Collapse by Kurt Schlichter

Author:Kurt Schlichter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19.

Fitz drove them up the nearly empty 280 in the dying sunlight in the back of the recycling truck. There were only a couple food tractor-trailer convoys rolling north tonight, and very few other civilian vehicles. As they passed the intersection with 380, which ran a couple miles east to the airport and the Bay, the Antifa Monument rose over what had been the Golden Gate National Cemetery. The rows of white gravestones had been plucked out and hauled away to use “for the benefit of our real heroes, the shelter-deprived.” But the building project for derelicts had been forgotten after the fun part, the desecration, was finished, and a small hill composed entirely of the granite markers sat at the southeastern corner of the nearly abandoned site. Few came to pay respects to the crude new statue, visible from the freeway, of a gender and racially indeterminate masked figure waving a bat at a cowering collection of soldiers, cops, rabbis, ministers, and businessmen.

They got off in Daly City. As they waited for it to get late, they watched some of the airborne operation from the parking lot of the old Serramonte Shopping Center. Of course, all the stores were long closed and looted. Now, the massive blacktop that used to hold the rides of the eager consumers was a transient camp. Fitz’s truck drew little attention as it carefully weaved through the worn Coleman tents, lean-tos, and people just lying on the pavement under piles of rags to shelter themselves from the fog.

But there was no fog that night, and while they could not see the paratrooper drops themselves, they figured out what was going on. First, they watched the “Wild Weasel” USAF electronic warfare jets over San Bruno Mountain, firing off the occasional anti-radiation missile at anti-air radars that stayed active for too long. A pack of F-35s came in next, tearing across the sky, launching air-to-ground missiles at the Chinese S-500A missile launchers parked on the Mountain itself. Orange bubbles bloomed where they impacted, and the noise rolled over the upper Peninsula. Quayle groaned, oblivious to the show.

The stealth fighters, peeling around 180 degrees, suddenly let loose with a barrage of missiles that shot straight across the sky north over San Francisco, almost certainly aimed at incoming Chinese interceptors. The American planes blew out their afterburners roaring back across the Bay eastward, but a finger of fire came up off the ground from where Candlestick Park had been and turned one into a flaming comet.

“Damn,” Fitz said through the cab’s open sliding rear window. “Hate to see that.”

Then the 747s came, making big sweeping turns over the Peninsula to their south after dropping their cargos. Lots of them. But there were more missiles headed that way from the Chinese emplacements near the City. The thud of a huge explosion down the Peninsula, probably in Burlingame or Millbrae, indicated that at least one of the big planes had gone down. Turnbull said a quick prayer that it had happened only after the paratroopers exited.

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