“Understood,” Jarvis nodded.
“Any more word from the mystery cruise ship?”
“The
Gulf Mariner
? No, ma’am. But if we do, I will pass it on via radio.”
“Do you have the log books from the Ukrainian ship?” she asked him.
He picked up his briefcase and slid the log over, along with a handwritten report on the sinking of the ferry and the freighter incident.
“Very good. I will check around and get these translated. Is the freighter in danger of breaking loose any time soon?”
“No, ma’am, it’s moored.”
“Very well, Lieutenant. Is there anything else?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I will file an operational order with you before I leave port tomorrow, so you have a good idea of what we are doing and when.”
“Orlando, you did all you could,” the Major said quietly as the coast guard officer stood and straitened his uniform shirt creases.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he placed his spotless dress combination cap on his head, the bright shield device shining on the front, and excused himself.
— | — | —
ChapteR 33
Reynolds walked up to the radio station enjoying the cool fall morning. It had been getting colder at night but the daytime was truly wonderful. The highs were hovering in the low 70’s in the late afternoon and, for a few brief weeks the Gulf Coast was neither too hot, nor too cold, but in the words of Goldilocks, just right.
Reynolds remembered her daughters and reading
Goldilocks and The Three Bears
to them years ago. She picked her head up and watched the commonplace site of a squadron of giant brown pelicans gliding majestically past the station’s antenna. They seemed to float on invisible jet engines, without once flapping their wings. She would trade places with them in a heartbeat.
The only radio station on the island was 620AM WGSH. Reynolds knew nothing about broadcast radio, but was told that it had been a 5kW daytime-only talk radio station. The station owner was a corporation in Florida. The facility had been augmented by FEMA with a generator and a 5000-gallon diesel tank, a shame because the engineer and DJ had vanished during the outbreak. The tank was only half-full due to looting when the town took the building over and a group of volunteers was working around the clock to get the station back online.
“Good morning!” called out Doug (just Doug, no one seemed to know his last name), as he saw the Major approach. He hung from a safety harness on the side of the radio tower above the building. Coiled around his shoulder were several dozen feet of black cable. Around his waist was a work belt festooned with pliers, meters, electrical tape, and all sorts of doodads hung from his narrow frame. A teenaged boy wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt with several bright fish on it looked on at the technician, holding the other end of the cable spooled around the man’s arm.
“Hello up there. Any luck?” Reynolds asked.
“We’re working on it,” he yelled. “Wyatt, you want to go give her the tour?” he said to the boy.
The boy nodded and allowed the cable to rest on the ground. “Ok,” he replied, a small blue fly buzzing around his curly hair.
“Follow me,” the boy said to her. There was something vaguely familiar about the boy as he led the way into the station.
As he walked through the front door and then past the reception area into the engineering spaces and studio room he was busy introducing every piece of equipment they came across with gestures and tidbits.
“The gear is pretty old-school but it seems to work. We got the generator running but have not energized the transmitter yet…just has shore power to the board and overhead lights. The computer drive has like ten years of Rush Limbaugh on it and some Christmas music but not much else…we think we can hit 200-miles out in every direction at night, but due to propagation issues only like 20 miles during the day,” the boy rambled as Reynolds nodded.
Extension cords ran the length of the halls, zip-tied to black licorice-colored coaxial cables. Like a science experiment run amok, the crew of volunteers had taken the radio station’s electronics over and expanded it into the office spaces and kitchen. Reynolds heard the crackle of static and the occasional broadcasted voice coming from every room in the building.
As the boy led her to the studio room, Reynolds saw a young woman in her twenties with pouty lips, green eyes and a mane of strawberry hair working with the operating board and microphone.
“Hello,” the woman said as she got up and extended her hand across the distance, “Mackenzie Tillman, but you can call me Mack, everyone does.”
“Sara Reynolds,” she said and smiled, suddenly very conscious of her well-worn flight suit for the second time that day.
“Yes, everyone knows who you are,” the young woman said with a knowing grin.
Reynolds almost pursued the bait but then dropped it and moved on, “I’m here to see how it is going. To get a status report on your operation and see what you guys need. Did you get lunch?”
“Yes, but after the grilled Tuna steaks over grits yesterday, it was almost a letdown,” the woman smiled, almost as if she was privy to an inside joke.
“Mr. Trung and his people donated their first shrimp to the town this morning. I have to say that I’ve never really been big into shrimp so I have to agree with you,” Reynolds said then changed gears. “Do you have enough volunteers for this project?”
“We had about 60-registered Ham radio call signs on the island a month ago. A lot were summer residents, but about a dozen that were not, were on the island at the time of the outbreak, and survived. Of these, most volunteered to help to some degree and have been in and out.”
“That’s good.”
“They are handling the shortwave and HAM stuff. Doug and Wyatt here are working on getting the AM back on line. I have to admit, all I am doing is the production end of it. I took a couple classes when I was a broadcasting major at UWF.”
“Looks like the outbreak interrupted your studies.”
“Actually life interrupted my studies. I couldn’t afford to keep going
and
pay rent so the only thing the outbreak interrupted was my banking and finance career.”
Reynolds nodded. She had started and stopped college a dozen times in her air force career working on her master’s degree and was still a couple years away from completing it between course costs, transfers, kids, and the divorce.
“So how long do you think it will be before you get the AM station broadcasting to the public?” the major asked.
“Doug and Wyatt said we are looking good for the next day or so. We had to bypass the emergency broadcasting equipment as it won’t let us broadcast anything.”
