Chapter Two

Sunset Valley Bunker

1632 ZULU
SUNSET VALLEY, BC
CANADA

In the words of Vice-Admiral Meg Austin

I’d always had a kinship of service with the Fleet Admiral and I admired him in the fact that he was always working for the betterment of the Naval Service. We’d crossed paths at the Pentagon as I was working in Weapons Research and Development developing bigger and better things that went boom and that was what the units were requesting. I was constantly in transit from DC to Naval Station Great Lakes and well, that kept our interactions from getting too personal. I have to say that I admired him a bit more than the Naval service would have allowed, but I kept that to myself. Now we were placed in a bunker in Canada in close quarters with each other contemplating the apocalypse. That was a great way to start a relationship, provided the winds of fortune went that way, sarcasm intended.

We met Command Master Chief Coates at the entrance to the bunker and took stock of our new home. The Command Master Chief briefed us on what was there and we took possession of the bunker. Chief Coates and I had rarely crossed paths other than the times that I had to meet with the Fleet Admiral for official business, but she struck me as quite a go-getter. It was hard to think that she was at one point in her service career such a foul-up that she was slated to be processed out. And of course, Harm would be the one to help her in such a way that she stayed in and became a productive sailor and one of our most valuable assets here in the Navy and the bunker. The Goat Locker had met up and deemed her worthy enough to become one of the few who wore the anchors of the chief petty officers and from there, she’d worked her way up to the top to be the most senior enlisted in the Navy. And frankly, the chiefs were the ones who ran the Navy. I watched as Tosh greeted her warmly and thanked her for her service in setting up the bunker.

We had a lot to do before everything went to hell in a hand-basket. There was provisioning that needed to take place...and that meant that all hands were needed on deck. We had to stock up on all things that we weren’t able to grow or make. It meant that all meat had to be stocked; enough rations to make sure that we survived the end of the world. Which meant that everything had to be brought in, in bulk.

I had never met Admiral Gracen before in my life. A statuesque red-head with gorgeously deep blue eyes and a steely demeanor that spoke that she was no-nonsense. But Tosh with the fact that he was Chief of Naval Operations had and he greeted her as well. The radiant smile that she gave him set off warning bells in me even though I had laid no claim to Tosh. She was going to be a competitor in the relationship stakes especially as Tosh and she knew each other, even if it was in a professional sense as she was the former JAG and now the CO of the Naval Reserves as well as now a bunker-mate.

Harm and I hadn’t talked at all on the C-17 heading to Abbotsford International Airport and that was mostly due to the fact that I wore the stars of a flag-officer and he was junior to me in rank as an O-6. I sat with Tosh on the flight but could see out of the corner of my eyes that Harm was constantly craning his head around to look at me and the flag officer stripes on my sleeves. And that was annoying Colonel Mackenzie to say the least. I wasn’t sure what was pissing Colonel Mackenzie off but I’m sure that seeing Harm’s former work-partner was part and parcel of her whole deal with me. Either way, the petty side of me was glad that she had to call me “Ma’am”. Take that.

Even though she was junior in rank to me, something set off warning bells about Kimber Benton. She was absolutely gorgeous with a model’s figure and she’d worked with Tosh from squadron level days. She was his wingman and flew F-14s together. And that made her absolutely dangerous from a relationship point of view in terms of being able to snag Tosh’s heart. The only thing that prevented her from being a part of Tosh’s life was the fact that she wore Captain’s stripes and he wore a Fleet Admiral’s rank. And all she had to do was drop her commission and she’d be able to snag him. She was dangerous and my hackles went up around her especially when she looked at him when he wasn’t looking at her – there was that longing in her eyes that told me that she would go after him if she had a chance. And she had a distinct advantage of familiarity with him that I didn’t have. She’d been around him for most of Tosh’s life, shared many interests with him including flying high-performance aircraft, were squadron-mates, went to war with him and were CO and XO of VF-41 at one time and all that time she had feelings for him. She was going to be my prime competitor for Tosh’s affections. With her, the only advantage I had to snag Tosh was rank.

