Barbie and Gator Ken
versus the Hurricane
Joelle Presby
I rolled through the Midtown Tunnel to the Norfolk side. My tank’s treads crunched over crash debris. The wall-mounted tunnel lights reflected off bits of plexiglass, and the almost spent road flares burned red in the gutter. I’d been in a hurry to get the lane cleared and left some car bits behind. I took a closer look with my cameras. What had been a piece of fender was now flattened thoroughly enough even non-tanks should have no trouble driving over it.
Cars whipped past me in the other lane on autopilot. The city’s emergency override system had them nose to nose going at least 50 mph in the tunnel’s second lane, but the passengers inside clutched at baggage and stared at their comm device newsfeeds instead of pressing their faces to the windows to ogle at Ken. If I’d needed any more evidence that Hurricane Idalia had the town in a panic, that would do it. Because Ken is exceedingly ogle-worthy. Even demilitarized and heavily modified by me, he remains a great lumbering hunk.
He’s originally a Gator III–class light tank handed off to civil authorities during the last military drawdown, and maybe he hadn’t looked like much with the faded reactive camo paint he’d had when I first got him. But he’s a gorgeous dusk gray now. The color’s almost regulation except for the extreme shine, and he’s adorned with unauthorized but nonetheless exquisite flame-wreathed National Guard Disaster Relief Unit shields on both flanks. The fire art around the shield’s transitions from a forward curl of hottest blue all the way through flame’s full spectrum to end in trailing orange-red and just a hint of blackest black smoke. And that’s just the paint job. The fuel cell drive system redesign is even neater, but . . .
“Need some help now, Sergeant!” Marjorie Kidd’s voice on the radio was tinged with an edge of panic.
“En route, Kidd,” I said and picked up speed.
Gator IIIs were built to be all-terrain light tanks, which meant they could move on unpaved roads and go over a few wet ditches. Nobody had intended for them to submerge.
The bottom of the tunnel had almost a foot of standing water. Since the cars whizzing by in the other lane tended to float on anything more than a couple inches, and I didn’t have an autodrive connection to instantly correct for any trajectory errors they experienced, it was a problem. The tunnel pumps were running at maximum capacity, but they’d been designed to be turned off and the tunnels closed during severe deluges. We needed this tunnel open for at least an hour more. The autodrive-controlled personal vehicles were being ramped down and through the wet on momentum, then picking speed back up as soon as they regained traction. The very best stunt car drivers could’ve done it without computer backup, but these were just regular people, so the autodrive systems were in full control.
Thankfully, the heavily populated parts of the Hampton Roads area were a cluster of peninsulas with no true islands, so the older vehicles that couldn’t handle a brief hydroplane even with computer assist had been routed elsewhere. Five bridge tunnel monstrosities crosslinked the densely populated zone with its convergence of rivers and ocean bay. They were all as crammed with fleeing vehicles as the Midtown Tunnel was—well, except for the MMMBT, the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel. That one was a mess I didn’t want to even think about. The situation made me want to find the city engineer’s house and level it with Ken’s main battery.
The swath of water filling the center of the tunnel had puddled deeper in the last hour. Ken was heavier than a passenger vehicle. A lot heavier. We could do this. We might even keep traction. We’d better, because I didn’t have an autodrive to take over for the hard parts. I kicked up my speed, closed all lower air intakes, and splashed through. Ha! I’d managed to keep us in our own lane without even a wobble. I’d half expected a little bit of float toward the tunnel wall there in the middle.
We clawed on up, and I slowed. We’d need to stop soon, and the momentum on something this big takes a little time to bleed off. I got my air coming in again. Ken requires no external oxygen, but I still need to breathe. Someday I might miniaturize an O2 exchanger for the cabin, but I haven’t yet. Instead I’ve got an old-fashioned scuba air tank strapped next to my driver’s seat for if I really need it.
Ken can do a lot, but not everything. Not to take too much credit, but I’d been tinkering with his systems since my unit got him.
Automotive engineering skills don’t directly map to military mechanized transport redesign, but a bored engineer is a motivated engineer. I’m the Roanoke Tesla Plant paint R&D girl. It’s dull. Watching paint dry dull.
So I play with Ken. God bless the National Guard. Every car enthusiast should really have a hobby tank hidden in the backyard garage. Thoughts of the way the HOA busybodies’ brains would explode if they knew were driven from my mind by what waited on the Norfolk side of the tunnel.
