Crashed: The Death Of The Dollar (21 page)

Mike had to bring attention to the Joint Chief's complete silence, “Well, Admiral, General, you two certainly got quiet. Would you care to answer Mr. Foster's question for him. Just how long would it take to get -”

“Years,” Admiral Miller said. “Maybe a decade. Maybe even more if our allies faced the same attack.”

“
Oh... damn!” Mr. Foster said as the ramifications of years without electricity clicked in his head.

“Look, gentlemen of the Board,” Chairman Miller said confidently. “While Mr. Paine and Mr. Ivey here seem eager to scare you into voting against this attack, they know our enemies will not launch any nuclear strike against our nations, whether surface or high-altitude. And they know this because they know we would detect the launch of those weapons and respond with an immediate barrage of nuclear attacks our self. And our counterparts in the Pacific and Soviet governments know we would launch a thousand nukes at both surface and high-altitude targets, forever eliminating their ability to recover.”

He paused to take a deep breath. “I support General Laub's proposed expansion of the attack, and can see that the rest of us here do as well. I cannot promise our missile defense systems will stop every single bomb they send from hitting our soil. But we will stop a significant majority. And nothing they launch will be nuclear.”

“
May we reconvene in a little while?” Mrs. Chapman, of Florida, requested. “I'd like a few hours to think about this, and I'm sure I'm not alone.”

Mike and Mr. Ivey were the only ones who's decisions were made and firm. They didn't need any time to think. They were going to vote against the attack proposals.

Taylor noticed that Mike's office had been silent for more than an hour and went in to see what was going on. She walked in and asked why they were so quiet. Mike just ignored the question, so Amanda filled her in on what the Joint Chiefs were proposing.

Taylor was as shocked at the idea as Amanda and Mike had been when they first heard it. But her first question wasn't about how they would respond, or how we could repel the return attacks. She only wanted to know if they should be safe up on the ranch.

“
Maybe,” Mike answered her. “We'll be far safer than most of the rest of the population, just as we were during the Guard's oppression. As long as they don't respond by hitting our nuclear power plants or actually nuke us, and as long as we can finish replacing the livestock I know we've lost in this snow, then we should be safe here. But I'm not confident that we can repel their return fire. There are just too many targets here that are too soft. If we do this, we will regret it.”

As he logged back on to the conference, neither Mike or Amanda could take a guess as to how the board would vote. But they soon learned. Mr. Ivey was the only one who joined him in opposition. Mike just shut his system down. “Damn. I feel sick. In a week and a half, we're going to kill tens of millions of people.”

That Sunday morning, They all gathered in the office at 3 am, while the children all slept, to watch the live video feeds of the attacks. Amanda and Taylor both started tearing up before the first explosions took place. The screens lit up as the missiles found their targets, all the explosions happening almost simultaneously.

As the views of the damage cleared from the initial blasts, water could be seen rushing downhill into the central area of Sao Paulo, as well as out of the Ivankovo Reservoir in Russia. Brazil's capitol was darkened and flooding, and Moscow's primary source of water was draining rapidly.

There was a lot of fire seen at the Itaipu and Three Gorges dams, but they were still standing. Mike sat quiet and emotionless, watching the screens as millions were being killed. The ladies cried for a while and were starting to compose themselves when, about ten minutes after the initial attack, Three Gorges Dam started to crumble.

“
Shanghai is about to get washed out to sea, and maybe a hundred of the fourteen million people living there know it's coming.” Amanda said softly as she started crying again.

The Itaipu Dam held out another thirty minutes before one section of it fell in. The rushing water slowly tore most of the rest of it down.

“
These bastards think the Pacifics and Soviets aren't going to unleash hell on us for this. I just pray they don't nuke us,” Mike said as he got up and walked out in disgust.

Chapter 18

Crushed

The first week of April came, and still no reprisal attack had come yet. A sudden end to winter had though, with ten bright, sunny, warm days. The remaining seven feet of snow had melted away everywhere the sun was hitting, and had mostly melted down even in the shade of the wooded areas. They got Jason's body buried, and tried to recover Amanda's truck, but found it washed a hundred feet further down the ditch by the runoff from the snow melt. The canyon running along side of the mountain where the houses sat turned into a raging river.

The next week, still no attack. Spring rains came, and came in abundance, keeping Mike's canyon filled and flowing rapidly.

“Well, the good news is, winter is over and all the major lakes are finally getting replenished from the drought of the last decade. The bad news is, I'm sure our reservoir has been washed away, I can't find any of our cattle, and only found five sheep and four goats still alive. The chickens and milk goats somehow survived in the barn though,” he told everyone that was sitting in the main room of the house.

“So now what?” Amy asked

“
Now we wait until it's safe to take the tractor out to start rebuilding the road and making repairs around the farm,” Mike answered.

