The Final Day

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Ernie, I need something, and I need it now,” John announced while still standing out in the snow in Ernie’s driveway.

For once, Ernie was out the door to greet him and actually grabbed John by the hand. “You okay? We heard about what happened last night. Makala, is she okay?”

“Yes, just fine. We’re fine.”

“Those sons of bitches.”

Lee had thrown a fit when, at midday, John had roused from his exhausted sleep and announced he was going to visit Ernie.

That had triggered an explosion of anxiety, with Kevin appearing with a pickup truck–load of their troops, fully armed, several of them wearing the captured gear taken from the dead raiders.

The last attacker had been found dead, shortly after dawn, having apparently bled out from his wounds, and after being stripped, he had been dumped with the others.

At least for the moment, it meant to John that he was safe and would not let what happened stop him from his routine, and that included using Maury’s jeep when it was snowing, so he ordered Kevin and the others to relax and get some sleep. An order reluctantly obeyed.

“Mind if we come in?” John asked, nodding over to Maury, who was standing beside his jeep and throwing blankets over the seats to keep the snow that was falling from covering them.

“Why don’t you have a top for that damn thing?” Ernie asked, shouting to Maury.

“Couldn’t find one that was authentic to the period.”

“Oh, great, historical accuracy before comfort.”

Maury did not reply. John knew it was painful enough for his friend to redo the paint job back early in the spring to cover over the white star on the front hood and paint the rest in a speckled camouflage pattern, which of course Maury had to match up with the Normandy 1944 look, so it was less easy to spot them from the air.

Maury just glared at Ernie and did not reply.

“All right, you two, come on inside.” He motioned to the door into the garage. Slamming it behind the two, Ernie turned, arms folded defensively.

“Are you going to shut me down?” he asked sharply.

“Hell no.”

“Well, I heard you are taking orders from our new potentate down at the Asheville airport and assumed you were sent here to pull the plug after he failed at his attempt at killing you.”

“Damn it, Ernie, did anyone ever discuss diplomatic conversation skills with you?”

“Nope. And if anyone ever does, I’ll tell them to go to hell.”

John couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, okay. Everyone knows. I surrendered without a fight. You got an alternative short of a bloodbath for our side? As to damn near getting killed, just leave that be for now.”

“How many troops does he have with him?”

“He’s got at least half a dozen Black Hawks, maybe as many Apaches, a couple of C-130s, and from what our lookouts in Hendersonville told us, at least half a dozen Bradleys and a dozen truckloads of supplies and additional troops up from Greenville. And you suggest we fight that?”

“Go up into the hills and wait him out. He’d be facing half a thousand or more very pissed-off, well-armed folks.”

“Ernie, you have been a burr under my hide from day one, but this tops it. I’m supposed to go back to those kids at the college and tell them to suit up and head out into the woods in this weather?” He snapped out the last words and pointed back outside where a lightly falling snow was being whipped along by twenty-mile-per-hour winds. “Half of them would freeze to death within a couple of days out there with no fires to keep warm. Light a fire, you got an Apache with infrared seeking on top of you.”

“He’s right, Ernie.”

The two turned to see Linda slowly coming down the basement stairs. “So stop needling him. You know as well as I do there was no chance to fight back, so let it be.”

“I was just suggesting an alternative, Linda.”

“Fine. You suit up, take a rifle, go sit out on the ridge for a few hours, and then come back and tell us if we should fight or not.”

“I’m seventy-five; those kids trained to fight are in their twenties.”

She ignored him and walked up to John and Maury, holding out two mugs of coffee.

“We don’t have much of that stuff left,” Ernie muttered.

“They need it more than we do warm inside here,” she snapped and then turned her attention to John. “Really, are you and Makala all right?”

“Just fine, Linda. It was bad, though, for those at the college. Five dead, a dozen wounded, and I doubt if a couple of those will make it.”

