by Jeff Kirkham
Still, in light of what he was hearing on the radio, Jimmy wondered. Could economic dominoes—energy, banking, transportation, communications, law and government—fall because of some weird event half-way around the globe?
It seemed impossible, especially on this fine day, in his fine car, wearing his fine suit.
• • •
Levan, Utah
Union Pacific Railroad Yard
By 11:00 a.m., there were already a hundred fifty semis piled up in the yard, waiting to offload coal from the biggest coal mine in Utah, the SUFCO mine in Sevier County. But there were no trains, which meant no coal could be offloaded.
Because of endless government dickering and countless environmental impact studies, the mine and the railroad had been struggling unsuccessfully for sixteen years to get a short-line railroad to connect the SUFCO mine with the town of Levan. Each day, six hundred semis drove from Sevier to Levan, an unnecessary trip of eighty-five miles.
Dante Morales, director of the yard where the coal transferred from the trucks to rail cars, had been yelling at everyone he could at Union Pacific headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Those hundred fifty trucks waited like ugly prom dates for a train to arrive. So far, nothing. Still no train.
In the previous months before the market crash, Union Pacific Railroad found itself in a precarious position, getting both lifted up and dragged down by energy markets, like a kite made out of hardwood.
Coal shipping was Union Pacific’s bread and butter, but coal was out of favor with the politicos in Washington, as well as every other state and municipality. Little by little, cleaner fuels were choking out the market for coal and Wall Street traders knew it. At the same time, the price of diesel—the fuel used by trains—had dropped so low it made Union Pacific’s profit-and-loss statement look almost rosy.
Most stock wasn’t traded by a bunch of old ladies tinkering with their retirement accounts. Most stock trades in the modern age were executed by razor-sharp experts. Most of the Union Pacific Railroad trades were being done by men who knew the exact strengths and weaknesses of UPR, diesel costs, and the coal markets.
When oil prices skyrocketed in the morning hours of trading due to uncertainty in the Middle East, the stock experts bailed out of Union Pacific like fleas off a drowning dog, knowing the railroad’s profit-and-loss statement would turn tits up.
Dante Morales knew nothing of stocks. He only knew that things had gone nuts in his coal yard. From his steel-cube office, he could see the yard was completely jam-packed with trucks full of coal, and they were lining up along the highway for a mile. The last time he lined up trucks on the highway, the Utah Highway Patrol and the state environmental protection douchebags had filed a formal complaint and he almost lost his job.
In a fit of exasperation, Dante called his counterpart at the SUFCO coal mine. “Turn those trucks around, Bill. We got no trains, and both our asses will be grass if we don’t get those trucks off the highway.”
“What do you mean, we got no trains?” Bill stammered. “You mean the train’s late?”
“No, Bill, I mean there are no damned trains. Not today. If they haven’t left Las Vegas by now, they’re not coming. You can leave a hundred trucks here in the yard, but all the rest need to go back right now.”
The guy at the mine couldn’t get his mind around what he was hearing. “That can’t be. Check again.”
“I already checked all goddamned morning, and there isn’t a single locomotive between here and Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s going on, but it has something to do with Union Pacific stock taking a dump and the West Coast diesel pricks screwing them on their contract.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Bill explained. “That coal gets burned by the power plant down in Delta and eight other power plants in Utah. It’s not like they keep a bunch of coal sitting around out in the weather. If we don’t get that coal up north, right fucking now, lights are going to start flickering in California and all around Utah. Then our asses will really be in a sling.”
“Of course I know what the coal is for, Bill. But I got no trains, so the power plants are just going to have to make do with what they got until the bean counters over at Union Pacific get their heads out of their asses. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your goddamned trucks off the highway. Thank you!” Dante slammed the phone in its cradle and turned back to the window, praying the Utah Highway Patrol was tied up at a donut convention.
Dante had never placed a call to the Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah before, but some industrious soul had written the phone number on a Post-it note and taped it to the side of his computer years ago. He had been looking at it, meaning to throw it away for as long as he could remember. It felt like destiny when he finally called the number.
“Hello.”
“Hello, is this the power plant in Delta?” Dante asked.
“Yes. Who’s this?” came the guarded reply.
“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard for Union Pacific. Who am I talking to?”
“Ron Weber. What can I do you for?” Weber asked.
Dante didn’t quite know how to say it. “I just wanted to make sure you knew there wasn’t any coal coming today.”
“What are you talking about?” the man asked.
“Union Pacific isn’t running trains today. Some kind of headquarters SNAFU.”
“Bullshit,” Weber cursed, echoing Dante’s own thoughts.
“Well, have you seen any trains today? Have you?” Dante asked him.
“I’m not sure. Can you hold on, Mr. Morales?”
Dante waited almost ten minutes before another person picked up.
“Hello. This is Senior Operations Director Dale Price. Who are you?”
“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard,” Dante repeated.
“Hello, Dante. Where’s our coal?” the senior operations director wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat.
“As I was telling your man, the coal is sitting here in trucks, but the trains aren’t running today.”