Corporal Marjorie Kidd’s hologram waved me over. A crowd management study said people respond best to rescuers they think are present with them. So we try not to do disembodied voices from loudspeakers. But Captain Wallen isn’t willing to put more people in the middle of an evacuation zone than he really has to. So Kidd was actually standing in a guardhouse shower room on the other side of the state with the taps on full instead of being in the pre-hurricane rainfall. Programming code existed to mimic getting soaked without actually being uncomfortable, but I’d been overspending on Ken’s mods lately. Wallen had put the remaining budget into top-quality hologram projection instead of splitting it between projection and image modification. He’d gotten his money’s worth. Kidd didn’t even waver out of focus when I got right up next to her. Water was dripping from her plastered blond hair. Her uniform rain gear was soaked through. I had a failed automotive high-gloss lacquer that would’ve refreshed the water repellant on her coat and only sort of stank like a dying skunk. I refrained from offering her a pint of the stuff to try out later. It wouldn’t have been appreciated.
“I can’t! I can’t!” the man in the pristine restored Tesla squeaked when a trickle of rainwater from the overflowing gutters lapped at his front tires. “The Midtown’s pumps must’ve failed. I can’t take my Rosebud through that!”
Ah. A true classic car would lack any connection to the city’s grid, which was how he’d been able to stop and block a full lane of frustrated traffic.
“Sir, sir!” Kidd yelled at him from a speaker at the tunnel mouth. She’d given away her hologram nature trying to get the driver’s attention and get him moving into and through the tunnel. Manually driving that car through a tunnel with the rest of the traffic on autodrive wasn’t the best idea, but she didn’t really know cars and might not have had time to look at the camera feeds for inside the Midtown Tunnel. “The pumps here are good. It was the Monitor-Merrimac where the pumps failed,” she said.
Failed. I suppressed a snort. Turned off intentionally by a panicky idiot was not the same thing as failed.
I glanced behind the lovely red Tesla. His lane was full bumper to bumper all the way back around the curve of Hampton Boulevard, and the cars in the other lane whipped on by with none of the little extra spaces the emergency drive system allowed in as traffic density began to ease. We had no time for another tunnel crash. Even with all highway and tunnel lanes reversed for outbound traffic, the Midtown was a major choke point, and all the lanes needed to move.
I jumped down to check out the Tesla problem. “Original restoration?” I asked. “And it’s a limited edition 2028, right, the one that used the same lines as the 2008s but not a 2048LE with all the insides changed up?” The pearly red of the car’s finish shone even under the darkening gray skies. Very good paint.
“We don’t have time for admiring old cars,” Kidd said to me with gritted teeth. The fixed traffic cameras couldn’t swivel for her, so she actually couldn’t have checked the car like I was doing.
“I can’t do it!” the man said again, his voice getting a panicked edge to it. I reached under the Tesla and made certain the custom restoration hadn’t done anything weird with the chassis. I wanted to tow the whole car and not just a piece of it.
“Sir, please speak in your normal tone of voice,” Kidd said. “The way is clear. All pumps are operational.”
The woman in the van behind him leaned on her car horn and a half dozen other drivers beat a staccato of angry agreement. Turn signal blinkers flared in a domino effect in the stopped lane as the people tried to take manual control and move into the unblocked lane. The system was able to block most of them, but some few managed to nose into the other lane, forcing the anticollision rules of the city autodrive system to further slow traffic. That aftermarket override was legal in this state, if not helpful in this particular instance.
Kidd lifted her issued bullhorn and bellowed an order for all vehicles to stay in their original lanes and to keep their vehicles slaved to the city autodrive system. Her voice echoed out of all the vehicles’ speakers, which earned us glares as whatever the occupants had been trying to listen to was interrupted. The cars did comply, but I couldn’t tell if it was because the people in the remaining stopped cars were civic-minded or if they just didn’t have the override.
I hooked my tow chain to the Tesla’s chassis. “Get in the tank,” I told the man. “I’m not sure if water intrusion backflow would short Rosebud out at the bottom or not, but we’ve still gotta clear the lane. The pumps are keeping up enough for recent vehicle models that can connect to city control, but a classic needs a little more help than that.”
Kidd shot me a concerned look. “Sergeant, I know you’ve figured out driving backward, but towing, too? Thought you’d push it out of the lane.”
“Tell Captain Wallen this’ll be faster. I’ve got to get Ken back through the tunnel anyway unless I’m sheltering him on this side somewhere.”
Kidd nodded. “Good luck, Sergeant.”
