Fifty Hours to La

By John R. Hampson III and Eugene Vincent Dinsmore

This is a story of a family fighting for survival in a world that may one day resemble our own. While on a business trip to Chicago, a man is separated from the wife he loves and the two sons he adores, who must fend for themselves in California in the opening hours of a nuclear war. His only hope in reuniting with his family lies in a cross-country odyssey in a light plane. Along the way, he must overcome enemy forces and barriers with the help of some newfound allies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546241836

John R. Hampson III

John R. Hampson, III, received a gift of inquisitiveness at an early age. In 1946, when he was young, he and his grandfather would watch TV test patterns and Kukla, Fran and Ollie in the afternoon while his mother worked in Hinsdale, IL, a surburb of Chicago, IL. John went with his mother to visit the first TV station in Chicago, WBKB, Channel 4. He watched two lady camera operators at work and then toured the inside of the TV studio. This eventually led John to a career as a Broadcast Engineer and a TV Cameraman, working for WIRL, Peoria, IL, WTTW in Chicago, NBC-Burbank, CA and WGN Channel 9 in Chicago. John worked in broadcasting for over 30 years and received the George Foster Peabody National Award for a documentary titled, Miles to Go Before We Sleep. He also won an Emmy in 1979 for his work for a Composite Videographer, while working in Chicago. After retiring from the TV industry, John turned his hand at writing. 50 HRS TO LA came to John while he was working in Burbank and traveling back and forth to Chicago. The many story ideas he has garnered from working in TV and his interest in aviation, has led him to be a full time writer. He has generated many different TV series, ideas and pilots listed at left. Suffering from dyslexia and not knowing until he was 45, he has continued to write and get his ideas onto paper. John, a true story teller, brings 50 HRS TO LA to life with his award winning style and background from TV. You will not want to miss this love story between a young couple trying to find each other after a nuclear bomb goes off in LA.

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© 2018 John R. Hampson III and Eugene Vincent Dinsmore.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   05/15/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4182-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4183-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905770

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Book 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Book 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

Dedicated to my children

Julia Ann Hampson Tubbs

Jennifer Lynn Hampson

John Robert Hampson IV

BOOK 1

Please note: This story deals with different time zones and different dates, so there is a global time lapse. Therefore, what happens at night in one country will be happening during the daytime in another.

The distance between two points is measured over the Arctic Circle.

It was a glorious midsummer day, an angelic day, a day that dreamers might have remembered. A high-pressure zone hovered over Kansas, giving most of the country clear skies and temperatures in the low 80s to upper 90s. The CNN news forecast predicted light showers for Washington State and the lower tip of Florida, extending into the Keys. What a wonderful weekend for family outings, playing golf, working in the yard, or traveling to see loved ones.

The US Saturday morning cartoons and public affairs shows were interrupted as news bulletins flashed around the world. In the United States, the Seal of the President appeared on TV screens and an announcer said, We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for this urgent message from the President of the United States. The news sent a shockwave to Bob Nulander’s heart. He was two thousand miles away from his beloved wife, Sandi, and his two boys. Bob went over his options for getting home. What would get him there the fastest and safest? He could drive, but that would be incredibly dangerous with all the potential criminality as people fled their homes and businesses and the fallout of the nuclear explosion. His friend John had offered the use of either his two-passenger Cessna 172 or the twin-engine Apache. The Cessna has the capability of landing on any strip that is six hundred feet long, like a road or a field, but it must have fifteen hundred feet to take off. The Apache would need to refuel at an airport, which might be unavailable, and it needed a longer takeoff strip. The Apache could get him to LA in under eight hours, but refueling would be hit and miss. The Cessna would take fifty hours to get to LA. It would take more time, but it would be safer. Bob could also borrow John’s Harley, but that would be slow and leave him exposed to criminal activity and physically harmed on the road as people sought cover from the atomic storm on the horizon. The chances were slim that he would make it to LA. Bob decided to take the Cessna because it would be physically safer, and finding a fuel source close to a highway would improve his chances of making it to his wife and boys at the high desert cabin near Lancaster, California.