“That’s not possible. We have a contract with Union Pacific that guarantees daily delivery,” Price said firmly.
Dante knew he had pretty much reached the edge of his pay grade. “I let my license to practice law lapse some time back, so I’m not much help with your contract. I just thought you’d want to know that your coal is sitting right here outside my window instead of on its way to your plant.”
“I understand,” the senior engineer replied. “Thank you. I need to get off the phone and make some calls.”
“Okay. Have a good day.” Dante hung up. It occurred to him that “have a good day” was probably a stupid way to end that conversation.
• • •
California Governor’s Office
Sacramento, California
Within three hours, the mayor of the City of Los Angeles was on a conference call with three power company commissioners and the California governor. The governor asked the obvious question: “Why don’t the trucks just drive the coal to the power plant?”
The Intermountain Power Plant in Delta was actually owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and seventy-five percent of the power produced poured directly into southern California via the HVDC Intermountain transmission line that carried twenty-four hundred megawatts at a blistering five hundred kilovolts from middle-of-nowhere Utah to the city of Adelanto, California.
How California had convinced Utah to host their dirty coal power plant was one of the seven wonders of American political chicanery. In any case, when the senior operations director in Delta, Utah called his boss, he placed the call to the 213 area code: Los Angeles, California.
Since the Intermountain Power Plant supplied an enormous amount of power directly to the three-and-a-half million homes of Los Angeles, Anaheim, Riverside, Pasadena, Glendale and Burbank, the call was taken seriously.
Nobody on the conference call had an answer to the go
vernor’s question, so he repeated himself. “Why don’t the trucks with the coal just drive to our power plant and drop it off?”
Sometimes the simplest answers can be the hardest to see, especially when hog-tied by bureaucracy and wrapped in decades of procedure. Sometimes the simplest answers can also lead straight down the road to hell.
2
[Collapse Plus One - Wednesday, Sept. 20th]
Santa Catalina Island, California
Near Avalon Bay
IT WAS THE FIRST TIME in four months they had heard the music on the radio interrupted by an announcement. Both Filipino men, now very sick, looked up from their fishing lines and stared blankly at one another, trying to interpret the rapid-fire English of the radio announcer.
The little English they had been taught covered the basic conversation of a tourist in America: “Where is the bathroom?” “Nice to meet you.” “My name is Mickey Mouse.” In the tiny Muslim islands of the Philippines, nobody harbored any hope of going to America as a tourist but the teachers still taught the perfunctory phrases of all language teachers everywhere.
As fighting-age men, both Njay and Miguel had also picked up English words related to jihad: military terms, praises to God, expressions of faith and the particulars of weapons and explosives.
When the radio announcer mentioned that a nuclear dirty bomb had been detonated in Saudi Arabia, both men knew enough English to grab their attention. But the radio station returned to its top-forty music before either could make sense of the news. Njay scrambled up, his stomach reeling, and pattered over to the radio. He turned the dial until he found a proper news channel. The two men listened intently for the next forty-five minutes.
They eventually came to agreement about what had happened: a nuclear attack had struck Saudi Arabia—the heart of Islam. Neither man understood the differences between the sects of Islam and both men reached the logical but erroneous conclusion that America had struck the Holy Land of Islam with a nuclear missile.
In their nauseated haze, Njay and Miguel decided the attack was the sign from Allah they had been waiting for, though neither was eager to believe it. They talked and talked, stalling. In the end, they did not want to die, even as sick as they felt. A direct attack against the people of Allah in Saudi Arabia enraged the men but their desire to live dragged on their resolve.
Njay remembered the faces of his mother and siblings. Now stooped and aging, Njay’s mother had beamed with pride as he left on this mission for the imam, certain she would see her son again in paradise.
Njay could not go home without completing the mission. He could not face his mother as a failure. He no longer had a home because there was nowhere he could return without dishonor. He didn’t want to die, but to fail the mission and wander the earth without a home and without a mother would be worse than death.
Like sleepwalkers, Njay and Miguel wordlessly prepared the boat to sail for California. It felt somehow important that the boat be made immaculate to do God’s work, even though they knew it would be vaporized. Almost like a ritual, they packed away their fishing tackle, cleaned the fish offal from the deck and mopped the fiberglass gangways of the sailboat. By the time the boat was ready, the sun had set on the horizon.
They agreed to approach the coast in daylight the next morning. They took turns defecating over the rail, then trundled below deck for a final sleep.
• • •
Within two hours of the brown-out in Orange County, four of the most powerful men in California joined a second conference call: the governor, the mayor of Los Angeles, the adjutant general of the California National Guard, and Robbie Fulton.
Robbie marshalled the influence of over three-hundred-fifty-thousand union workers in the State of California. If there was something big that needed to be done, politicians saw him as the go-to guy. It had been natural for the governor to dial him in on the conference call, even though Robbie wasn’t an elected official.
“How the HELL is ONE power plant in Utah kicking our asses?” the governor nearly screamed into the phone.