The man blinked in surprise at having a solution chosen for him and proved to have more sense than I’d come to expect from stressed and panicked people by climbing onto the tank. While he snapped a selfie with Ken, I made sure his Rosebud was in neutral and gave Kidd a cheery wave. “Clearing lane one, again,” I called out to her.
A second quick check around Rosebud confirmed it was precisely the restoration princess it looked to be, and no obstructions would prevent a safe tow.
“I’m Ford,” the man called out from the top of Ken. “Henry Ford the Tesla driver,” he added with a smirk. Well, at least his name was going to be easy to remember. “Thanks for saving my car,” he continued.
That was no sure thing. I wasn’t sure it’d start again on the other side of the tunnel. The rain had slowed to only spit occasional fat droplets. Ken would smell like wet dog, but the drizzle wasn’t enough to damage the tank interior. Ford’s hair started to mat, and the man brushed frantically at it while ducking farther into the tank. I snorted. There was a reason I liked my tough Ken more than most people.
“I know Rosebud is not as important as people, of course, but I got stuck,” Ford called out from inside the tank.
“Yeah,” I acknowledged. I’d have him through the tunnel and out of my tank again soon enough.
I climbed back into Ken and started us rolling smoothly in reverse back through the tunnel. The powerful pumps had lowered the bottom water level down to only inches now, thanks to the break in the rain. Still, the backward driving could get a bit tricky with the extra pushes the water could give us. We splashed through the wet at the very bottom of the tunnel, and arched back up to sunlight with only a few seconds of the Tesla floating during Ken’s point of least traction. Momentum had carried us through without any side drift into the very full other lane. I allowed myself a grin.
Ken’s treads pulverized another piece of road debris, and I nudged the driving lever to keep us in our lane.
Ford pulled out his personal comm and turned on a video news weather report as if driving a tank backward while towing a car were a nothing job that required no focus. As a former combat vehicle, Ken had no autodrive, and absolutely no remote override capability. Even military contractors hadn’t been able to convince the government to do that.
The talking heads on Ford’s news show spoke with breathless pronouncements about the hurried evacuation efforts. Idalia was disappointing them by remaining only a Category II hurricane. “Well, at least it’s not a three,” Ford said with the resignation of man whose house was about to lose its roof and get filled with only four feet of mixed seawater and sewage rather than eight. The reporters’ vulture-like interest remained high. A local news show well inland had managed to corner some early evacuees. The two men and a woman interviewed seemed to take tearful delight in their fifteen minutes of fame. Until the questions got to pets, that is. Then the woman made an offhand comment about no provisions having been made for the animals.
“They better not have left their pets behind.” My passenger swore at his screen but used unusually mild epithets.
I agreed with him about the animals. I would’ve said it much more crudely, but I try not to curse in uniform while a member of the general public who may or may not be live-streaming his evacuation experience sits in the cab with me.
“I got the family out on one of the evac ferries yesterday,” he said. Yup, sure sounded like he was talking to an audience of more than just me. “Got the cats out this morning. I’d never leave a pet behind. I can’t believe some people. Anyway. The cats went into hiding, you see, and I had a devil of a time finding an open grocery store to get some tuna to lure them back.” He continued without needing encouragement or interaction from me. “I was going to take Rosebud to one of the raised parking garages and shelter-in-place after. Since I’m a volunteer firefighter, you know.” He blushed. “But, ah, I’ve been too busy to do shifts in a couple of years, so they didn’t have me on the active list. So I couldn’t get a parking spot at the MacArthur North parking garage, and the MacArthur South was all full up. So I thought I’d just drive Rosebud out. Come to find out after six hours in line last night for the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel that the water level there was too high for Rosebud, so I got in line here for the Midtown Tunnel even though the chatter is that, once I got over to Portsmouth and wanted to take the freeway route north, the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel might not open again before Idalia hits, so I’ll have to take a west-and-southwest evac route rather than my planned highway route through the MMMBT—that’s the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel—after getting through the Midtown Tunnel, thanks to this tank driver here.” He finally took a breath.
Spelling all those things out with the extra details? He was definitely talking to an audience.
My radio chirped. “Yup, Sergeant Barbie here,” I said. “Almost through clearing lane one.”
“Hey, her shirt says, ‘B. Ommerowie . . . ’ um, something.” Ford, like most people, couldn’t pronounce Oumarou. I didn’t bother to help him out. “They ought to be calling her by her last name. Big O., who won the Heisman last year, had the same name. And his cousin Johnny O. got that seat in our state assembly last year.”
“Stop talking,” I said.
