Next afternoon, a Friday, when Mike Ricardo walked into Con Ed’s eight-story-high fossil-fuel Astoria Station for his four-to-midnight shift, he paused for a moment to look up at the five sets of high twin stacks belching their white smoke, in sharply etched columns, against the cerulean blue. He’d been working at the Astoria fourteen years, his job a member of one of the maintenance crews for the six giant white log-cake-shaped turbines that sat on an immaculately kept rust-red-painted boiler-room floor over a hundred and twenty feet below the 217 miles of piping that bent and curved like the exposed innards of some enormous refrigerator. But here it was far from cold, temperatures soaring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit as the fossil fuels, coal mainly, burned twenty-four hours a day to drive the turbines that helped feed the enormous appetite of the New York grid.
At the same time that Mike was beginning his shift, at Indian Point in upstate New York, thirty miles north of Central Park, Stefan, the third member of the cell, was donning a blue surgical cap. Slipping his ID/lock card into the slot, he passed first through the turnstile and the blue-green protective door, on through the second shielding door, and into what the men at the two plants at Indian Point called the “blue room.” Here the fuel rods lay in an innocuous honeycomb arrangement twenty-five feet beneath the blue water shield.
In Albany the computer monitoring the flow of electricity was showing above average power being consumed in Manhattan and Queens, so that up to half of it had to be drawn from the grid fed by the enormous hydropower complex at La Grande in Quebec, the “juice” coming down on the 345,000-volt lines from the roaring spillways of La Grande One and Two. Manhattan’s eight substations’ transformers, like those throughout the rest of the city, downstepped the voltage so that David’s father, Admiral John Brentwood, in the World Trade Center’s offices of the New York Port Authority, could keep track of the highly complex business of coordinating convoy loading, departure, and arrivals, and, when he had time, brew the coffee that kept him and millions of other New Yorkers, from brokerage houses to subway drivers, working the extended war hours.
Northeast of the Bronx, on the calm waters of Croton Reservoir, the water-police helicopter was carrying out its normal patrol to insure that no powerboats were churning up the bottom. If left undisturbed, the water would be aerated through the action of the sun’s ultraviolet light, and, once rid of impurities, would pass through the aqueducts and tunnels built a hundred years before and become part of those one-and-a-half billion gallons of water that New Yorkers consumed every day. The chopper came down as it spotted the quality-control men on the only powerboat allowed in the lake lowering the seki disk — which they saw was visible down about three and a quarter meters, much deeper than the two meters required by law.
In New York, the fourth Spets who was replacing the “floater” Gregory walked as casually as he had for the past ten years into Con Ed’s orange-carpeted ECC — energy control center. The controller glanced about at the twelve-foot-high, half-moon-shaped wall beaded by quarter-size lights that traced the lines on the hundreds of flowcharts, making it all look like the massive circuit board of a railway network rather than that of New York’s electric flow.
The weather report was now predicting variable overcast conditions preceding the storm moving up from Virginia. The overcast was responsible for more afternoon lights than usual being turned on in Manhattan. The operator, pushing himself back in the high, gray, luxurious chair at the center of the control room, glided quickly and deftly to the tracking ball control, his palm moving over it as blue and amber readouts on the computer screens told him backup alarms were about to ring. The indicator for the substation at West Forty-ninth and Vernon was flashing, overloaded at nine hundred megawatts, about to trip and set in motion a “brownout.” This was averted by the controller siphoning off extra power from feeder line eighty — the line which brought the hydro-power down from Canada. Still, overload threatened.
“If it goes above two thousand,” the controller called, “start shedding,” which for the men on the four-to-midnight watch meant that they weren’t to wait until substations started tripping out. “Call Kennedy, hospitals, medical, fire, ambulance — they’ll have to go to EGs.” But the Spets man knew that the controller didn’t suspect any crisis building up. He was merely taking strict precautionary measures, confident that Con Ed’s BJGs — backup jet generators — could kick in at a few moments’ notice if necessary. What the chief controller didn’t know, however, was that the jet-engine generators had over ten pounds of sand thrown into their innards. It had been as simple as a child throwing sand at a beach. The moment they kicked in, they’d overheat and burn out.
