by Paul Briggs
Shortly after six p.m.—eight a.m. in Korea, where they must have had the longest night in their history—Pratt got word from the field. “It seems to be a committee of NK generals,” said Swanston. “No word if any one of them is in overall command, but it doesn’t matter—the important thing is, they’re offering unconditional surrender.”
“Excellent.”
“I’ve just got word from Seoul,” said Jim. “The Republic of Korea will be securing all government and military assets within the… ‘former DPRK.’” Pratt mentally added the words starting with the nuclear stuff. “They’re asking American forces to remain on the alert in case of rogue units that don’t want to cooperate with the surrender.”
Pratt nodded. Ever since he’d realized—no, decided—that the DPRK wasn’t going to make it through the next twenty-four hours, a part of his mind had been quietly considering possible endgames. Now he had one he liked.
“Tell our forces not to come within…” He glanced at a map. “Ten miles of the border. We don’t want any incidents.”
* * *
Seeing that there were cameras outside, Pratt waited until his hands had stopped shaking before he stepped out through the front door. He left Alaska Regional Hospital with a hundred nightmarish images burned into his brain like pajama patterns onto skin.
When he was too young, he’d seen a movie called The Day After. It made dying in a nuclear attack look downright merciful—FLASH, bones, nothing. No time to feel pain.
That would probably have been the case for anyone who had been inside the fireball itself. But the people who died in Anchorage died horribly—burned over half their skin, crushed by falling houses, trapped in piles of debris, and roasted alive in the advancing flames. Those had been the lucky ones. The unlucky ones died later, or were still in the process of dying right now, of radiation poisoning.
He couldn’t decide if it was a mercy or a torment that everyone seemed grateful to him. Nobody blamed him for what had happened. Everybody agreed that it was the fault of that crazy bastard in Pyongyang and Pratt had dealt with him pretty good. Three different people who wouldn’t live two more days had promised to vote for him in two years.
Judging by his approval ratings, most of the rest of the country agreed. What is wrong with people? he thought. Give them peace and prosperity and they find things to complain about. Lead them into a war and they feel they owe it to their country to support you.
Not that I ever gave them prosperity…
Heather Sanchez, his science adviser, was waiting outside with Governor Hugh Keegan. A dozen cameras watched as Pratt joined them. Ignoring them, Pratt turned to her. “Any new word on the fallout situation?”
“That’s the one mercy,” she said. “There isn’t much fallout. It was an airburst over the ocean, so the fallout is mostly from the weapon itself, plus some sea salt that got vaporized and sucked up into the fireball. The good news is, the worst elements have the shortest half-lives. Iodine-131 has a half-life of eight days. That means it’s”—Sanchez did some quick work on her phone’s calculator app—“29.3 percent gone already.”
“You mean twenty-five percent, surely,” said Keegan. Pratt had had the same immediate reaction, but he wasn’t inclined to correct his science advisor’s math.
“No, that would be a linear progression, and I wish it was what we were dealing with—then all the iodine would be gone in sixteen days. As it is, in a month it’ll be about ninety-three percent gone, and in three months you’ll never know it ever existed. The bad news is that a lot of the concrete in the eastern half of town is going to have to be replaced. The rain soaked into it, went through it and left most of the fallout behind.” Considering that everything in the western half of town would have to be replaced, including just over fifteen thousand people, this didn’t sound so bad.
And even thinking about what had happened here felt like self-indulgence. Seoul had suffered three times as many casualties from plain old non-nuclear artillery fire. And no one would ever know exactly how many people had been killed—no, how many he had killed—at Pyongyang, but it was more than had died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined… and close to fifty times as many as the death toll from Anchorage.
On the way to Anchorage, he’d gotten a report from the handful of brave souls in radiation suits who’d ventured into the ruins of the Pyongyang bunkers. The government that had troubled the world so long was gone. Even where the bunkers hadn’t collapsed entirely, their walls had cracked open, letting in streams of skin-destroying superheated steam and ten-thousand-degree rock vapor that ignited everything flammable. Where the steam and vapor hadn’t gotten in, the flames had sucked out the oxygen, replacing it with carbon monoxide and other poisons. All the powerful men and their families who had taken shelter down there were dead before the radiation even had a chance to take effect. That said, it would be best if nobody else disturbed their tomb for at least four thousand years.
“Mr. President?” said Keegan as they got into the back of the limo. “While I’ve got your ear, could I talk to you about something else?”
“All right,” said Pratt, already dreading this a little.
“Somebody needs to have a talk with Japan about the tuna fishery.”
Pratt gritted his teeth. People swore up and down that they didn’t want Washington to have too much power, that they would never dream of giving the federal government any more control over their lives than absolutely necessary… and then something went wrong. There was some sort of issue with eminent domain in New York that people were asking the Justice Department to intervene in. Sen. Ramos of Florida was asking for more help from FEMA in dealing with the aftermath of the off-season storms and tidal flooding—as if FEMA didn’t have enough to do. The California delegation was divided over whether to ask for money to rebuild the Los Angeles Aqueduct or to build more desalination plants. And now this.