CHAPTER 1

In the late 1800s, in Tsarist Russia, a secret police force called the Okhrana had assembled to protect the tsar and his family. This group of twenty-five officers was allowed to use all forms of torture, terror, and intimidation. Jump ahead well over one hundred years into the 1990s, and the Okhrana had morphed into the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—better known as the KGB. Now with more than 780,000 agents worldwide and a new third building added to the agency complex on Lubanka Square, the KGB had more agents than people who served in the entire United States Navy.

In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and its sister states left the so-called protection of Mother Russia. These newly independent states had one thing in common: a great hatred and distrust of anything or anyone Russian. Now the secret police—whatever their incarnation as Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD, KGB, or FCS—had a major problem. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had placed hundreds of nuclear missiles in underground silos in what were at the time their partner states. Personnel at all levels inside and outside the new governments in these former Soviet states were grasping for positions of financial and political power. Their presence brought everyone to the brink of a future war. The Federal Security Police (FSB) was now the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FCS) and playing a new game that had no rules. Bribes, threats, intimidation, and terror would befall any entity that didn’t cooperate. The FCS agents were determined to get the housed missiles turned over to Russia.

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The hardliners wanted to wrest control of the military and economic life of Russia from the president and the People’s Congress. Also, their goal was to re-secure control of those independent states where internal ethnic feuding was taking place. Russia was even having problems in its own provinces. By 1995, the little two-hour war in Chechnya, as described by the Russian defense minister, entered its second year. All of the now independent states had one thing in common: a great hatred and distrust of anything or anyone Russian, especially the new Russian mafia.

It became clear to the world by 1994 that the former satellite countries of the old Soviet Union were not willing to relinquish or dismantle the atomic warheads, rockets, and launch facilities they had retained. The Russia’s politicians and its military miscalculated the independent Eastern European Bloc countries’ attitudes about their defense. They did not want the military protection of Russian armed forces. They wanted protection against Russia. The Russians had been blinded by their own propaganda. By painting Western democracies as demonic with colonial aspirations, they did not realize how much the newly formed free, independent states saw Russia as the true colonial threat. Moscow was truly hated and mistrusted by the new governments of the once loyal Warsaw PACT allies to the west, south, and east.

CHAPTER 2

General Leonid Granick (retired), late of the Supreme Russian Army general staff, was one such man the FCS tried to play with. He was born of a fifteen-year-old harlot, Eva Shlevic Granick. Leonid was told he was fathered by a man his mother had never seen before and would never see again. Granick had been but a few grunts and groans and a creamy white fluid oozing from his mother’s vagina to the sweat- and semen-spotted bed. That same bed, in a hot, musty, five-room hotel in a small port town along the coast of the Black Sea, was the setting for Leonid’s convulsion into life.

The state recorded that Leonid was born as a bastard. This title would hound him for the rest of his life. At six months old, he was stricken with pneumonia. Feeling that Leonid was living in unhealthy conditions, the state took him from his mother and placed him in a state-run orphanage that was in itself anything but wholesome. But Eva loved her son with all her heart. She would visit him as many as four times a week. She would bring him a few sugar candies and a small gift if her current pimp gave her some money.

Leonid, as the child of a prostitute, had a hard street life as a kid. What little Christian influence he acquired came as an altar boy in the Eastern Orthodox Church where he could sometimes find food to eat after service. Whenever a new pimp would take over his mother, Leonid would spend another year or two at State School #947 for Orphans. His mother put a stain on Leonid’s life because she was a whore. As a teenager, he was continually hounded and harassed by adults and fellow students. Education became his refuge, his main focus, and his best friend.

Leonid was alone, and his soul had been hardened, but he worked hard for his grades. As a young man, he entered the only career that would have him: the Army of the Soviet Union. At least in the army he felt as if he belonged. Many of his comrades were misfits, without connections to family, religion, or the feeling of being loved. Yet, it was a place to be, to belong, a place of stability no matter how cruel the taskmaster.

