Chapter 10: Chapter 10
At the beginning of the war, when American cities first found themselves under the threat and then the actuality of air attack, the Civil Defense Department had imposed nightly blackouts. This had only lasted a short time before it was pointed out that blacking out a city to prevent or impede bombing was an anachronistic and useless measure. Modern planes of war were equipped with infrared visualization equipment that allowed the pilots to see in the darkness and sight their targets with precision. It was now actually harder to find a target at night if the lights were left on since the residual illumination tended to blur the infrared image an attacking pilot would be using. Not that this had been a factor in allowing the power to continue flowing after dark. Angry and sometimes violent nationwide protests against the blackouts had finally been the death of them. The Americans had been able to put up with being bombed. They had been able to put up with aircraft and exploded missile fragments falling onto their houses and killing their children. But they had been not been able to put up with the inability to use their microwave ovens and televisions and computers after sunset.
Since the blackouts were a thing of the past, like carpools, police helicopters, and cheap petroleum jelly, Mark and Darren were treated to the inspirational sight of the city lights of Sacramento and Roseville coming to life once the sun gave up its command of the sky. From the catwalk of the water tower the bright pinpoints of orange and white light stretched almost as far as they could see, all the way to the Sierras to the east and all the way to the horizon to the south. The city lights gave the landscape a friendly, civilized, almost peaceful glow. All of the ugly scars on the landscape, all of the radar masts and air defense weapons, all of the smashed and burned subdivisions became invisible, indistinct amid that glow. You could almost believe you were looking at a world at peace when you looked at the world at night.
Of course it helped if, like the two teenagers, you were stoned to the eyeballs on high-grade marijuana.
"So what's the deal with this request you had today?" Darren asked. "Anything come of it?"
"I got the dinner invite from her," he said, giving a lascivious grin. "She's gonna cook me her burgundy beef stroganoff at 7:00 tomorrow night. It was almost too easy."
"Did you use that my-mom-used-to-make-great-dinners speech that I taught you?"
"Hell yeah," Mark said. "Worked like a charm, just like always. Twenty-four hours from now I'll be sliding my AT-9 right into her breach."
"You the commander, sarge," Darren told him, holding up his hand for a high-five, which Mark gladly provided.
"How about you?" Mark asked him. "You had three requests today. What's the status?"
"They're all in different stages," he replied, helping himself to one of Mark's cigarettes. "One of them is in the early stage, where she's still not sure she wants it yet. The other is in the I-can't-believe-I'm-flirting-with-this-delivery-boy stage. I'll probably squeak a dinner out of her on the next trip. But the third one, now she was a repeat performance."
"Oh yeah? Did she give it up right there?"
"She wouldn't go for an all-out attack today because her fuckin kids were home," he said. "But she did take me into the laundry room and clean my AT-9 for me."
"A blowjob? Right there in the laundry room?"
"Fuckin aye," he confirmed, lighting his smoke. "Wasn't the worst one I've ever had either."
"Goddamn," Mark said, impressed. "Ain't this a great time to be alive?"
"You got that shit right," Darren agreed.
Their conversation about breaches and AT-9s and what a great time it was to be alive was interrupted a moment later by the war. The high-pitched, drawn-out whine of the air-raid sirens suddenly pierced the night. The sound swelled up from nearby, a single siren at first that was soon joined by other, more distant sirens, one by one. They rose and fell in ten second waves; the closer sirens fading between cycles as the further ones were still winding up. Hearing this, both of them peered out over the darkened city knowing they would not be able to see the planes but looking anyway.
"A little early tonight," Darren remarked. "This should be a good one though."
"A good one? You think so?" Mark replied, knowing that when it came to the war and the mechanics of fighting it, Darren knew at least as much as the military experts on the evening newscasts.
"It only makes sense," he explained. "They hit Executive yesterday with anti-runway bombs. That meant they were trying to suppress the air cover. They only try to suppress the air cover if they're planning to come in with a big raid the next night. We're talking twenty, thirty planes maybe."
"Static," Mark said, pitching his cigarette over the side of the rail. He continued to scan the night sky, looking for the telltale signs of the approaching enemy. "What do you think they're going trying to hit tonight? The train yards again?"
"Probably," Darren said, standing up to get a better look. "That's the only thing around here worth hitting with a large raid. The airports are too hard to damage and the port is already wrecked to shit. But they can really fuck up the supply line if they put the rail yard out of action for a week. And now that they have an offensive going they're gonna really want to pound the supply line. They'll hit the train yards and all of the railroad bridges between here and Boise."
