October 2012 Revised Edition The world's financial system is collapsing and this crisis is being used to begin the coup in America that will finally end the "American Experiment". Two related groups of prepared citizens have run to their survival retreats, one in southern Ohio, the Compound, and the other in eastern Kentucky, the Farm, with the intention of hiding until they know if the coup is successful, or if everything simply goes out of control. The Compound is commanded by a retired Marine Lieutenant General known by his Seal Team name, Iceman. The Farm is commanded by his older son, a retired Marine Colonel known also by his Seal Team name, Mack. Both groups share the same goal, to survive whatever is about to happen. Over the first week they quietly watch as things begin to deteriorate both in America and around the world. Because the government has terminated the internet and cell phones while actively monitoring all land telephone lines, along with controlling all television signals, their information sources are limited to the CB radio and shortwave radio signals. Nevertheless, these signals are sufficient to allow the real truth to be told. A nuclear war has started in the Middle East and, in America; massive riots have begun in the cities. Then, as they watch everything irrevocably slide out of control, someone, somewhere makes a mistake. In the mid-70's the first space based kinetic energy weapons platform was put into space. This system, along with its sister systems that were put into space by the other major powers, consists of platinum rods with a guidance package and a booster rocket. They are designed to impact the earth's surface with a force roughly equal to that of a forty megaton hydrogen bomb, only without the radiation. Because of the limited amount of time available to respond if these platforms were attacked all of the major powers had made their systems automatic and computer controlled. Whatever happened that caused these systems to fire the result was that in less than an hour over half of Earth's population die's as the kinetic energy weapon systems rain tens of thousands of missiles onto the planet's surface destroying military targets, cities and infrastructure everywhere. With the electrical grid destroyed, along with most major cities, all military bases, and the supporting infrastructure of our civilization, the citizens in the Compound and the Farm now find themselves attempting to help as many survivors as possible. While they have limited supplies available to them, they still reach out to their neighbors with offers of help and the information the neighbors will need to help them to also survive what is coming. As they experience the rapid cooling off of the planet because of the vast amount of debris thrown into the mesosphere, which is preventing the suns energy from reaching the surface, they are also fighting to keep the supplies they have accumulated from being taken by their enemies. Since they know that they are now facing a multi-year winter, loss of those supplies is nothing short of a death sentence. When the coup began, only a few weeks before, the governments new enforcement arm, the Citizens Army for Liberty (CAL), which has nothing to do with citizens (except to discipline them), or liberty, but is an army, was introduced. With their food, military supplies, and bases destroyed along with the cities they had been in, CAL is forced to forage for the food it needs to support its men, regardless of just who they have to kill to accomplish their goal. The citizen survivors are forced to defend themselves against the depredations of CAL while preparing for a "nuclear" winter, a multi-year winter that the world hadn't seen since the start of the last Ice Age!
About the Author: I am a serious student of history, political, economic, military history, read copiously, usually 2-3 books a week, and I have found this knowledge to be both a blessing and a curse. The blessing: I understand what I have read, and I prefer original sources. The curse: mankind is really doomed to repeat the same errors endlessly. Do I take myself seriously? Not really, even though the characters I use in my books all have a basis in reality, I have found that the passions of youth really do mellow out as one gets older. I do take great pride in using weapons and systems that either actually exist, or are theoretically possible. Also the combat situations I describe are as accurate as I can make them. In my book Destruction of Civilization; The Apocalypse Begins the scariest part of writing it was seeing that the preconditions necessary for the story to actually happen were happening. As a person, I am a grandfather of 3, a father of 2 boys and a girl, have been married to the same wonderful woman for 44 years, and have made, and lost, two fortunes, but have made my third, so I stopped while I was ahead