He tried to say those words without becoming emotional again. They had died saving his family and him. All of this was becoming too much to bear. He knew if he broke in front of Linda, she would go all to pieces as well. He shook it off and just offered a weary smile of resignation.

“My only other question, John: Do they know about our operation here?”

John shook his head. “So far, I don’t think so; that’s why I called and said to double-check the camouflage on your satellite dishes.”

“You can’t see them from the road or from up above. I had the kids make some netting out of bedsheets to blend in with the snow. I think we’re safe.”

“Good. That’s the way I want to keep it.”

He could see that Ernie was still glowering and felt it necessary to smooth the waters. “Ernie, I’ll admit now, it was a smart move to shift your operation down here. The last thing I want is another war. You saw what a couple of Apaches under Fredericks did to us in the spring. Their only tactical mistake was basing out of the mall. If they had been based at the airport with proper security, Fredericks would have won. We don’t have Stinger ground-to-air missiles, and any Hollywood hokum about taking one of those birds out with an old-fashioned RPG is absurd. General Scales held the trump card, made sure we saw it in his opening move and won.”

“He played it well,” Maury interjected. “There was nothing we could do in response, at least for now.”

“But—” Ernie started, and Linda cut him off.

“But what? A hundred, two hundred kids dead?”

“They’re not kids, Linda.”

“We’ve got grandchildren that will be in the militia units in another year, Ernie. To me, they’re kids.”

John caught her eye and nodded.

Strange, when his second lieutenant’s bars were pinned on him, he was twenty-one and felt he was indeed a man. His father had been flying combat missions at twenty-three, his grandfather at twenty-one. Of course he felt like a man then. But now, when there was an entire generational difference between him and those who were actually the ones who would carry the fight, it was all so different.

He recalled the old photo books of soldiers from World War II. The haunting image of a shell-shocked Marine covered in filth and blood, staring at the cameraman with vacant eyes. One had to look deep into that photograph to conjure out the realization that the frightfully aged Marine most likely was, in fact, not more than eighteen or nineteen years old.

Those whom he called kids, when looking up at the Apaches circling over the campus, were again ready to fight, but in their eyes they had as well that same haunting gaze. They were veterans of two major battles, and they knew the price and the loss even when they won. They were ready to fight even though with the pragmatic realism that only a veteran could gain, they knew without doubt the fight would most likely be futile.

Memory of his walk up to the campus of several weeks back came to him, the young amorous couple playing in the park. That should be their world, holding with it some hope of a future, not another fight to the death. And now one of them was indeed dead. The thought of that stabbed deep, but he had to push it aside for now.

Damn all that created this world for them, he thought bitterly as he nodded, still looking at Linda.

“You’re right, Linda; they’re still kids, or at least should be kids. I’m not going to spend their lives in some final gesture of defiance.”

And even as he spoke, the nightmare of what Bob said might happen—that Bluemont might unleash another EMP—hung over him. After what had happened just hours ago, he was no longer sure of Bob, though as emotions settled, he did want to believe him. Perhaps now the answer to it all was to find out, on their own, what the truth really was regarding Bluemont—and what was happening in this house might be the key.

He suddenly realized that he had been standing in quiet contemplation for several minutes while Ernie and Linda had launched into what he realized was something of a standard method of communication between the two. Ironic as he focused attention back on them. They obviously loved each other dearly, and yet they sure had a strange way of expressing it.

“All right, you two, let’s chill it.” It was Maury who finally interrupted the argument.

The two looked at him, and Linda smiled. “Thank you, Maury. Point taken. At least by me.”

Ernie said nothing and finally turned back to John. “Let’s answer the first question, then. If you are not shutting us down, why are you here?”

“I just want an update and to pass along a few suggestions. I want your team to lie low, but keep the kids working here on task 24-7.”

“So you are not this General Scales’s lackey?” Ernie quipped.

“You know, Ernie, someday when all of this is over, you and I are going to have a real serious discussion.”

