This Changes Everything Read online

  And the enemy, damn them, probably wouldn’t abide by the request anyway.

  For every tank and Bradley fighting vehicle they send into battle, the Army likes to have two of each on standby within twelve miles.

  The Marine Corps likes to have three of each within ten miles.

  The same is true of artillery pieces, Hummers, anti-aircraft guns, radar units, deuce and a half trucks… you name it, there are an awful lot of backups.

  And it’s not just vehicles and combat gear.

  The same is true of weapons and ammunition, medical supplies and everything else it takes to run a combat operation.

  Since we’re talking Air Force, we have to mention what the USAF calls “WRSK kits.”

  It’s an acronym, and it’s pronounced “RISK kits” because sounding out each of the words would make for an ungainly conversation.

  The Air Force, like all branches of the service, loves to use acronyms. It that makes sense because the nomenclatures they attach to everything is generally a mile long or longer. Acronyms save time and breath. As long as everyone knows what a WRSK kit they don’t have to say “War Readiness Spares Kits” several times in the same conversation.

  “WRSK kits” is just faster and easier.

  WRSK kits are air-transportable packages of spare parts which are configured in advance and stationed alongside a particular aircraft.

  They can be deployed within a matter of hours; typically faster than the squadron of aircraft the kits support.

  Say for example, a squadron of F-15 Eagles is sent to a forward operating base (or FOB, yet another acronym) in Afghanistan. It takes a bit of coordination, identifying which flight crews will fly them, which extra crews will go along as backups, which tankers will meet them in the sky to refuel them, etc.

  The WRSK kits just need an empty cargo plane to stop at the deploying base. It’s typical for the WRSK kits to arrive at the FOB before the wheels of the F-15s are tucked into the wings back in the states.

  That’s the upside. Aircraft can deploy overseas and have spare parts instantly available from the moment they arrive.

  The downside is that it takes an awful lot of spare parts to make up the WRSK kits. Parts which are sitting on netted aircraft pallets ready to go instead of on the shelf in a warehouse ready to use.

  The kits are an essential part of the mission.

  But to some, mostly accountant or watchdog types, they’re an incredible waste of money.

  Excess.

  It’s a debate that’s been going on since the first U.S. Calvary unit rode their horses into battle.

  How many spares, how much stores, are really needed, and how much is too much? At what point does “essential” become wasteful?

  It’s not just airplane parts.

  The Air Force also stores vast amounts of food and drinking water. All the services do, for it really is true that an army travels on its stomach.

  They store vast amounts of fuels too, for all those buildings, both at permanent bases and FOBs, have to be heated and cooled.

  From the earliest days of the first freeze personnel at Joint Base Lackland didn’t have to forage for food. They merely went to the dining facility

  It was once called the “chow hall,” but that term is now politically incorrect.

  At the dining facility they enjoyed one hot meal a day and were given a Meal, Ready to Eat (enough acronyms already!) or MRE.

  A third meal wasn’t necessary, for the MREs contained over two thousand calories apiece.

  The people of Bexar County and San Antonio were lied to about Colonel Montgomery’s growing operation. They thought they’d benefit from it and weren’t.

  Still, they were helped through the freeze with dried goods and flour from military excesses, commodity goods from FEMA, and excess grains from the Department of Agriculture.

  It wasn’t easy for anyone. But weather guru Tina Koszarek and her counterparts had enough food to get by.

  Everyone pretty much agreed that was the very best of a dwindling number of “military benefits.”

  -27-

  Tina was indeed monitoring the temperatures at Joint Base Lackland several times each and every day.

  It was the only accurate way of forecasting how long the new freeze would last, and when the thaw could be expected.

  She had noticed the temperature rose above freezing for three consecutive days in the middle of August.

  San Antonio, because it was farther south than Salt Mountain and had a lower elevation, actually fared better than Hannah and her bunch. At least when it came to higher daytime temperatures

  The temperature at Joint Base Lackland made it to thirty seven degrees for a short time before the sun set on August 17th.

  The snow pack at the sprawling base receded more than an inch, and packed ice on the roadways shrunk by almost half an inch.

  The base commander instructed the command post to keep the melt under wraps, so as not to get anyone’s hopes up.

  “It might be just an anomaly,” he said. “No sense leading people into believing things will be back to normal in a single year when it might take three or four.”

  But good news always gets out.

  The military is usually good at keeping secrets, but this was probably the worst-kept secret in military history.

  Anybody who went outside during those three days saw the melt for themselves.

  Everyone knew.

  Everyone except General Lester Mannix and his staff, for they were still rat-holed in their once top-secret bunker.

  None of them ever went outside.

  Now, some might say that not informing the Air Force Chief of Staff of something so important smacked a little bit of mutiny.

  But they’d have been wrong.

  For Tina or anyone else to be guilty of mutiny she’d have to have been under General Mannix’s direct command.

