CHAPTER TWO
Senator Owen Tovar blew out a long, low breath. “How did Delarosa know there was a nuke in a sunken ship?” He glanced at Haru Sato, the soldier who’d delivered the news, and then looked at the island’s intelligence officer, Mr. Mkele. “More to the point, how did you not know it?”
“I knew there was a sunken fleet,” said Mkele. “I had no idea it had been carrying a nuclear warhead.” Haru had always seen Mkele as a confident, capable man: terrifying when he and Haru were on different sides, fiercely reassuring when they were on the same one. Now, though, the intelligence officer seemed desperate and overwhelmed. Watching Mkele flounder for answers was even more disturbing, in its way, than the horrors that had brought them to this point.
“One of the people in Delarosa’s resistance group knew about it,” said Haru. “I don’t know who. It was some old navy guy.”
“And he’s kept it to himself all these years?” asked Tovar. “What, did he want it to be a surprise?”
Senator Hobb tapped the table. “He probably had the very understandable fear that if he told someone, they’d find it and try to use it. Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened.”
“Delarosa’s claim is that the Partials are overwhelming us,” said Haru. The four men were deep in the tunnels beneath the old JFK International Airport—a ragged ruin now, but one with a wide airfield around it that made encroaching Partials easy to spot. It had become the fugitive Senate’s last, desperate hiding place. “Not just now, but forever—she says that the human race will never be able to rebuild properly while the Partials are still out there. And she’s right, that’s the terrible thing, but that doesn’t mean detonating a nuke is going to make things any better. I would have stopped her, but she’s got a whole army of guerrillas, and most of my unit joined them.” He shook his head. Haru was the youngest of the four men, barely twenty-three years old, and he felt more like a child now than he had in years—than he had since the Break, really. The doom and the chaos were terrible enough, but it was the familiarity that really got to him—the sense that the doom and the chaos had all happened before, twelve years ago when the world ended, and now it was ending again. He had been a child then, and suddenly he was a child again, lost and confused and desperate for someone, for anyone, to step in and make it all better. He didn’t like that feeling at all, and he hated himself for allowing it to enter his mind. He was a father now, the first father in twelve years to have a living, breathing, healthy child, and she and her mother were trapped somewhere in the middle of this mess. He had to pull himself together, for them.
“I liked Delarosa better when she was in jail,” said Hobb. “This is what we get for trusting a terrorist.” He shot a glance at Tovar. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“No, you’re right,” said Tovar. “We’ve made a habit of trusting fanatics, and it’s rarely turned out well for us. I was a pretty savvy terrorist—savvy enough to get my label switched to ‘freedom fighter’ and wind up in charge—but I’m a terrible senator. We like people who stand up and fight, especially when we agree with them, but it’s the next step that really matters. The part after the fighting.” He smiled sadly. “I’ve let everybody down.”
“The Partial invasion was not your fault,” said Mkele.
“The final remnants of the human race will be glad to hear it,” said Tovar. “Unless the Partial invasion’s a big hit, in which case I’ll totally claim the credit.”
“Only if Hobb doesn’t beat you to it,” said Haru.
Senator Hobb spluttered an awkward defense, but Mkele merely glanced at Haru disapprovingly. “We have more important things to do than trade insults.”
“Even true ones,” said Tovar. Mkele and Hobb both glared at him, but he only shrugged. “What, am I the only one admitting my personal failings?”
“There’s a convicted war criminal with a nuclear weapon loose on our island,” said Hobb, “not to mention the army of super-soldiers murdering us like cattle. Can we maybe focus on that instead of personal attacks?”
“She’s not going to use it on the island,” said Haru. “Not even Delarosa’s that bloodthirsty. She’s not out to kill Partials, she’s out to save humans—she’s still going to kill the Partials, obviously, but not at the expense of the few of us who are left.”
“That’s a nice sentiment,” said Mkele, “but a nuclear warhead is a very imprecise weapon. How do we know she’ll use it wisely? Best-case scenario, she takes it to the mainland, blows it somewhere north of the Partials, and lets the fallout radiation finish them off; more likely, she takes it to their home base in White Plains and blows it there, killing all of us in the fallout instead.”
“Which might be the only plan that works,” said Hobb. “For all we know, they’re not even susceptible to radiation poisoning.”
“How close is White Plains?” asked Tovar. “Anybody have a map?”