“Just remember, Matherson, I saved your life. Fredericks was ready to shoot you in the back.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ernie smiled. “Well, some are whispering I just simply saved you from the dilemma of what to do with that son of a bitch by just shooting him and getting it over with. Either way, I did you a favor.”

John finally relented and nodded.

“This basement is freezing,” Linda announced. “Let’s go up to the Skunk Works.”

“The what?” John asked.

“That’s what we’re calling it now. The kids like the name, especially after I told them about a little side contract work we once did at the real Skunk Works Lockheed had.”

John smiled at that. Lockheed had been a prime contractor for highly specialized spy planes back during the Cold War, their secret R&D lab dubbed the “Skunk Works.” It fit for what they were doing now.

Linda led the way up to the main floor of their home, again cheerily warm thanks to the fireplace and the wood-fueled kitchen stove. She led them up to the second floor, moving a bit slowly, bracing her knee as she climbed the stairs, muttering that she wished she’d had the replacement knee surgery done before everything had hit the fan.

As they reached the top of the stairs, John looked up and grinned at the hand-drawn sign hanging in front of them: “Linda and Ernie’s Skunk Works.” Whoever had drawn it was indeed creative. Linda and Ernie caricatured as cartoon skunks, arguing with each other, with an array of $#*#%& erupting from the skunk image of Ernie’s mouth, even as they were holding hands.

The entire room was now cluttered with electronic equipment, most of it retro from the ’80s and ’90s but some of it looking fairly recent. The work crew had grown from the five he had seen last time to nine, hunched over screens, empty plates and cups strewn on the tables and floor. That alone made John wonder how many precious rations Linda had been lavishing on them. The mere sight of a half-eaten sandwich, packed with what look liked hamburger meat, by Samantha’s work area triggered hunger in John. A half-eaten sandwich remaining unconsumed was something he had not seen in a very long time in this starving world.

All were at work, two arguing in the far corner, each pointing to their respective screens, one of them a fairly new nineteen-inch flat screen.

“How and where did you get all of this?” John whispered to Ernie, those at work not yet noticing his presence.

“Here and there,” Ernie whispered.

“I need to know. If word gets out we are salvaging equipment from people’s basements and attics, it might leak out.”

Bob’s comment about a spy in their midst had been troubling him ever since he’d woken up.

“Let’s just call it Dumpster diving from abandoned buildings in Old Fort. I figured on hunting down there; it’s only five miles away if you take the abandoned road for which I have a key to the gate. I took my sons along, and we prowled around a bit. Hell, the old police station and town hall are down there. Anything that looked to be online down there I assumed was fried, but in a back-room closet, there was a whole stack of tossed-off equipment. Someone told me they had just had a major refit of their entire computer system just a few weeks before everything happened, had stashed the older stuff, most likely to be quietly taken home after being formally written off as junked. It was still there, so I took it, and no one the wiser. Who the hell wants computers anyhow in Old Fort? Smarter than prowling around Montreat where curious eyes might see us and gossip about it.”

It was important to keep this man happy, John realized, and he made the effort to pat him on the back.

Samantha at last turned in her chair, saw John and Maury standing watching them, and smiled.

Whatever Linda was feeding them, the girl looked the healthiest John could ever recall. She must have put on five pounds or more since he had last seen her. She nudged those working to either side of her, and for a moment, all work ceased.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” John said with a smile. “I just dropped by to see how things were going.”

“Is it true that we’ve been occupied by military from Bluemont?” Samantha asked. “We heard the choppers coming over and shut down while they were overhead. We also monitored a BBC report, claiming they had reports of heavy fighting in Asheville and that you were under arrest and standing trial for the murder of ANR prisoners after they surrendered.”

Those bastards, John thought. Of course they would spin it that way.

“None of it true, Samantha, at least my being arrested. I’m still here, aren’t I? Yes, the military has occupied the area. Yes, several of our people and a couple of theirs were killed in Asheville and a dozen others on both sides wounded. But no one over here. There is no more fighting on either side. The general in command is an old friend of mine. We have a peaceful understanding for now. So don’t worry about it, and just stick to what you’re doing.”