And frankly put...competition was going to go that way since if the bombs did fall, it would be up to us to bring civilization back. All of whom was left of humanity would be tasked with the problem of bringing our population back to pre-war levels. And it would take thousands of generations to do exactly that. I had heard scuttlebutt that there was magic. Seeing cauldrons and books made my eyebrows shoot a beeline for the top of my head. Maybe there was more to this than what authors had written in fantasy books. Who knew?

But relationships had to be put on the back burner for now. There was far too much to be done in a short time. We didn’t know when the balloon would go up. And we didn’t want to be still in prep-mode when it did. In otherwords time was of the essence and it meant that we had to use every single minute of the day to make sure that everything was able to be locked down at a second’s notice. Being prepared was of prime importance to survival. There was no way to look for something you might have missed when the world was in ashes.

We would be taking inventory of what was there and then supplementing it with stuff that we would be bringing into the bunker during our provisioning. Then after all that was completed; we would lock-down and await our fates in hopes that Providence would look down on us and spare our bunker from being hit by nuclear attack. Even though the roof was rated for a 100MT direct hit, we sure as hell didn’t want to test that out.

In the words of Captain Harmon Rabb Jr.

I knew that Meg had command potential, but I had not known that she’d shot up the ranks like that. When she had stepped into the office in DC and I’d seen out of the corner of my eyes that she was wearing Vice-Admiral’s sleeve rings, I felt my heart sink into my chest. Was I that far out of step? I knew for a fact now that when I had decided to flip for Mac’s and my future, that I made a big mistake. I’d flipped the chance away of ever becoming an admiral. When I saw the coin land on tails, I knew that I had to honor the choices made. It meant that I ended up having to turn in the captaincy since I’d rejected the position in London. Being frocked for Captain was contingent on my accepting the posting and since I’d rejected the position, I went back to being an O-5 and awaiting my position in rank. My decision also didn’t sit well with high command and I’m sure that my NAVPERS record went in the very bottom of the pile as I reserved my commission and went to be Mr. “Mackenzie-Rabb” – though in the end that never turned out because we could never get our stars aligned.

Eventually after delaying a wedding multiple times, we each got the feeling that it would never work out and we went our separate ways. I decided to re-activate my commission and my detailer had said that I had severely shot myself in the foot with that coin-toss and rejecting a command that would have sent me to the Judge Advocate General’s chair eventually. I had pretty much kissed any chance of my being an admiral good-bye. In fact it was going to be hard if not impossible to get back into position to be promoted to Captain. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. If I had known that everything would go south, I’d have never had that coin-toss.

As it was, Lia got the JAG’s position and became a vice-admiral then went on to command Naval Reserves and become a four-star. Seeing Meg again was not only wonderful, but traumatic owing to that fact that in one stupid fell swoop, I’d kissed my chances of ever being able to wear stars. It was too late for regrets. And seeing that large stripe and two smaller stripes on her sleeves meant that there was no chance for us, meaning that Meg and I could never be an item. She was too far up the chain of command that a relationship was not possible.

It was with a heavy heart that I had to close the door on any eventuality of my reuniting with Meg. In fact what hurt even more was that at one point, she was calling me, “sir.” Now I had to refer to her as “Ma’am” in my dealings with her and in fact, Animal had made her his XO in the bunker which meant that she held a command position which meant that her word and his was law in that bunker. I rationalized that it was a small price to pay for survival. But I often wondered if the fact that we were ending up having to live in a hole like rats was going to mess with our sanity and whether we’d be coming out of the bunker with our minds intact.

Part 2; Chapter 3

In the words of Fleet Admiral Nakamura

Arriving at Sunset Valley was a revelation of sorts. Seeing CFB Gnome and the Canadian Space Agency’s launch vehicle on final approach into YXX made me realize that Sunset Valley was just as much a target as DC. However since there was only one military base and our bunker was situated practically six miles away from the epicentre of what would be the target of any missile intended to destroy the base, our bunker had a chance to survive what would be humanity’s last days. When our flight landed, we made our way to the awaiting Canadian Forces vehicles which would transport us to our destination. General Kelly, RCAF would be joining us much later as he had many things that needed to be done. At least that was what Colonel Baker told me as he dropped us off at the bunker.

