“Gentlemen,” she said to Ben and Billy, “I assure you I understand the importance of these exercises. You’re going to have to trust me when I tell you that in a time of crisis I will treat things more seriously. The next time we run one of these simulations I will have a better attitude, especially if the exercise is more pertinent, but today is not a time of crisis.” She rose from her chair, and everyone in the room who was sitting snapped to their feet.
He’d made the transition from lover to friend and then back to lover without difficulty, and he’d handled moving from the campaign trail to the White House with equanimity, but getting used to the ceremony that attended having one of his oldest friends go from “Steph, down the hall in my dorm,” to Stephanie Pilgrim, the first female president, had been hard. He’d never been one to stand on formality, but more often than not, since the election, he found himself having to actually stand as part of the formality.
“Madam President?” It was one of the uniformed officers at the bank of computers and monitors on the side of the room. There was a large set of monitors and screens on one wall so that the president and the other advisors could track details, but this officer was looking at something else. His voice was loud enough to cut through the room and bring the president to a stop. Normally an officer of his rank wouldn’t address the president directly unless asked a specific question.
“Madam President,” the man said again, and this time he pulled the headphones off his ears. “The Chinese.”
Steph let out a sigh and Manny stepped forward. “I think we’re done for the day,” he said. “Call off the simulation.”
“No,” the officer said, and there was something urgent and harsh in his voice that stilled the small movement that had started up in the room, something that kept the president’s attention, that left Manny waiting for more. “This isn’t part of the exercise,” he said. “They, uh, it’s going to be on the screen in a few seconds. Ma’am?”
“Well, spit it out.” Stephanie had stopped, but she looked bored. Most of the other men and women in the room had already started packing up again, and Manny realized nobody else seemed to see the look of fear on the officer’s face. He also realized that Alex was still sitting, a look of alarm on her face as a uniform whispered urgently in her ear.
Manny glanced up at the big bank of television screens and computer monitors that lined the wall. Most of the information was related to the simulation, but on the end, there were two large screens showing close to real-time satellite images of China, the information coming in with only a thirty- or forty-second delay. The country was split almost in half on the screens, with one showing the more densely populated portions of eastern China, Beijing a web of roads, the other screen displaying the western half of the country, a line indicating the upper borders, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
And suddenly there was a glow of light. A burning dot on the upper-left-hand side of the western screen.
“Holy Jesus,” somebody said, and then a moment later Manny realized he was the one who said it.
“What the fuck was that?” The president was looking at the screen as well.
Everybody in the room was now staring at the map of China, looking at the bloom and fade of light near the northwest corner of the country. That is, everybody but the national security advisor. She was staring at the uniform who had been whispering in her ear. “Was that it?” Alex asked. She turned to look at the officer by the console. “Was it a missile? Whose was it? Are there any others in the air? Was it just the one?”
The officer, who had one of the earpieces on his headphones pressed back against his head, held his hand up to Alex, looked at the screen, and then nodded. “That’s it,” he said. “It wasn’t a missile.”
Manny realized he’d been drifting between watching Alex and the officer and looking at the burst of light fading back to darkness. “If it wasn’t a missile, what the fuck was it?”
The room had gone weirdly quiet, a sudden vacuum of sound in the wake of Manny’s question, and he knew he wasn’t the only person who jumped when the phone behind them rang. It was not just a phone that rang. It was the phone. He remembered as a kid when they showed the president picking up the hotline to the Russians in movies, how it was usually a red phone, sinister and there as the last resort before nuclear winter, but it wasn’t until he’d actually spent some time in the White House that he realized the phone was real. And the phone was ringing. There was no question that the person on the other end was going to be the Chinese general secretary, and it took only two rings before Steph stepped over to it, her hand on the receiver.
“Can somebody,” she said, barking out the words to the room as she prepared to pick up the phone, “tell me just what the fuck that was on the screen?”
“That,” said Manny, looking at the screen again, where the flare of light had already started to dissipate, “was a nuke.”