While the controller watched, alarm lights started to flash all over the circuit board.
Twenty-seven minutes later, the huge spillways of La Grande in Quebec exploded, causing massive flooding racing at unprecedented speed over the vast Canadian tundra. Feeder eighty and all other transmission lines from Quebec went dead. Four-point-seven minutes later both the nuclear plants at Indian Point reported explosions, not in the restricted rod pool area inside the plant but in the control rooms themselves. Six operators were dead — more than twenty critically injured.
Now, devoid of nuclear power, its hydro feeder and fossil-fuel generating plant capacity out, over 90 percent of New York City was plunged into darkness — only hospitals and control towers at LaGuardia and Kennedy functioning on their own emergency generators.
The lightning forked blue over New York so that at first New Yorkers believed the power lines and substations had been hit by the storm moving up from Virginia, and they blamed this for stopping everything from their TVs to the subway — over two million people caught in rush hour, the port loading facilities immobilized, auto accidents by the thousands, and in Flatbush, looting worse than during the blackout of 77.
In Mount Sinai and other hospitals from New York to New Jersey and in Westchester County, over forty-three patients died during the delays before emergency generators kicked in. At Bellevue a new orderly, eager to help, struck a match, creating a flashback along the oxygen feed line to an oxygen tank, which became a rocket, tearing through two walls and killing four elderly patients waiting to go into OR, and two more in the recovery room, the explosion also creating a massive fire. Oxygen feeds were quickly cut off to prevent other explosions, but this meant that dozens of emphysema patients, most elderly, went into respiratory distress, eleven of them dying despite heroic efforts under emergency battery lights to resuscitate them.
Ambulance crews did their best but were plagued by motor accidents, fourteen in Manhattan alone, which prevented them from responding to emergency walkie-talkie calls. Many civilians were struck down in Times Square as they were pushed off curbs by the sheer force of crowds panicking in response to the gunfire of a mugging at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway.
Two women were dragged off near Central Park West between West Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth and raped. One was left dead, her throat slit by her attacker. There were quiet, heroic actions too throughout the city, but these were isolated cases that couldn’t hope to arrest the war-spurred fear, which climaxed around 7:15 p.m. that evening when a radio station, broadcasting weakly but broadcasting nevertheless via its own emergency generator power, relayed a conversation with a ham radio operator claiming the police had found evidence of coordinated sabotage against the city. Furious, the mayor, having to drive through the terror-filled streets first to Con Ed’s ECC and then to the radio station, finally countered the report by announcing that he had been assured by Con Ed that the blackout was an “unusual confluence of forces” and that power would be restored as soon as possible.
Many people took refuge in churches, and some caught by the blackout near Fifth Avenue sought protection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. But nowhere was it totally safe, several people mugged in the western chapel of St. Patrick’s, while on Sixth Avenue a visitor to New York, driving north, took a right onto Fifty-seventh Street, and was sideswiped twice before being hit and killed by a city garbage truck, the accident creating a solid traffic jam four blocks east to Lexington.
While most others had been heading home when the power went out, some had been on their way back to work in the New York Port Authority’s convoy-coordinating center in Trade Tower One when the power went out, and found themselves trapped on an elevator between the sixtieth and sixty-first floors. All telephone lines were out, the only news being relayed by the emergency-generator-run radio stations, the mayor’s assurance sounding thinner by the minute, with one station reporting heavy gunfire in Flatbush between blacks and “Little Seoul,” and several shootings in the Midtown Tunnel.
By 8:17 p.m. the New York radio stations operating on their own power had grown to half a dozen, their lights, like those of the hospitals, pinpoints of illumination in the canyons of darkness, several more stations broadcasting unconfirmed reports of sabotage against the feeder lines coming through Westchester County and from the East Rockies mountain grid. The mayor did what he could to disavow these rumors as well, and indeed several of the stations refused to run them, but those that did were no longer relying on the unconfirmed reports of ham radio operators but on FM “Radio du Canada” broadcasts out of Montreal and CBC stations in Toronto, picked up by truckers on the interstates from Chicago to the Adirondacks. The mayor again appealed for calm. “Now’s the time,” he told the population of eleven million, “for New Yorkers to stick together.”