The news was full of stories about flooding happening across the continent. Even little Saint George had become a major headline for it's flooding. But the news also reported that the bright side of things was that the damage from the drought in the west had in fact been mostly reversed, at least temporarily. Even Lake Mead was almost back up to capacity, and forecast to keep rising for at least another two weeks.

Stories about devastation were also being talked about a lot. There were no official numbers out of Brazil, Russia and China, but all estimates were that more than fifty million people had died as a result of the attacks.

The Ogallala Nation was being hit by severe flooding as the Missouri River was taking in all the snow melt and rains too. What was a blessing to Grand Canyon was a curse to those on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. The Lincoln Nation and Confederate States were bracing themselves for the floods that would hit them as the Missouri River's waters made their way from Montana, to the Gulf of Mexico. It was going to be ugly, but wasn't expected to be quite as bad as the floods of 2011 had been.

The kids were all upstairs playing happily while the adults were downstairs. Taylor was playing cards with Amanda, Amy and Mike.  Jessica was laying on the floor watching Anthony play with his little sister Keira. They were finally starting to relax again emotionally and mentally from the cabin fever of winter and all the events in the war.

“Rummy!” Mike called out, glad to finally win a hand, when his messenger began beeping. Then Amanda's started beeping as well.

“
Oh shit! Oh, no. No, come on, we need to log on!” Amanda said, sounding panicked.

“
What the hell is going on?” Mike asked.

“
You said they were going to strike back. They are. The Soviets and Pacifics both have missiles in the air.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing to scramble into the office. Amanda pounded her fists on the desk impatiently as they were logging on to SatLinc. She was able to find a tracker for the incoming missiles and see where the NAU's intercept missiles were being launched.

“
Come on, what's going on. I can't tell what's what? Where are these things going to hit. How many are there?” Amy went on rambling with questions faster than anyone could try to answer.

Mike sat back in his chair, “I'm assuming all the little dots moving towards the North American continent aren't our intercept missiles. It looks like the blue dots are our missiles, and the red ones are theirs.”

They continued to watch as several blue dots vanished from the screen as they crossed paths with the red dots. Mike leaned in as more dots kept appearing and disappearing. His heart started to sink in his chest. “Is it just me, or does that suddenly look like there's way more reds than blues?”

Amanda sighed as she answered him, “I guess we just wait to see if they hit us or not.”

Jessica hollered for the kids upstairs to come down. She held on to Keira and let Anthony sit in Amanda's lap. Taylor was holding on tightly to Mike and Brad's shoulders, and Amy stood with her arms around Anna and Stephanie. They all huddled in close together as they watched red dots disappearing in various places around the NAU before there were finally no more dots.

Mike grabbed his messenger up and sent a short message to the entire Joint Chiefs panel and the advisory board.

“
Please exercise restraint.”

He waited a few minutes, and got no reply. He sent another message.

“They're waiting to nuke us. Exercise restraint, please.”

Mike didn't know if those dots had been nukes. He didn't know if anyone he was sending messages to was alive. Amanda was trying to find information, and hopefully video, of what had been hit. As she was finally getting in information, a message came in from Admiral Miller.

“
We will hold for forty-eight hours.”

The video feeds began to come in from all across the continent. New York City took four missiles. The New Jersey entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and George Washington bridges were all hit. There were reports that several, and maybe all, of the bridges crossing the Mississippi River being hit. Then even Mike started to tear up as more reports of damage came in.

“
They responded in kind,” he said. “with attacks on our infrastructure. They... We... I don't know how we'll ever recover if this is as bad as it looks.”

Amanda blew up a video of the mountains from Bakersfield, CA. At the bottom of the screen it said several missiles had caused a breech in the Isabella Dam. A ticker below that was scrolling more information.

“
More than one-hundred and eighty million gallons expected to rush over Bakersfield, CA from Lake Isabella... Flaming Gorge Dam has collapsed from Missile strikes... St. Louis flood walls destroyed by missile attack...  Kentucky Dam attacked but still standing... Canyon Ferry Dam in Montana has collapsed... Garrison and Oahe Dams on the Missouri River both struck in missile attack... Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky has collapsed...”

Amanda began to switch to other video feeds. The Missouri River flooding was expanding rapidly, and rather than stack more and more sandbags, emergency evacuation warnings were given for it's entire two-thousand, three-hundred mile length, and for the Mississippi River from St. Louis, south.

“
Amanda, fire up that brain of yours. How many people are about to be killed or displaced?” Mike asked.

“
I... I... um... I don't... I don't know how many millions,” she said. “Nashville will be gone, under twenty or thirty feet of water, before many people realize what's happening. Memphis, St Louis, New Orleans, Omaha, Kan-.”

