“I expect those fighter planes to be approaching the city within ten minutes”—he checked his watch— “so phase three will begin at 13:07 local time.”
With that, he smiled and turned his attention back to the screens, keeping a careful eye on the Washington news channel.
Seven thousand miles away as the crow flies, if a crow could traverse half the earth, at one in the morning was a similar command center. This one, as with any modern tactical command hub, did bristle with wires and phone lines. Banks of screens showed live news from all around the world, and a digital bank of clocks gave local time for every major city in the world.
This part of the operation was critical, as so many factors could be controlled with the exception of foreign interference beyond their influence.
The woman in the dark suit watched with her cold expression giving nothing away; she could be angry or she could be experiencing the happiest moment of her life, only nobody but her would know. She watched as the flaming jet trails of the two F-35s soared away from the ground and the camera shot panned out to see the aircraft disappearing over a fluttering stars and stripes flag.
Internally she sneered as her face remained as stone. Their theatrical sense of national pride would soon suffer irreparably, she reminded herself.
FALLING SKIES
Friday 1:07 p.m. – 3rd Avenue, NYC
Cal was making slower progress now, as the streets became packed with people fleeing the financial district. Some had been sensible and had headed south for the ferries which would revert to evacuation at the first sign of any attack, but even if he had thought of it, that wasn’t an option for Cal. His passport was in his hotel room safe, but the biggest priority was to find the only person on this island he cared about.
In contrast to the chaos and panic in the streets, he saw a table of five people a little younger than himself inside a coffee shop. They were sat in silence, but all were still and calm as they sipped their drinks from oversized cups. Shaking away the image of them, to Cal the image of stupidity and a lack of any sense of self-preservation, he jolted back to the present with a painful impact.
A cab driver had decided to ignore the rules of the one-way streets, and broke free from the traffic jam by clipping the bumper of the car in front and spinning his tires as he shot down a side street against the normal flow of traffic. He did this at the exact moment Cal ran into the road.
Rolling up the windshield and hitting his lower back sharply on the taxi sign on the roof, the cab stopped and rolled him back down over the hood to slam into the street again. Groaning in agony and shock as he took a long, tortured breath to fill his lungs, Cal rose unsteadily to his feet and limped to the passenger side of the vehicle where his confusion made him instinctively think the driver would be sitting behind the wheel there. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to say to the cabbie, other than to give him abuse, but he never got the opportunity as the tires screeched again and the cab took off down the street.
“PRICK!” Cal shouted after him impotently.
“Hey, buddy. You okay?” said a voice behind him, still muted by the temporary deafness he suffered. Cal turned to see a man, olive skinned and dark haired in appearance with the contrasting twang in his voice of a New Yorker. He had his sleeves rolled up and wore a grease-splattered apron which Cal imagined had been white at one point in its existence.
“You got yourself hit pretty good there, huh guy?” he said, his face showing a mixture of concern and amusement.
“Yeah,” groaned Cal, bending at the waist to try and catch his breath as he screwed his eyes shut. “Fucking arsehole,” he said, meaning the cab driver.
“Buddy, listen, forget about it. The whole city’s going nuts out here and you need to get yourself someplace safe, huh?” the man said, eyes darting around at the rising panic.
“You too,” said Cal, standing up stiffly. He knew that he was going to be in some serious pain tomorrow.
“Oh, I will, don’t you worry,” he replied with a chuckle. “But I need to lock up my deli first so none of these dumb schmucks decide to do a little redecorating. After that I’m checking out if you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” said Cal again as he wavered on the spot with a wave of dizziness.
“Buddy, you don’t look so good…” the deli owner said, eyeing the Brit with concern.
“I need to get to the Waldorf,” Cal told him, his desperate need coming back to him, “which way do I go?”
His concern forgotten, and the chaos enveloping the city momentarily pushed aside, the man launched into directions. “Okay, what you want to do is head north on 3rd, take a left on 23rd for two blocks then head north on Park.” The man glanced side to side and bounced his shoulders as he talked.
“Thanks,” Cal grunted through gritted teeth before he straightened up and went to walk away.
“Buddy, that’s west! You gotta get your bearings,” he was told, but any further response was drowned out by a helicopter coming in low.
The pilot of the Bell 429 came in low and slow, heading toward the financial district after they were re-tasked from monitoring the vehicle fires on Broadway. As they passed overhead, never knowing about the conversation between a British man who just lost a fight with a city cab and a local shopkeeper, a text message was received onboard.
The cell phone taped securely to the small box hidden away toward the back of the cabin lit up, connected the circuitry inside, and blinked out.
Simultaneously, the instrumentation onboard also blacked out, and as the pilot fought to control the flightless bird he suddenly found himself in, gravity did what it did best, and reminded the human race that they had never evolved to fly.
“Abort! Abort!” shouted the F-35 pilot as he yanked the stick toward him, put the machine at a right angle to the earth, and punched it. Climbing straight up at hundreds of miles per hour, his wing man copied the maneuver instinctively. Hitting the radio mic, he hailed Chambers Field.
“C-F, C-F, this is Phantom. Be advised we are bugging out. NYPD rotary wings have been downed by unknown E-W. Repeat, NYPD birds have been downed by E-W,” he reported, his voice muffled and robotic partially disguising a Florida accent.
“Say again, Phantom,” came the reply from the Chambers Field naval airbase in Virginia.
“I say again C-F,” the pilot said in a voice which made it clear he wasn’t impressed with the request. Reducing his airspeed and rolling to level out and point the nose of his aircraft toward home with the blood returning to the front half of his body, he said, “Unknown electronic warfare in play. NYPD rotary wings are down. I saw two drop simultaneously. We are not equipped with ECM and request orders to RTB. Repeat, we are not equipped with ECM and have no response to threat.”
A pause before the radio operator came back.
Phantom imagined the base commander standing behind her, the handset of a landline pressed to his shoulder with an important call waiting. The F-35 truly was at the cutting edge of fighter plane technology; its onboard computer systems were capable of identifying threats and deploying countermeasures in an instant without the need for the human pilot to react. What Phantom had seen, however, was what he truly believed was a directed energy weapon or something similar, and he didn’t much like the thought of having his ride go dark on him.
“Negative on the RTB, Phantom,” said the voice in his ear. “Climb to ninety-eight hundred feet and stay on target as CAP. Repeat, floor of operations is now ninety-eight hundred. Acknowledge,” she ordered.