A year later he entered the Frunze Military Academy, the Russian equivalent of West Point. Each year of his attendance, he advanced in his class rating, from almost failing his first-year studies to graduating at the top of his class in all requirements. In his spare time, Leonid studied military history, concentrating on tactical mistakes in the era before World War I. His main exercise routine included hours perfecting the formal Soviet marching style, the elongated goose step. He hoped to be noticed at ceremonial occasions, and he was. For his dedication and sharply chiseled good looks, Granick became the first man from the Republic of Ambikistan to earn the prestige of serving as an honor guard at Lenin’s Tomb. As time passed, he went on to appear on Lenin’s Tomb postcards in the goose-step pose, as well as in several propaganda films.

Leonid’s fellow soldiers harassed him by calling him girly boy (he had never dated a woman), granite face (for his stoic expression), and bird turd. The last slam came about when a pigeon landed on his shoulder as he stood at attention in front of Lenin’s Tomb. He was not allowed to move a muscle or make a sound to scare off the bird, who felt the call of nature and left a deposit. In time, Leonid was noticed by General Vessile Marocovich. Marocovich also was a loner, and there were rumors that Marocovich was a deep-in-the-closet homosexual and in love with the handsome Leonid. Unlike the rumors, it truly was a father and son love. Those rumors were never proven, but they left a stain on Leonid’s life and career.

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Fifteen years after Leonid’s birth, Eva would bear another son who she named Akeim Accasi. Her pimp at the time, the Muslim Omar Accasi, had fathered Akeim. Unlike Leonid, who was more or less raised in the Eastern Orthodox faith and was highly educated at Frunze Academy, Akeim lived according to his father’s religion and what the radical imams were preaching. At nineteen, Akeim joined a paramilitary group called Mohammad’s Avengers, affiliated with the Islamic State.

It wasn’t obvious when they were standing next to each other that they were brothers from the same mother. One was rotund, with a high squeaky voice and loved to tell jokes. The other was tall and handsome, with a commanding low voice and no sense of humor.

When Akeim was only eight, Omar killed Eva. In a burst of jealous rage, he knocked her to the floor and beat her head against the concrete. Leonid evened the score by tying Omar to a chair and, over a ten-hour period, employing a small pen knife and a great deal of patience, cutting off his fingers, toes, ears, and strips of skin. He wanted Omar to feel the suffering, the pain, and the abuse his mother had endured for years under Omar’s thumb.

CHAPTER 3

The fuse of this war was set when General Leonid Granick, formerly of the Supreme Soviet General Staff, fomented a coup in his native country of Ambikistan, a small eastern Mediterranean country rich in gas and oil reserves. He became their leader and ultimately their president.

Big things come in small packages. A great war that rips apart parents, children, countries, and the world begins with one small action. The infancy of this war was the assassination attempts of the FCS, which were meant to frighten Leonid Granick into turning over the multiple warhead missiles (MIRVs) that the Soviets had forced on them in the first place during the Cold War. As far as Granick was concerned, control of these missiles gave him an ace in the hole when dealing with the assholes sitting on his northern border. Over the years, Russian politicians came to realize that Leonid wasn’t going to just give them back their missiles. Several times, the FCS tried to blow up the silos. After repeated attempts, Leonid decided to make a counterplay. Instead of going after Vladimir Bolstoy, head of the Russian state, he issued a warning by poisoning Bolstoy’s support staff with nerve gas. The last Russian attempt on the silos was carried out while Crimea was in flux, which caused a diversion so the attack on the silos was secondary. To Leonid, the silos were always number one until the attack touched his brother Akeim.