“Always,” said Mkele, and set his briefcase on the table, undoing the locks with a pair of soft clicks. “Traveling from here to White Plains would take days, because you’d have to go around the Long Island Sound.” He unfolded a paper map and spread it flat on the table before them. “Even if she crosses the sound by boat, which is the route most likely to get her caught, it will take her a couple of days to get there, at minimum. Months, maybe, if she travels carefully enough to stay hidden. As the crow flies, though, it’s not that far. White Plains to East Meadow is . . .” He studied the map, pointing out the two cities and measuring their distance with a well-worn plastic ruler. “Forty miles, give or take.” He looked up. “Do we know what kind of nuke she has? What kind of payload?”
“She said she pulled it from a ship called The Sullivans,” said Haru. “Plural like that, I don’t know why.”
“That’s a destroyer,” said Tovar, “Arleigh Burke class—an older ship, even twelve years ago, but very dependable; the navy used them for years. The Sullivans was named after five brothers who all died in the same battle in World War II.”
“I thought you didn’t know about the nuke,” said Hobb.
“I didn’t,” said Tovar, “but you’re talking to an ex-marine. Try to name a navy ship I don’t know the specs of.”
“Then tell us the specs of this one,” said Mkele. “Would that class of destroyer be armed with nuclear missiles, or would they have just put one in the cargo hold for onboard detonation, like a suicide bomber?”
“Arleigh Burke destroyers would be outfitted with Tomahawks,” said Tovar. “That’s a nuclear cruise missile with a two-, maybe three-hundred-kiloton payload. Those are designed for long-range attacks, but the Partials had enough antimissile defense to shoot one down before it hit home. The reason it’s sitting right off the coast of Long Island, I assume, is that they brought it close to detonate on site; it would have sacrificed the fleet, and most of New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, but it would have destroyed the Partials pretty decisively.”
Haru grimaced, marveling again at how desperate the old government must have been to consider such a thing—though he supposed it was no more desperate than their situation now. Before the world ended, and knowing that it was about to, a nuke would have been a small price to pay: You’d kill everyone in range, and destroy the area for decades to come, but the Partials would have been gone. It might have actually been worth it. Now, though, with the last of the human race sitting just forty miles away . . .
“What’s the radius of destruction?” asked Haru. “Is the entire island dead?”
“Not necessarily,” said Tovar, “but we don’t want to be here if we can help it. At that payload the initial fireball’s going to be about a mile and a half wide—that’s the part that’s two hundred million degrees—and the physical shock wave will destroy everything within five or six miles. Everything in that zone is going to go up in flames, instantly, and that much fire starting that abruptly will suck in enough air to jump-start a raging hurricane with air temperatures hot enough to boil water. Every living thing within . . . ten miles of ground zero would be dead in minutes, and five or ten miles farther out you’d still kill enough of everything not to know the difference. Here on the island we won’t have any of those primary effects—we might feel a thump, and anyone looking right at the detonation will be blinded, but that should be the worst of it. Should be. Until the radioactive ash cloud gives us all leukemia and we die in slow, crippling agony.”
“And how big is the ash cloud?” asked Haru.
“A nuclear ash cloud doesn’t radiate out like a shock wave,” said Mkele. “It’s a distribution of physical material, so the exact pattern will depend on the weather. The major winds in this region tend to blow northeast, so most of the ash cloud will drift that way, but we’re still going to get some peripheral fallout—flurries around the edges, and castoffs from the winds in the firestorm.”
“Anyone less than ninety miles downwind will be dead within two weeks,” said Tovar. “We just have to hope the winds don’t change.”
“So the Partials would be effectively destroyed,” said Hobb.
“Everyone on the mainland, yes,” said Mkele, “but this close to the blast zone we’re going to lose a lot of humans as well, even under ideal conditions.”
“Yes, but the Partials will be gone,” Hobb repeated. “Delarosa’s plan will work.”
“I don’t think you’re grasping the ramifications here—” said Haru, but Hobb cut him off.
“I don’t think you are either,” Hobb snapped. “What are our options, honestly? Do you think we can stop her? The entire Partial army has been trying to find Delarosa for weeks, and they can’t; we can barely leave this basement without getting shot at, so I’m pretty sure we’re not going to find her either. We could find her strike force, maybe, because we have protocols in place for that, but the team delivering the warhead is likely beyond recall. This bomb is going off, whether we like it or not, and we need to be ready.”
“The Partials will catch her,” said Mkele. “A warhead’s not an easy thing to transport—it’s going to compromise her ability to stay hidden.”
“And if that happens, she might just blow it on sight,” said Hobb. “As long as she’s twenty miles from East Meadow, our major population center is safe, and then the winds will blow the fallout north to White Plains.”
“If she makes it twenty miles,” said Haru.
Tovar raised his eyebrow. “Are we prepared to risk the human race on a bunch of ifs?”
