Chapter 367: Nuclear Aftermath

Thursday, June 7, 2007 (Continued)

Being the responsible people they were, the reporters agreed to keep the news secret to avoid panicking The People, instead quietly phoning The Authorities to report the presence of a nuclear bomb in downtown... - Oops! I appeared to have slipped into a weird parallel dimension (correction: an "opposite dimension"). Wait a second while I pull myself back to reality.

I'm back now. As a general rule, DC-based political reporters don't know a great deal about nuclear physics - or much else come to that, although they do have encyclopedic knowledge of all the bars in central DC and they dress very well - but the morning's news about the F-15s crashing into the Weapons Storage Area at Minot AFB had made them all aware that Minot's WSA stored nuclear weapons. That fact plus the tone of the Guardian Angel's note added up to an EXTREMELY disturbing possibility. Some of the reporters owned handheld gizmos which were capable of accessing the internet (for email purposes rather than fact-checking, because they're POLITICAL reporters). The vans had laptops with internet access, and all the reporters had cellphones to call their studios: "Hi, it's Sandy here. Can you google 'W80' for me please. What is it? 'A small thermonuclear warhead'? Okay, thanks. By the way, can I put in for some vacation time please? I'm thinking of taking a trip to Fiji. Right now works for me."

Meanwhile the cameramen had been doing their job. They'd missed the package's silent arrival in the plaza, but they'd filmed the casing sitting there, the Guardian Angel's appearance, and the reporters floating toward the note. Some of the cameramen had zoomed in on the note before it became obscured by reporters' legs. Some of the reporters had pretty legs, so the cameras tended to linger on those as there was nothing else to film.

Then the heads on top of the pretty legs found out what a W80 was, so the pretty legs, and the other legs too, turned away and RAN! The heads screaming, "It's a BOMB! A NUCLEAR BOMB! RUN!"

Being the responsible people they were, the network producers getting the live camera feeds decided to keep the news secret to avoid panicking The People, instead quietly phoning The Authorities to report the presence of... - Oops! That damned opposite dimension got me again.

The public had the right to know and it'd make for FANTASTIC ratings, so all across the country: "NEWSFLASH! NEWSFLASH! BREAKING NEWS! We have unconfirmed reports that moments ago the Guardian Angel deposited an as yet unexploded nuclear bomb in Freedom Plaza, central Washington DC, a short distance from the White House. Repeat: There is an as yet UNEXPLODED NUCLEAR BOMB IN CENTRAL DC! We cross live to our reporter on the spot, Sandy Johnson. Sandy? Are you there, Sandy?..."

Not everyone ran away, as some of them didn't or wouldn't believe it could be what it seemed to be, so some of the networks continued to get live feeds. Cameramen are pretty staunch guys, standing next to a nuclear bomb requiring more than your average degree of staunchness. Most of the networks were able to 'reassure' - while actually scaring the shit out of - the people that the unconfirmed nuclear bomb was just sitting there.

Despite the reassurances, it would be fair to say that it was NOT "work as normal" in DC. Many people, then even more people as the report gained confirmation, then hundreds of thousands of people, and then pretty much everyone else, fled the city. That was especially true of the inhabitants of the central city, most of them getting about twenty feet before gridlock stopped their cars. Some people in other cities even fled those cities, just out of panic.

The networks showed the note, explaining that it was a FUTURE threat. That probably kept some people from fleeing, but it didn't seem that way judging by the videos of the bumper-to-bumper conditions on the streets and highways out of DC.

I hadn't bothered finding out whether the President was in the White House today. I didn't want to take any risk by asking or snooping for that information, especially as it didn't really matter. He'd understand the warning just as clearly whether he was in his office or not. As it happened, he wasn't in the Oval Office when the newsflashes intruded on normal programming, but he was having a meeting elsewhere in the White House. It only took seconds for the White House to get confirmation that W80s look like the picture they were staring at, and that the five serial numbers matched those of warheads that were supposed to be in Minot's armory. That was enough to utterly disrupt the President's schedule for the day. The Secret Service GRABBED him, and he was outta there as fast as they could get Marine One onto the lawn.

