The cameras and hot lights cut off, and we stood there for a moment, everyone thinking as hard as we could. None of us had any ‘eureka!’ moments, though. The technicians cleared away the equipment and left, with just Kim, the governor and I left. She looked at the two of us with a determined expression.
“See to it any ideas your people have are on my desk by noon, tomorrow. I want something to tell Dr. Atkins before evening.”
I glanced at Kim, who just shrugged and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Noon it is,” I said as we left.
I just hoped we could come up with something.
By 1 p.m. the next day, I’d come to two conclusions: there were a lot of very creative people in our bunker—which made sense, given the propensity for creativity in the Pacific Northwest before Z-Day—and that most of them were, quite possibly, certifiably insane. One person had even suggested a massive, jury-rigged dirigible. When reminded about the destination, to say nothing of the construction of such a vehicle, the suggestion was quickly rescinded.
“They want us to what?” asked Governor Gates, looking at Orville Seward, whose department had had some of the more… intriguing… ideas.
“They want us to take a container ship down there.”
“A container ship.”
“Yes.”
“To Antarctica.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it would certainly hold enough people.”
“Yes, ma’am. Except for part about needing a crew, fuel, and an icebreaker. And a
boat
.”
“Except for that, yes. I think we can safely put that one in the ‘no way in hell’ pile, Mr. Seward.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I grinned as I walked back over to the table with my coffee, setting one down for Kim and the governor as well, then taking my seat. “So, where does that leave us?” I asked, looking around at the board.
“Right back where we started, with the only plan I can see being at all viable.”
I sighed. “I don’t disagree, Governor, but it’s going to be hell to find even one plane big enough, much less a few, which is what we’ll need to bring everyone back
, and someone to fly them. Military maintenance ain’t exactly what it used to be. Those big planes are probably all rusted to shit by now and will never fly again.”
“Thank you, Mr. Blake, for that rousing vote of confidence. Still, with half a billion gallons of usable—or mostly usable—fuel burning a hole in the ground, we might as well get
some
use from it. Colonel, get on the horn to the other bases and see what they have in the area. Orville, I want you to go over the reports from the scouts who went to Lewis-McChord and see if they brought back anything useful. And, more importantly, if they noted any big planes over there.”
The governor turned to her assistant. “Daniel, find me a pilot, any pilot, who can handle the big planes. C-130s, that sort of thing. Sheila,” she continued, spearing the portly BioSciences head with her gaze, “I want you to draw me up a list of supplies that whomever we send will need to take with them. Dr. Latham, organize the medical supplies they’ll need. Those people could be hurt, and are definitely starving.”
Ted Latham was tall and thin, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and in every other possible way was the absolute stereotype of a scientist. Except he was also the best damned doctor I’d ever been to. Funny and likable, we’d had more than a drink or two together. As Gates turned to him, he leaned forward, putting down the pen and pad he’d been taking notes with. “That’s easily done, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” said Gates. “That’s it, folks. You all know what to do. Go find us some planes!”
“That’s right, Frank,” said Kim into her headset. She was sitting at the desk in our quarters as I walked in.
I kissed her on the forehead and sat down on the chair to one side, taking off my boots and leaning back.
“We’re looking for anything big.” She blushed, and I could hear laughing from the other end of the line, and I grinned as well. “Har har har. You know what I mean. Hey, I’m putting you on speaker; David’s here, too.” She punched a button on the phone and hung up the receiver.
“David? How ya doin’?”
I hadn’t spoken to Commander Anderson in quite some time. It was good to hear his voice. “I’m fine, sir. And you?”
“Oh, we’re good here. Not much to look at, but plenty of room. Hardly anybody anywhere around, now that the crazies have all left Austin.” Bunker Eight, where Anderson was stationed, was only about twenty-five or thirty miles outside Austin, Texas. “I hear from Kim that you’re looking for something big.”
I grinned again as I looked at Kim, who just rolled her eyes. “Yes, sir. We’ve got about nine hundred people we need to rescue, so the bigger the better, sir. And we’ll need pilots for it, too.”