“Ah, okay.”
“Doug says we have enough diesel fuel once we start broadcasting for about ten days if we run 24-hours a day.”
“About that, I’m sending someone by to get most of the diesel as we need it for other locations. On the bright side, the windmill gang say they will be up and running by the end of the week, and we will make sure you people get a line here.”
The young woman gave her one of the best eat-shit looks she had ever gotten, which was saying something, as Reynolds was something of a collector of eat-shit looks.
Wyatt, so far just an observer in the conversation, protested, “This isn’t fair, it’s our fuel. We are the ones that found it!”
“I was told we had priority on this project by George,” Mack said confidently.
“George is the civil administrator and fuel is a military item. Like I said, we will leave you enough to keep running for a few days and, as soon as we can, I will get your electric line turned on. We need this program to keep people informed and to give them a sense of normalcy. But I also need the diesel for defense and food at a higher priority.”
Mack accepted that.
“So what have the Ham guys been able to get? Have they made any outside contact? Any news to pass on?” Reynolds asked.
Mack nodded and reached out to tap the Major’s shoulder. “Yes, come with me. They are in here,” the redhead said as she walked out of the studio room and down the hall.
After talking to Edgar and Andrew, the two Ham radio geeks down the hall, Reynolds decided they were two sides of the same coin. Both retired, both proud little peacocks who delighted in outdoing each other, they had invested most of their time and treasure for decades into their hobby.
The men did not know each other before the outbreak but since the town meeting asking for volunteers had been inseparable. They had been sleeping at the station and were putting in 16-hour days. Along with Doug, Mack, and Wyatt they were the meat of the communications project.
They had scoured the island for multiple radios and antennas, then ganged them together through an old desktop PC and used advanced radio control software to hop over shortwave HF, UHF, CB, and other frequencies to listen for anything that might be out there.
“So, what have you found out?” Reynolds asked.
Edgar pushed his thick plastic-framed glasses up over his nose and cleared his throat. “Well. We have a few contacts in the Pacific Northwest. They are very fuzzy about saying exactly where but we guess they are in Idaho. Total nutjobs.”
“Anyone else?”
“A Canadian in Newfoundland. He says that they have Norwegian troops there on the streets and the outbreak is touch and go up in the countryside. He said the cities have all been overrun.”
Reynolds nodded, “Go on.”
“We got lots of broken stuff coming from Scandinavian call signs but their English is horrible and our Swedish-chef imitation isn’t going over well. What we can get is that the Russians have nuked a good deal of Europe and there is some sort of evacuation going on there.”
“Friggin’ radio-active zombies!” Andrew broke in.
Reynolds shot him a cool expression and firmed up her entire posture. “Let’s be clear here. This stuff needs to stay in this room. Most of it is just wild rumor and speculation. If I hear any of these stories floating around the island, I am coming here with the MPs and locking the whole place down. We clear?”
Andrew and Edgar paused before they said, “Clear,” in unison.
“Good. Anybody closer than Canada?” Reynolds began the questioning again.
“Nothing in the tri-state area. I am guessing that at this point, there is a big issue with power. About the closest we have is a fella somewhere up the Florida Atlantic coast who is broadcasting all the time. His name is Ike but he is being coy about his exact location. I guess people are paranoid. He’s all questions but few answers.”
“Sounds like a policy we need to adopt gentlemen. When you talk to anyone, be sure to give minimal details about the size and formation of the military forces here, or even how many people we have here. You can give out our location but be fuzzy on everything else. We are not going to turn any refugees away but I don’t want to give out military secrets just in case there is actually a Russian U-Boat off Santa Rosa Island.”
They agreed with the Major again.
“Speaking of Russian U-boats…anything that seems funny? Any military units that you have made contact with?”
“Shortwave station broadcasts are dependent upon atmospheric propagation and can only be heard certain times of the day, mainly at night.” Edgar explained with obvious fascination. “We hooked up an old shortwave to a PC-radio and we’ve been monitoring alternating between 2.3200 for FEMA and 5.6800 for the Coast Guard for long periods of time and all we get is nothing—except for when our local cutter keys up of course. We have been scanning everything else and have only gotten two stations with no call signs that every hour transmits an electronically synthesized English-accented female voice reading groups of numbers in sets of five. It is the same numbers repeatedly so we think it may be completely automated and possibly unmanned. We also get chatter on two freaks-,” motioning to Andrew who replied:
“—exactly!” Andrew shouted out with hands raised like a revival minister. “They are transmitting what breaks down to be junk in bursts of high-speed Morse code.”
“Why is it junk?” Reynolds asked. She noticed Wyatt beside her hanging onto every word that was exchanged. Mack had taken the chance to vacate and did so, retreating back to the studio while the two Hams regaled Reynolds.
“We hooked it up to a printer and translated the code out and it doesn’t make sense. I’m guessing its military crypto stuff. But the stellar thing about this is that it’s always different, sooooooo…” Edgar said, again cueing to Andrew who replied:
“The Empire is still out there and it’s communicating with itself.”
Reynolds looked around at the three men and boys in the room, grinning ear-to-ear like Cheshire cats and only shook her head.
— | — | —
ChapteR 34
Spud watched the yellow diesel jug fill quickly from the garbage truck’s tank. Few people knew that if you had a length of garden hose, a couple of fittings, a cordless drill, and a $15 drill pump, you could fill a five-gallon gas can from a car’s gas tank in just over a minute flat.