Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass Read Free

might. There were others, but those had been anchored offshore months ago, abandoned. One carrier was even reserved as a floating nuclear power plant, providing gigawatts of electricity to withering military island outposts and some remote coastal airstrips. Previously known as USS Enterprise, she was now officially renamed as Naval Reactor Site Three. A small contingent of power plant engineers was all that remained of her former five-thousand-sailor crew. Not all of these behemoths were accounted for. A handful of the steel giants had been trapped overseas when the alarms sounded and society collapsed. The USS Ronald Reagan sat at the bottom of the Yellow Sea with most of her crew undead, still floating through the black compartments of Davey Jones’s locker. In the beginning, there was blame to cast and throw about like blacksmith anvils—that is, while men still lived to cast it. There was chatter via classified cables that the USS Ronald Reagan had been brought down by simultaneous attacks from several North Korean diesel submarines in the days just after the anomaly. No one really knew for sure. The USS George HW Bush was last seen dead in the water near Hawaii. Visual observers from a nearby American destroyer reported that the undead creatures swarmed her decks—she was now a floating mausoleum and would remain so until a rogue wave or super typhoon sent her down to Poseidon.
    Some of the surviving crews from the remaining carriers had been recovered and consolidated onboard the USS George Washington, still on active service in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. military diaspora continued.
    •   •   •
    The hundred-thousand-ton USS George Washington cut through the Gulf waters, maintaining a patrol box ten miles off the infested Panamanian coastline. The Continuity of Government still remained, its primary orders clear and concise. Recover Patient Zero by any means necessary .
    Admiral Goettleman, Task Force Hourglass commander and acting chief of naval operations, sat in his stateroom eating breakfast, watching the ship’s cable TV network. A loop of The Final Countdown had been playing over and over again for the past week. He’d need to call someone about that, or maybe he’d let it go. Perhaps the crew enjoys watching an aircraft carrier travel back in time with the opportunity to change history. A loud knock on his door signaled Joe Maurer, a CIA case officer and his aide since the beginning of this mess.
    “Good morning, Admiral,” Joe said cheerfully, but somewhat insincerely.
    “Mornin’, Joe. Our boys make it to the Virginia ?” Admiral Goettleman asked, chewing his final bite of powdered eggs.
    “They will shortly, sir. The radio room reports that they are over the Pacific and zeroing in on Virginia ’s beacon now.”
    “I wouldn’t be an admiral if I didn’t worry about the weather. The helo reporting any bad chop?”
    “No, sir, smooth waters, good air. Got lucky today, I suppose.”
    “We’re going to need to save some of that luck. Hourglass has a long way to float. I’m deeply concerned at how all this is going to play out. Despite that I’ve asked you a hundred times, what are your thoughts? Ground truth, no bullshit.”
    “Admiral, they’ll need to get there first. Assuming they survive the transit to Pearl, the Kunia operation in Hawaii, and the long transit to Chinese waters, the worst will still be in front of them. The lights are out around the world and we’ve received no communications from any of the Chinese Military Regions since last winter. The country has gone dark. We don’t have the HF radio operators to monitor the band. We could have missed their transmission a dozen times and not known. We’re short on Chinese linguists. If our people did receive their transmission, we have maybe five folks onboard that could interpret. Let’s say it’s a given that the team makes it across the Pacific to the Bohai and up theriver. Then what? You know how bad it is in the