He could see their doubtful gazes.

“Please trust me. There is no fighting at the moment. What I am asking of all of you is to keep at what you are doing. I’m counting on you for that.”

Several started to talk at once, but Linda held up her hands like a schoolteacher bringing her class back to order. “Stay on those screens. We’ll have a team meeting over dinner to evaluate the day’s data. Now get to it.” Her voice was gentle but firm, and all followed her orders.

Linda beckoned to the back office. As they left the work area, John leaned over to Linda. “Do they know what happened this morning?”

“Ernie and I decided not to tell them, though one said they thought they heard a helicopter passing overhead. Until we know who the casualties are at the college, we figured it best not to get them upset and not focused on their work.”

John nodded his thanks as they followed Ernie, with Maury by his side, into the back office.

There was no comment from Linda as Ernie fetched out the bottle of brandy, a jug-handle quart and a half, broke the seal, and without comment poured three glasses, keeping one and handing the other two over, with Linda abstaining.

“Here’s to a blessing to the health of your family and you,” Ernie offered.

“And to those who gave the last full measure this morning,” John whispered before taking a sip.

Ernie put his glass down and smiled. “John, I think we are onto something.”

“What?”

“We’re not having much luck at all with breaking the encrypting. Bits and pieces at best, which is mostly guesswork. We’ve figured out a header to messages that indicate place of origin is Bluemont. A couple of names and titles. Their encrypting is sophisticated, as to be expected. What shows as the letter A might mean the letter M the first time it pops up. If that were the case, any fool can just sit down with a chart and a frequency table of how many times a particular letter is used. For example, A is used a hell of a lot more than X or Z in anything we write. Kind of like playing that old television game show but without lovely Vanna pointing out the letters as the players guess.

“But of course it’s not that simple. A might mean M the first time we see it, but the next time it might mean L or W, and so on and so on. It is the same problem Turing faced when building a machine to mimic the German encrypting machines back during World War II. The trick was to try to see patterns. One of the Germans’ big mistakes was daily submarine check-in reports with longitude and latitude, three groupings of two numbers each for degrees, minutes, and seconds. At the same time, naval intelligence reports in they’re tracking a sub at, say, twenty degrees west and fifty-five degrees north, and they think it is U-Boat 111. Add in that French intelligence had reported U-Boat 111 putting to sea and a drunk sailor had told his girlfriend who is with the resistance where they were bound for patrol. Put those three different data points together, look at what we are getting via the Enigma machine—most likely from that sub—and it puts another piece into that puzzle to breaking the code.”

Maury, the World War II history buff, interjected, “But they had hundreds working at Bletchley Park on breaking Enigma. They already had parts of the machine snatched by the Poles out of a German embassy just as the war started, machines later captured from subs, and like you said, data to correlate from other sources. Even then, it took several years to even start to get it right, though eventually we were transcribing the orders their high command was issuing almost as fast as they were being decoded by their own people.”

“We don’t have hundreds of people, and we don’t have years,” John replied softly.

“We do have our computers up and running,” Ernie interjected.

“But how fast can we get results that we can use?”

“It depends on what you are looking for,” Linda replied with a smile.

“How so? I fear this is a needle-in-a-huge-haystack problem.”

“I recall stories from before the war of highly placed government officials, damn idiots, using their personal e-mail servers for classified data and transmitting in the open rather than on government-secured lines.”

“And?”

“During the war,” Maury interjected again, “I mean the Second World War, it was found that some bored sailor on a U-boat was playing chess via Enigma with a friend back at naval headquarters. ‘Queen pawn to queen pawn four’ type stuff.”

The two looked at him.

“Well, it was stupid, but when the pattern was realized, people at Bletchley Park were decoding it and then transferring that knowledge to important stuff, even while they were laughing about how the guy back at headquarters was a lousy player and placing bets as to who would win.”