They sat in silence for about three minutes, each with their eyes peeled. The planes could come from any direction. When attacking the Sacramento area they typically approached the region by moving south through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, flying at low altitude from their bases in southern Washington and using the cover of the mountains to hide them from radar detection. Once they came within forty or fifty miles however, they would leave the safety of the mountains and scream along the floor of the valley, always coming at their target from an unpredictable angle. Sometimes they stayed in the mountains until they were far past Sacramento and they approached from the south. Sometimes they left the mountains before they got to the city and approached from the north. Sometimes, and this was very rare, they left the mountains directly across from their target and approached from the east. This was what the flight that had killed Mark's mother had done.
The sirens continued to whine up and down, rising and falling. They saw nothing but city lights and the occasional pair of headlights moving along the freeways. They both knew that there was a strong possibility that the sirens were simply a false alarm. At least half of the time an alarm was triggered by the detection of enemy planes in the area that were actually heading somewhere else. That was one of the reasons that people so seldom went to the shelters. Neither one of the young men ever considered for a second that they should climb down from the tower. There was no reason why the Chinese would attack the tower deliberately and the odds of it being hit accidentally by an off target bomb or a crashing plane were the same as the odds on the ground. They had been up on the catwalk many times during air raids in the past and actually found the experience exhilarating, particularly when the train yards were the target.
"Over there," Darren said, pointing off to the south. "Check it out!"
Mark looked that way, at first seeing nothing but the endless expanse of city lights but, after a second, spotting a few streams of red anti-aircraft tracers in the far distance stabbing upward like probing fingers. The first few were joined by a few more, and then a few more until thirty or forty were waving back and forth. "They're coming from the south," he said. "Maybe they're hitting Executive again, or maybe they're going after the fuel storage tanks at Miller Park."
"That's possible," Darren said, continuing to stare intently. "Look! A SAM launch!"
Mark did not need to have that pointed out to him; he was able to see the streak of white light flashing into the sky for himself. The surface to air missile did not hit anything. They saw the white glare of its rocket engine turn sharply to the west in pursuit of an unseen aircraft and then there was a brief flash as the missile exploded. There was no secondary explosion.
"Missed," Darren said, shaking his head. "Those fuckin' chinks fly so low it's hard for the SAMs to lock onto 'em." He sounded like he thought that the Chinese, in the interests of fairness, should fly a little higher in order to give the anti-air defenses a decent shot at them.
Mark said nothing. He simply watched as the tracer streams grew closer and closer to them, effectively marking the position of the attacking planes as each gunner or automatic system tried to bring them down. Watching such a thing while stoned was a very surreal experience.
"They're moving this way," Darren said. "I bet they are hitting the rail yard!"
"Looks like it," Mark agreed, leaning outward a little to get a better view. "Not a very smart approach though, is it?"
"No," Darren said. "They have to fly all the way over the city and all of the AA guns. They should be hitting it from the north or the west. That's mostly open ground."
"Maybe they're afraid of becoming predictable."
"Maybe," he allowed. "Or maybe they're just a bunch of dumb chinks who don't know any better."
The bursts of tracer fire marched closer and closer, rapidly homing in on the southern Roseville area. When they were about ten miles away one of the streams contacted a plane, causing a bright spark to flash. A half a second later a tremendous fireball lit up the night to the south of them as the plane went down and exploded.
"Yes!" Darren yelled, pumping his fist in victory. "Took that motherfucker out!"
Mark was not as enthusiastic. Such occurrences hit a little too close to home for him. He knew that the crashing bomber had more than likely just wiped out a sizable portion of a residential area of Sacramento, or maybe a strip mall, or maybe an apartment complex.
As the planes closed in and began to climb to bombing altitude, the rail yard defenses started to react. From the south side of the yard there was a sudden flash of light as a SAM left one of the sandbagged launchers. Two others joined it over the next three seconds. They sped off towards the planes, keeping low above the rooftops, heading in the direction of the tracer streams, the glow of their engines bright enough to hurt Mark and Darren's eyes if they stared at them. No sooner had they left their launchers than four bright streaks appeared from where the planes were. These were smaller, faster moving streaks of light heading directly back towards the train yard.
"Anti-radar missiles," Darren said, pointing at them. "They're trying to hit the fire control radar before the SAMs hit the planes."