“But they should call . . . ”
“Stop.” I leveled a glare at him, and he finally snapped his mouth shut. I was well aware that some famous and semi-famous people shared my last name. And nobody called them by it either. I was good with Sergeant Barbie. I’d been with the Guard long enough and met enough active duty types to know the nickname could’ve been a lot worse.
“Barbie here,” I said. “Had some local static, sir, say again, over.” Captain Wallen would know that meant a member of the public was present, and I’d just shut him up. We don’t use strict communications protocols in our unit, but we do have a working set of unit specific codes to report things we need to share but don’t want broadcast out of context on the local news.
“Gotcha,” Wallen said. “We just got a bunch of reports about some chic animal-boarding center being abandoned without anybody evacuating the pets. I need you back on the Norfolk side for a dog rescue.”
“All based on some comments from a pet store receptionist interviewed by Roanoke Channel Four?” I asked.
“Glory be, really?” That meant he thought it was shit intel, but he had to pretend it wasn’t. Captain Wallen’s grimace wasn’t visible on the audio-only channel, but I’d worked with him long enough that I could see it. “Yes, Mayor, yes, Lieutenant Governor,” he said without keying the transmission off, “I’m about to have someone on the ground check it out. Yes, I understand that your constituents are very concerned.”
Ford flashed a smile at his comm and said, “I’m staying for the dog rescue.” He turned to me. “Seriously. I found a place three-point-eight miles from here and still open where I can pick up some dog chow. Do you think half big dog and half small dog mix? What about puppy chow?” He held up a hand even though I hadn’t agreed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just get whatever they have left.”
I counted to ten in my head. “Mr. Ford, your car may or may not start. If it doesn’t, I’ve got to radio for a state trooper or convince a random vehicle to let you take an empty seat on out of here.”
“Rosebud will start.” Ford blinked at me. “I live in Norfolk. Of course I have her whole underside water sealed. I get it refreshed every six months. I just didn’t want the upholstery ruined if water came into the interior through the ventilation system.”
“The upholstery,” I said and crunched out of the active lane. I took down a section of guardrail. Oops. Rosebud’s narrower body followed through without a scratch. I bled Ken’s momentum off with a curving tight turn at the gravel edges of the little side lot. A big sign overhead read Emergency Vehicles Only. Normally I’d have slowed before the turn and avoided damaging the guardrail, but I wanted everyone behind us moving at top speed.
I nosed Ken to a stop. I did some calculations in my head, guessing at the number of cars backed up waiting to clear the tunnel, assuming no further delays . . . I tapped a few buttons to pull up some info from the video cameras on the major roads to help estimate how many cars were still coming through and to check if the emergency system had them quite up to 80 mph yet. They’d be doing 120 once they got through to I-480, but traction in standing water was shit. I did the math and suppressed a few curses.
They’d be getting out ahead of the storm, but Midtown wasn’t going to be empty soon enough. I was going to have to crawl Ken across the bottom of the Elizabeth River again. I’d tested that out last year during drill in non-storm conditions, and it did work, but tanks were really, really not supposed to have to do stuff like this. Whatever happened to blowing things up with a main turret? Assuming, that is, I ever officially got any ammo to try out or was able to reinstall the targeting computer from one of the other tank hulks. Of course if it were known that I had a functional gun, I’d have to accept an actual tank crew instead of driving around alone and unafraid as my one-woman, all-terrain wrecking ball.
“Ford,” I said. “Out of the tank. Show me that you can really turn Rosebud on without turning yourself into a charcoaled and smoky former car nut.”
“We prefer the term car fanatic,” he said. But he was moving.
I unhooked my tow cable and stepped well back as he got into the gleaming old Tesla and demonstrated the car was on with a few headlight flashes. He started to turn Rosebud toward the fast flow of cars exiting the tunnel.
“No way, Ford! You’re taking the back way.” I pointed at the narrow parallel tracks of gravel leading out an anonymous waterfront side street.
“That adds eight minutes to my route to the pet supply store,” Ford complained. “You could be back with the dogs and I’d miss it if I go the long way. You’ll have to stop traffic anyway to go back through the tunnel.”
I wasn’t going to get to use the tunnel. I suppressed my shiver, not wanting to have it caught on camera. “You aren’t coming back with puppy chow unless you want the state police to impound Rosebud and chain her to the cleats here right next to the last tunnel wreck.”
“Harsh,” Ford said. But he was holding up his comm for a good camera angle and had a slight smile on his face. Sometimes I hate humans. Why can’t everybody be more like a reliable tank?