  And while it’s a fine line, not all Air Force members report directly to the four star general at the top of the heap. In a round about way he was responsible for her, and she certainly owed him her loyalty. But he didn’t endorse her annual performance reports; therefore she didn’t work directly for him.

  Besides, one of the other basic elements of a mutiny charge according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or UCMJ (there’s another of those pesky acronyms) is that the person charged must have been trying to take command and control away from one who lawfully had it.

  Nobody was trying to do that.

  Nobody else wanted the job.

  Mannix might not have been the most popular chief of staff the Air Force ever had. But he was safe in keeping his job. For it was probably the hardest job in the Air Force and he earned every dollar he was paid.

  Or rather… he earned every voucher he received.

  So scratch any rumors going around of mutinous behavior.

  Some also believed that the base command post’s refusal to tell Mannix and his people reeked of treason.

  But that didn’t hold water either.

  Yes, martial law had been declared just prior to Saris 7 striking the earth and was never rescinded.

  And yes, it was a time of great national emergency. So peacetime treason laws did apply.

  But an essential element of the charge was an affirmative duty to obey an order or do something covered by regulation.

  Tina had been given no orders to update the people in the bunker of anything.

  If she’d been asked she certainly would have.

  But she simply wasn’t asked.

  No, if Tina and the base commander and his deputy were guilty of anything it would have been conspiracy.

  But even that charge likely wouldn’t stick.

  Conspiracy defined meant a group of people working in concert to do something illegal or shady in seeking a distinct goal or outcome.

  Typically that defined goal or outcome would have benefited the conspirators in some way. Usually monetarily.

  The only thing this group
was seeking was a fair shake for Colonel Medley and Colonel Wilcox. For word had gotten around that General Mannix was not only charging them with a crime few others on the base agreed with; he was also seeking to put them to death for the crime.

  Most people on the base, though they could not voice the opinion, thought the only crime committed by the pair of colonels was bruising the general’s enormous ego.

  And for forcing him out of his warm bunker and into the frigid cold and making him shiver for forty five minutes.

  Nobody, other than the general himself, felt that warranted the death penalty.

  To be sure, there was no love lost between Colonel Tim Wilcox and the men and women working under him.

  By all accounts he was a fine doctor and an excellent surgeon.

  But he lacked two things essential to a good commanding officer: empathy for his troops and good management skills.

  He could perform a successful appendectomy with the best of them. But as a leader of men he was a flop. He was generally despised by all and considered a pompous ass.

  Conversely, Colonel Morris Medley was universally loved and respected.

  He was like everybody’s dad. He always had a kind word to say, some heartfelt advice to give… and most importantly he had his troops’ backs. He wouldn’t tolerate injustice of any type.

  The entire base populace believed firmly that things would have gone a lot better if Medley outranked Wilcox instead of the other way around.

  But he didn’t.

  Their replacements at the head of base management were two other colonels. Two colonels who believed that “slow rolling” the general was the way to go. If the general knew the thaw had started he’d press on with his plans to court martial the pair. Perhaps even move everything up.

  But if he thought the trial was two… three… maybe four years away, he might have a change of heart and release the men.

  Instead of lining them up before a firing squad.

  -28-

  Frank and Josie had been sneaking off lately, whispering things to one another when they were fairly confident Crazy Eddie wasn’t following them around in the darkness.

  He had a bad habit of eavesdropping on them so he could share their secrets with the others.

  Their elusive behavior wasn’t rooted in evil, or even anything slightly shady.

  They certainly weren’t plotting against Josie’s family, or anyone else for that matter.

  They were just unsure how the next big event in their lives – the coming thaw – would change their plans to escape the facility and leave Plainview.

  They both knew they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. They were both madly in love.

  But many members of Josie’s extended family were a bit too iffy to trust. Many were mentally unstable to various degrees due to a wide range of factors.

  Eddie and Aunt Stacy were the most obvious, but others were worrisome for various reasons as well.

  Patriarch John Dykes, for example. Years behind bars in one of the most brutal prisons in Texas had taken away most of his humanity and replaced it with anger.

  He was just downright mean.

  And a bit unstable to boot.

  Cousin Paul was having nightmares recently which seemed to make no sense.

  He’d dream of a band of women attacking the group with machetes and butterfly knives.

  Women because they entered through the twenty-inch hole the brothers had cut in the roof to provide ventilation and to let snowflakes drift into the water barrels below.

  Men couldn’t fit through the tiny hole and rappel down to the warehouse floor, but smaller women could.

  Machetes and butterfly knives were their weapons of choice because they were lighter than firearms, required no ammunition and didn’t jam.

  The most unbelievable; the most ludicrous part of Paul’s recurring nightmare, was that all the women looked alike.

  Not identical twins or even triplets, for there were twenty of them. Identical… something, maybe.

