Stuart Slade: Pantheocide

“Wind speed picking up fast.” The meteorologist was attempting to make up lost ground. “120 knots now and still increasing. The anemometer goes off the scale at 165, we’re going to pass that easy.”

High on the AOC wall were a series of displays from the outside surveillance cameras. One of them pointed east and showed the ground out towards Sedalia. Or, it would, normally, but now the scene was different. The sky had blackened over until light levels had dropped to night-time conditions. Even so, the camera was showing three massive tornadoes bearing down on the base, their fearsome funnels illuminated by the almost continuous lightning discharges. The sight was awesome, even the tornadoes that had destroyed Greenburg hadn’t matched these monsters.

“They’re EF-5s for sure, no doubt about it. I’d say they were F-6s on the old Fujita-Pearson scale.” The meteorologists voice was awed. Those funnels must be three quarters of a mile across. Lord knows…” He was interrupted by an exaggerated barrage of throat clearing from around the room. Mentally he dope-smacked the back of his head, he came from a family that had taken its Baptist religion seriously and The Message had hit them all hard. One of his aunts had even laid down and let herself die just like it had demanded. Now the truth was known, nobody in his family believed anything any more and they looked on their dead aunt as the worst kind of fool. Even so, changing the speech habit of a lifetime took doing. “Sorry. I have no idea what the wind speeds in those things are, over three hundred miles per hour, I’m sure of that.”

The funnels swelled quickly until they filled the screen. By that time the sky was so dark it took Cochrane a few seconds to realize that the television camera had ceased to function. The room was filled with a dull roar, the floor shaking despite the depth to which the facility had been buried. That, if nothing else, told Cochrane just how much energy the storm was containing. The television screens were all blacked out, he guessed the cameras had been destroyed but then he saw a shadow moving on one and realized it was just the conditions out there. “Have we got a night vision option on camera five.”

There was no verbal reply but the image on Camera Five went from black to green. It showed very little more than the normal vision had revealed, the intense driving rain was blanking out most of the imagery but what was visible went far beyond any words Cochrane had to describe it. The shadow he had seen was a B-2, picked up by the storm and thrown cartwheeling down the hard-stand. Other shadows could have been the A-10s and F-5s parked there being tossed around with the contemptuous disregard malicious children showed for toys belonging to others. There were other objects as well, Cochrane couldn’t recognize them but they hurtled across the screen before Camera Five too blacked out.

“That’s it Sir. All cameras are gone.” The voice was quiet and awed at the brief glimpse of the destruction on the surface.

“Doppler radar has gone as well Sir.” The meteorologist looked over at General Cochrane, half-expecting to be held responsible for the equipment failure. But who could have expected something like this, F6 tornadoes weren’t supposed to be possible, that’s why the classification for the Enhanced Fujita scale stopped at EF5. Boardman guessed that an EF6 would be added after today,

Cochrane glanced at the viewer, it was still showing the track of the storm front. It was passing Whiteman and closing in on Warrensburg, the small town to the west of the base. It was a favorite for men on leave and now it was going to be gone. No town could survive a tornado that had hammered a base designed to resist nuclear attack so badly. “How come we’re still getting data?”

“Sir, we’re pulling radar data from the Tornado Watch on the Weather Channel. We’ve got a cross-connection, when they sought permission to use input from our radars, we got input from their system in case ours went down.”

“Who thought of that?”

Boardman shrugged, “It was a joint effort sir, we were all brainstorming and the idea just came up.”

The storm on the screen was slowly weakening as the trailing edge crossed Whiteman and left the base, if there still was one Cochrane thought, sitting in a sea of light green. By the time it enveloped Warrensburg, the purple areas had gone and the dark red had shrunk markedly. That was only relative though, Warrensburg still didn’t have a hope of surviving. It was towns beyond that now stood an honest chance of being able to rebuild. The dull roar had faded and the floor had stopped shaking, it looked like the monsters had indeed passed.

A few minutes later, he was standing on what was left of Whiteman Air Force base. Behind him the massive doors on the bomb-proof hangars were opening. It was still raining but the force of the downpour was easing off. Cochrane almost found himself wishing it hadn’t for the rain had hidden the worst of the destruction that surrounded him. The aircraft left outside on the hardstand had gone, mostly they were small fragments of shattered wreckage scattered all over the base. 20 B-2s, Cochrane thought, at two billion dollars each. That alone made this storm a catastrophe. The smaller, lighter aircraft, the F-5Es, A-10s and the handful of F-16Cs that had been assigned here as guards against a Harpy attack, oddly they had suffered a little less than the B-2s. Perhaps because the tornadoes had picked them up and thrown them rather than just ripping them apart, some of the birds were still recognizable. There was, for example, what was obviously a wing from an F-16C stuck in the ruins of the control tower.

It was the hardstand itself that showed the awesome force of the storm that had hammered Whiteman Air Force Base. The concrete and blacktop had been ripped from the ground in huge chunks and the fragments hurled around the base as giant, vicious projectiles. One such chunk had hit the blast doors of a hangar and dented them It had dented a door meant to resist a nuclear blast. That alone showed the incredible force that the storm had unleashed.

Around him, the base personnel were pouring out of the hangars and bomb shelters, only to mill around, seeking direction in the face of the unimaginable devastation. Cochrane looked behind him, the areas where base housing had been built were leveled as thoroughly as the rest of the installation. That gave him his first priority at least. Fortunately he had a loud-hailer available, the presence of mind to think of bringing one as he’d left the AOC was one of the reasons why he’d made it to General.

“Listen up. Everybody who has family in the base housing area, you are dismissed now. Take whatever transport you need from the hangars and get to your quarters, help your families. Move.” He hesitated while about a third of the men broke away and set off. “The rest of you, we’re forming work gangs to dig the casualties out. There will be a lot of them and we have to move fast. Get whatever tools you can find and get going. Base security, get the infra-red gear and the K-9s, we’ll need them to find people buried in the ruins.”

As the base surged back into activity, Cochrane walked over the shattered hardstand to the runway. It wasn’t quite as badly damaged as the hardstands but it was still a mess.

“Sir.” The voice sounded behind him. One of the pilots was running up to join him.

“Yes Captain?”

“Sir, my Warthog is fuelled and ready to go, she was being prepped for a test flight when the emergency hit. I can take her up, see what the damage is from the air. I’ve got a FLIR pod as well, I can help look for people in the wreckage.”

“Captain, just take a look at the runway. It’s a wreck and its covered with debris.”