His second nodded his agreement, “Should I tell the others to go to their base?”
“Not yet, let’s give them a little time. Then you and I will pay him a visit he won’t forget. Make sure every weapon we carry is silenced. If we have to nail the SOB, I don’t want anyone to hear us. Put your uniform on, we’ll pass for them. They won’t give us any thought, they’ve seen us come and go enough times.”
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Jon was amazed how smooth and cleared the road surface was. The tank cleared the constant falling snow as soon as it landed. They were easily able to maintain 35 Mph which was the speed of the convoy. He had time to look around at their surroundings. The more he saw, the sadder he became. No matter where he looked all he saw was destruction and snow that consumed everything. What used to be lush green farms and orchards were now fields of dead crops and trees covered in the curtain of never ending white.
The snow never stopped falling and the wind whipped it around so it looked like it was dancing. When Jon drove into the steady snow in the dark, it reminded him of when he was a boy and his father drove in the winter. It looked like they were in a spaceship flying through space and the blowing snow was a dense star field which they navigated.
Ariden tapped her mother, “Is the sun ever going to shine again? I’m so tired of it always being dark and cold.”
“Honey it will, but it might be an awfully long time up here. I pray that it will be different when we find our new home.”
“Where is our new home going to be? Will any of my friends from school be there?”
“We’re going into what they call the Smoky Mountains and I think you will find some of your friends. The people at the border told your father and I many of the people from Canada were being resettled there.”
“What does resettle mean?”
“It means we’re going to be given a new place to live and your father will get a new job. It’s where we’re going to make our new life."
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Two months before the asteroid struck the Earth
President Aristov listened to his generals while he sat at the head of his conference room table. General Chekhov began his presentation to the President. “Sir, we have been able to prepare six of the supertyazhs, them and their RDS-202 will be completed in seven weeks…”
“How much time will that leave us before we all die?”
“Ten days, if we don’t hit another delay.”
“Ten God damned days? You had months and you’ve come down to less than two weeks? Will you even be able to reach the rock and will there be enough time to shift its orbit?”
“We believe we will just make it, if every rocket works, if every warhead explodes where we want them to, and if every aspect of the mission succeeds.”
President Aristov shook his head, he had started to perspire. “Tell me what can go wrong. I want to hear every bit of it.”
“There is a long list of potential issues, are you sure you want to hear all of it?”
“Yes, tell me!”
“The top items are will all of the rockets work and launch the warheads on the right course? None of them have ever lifted such a package. Can the rockets which were designed to lift large satellites track the rock and deliver the warheads to the exact spot at the right moment? Of course, there’s also the issue of whether all of the supertyazhs will clear the tower. We’ve only built a handful of test rockets, of those, we lost thirty percent of them in explosions.”
“What about the warheads?”
“They were much easier to build then the rockets. We applied a lot of modern technology to the weapons’ design. We have boosted their yield to 125 megatons.”
The President silently sat in his chair, “Okay, you have my permission to proceed.”
After the military left President Aristov called the Directors of the FSB and the GRU, Russia’s two intelligence organizations. He asked both, “Tell me what the Americans are doing and what happened to the story about the rock the media talked about?”
The Director of the FSB replied, “The American government blocked their media from publishing any more details about the rock. They told the media they could either stop the story or they wouldn’t be included in the special bunkers.”
“What special bunkers? When did they start making special bunkers?”
The Director of the GRU quietly responded, “Sir, we both reported it to you around a couple of weeks after they discovered the rock. They started a massive shelter building program in their Southern states. They also began building monster tent cities which were built behind fences and walls to keep them away from prying eyes. They went so far as to declare the air space around and over these tent cities as restricted. Not even their media helicopters can fly into restricted air space.”
“We know they’ve recalled their military. They’ve broken almost every one of their mutual defense treaties. They’re using their military in addition to construction companies to build what they need. They’re preparing to tell their people this coming Monday…”
The President shook his head, “They’ll only have ten weeks to move all of their people?”
“Sir, they will have a lot more time. Even if the rock strikes us, the ice age won’t start right away and they’ll have time to complete the move. They’ve spent the last few months preparing to
