with tsunamis?”

“The tide,” Lee answered.

“The Moon ain’t pulling the tides up any more,” SIMI added. “All that water’s gotta go somewhere.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Up our asses in forty minutes if we don’t get hopping.”

From the air the pilots saw big boats make a slow march out of Pearl Harbor, a thin gray line stretching miles into the Pacific.

“Think any of those ships can withstand a hundred foot wave?” Lee barked over the radio to the bubbas.

“It won’t be a hundred feet once they get out far enough,” Nana replied.

“Well that shit is due here in half an hour, how fast can they move?”

SIMI chimed in. “It’s classified, but a Navy buddy told me that they clocked the Reagan at over a hundred miles per hour after the tsunami in Japan.”

“How about
our
tsunami?” asked LARS.

“Fast as a bullet,” Lee answered. “500 miles an hour, something like that.”

“How do you know that?”

“Colonel gave me the mission log, didn’t want you three getting sentimental before we left.”

“Shit,” the bubbas said in unison.

“I hope he was kidding about sandbag duty. Ain’t no sandbags gonna stop that,” Nana pined.

“He’s evacuating civilians to the punchbowl,” Lee informed them. “He’ll get out.”

“No time to worry about it,” LARS cautioned. “Looks like whatever took out the Moon did a pretty good job on the GPS satellites. I got nothing on my spec. SIMI?”

“Nothing here either, so how are we going to find the president?”

“You’ve got a compass don’t you?” Lee said. “Not to mention the entire Pacific fleet is laid out under us like a giant arrow.”

They looked down with pity at their Navy comrades, hoping they’d surge far enough out to meet the waves before they were too high to break.

“So, the rest of the squad that we’re relieving,” LARS asked, “where is JSOC sending them?”

“I imagine they’ll circle west until the tsunami has passed, then try to land on a carrier,” SIMI answered.

“If there still
is
a carrier,” Nana noted.

“We’ve got a job to do, boys,” Lee reminded them, banking her Raptor northward and taking one long last look at the paradise in the Pacific she’d been lucky enough to call home for the last six years. “There’s a president waiting for us, that’s all we should worry about right now.”

Chapter 2

Air Force One dipped far below cruising altitude as the presidential caravan flew over Honolulu. On the way they’d passed wreckage of gunboats and destroyers caught in the surging waves. Sailors dashed in the waters of the Pacific reached up in a vain plea for help from the commander they served. As the waves approached the island, landfall height estimates reached higher, though few would be around to validate them.

The presidential albatross dipped even lower to watch over Pearl Harbor. An eerie radio silence fell as the waves approached the southwestern shore, home to the majority of the million inhabitants of the state.

The ninety-minute tsunami warning did little to prepare Hawaii for this new class of disaster. As the impending doom ripped through stragglers from the Pacific Fleet, the Raptor pilots escorting Air Force One squinted to discern oblivious tourists still wandering the white sand beaches. The hapless vacationers followed the water as it retreated from the beach.

An Air Force One staffer broke the silence onboard. “The number of estimated dead in Kauai approaching 50,000, sir. Bodies will be pulled out of tree tops and wash up on isolated shores for years to come. Not many folks left to do the counting, so we suspect the true number might be higher.”

“What have we done for Honolulu?” the frustrated president asked.

“Hickam is doing its best to get everyone to higher ground, sir. Being Christmas Eve, the base was understaffed for an emergency like this. It didn’t have much warning, and the civilians even less. Most people were asleep until the sirens went off. We’re expecting high six figures.”

The President put his head in his hands, peeking through his fingers at the main island below.

“Have we been in contact with the mainland?”

“Yes, sir, though communication is difficult without our satellite links. Infrastructure is overloaded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Areas farther out get their news mostly from larger markets. Cell phone networks are busted everywhere and cross-country call satellites obviously went dark with the rest.

“As you may know, Hawaii has an evacuation app, but with the towers jammed many are unable to use it. Since TV and Internet are monopolies, they’re down at the same time too with no satellites to send the signals to the local market centers.”

“Goddamned telecommunications deregulation!” the president bellowed. “Now they’re not just waiting for Facebook to load, people are going to have to
die
before Congress realizes access should be a right!”

“Remember, sir, the difficulty is not in getting the warning out, but getting the
people
out. Infrastructure is lagging and the highways are jammed already in the major cities.”

“Congress has fought me on infrastructure funding my entire presidency, they’d rather their constituents get jobs building more F-35s. A lot of good those planes are going to do today. Are we at least broadcasting on the radio?”