For the most part they did, but the widespread random acts of violence had not yet abated, and by the time the mayor returned to City Hall he was already trying to compute the political costs to him of having told a barefaced lie earlier on, having dismissed the rumors of sabotage as “patent nonsense.” One of his aides told him that he was wanted on the phone.
“Better be the president of Con Ed!” His Honor snapped.
“No, sir. It’s the president of the United States.”
The mayor held his hand over the receiver for a moment to compose himself. “Mr. President?”
The president’s voice was competing with static on the radio telephone. “Mr. Mayor. I’m sending Al Trainor up to see you.”
The mayor wasn’t sure what to say. What he needed was electricity — and fast — not presidential aides. “Well, Mr. President, he won’t be able to…” His voice disappeared in the sound of an enormous explosion and a ball of crimson flame curling in on itself, followed by the sound of crashing glass. A chopper, all but out of gas, had tried for a last-minute landing atop one of the skyscraper pads, but instead, buffeted by wind shear into the darkness, the pilot momentarily disorientated in the pitch black night, a rotor had hit the water tank.
“We don’t want to get in your way, Jim,” the president was telling him, switching to an informal tone, impressing the mayor’s media aide who was close enough to pick up the conversation. He could hear Mayne cough briefly, then continue. “I ordered Fort Dix to give all possible assistance.” The mayor knew he was alluding to the riots but was being nonspecific as they were on an open line. “Al Trainor’ll fill you in with the details of assistance. I want him to be with you to see at first hand, then report back to me. Help you coordinate recovery efforts. We don’t want Washington bureaucrats standing in your way. He’ll be bringing the Apple Two contingency plan with him. Get rid of any red tape.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Putting down the receiver, the mayor seemed even more puzzled by the president’s last comment. He turned to the clutch of aides. “What in hell was that all about? Contingency apple — two? What the hell was that? Marvin?”
“That’d be the emergency response plan, Mr. Mayor. ‘Apple’ for New York.”
“We’ve got our own contingency plans,” the mayor replied tartly. “What we need is electricity and money, not goddamned—”
“It’s not just for New York,” the aide explained. “It’s a plan that ties in New York with the feds. With the rest of the country. Ah — you signed it, Mr. Mayor.”
The mayor raised an eyebrow. “You mean we’re only going to get what’s left over — after Washington gets finished allocating it to—”
“No, sir,” Marvin said. He liked the mayor — had worked for him for five years — but His Honor had a tendency to see the whole world in terms of political clout and money. “No, sir. Apple Two means that it’s not just us involved. It’s all over the country. The West Coast has been hit, too.”
“Who the hell else is going to get in on it?” the mayor pushed. “We don’t need Trainor up here to tell us that. I don’t want Jersey and the rest of them riding on our coattails. New York’s my priority. My responsibility. If Trainor’s coming up here to slice up the pie I—”
“Until Trainor gets here, Mr. Mayor, we won’t know.”
The mayor took a breather and relaxed as much as the situation would allow before turning to another of his aides. “What d’you think, Frank?”
“Well, Mayne’s fresh from reelection. No cause for him to go grandstanding with us to win votes — long as he doesn’t send us a Quayle.”
For a moment the mayor thought his aide meant a bird. “Trainor’s no Quayle,” put in the mayor’s stenographer, a petite redhead who up till now hadn’t said anything, preoccupied with worry that her parents had been caught in the tunnel. “Trainor’s very well thought of in Washington.”
The mayor grunted. He was always skeptical of Washington — no matter what the situation, Washington always wanted something in return. If he wasn’t careful, the mayor of the Big Apple knew that the president would get all the glory. “Jennifer,” he said, looking across at the stenographer, “I want air time booked — prime time. Soon as Con Ed’s got the power back on.”
“Can’t right now, Mr. Mayor. Phone lines are down again.”
“What — Jesus! Well, send someone by car. Send a smoke signal — anything. If we’re not on the tube first Washington’ll steal all the bases.”