It was difficult to tell which set of missiles won that particular race. Two of the anti-radars seemed to go wild. They went twisting off in crazy circles before finally exploding in mid-air. The other two came speeding in like bolts of lightning, detonating just above the ground over the train yards. Two of the SAMs then instantly exploded in flight, offering no secondary explosions for their effort. The third SAM however, did produce a secondary fireball as it crippled an attacking plane. The fireball sank quickly to the ground and grew to tremendous size as the plane exploded on impact.
"Yes!" Darren screamed, actually jumping up and down on the catwalk he was so excited.
Sounds began to reach them now although with the relatively vast distance between themselves and the sources of the sounds, they did not coordinate with the action very well. At just over four miles away from the train yard, it took a sound wave more than twenty seconds to reach them on the water tower. Although they heard the launch of the SAMs as a series of dull roars, and though they heard the sharp cracks of the anti-radar missiles exploding, they did not hear them until long after the missiles themselves had disappeared from view.
As the planes came closer to the rail yard one more SAM was launched. It streaked out and exploded harmlessly three seconds later without ever correcting its course. The yard's batteries of large caliber anti-aircraft artillery guns then began to fire, each one pumping two shots a second into the sky until the night to the south of them was lit up by a wall of exploding flak shells that burst like blooming orange flowers. Two more planes fell to this barrage, one exploding in mid-air about three miles out and raining burning debris down, the other spinning directly into the ground, sending up another of the great fireballs.
"What are those planes gonna be armed with?" Mark asked as the hollow thumping of the AAA guns finally began to reach them.
"For the rail yard," Darren answered, "they'll each have eight or ten five hundred pound high explosive bombs that they'll try to spread out all over parked trains."
Just as the sound of the flak shells bursting reached their ears the flak guns themselves stopped firing. The smaller caliber guns, the 23 and 30 millimeter rapid fires; the last line of defense for the yard, opened up one by one until more than thirty were firing at once from all points around the yard. The tracer streams moved back and forth, up and down, sometimes crossing each other as they sought out the Chinese aircraft. Most moved with the jerky motions that bespoke of a human hand guiding them. A few moved with the smooth, rapid precision of radar or infrared guidance.
"This is fuckin awesome!" Darren yelled happily, his eyes transfixed by the sight.
"Hell yeah!" Mark agreed.
The attack itself took less than five seconds. They only had the briefest impression of the outline of the planes as they shot over the yard at more than five hundred miles per hour. One of them, hit by a tracer stream, spun in and crashed along the road just short of the security fence. The surviving planes flashed by in an instant, continuing over the city of Roseville to the north, a SAM and multiple tracer streams chasing after them. They never saw the bombs at all, at least not while they were in flight.
But when those bombs began to land and explode, they could look at nothing else. Each plane's load was marked by a line of explosions a half a second apart marching forward from the first as the bombs impacted one by one. Five such loads landed at once, about an eighth of a mile apart and stretching across the northern portion of the coupling area. Six more marched across the south portion. When the explosions hit train cars they burst apart, sending metal and other shrapnel through the air. Some of the cars, obviously containing items like AT-9 rounds or artillery shells, went up in spectacular secondary explosions ten and twenty times the size of the primary explosion. The concussions from these impacts, when they reached the tower twenty to thirty seconds later, would shake and jolt the entire structure, thrilling Mark and Darren to no end. To an adult it would have seemed a terrifying and foolishly dangerous manner of entertainment, but to teenagers, who thought themselves immortal, it was more thrilling than a rollercoaster ride.
The first of the concussions from the attack was still on its way to the tower when one of the lines of falling bombs stretched across a group of thirty or so tanker cars that contained either jet or diesel fuel. Usually large numbers of flammable liquid cars were not stored together but apparently the yard workers had not had a chance to separate this particular batch yet. The reason why such cars were kept separate became dramatically visible a moment later. The secondary explosion consisted of the entire line of tankers going up at once. The flash was so bright that night was momentarily turned to day, even four miles away. Every rail car within a hundred yards was obliterated instantly, sending tons of metal fragments outward at lethal speed for more than a mile in all directions. The fireball reached a thousand feet in the air and multiple third and forth generation explosions resulted as boxcars and one SAM site went up.
"Oh shit!" Darren yelled fearfully, sitting back down and grabbing the railing of the catwalk. "I think we'd better hang on for this one!"