“My point is,” Linda replied, taking over again with the conversation, “you look for someone using the system in a declassified or inappropriate way. In one case, a couple of hackers in Europe were able to get inside the system of a very high-level official before the Day and cracked into thousands—tens of thousands—of files because that high-level government type was using their personal server. Letters going to friends asking about a kid’s birthday mixed in with very deep stuff about military operations.”

“How does that help us?” John asked, feeling that he was swimming in seas beyond his understanding.

“We’ve got an idiot like that,” Linda said with a grin.

“I don’t think it is that important, Linda,” Ernie announced.

“Well, I think it is, and John should hear it.”

“Go on.”

“Within all the reams of encrypted data, something has been popping up. We’re almost certain it is from Bluemont.”

“We suspect it is from Bluemont,” Ernie said.

“All right, suspected, then. What is it?”

“Personal notes. Short ones,” Linda interjected.

“So?”

“John, this is high-level stuff, and we think we are getting into the stream.”

“What kind of personal notes?” John asked, feeling numb from exhaustion and the impact of the brandy, now desperately trying to fathom where Linda was going and why it was important.

“It reads like husband to wife. I-miss-you type things.”

“And?”

“A comment that in a few weeks the sender is scheduled for two days off and will visit.”

“That’s it?”

“It could mean anything,” Ernie snapped. “Maybe it’s to a girlfriend. Hell, maybe boyfriend to boyfriend. I don’t put much on it.”

“You would say something like that, Ernie. I don’t care who it is to or how you see their relationship. It just caught me as strange, popping up unencrypted.”

“Linda, you’re losing me here. So far, I’m leaning with Ernie.”

He hesitated, going over in his mind his promise to Bob Scales versus what was already out in the community as to what Quentin had said while dying.

“When we started this endeavor, there were questions about what that dying messenger said. Something about an EMP. Are we picking up and deciphering anything that looks like messages about an EMP?”

Ernie perked up with that. “Why, John?”

“It was a reason I decided to green-light this project.”

“Did you get something out of General Scales?” Ernie pressed, staring up at John.

“I’m dealing with what we know from Quentin,” John replied, trying to sound calm but knowing he was never the best of liars or one able to cover up facts that were troubling him.

“I see,” was all Ernie said in reply while offering to top off John’s drink, which John firmly refused but then wondered if his gesture not to drink was a clue to Ernie that he wished to remain absolutely sober during this conversation.

“No, nothing clear yet. Thought we had a code word for it yesterday, but that fell flat on its face. Remember, good encrypting can mean billions of permutations changing all the time. The machines we’ve got are way behind the ability to tackle that with the speed we wished we had. The machines out in the next room are not even doing gigs of calculations a second, when we actually need terabyte capability. So no, nothing yet.”

“Then just please keep at it.”

“You dodged my question, John,” Ernie replied.

“Maybe I did,” was all he could say in reply. “But I want to shift this back to Linda. Why are you interested in these personal messages?”

“They just strike me as odd. We have no idea exactly what Bluemont is, other than it was listed before the war as a center for FEMA in the event of a national emergency. Their updated version of the Cold War bunkers is out of some movie like Dr. Strangelove from back in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Ernie and I knew about them. Gossip when we worked at IBM, people sent off for a couple of months to set up computers and when asked about what they were doing, they’d smile and act all hush-hush. You know how it is—you were military once—and how some of those with a secret just walked around all so self-important.”

John nodded. Such types always drove him crazy. Just because they had a security clearance for some particular project, they would strut around with an oh-so-superior air, like a child taunting, “I know a secret you don’t know.”

He often wondered how any secret actually could survive at all when placed into the hands of so many people with such ego issues.

“What are you leading to?”

Ernie started to speak, but Linda overran him. “I think tracing out these short notes might bear some fruit. If nothing else, there might be something classified spilled in one of them. It’s happened before, I bet.”