Jennifer dispatched messengers — some by bike. For some strange reason in the flashlight-lit hallways her voice seemed to echo more than it ever did in the bright night light.
When the messengers returned an hour later, one of them bleeding badly from a fall, they apologized to Jennifer that though they’d booked time for the mayor, the White House had already requested air time ahead of them.
“Damn it! I knew it,” the mayor thundered. “Washington wants all the glory. It’s a grandstand play.”
It wasn’t.
Electrical-distribution networks right throughout the United States had been hit, including and especially the West Coast ports, where sabotage throughout the Rocky Mountain grid caused a “back jam” of ships urgently needed to resupply Second Army over five thousand miles away.
It was the president’s decision in the face of such overwhelming sabotage to once again broadcast a reintroduction of the Emergency Powers Act of the kind that had allowed them to pick up the likes of La Roche, though in that instance their timing had been all wrong.
To assure the nation that the government was still intact, the top Washington bureaucrats were already en route to Mount Weather, forty-nine miles west of Washington, its hub a massive bunker dug into the mountain that was operated by EM A — Emergency Management Agency — with four-foot-thick, blast-proof, reinforced steel doors, a complex that had its own underground water supply, cafeterias, hospital, TV and radio communication center, and, particularly vital in such situations as that created by the blackouts, its own power plant and sewage facilities.
That evening as Washington’s bureaucratic convoy moved through Virginia’s Loudoun County along County Route 601, slowing near Heart Trouble Lane to no more than ten miles per hour, they saw the barbed wire atop a ten-foot cyclone chain fence that ringed Mount Weather’s four hundred acres. Above the bunker, amid the rich Virginia foliage, barracks and microwave relay antennae were already alive with activity. It might take only several days for the total power failure to be put partially right, but until then Mayne was playing it safe. What Mayne desperately needed for the American people was not to give them any more humiliating communiqués from a superhardened bunker but a victory — the feeling that despite their trials and tribulations at home, at least America was winning.
What in hell was Freeman doing?
What Freeman was doing was waiting for the brand new M-1 Abrams-1 Block 3 automatic loader, modular-armor, main battle tanks, which at fifty-one tons versus the old sixty-plus could go faster and fight harder but which were now sitting cluttered dockside, the U.S.A.’s power failures meanwhile paralyzing communications not only from the Pentagon to the West Coast but even within the Pentagon itself.
Meanwhile Freeman’s G-2 was informing him that General Cheng’s ChiCom buildup along the Manchurian border was continuing unabated, that Second Army must expect an all-out crossing of the Amur within seven days. There was another “minor” impediment, as Freeman, with calculated understatement, put it.
“They can hit me from the Turpan depression with intermediate missiles if I move south to engage the Manchurian west flank.”
“Yes, they can,” Norton confirmed.
“Your estimate, gentlemen?” Freeman asked, looking about the forward headquarters Quonset hut at Chita.
“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” a young colonel proffered. Norton waited for the explosion to come for the officer having stated the obvious, but it didn’t.
“Colonel’s quite correct,” Freeman conceded, his face drawn and tired from looking at the maps. “Well, gentlemen, there’s only one thing to do!”
“Sir?” Norton asked.
“Take a walk.” And with that Freeman buttoned up his winter coat and pulled on his gloves.
“Sir?” It was Norton.
“Yes?”
“Think you’d better have two minders.”
“Whatever you think, Dick, but if the good Lord says your time’s come, so it has.” And with that, two nonplussed marksmen were sent out after him.
“Give him at least twenty yards,” Norton advised them. “Otherwise he’ll start giving you the gears for being goddamned nannies. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. Ah, Colonel Norton, sir?”
“Yes?”
“I sure hope he thinks of something to get us out of this—”
A clump of needle ice crashed from a pine onto the roof of a Humvee.
“So do I,” Norton said.
Freeman hadn’t even turned at the ice smashing on the Humvee; he was already doing what Norton called his “Napoleon”: head down, walking stick behind him, trudging through the crisp spring snow. The PLA was south and east of him along the Manchurian hump, and no word yet from the SAS/D team he’d sent in to sound out the Mongolians’ disposition.
