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  Chapter Seven - Then

  Mike was pretty happy. Jo flew up for a week. She took some vacation time to come see him. Mike was happy as hell that she was able to come up, and to see her face when he came back to the BOQ. She brought him a copy of the ultra sound, and he spent an hour with his head resting on her stomach, talking to the baby. Jo thought that was the sweetest thing she had ever seen.

  Mike rented a car so that they didn’t have to take one from the team to get around. On the last weekend she was there, Mike and Jo rented a cabin and went to Yellowstone for the weekend. He woke up to her on Monday, and she flew out to the east coast for some time with both Mike’s and Jo’s families. Due to her father’s busy schedule, she was stopping in Georgia first to visit Mike’s family.

  So, now, Mike and the team were back at Area 19, and back to work in the mech armor. The team was armored up. The power armor was now second nature to them. Today’s exercise was to move as a team across the play room floor and use the internal map to track each team member and to monitor team kill zones. They used a standard infantry wedge formation and watched the interlocking kill zones on the map to engage imaginary targets. After each engagement, they would move into a circle for three hundred and sixty degree security, and watch as the kill zones shifted to encompass the new reality.

  Mike was very impressed with what he had seen in the mechs. With his team’s input to the software, and the sensor package in the suits, they came a long way to perfecting the capabilities of the power suits for future combat operations.

  Red lights started flashing around the room.

  “Hey, what the hell?” he asked, startled.

  The rest of the team were looking at their displays, wondering what was going on. The engineering team looked concerned.

  “What’s going on? Does anybody have an idea of what is going on?” he asked.

  Lieutenant Pang was the only person in the room that understood what the red flashing lights meant. But she wasn’t going to announce it until she was sure that this wasn’t a test or malfunction in the system. Her money was on a malfunction.

  “Hang on, let me call up to security,” she said, loud enough for everybody in the room to understand.

  Mike and the team heard perfectly inside the mech armor. The suits could pick up the smallest noise and magnify it so that the team could hear what was going on.

  Lieutenant Pang walked to the far side of the room where the desks were located and grabbed a phone and made a call. Mike turned up the sound so he could hear what she was saying.

  “Yeah, I’m calling about a possible malfunction in the emergency system down here. All the lights are flashing.” She was quiet for a moment. “What?” she asked. “What do you mean it isn’t a malfunction? Is it a test?” She was quiet, simply listening to the information. The sensors were good, but Mike couldn’t hear what was being said from the other end of the conversation. She didn’t say anything and turned to walk back to the team. The look on her face was not good. She was alarmed.

  “Folks, I don’t want to scare anybody, but there is an emergency situation. Security is aware of what is going on, but they don’t have time to explain everything to me. Evidently, there is an att-“

  The world blinked.

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  Dear Leader was coked up again, breaking bottles as he threw them around the room. He was partying with coke and alcohol, watching Disney movies, and having sex with several of the little girls from the North Korean gymnastics team.

  General Som Bak Yip was not pleased with the situation. The new Dear Leader, Kim IL Don, was not exactly the most comforting presence. Since his supply of fat, young, Chinese girls had been cut off, he had been rougher on the North Korean girls that he used. They were skinny. He didn’t like skinny. If the girls didn’t please, they and their families were executed. If they did please, Dear Leader kept them around until they didn’t please him, then he had the girl and their families executed. It was a no win situation for the girls, which explained the tears on their faces.

  Kim IL Don had also been abrupt with the North Korean soldiers who had been careless, resulting in a cross border fire fight with a Chinese army patrol. General Som Bak Yip was not sure if this was because they had been caught, had created an international incident, or had not delivered the three Chinese girls that Dear Leader had been anticipating. The soldiers’ bodies had been left rotting in an open grave, food for the crows and dogs.

  Luckily, the Chinese Government and the international community didn’t really understand how long this had been going on. There were only rumors about the boy’s tastes during the wait for his father to die, and few knew about his more extreme appetites. If his father had found out about them when he was still alive, well, he wouldn’t have really been upset. He would have just found a way to ensure that the girls were purchased quietly and efficiently for his son. What the father didn’t understand was that the suspense of stealing the girls led to the psycho-sexual adrenalin rush of anticipation that his son felt.