“Code words during World War II.” Again it was Maury. “Manhattan, Big Boy and Little Boy, Omaha and Overlord. You put them into a letter that had to go through censors and the FBI was at your door. The double edge there. The mere fact that you used those words innocently could bring a whole lot of hurt down on you, but that it did bring down a whole world of hurt meant you had stumbled onto something. There’s the story about some innocent guy who wrote crossword puzzles and by chance had the code names for three of the five invasion beaches for D-day in a puzzle. He winds up in an FBI office getting grilled. Of course, no one reported it, but suppose it had been in a radio broadcast then, or an e-mail today, and suddenly that person is grilled and others find out. That’s a tip-off.”

“And fat chance we’d have such luck today,” Ernie replied. “Anything going up to the sat and back down to wherever from Bluemont is a closed loop. If somebody screws up, who are we to even know they screwed up? Assigning a code word to an EMP, they sure aren’t going to use flashbulb or big boom. It’ll be subtle—Starfish or Rose—and we’ll never notice it.”

“I’d veto Starfish,” John said softly. “Might make you think about looking up at the stars, and beyond that, it was used by us, Starfish Prime, for a test launch of an EMP back in 1962.”

“I knew that,” Ernie replied with a smile. “I remember that test—just testing to see if you remembered.”

John wondered if he was for real or just pulling his leg, but it did not matter.

“Okay, let’s cut to the chase,” Linda said. “Whoever this lonely guy or girl is in Bluemont, the single letter R has turned up in every one of the unencrypted correspondences between the two separated lovers. ‘To R,’ and ‘Re: R.’”

“So?” John asked.

“I want to put half our assets on looking for anything related to R in any message headers and addresses.”

“You’re crazy,” Ernie retorted.

“Yes, I was; I married you,” Linda snapped back.

John held his hands up in a calming gesture, looking one to the other. Who do I side with? he wondered. Ernie was the one who had pulled off creating what was now the Skunk Works—did so under his nose—and his foresight had been proven because if still located in the college library basement, chances were Bob Scales would be onto it. But on the other side, Linda was proving that she had a deep intuitive sense about some things.

He recalled years ago, while at the War College, interviewing a retired four-star general, who as a young colonel was first wave ashore at Omaha Beach. The dignified elderly man spoke about Napoleon’s famous interview question for a candidate for promotion to general: “Are you lucky?” The old man had laughed in a soft, self-deprecating voice and said that luck was about intuition and listening to an inner voice of warning. He recalled a night when his battalion dug in to an orchard for the night and he awoke a few hours before dawn with an overwhelming dread that something was about to go wrong. He ordered his battalion to decamp immediately and pull back a quarter mile. Shortly before dawn, the Germans laid down a killing barrage on that orchard they had vacated but a half hour earlier and sent in a dozen panzers to finish the job. His battalion’s reply was to annihilate the panzers.

It wasn’t luck, he said, it was some inner warning that had awakened him. That the orchard must surely stand out on a map to the Germans—a likely and comfortable place for a battalion of motorized artillery to laager for the night—and with that realization bringing him awake, he moved out. He never doubted his intuition again or tried to rationalize it away. He acted. Often he was wrong, but the times he was right made the difference between him sitting in John’s office to be interviewed and being buried in France.

He realized his meeting with Bob at the snow-covered airport should have set off every alarm bell, for surely Bob was feeling out the situation prior to striking. He should have prepared better and had failed to do so. If he had acted, would he have fought Bob? He realized that was futile; his reaction would have been the same, but nevertheless, he should have listened to his inner warnings far more closely.

He looked over at Linda, his decision made. “I’m with you. Put half your kids on it. Focus in on any communication that looks personal and has some sort of reference to R. I think you are onto something.”

“Oh, hell, I knew you’d agree with her,” Ernie growled.

“That’s because he’s smart,” Linda said with a smile. “Now I saw the way you were looking at a half-eaten sandwich, John. I still have some burger meat left over. Let me cook one up for you two visitors and enough left over to take home to your wives and kids.”