It had been a simple thing to overload the power relays remotely and shut down the supply to the city. Now nothing that didn’t have its own generator would be dark, and anything that did would attract a load of attention it probably didn’t want.
Chung Fei, thirty-one years old, unmarried, and a dedicated servant to his beloved country, checked the top pocket of his backpack as his team prepared themselves similarly. He smiled at the sight of the fifteen incendiary grenades within easy reach. Having spent months working in the city being treated like dirt, he had more than a few places in mind he wanted to pay a visit to that night.
HOLDING PATTERN
Friday 6:58 p.m. – Ninety-Eight Hundred Feet Over NYC
“Phantom this is Banjo, here to relieve you, over,” came the southern drawl over the F-35 pilot’s headset. He still had almost forty-five minutes playtime on station before he and his wingman would be bingo-fuel and in any other setting he would want to stay up in the sky hunting.
Today was different.
“Banjo, Phantom,” he said with none of the bravado of his fellow fighter jock. “Skies are all yours, we are RTB. Stay Safe and stay high. Phantom out.”
“Wilco, Phantom. Go get a cold one for me,” replied the fresh pilot as he banked hard left in his holding pattern to get a satellite view of Manhattan. Only he couldn’t see the island. He could barely see anything below without switching to use the fighter’s high-tech array of sensors, but even at this height he expected to be able to see the outline of the island.
Levelling out and keeping his plane in the wide figure-eight that the previous two pilots had worked for their duration, Christopher ‘Banjo’ Redden mentally prepared himself for the next five hours of dull inactivity as he screamed around the skies above New York at close to three hundred miles per hour, waiting for his relief to come at midnight.
Friday 7:20 p.m. – 13th Precinct Station House
“Sarge, I’m telling you, this guy saw it happen,” Jake Peters told his overworked supervisor, as though repeating himself would make any difference.
“Look kid,” the sergeant said, turning and bumping his considerable gut into Jake’s lean frame. “We got car wrecks, the city’s in gridlock, we’ve lost guys in the explosions and in the chopper crashes, and you want me to prioritize some British guy who got himself too close to something that went boom?”
“There’s the robbery victim too,” Jake said weakly. “Come on, Sarge. It was felony assault right in front of me. I drew my off-duty weapon. I gotta write this up!”
Jake Peters was a pain the sergeant’s ass on most days, but today he just couldn’t handle him arguing to fight the good fight just like every other day he’d known the kid.
“Fine. Go get your complaint,” he told him. Jake smiled and went to turn away before he was stopped. “Tomorrow,” the sergeant said, “because right now I need you up on 23rd stopping traffic coming up the one-way streets, okay?”
Jake never got a chance to answer. For an overweight man, the sergeant really knew how to move when he wanted to.
His deployment was unprecedented as he wasn’t usually called to guard street entrances for minor traffic violations, but he guessed that the real reason for it was to try and get a cop on every street corner and not for any traffic-related reason as that responsibility had been farmed outside of the NYPD years before. What was unprecedented, for him at least, was going anywhere on duty alone, but he guessed that needs must.
He sighed as he turned away, knowing that he would be walking the two blocks back to 23rd where he had first met Cal stumbling toward him bleeding. He wished he could take something heavier than the Glock, if only to reassure himself. He doubted the general population would feel similarly reassured.
It would definitely reassure me, he thought, convincing himself that it was a childish want to take one of the shotguns stored at the station house, even though he got a foreboding feeling that he may require more firepower before the night was out. Jake stood rooted to the spot, trying to find a way to get through to his supervisor and be permitted to return to the Waldorf, but he sighed and did as he was told. The lights in the station house flickered, going dark briefly before they weakly returned to life.
He was scared, and the fear was almost as intense as his need to help people, to be the hero, only now that his chance came he felt the fear pulling him away more than he hoped it would. Against all regulations, and more out of fear than anything else, Jake took the harness to hold his off-duty weapon and put it on under his uniform jacket. He carried his service weapon, a Glock 19, which was effectively the same gun just not shrunk down, and the three full magazines for it. Wishing he could still carry something heavier, he made for the door and walked north toward his post.
It took him three times the normal walking distance to make the two blocks. Every second person stopped him to ask what was going on, if he had seen someone who they were looking for, if he could help them.
After barely being able to move for the mob around him wanting answers in the growing dark, he raised his voice and held up both hands to get their attention.
“People, please return to your homes and lock your doors. The NYPD is doing everything we can to find out what’s going on. Please, go home.”
He tried to walk on, to push through the crowds of scared people—the people he had sworn to protect—but he heard more questions shouted at him.
Why don’t the phones work? When is the power going to be restored? Who did this to us?
Jake had no answers to anything, he only repeated his advice for them to return to their homes and lock the doors until this had passed. He hoped that sounding confident would make the people believe him, like he was repeating official advice from the department, and they wouldn’t think that he was just as scared and clueless as they were.
He turned up the dial on his radio to hear the traffic in his earpiece but heard nothing. That was unheard of for any time of any day, let alone late on a Friday when the city was in panic. He pulled the radio from its pouch on his belt and checked he was on the right channel. He was, but it was dead. He tried to call up for a commo-check but there was no answer. Trying to convince himself that it was just a black spot, one which hadn’t been there on any day of the last year and a half he’d worked this precinct, he pulled his cell from his pocket. Also dead. Nothing which required a signal still worked, but Jake pushed it all aside and told himself that he would get to his post and do his job until he was needed elsewhere.
That kind of delusional thinking got him through almost two hours of yelling, pointing, and being shouted at on 23rd Street. He yelled at drivers to leave their cars after the first six people tried to drive the wrong way down streets to get through the traffic. Desperation did funny things to normally law-abiding citizens, and the thought of abandoning the car they had worked hard to afford was unimaginable to most people, and Jake had argued repeatedly until he realized that the cars which had piled down the wrong way only added to the gridlock on the avenues heading south and north.
People left their cars and walked, carrying their belongings, their children, even their pets.
“Hey!” a male voice snapped from behind him petulantly. Jake turned to see a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase as he stepped out from the back of a stranded town car.
“Hey!” he said again, testing Jake’s patience.