Waiting by the front entrance were Admiral Gracen and Command Master Chief Coates who had overseen the construction of the bunker. It was good to see some more familiar faces. And Captain Benton could go back to just being Chief of Staff rather than having to do double duty as my Yeoman.

I greeted Admiral Gracen. “Admiral, good to see you again. All preps in place?”

“Outside of final provisioning in terms of food, and supplies. All construction is completed and when provisioning is finished we can lock up and hunker down, sir.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” I nodded and looked over at the bunker, “Low to the ground...it’ll keep the blast wave from tearing our roof off.”

“Yes, sir...it’s what one of the Seabees told me the reason was for the low structure. The blast pressure wave can pretty much destroy everything that isn’t only a foot off the ground.”

By this time, Command Master Chief Coates had managed to make her way over to see the both of us. “Sir...it’s good that you and the rest of the group have managed to make it. I’ve been hearing some very disturbing news over the network.”

I nodded, “Coates...it’s worse than we expected. We lost assets in the Pacific. Three hundred men lost and the Monaghan is at the bottom of the ocean. It’s not something that the President is going to back down from and we’re essentially at war.” Coates could see that I wasn’t kidding about that. The preps pretty much gave away the truth that this would only go one way and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Already there were conventional clashes between the Chinese fleet and ours. We’d sunk several of their submarines that were trying to make clandestine hit and run attacks on our fleet in the Pacific. And the Chinese were hot under the collar. Well, it was in retaliation for the Silkworm attacks on our destroyers. The casualty totals kept rising on both sides. And according to reports, specials were being prepared just in case everything kicked off. Which meant one thing for us: that we were on a rapidly diminishing timescale to provision. That was going to mean round the clock provisioning for us as we wanted to make sure that we were fully stocked in terms of meat and other essentials that could not be grown.

Specials was a term that sent chills down our spines. That was code for tactical nuclear weapons. When fleets and armies started tossing those around that meant kick-off. And it also meant absolute destruction. The nuclear genie in the bottle after it was let out to play couldn’t be put back in. And one thing was for certain, Gnome would get hit whether with a single JL-2’s 1MT warhead or by several; it wasn’t going to matter. Gnome would be radioactive rubble and Sunset Valley along with it.

I noted three civilians within our midst and Admiral Gracen briefed me on them. One, a male was going to be our gardener, the other was a scientist female and the last was an artist and a metaphysical fan although I had no idea as to why the last was selected other than the fact that she was the gardener’s spouse. “Well, let’s take stock of what we have...” I said and motioned the rest of the group that we should head into the bunker itself. We had a Faraday-caged elevator which meant that the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) flash that preceded every nuclear detonation wouldn’t fry the circuitry of our elevator and trap us all underneath. Everything was shielded including the outer walls so that there would be no chance of radiation or EMP leakage or anything that could potentially harm us. Even the top farming area was separated from the surrounding ground by the shielded concrete and brick wall which blended into the bunker walls. It was interesting growing plants and fishing in a pond in an area covered by roof but that was to be our existence for the foreseeable future.

Meg came over to meet with us at the entrance and we all headed in as a group. The elevator was a single unit and it meant that there would be some waiting. Which meant that only essential staff would be allowed to go to the surface. That meant that the rest would spend the rest of their lives in the bunker itself; their only contact with the outside world through the TV for as long as we were able to have television stations to watch. The rest of the time we would be busy honing our survival skills and getting trained on other necessary tasks. Basic skills but skills that we’d been relying for too long on other people to do for us. We needed to learn to do them ourselves. Each one of us would be taking a rotation on gardening and cooking. We all needed to learn those basic skills as it would stand us in good stead when we emerged from the bunker – though whether that would be in our lifetime or not; it was hard to say.

