Devon Ford - The Fall

After seeing how badly the Movement could damage the infrastructure, of how connected and powerful they were, the new era could begin.

Butler could almost see it now, as he was brought in as the national security advisor to the president. He would have key members of the Movement everywhere, and they would puppet the existing administration through fear of their ability to bring instability. It would be a perfect, near silent coup d’état .

Taylor’s men had already succeeded in securing POTUS, and the whole area was locked down after the White House reported that a terror attack on the president had been foiled by National Guardsmen. Those same guardsmen had the senior politicians secured underground and would be heralded as heroes who acted on instinct and stormed the White House to save the day.

The truth was what the newspapers reported after the shit had hit the fan, just as history had always been written by the victors.

The stony-faced woman in the dark suit barely blinked as her eyes scanned the wall of screens. Occasionally she would shout a number, and the corresponding television would play the sound through disassociated speakers until she had heard enough. She waved a hand for the sound to be turned off again and took her eyes away for a second to make sure she connected the tip of the cigarette to the intense flame jetting out of the windproof lighter.

Eyes flicking back up, she pocketed the lighter and rested an elbow on her hip as she smoked, digging the fingernails of her right hand into the pad of her thumb one by one. The small pain helped to focus her, helped her to stay alert and connected. It was a thing she did when she was tired, when she needed to concentrate, and at times she had even drawn blood.

A man stopped as he walked past her, turned to follow his nose in the darkened room and opened his mouth to protest about her smoking inside the control room. Before any words left his mouth, his brain saved him from pain and humiliation and he closed it in silence. In a building where not wearing identification could get you searched at gunpoint and dragged off site, the fact that she wore nothing indicating she had a right to be there worried him deeply. Only people from certain walks of life could get away with being in this building and so obviously flaunt their anonymity. He decided that if this ghost wanted to smoke in the control room, then it wasn’t for him to offer an opinion otherwise.

Walking away as the woman took another long drag and smiled at the back of his retreating head, she saw him kick the chair of an analyst who was leaning back to stretch, and heard him bark orders for the analyst to keep working and not to relax.

Kick the cat? the woman thought, is that what the English say?

“There! Thirty-six,” she said, her voice deeper and more powerful than her small stature would indicate.

“Take it back and show me,” she snapped, dropping her half-smoked cigarette into the glass of water in her other hand, and reaching out to swap the glass for a large tablet the analyst held. The swap didn’t materialize immediately, so her fingers snapped twice to indicate that everyone around her was failing.

The pad appeared, and she tapped the screen to play footage of an up-close version of what she had just seen at a distance, only this time with sound. Her finger swiped across the bottom of the screen, replaying the explosion frame by frame with each tap of a delicate digit, and a smile crept across her face. Almost throwing the pad back, she stalked back to the corner she had been stood in and spoke over her shoulder to the shadows behind.

“Our assets are in play,” she said. “Power grid is failing and secondary explosions have begun. By tomorrow the American puppets will have lost any credibility they could have gained and there will be chaos.” She reached back into the pocket of her suit jacket, retrieving another cigarette and the miniature flamethrower she used to light it. A snap of fingers from the recess behind her echoed, making her hand back the one she had just lit and incinerate the tip of another for herself.

“Activate the rest. All of them,” said a voice even more menacing than her own. “Let them tear themselves apart for now and then we will turn the vise tighter.”

She half-cocked her head toward the source of the orders, nodded slightly in a bow of acknowledgment, and walked away.

The man flipped up the rubberized antenna of his satellite phone and answered the call with a single word.

He listened, repeating his acknowledgment two more times, before ending the call and stowing the phone in his backpack. Six other men and three women were in the room in Midtown with him, and all eyes were on him.

“We go soon,” he said, “when it is darker.” He walked through the room and made eye contact with his whole team as he went.

“Any target is legitimate,” he told them. “NYPD, National Guard, banks, shops, local thugs. We tear this city down. Work your sectors in pairs, stay out of sight, and be back here before sunrise.”

He knew his team wouldn’t be the only one active that night, and he reiterated their area of operations, their limits of exploitation, nervous that they would end up in a firefight with another team of insurgents intent on their own goals of destabilization and carnage.

The eight other people in the room all stood and sketched a bow at the man in charge, before pairing off and preparing to head out to the areas allocated to them. They would spend the night sniping at police patrols, throwing grenades into shop windows and setting fires. None of them doubted that many residents of the city would take very little encouragement to riot, but they had been activated to accelerate the process.

It had been a simple thing to overload the power relays remotely and shut down the supply to the city. Now nothing that didn’t have its own generator would be dark, and anything that did would attract a load of attention it probably didn’t want.

Chung Fei, thirty-one years old, unmarried, and a dedicated servant to his beloved country, checked the top pocket of his backpack as his team prepared themselves similarly. He smiled at the sight of the fifteen incendiary grenades within easy reach. Having spent months working in the city being treated like dirt, he had more than a few places in mind he wanted to pay a visit to that night.

“Phantom this is Banjo, here to relieve you, over,” came the southern drawl over the F-35 pilot’s headset. He still had almost forty-five minutes playtime on station before he and his wingman would be bingo-fuel and in any other setting he would want to stay up in the sky hunting.

Today was different.

“Banjo, Phantom,” he said with none of the bravado of his fellow fighter jock. “Skies are all yours, we are RTB. Stay Safe and stay high. Phantom out.”

“Wilco, Phantom. Go get a cold one for me,” replied the fresh pilot as he banked hard left in his holding pattern to get a satellite view of Manhattan. Only he couldn’t see the island. He could barely see anything below without switching to use the fighter’s high-tech array of sensors, but even at this height he expected to be able to see the outline of the island.

Levelling out and keeping his plane in the wide figure-eight that the previous two pilots had worked for their duration, Christopher ‘Banjo’ Redden mentally prepared himself for the next five hours of dull inactivity as he screamed around the skies above New York at close to three hundred miles per hour, waiting for his relief to come at midnight.