A thought hit me. “Your cats. Where are they? Tell me you didn’t leave them in a cat carrier in the back of that Tesla to maybe get electrocuted if your wetproofing failed during the tow.”
Ford flipped his comm down, genuinely hurt. “Of course not. I dropped them off at the boat Muddy Paws had going out. They’d chartered a ferry for pet evacuations and were getting everything two-footed, four-footed, and no-footed out of the storm path. They even told me that a police officer had cut the locks for them at a certain competitor kennel to get some dogs out that idiots had left behind. Not exactly breaking and entering when a police officer helped, but of course I won’t stream that. People can get all shitty with the insurance and liability claims.” He double-checked his comm. “Good: off. Can’t curse on the feed or they give you an NSFW label and you lose all the under-eighteen viewers who don’t know how to log in under an adult’s access.”
I pointed at the gravel path leading out to Seaboard Avenue. “Get.”
He drove off and managed to squeal his tires on the turn onto pavement despite going no more than 15 mph.
I stowed the tow chain and re-entered my tank. I had really been hoping I could stay on the Portsmouth side until after the storm passed. The police car fleet and ambulances had streamed past more than an hour ago. The Portsmouth Naval Hospital complex had a new Deltec II building the emergency responders were using for shelter on this side. It was compact, wind-resistant, three-stories, and extremely well engineered. It’d do just fine in the storm. The rebuilt MacArthur Center and associated parking garages were only Deltec I and had more stories. Since the lower floors would flood, they needed the height but the upper levels would be battered by higher winds and more debris.
“Captain, this is Barbie,” I said. “New intel. Local reports some Samaritans with the pet supply and boarding co Muddy Paws may have the dogs.” Samaritans was our code for do-gooders who weren’t entirely following the expected social norms of who was expected to do what. I left out all mention of police involvement and of breaking and entering.
“Roger that,” said Wallen. “Got new tasking anyway. Need you to check on a Lily Sunset—again on Norfolk side.”
I pulled my hatch shut and dogged it tight. I had Ken rolling down the soft incline toward Seaboard Avenue and the water as Wallen kept talking.
“I’m working on the exact address. This is for a city’s civil engineer.”
I paused. “The one who shut off the pumps and closed Monitor-Merrimac early, and will be directly responsible for a lot of deaths if any further screwups slow the evacuation?” I asked. “The same civil engineer who told the city to turn off the pumps for the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel while the evacuation was still in progress, and about fifty thousand people without access to personal boats still needed to drive through that bridge-tunnel?”
“Uh, negative.” The rustle of pages meant Wallen was checking something in his unofficial personal logbook. “Believe that guy’s been removed for cause, so this would be the newly promoted former underling who’s in a wet suit inside the MMMBT’s tunnel right now.”
“Shit.” The word slipped out. I did not compound it with my demands to know what possible useful thing anybody thought they could do in the tunnel now. Three days ago, sure. Even last night, if there were extra pumps that could be brought online, they might have been able to drain the thing and reopen it as an evacuation route. Now it had to be too late.
“You’d be going even if Lily were a relative of that, ah, citizen,” Wallen said.
We probably shouldn’t have chosen “citizen” as code for “asshole.” It’d make sense, though, if Lily were the former city engineer’s mom. Assholes do tend to breed true.
Some background babble that might be one of the dignitaries included a fair bit of cursing people who insisted on sheltering-in-place until just before storm landfall and then screamed for the city to evacuate them. They didn’t sound particularly politician-like at the moment, but maybe they were imagining the police and EMS funerals that they’d be asked to speak at after this.
“Just remember,” Wallen said, “you need to be back at the MacArthur Center North Parking Garage on at least the fourth level before the storm makes landfall. Oh, and secondary mission if you have time: we’ve got an ambulance boat on Fairfax Canal that needs a tow. They were responding to a driver in need of assistance. Somebody’s classic car was floating in figure eights and they tried to save it instead of just bailing out the driver. Ambulance boat got stuck on a lawn. They think it’s stuck and not actually hull damaged. They want to have it in service for post-Idalia relief ops, but it won’t be if they can’t get it to cover before the storm hits.”
“Got it. Two missions. The engineer’s Lily is primary. Ambulance boat tow is secondary. Going under.” I had rolled up right to the bank of the Elizabeth River. Ken could do this, but I was going to be blind getting across. Lily Sunset better be the world’s sweetest grandma who’d only stayed behind because her fifteen cats needed to be saved from the storm too, and she’d had some trouble rounding them up. And why the fuck couldn’t somebody on the other side check on Lily?