A lot of us were still at the stage where we were in denial. How could this happen? How could we have let it get to the stage where we had to prepare for nuclear annihilation? The reason why I had put Vice-Admiral Meg Austin in place as my XO was because I had determined that I would be the one going out to do the provisioning. I was nearly sixty-two – near retirement age and frankly, if this hadn’t happened, I’d be slated for separation from the military in six months time. As it stood, by congressional and presidential mandate, I had been extended in service...by the needs of the Navy for as long as this situation persisted. I just received a notification via e-mail that the Navy had deposited an amount of §1,200,000 into our account to provision. After that, we were uncertain as to what awaited us.

The Chikamoris (the paranormal enthusiast and the gardener) had several dogs that they wanted to bring into the bunker. A dog meaning a Rottweiler, a wolf and a fox. God knows how they managed to find a fox and a wolf and domesticate them. I had thought that domesticating a wolf was damned near impossible, but evidently, the Chikamoris had managed to find a way to do so. From what they told me was that their dogs had a great nose for sniffing out gemstones. So well, they would sniff out gemstones until we were certain that we had what we needed to survive financially as well then they would take shelter with us and not go out again until the radiation levels came down. That meant even more that I had to keep an eye on what was happening in the world, since I didn’t want to lose those dogs to a nuclear blast and call them in when the worst threatened.

I called the group together for a meeting and it was a rousing one. People were on edge with the impending apocalypse and tempers ran high. I could see Meg eyeing Mac with a jaundiced look and Mac wasn’t looking too friendly at her either. While I was speaking I noticed that Lia was listening intently and Commander Burrows...well, he was doing whatever his insanity would let him. I just tried to ignore him.

My speech mainly consisted of how we all had to pull together to survive this and how we were going to not despair, to look to the future and that we would come out the other end stronger and more resilient and all that rah rah pump up the group stuff. We needed it. When facing the thought of nuclear annihilation, one needed all the “pumping up” in morale that we could get. Kimber was also listening intently at what I was saying. I went down the particulars, that all civilians were under military jurisdiction and that their conduct and specifically their actions would fall under military law. I could see Mrs. Chikamori’s eyes grow wider at that – I don’t think she was expecting that.

Establishing myself as the head of the group was relatively easy as I read out my orders from the SECNAV mandating me as Commander of the Bunker. And I introduced Meg as my XO and Admiral Gracen as the presiding judge advocate and legal officer who would be meting out justice should anyone stray from the straight and narrow as far as conduct was concerned.

Life in the bunker was not going to be easy and I didn’t expect it to be.

Stocking the Bunker

In the words of Fleet Admiral Toshio Nakamura

Within the bunker, we had a lot of amenities that we could use to increase our skills. It wasn’t a matter of sitting in the bunker waiting for the world to end and becoming bored out of our minds. We would have plenty to do...and the war would be over that quickly. All things considered, nuclear weapons didn’t give much of an opportunity for the good ol’ days of hand-to-hand combat and beating the enemy one-on-one. It was a “launch missiles” and if you weren’t vaporized off the face of the earth, you ended up becoming one of the ones who if you couldn’t make heads or tails out of the new way of things, were destined to starve.

Anyways for the first day, I allowed the bunker group to do what they wanted. We’d have to buckle down to work anyways soon enough. A day of rest was just what the doctor ordered. And come to think of it, we didn’t have a doctor on staff. That might be something that we had to remedy...before the bombs fell.

Lia, Mac, River and I decided to play a game of pool. I’ve always enjoyed pool in any case. It has always been a way for me to relax. What better form of enjoyment than to take a stick and whack a little white ball at a bunch of other ball trying to knock ‘em into one of six holes.

Haruo, Harm, Bebe and Jen decided to take a table and play dominoes. And Meg and Kimber played chess together, surprisingly amicable. I wasn’t sure why Meg was eyeing Kimber and Mac suspiciously like that throughout the introductory meeting but well, it certainly made for some interesting dynamics. I felt that things would work themselves out and just so long as they listened to what Meg had to say as she was my XO and that she was the one that would be backing up my orders.

