April (75 page)

"What are their orders if we are destroyed?"

"If you are gone you
can't
give us any orders." The feed from The
Home Boy
came back, with Eddie speaking to answer Jon. "If you are gone we plan to blast the snot out of every fault line on the North American Continent and in China, until they're emulsified like they went through a blender. I mean not a wall standing anywhere, if it can be done. They say the last time the New Madrid fault really let loose, the Mississippi ran backwards. It should be something to see, even from orbit. That's the price they'll pay if Home is gone." Nobody had any ready reply.

The counter ran down to the zero point where the missiles should be at the theoretical horizon. It would be a little before they came from behind enough atmosphere to see. They all tried to picture what Eddie had described doing, would mean below. Most of them wouldn't really want a few hundred million killed to avenge them, but it was true, if they were gone they couldn't stop Eddie. Their eyes all shifted to the radar and waited. When the numbers had climbed back up to twenty seconds, the radar acquired a target and a yellow icon appeared on the radar screen, with a small bracket beside it on the screen filled with changing data. Almost immediately another icon appeared beside it, actually touching with a similar bracket. The projectors had been programmed to fire as soon as they had a radar target and the count of their cycles immediately started scrolling up in a box in a corner of the screen. The first digit a blur as it added twenty a second. They fired on the missiles for a long handful of minutes, everyone watching in grime silence and they were still far back over the western Pacific, right about where the terminator was, when both icons on the screen changed to flashing red and all the data numbers zeroed out and then disappeared. What caught their eye and swung every head around though, was the other screen's view through the telescope.

A ragged edged black circle, surrounded by glaring white, had appeared in the upper left corner of the screen, as the photo sensor in the telescope burned out from the light input. Also leading away from the halo of glare, a distinct thin thread of light was drawn from the upper atmosphere, back down to the land below. The clouds were sparse and they could see enough shape to tell it was the southern extremity of the Japanese Islands. The terminator had gotten far enough west now, so the outline of the island was plain and the line went straight to the Southern part of Kysushu, where Japan had extensive space resources in Kagoshima.

The glare and brilliant thread faded away, but the black blob remained now permanently on the feed. The sensor was not just temporarily overloaded, it had a patch burned off its surface by the intensity of the flare.

"Hoy Chi Mama!" Eddie's voice rang through on the com. "What the heck nailed those suckers? We're turned with the view ports looking back at you. We were both looking down at the screens and it still left us with purple flash blobs floating in front of our eyes. We'll be OK, but what a shock. At least I don't see any ionizing radiation count on our boards"

"I don't know." Allen admitted. "I guess we're not the only ones with some secret weapons. See you when you come around. See how many of those missiles you can get before they try this again. We're still here OK," he added as
Home Boy
, much lower and faster, was about to go over the horizon ahead of them.

"Home - you still there?" The
Happy Lewis
was coming over the opposite horizon behind them, all worried. "We saw a flash just over our horizon, that lit the whole arc of the atmosphere up bright yellow and then faded out over two or three seconds. Are you guys OK?"

"We're OK Lewis. We appear to have received a little help."

"We got the flash on video. Wait until you see it." There was a pause. "You mean it wasn't you guys set them off?"

"We might be better off not saying anymore, in case someone can crack us," Jon said. "You'll understand when you see our video. Make a few more passes on their missiles and come on home. You both need a rest and I don't think anybody will be shooting at us again very quickly. Maybe it's time to let the Norté Americanos stew a little, before we do much more."

April looked at the black circle permanently seared in the telescope sensor, until they could replace it. Japan was almost gone now, over the horizon behind them on the edge of the screen. "I know one thing," she informed all her friends. "It's a damn good thing we didn't go to war with Japan." They all looked at the blob and pictured a line from the mystery weapon ascending to vaporize Home, instead of the missiles. How many passes of Japan could their ships have made before this weapon swatted them out of the sky? Nobody disagreed with April.

Chapter 34

The scooters both docked late that evening and the crews took a break, but they were worried enough at having both together as a target, that two of Dave's men took the
Home Boy
off, to park it at a higher orbit for safety, while the
Happy Lewis
was home. They slipped away as soon as it was provisioned with basics and while over the Pacific, as they thought there were no NA radars active there now.

April was happy to see their shattered front door finally replaced, when she went home. The weld around the frame was still unpainted and a hot metal smell still lingered. After a cleanup and meal, she joined most everyone in the temporary command center, at the Lewis cubic on the hub.

Allen and Heather were conferring about something and called everyone to look.

"These are all separate images we correlated," she explained. "Allen looked at these sort of helicopters and fan platforms, because they are used to ferry VIP's out of the city in emergencies. He went back over the times immediately after we started shooting and cataloged all the vehicles like this, an automated search could find on the memory." She showed a pattern of green dots over North America. "Now some of them if you project their flight path are going to a known airbase." Perhaps a third of the dots disappeared as she said it. "A number of them are going to sites we fired on, in our first few passes. In some cases we even see them later on the ground, beside the target, or nearby at a hospital."

Most of the other dots disappeared. "Now, of those left, a few go to something we could identify. This one for example," she drew a yellow circle around it with a cursor, "It went to the small New England town, known for having the cottage of the Vice President. We doubt he would go there in an emergency, so we are guessing he sent his wife and family home as a safe haven. They are certainly not a valid military target. If we eliminate all of those, it leaves these."

The map now had a dozen dots spread far apart. "A couple we see landed and have no idea why. Maybe they broke down. A few disappeared and we have no idea where they landed. They must have been hangared quickly out of sight, in barn, cave, or something. I suspect a few were stolen by crew, to go AWOL. These three however," she drew a circle around them, "are closer together than all the rest, disappeared at the end and they are all converging on a point where there is nothing."