“Where we can, sir. Most stations have automated playlists. Not many stations have people in-house to broadcast on Christmas Eve. Most of the networks we’ve attempted to contact can’t even be reached over the radio.”

“Are you telling me that we can’t radio the damned radio stations?”

The president looked down again, feeling more helpless than ever in the face of the oncoming tragedy.

When the water receded from Waikiki, most locals heeded the sirens and attempted to find higher ground. Though it would be far worse than they suspected, anyone who’d lived for some time on the island was well aware of the danger tsunamis posed. Still, even the revised extreme tsunami evacuation areas were a far cry from the real danger zones. The world had never seen a tsunami like this before, and many that did now would not survive to see anything else after.

The pilots and politicians looking down saw thousands of Hawaiians abandon cars to run ahead of traffic jams. Tens of thousands clamored up the slopes of Punchbowl, Diamond Head, and Koko Head hoping the craters would protect them when the waves crashed.

The walls of beachfront high-rise hotels lining Waikiki Bay, none much more than 400 feet, looked even higher against the bare beach peppered with dying fish, collateral damage exposed as the ocean reorganized for the first assault on land. The cobalt colossus, slowing only to a few hundred miles per hour as it reached up and over the shelf in front of the island, grabbed glass and steel, tossing it inward, crushing and splintering like a child stomping on dead leaves.

The waves, easily eclipsing the 761-feet-high tip of Diamond Head, sloshed down into the craters and tumbled thousands of climbers to the swirling basin.

The waves moved past lowlying residential areas on the western coast, putting Hawaiians still in their homes hundreds of feet below the lip of the swell. Finally, the first wave lapped against the high hills east of Waikiki and ran back down to rip asunder any of the structures remaining.

It looked strangely soothing from thousands of feet in the air; gentle waves brushed clean the green parapet slopes of the Koʻolau Mountains and retreated, crests growing lower, until water ran off the streets, relieving the traffic jam by taking cars along with it.

Only those who took the highway through to Kailua at the first siren would ever see another perfect Hawaiian Sunset. They instinctively headed to the undermanned and overwhelmed Bellows Air Force Station. The living appreciated their luck, but wanted answers. The barely one hundred enlisted soldiers at the base had nothing prepared.

First to break radio silence, the president broadcast on civilian and military shortwave simultaneously.

“Those of you on the coast,
any
coast, please evacuate immediately! The loss of our Moon has had an unprecedented effect on our oceans. Tsunamis are headed toward both North American coasts.

“Earlier reports cited one hundred foot waves. Sadly, these estimates were woefully inadequate. I witnessed the devastation to our most western state just minutes ago. I fear nearly a million Americans have perished in the Pacific. I pray this day will not see a million more, but I need your help.

“Please open your hearts and your homes to fellow Americans when they seek aid. Everyone in eastern California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Pennsylvania, the Eastern Seaboard, and our Southern Gulf neighbors, please take in these refugees as you would your own family. Because they are. We are all Americans. We
will
persevere together thanks to our shared sense of generosity. As a nation. As a planet. As a people.

“God Bless.”

“Raptor squad,” said the air commander, their next in command, crackling the radios. “Your mission is to escort the president and Air Force One to Edwards Air Force Base in California. Force One will make it fine, but you’ll need to refuel a few hundred klicks off-coast. We’ll send coordinates for the mobile tanker when we get them. Check back in before you leave radio range. For now, head east, fifteen degrees.”

“How are things at Hickam and Pearl, sir? What of Colonel Franks?” Lee asked.

“Keep this channel clear Lieutenant Green,” the commander gruffly ordered.

“You think he made it okay?” SIMI asked over the com to the bubbas.

“I’m sure the commander just doesn’t know,” Lee said. “Means there is a chance the colonel survived, that’ll have to be good enough.”

“You think there’ll really be an air tanker for us?” LARS whispered. “There’s no emergency runways in the Pacific.”

“If the fleet was pulled out of Pearl, you can bet anything normally docked in California is sitting a few hundred klicks off that coast now too. They aren’t abandoning a billion dollars’ worth of fighter aircraft in the ocean in a crisis.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, LARS,” SIMI said. “Big Gubmit has plenty of emergency fuel stored safe and secure; those tankers can stay up here a long time.”

Nana countered. “Maybe we should start worrying about where the fuck the Moon went?”