  And they all dressed alike, according to Paul. Right down to the red scarves they wore around the collars of their ninja jumpsuits.

  Nobody wanted to openly discount Paul’s nightly dreams, for he believed with all his heart that an attack from the ninja-women was imminent.

  They tried their best to repress their outright laughter, settling for an occasional giggle or sideways glance at one another.

  The nightmares were impossible to ignore, though, since Paul talked about little else.

  And he coerced all the men to walk up and down the warehouse’s aisles at night, on alternating two hour shifts.

  “So when they do invade, they won’t take us with our guard down.”

  Okay.

  Even young Jason, normally the most stable of the brothers, was showing signs of cracking.

  Most of it was the strain of living in an armed fortress for so many years without the chance to go outside occasionally and breathe in some fresh air.

  He was showing classic signs of cabin fever; a condition men get when they’re “snowed in” for months at a time in the Arctic region.

  He was getting claustrophobic, paranoid and short-tempered.

  Frank and Josie’s problem, as they saw it, was that in a year or so they’d be free to leave if they wanted. The roads would be thawed enough to allow them to jump in Frank’s Humvee and put miles beneath its wheels.

  They were quite clear that they wanted to spend their lives together. That decision was easy.

  The other part of that equation… the fact they’d decided to leave Plainview and go back to Junction… they’d kept to themselves.

  Frank had been confiding all his secrets to her a bit at a time.

  She now knew that what she’d long suspected was true. That he was once a law enforcement officer and a former United States Marine.

  He’d regaled her with stories of a wondrous place in an old salt mine not far from San Antonio.

  A place where the most wonderful people imaginable resided.

  They were welcoming and friendly. Loyal and fair. Kind and generous in all ways.

  Josie loved her family.

  At the same time, though, she knew it was time to sever her ties with them.

  Some families build their members up and help them succeed.

  Other families, like the Dykes, were like a lead weight chained around one’s neck.

  They dragged down good people because… well, because they were at the bottom, in the dredges of society, and they didn’t like being there all alone.

  Misery loves company.

  So do dirtbags.

  Josie was a successful Emergency Medical Technician before the world froze over. She was a respected member of the fire department and drove an ambulance and saved lives.

  She was the only one of her family who ever went to college and never went to jail.

  And she wanted it to stay that way.

  Eventually the world would thaw again and get more or less back to normal.

  Eventually the Dykes would return to their old ways.

  They’d go back to burglarizing and stealing.

  And assaulting anyone who dared get in their way.

  Josie was terrified they'd drag her down with them, get her involved in some of their crimes.

  And that she’d finally see the inside of a prison.

  When she heard of Frank’s nirvana, she didn’t even hesitate.

  “I want to go there with you as soon as we’re able,” she told him.

  “But we can’t tell anybody. They’re all unstable to some degree now. I don’t know how they’ll take it. I’d like to think they’d wish us well. But they might just as easily take it as an affront. They might see it as a betrayal.

  “They might be angry.”

  -29-

  Frank wasn’t the type of man who snuck around doing things behind people’s backs.

  Josie thought hard, trying to remember the last time she’d outri
ght lied to her family.

  She couldn’t think of a single time. Ever.

  Frank tried to make her feel better and maybe a little less guilty because that’s the kind of man Frank was.

  “You’re not exactly lying to them,” he said. “You never actually told them you’d stay here with them when the world warmed up again.”

  “I know, honey. I’ve been telling myself that, trying to rationalize my behavior in my own mind.

  “And while that may be technically true, it’s also true I’m misleading them. And that’s just as bad as lying to them.”

  “So let’s just tell them then, and hope for the best.”

  “Frank, they could kill you out of anger.”

  Frank paused and thought.

  It was indeed a dilemma, one there was no easy answer for.

  Frank was a decision maker from way back. Long before he joined the police department. Long before he joined the Corps, even.

  He was captain of his high school football team. He was trusted enough by his coaches to call his own plays. He had the authority to send a fellow player to the sidelines when he felt he wasn’t getting a hundred percent from the player.

  To call a time out when he saw something he didn’t like in the defensive backfield.

  To yell and scream at his players and friends to get everything he could from them.

  Odd thing was, his friends on the team never got upset with him, even after he gave them grief or kicked them out of the game.

  Because Frank was right.

  Even back then he had a reputation for considering all the angles. Thinking everything through, then making the right decision almost every time.

  How could anyone get angry or upset with a guy like that?

  Frank was never a follower. He was always a leader held in high regard by his superiors.

  But he also knew that some decisions weren’t his to make.

  In this case, Josie had a dreadful choice to make.

  If she announced to her family she was going with Frank to south Texas all hell might break loose. Her family might disown her. Frank could catch a bullet.

  If she snuck out in the dead of night, though, she’d be betraying not her family but rather herself.