“It’s the damn oke-maki fleets,” Keegan said. “They’re always out there, like a bunch of damn shepherds. They act like they own the tuna, and Tokyo backs them up. Some of our fishermen have been shot at for trying to do their jobs. Those are international waters. We have as much right to those fish as anybody.”
Pratt checked his tablet. “According to Fish and Wildlife, only about a third of the wild tuna in the Pacific is currently under supervision by the oke-maki industry.”
“With all due respect, Fish and Wildlife is running off old data. Real tuna’s getting hard to find out there—all these damn shifts in ocean temperature are screwing up the food chain, and tuna’s a high-end predator. We have to charge more for the real fish, and they can undercut us. Think about what De L’Air did to the diamond industry. We could be next.”
“Surely there’s still a market for genuine tuna.” Pratt couldn’t imagine eating oke-maki unless he was desperately hungry.
“Rich foodies,” said Keegan. “They gotta have real fish, and it’s gotta be wild-caught. They’ll pay any price. But there’s not enough of these people to support the whole industry. Fish oil, cat food… there’s a dozen markets we’re gonna be priced out of if somebody doesn’t do something.”
“What I hear you saying,” said Pratt, “is that there are not as many tuna as there used to be, and there are not as many people who want to eat tuna as there used to be, but you would very much like there to be as many tuna fishermen as there used to be. Is that about right?”
Keegan, who was apparently smarter than he sounded, didn’t reply.
“And do you seriously think that at a time like this I have nothing better to do than prop up one of your state’s industries?”
“We help feed people,” said Keegan. “Now more than ever, you need that.”
Pratt shook his head. “Now more than ever, Governor, if there’s someone else out there who can feed more people for less, then I’m not going to stand in their way.”
* * *
The electric limo was completely self-driving. Without even a chauffeur to talk to, S
ecretary of State Ahn had nothing to do on the road from Busan to Gyeongju but go over his notes for the summit, or just look out the window. He’d memorized his notes on the flight, so he looked out the window.
Ahn had lived in the United States since before his fifth birthday—only his very earliest memories were of South Korea. This place, as beautiful as it was, didn’t look like anywhere in America. Even under a foot of snow—snow that was already starting to melt—you could see the differences.
Perfect little homes with roofs of faded blue tile. Ahn had been born in a house like that.
Steep, forested hills rising like islands out of a sea of farmland, their tops hidden in gray clouds during the morning hours. The fields were even more of a wonder than the hills—South Korea was less than 30 percent arable land, but they made the most of it, growing crops on every flat stretch of ground bigger than a doormat. Even highway median strips would have vegetables planted in them come spring. Another few years like the last one and we’ll probably be doing the same thing, thought Ahn.
And to make sure the farmers stayed in business, the government placed tariffs on food imports, although those had been relaxed during the current shortage. As much as libertarian-minded people like Pratt and Walther hated this sort of thing, it made sense under the circumstances. During a longer war than this one had turned out to be, ships from the outside world might not be able to get through, and the country would have to be ready to fall back on its own resources that very year.
Ahn shook his head. When he thought of home, he thought of the Newark neighborhood where he’d grown up. Only his family called him “Jae-oh” any more—to everyone else, he was Jim. South Korea was another country.
No. Not South Korea anymore. Korea. Ahn supposed it shouldn’t have been too surprising how quickly the North had caved. Dictatorships were like that—while they were in power, they seemed to have no trouble stage-managing themselves. Everyone who lived under them had an incentive to parrot the party line and hide all signs of dissent. Reporters showed up, were wined and dined, given the grand tour, and came home babbling about how everybody over there was just aching to do or die for the Dear Leader. And then, when the government collapsed, the truth came out. That was why these talks would feature representatives from Seoul, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, but not Pyongyang.
* * *
Gyeongju—which was Kyongju according to the romanization system Ahn had gotten used to, but he didn’t feel like arguing with Seoul about it—had once been the capital of the Silla dynasty, which lasted for about nine hundred years in the first millennium A.D. and at its height governed most of the peninsula. These days the main industry was tourism, and late winter was the off-season. There were crowds here, but they were people who’d lost their homes to the flooding last fall or the shelling of Seoul. So it was as good a place as any to hold an emergency summit, especially if you were trying to emphasize Korea’s identity as a nation and culture in its own right and not anybody’s vassal state or puppet government.
Right now, Ahn and the rest of the U.S. delegation were in the Daereungwon complex on the southern edge of the city. At first glance, it looked like a park with a lot of small, smooth-sided hills covered in melting snow and dead grass. Then you noticed that the hills had doorways in them, and you realized these weren’t hills at all. They were tumuli—the burial mounds of the Silla dynasty. Like the pyramids of Egypt, they seemed almost too big to be man-made.