“I’m more worried about everyone on the island. You saw those waves, the punchbowl was no place to hide.”

“Nothing we can do but keep your coms on and follow orders,” Lee told them. “Colonel would have wanted it that way.”

They veered southeast, leaving their home behind, maybe for the last time.

“Lee, you see that radar blip?” SIMI asked, breaking a long silence.

“Too fast to be our refuel tanker.”

“Maybe a friendly to relieve us?” Nana suggested.

“Not likely. We can see each other. A California Angel would have said hello,” Lee reminded them before issuing orders and banking her raptor. “SIMI, you’re coming with me. Let’s see if we need to scare somebody away.”

“Okay, RF, but check your scope again.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s big enough to be another Force One.”

“A tanker and some escorts with broken radios?” LARS guessed.

“Let’s hope,” Lee said. “LARS and Nana, you stay with the president. If you see us go down, you shoot on sight at whatever comes. The Colonel warned us we might see combat, maybe this is it!”

The two raptors broke off and increased their speed from the snail's pace of the presidential 747 escort.

“Coming in fast,” barked Lee, as the two radar blips became bigger and faster.

“Must have spotted us,” SIMI said.

Two green and yellow jets blurred past, only a few hundred meters out.

“Well, they ain’t ours,” SIMI surmised. “F-16s?”

Lee broke off to engage the two planes circling below, getting a clearer look through her canopy as she craned her jet around and down. Over land the camouflage paint scheme may have made it hard to see the straight edges at the backs of the wings and horizontal stabilizers. Over the blue ocean the squared-off jet intakes were a dead giveaway, the tapered strakes of an F-16 absent. It wasn’t an F-16, or even an F-15, but their grandfather.

“Earlier than F-16s, those are F-5s,” she radioed up.

“Who would try to intercept us with antiques?” SIMI asked, arcing in pursuit.

“An F-5 intercepting? Doubt it, they probably saw a ‘lonely’ 747 and were going to check it out, just like we did. No way those museum pieces could see our radar signatures, probably didn’t even realize we were here until the flyby. Probably shitting their pants right about now.”

“Fish in a barrel,” SIMI said.

“Don’t shoot until we’ve figured out who we’re shooting
at
.”

The much faster F-22 Raptors easily caught up. The F-5s looked like toys, a single white missile on the end of each fixed flat wing. The two Air Force pilots started to play with them.

The Raptors made simple curves and arcs, bottling up the other two jets every time they attempted to push past. Even their training back at Hickam had been against better jets, and probably better pilots. After a few minutes establishing superiority, Lee and SIMI put a radar lock in place and scooted in tight, damping their own engines to match speed with the F-5s.

“Identify,” Lee radioed, flipping through different frequencies.

A gruff and nervous voice replied, “¿Quién es usted?”

“SIMI, they’re Mexican, gotta be. You went to school in California, you take any Spanish classes?”

“Uhh, un poco.”

“Tell them to go home or we’ll turn the clouds red.”

“Pilotos Mexicanos . . .
retirada . . . acuerdo?”

After a few seconds the nervous voice came back with better English than SIMI’s Spanish.

“We are refugees from the Mexican Air Force, requesting asylum in the United States.”

“Aliens, boss,” SIMI radioed Lee. “Should we take them to our leader?”

The refugees in F-5s turned out to be not-so-distant cousins of the Raptors, escorting their own president’s 747. The raptor detail never let
Fuerza Aérea Mexicana Una
slip within a mile of Air Force One, but the American president eagerly accepted the opportunity to radio his counterpart.

“I wish we were meeting again under more pleasant circumstances. After you came to Toluca I always wished to come visit you in Washington. However, I’m afraid I must request to do so on quite different terms today.”

“Señor Presidente, once this crisis has abated you’re more than welcome to come to the White House. We can shoot some hoops.”

One of the president’s aids cringed at the overly casual remark recorded for posterity in the middle of a global crisis.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible as I’m no longer president.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have placed America under martial law, yes?”

“In a manner of speaking. I don’t believe everyone is aware of it yet due to the satellites being out. We still have many rural areas to—”

“I am sorry to cut you off, Mr. President, but I must make my case to you very quickly. At present, I do not claim ownership of the presidency of Mexico because the office has been vacated under duress. In the disarray, after night turned to day, the cartels launched a putsch. Our inside Sinaloa man got a message to us before the network died. I’m sure he’s dead now, but if he hadn’t done so, my entire Cabinet would be gone.”