“Let’s do it!” George quickly reeled in his line and set the fishing pole aside.
Dwight turned around and motioned George to move back as a couple of GenCon deckhands wheeled up a contraption that, to George, was a beautiful sight. The SQID was about ten feet long, tubular, with a bell-shaped nozzle at the back end. It expanded at the front end to form the water chamber, and a large hydraulic actuator was attached there to force the piston through the chamber. The SQID was welded to a test stand, which Dwight and the deckhands locked into position at the edge of the platform with large tie-down chains hooked into tie-down points on the deck. The nozzle pointed out over the Gulf at a slightly elevated angle. One of the deckhands pulled over a two-inch fire hose and began filling up the water chamber while the other hooked up electrical power to the hydraulic actuator.
When they were all set, Dwight looked at George. “You ready?”
“Hell, yes!”
With a grandiose gesture, Dwight reached over to a panel welded to the SQID test stand and flipped up a red switch guard, revealing a simple chrome switch in the down position.
“Are you ready? Are you really ready?”
“Get on with it, man.”
Dwight flipped the switch to the on position. The hydraulic actuators started to whine. Suddenly, there was a tremendous roar as a jet of water blasted from the nozzle. George covered both ears with his hands as he watched the trajectory of the water jet in amazement as it flew through the air for a thousand feet or more before dissipating in the air over the Gulf of Mexico. The test stand strained against the large tie-down chains as the momentum of the water jet pushed the stand in the opposite direction. In seven seconds, it ended as abruptly as it started. The silence was deafening!
“Holy cow, Dwight! That’s not a propulsion system — that’s a directed energy weapon! Hell, if you turned that thing skyward, I’ll bet you could shoot down an aircraft!”
George walked around the SQID, admiring it as an outstanding bit of engineering, and kneeling down to examine the nozzle. He looked up at Dwight. “Well I’ll be! You did it, Cousin.”
“We did it, Cuz. It was all your idea, I just built it.”
“Let’s try it again, and see if—”
George was interrupted by Dwight’s foreman shouting something from the control shack. He ran across the deck toward them. His urgency and the ashen look on his face unsettled both George and Dwight. They glanced at each other.
“Uh-oh,” said Dwight. “This can’t be good.”
“Dwight!!” the foreman shouted. “You gotta come listen to the radio. Now, man!”
Chapter 3
George, Dwight, and the foreman ran to the control shack and joined a crowd of men around the radio.
“… repeat. What appears to have been a nuclear blast just occurred in Washington DC. There is no information from the scene. All communication has been cut off to the DC area. Baltimore affiliates of ABC are reporting a mushroom cloud in the direction of downtown Washington. This is ABC News, New York, and the alert level is RED. All off-duty first responders and military personnel are to report to their duty stations immediately. All military installations are on full alert…. repeat…”
Dwight looked at George. Neither could believe it.
George looked at his watch: 1140 central time. “Dwight, I have to get back to Norfolk as soon as possible. Would you fly me ashore in the helicopter?”
“Sure, if we can get clearance. They’re probably shutting down civilian traffic the way they did after 9/11.”
“Get me on the radio with Naval Air Station New Orleans,” said George. “I should be able to get us clearance to fly to the Naval Air Station. Hopefully, I can catch a military hop out of there to Norfolk.”
“Okay, I’m on it.”
“Thanks.”
One of the best days of George’s life had just turned into the worst.
Since the Annapolis was in the yards, George was temporarily assigned to a joint-service operations unit surveying the damage in Washington DC. Because of high radiation levels, much of the surveillance was done with unmanned Predator reconnaissance drones. George and other team members worked in a small, portable control van reviewing the video sent back by the Predator and assisting search and rescue (SAR) teams in their efforts to locate survivors. The Predator video was amazingly good — too good in many instances. George saw a lot he wished he had never seen.
Despite years of military training, none of the Predator team members were prepared for the magnitude of the disaster. The area surrounding the Washington Monument was the ideal location for a nuclear blast to wreak maximum damage to the capital of the United States of America. George and an air force major sat at the Predator control console. Through a remote-control link, the major flew the Predator slowly up what used to be the National Mall. The blast had destroyed everything along the mall’s main axis, from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and everything along a cross-axis formed by the White House and the Jefferson Memorial.
“Wow,” George solemnly said. “Within a half-mile radius of ground zero, it looks like everything is vaporized — cars, buses, trees, buildings, and people — there’s just nothing left. It’s as if everything was instantly fried and blasted into tiny molecules of radioactive debris. There’s not much sense searching for survivors in there.”
“Yeah, and there’s not a single building standing within a mile — everything is totally flattened,” responded the major. “If anybody survived in that zone, it’s a miracle.”
“From what it looks like, a lot of buildings outside of that are so damaged, they’re going to have to be razed. But there could be survivors in there. Maybe that’s where we should concentrate our search.”
“Yeah, I hate to just give up on the other areas, but I guess it’s a numbers game. We have to expend our resources where there’s the best chance to find the most people alive and reachable. The area around ground zero is so hot, we can’t safely put rescue parties in there.”
“How many do you think died in the initial blast?” George asked.
“I don’t know. I heard a preliminary estimate of 125,000 but I don’t know who came up with that number.”
“Whatever the number is, it will probably double later from injuries and radiation poisoning. Let’s head up to Capitol Hill,” George suggested. “I want to see if there is anything left up there.”
The Predator flew over the remains of the Capitol Building. Congress had been in session at the time of the blast, and 397 senators and representatives were killed or missing. Likewise, the Supreme Court had been in session and, apparently, none of the justices survived.
It appeared as though the flash had initially seared the Supreme Court Building and the office buildings of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and then the concussion blasted the remains thousands of feet down range. George saw huge chunks of blackened granite a half mile from the remains of the Capitol building.