Ahn looked toward the east, the ridge where Unification Hall stood—the place where he would be meeting today with the foreign ministers of Korea, China, and Russia. Officially, the name of that place referred to the unification of a number of small feudal states by the early Silla kings, whose achievements were celebrated in murals within the hall. This fooled no one. Especially not now, when unification was becoming a reality.
I have to make this happen just right, thought Ahn. The whole world is watching. Not just Russia, China, and Japan. India, Pakistan, the Basra Pact… even the Second Union. They’re all watching in fear. Fear of us.
The United States had defeated the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in less than twenty-four hours. That wasn’t the scary part.
The United States had partly thwarted a nuclear attack. That wasn’t the scary part—or rather, it was only scary to Americans. If it hadn’t been for the GMD, casualties would have been ten times higher. If it hadn’t been for the Nightgaunts, they would have been a hundred times higher.
The scary part was that the United States had suffered a terrible blow and had kept fighting. The whole world thought of America as having a glass jaw—great power to inflict havoc and ruin, balanced by an absolute inability to withstand any pain that could be noticed. The Special Forces would be deployed against some terror group in some odd corner of the world, ten terrorists and one American would be killed in the battle, and the media would howl that the death of that one American soldier was a terrible tragedy that should never have happened. That impression of weakness, embarrassing as it was, was the only thing that allowed the U.S. to be anything less than terrifying.
Now, after Anchorage, that impression was gone. It was as if Dracula had stepped out into the sunshine and said “Gosh, what a nice day.” No one knew quite what to do next.
Which made this summit crucial. The Russian government wanted to expand its influence, the Chinese government wanted the same, but both were now contemplating the threat of a U.S.-allied Republic of Korea on their borders whose GDP had been slightly higher than Russia’s even while it was just South Korea.
The worst-case scenario was that Russia, China, and who knew how many other nations would start allying against the United States for no other reason than to prevent Henry Pratt from dominating the world. Yevgeni Nardin, the new Russian foreign minister, would certainly do everything he could to make that happen.
It wasn’t going to happen if Ahn had anything to say about it.
In late February, half the blanket of heavy snow covering so much of the northern United States melted with warm winds coming from the south. Then a polar vortex caused it all to refreeze for three bitter days. Then it resumed melting and vanished in the first week of March. The entire process took eleven days, and caused fresh flooding in many of the places that had been hardest hit by the Northern Monsoon.
Those whose houses had been on higher ground, allowing them to remain in the affected area through the Monsoon, had experienced only intermittent contact with the outside world that winter. Many of them had been forced to raid the flooded houses for supplies to survive.
Meanwhile, all through the American South that January and February, winter had only been a word. Warm, damp air flowed northeast from the Gulf over the warm, damp land from the lower Mississippi to the coast of the Carolinas. Rain was frequent, but gentle and moderate.
In late March, a powerful upper-level trough emerged in the skies just east of the Rockies and began to move east. Its progress was slow, but carried with it the promise of violent thunderstorms when it hit the warmer air. Behind and just below it, a mid-level jet stream was coming. It was like the weather conditions that had prevailed in April of 2011, just before the largest outbreak of tornadoes in recorded history.
The result was similar.
* * *
“So how bad is it?”
“Not good, Mr. President,” said al-Harrak. “One of the tornadoes hit Oklahoma Bravo late last night. It plowed right through the northern half of the camp.”
“Casualties?”
“We don’t have an exact count, but… somewhere between six and seven hundred dead.”
“From a tornado? How is that possible?”
“Two reasons. First, normally—at least in the United States—any concentration of people that large would have enough big buildings in it to break up tornado winds, so such a thing would never be in danger of happening. But our camps are just trailers and cabins and portable schoolrooms. Nothing to stop them, and nothing
that could possibly withstand them.
“Second… I’ve done what I can with what was available, but the truth is that hospital facilities in the camps are just barely adequate to the needs of the population under normal circumstances. In the face of this kind of disaster, there was no way to help the injured quickly enough.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Al-Harrak nodded sorrowfully. “The news doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid,” he said. “Kentucky Alfa was hit by a derecho. There were fewer than a hundred casualties, but a lot more of the homes were damaged. Beyond use, often.”
“Any chance of expediting their return home?”
“I’ve been trying to get everyone home. Anyone who’s still in a camp is someone whose home didn’t survive the flood and the winter intact, I’m afraid. Or they were homeless to begin with.”
“Is it true that cities have started busing their homeless population into your camps and leaving them there?”
“I’m afraid so. After the ice storms, Chris Lopez admitted it openly—he said we were better able to care for them than New York City was.”
“And now we’re going to have an influx of people from all over the South whose homes were destroyed by tornadoes.”
“Things might not be that bad,” said al-Harrak. “They at least still have some insurance. Of course, if anything like this happens next year—”
Pratt raised a hand for silence. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”