"Right," Mark said, assuming the same position. He grabbed onto the rail for dear life and braced himself. They had never seen an explosion near as big and had no way to predict what the results of it would be. Would it be able to knock the tower down? Would it be able to jar the catwalk loose, sending them downward to their deaths?
A few seconds later the tower began to rock gently as the sound and the displaced air of the first concussions hammered into them. They could feel each explosion like a blow to the chest, could feel the catwalk rattling back and forth. In their ears the soundtrack of what they had just witnessed caught up to them. The dull thuds of the exploding bombs and the larger, secondary explosions of the boxcars assaulted their eardrums, almost, but not quite painfully. This was all expected, something that they had been through many times before, something that they usually did not even bother sitting down for.
"Any second now!" Darren screamed over the noise, his knuckles white upon the metal rail.
Mark did not answer. He simply closed his eyes and prepared to be hit by the blast wave.
It struck them like a speeding freight train, with such power that the entire catwalk was wrenched violently up and down with a hideous screech of tortured metal. The breath was forced out of their lungs in a whoosh as the blast of air pressure struck them. Despite the fact that they were hanging on to the rail, they were driven backward against the metal of the tank and bounced more than two feet in the air, crashing down painfully on their butts. They felt their eyeballs actually pushed back in their heads from the pressure, felt their teeth jar in their mouth. The noise, which hit them simultaneously with the concussion, was a sharp, biting crack that produced an immediate stabbing pain in their ears and temporarily deafened them. For a moment, with their heads reeling, their eardrums sending knives of pain through them, and their lungs unable to draw breath, both thought that they had been killed.
As the third and fourth generation concussions began to reach them, feeling a little like the playful taps of a child in comparison to what they had just experienced, they looked at each other with wide eyes.
"Jesus," Darren said, shaking his head to clear it a little. He found that the pillow he had been sitting upon was missing, probably tossed over the edge of the catwalk while he had been in mid-bounce. "That was some shit."
Mark's ears were ringing, making it sound as if Darren's voice was coming from a vast distance. "No kidding," he said, touching his nose. His finger came away bloody. "I thought the whole fuckin' tower was coming down."
"That threw me backward like I was a damn rag doll. It ripped that railing right out of my hands."
Mark nodded, noticing that his own pillow was missing as well. He looked out over the train yards where utter chaos was now taking place. The entire south side of the facility was ablaze as burning fuel from the tankers continued to ignite and explode boxcars and other tankers. Flames shot into the air with each new explosion hurtling more debris violently outward. Hundreds of smaller fires were burning around the periphery of the yard and two of the storage buildings were also ablaze. The tiny figures of people could be seen rushing here and there around the yard, trying to get out of areas that were being consumed by fire or that were in danger of being leveled by another explosion.
"How's your nose?" Darren asked, looking for the cigarette pack and finally finding it beneath Mark's backpack. He helped himself to one.
"Hurt's a little," Mark told him, grabbing a cigarette of his own. "That was one fuck of a concussion."
"Yeah," Darren agreed. "The chinks got lucky and hit a whole line of tankers. I bet that broke some windows in our neighborhood."
"Damn near broke my eardrums and my neck too." Mark said, searching for and finally finding his matches.
They took a moment to light their cigarettes, drawing deeply and blowing the smoke out over the railing, letting their heartbeats return to normal. Below them, at the train yard, explosions continued to occur every fifteen or twenty seconds. Most of them were the relatively small bombs or crates of AT-9 warheads, but every few minutes or so another tanker would blow up, ignited by the destruction of a nearby boxcar. In the distance they could see the emergency lights of fire engines, trucks, water tenders, and police cars heading for the scene of the attack. Not that they would be able to do anything until the explosions stopped. As they watched them approach and begin to fan out into pre-planned staging locations, the concussions continued to batter at them, rattling the catwalk and hammering into their chests, though not with the force that they had experienced a few minutes before. By the time they finished their cigarettes and pitched them over the edge, a perimeter was nearly formed around the yards and most of the people seemed to have moved away from the danger area.
"That'll disrupt the supply line a little, won't it?" Mark asked, sitting back down and letting his legs hang over the edge once more.
"Yep," Darren said sadly. "It'll probably take 'em a week or two to clean that one up. Fuckin' chinks."
"War is hell they say," Mark agreed. He looked over at his friend. "Why don't you roll us another missile? That'll help put this into perspective."
"Sounds like a mission," Darren said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his baggie.
They settled back against the tank once more to smoke some more marijuana and watch the show.
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