“I asked up the chain about other responders,” Wallen said. We’d worked together long enough that the officer was excellent at guessing my questions and he took to heart all the directives about keeping the troops on the ground fully informed about other available resources. “You’re all we’ve got that can handle the terrain. I’ve got no backup for you.”
If I’d had a crystal ball earlier, I could’ve stayed on the Norfolk side and had some Portsmouth wrecker truck come through to tow out Rosebud. But no, that would have involved a wait and those critical minutes were making a difference in how many of the last-second evacuees got entirely clear of the storm or ended up sheltering in freeway underpasses later when the hurricane spun off its usual mess of nuisance tornadoes.
“Hey, remember,” Captain Wallen said. “If Ken gets stuck; if there’s new debris washed across the route; if the ramps we put in have been dislodged; if you can’t get through for any reason, you bail out like we practiced. Do not wait down there for a crane. It won’t be coming. You hear me, Sergeant?”
Like hell I’d bail on Ken. I didn’t answer him. I’d already signed off for submerging. And what do you say to that sort of commentary anyway? For that worst crossing attempt we’d done, the crane had torn one of Ken’s treads, and I’d woken up in a bed at Norfolk General. But they had gotten us out, and if I’d rammed through once more that time, Ken would’ve gotten us out on his own. It was operator error that I’d passed out from oxygen deprivation before I’d figured a way through crawling around blind on the river bottom. Tankers historically used to drive around pretty close to blind in combat conditions with just a narrow slit to see through. And the whole Gator line from the first has been able to move while hermetically sealed to harden it against chemical and biological attack. What I’d done with Ken wasn’t that extreme of a modification.
“She’s going to fucking drive that tank across the Elizabeth River?” a new voice said. Captain Wallen had left the radio transmitting again. He probably thought it’d be encouraging for me, or something.
“Absolutely, Governor,” the Norfolk mayor said. “They do it all the time.”
Once. We’d done it successfully once. And I’d gotten stuck seven other times including the last two times we’d tried it. Lily Sunset better be worth this, and I hoped that ambulance boat crew had the sense to find the most survivable nearby house and break a window or whatever it took to get themselves into a shelter if I couldn’t reach them in time. If Lily was an ornery sheltering-in-place, mind-changing, ah, citizen who’d chosen an unsurvivable shelter, she could be tough to move.
The countdown clock for Idalia’s upcoming landfall clicked ever downward.
Ken’s treads crunched over to the ramp. Three minutes. The ramp we’d installed on this side wedged between two wharf-side buildings and pointed due east instead of straight at the opposite bank. If I turned correctly immediately off the ramp and crawled across the river bottom on a straight line course to the opposite ramp, I should be resurfacing at Plump Point Park right behind Norfolk General Hospital’s neurology building within three minutes. If not, if I had to wiggle in a zigzag back and forth, guessing and second-guessing about where that second ramp had gotten to, I had about an hour and a half of air. That’d be eighty-seven minutes of knowing I’d never before managed to find that second ramp or rediscover the first ramp after missing the goal on the first shot across. I could and had found riverbanks with high rock seawalls that even Ken couldn’t climb. I could open the hatch against water pressure, let the river pour in, and let that brackish water fill the entire cabin. After the water pressure equalized, I could swim up, still breathing just fine with my scuba tank, and I’d get out.
But Ken was waterproofed only from the outside. Water in the cabin would seep from there into every nook and cranny of Ken’s electronics and electrical systems. He had no protection against threats from inside himself. He’d be only a paperweight after that. His chassis and treads would be spare parts for some other tank with all the tweaks that made him dead on the bottom of the Elizabeth River. If I swam up with my air tank, surfaced, and found a part of the seawall where I could climb out, I’d be fine. Sure, I’d have to still find a shelter, but there’d be enough to choose from and people tended to open their doors in welcome for a woman in uniform. Only Ken would be dead. They might not even rent the crane to get Ken out after the storm passed. Call it a burial at sea, maybe.
I wiped my sweating hands on my uniform pants. I could do this. I had do it. Ken had done it. We just needed to do it again. Perfectly. With no backup.
I put on my breath mask and tested my air, and rigged Ken for dive. The four external cameras gave me a 360-degree surround-view of the ramp and the Portsmouth commercial waterfront behind me. The cameras had no ability to angle up and of course I had no headlights, but at least I wasn’t squinting at a collection of finely aligned prisms and trying to peer through a little slit visor.