“What are we risking?” asked Hobb. “We send someone to stop her, and everyone else to evacuate the island—we’re not risking anything unless we don’t act.”
“Hobb wasn’t exaggerating about how hard it is to move around,” said Mkele. “Haru can do it because he’s been trained, and he knows the island, but how do you intend to carry out a mass evacuation without drawing attention?”
“We do it after the blast,” said Hobb. “Spread the word, get everything ready, and when the bomb goes off and the occupation force is distracted, we rise up, kill as many Partials as we can, and run south.”
“So your plan is to murder a superior enemy army,” said Tovar, “and then outrun the wind. I’m glad it’s so simple.”
“We have to evacuate first,” said Haru, “now, to avoid even the periphery of the nuclear fallout.”
“We already talked about how that’s not going to work,” said Hobb. “There’s no way to move that many people without the Partials seeing us and stopping us.” He looked at the others. “Remind me why the kid is even here?”
“He’s proven himself valuable,” said Mkele. “We’re not exactly in a position to turn away help.”
“Which is also why you’re still here,” said Tovar.
“My wife and child are in East Meadow,” said Haru, “and you know who they are—every human being alive knows who they are. And that means you know why we don’t have time to waste. Arwen is the only human child in the world, and she’s going to attract some attention—for all we know, they’re already in Partial custody somewhere, ready to be cut open and studied.”
“We can’t lose that child,” said Tovar, and Haru could see that the fear in his face was real. “Arwen represents the future. If she dies in that explosion, or in the fallout after . . .”
“That’s why we have to evacuate now,” said Haru, “before Delarosa detonates that nuke. There’s got to be a way.”
“Hobb’s plan uses the explosion as a distraction,” said Mkele. “But what if we distracted them another way?”
“If we could create a distraction big enough to overthrow the Partials, we’d have done it already,” said Hobb. “The nuke is all we have.”
Mkele shook his head. “We don’t need to overthrow them, just pull their attention. Delarosa’s guerrillas have been doing that already, more or less, but if we went all out—”
“We’d die,” said Tovar. “It’s like Hobb said, if we could do it safely, we’d have done it already.”
“So we don’t do it safely,” said Mkele.
The other men went quiet.
“This is as final and as deadly as any situation can be,” said Mkele. “We’re talking about a nuclear explosion forty miles from the last group of human beings on the planet. Even our best-case scenario, where somebody finds Delarosa and stops her in time, leaves us trapped in the hands of an occupying species that treats us like lab rats. An all-out attack on the Partials is going to kill every human soldier who tries it—none of us hold any illusions about that—but if there’s a chance that the rest of the humans could escape, then how can we possibly argue that it’s not worth it?”
Haru thought about his family: his wife, Madison, and his baby girl. He couldn’t bear to think of leaving Arwen without a father, but Mkele was right—when the only alternative is extinction, an awful lot of horrors become acceptable. “We’re going to die anyway,” he said. “At least this way our deaths will mean something.”
“Don’t go volunteering just yet,” said Tovar. “This is a two-part plan: One group provides the distraction, and the other gets everyone as far south as humanly possible. No pun intended.”
“Then we run,” said Mkele. His voice was somber. “Away from our only source of the cure. Or did we all forget?”
The room fell quiet again. Haru felt a numbness creeping up his legs and back—no matter how far they ran, they still had RM. Arwen was alive because Kira had found a cure in the Partials’ pheromonal system, but so far the humans had been unable to replicate it in a lab. They’d have to start over in a new medical facility, and it could take years just to find one and get it working again—and there was no guarantee that they’d ever be successful. If the Partials died, the cure would almost certainly die with them.
Haru could tell from their faces that the others were thinking of the same insurmountable problem. His throat was dry, and his voice sounded weak when he broke the silence. “Our best-case scenario keeps sliding closer and closer to our worst.”
“The Partials are our greatest enemy, but they’re also our only hope for the future,” said Mkele. He steepled his fingers and pressed them to his forehead a moment before continuing. “Maybe we should take some with us.”
“You say that like it’s easy,” said Haru.
“What do you want to do?” asked Tovar. “Just keep a few in cages and pull out the pheromone when you need it? Doesn’t that seem kind of evil to any of you?”
“My job is to protect the human race,” said Mkele. “If it means the difference between life and extinction, then yes, I will keep Partials in cages.”
Tovar’s face was grim. “I keep forgetting you had this same job under Delarosa.”
“Delarosa was trying to save the human race,” said Mkele. “Her only crime was that she was willing to go too far in order to do it. We decided, briefly, that we didn’t want to go along with her, but look at us: We’re hiding in a basement, letting Delarosa fight our battles, seriously considering letting her deploy a nuclear bomb. We are long past the point where we can pick and choose our morality. We either save our species or we don’t.”