She hit a few keys and there were three dashed lines crossing over an area of wooded mountain. "The interesting thing is, if you examine this area there are just a few homes and farms we can see, but none of them in about a twelve square mile area have any cattle or current cultivated crops, or active items like farm machinery working. There are a few vehicles near buildings, but they don't move at all. The buildings have no thermal signature." She drew an outline of the area. "There are however several points, at which we occasionally see heavy vehicles, which must be military recon, or big four wheel drive trucks." She peppered the valleys, with a necklace of small purple icons.

"What it looks like to Allen here, who assures me he is a genuine West Virginia hillbilly, is this ring of hills all forms a perimeter." She drew a smaller circle inside the larger one. "So the patrols on the inside, are not visible at all to the world outside the ring. You would have to penetrate past the ring of hills to encounter the patrols and it would be very unlikely to do so in innocence."

"Allen assures me, that although it may only be two or three kilometers in a straight line, the terrain is so difficult it would be three times that distance and up and down hard grades to penetrate from any outer point to a patrol. All this means we can assume a very important deep bunker for something, is inside the central hill."

"We are proposing, that  when we restart bombardment, we saturate this hill just as we did Cheyenne Mountain. We don't have the capacity to put a bolt straight down through every square meter, so we propose to start walking lines through it from the horizontal, as we can see it to aim, starting at the valley floor level and walking up. They probably have an entry down at the patrol road level and excavated from the road level up in the mountain, to avoid having to keep it pumped out."

"Sounds reasonable," Ajay agreed. "What else are you going to hit, that will be different than what you've already done? Especially to force some acknowledgment they even have a problem. They're starting to irritate me with this 'You're not worth noticing,' attitude. They may regret pushing us to make a point they can't ignore."

"What do you folks suggest?" Allen asked. "If we destroy refineries and power plants and dams, it's almost winter and without heat or power civilians will die. We already have damaged their economy badly, taking the satellites out. We can't do much more, without killing far too many innocent people."

"We should continue destroying commercial aircraft just sitting on the ground." Jeff said. "Not as a primary target, but when we don't have anything else in sight to hit. If people can't get a flight they notice, but there are just so many planes, it's hard for two ships to hit enough secondary targets, to cripple such a huge system. I'd refuse to hit them in the air, even if it wasn't against the Geneva Conventions. Even on the ground tell the gunners to try to hit the wings, so we don't hit civilians in the cabins. They may be loading, or have workers servicing them."

"What is symbolic? What can we remove that will have little real impact, but inconvenience them and shame them?" Jon asked.

"Knock down every bridge on the Mississippi river," suggested Steve Lewis. "It would cut the country in two and they'd have to load stuff on boats to go across. People just take bridges for granted, even when they need to cross them every day to work. A big river town usually spreads along both banks, because they cross so easily. It will really hurt the local economy and be a wakeup call, but not kill anyone if you announce it. Nobody has to be on any of the bridges, unless they are amazingly stupid. Let them try to hide that," he challenged.

"There are a couple bridges which are the defining feature of an area. They are artistic or historic." Jeff suggested. "Take down the Golden Gate, the Brooklyn Bridge, cut the Seven Mile Bridge in the Keys and the Mackinac in Michigan, maybe the Tampa Bay Skyway too. Nobody will starve to death from it, but it will change their lives."

"I think we should ask them to surrender first," Heather offered, looking at Jon.

"I've got no problem with that," he replied, feeling accused by her look.

"There are still a lot of military targets we have not hit," April ventured. "What else can we do? Go through and clean out all the storage for armored vehicles and robots and other weapons?"

"Trouble is," Jon explained, "if we make them too weak for a war down there on the earth's surface, we will have to guard them from being invaded or overrun by some other Earth nation. There could be civil war easily start in Mexico or Canada. We don't want to install a foreign government there. I don't especially want the duty to have to protect them, because we weakened them too far."

"How about targeting something like a monument?" April asked "What has no real utility, but sentimental value? Something they can't just move, if we announce it as a target."

"Washington monument on the Mall in D.C., Mount Rushmore," Steve suggested. Other piped in and suggested a number of targets. "The Statue of Liberty," suggested Jeff in turn.

Jon and a couple others looked hurt. "No Jeff, we don't want to hurt Lady Liberty. She was a gift from the French. We'd rather restore her ideals, than bust her."

 Jeff seemed embarrassed then.

April filled the awkward void. "Did anyone ever thank the Japanese?"

"No. I'm not even sure how to go about it." Allen admitted. "We might cause some problems for them, if we even acknowledge the help publicly."

"Do you mean, there has not been anything in the Japanese media about it? If we could see them firing a beam from orbit, plenty of people had to see it from the ground."

"Oh sure, there were news broadcasts within minutes about a huge explosion in space and comments about the continuing hostilities between Home and North America. But not a word to indicate the Japanese had anything to do with it. I'd say they don't want open hostilities with NA if they can avoid it. I'm surprised they could be getting away with it. Why ruin it for them?"

* * *

"Surely there is a video or radar image somewhere, which shows this weapon in action." President Hadley insisted. "People have their phones everywhere. Amateurs go out and look through telescopes. Every time there is a plane crash it seems like there is a video, sometimes two or three, of it."

The officer sent to brief him was a mere Colonel. Everyone else had found reason to beg off, afraid the messenger would be leaving under arrest again. "Sir, we have twenty solid eye witnesses from our military personnel, seeing some kind of connection between the explosion and the ground. We just have no mechanical record. Our optical sat in LEO, which would have covered that, was taken out by someone when the Lewis was removing the higher ones. It went around to the far side of the world and just never came back. There was not even a debris field on radar, when it was supposed to come around again".