Ken rolled down the ramp into the water. I didn’t hear the water lap and splash against Ken’s sides as we sunk into the Elizabeth River, but the view from the front and then the side cameras fogged and dimmed to a murky gray. By the time water covered my rear camera, the front view was solid gray. I’d be blind until halfway up the second ramp.
My aftermarket gyrocompass was the only reason this had worked that once. It gave me true compass headings while submerged without Ken’s magnetic field distorting it. We reached the bottom of the ramp. I gave Ken a gentle turn to a heading of 047. I tried to ignore the monitors but didn’t turn them off. The billows of river mud churned up by Ken’s treads built optical illusion structures in the inky grayish brown nothingness. I had just under half a mile of bottom to cross at an easy 10 mph.
We tilted gently downward. The gyrocompass heading stayed steady. I rolled Ken onward. Something crunched under us. We’d shifted slightly north to 045. I hissed a curse at myself and angled back to 049. I counted out a guesstimate of twenty seconds off course and returned us to 047.
Two minutes and two seconds in, Ken stopped moving. I revved up the power, and we continued to not move. Something blocked our forward path. We were at least a tenth of a mile from Plum Point Park. I closed my eyes. This was either a big new wreck, or it was something that’d always been here, but I’d not run into before. I stared at my map, knowing I had to make a choice fast. If I let Ken stay still long enough, we’d sink too deeply into river-bottom mud for even his tank treads to get us moving again.
I hoped the obstacle was new and small. I’d go backward and then slightly north to get around. That way, if my earlier off-course northerly drift had been longer than I’d thought, I could work my way south and more south and, I prayed, find the ramp out.
I backed Ken. He moved. Five seconds back. Stop. Forward turning to 045. Hard stop at five seconds. Shit. This was a big obstacle. North again. Backing for five along bearing 227 in the straight-line reverse of bearing 047. Forward at 045. Hard stop. But Ken twisted as he stopped. There was a corner on this obstacle, and we’d found it. I cut power. We were pointed 097. Ken’s left tread had been clear of the obstruction and kept moving while the right side ground against an immovable something. I stared at the map and did a quick measurement. There was a high seawall for the piece of land just south of Plum Point Park. I was almost certain that that was what we’d been ramming into.
Well, at least if I had to abandon Ken, I’d be close to our intended destination.
Wait, no. I didn’t have to keep guessing! I could make just one last guess. If I was right about where I was, I had an exact point for my current location. I had the last pre-storm satellite image enlarged into a detailed map with my two ramps marked, and—there—I had the corner seawall that Ken’s right tread might be rolling ineffectually against. I drew the line to my target. I needed an 039 course for 0.11 miles from here to the second ramp. After I’d drifted too far north, I must’ve overcorrected south. Hope bloomed inside me; I might still be able to get Ken out.
I pulled back from the corner for just a half second, turned to 039, and headed north-northeast. Ken scraped against the seawall corner as we passed it. Just over a tenth of a mile to go at ten miles per hour meant a smidge under forty seconds to the ramp at our 10 mph crawl. My clock counted down. At thirty-nine seconds, Ken’s nose lifted. I slammed on the brakes. The ramp wasn’t wide. I shifted backward and forward bare seconds of movement at a time. Gator tanks do not corner well. It took us an eighteen-point turn to get from an 039 bearing to an 047 one. But the front of Ken’s treads still found the base of the ramp, and we powered up it without falling off a side.
The monitors cleared to show the beautiful storm-grayed skies, sodden unkempt city park green space, and the cracked old walking path of Plum Point Park. I spat out my regulator, cracked open the hatch to get my cabin air speedily refreshed, and rigged Ken for normal operation.
“Barbie and Ken, checking in at Plum Point,” I radioed Captain Wallen.
“Took her long enough,” the mayor said, and Captain Wallen cut the transmission before whatever other snark the politicians had to say could come through.
Corporal Marjorie Kidd appeared at the head of the ramp. Ken’s speakers crackled with her voice. “Thank God, Sergeant! Captain Wallen was going crazy looking for a crane operator company who’d let him do a remote operation to rescue you, but none of the ones he browbeat into giving him control codes could reach to this side of the river. We used a crane boat last time, and it was evacuated weeks ago.”
Huh. So much for nobody coming to get me out. We didn’t have microphones on the ramp to catch any of my responses, so I only gave the camera a turret wave. “Address on Lily received,” I reported back in to Captain Wallen.
“Go, go, go,” Kidd said. “Winds are picking up faster than the models predicted.”