The rant was directed at the L.A. mayor, since he controlled the L.A. Department of Water and Power, the agency that controlled the power plant in question.
“Mr. Governor, it is my understanding that we consume, at peak times, about seven thousand megawatts in our service area. Over the years, Intermountain has provided an ever-increasing percentage of that demand. Today it provides almost a third of our power during peak periods.”
The governor waded right in with the question on everyone’s mind. “And why are one-third of our goddamn eggs in one basket?”
“Sir, respectfully, your push for air quality and a lower carbon footprint in this state has had a variety of unintended consequences. One of those consequences is that we’ve had to drastically reduce our reliance on California-based coal and natural gas power generation. We’ve mothballed turbines in California, which has left us more dependent on Utah.”
“You’re telling me that our ‘Leaps Toward Low Carbon’ have been us pushing the carbon six hundred miles east? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Essentially, sir, yes,” the mayor admitted. “You wanted immediate action, so the folks in California EPA have been pressuring us to stop using power plants inside the state.”
Watching one politician pass the buck back to another politician was such a regular part of Robbie’s life that he hardly noticed. It was like people using their turn signals. After a while, it didn’t even rise to the level of consciousness.
Robbie had to wonder how he had gone from being a master ironworker, perched on a steel I-beam three hundred feet above L.A., to listening to politicians grovel and peacock with one another. They called his career a meteoric rise in Capitol Weekly Magazine. Robbie called it drowning in bullshit.
“What happened to my plan where the trucks would drive the coal down to the power plant?” the governor followed up with his idea from the day before. He had been proud of that no-nonsense idea, so nobody on the call wanted to be the bearer of bad news.
After a long pause, the mayor replied like a man on his way to the executioner, “The mine owners wouldn’t do it. They say it would take them three weeks to get those trucks re-tasked and re-routed.”
“You’ve gotta be bullshitting me!” The governor was picking up steam on the Angry Train. Robbie kind of liked having another former actor as California governor. At least the political doublespeak and spin-doctoring was colorful.
The governor popped into solution mode again. “Okay, boys, here’s what we’re going to do: let’s send a detachment of National Guard with a couple of hundred of our own trucks and let’s move that coal ourselves.”
Goddamn, Robbie thought, this dude’s not just an actor; he’s a real son-of-a-bitching cowboy.
The L.A. mayor and adjutant general of the California National Guard both spoke at the same time. The mayor was happy to concede the line to the general.
“Governor, sir, are you suggesting we send troops into a neighboring state?”
“Don’t make it sound like we’re invading Utah. Let’s just send a small detachment to make sure nothing stops us from getting that power plant back online. If these power outages hit Los Angeles, we’ll see riots. Am I correct, Mr. Mayor?”
Someone, presumably the mayor, grunted agreement.
“I need someone in Utah who can follow goddamned orders. Can you provide that, General?”
“Of course, Governor, I can provide troops. But I need you to be absolutely clear with your orders: how many troops, how should they be armed, and what are their Rules of Engagement?”
“Can’t we just DO something without a bureaucratic circle-jerk?” The governor was feigning exasperation. Everyone knew he was squirming because the blame, if anything went wrong, would land squarely in his lap.
“Of course, sir. Please issue orders and we will follow them to a ‘T.’” The general was probably remembering the Los Angeles riots, twenty-five years
back, and the Watts riots thirty years before that. California National Guard troops had been called in to keep the peace, but confusion regarding the Rules of Engagement had cost several Army officers their careers.
“Jesus, it won’t take much. Just send thirty soldiers plus several hundred coal trucks. Your men don’t even need to bring guns.”
“I understand, sir,” the general pressed. “I apologize, but I don’t believe the Guard possesses that many trucks equipped to move coal, nor do we have the truck drivers.”
Robbie spoke up for the first time on the call. “I can get the trucks and drivers. Where and when should they meet up with your men, General?”
“Oh-seven-hundred tomorrow morning in Barstow.”
“Done,” Robbie agreed.
“Now THAT’S what I’m talking about, gentlemen,” the Cowboy Governor gushed. “THAT’S how shit gets done!”
3
[Collapse Plus Two - Thursday, Sept. 21st]
Shortwave Radio 7150kHz 1:00am CST
“THIS IS JT TAYLOR. PIRATE of Info Porn, Alcoholic of the Apocalypse… Drinkin’ Bro Extraordinaire… broadcasting from a stolen vehicle courtesy of the United States Army, Fort Bliss. Thank you, boys, for the sweet-ass ride and the huge pile of MREs.
“Yes, folks, I’m rolling in a vintage SINCGARS Humvee with a rock-hard 8 meter antenna, on a personal JIHAD against the US Guv and their bullshit propaganda. I’m collecting pirate news from Drinkin’ Bro servicemen and babes all over the globe, receiving on the 49 meter band, 6000kHz right on the nose. If you’re a Bro or Bro-ette, and you’re in the shit, give me a jingle on the radio tonight and we’ll tell the world what’s REALLY going on.