  Kim IL Don had a pistol in his hand and waved it around at the girls, shouting incomprehensibly, throwing empty liquor bottles at them. The girls were all crying, wondering if they were going to live through the night.

  Kim IL Don cursed and turned his back on the girls. He used the pistol in his hand to point at one of the guards and started to say something. The pistol went off, barely missing the guard. The guard flinched, but knew better than to say anything, and stood very still while Dear Leader started laughing.

  Kim IL Don grabbed one of the girls by the collar of her dress and started walking with her. He walked to and out the door, his arm around the girl’s neck. The door slammed shut behind him. The General walked to one of the guards.

  “Get servants in here to clean all this up. Make sure the girls are taken to the doctor to see to their needs. Send them to their rooms. Dear Leader may need their services later.”

  The General walked from the room as the guard rounded up the girls with barked commands and started herding them out the door on the other side of the room. The girls were still crying and whimpering, knowing that, just because they survived this encounter, it didn’t mean that they were going to survive the next.

  The General thought about the situation before him. He had gone into the room to tell Dear Leader that the UN General Counsel meeting moved to instill more sanctions on North Korea. This time, neither the Chinese or Russian government used their veto powers to stop the sanctions. It was not a good time to be in the military in North Korea.

  The General had money stored away in several off shore accounts. He had squirrelled it away for many years. He did this when he saw the writing on the wall after the twin towers were destroyed. It was done very carefully, because if anyone else found out, he would be a very dead man.

  As it was, he couldn’t see the power structure of North Korea being able to weather another five years, let alone thirty. Odds were very good that the current Dear Leader was quite probably the last Dear Leader that North Korea would ever have to worry about. This possibility was starting to worry several of the senior North Korean officers.

  After the demonstration that Kim IL Don put on tonight, it was doubtful that Dear Leader would be around much longer. General Som Bak Yip would have to talk to the other senior officers about limiting Dear Leader’s access to the special weapons program. Dear Leader’s influence over some of the junior officers in the program was . . . disturbing.

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  Kim IL Don was upset. Even in his coked up state, he knew that his empire was collapsing around him. The economy, what little there was, was declining rapidly. The international community instituted more and more sanctions against him. Because of this, it was getting hard to feed his army. The Chinese and Russians were starting to curtail their support for him as well. This was more disturbing to him tha
n the sanctions from the international community.

  The kingdom survived by keeping the Army happy. Most of the Army was totally devoted to its Dear Leader. It had been devoted and loyal for four generations of Dear Leaders. He had been lucky that his brother and his brother’s new wife died in an airplane crash. It took finesse to ensure his father didn’t find out his role in that. He was lucky though, and he had help. Senior officers were upset with some of the new initiatives that his brother tried to implement. Anything that took power away from the senior officers was generally frowned upon by the officer corps.

  He knew that his esoteric tastes in girls, and the things that he liked to do with them, caused trouble with the Chinese government. They looked the other way about a lot of things that had happened in the past. The economy in China was not working very well right now, though, and the Chinese media was being used to focus the attention of the Chinese people in any other direction that would take their minds off of Chinese internal problems.

  By diverting the attention of the Chinese general population towards the situation with the North Koreans, they bought themselves another six months to try and fix thirty trillion dollars of debt, corruption, and a big real estate bubble. It was a fragile six months, but it bought time for the senior leadership to steadily move their own funds to offshore accounts. They needed this to manage a comfortable existence once the collapse in their own country began.

  He had been sacrificed by the Chinese to ensure that they had time to arrange for a better outcome to their circumstances. He raged as he walked down the hall, the little North Korean gymnast by his side. She cried as they walked. She was too afraid to do anything else. She was fourteen years old, and only wanted to be with her mother. Dear Leader still had his pistol in hand, and as Dear leader raged, he waved the pistol around, scaring her.