I wasn’t going to be unfair under any circumstance or pick favorites. Everyone had an important role in the bunker and each would have to work towards the benefit of the entire bunker as a whole. If we were going to survive this war, we would all have to work together as a cohesive group. There was no room for individuals in a situation like this. To work together was to survive.

And there was too much to do before the bombs fell. I knew that it was going to go that way. There were already too many signs. Admiral Jennings; the de facto replacement for my rear-end who had to go into hiding in the bunker, already had his hands full trying to deal with the Pacific Fleet crisis and his XO Admiral Davison was having his hands full trying to make heads or tails of what the Russians had planned in any case chasing the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Atlantic if and when this whole thing kicked off. And the situation seemed to be spiralling the toilet enroute to being flushed./

While everyone else had a relaxing day, I took the APC and headed out to the grocery store and decided to stock up on meats so that the bunker had enough to eat once the whole event went down. If we could stock up to about 1000 on each type of meat we should be fine. And Kimber and Bebe were doing their best to become good at science. In fact, Bebe took initiative, after informing me that she had been technophobic, and went down to the brain-enhancement machine and readjusting her temperament and phobias so that the technophobic trait wouldn’t affect her any longer. Now she was constantly busy with the science station which had freaked her out before and honing up on her scientific knowledge.

River and Lia started on the arcane working with magic and that would stand us in good stead. Who knew what creatures we’d see when we opened the blast door for the first time after the radiation had died down. Misshapen lethal creatures could potentially abound within the flora and fauna of a recovering radiation and war-torn world. And we weren’t sure how to deal with such mutations. We would have to be well on our guard in any case, every time we stepped out of the bunker.

The store appeared to be well stocked and the grocer mentioned that he had more stock in the back freezers should we need it. He also mentioned that he could raise orders enough to outfit us. Of course considering the fact that what we were privy to was classified, I didn’t mention anything to the grocer, just that if he could raise the meat orders so that we could buy 500 of each at one time, it would be beneficial to us in terms of stocking our cold pantry with enough to last us through tough times.

When I came back from the grocers it was time to get busy with dispatches from the Pentagon and the latest news from the battlefront. Admiral Jennings kept me updated as I was his direct superior and even though I wasn’t on the Beltway any longer, I was still a part of his chain-of-command and they still reported to me on a regular basis. They were my connection with DC. So I sent off a dispatch to the JCS and they were informed that we were now in possession of the bunker and that we were on replenishment mode prior to lockdown.

Dinner in the bunker was an all-hands affair. Each person did a little bit trying to improve their cooking skills. Cooking was a necessary skill for those who would survive and it was certainly needed in order to be well-fed. If you couldn’t feed yourself in the new world of devastation, you would end up starving to death very quickly.

After dinner, I heard Haruo swearing upstairs. Evidently the elevator had got him...and he’d done a faceplant on the brick flooring upstairs beside the garden area. Evidently the elevator has a thing for trying to injure us. Well...someone’s going to have to learn handiness quickly.

Harm had decided to tackle robotics...and was planning to build us a plumbot that could potentially go up into the radioactive miasma and scout around to see what had happened. And better to have it now before things happened than have to play catch-up. We certainly had a well-stocked activity area where people could learn new skills.

Phil, as usual, tried to play with metal and a blow-torch; that wasn’t really a good combination as he kept scorching his fingers.

Meg, as my XO, had to deal with just as many dispatches as I did. So we were both locked up in our rooms trying to play catch-up with communiques from the Pentagon. After which Meg and I discussed matters in the kitchen as far as running the bunker. Everyone else was downstairs trying to raise their skill levels so things were very busy in the bunker.

She brought up a number of key points of personnel that we were missing in terms of the medical staff and a few other individuals that could potentially keep our bunker maintenance up so that we could train other members to do the same tasks. She made some really good points in that. I had been too busy focussed on the day to day aspects of bunker life whereas we needed to maintain the structural integrity of the bunker or it would not bode well for us. There was a reason why I had chosen Meg for my XO...and the reasoning that she put forth to me about making sure that we had a good solid maintenance person and medical staff was clearly shining through in why I had picked her for the job of bunker executive officer.