East of Nalayh, over four hundred miles south of the confluence of the Manchurian-Siberian-Mongolian border, the wind was increasing and Aussie Lewis, after having floated down into the gritty dust storm, had to rely entirely on his GPS to know exactly where he was. He lost sight of the Talon completely, hearing only its fading roar as it, together with its fighter escort, withdrew, heading back north to Second Army’s territory.
Aussie wasn’t bitter — had he been David Brentwood he would have done the same thing, ordering the Talon to withdraw, not having enough time to try another FUST.
As Aussie unclipped his chute, the head herdsman moved quickly over to him, yelling excitedly. Perhaps he had heard a chopper, but no, now the Talon had gone, the dogfights had ended, and all he could hear was the banshee howl of the wind. Then he saw it, suspended by two parachutes, a blurred orange image at first in the dust but its archetypal image more definite now as it struck the ground, bounced, and flipped on its side.
“You bloody beaut!” Aussie shouted, immediately running to and unharnessing the Talon’s farewell gift. It was no guarantee he’d get away, but at least there was a chance. The headman recognized it of course as a motorcycle, but he had only seen some of the motor and sidecar units of the Chinese army in earlier skirmishes with the PLA over southern borders — not one like this.
“You bloody beaut!” Aussie repeated. It was a khaki-painted Kawasaki-250D8, which had won out against the Harley-Davidson and Yamaha for the marine corps and army contract. Used mainly in Desert Storm for recon and courier service during radio silence among the most forward units, the Kawasaki had performed well. Aussie cut the chute straps with his ankle K-bar knife, heaving the 296-pound bike up onto its stand, and could hear the tight slosh of a full tank, another jerrican of gas strapped to the left side of the pinion seat, a carbine in a right hand reverse cavalry leather holster.
With a liquid-cooled engine, the Kawasaki could give him eighty-plus miles per hour over the rock-strewn plains, the motorcycle modified for the army so as to have wider, better-grip tires, especially in sand, with a forty-six-tooth rear-tires sprocket, giving it two better than the standard forty-four and so reducing its gearing. And the biggest plus of all, given Aussie’s position, was that the Kawasaki had a liquid-cooled engine. This made it not only more environmentally friendly in reducing fuel emission but more importantly for Aussie made it about the quietest bike in its class.
Aussie figured if he could average fifty miles per hour through the dust storm that had now enveloped him and the enemy alike and could drive on through the night, he could make the border in eight to ten hours. But first he went back to the bullet-riddled Spets chopper and helped himself to a Makarov pistol, an AK-74 with six clips, and a dozen Spets F-1 grenades. He stuck two of them in the pockets of his del and the others in the right saddlebag with a water canister and the dried camel meat the herdsmen had given him.
Using a canvas strap from the parachute he made a sling for the AK-74, the Makarov 9mm in his belt beneath his del, a pair of ten-power night-vision binoculars around his neck, and packed on — or rather, packed around — the pinion seat more cargo from the immobilized chopper, namely an RPG-7D antitank rocket launcher with five rockets. Then, courtesy of the dead Spets chopper pilot, he took off the man’s Spets uniform, including the telltale blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, rolling it into a bundle that he stuck between the seat and gas tank. The herdsman was grinning appreciatively and shook Aussie’s hand vigorously as if it were a water pump.
Two minutes later, Aussie was lost to the herdsmen’s view in a muffled roar as the Kawasaki headed east from the gher caravan that itself was already on the move. Checking his GPS, Lewis knew exactly where he was within ten meters because of the satellite triangulation. What he couldn’t tell was what he’d meet along the way, and soon he was too far from the ghers to see what happened a half hour later when a Spets chopper out of Nalayh blasted the moving caravan of ghers to a stop, then landed and took prisoners.
In the swirling dust storm they asked them which route me American had taken and how was he traveling — by camel, by foot — how! The Siberian fighters, probably Fulcrums, though having driven off the Americans, had reported the three dirigibles that were part of the single-line extraction technique. Where was the fourth? Was he heading north or east for the border — along the Indermeg road or even further east towards Choybalsan on the Herlen River before turning north?