The secret service agents, the pilots and the President were shitting themselves during the evacuation because Archangel Michael had warned the guards at Andrews AFB that the President shouldn't fly if Archangel Michael was unhappy. Recent events had provided the more astute analysts with a good hint that the Guardian Angel was probably unhappy, but by helicopter was the only way to evacuate the President fast enough to get him outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb that was effectively parked on his front lawn. Everyone on the helicopter was very happy to be leaving ground zero, but they also knew all too well how their helicopter would do in a Marine One vs. Guardian Angel dogfight. There was also the VERY real possibility that the angel had done what it'd done specifically to get the President into a helicopter. There were VERY scared people in the chopper.

The President could have hidden in an underground safe room, but the angel apparently had four more W80s and no one wanted the President to be in a known location given the angel's letter's enthusiastic repeating of "detonate W80 near that organization's ultimate leader." It had waltzed through Air Force bases completely indifferent to every weapon fired at it, and had obtained the W80s out of security equivalent to what the President would be hiding in, so no one thought the angel would have any trouble dropping a warhead at the President's feet if those were left in a known location. The President had to FLEE!

The other workers whose actions are worthy of note were a couple dozen of the FBI agents in the J. Edgar Hoover Building just a quarter mile down the street from the Freedom Plaza. They RAN up the street and surrounded the warhead, sending pictures of its ID plate back to the office, and standing guard.

The Government keeps sophisticated Geiger counters on hand in case of something like this, several of which were at FBI headquarters. The nearby Secret Service has them too, but the FBI got theirs to the bomb first. It only took moments for the FBI to verify that the casing contained radioactive material, and still the agents stood guard. They might know that they were safe from casual radiation - the same as I'd been safe to fly around with five of them - but they didn't know whether the Guardian Angel had rigged it to explode at any moment. They had to have big balls to stand guard over it.

[[They were "protecting the United States of America". Ironically that's the same attitude that had caused this mess. The UAV had been stationed over our home because the FBI considered they had the right and need to "protect America" from Archangel Michael initially, and then the Guardian Angel. National loyalty, combined with the arrogances of sovereignty and unaccountable power had caused them to do as they saw fit, with little regard to having to face any consequences for it.]]

That the serial numbers matched and the casing contained radioactive material meant the shit had well and truly hit the fan. The biggest possible size of fan and truckloads of shit.

The Government had contingency plans for a nuclear bomb being smuggled into the city, so they put those plans into action. Some parts of those plans were easy to carry out, such as the evacuation of essential personnel, fetching the right sort of bomb squad, putting the Air Force on high alert in case it had to go bomb another country, scrambling lots of fighters so they could scream back and forth over the city to look impressive, reviewing the videotapes from security cameras to find out who'd left the bomb (that was a little tricky in this case), and a whole multitude of other actions.

[The videotape did eventually result in the tag of the motorcycle I'd used being traced, as were the tags of every vehicle within a thousand feet of Freedom Plaza. That motorcycle's tags led investigators to its registered owner, a member of the Allentown chapter of the MS-13 gang. It had a very bad reputation and an ambition to be the biggest, baddest gang in America. There was a mutually disagreeable conversation between the Allentown Bad Boys and the Washington Serious Men. The Serious Men won and the full story of how the bike had gone missing emerged. The investigators considered it sufficiently angel-like for that to be the most likely explanation of how the bomb had been delivered. The investigative discovery didn't make any more real progress, getting stuck on questions like "Why would the Guardian Angel choose to travel by motorcycle?", "Who was the fat guy on the bike?", "Can the Guardian Angel possess people like Archangel Michael claimed he could?"]

Part of the Government's contingency plan called for trying to capture the culprits. Sealing all the exits from the city would be ideal, but the Government knew that hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of Washingtonians would disagree with not being allowed to flee. Roadblocks were put in place, with vehicles and people being tested for trace radiation before being allowed to proceed.

I'd suspected that I might be sealed in by roadblocks, a suspicion that was confirmed by the sight blob I had scouting ahead. I saw the cops in plenty of time for me to turn away before they saw me. I'd seen that they were waving a wand-type thing at people and it wasn't hard to guess what it was. Having spent several hours in the close company of five nuclear warheads I doubted I'd come up clean, but even if I'd been sure I would, I couldn't go through the roadblock. I didn't have any ID with me and I didn't want to lift my visor or remove my helmet because Ron Fisher/Mark Anderson was too well known.

With a sight blob a few hundred feet above me, it was easy for me to navigate away. Being on a motorcycle helped too, although they're not as good at dodging traffic as flying sleds.