  They came to his room. He opened the door and pushed her inside. He pushed her down on the bed and walked over to the dresser and poured himself another drink. She was relieved to watch him put down the pistol to pour, hoping that he would forget it was there. He walked to an overstuffed chair and sat down. He drank the scotch, and held the cold glass to his head. Suddenly, he noticed the little girl again.

  “Make yourself useful,” he told her.

  She was still crying, but she nodded and stood up.

  “Without the clothes,” he ordered her.

  She wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes to begin with, but she shrugged out of the gauzy lingerie that she was wearing. “What does my Dear Leader desire?” she asked in what she thought was a seductive voice. Both of them ignored the quivering undertones.

  “You’re a gymnast, yes?” he asked.

  She nodded. She had to fight the impulse to cover her body with her hands.

  “Then do something. Do a dance. Just do something,” he told her.

  As she danced, he tried to think. He blamed the Chinese for his predicament. Hell, his father had been worse than he was. The Chinese had been more than happy to procure girls for his father. Of course, his father was not as rough with them, and they returned to their families richer when his father was done with them.

  His current problems were the fault of the Chinese government. His father had been more than happy to act as the cut out for the more violent worldwide programs that the Chinese were involved in. His kingdom, of course, made a lot of money from the transactions, and North Korea kept the Chinese government’s involvement from being identified. Now they had abandoned him. He was furious. He knew that his senior officers would be meeting soon about the situation. He may be a coked up pedophile, but he learned the way of internal politics from his father. He had spies everywhere, watching everyone. He knew what was going on in his kingdom.

  Superficial thoughts ran through his head as he watched the girl go through her routines. She was a very good gymnast, and she was quite flexible. He could tell that she would be a pretty woman when she grew up.

  He was still upset, and the longer he thought about things, the more upset he became. Finally, he decided to do something about it. He walked over to the wardrobe, and started getting dressed. The gymnast watched this with interest when his back was turned. If he left, she might actually live through the night. If she was lucky, she might even leave the palace and go back to practicing gymnastics.

  He slicked back his hair, and then walked to the door of the room. The girl was completely forgotten. He walked out and told one of the guards to get a car ready for him. The young soldier ran off and made sure that the commander of the guard knew what was happening. They had the motorcade ready for him by the time he got to the door leading out of the building.

  He walked out and the leader of the security detachment asked him where he wanted to go. He told the young officer, and then settled into his personal car. As he seated himself in the plush interior, he was focusing much better. His thoughts were directed towards one goal, so his focus was quite intense.

  The motorcade started up, and they drove north. They were going to one of his favorite places in the world. This was the one thing that kept the rest of the world at bay. He knew that as long as he possessed nuclear weapons, the rest of the world would never be able to do anything to him. It was his own senior officers that worried him, though. He needed a purge, and he could only do that if his kingdom was secure. There was only one way to ensure this. The Chinese needed to know that he was a serious man. The Chinese politburo would never have imagined his intent.

  The rest of the world knew about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and they knew about the missile program. What they didn’t know about was the No Dong missiles with nuclear warheads on them. While there were some critical ideological differences between North Korea and Pakistan, they had collaborated for some time to ensure that both had the capability to launch nuclear missiles at their enemies. The collaboration between the two countries had been very beneficial.

  China, while it had spies among the North Koreans, didn’t know the full capabilities of the North Korean nuclear program, because the North Koreans had been feeding disinformation to the Chinese for some time. Right now, the Chinese thought that it might be another ten years before the North Koreans possessed a viable nuclear missile.

  Dear Leader thought about the situation, and started feeling better. Once the Chinese understood the strength and resolution of North Korea and Dear Leader, they would once again respect him and his country. Then they would do as he told them.

  He pulled a small vial and spoon out of his pocket. The nice thing about being a dictator was that he had access to all the good drugs. He had his own personal lab and chemists who ensured that he had the finest, purist drugs available. On the way to the nuclear facility, he did some coke, a hit of ecstasy, and washed it down with more scotch. He was weaving when he entered the facility that housed the command of his nuclear forces. He borrowed a pistol from one of his personal security detachment to remove a few obstacles, their bloody bodies speaking loudly to the rest of the personnel in the building, and the rest of his security detachment ensured compliance with his further instructions.

