Digital Winter by Mark Hitchcock

Author:Mark Hitchcock [Hitchcock, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi
ISBN: 9780736949132
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

Ain’t Nuthin’ Right

Jeremy felt like a corked bottle floating on a wide, churning sea. Reports were trickling in from military bases with communication equipment protected from EMP attack. Early reports had cleared up a few things. Early evidence indicated that Jeremy and General Holt had been right. The EMP pulses had come from satellites at various orbits above the earth. The first contact made from Mount Weather was with NORAD. They tracked everything that moved above the planet. Some of the satellites had been in space for several decades and declared retired by their parent government.

The fact that the pulses occurred in sequence instead of all at once indicated planning. A few of the satellites had eventually been identified. What puzzled Jeremy was that no one country was responsible. Some had been Chinese, some Russian, some Israeli, and sadly, many were American.

One thing was clear. If the president was to be believed, and Jeremy had no reason to doubt him, the US had not ordered the activation of their space-burst satellites. They had gone off on their own, helping take down the Eurasian grid.

To make dark times even darker, non–Star Wars–style satellites had self-destructed. Those with emergency destruct devices installed to keep them out of the hands of the enemy or to destroy them should they start to fall to earth had blown themselves to pieces. Those that lacked explosives to do the work simply stopped talking to their earthbound handlers, most likely victims of the EMP pulses or a computer virus that shredded their electronic brains.

The world was without power and without satellite communications. Military birds had become multimillion-dollar paperweights, coursing through space and waiting until their decaying orbits gave in to their fiery deaths in the atmosphere.

Jeremy spent the night and early morning hours wondering how such a thing could be done. His body craved sleep, but his mind refused to allow it. There were thoughts to think and speculations to be made.

His computer had been wiped by the pulse, obliterating the information he needed to analyze the worm as he planned to do. He would have to find a way to retrieve that information from the NSA building at Fort Meade. President Barlow had made getting the information to Jeremy a priority, but it would be hours before he could have the material he needed.

The military had been crippled but not paralyzed. The possibility of an EMP attack had been considered for decades. No one could be certain about the effects such an attack would have on the country, but the computer models had been close. What wasn’t known was what an entire wave of such attacks would do, or what would happen if a rogue worm had first infected the computers of the world.

Now they knew, and the answer wasn’t pretty.

Still, military paranoia had proven its value. Many aircraft and vehicles, including those thought to be “hardened,” were out of commission, but some of the new craft remained useful or could be easily repaired. The question

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