#6: <I think we have to get under cover. The FBI could get the license plate numbers off all the vehicles that were near Freedom Plaza when the bomb appeared and put them on an alert list.>

#13: <We can't leave the bike to be examined, so how about we try to get close to the water now and see if we can slip into it, bike and all. We'll submarine away and let the bike sink when the water is deep enough.>

#20: <Agreed. We could find another boat to listen to TV from. That'd be easier than using a private home because the city is too built up around here.>

I headed east until I reached the water. Some scouting around took me to Daingerfield Island, a mile south of Ronald Reagan National Airport, although accessed off completely different streets as I didn't want to face any airport security at the moment. The island had a small marina at the north end, which was far too busy for me. People would notice if a guy on a motorcycle rode off the end of the jetty.

Other than the marina, road access to the riverbank was very limited. That was great for me because I didn't want anyone else to be there. Most of the island was brush and trees so I stopped on the side of the road in an uninhabited part of the small island, waited for no traffic, then used NP to push the brush to either side and float the bike and me through the gap. From above it'd look like I was pushing the bike along a path, even though I was really a couple of feet above the ground. There were quite a few fighters zooming back and forth overhead by now, some at low level although I'd waited for a gap between those before making this move. I was confident that the high altitude planes would never spot the slight impossibility of what I was doing.

I got to the riverbank and it provided me with all the privacy I wanted. Unfortunately the river itself didn't provide me with the depth I wanted, since it got deeper very slowly. I'd have to go out about fifty feet to get two feet of depth, and out about four hundred feet before it'd be deep enough for me to be invisible from above. That problem was fairly easily overcome though. I created an NP-tray about fifteen feet long and five feet wide, with sides an inch high. I lowered it slowly into the water about a dozen yards out, settled it on the bottom, then bulldozed the mud around it onto it.

I waited a minute for the mud to settle, then slowly lowered a lid onto it. I lifted it to the surface and looked down at it from above. It didn't look sufficiently murky, so I lowered it to the bottom again, canceled the top, raised the sides to be two inches high, then scooped up dozens of small boxes of mud from the bottom around it, tipping them into the box.

I waited for the mud to settle, then put another lid on it. It looked much better when I inspected it on the surface this time. I curved the sides down, to make a two-foot high dome shape.

A check showed no one coming from the land, no boats close enough to matter, and the only planes were at very high altitudes. The bike and I lay down on an NP-mat which I covered to make an airtight box that was as vertically thin as possible. We slid toward the water, as the 'water' seemed to slide toward and over the top of us. As soon as we were inside the water-filled dome, the dome reversed its direction and we collectively slid into the real water.

I kept the submarine moving quickly and almost sliding along the bottom to be as deep as possible. The dome's top protruded as I headed for the middle of the river, but I thought it wouldn't be too bad. From side-on it looked like a weird swell that quite rapidly diminished in height and area. From above, the dome itself wasn't noticeable, only the wake it was making and that there was an outline of an unclear dark shape under the water. As I got deeper, the outline got vaguer. The dome wasn't attached to my submarine, so water flowed between the submarine and dome, obscuring my and the bike's shapes even more, especially after I pushed the air out of the dome to let it fill with the dirty water we were passing through. I didn't have a dozen fighters scream down to fill me with cannon shells, so I guess it worked. That was good.

When I thought I was deep enough, I moved the dome to the side then looked down on myself from four hundred feet up. I couldn't see even a blur of me or the bike, so I canceled the dome and resumed my journey.

When the water was another few feet deeper, I paused to expand my submarine by stopping, raising a snorkel, etc. I'd initially made the submarine very flat to have as much water over me as possible, but that was now less of an issue than comfort was, because this was going to be a long trip. With room to move, and my feet no longer tangled up with the bike, I canceled the snorkel and resumed the journey.

It was nearly two hundred miles from my entry point to Virginia Beach, as the crow swims, which is following the deepest part of the channel. The Air Force was on high alert and very busy. They had a great deal of real estate and airspace to cover so didn't worry me much, not even the low level passes by pairs of fighters mattering now that I was invisible underwater. The Navy was a nuisance though. It wasn't anything like as frantic as the Air Force, but still inconvenienced me. I'm not sure what they thought they were looking for since everyone thought the Guardian Angel had no body and could 'fly' through the ground, but whatever they were looking for, I didn't want them to find me. The two hundred miles I estimated my travel distance to be was clearly going to be an underestimate, as it didn't allow for the zigzags I had to make to avoid getting near any occupied boat, many of which were busy Navy boats.