  It was only later, when the Chinese saw the lone missile launch from North Korea, that they took the North Korean leader seriously. By that time, it was much too late to do anything about the situation. The single missile took the entire world by surprise. The target selection was even more surprising. It was headed directly towards Beijing. The Chinese Strategic Missile command had a series of orders that they followed. Because of this, mutually assured destruction was very much ensured. Though officials in the politburo knew where the missile was coming from, the ones that knew were more concerned about leaving Beijing than they were about stopping the retaliation against everyone else.

  Chinese nuclear missiles filled the air as they launched toward targets in foreign countries. Even though it was a lone missile, because of submarines, the Chinese Military wa
s not sure which country launched it. Just because the missile came from the direction of North Korea, it could have been a launch from a United States or Russian submarine in the Sea of Japan. More than one Chinese officer was cursing the Japanese and Taiwanese as well.

  Nuclear missiles launched from China and headed to Russia and the United States. They, in turn, launched everything that they had in their inventory. Prayers filled the air, but none were answered.

  Ten years ago, a Chinese scientist attached to the nuclear program watched a DVD about a super volcano located in North America. After watching it, he contacted his superior, a general officer in the Chinese army. The scientist did a presentation to several senior officials and generals. They brought in several prestigious geologists with backgrounds in vulcanology from different Chinese universities, and explained to them how their families would be killed if they ever talked about the subject material discussed.

  After the geologists left, there were several papers produced, and many scientists and officers were asked for their opinions on the subject. Once everybody concurred, three nuclear missiles were retargeted. Those three missiles flew an eight minute trajectory. They were targeted for Yellowstone National park just outside of Jackson, Wyoming. They were aimed at the Yellowstone Caldera.

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  Yellowstone is an active volcano. Most people in the United States were unaware that an active volcano, capable of extinguishing a great portion of life on the planet, is one of the United States most popular tourist destinations. The entire park is comprised of a huge volcanic caldera that was shaped over a time period of 2.1 million years. The caldera itself was thirty four by forty five miles wide. The caldera was shaped by three large eruptions, one at 2.1 million years ago, one at 1.3 million years ago, and at 640,000 years ago. The most recent eruption was a smaller steam explosion 13,800 years ago.

  The hotspot that created the super volcano has been moving east as the North American plate moved west across it, which created the Snake River Plane. The most energetic eruption was the one at 2.1 million years prior, which produced 2,500 times more ash than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Recent studies concluded that it was unlikely that the super volcano would erupt, and indeed, might be slipping under thicker crust that would not allow it to explode until it created another hotspot further east.

  This all changed as the nuclear bombs ripped into the crater, cracking the underlying geologic strata, making the rock underneath bow down as it absorbed the energy from the radiation and overpressure of the nuclear explosions. It took moments for the energy to be redirected as the floor of the park cracked, and the ash exploded into the sky.

  Malmstrom Air Force base was hit by two nuclear bombs, one from Russia, one from China. The Air Force base, and the town of Great Falls, Montana turned into a melted, desolated nuclear ruin before the volcano destroyed the landscape. Lava bombs peppered the land as far as two states away from the volcano.

  A ridge of rock south of Great Falls redirected the pyroclastic flow away from the Great Falls and Malmstrom AFB area to the east. But, the area was not to be spared. The pyroclastic flow moved to the west down the valleys carved by the Madison, the Gallatin, and the Jefferson rivers, across Canyon Ferry Lake and onto the Missouri River. The current of hot gas and rock known as tephra, reaching temperatures of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, flew across the top of the water, and moving at 450 miles per hour, destroyed all life and any sign of human habitation.

  The area around Area 19 was devastated, irradiated and shattered by nuclear weapons. Then the pyroclastic flow completely covered everything in the area. There was no indication that any life had ever been present. As the ash cloud exploded from the super volcano that used to be Yellowstone National Park, it settled and buried the Air Force base in cement like particles that combined with the steady rain that the ash particles induced from the atmosphere. Lightning skipped along the ash clouds, highlighting the hellish landscape that used to be the Missouri River Basin.

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