We crunched directly over empty streets, soaked lawns, and the lacy patchwork of canals that made up the Norfolk water transportation grid. In a row of old houses, I found my address for Lily. The ambulance boat crew struggled on a neighboring lawn. They’d procured a heavy rope from somewhere and with one end of the line wrapped around a tree, they were trying to pull their boat back into the canal by main force. The winds knocked over two of the four EMTs. It wasn’t going well.
I popped open Ken’s top and almost got my head lopped off by a piece of tree better described as trunk than branch. I pulled the hatch almost entirely closed and peered out more carefully. Taking a hint from Kidd’s style, I used my bullhorn.
“Lily Sunset, this is Virginia National Guard Disaster Relief Unit Six. We have received a call that you require assistance. Please respond.”
Silence from the house. I was going to have to go knock on the door and maybe get my skull cracked by another tree.
Four thumps hit against Ken’s side. The crew of the ambulance boat had dashed the hundred meters to shelter on Ken’s leeside. I opened the hatch wider. No reason for them to wait outside.
Four blessedly lean EMTs sporting bruises and scratches wedged themselves into Ken’s cabin and clumped together to give me space at the controls. Like me, they had their names embroidered on their shirts.
“Lily needs to be shot, not evacuated,” B. Haven said.
“Hardly the plant’s fault that its gardener is an egotistical asshole with no concern for human life,” G. Whittaker said.
“Thanks for the rescue.” P. Doyle gave me a nod.
“I just wish we weren’t going to lose Betsy,” P. Gold said.
“Lily is a plant, not a person. And my orders to help her evac are some sort of bullshit,” I translated. I got four nods. “Who is Betsy?”
They blushed. “The boat.” P. Gold sighed. “I couldn’t keep her steady during the swells while Doyle and Haven were trying to figure out which lily was the prize-winning sunset lily that the overly connected asshole pretending to be a civil engineer wanted dug up and saved.”
“I really think if we could just pull Betsy back into the canal, the mud lawn’s soft enough that she ought to slide back without major hull damage,” B. Haven said. “We can still get back to the boat lift at MacArthur North.”
P. Doyle turned to me. “Would you help pull? With five together maybe we can shift her.” He looked at my slim shoulders with more doubt than hope.
I snorted. “Ken will rescue your Betsy.” I patted the side of the tank cabin and their eyes lit with understanding. I gave them the tow cable to attach.
As Doyle and Whittaker got Betsy hooked up, Haven tried to explain that they had a collection of code phrases for stuff they need to share with dispatch but didn’t care to hear repeated on local news channels, and a “classic car rescue” meant . . . I waved away the details, I got it. This lily belonged to the citizen who’d closed the MMMBT early. The assistant who was trying to make sure a pump system subjected to an emergency override shutdown would still restart after the storm didn’t own it.
“Backup only comes after the tunnels get pumped. We’re going to be on our own for a fair bit after Idalia’s gone through, and Betsy’s a tough boat. She can do it, but, um, only if we can get her unstuck,” Haven summarized.
I grinned. “Don’t you worry. Ken will save you.”
We pulled Betsy free in one easy tug. Before Haven and Gold left, I pointed at the front of the house where a raised decorative planter stood in a position of honor in the front landscaping. Whatever plants (lilies or otherwise) had been there, the wind had already ripped all leaves from the bare earth. “Are you absolutely certain that this is the citizen’s—I mean, asshole’s—house?”
“One hundred percent,” B. Haven said. P. Gold nodded in confident agreement.
I turned Ken’s turret at the stone planter and fired. It’s amazing how much damage pulverized stone can do to a house when a tank round hurls it through the front façade. The round itself kept going through interior walls, through the back siding, and out into the gentle waves beyond. “Gotta love waterfront property,” I said.
Haven grinned. Gold stared. Haven pointed at my comm unit. “We’re on channel sixteen for the return transit.” He and Gold ran to their boat.
I adjusted my settings in time to hear the all-stations emergency coordination channel crackle on. P. Doyle’s voice from the ambulance boat Betsy reported, “High winds from Idalia kicking up excessive debris. Ambulance Unit One-Two returning to shelter. Gratitude to National Guard for assistance above and beyond. I wish we had tanks. Over.”
Dispatch answered, “You aren’t getting a tank, Doyle. You’d shoot something. How’s the classic car? Over.”
“Unable to locate at this time,” Doyle said. “Unit One-Two, out.”
Ken saw Betsy home, steady and reliable just like the gentleman tank he was.