My underwater speed is mostly governed by how much of my force is lost to overcoming buoyancy. A large submarines takes a great deal of 'holding down', leaving not much force for pushing it. (A large submarine is also constrained in depth, not being able to go much below fifty feet, because I can't make the walls strong enough without running out of minds to push me down, but that wasn't an issue now.) With it having to contain the bike, my submarine was quite large, so its speed was constrained.

The water was initially too shallow for me to risk going at even my bike-reduced top speed to avoid creating a wake on the surface, so I averaged about 10 mph for the first three or four hours, although my speed was gradually picking up as the depth increased. The water was soon deep enough for me to speed up even more, but I didn't have any push left after I got up to about 15 mph. Carrying the bike was slowing me down, so it was time to look for a good opportunity to get rid of it. I preferred to do it in water as deep as possible and as far from the central city as possible. I was going to burn the bike before letting it sink, so that meant smoke. Anything unusual near the city would probably get some rapid interest at the moment, but sixty miles away from ground zero was a very different situation. The naval activity had taken a while to peak - while the crews rushed to their boats, presumably - but it had peaked and had been decreasing recently, either with time or because I'd gotten farther away from the city.

I found an old, unoccupied catamaran at anchor, moved myself under it and ascended to be near the surface to free up as many NP-fingertips as possible. I split my submarine in two (normally a bad thing to do to a submarine you're in, but okay with my type if done carefully). The bike and backpack was in one box; me, my sheet, helmet and map in the other box. Then I SMASHED the bike, making as many of the big pieces into smaller pieces as I could. I created a large air intake from the surface down to the bottom of the box and several small chimneys that ran from the top of the box to multiple locations between the cat's hulls, to spread the heat out. Then I set fire to the pool of gas. WHOOSH.

I splashed water on the underside of the cat because it got hot pretty fast, according to the infrared-sensing radio blob I had looking out for that.

I didn't need to let the bike burn out, just enough to destroy any of my DNA on it. That'd probably been achieved in the first few seconds, but I gave it a minute and then blocked the vents.

When the fire was out, I descend down to a depth of twenty feet and resumed my travel down the river dropping off pieces of bike as I went.

About 6pm, I decided it was time to watch some TV. I was bored and curious to see if anything interesting had happened today. I found a suitable boat and did the usual playing around with the electric switches to get the TV going.

It must've been a slow news day because there only seemed to be a single topic worth talking about, although most of the people were yelling rather than talking. The Government's many politicians weren't sure who to scream bloody murder at, but the Air Force, angel and "to the Heavens" came in for a lot of outrage. Politicians were screaming at each other too. They were genuinely very upset, as were the reporters they were talking to and the commentators back at the studios, because all of them and many of their families would've been killed had the w80 exploded.

Non-Governmental Washingtonians were screaming too, some at the Government and/or Air Force for pissing off the angel by attempting to kill Mark Anderson's parents, and certainly at the Air Force for not guarding its nukes properly. Some were yelling at the angel for threatening them when it wasn't their fault if the Air Force attacked the Andersons.

The Air Force had chosen an interesting set of responses:

• To the accusation that they hadn't guarded their nukes properly, the Air Force said a politer version of, "Don't be silly, it's impossible to guard something from God."

• To the accusations that they'd attacked the Andersons, their answer was, "We've given a full report to the President. So far he's chosen not to release it."

• Apparently in response to the President continuing to not release the document that exonerated the Air Force, a REMARKABLY well-informed, retired, independently wealthy Air Force general was giving ALL those details to the media anyway. In a nutshell, he was saying, "The FBI did it!"

The FBI was saying, "We did not!" In response to further questions about whether they'd been using the UAV to spy on the Andersons with Northrop Grumman operating it - information courtesy of the well-informed retired general - the FBI was saying, "We did NOT attack the Andersons."

Northrop Grumman was saying, "We can't say anything. We've signed a confidentiality agreement." In answer to the reporter's next question, I learned that NG's confidentiality agreement even kept confidential who the agreement was with.

The President was in an "Undisclosed Location" and couldn't be reached for comment.

There were dozens of other opinions:

• "I KEEP telling you, it's the DEVIL! We've got to drive it out! Join me in prayer and send money to..."

• "The angel didn't set it off. It was just a warning. If no one attacks the Andersons, nothing bad will happen."

• "It's the President's fault!"

• "It IS NOT the President's fault!"

• "We shouldn't have nuclear weapons. This wouldn't have happened if they'd never been built in the first place."

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