Chapter 35

South Nevada and environs

The 17^th Sustainment Brigade of the Nevada National Guard, specifically the 240th Engineer Company, the 277th Engineer Haul Platoon, the 777th Engineer Detachment and the 1864^th Transportation Company, had been working on helping to build power substations for several weeks when their assignment suddenly changed to string electric cable toward Las Vegas. In late January, the 1^st squadron of the 221^st Cavalry Regiment showed up – in numbers greater than the commander-in-chief of the Guard (the Governor of Nevada) had originally authorized.

Major Robert Waldspeil had thought that his men of the 17^th SB, were going to be assigned to guard duty at the recently constructed substations and at the dam itself, but his boss, General Robertson, neatly arabesqued around the Governor and had a 'surprise call up' for the 1^st of the 221^st. The 1-221 Cavalry, as they called themselves, were hardened soldiers, having had three tours in the sandbox of Iraq. They brought helicopters and light tanks to the party, allowing the 'sissy 17^th SB' to keep working, now on stringing wire. The 17^th SB were a sissy brigade since they 'only' had two tours in Iraq, building roads and clearing IEDs. The 17^th referred to the 1-221 Cav as 'copter jockeys who never had to put their boots down in the dust.' The annual inter-unit boxing matches were something to see.

When 1030 hours PST rolled around on 1 February, three small buses full of Chinese terrorists unloaded their passengers near the front gate of the SoCal substation, the LV substation and the Phx substation – the three main substations that handled 90% of the power coming out of the Hoover Dam complex. At each site, the 1-221 Cav barely had time to react when the first shoulder fired missiles came flashing overhead and the power stations were crippled.

Captain Leonard Histrol of the 1-221 Cav was sitting in the command tent, next to the Apache chopper sitting on the ground in the middle of the SoCal substation when he heard the missile hit the substation's command building. He'd been in that building only an hour earlier, getting an update on the security situation. All was quiet at the time. Now the building was in ruin; the twelve people who were working there, almost surely dead.

Histrol put his brain pot – his helmet – on and was fastening the chin strap while he talked. "Get the choppers up. Command comm, notify HQ that we're under attack. No details yet. Let me know when we can expect reinforcement. Somebody get the civilians out of the buildings and somewhere safe. Sergeant..." he pointed to his secondary communications coordinator " ... with me." Sergeant David Filmore grabbed his radio and followed the Captain.

All around, soldiers were grabbing weapons, powering up helicopters and turning tank engines over.

Histrol stood in front of the command tent and looked toward the front gate. There were only five soldiers, a squad from the 3d platoon, at the gate, firing out at a group of terrorists and the missile launcher was among them, hiding somewhere behind the bus.

"Filmore, get a tank on that bus," Histrol said. The two tank crews didn't need to be told and the Apaches were lifting off now, and they'd be lighting the bus up soon.

The first boom of the tank's main gun went off. Filmore grabbed the back of the Captain's uniform and hauled him down. The second missile flashed nearly over Histrol's head. Really, it wouldn't have been close enough to do him any harm. The shrapnel from the explosion of the conglomeration of electric breakers from off to his right would have, though.

The Chinese terrorists had time to nearly empty their loads of missiles into the various buildings and equipment centers before the 'copters, tanks, and men of the 1-221 Cav took the terrorists apart. They went down hard and fast. There were no survivors.

But 7.5 minutes of fire power was enough to cripple the ability of each of the three substations to transmit power. The casinos of Las Vegas went to backup power just long enough to shut down operations. Large sections of the Los Angeles-San Diego corridor went black, the air conditioners stopped pumping cool air, and elevators in the tall downtown building stopped. In Phoenix, the situation was only marginally better: only 1/3 of the city and metro area were shut down.

The electric companies at first didn't know what was going on, and began automatically shifting the power draw to alternate links in the grid. Those links began to fail as the requested power was too great to handle. Street lights and supermarket freezers flickered and eventually went out all the way up the coast toward San Francisco, until the state electricity coordinator's office cut off south California entirely, to save the rest of the state. In Phoenix, the situation was similar, the blackout engulfed Tempe quickly and got as far as Scottsdale before somebody at the Tucson Electric Generating Plant pulled the plug to stop the cascade.

In the high plains of Northern New Mexico, Astrid Little Feather was watching her status screens. She knew that today was D-day: Ms Lenti's target day for the failure of the power system coming out of Hoover – she's give her left nut to know how Ms Lenti knew that. Of course, since Astrid didn't have a left nut, or a right one either ... well, it was just an expression, after all.

When the system board started showing the flashing red that meant 'emergency outage, ' Astrid first punched up her conference call autodialer and waited. Within seconds the three supervisors at her power substations answered.

"Are you under any attack?"

She got three 'no' answers, from the confused supervisors.

"Okay. Well, the rest of the Hoover Dam connections are. Northern link: Start to draw the maximum you can from Hoover and ship it all to Las Vegas. Maximum includes using all the new 'extra' equipment you've got. Go to 100% of capacity, but watch the power draw from LV, we don't want to have them trying to get more than we can give. Southern: don't use your excess capacity for Phoenix, but give them all of your regular juice. Navajo link: don't draw anything. Stand by to send replacements to the other substations. All of you: contact the National Guard units with you. They probably know already, but if not, tell them. Any questions?" The links were silent. "Right. Little Feather out."