“Well, about the only thing I can think of around here would be those big sumbitches they have down at the Air Force base in San Antonio.”
Kim and I both perked up at that. “What kind of equipment are we talking, commander?”
“I don’t remember what they’re called, but I remember seeing them on a recon a couple years back when the crazies were giving us some grief. These things were huge, must’ve been close to a football field in length.”
“Did you notice what kind of shape they were in? What was the Air Force base’s name? Can you—”
“Hold on there, son. Tell ya what: I’ll found out what I can, and then call you back. Things are quiet here, so we can send out a recon and see what’s what. Give me a couple of days, and I’ll get back to you.”
Kim spoke up. “Thanks, Frank. I’ll let Governor Gates in on the news. Talk to you soon.”
“Always a pleasure, Kim. Goodbye,” he said, hanging up.
I stood up and began pacing. “If he can find some usable planes down there, then we can fly down and get them in shape, then leave from there. I can’t remember any planes that are as long as a football field, but that doesn’t mean anything. Military hardware was never my strong suit, anyway.” I noticed that Kim was looking at me with a worried expression, and I stopped pacing. “What? What is it?”
“You said ‘we.’ ‘We can fly down.’”
Oops
. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
“So when were you going to tell me?”
I squatted down next to her chair, taking her hands in mine. “I hadn’t planned anything. It just… slipped out.”
“But you want to go, don’t you?”
I thought about it for a moment, and it sounded exciting, and interesting, and thrilling… and then I thought about it from her perspective. As the head of the military unit for Bunker One, she wouldn’t be able to go, especially since Beoshane could attack again at any moment. So if I went… well, I’d be thousands of miles away from her, in even more danger than she would be. I saw it as she was seeing it, and knew I couldn’t do that to her.
“I do, but I won’t, because you need me here, too. You need my help here more than those folks down there do.”
“We don’t have to decide anything right this minute, do we?” she asked.
“No, no, of course not. We don’t even know if Frank’s going to find anything or not. We’ll table it for now.”
She smiled and gave me a kiss. “Good.”
McMurdo Station
Dr. Jack Warner paced up and down the short length of the Shack’s control room, his boots making a clomping sound on the raised floor. His pants made a soft swishing sound as they rubbed together, the nylon coating of the cold-weather gear scratching against itself.
It was about to drive Jim Atkins out of his mind. “Will you stop that pacing!” he yelled, the outburst startling Warner.
“My apologies, Doctor. I simply loathe waiting,” Warner said, leaning against the only unoccupied wall, near the door to the structure’s exit. “Anything?”
“You’ve been here the entire time I have, Jack. You’d have heard it, too,” Atkins answered, exasperated. “So what do we do when they get here, Jack? It’s bad enough that we’re keeping the details from everyone else. Having only a couple of us coordinating makes things simple, nothing gets missed. I get that. And I know you only included me and Sabrina because we were in the damn room when the transmission came in. But you know as well as I do that there’s no plane big enough to take all of us at once, no matter how much we squeeze in. So who goes? Who stays? How do we choose?”
“It may not come to that. They’re in Seattle. Maybe there’s a boat they could bring. A container ship, even.”
Atkins looked at him as though he were mad. Which, in a very real sense, they
all
were. Or soon would be. “Do you have any idea what that would take? What it takes to sail one of those things? Even forgetting the complete lack of training or sea experience, where would they get the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gallons of fuel to get it here? And once they did, they couldn’t get to
us
without an icebreaker!” Atkins spun around in his chair in frustration, unable to look at Warner. “No, they’ll be coming by plane, if anything.”
“Maybe they could get another submarine.”
“And have it end up the same as the
Texas?
And that’s even assuming they could not only find a submarine, but also the people to get it down here, and that the submarine had the reinforced sail necessary to break through the ice. No, it’s not going to happen.”
The
USS Texas
had arrived several years before, but had become trapped in the harbor ice after an extended stay. With nowhere to go even if they did manage to free the sub, and no way to take everyone off the ice, the crew had decided to assimilate into life at McMurdo. Their additional power and onboard stores had been welcomed by the marooned scientists.
