Chapter Two - Part One
Sunset Valley Bunker
1632 ZULU
SUNSET VALLEY, BC
CANADA
In the words of Vice-Admiral Meg Austin
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I’d always had a kinship of service with the Fleet Admiral and I admired him in the fact that he was always working for the betterment of the Naval Service. We’d crossed paths at the Pentagon as I was working in Weapons Research and Development developing bigger and better things that went boom and that was what the units were requesting. I was constantly in transit from DC to Naval Station Great Lakes and well, that kept our interactions from getting too personal. I have to say that I admired him a bit more than the Naval service would have allowed, but I kept that to myself. Now we were placed in a bunker in Canada in close quarters with each other contemplating the apocalypse. That was a great way to start a relationship, provided the winds of fortune went that way, sarcasm intended.
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We met Command Master Chief Coates at the entrance to the bunker and took stock of our new home. The Command Master Chief briefed us on what was there and we took possession of the bunker. Chief Coates and I had rarely crossed paths other than the times that I had to meet with the Fleet Admiral for official business, but she struck me as quite a go-getter. It was hard to think that she was at one point in her service career such a foul-up that she was slated to be processed out. And of course, Harm would be the one to help her in such a way that she stayed in and became a productive sailor and one of our most valuable assets here in the Navy and the bunker. The Goat Locker had met up and deemed her worthy enough to become one of the few who wore the anchors of the chief petty officers and from there, she’d worked her way up to the top to be the most senior enlisted in the Navy. And frankly, the chiefs were the ones who ran the Navy. I watched as Tosh greeted her warmly and thanked her for her service in setting up the bunker.
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We had a lot to do before everything went to hell in a hand-basket. There was provisioning that needed to take place...and that meant that all hands were needed on deck. We had to stock up on all things that we weren’t able to grow or make. It meant that all meat had to be stocked; enough rations to make sure that we survived the end of the world. Which meant that everything had to be brought in, in bulk.
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I had never met Admiral Gracen before in my life. A statuesque red-head with gorgeously deep blue eyes and a steely demeanor that spoke that she was no-nonsense. But Tosh with the fact that he was Chief of Naval Operations had and he greeted her as well. The radiant smile that she gave him set off warning bells in me even though I had laid no claim to Tosh. She was going to be a competitor in the relationship stakes especially as Tosh and she knew each other, even if it was in a professional sense as she was the former JAG and now the CO of the Naval Reserves as well as now a bunker-mate.
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Harm and I hadn’t talked at all on the C-17 heading to Abbotsford International Airport and that was mostly due to the fact that I wore the stars of a flag-officer and he was junior to me in rank as an O-6. I sat with Tosh on the flight but could see out of the corner of my eyes that Harm was constantly craning his head around to look at me and the flag officer stripes on my sleeves. And that was annoying Colonel Mackenzie to say the least. I wasn’t sure what was pissing Colonel Mackenzie off but I’m sure that seeing Harm’s former work-partner was part and parcel of her whole deal with me. Either way, the petty side of me was glad that she had to call me “Ma’am”. Take that.
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Even though she was junior in rank to me, something set off warning bells about Kimber Benton. She was absolutely gorgeous with a model’s figure and she’d worked with Tosh from squadron level days. She was his wingman and flew F-14s together. And that made her absolutely dangerous from a relationship point of view in terms of being able to snag Tosh’s heart. The only thing that prevented her from being a part of Tosh’s life was the fact that she wore Captain’s stripes and he wore a Fleet Admiral’s rank. And all she had to do was drop her commission and she’d be able to snag him. She was dangerous and my hackles went up around her especially when she looked at him when he wasn’t looking at her – there was that longing in her eyes that told me that she would go after him if she had a chance. And she had a distinct advantage of familiarity with him that I didn’t have. She’d been around him for most of Tosh’s life, shared many interests with him including flying high-performance aircraft, were squadron-mates, went to war with him and were CO and XO of VF-41 at one time and all that time she had feelings for him. She was going to be my prime competitor for Tosh’s affections. With her, the only advantage I had to snag Tosh was rank.
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And frankly put...competition was going to go that way since if the bombs did fall, it would be up to us to bring civilization back. All of whom was left of humanity would be tasked with the problem of bringing our population back to pre-war levels. And it would take thousands of generations to do exactly that. I had heard scuttlebutt that there was magic. Seeing cauldrons and books made my eyebrows shoot a beeline for the top of my head. Maybe there was more to this than what authors had written in fantasy books. Who knew?
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But relationships had to be put on the back burner for now. There was far too much to be done in a short time. We didn’t know when the balloon would go up. And we didn’t want to be still in prep-mode when it did. In otherwords time was of the essence and it meant that we had to use every single minute of the day to make sure that everything was able to be locked down at a second’s notice. Being prepared was of prime importance to survival. There was no way to look for something you might have missed when the world was in ashes.
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We would be taking inventory of what was there and then supplementing it with stuff that we would be bringing into the bunker during our provisioning. Then after all that was completed; we would lock-down and await our fates in hopes that Providence would look down on us and spare our bunker from being hit by nuclear attack. Even though the roof was rated for a 100MT direct hit, we sure as hell didn’t want to test that out.
In the words of Captain Harmon Rabb Jr.
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I knew that Meg had command potential, but I had not known that she’d shot up the ranks like that. When she had stepped into the office in DC and I’d seen out of the corner of my eyes that she was wearing Vice-Admiral’s sleeve rings, I felt my heart sink into my chest. Was I that far out of step? I knew for a fact now that when I had decided to flip for Mac’s and my future, that I made a big mistake. I’d flipped the chance away of ever becoming an admiral. When I saw the coin land on tails, I knew that I had to honor the choices made. It meant that I ended up having to turn in the captaincy since I’d rejected the position in London. Being frocked for Captain was contingent on my accepting the posting and since I’d rejected the position, I went back to being an O-5 and awaiting my position in rank. My decision also didn’t sit well with high command and I’m sure that my NAVPERS record went in the very bottom of the pile as I reserved my commission and went to be Mr. “Mackenzie-Rabb” – though in the end that never turned out because we could never get our stars aligned.
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Eventually after delaying a wedding multiple times, we each got the feeling that it would never work out and we went our separate ways. I decided to re-activate my commission and my detailer had said that I had severely shot myself in the foot with that coin-toss and rejecting a command that would have sent me to the Judge Advocate General’s chair eventually. I had pretty much kissed any chance of my being an admiral good-bye. In fact it was going to be hard if not impossible to get back into position to be promoted to Captain. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. If I had known that everything would go south, I’d have never had that coin-toss.
As it was, Lia got the JAG’s position and became a vice-admiral then went on to command Naval Reserves and become a four-star. Seeing Meg again was not only wonderful, but traumatic owing to that fact that in one stupid fell swoop, I’d kissed my chances of ever being able to wear stars. It was too late for regrets. And seeing that large stripe and two smaller stripes on her sleeves meant that there was no chance for us, meaning that Meg and I could never be an item. She was too far up the chain of command that a relationship was not possible.
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It was with a heavy heart that I had to close the door on any eventuality of my reuniting with Meg. In fact what hurt even more was that at one point, she was calling me, “sir.” Now I had to refer to her as “Ma’am” in my dealings with her and in fact, Animal had made her his XO in the bunker which meant that she held a command position which meant that her word and his was law in that bunker. I rationalized that it was a small price to pay for survival. But I often wondered if the fact that we were ending up having to live in a hole like rats was going to mess with our sanity and whether we’d be coming out of the bunker with our minds intact.