The terrified Mongolians reminded the Spets that the Mongolian People’s Republic was a friend of the Siberians and told the Spets that they did not know what direction the fourth American took. The Spets loaded them all aboard the Hind, flew it to two thousand feet above the dust cloud, where it looked like a huge, bug-eyed dragonfly, and threw all of them — seven adults and three children — out, then headed toward Choybalsan. Flying through the dust storm they could see nothing, but one never knew — a sudden shift in the wind here and there might suddenly reveal a break.
The Spets were in no mood for any more noncooperation, especially by Mongolians whom they no longer thought of as the master race that had terrorized and subdued their world under Genghis Khan but as there lackeys of Siberian will. They glimpsed another gher village during a break in the dust cover, landed, and asked about the Americans. The herdsmen, eleven of them, had nothing to tell them and were quickly shot. Then two Spets held the youngest female — a girl of about thirteen — while a third Spets raped her by locking his arms about her neck, barely able to enter her because she was bucking so much, the other two Spets laughing until finally she was exhausted and groaning like a wounded animal, bleeding, having no option but to submit to his will. Then they shot her.
It was clear they’d get no information from the Mongolians, who were obviously more favorably disposed to the Americans, but at least from now on word would spread quickly through the ghers that if the Spets wanted information you’d better give it to them. The Hind took off through the dust cloud. “What are we looking for?” the Spets pilot asked. “Is he on a camel, horseback, walking, or what?”
“We don’t know,” the praporshnik, an Afghanistan veteran, snapped. “We’ll shoot anything that moves. Anything. Understood?”
“Da!”
Frankly, Aussie told the wind, he would have preferred a Harley MT-350cc — better suspension. Besides, he’d always fancied himself a bit of a rake on an Electra Glide in blue and like Fonda — not his commie fawning sister — out on the road on the old Harley-Davidson. Still, the Kawasaki’s whine was just fine and, head down, goggles firmly attached, he was making good time, though learning that driving virtually blind — visibility down to fifteen feet — took more courage than he’d thought. Man, if his Olga by the Volga with the big tits could only see him now — whoa! Through the dust he could see a darker dust, looking like a huge scab, a stationary Soviet-built armed personnel carrier — a BMP-1.
Aussie knew the odds immediately: a crew of three, three passengers with assorted nasty small arms, a main turret gun—73mm, killing range twenty-five hundred yards. Also armed with a coaxial 7.62mm and antitank guided weapons. Stifling inside, most of its infantry resting outside. Its hull armor plus or minus 19mm. Only thing in his favor was that the Kawasaki was almost twice as fast as the BMP-1, and if they’d seen him, by the time they’d loaded up with their full complement of infantry, he’d be a quarter mile ahead anyway.
“Say bye-bye to Ivan!” Aussie told the Kawasaki and gave it full throttle. The next minute he was airborne, the bike skidding furiously in front of him, the right side of his del shredded to pieces by the gravel rash, the spill driving the Makharov hard into his groin. He had the bike up, its wheels still spinning, and was resaddled in a matter of seconds, pride a little punctured, the earth exploding about him with small-arms fire. But then he was flat out again, into the curtain of dirt.
The BMP’s 7.62 started chattering as if it felt left out, followed by the steady thud-thud-thud of the 73mm, but the shots were wild and well behind him. But of course now the word would be out: the lone SAS was on a motorcycle heading east for Choybalsan. The BMP didn’t even start its engine, no doubt radioing his position to the next roadblock as he rode parallel to the Herlen River road.
Aboard the Talon combat aircraft David Brentwood, Salvini, and Choir Williams were grim-faced at having had to leave Aussie behind. The only good news they could give Freeman’s headquarters was that from what they’d seen, the Mongolians were clearly anti-Chinese, and that Marshal Yesov, if he did have any plans of attacking the Americans from the west, wasn’t going to get much help from the Mongolian militia or the regulars; otherwise the Mongolian president would have had the foothills and the flats around the Hentiyn Nuruu swarming with patrols looking for the SAS/D team. Instead, he’d left it entirely up to his Siberian “guests.”