“Point made,” John announced.
“What point, damn it?” Ernie snapped.
“One chance in ten, maybe one chance in a hundred, that the message that Major Quentin Reynolds was carrying was a warning of things to come. Last time we got hit, no one here knew it was coming, and look at us now. Suppose someone somewhere is planning to do it again? Suppose my friend General Scales is still alive and wanted to get a warning to us?”
“Then why all the mystery?” Ernie retorted. “If your buddy is still alive out there and has this big secret he wants to warn you about, just fly in and tell us, or get on the radio and announce it. The whole thing is screwy, John, and you know it.”
“I agree in part, Ernie. Yeah, it is strange, a lone guy claiming to have served with the general showing up half-dead. But we definitely live in a screwy world. Maybe my friend has reasons for not doing what you said. I can think of a dozen of them.”
“Name one.”
“He knows something he can’t let anyone else know for whatever reason and wanted to get word to me. Send it out on a radio and the entire world can listen in. Fly here? That draws notice as well. I could go on, but there’s a couple, for starters.”
Ernie took that in. “Or the whole thing could be a trap to lure you out of this valley by claiming a friend is still alive with some sort of secret message. You take the bait, and Bluemont gets payback for Fredericks with you dangling from the end of a rope.”
John could see Makala go tense over that one, nodding in agreement. It was exactly what she had said within minutes after he returned from trying to see Quentin. It was a setup to entrap him.
“Think about it,” John pressed in, avoiding eye contact with his wife. “We are just starting to get back on our feet. We’ve got electricity back, a lab here on campus making antibiotics and anesthesia; they even think they’ll get one of Doc Weiderman’s old x-ray machines he had packed away down in the basement of his office on the day things hit back online soon. Think of what that would have meant after our fight with the Posse and with Fredericks. We’ve got water pumping again through the town water mains. We are starting to crawl back out of the darkness. But if we are hit by another EMP, again without warning, we might as well just bury the last two and a half years of struggle, dig a grave for the rest of us, and crawl into it.”
“Who would be crazy enough to do that again?” Maury asked.
John shrugged. “Who was crazy enough the first time? After the fact, we finally figured out it was North Korea and Iran handing off nukes to terrorists who launched them from container ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. There are still terrorist cells out there, maybe wanting to this time provoke a full-scale global nuclear war. Could be China wanting to push us down even further but stand there looking innocent and then suggesting we need more aid east of the Mississippi. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who.”
He paused for a moment.
“Did it ultimately matter who did it last time? The result was the same; it took us to the edge of extinction. If it might happen again, and there is a chance we can get a forewarning, I want that chance for all of us.”
“There’s one other reason now,” Ernie said.
John looked over at him, ready to let fly with an angry burst for him to remain silent but then realized the secret would soon be out anyhow, and laying it on the table could help with his argument.
“Okay, this is classified, and I mean strictly classified; it has to stay in this room.” John paused, looking at the telephone receiver on the table in front of him, tempted to hang it up. But those listening in were now part of the government as well. “Do we all understand each other? What I say next can go no further.”
There were nods of approval, all now obviously filled with curiosity.
“We’ve managed to get a few computers back up and running.”
“A few computers?” Billy said. “So what? Play Pac-Man, or some dumb-ass flight simulator on them? The Internet is gone forever, at least here, and unless linked up, they’re useless.”
“Didn’t AB Tech in Asheville once offer a course on aircraft maintenance?” Ernie asked.
“Yes, why?”
“How did they teach it?”
“Computers, of course, and anything hooked into the net and plugged in for power got fried.”
“Maybe the maintenance manuals for the L-3 and the Black Hawk were on CDs. I got another old PC up and running over in the library yesterday while our hero John and company were trying to kill themselves going over the mountain. Give me a computer, give me data stored on a CD, and I’ll get the machine to run it. You want it?”
Billy could only nod.
“And fiber optics, my friends, were not cooked off. They’re dark now, but give me enough machines and the juice to run them, and I’ll get a network—at least local—up and running again.”
“So we can play games and send those damn tweets,” someone snapped.
“No, damn it. Data transfer was the lifeblood of what we were. Medical libraries, technical data beyond the magazines moldering in the school basement… find a way to hook me in, and we can even eavesdrop on Bluemont.”
Though John was growing increasingly frustrated with Ernie taking the topic off the point he was trying to close in on and talking about more than he should, this did catch everyone’s attention.
“After I left IBM back in the late ’80s, that was the business my wife and I set up. We wrote the software and provided some of the hardware for those big array dishes. Not the crap units you all started to get with your televisions; I’m talking about the big stuff used by governments. Chances are the LEOs were most likely taken out in the war, but the geosynch stuff I bet is still definitely online.”
“Translate, please?” the Asheville rep shouted from the back of the room.
“Oh, jeez. LEO, low-earth orbit. Companies like those direct television networks, their satellites were high up, twenty-three thousand miles up, what we called geosynch. The comm sats up there were heavily proofed against any kind of electromagnetic pulse. Had to be in order to survive solar storms, or coronal mass ejections, as we called them. Chances are Bluemont and other surviving governments are still using them for chatter and for encrypted stuff as well. You give me enough juice, some fairly recent computers that some rich kid tossed into his basement when Mommy and Daddy gave him an even faster unit for his damn stupid games, and I know how to start listening in.”
“You mean hacking?” Maury asked.
“Yup. Hell, my wife is a pro at that. Some years back, we installed the tracking software for a Middle Eastern country to link into a geosynch satellite.”
“Which Middle Eastern country?” John asked.
Ernie just smiled and replied, “Classified.”
No one interrupted as Ernie smiled expansively, pleased that he had obviously taken over the meeting for at least a few minutes.
“Well, the bastards welched on the last half of a payment of around a million bucks. Figured they had the system we installed, so why bother to pay some Americans once they had it in place?” Ernie started to laugh.
“They hadn’t counted on my wife, Linda. She sent them the usual notices and finally a warning, and they basically told us to screw off. Anyhow, they didn’t reckon on her. She had a Trojan in the software, hacked into it on day 121 of overdue payment—after all due proper notice and warning, of course—and fried their entire system off. We lost a million bucks but laughed our butts off.” Ernie chuckled at the memory of it.
“We have another resource as well,” John chimed in. “This college was starting up a cybersecurity major just before we got hit. We have some kids here that were getting top-notch training in how to keep systems secured from hackers.”