After eight years Granick still wouldn’t comply with Russian demands, and he moved to number one on their hit list and the current Russian president and ex-KGB/FSB agent Vladimir Bolstoy. Some of the seeds of war were planted when the KGB/FCS attempted to assassinate Granick. Naturally, this upset him a little, but what got him really pissed was the fifth attempt, staged while his brother, Akeim, was visiting him. They were sitting in Leonid’s office discussing various items. First, they both heard the metal pin hit the floor, followed by what sounded like a metal ball rolling across the floor, heading toward the chair Akeim was sitting in. At first the chatter had been about Leonid’s farm and the racehorses he was grooming for the big fall race, which he was sure to win. He also talked about the new bulletproof Mercedes he had acquired from an opposing leader, who, surprisingly, had recently up and passed away. The chair Akeim was sitting in had a tall back and was very comfortable and plush. It was positioned at a twenty-degree angle in front of Leonid’s very large desk. Akeim was sitting with his right leg crossed horizontally over his left knee. He had just started telling his brother about how much fun he was having searching for his seventy-two virgins when the little gray pineapple bumped the back of Akeim’s left shoe and rolled backward two inches. Leonid yelled at Akeim, Jump over the desktop now! As Leonid’s head cleared the desktop, the grenade exploded. The grenade blast left tore off Akeim’s right leg at the knee.

Five other attempts had been made on Granick’s life in the last ten years. All of Granick’s injuries had been minor. There had even been a rumor that one attacker was a newer recruit to the KGB, Vladimir Bolstoy, a rising star in the FCS/FSB and in politics. He took credit for receiving a six-inch cut on his forearm. He told the doctor that bandaged him up that he was wounded when one of Granick’s security men shot at him. The doctor said that he could not find any bullet residue and that the cut looked like a nail scrape. It was also rumored that while Bolstoy was running for cover, he peed and shit in his pants. At first, Bolstoy was the type of person who talked a good game but didn’t necessarily follow through.

The Russian general staff and the KGB/FCS did not like Leonid at all. Some of the elite believed Granick to be the son of the devil or similar to Bolstoy. They could not understand how he could live through so many attacks. Teams of between two and five people were sent out to kill him. They always turned up dead. Personnel in the need-to-know lower ranks admired him for having the balls to tell the assholes to go fuck themselves. That small group of people kept him informed of any impending attacks, except for this last one.

The brothers’ enemies were out there, intent on annihilating both of them. Their different beliefs did not diminish the love they had for each other, and they were all the family they had. Within the next several days, the two brothers would bring what they believed were the two great Satans, the United States and Russia, to an atomic end. Leonid changed his target from Vladimir Bolstoy’s staff to Bolstoy himself because he had attacked Leonid’s family.

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This last attempt by the FCS and Vladimir was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Akeim’s left leg was torn off at the knee, and Leonid’s body was riddled with so many toothpick-size pieces of wood spikes that it made him look like he had a case of the measles. This last attempt would include physical damage to Leonid’s brother, Akeim Accasi. As far as Granick was concerned, Bolstoy and his asshole FCS boys had crossed the motherfucking line because they had messed with his family.

For the FCS, it was almost a success; however, they didn’t get the job done. Both brothers survived. This would be the last chance that Bolstoy would have to enjoy a walk around the Kremlin or ride a horse with his shirt off. Leonid sent four groups of assassins to put Bolstoy to sleep.

CHAPTER 4

She could smell the sweet scent of freshly mowed grass wafting on the light breeze through the rear windows. She moved toward the sliding glass doors leading out of her kitchen and onto the patio. At the door, she paused for a moment and looked into her backyard and across the pool. She spied her husband, who was blessed with chiseled looks and a sculpted body, and saw that he was relaxing under a tree, arms folded across his chest, and eyes closed. Sandi was a picture herself, wearing a white sundress with a yellow and green printed floral design. The thin white spaghetti straps accented her tanned, lightly freckled shoulders. Her gently applied makeup and blond hair made her look like an angel who had just descended to earth.

Beyond the patio, under a big old catalpa tree with its heart-shaped leaves and long cylindrical Indian bean seed pods pointing toward the earth, she saw Bob lying in the grass. Small lines of sweat dripped down his jaw. The love of her life was at rest; only the gently rising and falling of his finely muscular chest produced any movement. His head was lying on a small round stone next to the tall, thick tree trunk. He was wearing a red polo shirt with thin white rings encircling his massive chest and thick waist. His legs were together, and she could see green grass stains that had been thrown by the mower blade showing on the cuffs of his khaki pants. Grass stains also appeared on the white soles of his tennis shoes. If he had been awake, his eyes would have captured her in his gaze, his body perfectly aligned with hers. He peacefully slept on.

Not making a sound, she