“Yes,” said Tovar, “but I’d prefer it if we were still worth saving by the end of it.”
“We either save our species or we don’t,” Mkele repeated, more forcefully this time. He looked at the other men one by one, starting with Hobb. The amoral senator nodded almost immediately. Mkele turned next to Haru, who stared back only a moment before nodding as well. When the alternative is extinction, all kinds of horrors become acceptable.
“I don’t like it,” said Haru, “but I like it more than everybody dying. We’re out of time for anything better.”
Mkele turned to Tovar, who threw up his hands in frustration. “Do you know how long I fought against these kinds of fascist policies?”
“I do,” said Mkele calmly.
“I started a civil war,” said Tovar. “I bombed my own people because I thought freedom was more important than survival. There’s no point saving us if we lose our humanity in the process.”
“We can change if we live,” said Mkele. “A nation built on slavery can be redeemed, but not if we all die.”
“This is wrong,” said Tovar.
“I never said it wasn’t,” said Mkele. “Every choice we have is wrong. This is the lesser of ninety-nine evils.”
“I’ll lead your distraction,” said Tovar. “I’ll give my life to help the rest of you escape, and I’ll sell that life as dearly as possible. Hell, I’ve always been a better terrorist than a senator anyway.” He stared at them pointedly. “Just don’t give up on goodness yet. Somewhere out there there’s a way to get through this.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but instead just shook his head and turned to leave. “I hope we find it in time.”
Tovar’s hand was inches from the doorknob when suddenly the door shook, practically rattling on its hinges as someone pounded on the other side.
“Senator!” It was a young voice, Haru thought, probably another soldier. Tovar glanced back at the group curiously before opening the door.
“Senator Tovar,” said the soldier, practically tripping over himself in his rush to speak. “The message has stopped.”
Tovar frowned. “The message . . . stopped?”
“The radio message from the Partials,” said the soldier. “They’ve stopped the broadcast. Every channel is clear.”
Mkele stood up. “Are you sure?”
“We’ve scanned every frequency,” said the soldier.
“They’ve found her,” said Haru, stunned by the sudden blend of relief and terror. He’d known Kira for years, and the thought of her in Partial hands was sickening, but at the same time, Kira would be the first to say that one girl was more than a fair trade for the hundreds of people the Partials seemed willing to kill in their search for her. He’d come to hate her for not turning herself in, and eventually convinced himself that she couldn’t possibly still be on the island; she must have either fled or died, or surely she would have come forward by now. No one could stand by silently while so many people were executed. But now, if she’s been captured, maybe that means she’s been here all along. . . . The thought made him furious.
“We don’t know for sure that they’ve found the girl,” said Mkele. “It’s possible that their radio tower’s just failed temporarily.”
“Or maybe they just gave up,” said Hobb.
“Keep monitoring the frequencies,” said Tovar to the soldier. “Let me know the instant you hear anything. I’ll join you when I can.” The soldier nodded and ran off at a dash. Tovar closed and locked the door, keeping their conversation secret—nobody else knew about the nuke, and Haru knew it was wise to keep it that way. “How does this change our plans?” asked Tovar, looking back at the group. “Does it change them at all? There’s still a nuke, and Delarosa’s still probably going through with her plan. Even without the daily executions it’s still just a matter of time, and this is still the strongest blow she can strike against them.”
“If the Partials pull out, it makes the nuke an even more attractive option,” said Mkele, “because it will catch more of them in the blast.”
“And Kira too,” said Haru. He didn’t know how he felt about that.
Tovar smiled sadly. “Twenty minutes ago we were struggling to justify this attack, and now we can’t bear to give it up.”
“Delarosa will go through with her plan,” said Hobb, “and we should go through with ours.”
“Then I guess it’s time to piss off the overwhelming enemy,” said Tovar. He saluted them stiffly, the ex-marine appearing like magic from inside the form of the old, weathered traveler. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you.”
Mkele saluted him back, then turned toward Hobb and Haru. “You’re in charge of the evacuation.”
“He means me,” said Hobb.
“He means us,” said Haru. “Don’t think you’re in charge just because you’re a senator.”
“I’m twice your age.”
“If that’s the best reason you can come up with, you’re definitely not in charge.” Haru stood. “Can you shoot?”
“I’ve trained with a rifle since we founded East Meadow,” said Hobb indignantly.
“Then get your gear ready,” said Haru. “We’re leaving in an hour.” He left the room, deep in his own thoughts. Maybe the Partials really had found Kira—but where? And why now, after all this time?
And now that they had her, what would they do?