At 0420 the Coast Guard choppers arrived and transported the six critical passengers to the closest hospital. Cutters came soon after that and swallowed up sixty-nine North Koreans, alive and dead. The cutters would transport them to shore to be turned over to the county sheriff to be jailed awaiting possible prosecution, or pickup by federal authorities. The other two cutters began a systematic search of the still-dark waters for survivors. They estimated there could be as many as fifty or sixty more North Korean sailors out there in the water.
Murdock asked Verbort to contact the fly guys again. The plan had been for the two Forty-Six choppers to wait at the ballpark until they were needed. They set up an 0530 pickup off the fantail of the big luxury liner. The captain was anxious to get under way. He pulled in his sea anchor, and had been instructed by his company to return to San Diego, where the passengers would be released and given vouchers good for another trip. The ship would go in for repairs, which the captain estimated would take at least four months.
At 0530 one Forty-Six landed on the golf tee on the stern of the Royal Princess, and the other one stopped by at the beach. The chopper crews were refreshed after four hours of sleep, and turned their craft toward San Diego and Coronado.
They had just passed Oceanside, and it was daylight, when the chopper pilot called Murdock up front.
“Not sure what is going on, Commander. Suddenly my radio reception went dead. Now I’m getting one transmission from a SATCOM my CO is using outside his office. He told me that the whole base and San Diego is blacked out. It’s not a rolling blackout. The whole county is black. My CO said he’s getting SATCOM traffic from Los Angeles and San Francisco. From what they say, the whole damn West Coast is running without the aid of electrical power. Everything electrical except battery power is shut down.”
“Terrorists or a nuke explosion in the atmosphere that blanked out all electrical?” Murdock asked.
“Can’t be the nuke, or my whole electrical system would be down regardless of the battery.
“Sounds like a power grid went down. That would flash through huge surges on the rest of the West Coast power grids and they all could blow. Remember when five or six of them went down in Northern California and Oregon when a transformer island blew up a few years ago?”
“Heard about it. So far nobody is reporting any enemy action.”
“We just might not have heard of it yet. I’d guess the satellites are still up if we can talk through them. At least the SATCOM satellite is still there.”
The pilot shrugged. “My skipper says to come home. We should land in about twenty minutes. Plenty of fuel. I’m going to stay over the ocean all the way down instead of cutting across. All of the commercial flights must be down. Good thing it’s light enough for them to land.”
Murdock went back to the troops and shouted the news to them. Sadler scowled. “Who the hell did it?” he asked.
“Could have been a power grid accident, explosion, almost anything to put down the whole West Coast grid,” Lam said.
“Who has our SATCOM?” Murdock asked.
“Back at the base,” Sadler said. “Didn’t think we’d need it.”
“Looks like we do, Senior Chief. But I don’t know if we could use it inside this bird or not. From here on out, I want that SATCOM glued to somebody’s back. Wherever we go, training or an operation. We have waterproofing for it?”
“No, sir,” Jaybird said.
“Everything except training swims and wet operations, we take the set. Senior Chief, get it waterproofed as soon as possible. Must be some gear that will do the job.”
“Copy that, Commander.”
DeWitt slid in beside Murdock. “Suppose this is some more of the North Korean attack?”
“Hadn’t thought about it, but sure as hell could be. Doesn’t take much to throw the whole grid into a blackout. All they would have to do is pick the right relay stations and a few major transmission lines.”
“How long was the power out before?” DeWitt asked.
“Don’t remember exactly. They found the problem almost at once and fixed it. As I recall, ten or twelve hours. Caused a horrendous mess.”
“Yeah, and now with the Internet and e-mail, think of the trouble it will cause. All business is shut down at the git-go. Can’t run a store without lights and cash registers. Oh, little places can get by, but not the big ones. Any on-line outfits are dead for the day or the week, and the stock market is deader than last year’s Super Bowl tickets.”
“Thanks, and the market was just starting on an upward trend,” DeWitt said.
Murdock went back to the pilot. “Check to see if there will be a bus or trucks waiting for us at your field.”
“My commander told me that the bus is there waiting. Has been since you took off. It can drive through Coronado, but there’s a huge traffic jam there with folks coming to work at North Island. No traffic lights. He says there are two radio stations still on using emergency generators. They keep telling people that when they come to an intersection to treat it like a four-way stop. Coronado has cops at the major intersections, but the whole thing is one huge mess. You might get back to your quarters faster if you hiked.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. We’ll see the lay of the land when we get there.”
A few minutes later, the twenty-four SEALs stepped out of the CH-46 after it had landed at North Island Naval Air Station, six miles from the SEALs headquarters. Murdock looked around. It was a little after 0745. He didn’t see the usual activity around the big base. The SEALs trooped fifty yards to the Navy bus waiting for them, and boarded with all their gear.
“Can you get us through the traffic?” Murdock asked. The Navy second class driving the bus shrugged. “Don’t have the faintest. The station sent most of the civilian workers home as soon as they got here, and that’s caused a reverse traffic jam. We’ll work it out and go around the ocean side. Might work.”
A half hour later the bus stopped in the NAVSPECWARGRUP-ONE parking area, and the SEALs traipsed over the Quarter Deck and into their quarters. Murdock and DeWitt stopped to talk with Master Chief Petty Officer Gordon MacKenzie. They had known each other for over six years.
“Well, Commander, lad, sir. A fine mess you’ve got us in this time. No juice at all, up the whole damn coast. Nobody has a shot glass of an idea what caused it, and evidently no idea about how to fix it.”
“You using your SATCOM?”
“Aye. Picking up lots of transmissions on all frequencies. Most are just short of panic calls.”
“Anything official?”
MacKenzie pulled out a small radio and turned it on.
“So, this is KFMB, one of two radio stations in San Diego still functioning. Our big turbine is spinning away driving the large generator and providing our station with power. So far we have received little information from the network. We have some receivers on covering many bands and frequencies. Up to now this is all we know for sure.
“Power is out all along the coast from the top of Washington State to San Ysidro. Most stores and businesses are closed. Traffic is snarled. No TV stations in town are on the air. Television takes a tremendous lot of power. We’re trying to get our sister TV station up, but so far no luck.
“What caused it? Nobody knows. Some emergency government agencies are swinging into action. We understand the county emergency radio system overlooking El Cajon has been staffed and will soon be operational. Power is out in what is called the Pacific Electrical Grid, which covers the coast states and most of Idaho, part of Montana, and all of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. It could be a long day and a horrendous night if they don’t figure out the problem.
“I have just received a call from a ham radio operator. All of you hams out there get your sets into operation and see what you can find out. This is a transmission from a woman north of Redding who says she witnessed a gigantic explosion in a huge electrical substation near her home. Redding is in the Central Valley about a hundred and ninety miles north of San Francisco. It’s a center where high-voltage power lines come in and power goes out in several directions. She said she’s seen a transformer explode on a pole.