It was Warner’s turn to grumble. Just when he was about to speak, there was a squeal from the speakers and the voice of Governor Gates came over the line. “McMurdo Station, this is AEGIS Bunker One. Do you read?”
Atkins cleared his throat and glared at Warner, just on general principle. Warner held up his hands in surrender. “Bunker One, this is McMurdo. Good to hear your voice again, Angela.”
“Yours, too, James.” Atkins noticed Warner raising an eyebrow in surprise and reddened slightly, then ignored him as the governor continued. “We have some news about the rescue.”
“Oh?”
“We put our heads together up here and came up with the idea of flying the biggest plane we can find down to you,” she said. Atkins smiled hugely and stuck out his tongue at Warner, who merely rolled his eyes.
“We wondered about that, Angela. Some of our people here had crazy ideas about container ships and submarines.”
Gates laughed. “They’re not the only ones. We considered those ideas, briefly. There’s a naval sub base near here, but there’s only one boat in the pens, and it looks… well, not exactly serviceable. And you can forget the big ships—no crew, no fuel, no sea experience beyond what few Navy personnel we’ve got. By air is the only way, I’m afraid.”
“I understand, Angela. Any luck finding a plane?”
“There’s nothing at the Air Force base near us that would work, but one of the other bunkers we spoke with is checking out an Air Force Base outside San Antonio. They said they saw some, as their commander put it, ‘big sumbitches’ down there a couple years ago.”
Atkins and Warner looked at each other, stunned. Atkins recovered first. “Angela, did you say San Antonio?”
“Yes, why?”
“These ‘big sumbitches’ he mentioned… did he say
how
big?”
“Almost a football field long, I think he said. Why?” Warner could barely contain himself, Atkins noted, and he had to admit he was more than a little excited, too.
Even now, though, it was still too painful to talk about the failed Shaw expedition to Christchurch. “We had an Air Force major here once who flew in on a big plane called a C-5 that was about that long. He talked about training in San Antonio. If your people have found some of those…”
“I honestly don’t know, James. We expect to hear back in the next twenty-four hours from them, and I’ll let you know. Would one of those be big enough to get all your people out?”
“Not all at once, even if we were sitting on each other’s laps.”
There was a pause, and Atkins expected the others were likely wondering what to say next, as was he.
“How many will they hold?”
“I’m not sure, Angela. Not all of us, certainly. Maybe half?”
There was another pause, this one long enough that Atkins got nervous. “Angela?”
“Sorry, Jim, we’re just a bit disappointed up here.”
Warner snorted. “
She’s
disappointed?”
Gates continued, “I’ll ask them to look for two planes, then, if not three. I don’t know what we’ll find, but we’ll try, Jim. Maybe we can make two trips.”
Even as she said it, Jim could hear how hollow her words were. They both knew whoever stayed behind would likely die before a second trip could be made. Even assuming the plane made it down the first time. Still, it was something. “We can use all the help we can get,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear. Because we’re going to ask something from you in return, James.”
Atkins frowned. “I’m not sure what we’d have here that you could want, but whatever it is, it’s yours.”
“What we want is inside your head. The head of our science group in the bunker network says you may be the single most important person on Earth.”
Warner coughed, and Atkins waved him to silence. “Um, what?” he said, unable to think clearly in his surprise.
“I doubt you’d be familiar with her work, as she’s been in Army Research most of her career, but Dr. Mary Maxwell insists that you are more important than anything else down there. Specifically, your research. She says you’re the only one who could lead us to a cure for this prion disease.”
Atkins was stunned.
How could they know about my research? Who is this Maxwell person?
“I’m… uh, I’m flattered by her assertion. I had no idea anyone else knew about my research.”
“She said she’s been following it for years, and that you were a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize.”
Atkins laughed. “That’s a joke. They’d never give it to… well, never mind. I’m happy to provide her with all of my research, Angela. I’ll make sure it comes back with us.”