Amanda stopped and yelled “Oh my God!” as she clicked on the mouse. A massive wall of water was starting to come out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains rushing towards Bakersfield, CA.

“
What's this?” Amy asked, pointing to a small window on the screen.

Amanda clicked to blow it up. “It's Green River, Utah. Oh my God these people are pointing their damn cell phone cameras up the canyon. What the hell is -”

“They have no where to go, Amanda,” Mike almost whispered. “Damn, this means Glen Canyon Dam is going to be over topped easily. No way it's going to survive that,” Amanda said.

“
There's a whole lot of dams everywhere that won't survive the water coming from the collapsed reservoirs upstream. Billions, if not trillions, of gallons are about to flood out of already overfull rivers.”

“Are you saying that Lake Powell is about to be gone?” Amy asked, fighting back the tears as she remembered frequent trips to there with her family before they were attacked by the Guard.

“
Yes, Amy. I'm sorry. Lake Powell is about to be gone,” Mike answered softly.

Amanda voice became more tense as she went on, “When we checked in to all this, we never figured out if Hoover Dam would survive over topping. We just didn't think about it. Lake Mead was so low.” She was clearly angry at herself for not investigating every possibility.

Mike put his hands on her shoulders to try and comfort her. “You could have never anticipated the lake filling back up,” he said. “And then getting rushed with several million more gallons.”

“Several million?” She said inquisitively with a look of concentration on her face. “No, try more like around ninety-five to a hundred billion extra gallons. This is going to raise the water level in the Grand Canyon to around five-hundred feet deep, all rushing to Hoover Dam. I don't... I don't know if Hoover can survive that.”

Other than crying, everyone sat quietly watching the devastation unfold on the screens of the SatLinc. Jessica eventually took the kids to try to play, hoping to get her mind, and theirs, off of what was going on. Mike and the other three just couldn't pull themselves away until they couldn't see anything else from the darkness of nightfall. Amy hugged them all, and hugged Amanda the tightest to show her she was no longer holding a grudge over the death of Jason.

The next morning, April 15th, there was a conference call with the Joint Chiefs. Mr. Ivey and Mrs. Chapman were the only other advisers who logged in. The others either had no power, no home, or were no longer alive. General Laub was the first to speak up.

“
I know I speak for us all when I say I am absolutely devastated. I overestimated our missile defense system, and underestimated our enemies. For that I am -”

Admiral Miller cut the General off. “We have to act, and we must act swiftly and sternly. The people all across our great union are working together as if we were still one nation. We must find justice for them!”

Mr. Ivey put his head in his hands. “Please don-”

“
We made a commitment to a balance of powers, and as tempted as I am to just take action -”

“
Nuke those bastards!” Mrs. Chapman cried out.

Mr. Ivey shook his head. “We're going to regret this,” were his final words as he logged off.

“
May I speak please?” Mike asked more nicely than anyone had ever heard out of him.

Admiral Miller and General Laub both nodded.

“Please reconsider this. We all know that right now, they have everything in their arsenals aimed at us and our ships out at sea. Anywhere and everywhere we have any form of assets, there are nuclear warheads aimed. They're just waiting to see the first nuke leave our land, or one of our ships or subs, and just like you would do if you saw that coming from them, they're going to push that button. Please don't do this. It was called 'Mutually Assured Destruction' in the Cold War for a reason. Please, please let this end.” Mike finished and logged off without waiting for a response. His messenger beeped about ten minutes later, just reading the word “Justice.”

Mike scrambled everyone together. “We've got to get the radio equipment, solar panels, and anything else electrical up to the cave now!”

“
What's going on Mike?” Amy asked. She and Amanda knew nothing about the cave.

Amy stayed with the younger kids while the rest all worked feverishly to pack up everything they could into the trucks, trying not to break anything in their rush. They tore the soggy ground beneath the tires speeding up to the cave to get all the electronics in there. Mike pulled his messenger and a radio out to keep with them, and then they sped back down to the house, hoping to get the last of the solar panels and batteries loaded up and taken to the cave.

They all stopped to take a short breather on the porch, exhausted from their fast pace work and heavy lifting. Taylor turned on NANN as they sat to rejuvenate before finishing the heavy lifting the rest of the solar system would require.

“Breaking News,”
they heard come across
the still-active state-run media.
“Nuclear explosions are occurring all across the The People's Republic of Pacific States, the Soviet Union, and their allies. Reports are that several detonations occurred hundreds of miles above their largest cities as well.

“
The enemies who levied such deadly devastation against us just yesterday no longer exist. I can say with confidence that World War III is now over.

“
And this just in. We're receiving word from the Pentagon that... What! Holy Sh..! Um, Oh my God! Ladies and gentlemen. Fellow Americans. I've just been informed that this will be our last broadcas...”