Xinjiang Province, China
For a moment he thought he was going to throw up, but he didn’t slow down. The truck had barely made it through the barricades, and even then he’d had to drive over two soldiers. The thought of the thump and the screams was enough to make him gag again, but no matter what happened, he wasn’t going to stop driving. He’d wanted to get to his sister and her family.
He’d been too late for that.
No, he wasn’t going to stop for soldiers and he wasn’t going to stop to vomit. He wasn’t going to stop until he ran out of gas, until he’d put as many kilometers between the area and himself as possible. The officials claimed the situation was under control, but the area in which they claimed it was contained seemed to grow every day. That, plus the original broadcasts, which featured local newscasters and party officials he recognized, had been replaced by people he didn’t know, people from outside the province. There had been rumors at the factory, rumors at the market. He knew of at least two men who had been working in the mines who had not yet been allowed home. Worse than any of that, and what had finally prompted him to steal a set of keys for the truck and stow a water bottle and a little food in the pockets of his jacket—the most he could manage without calling attention to himself—was that three days ago all communications with the outside world had been cut off. No landlines, no cell phones, no Internet. Nothing in or out. Just the official television and radio broadcasts.
It had been only five days since the first incident at the mine. He had assumed it was just another accident, but it didn’t take long for the whispers to start spreading. A virus. The army experimenting with chemical or biological weapons. The old woman who brought him his soup at the restaurant around the corner from his apartment insisted that it was ghosts, that the miners had disturbed some sort of supernatural force. The sister of one of his friends, a girl who spent most of her free time reading pirated copies of American novels for teenagers, claimed it was either vampires or zombies, and that was why the army arrived so quickly.
At first, he didn’t think too much of any of it. People died in the mines. That’s the way it was. At least he didn’t have to work there. While he didn’t love his job in the factory, at nineteen he made more money in a month than his parents were willing to believe. They kept insisting he was exaggerating when he told them his salary. He had a small apartment to himself. He had his own television, a cell phone, a computer, and he even had the occasional night alone with that sister of his friend. His own sister and her two children were only a short walk away from his apartment, and she had him over for dinner a few nights each week. So if he did not see his parents as often as he would have liked, the five-hour bus trip something of a hardship, it was hard to complain.
Five nights ago, when most people thought it was just an accident, he’d had dinner with his sister, and while he bounced his nephew on his knee, his sister’s blowhard husband went on and on about safety lapses at the mine, about how this sort of thing was bound to happen with all the steps they skipped. Four nights ago, he’d been aware that there was talk, but it
was one of those nights when his girlfriend—or whatever she was to him—had come over, and the two of them didn’t do much talking.
But it was three nights ago that he really took notice. He’d cooked himself dinner and then tried to go online. His computer was having none of it. He wasn’t concerned, because even though the village had a relatively fast Internet connection, it was sporadic. Then he pulled out his cell phone to call his parents and realized he didn’t have a signal. And on the television, every channel was blank except for the official local channel, which was on a one-hour loop. He sighed, read for a while, and then went to sleep.
It wasn’t until the next morning, on his way to the factory, that he noticed just how many soldiers had come to the area. Then he saw the coils of wire going up and realized that the boys in uniform, boys his own age, were clutching their rifles a little too tightly. He normally kept to himself at work, but during his lunch break he sat with a group of older men. He was shocked when he heard that the mine had been sealed off, that none of the men who’d been working when the incident occurred had been allowed to go home. Then, later, near the end of his shift, the foreman came on over the loudspeakers and announced that they were expected to continue on, that nothing was wrong, and they should keep coming in for their shifts.
His cell phone still wasn’t working, and nobody else could get a signal either, but he was smart enough to know that when soldiers started flooding in and razor wire started going up, when the people in charge tried to reassure him that nothing was out of the ordinary even though, clearly, things were out of the ordinary, it was time to worry.
That was when he stole a key to one of the trucks. That was when he filled a bottle of water and tucked an apple and some crackers into the pockets of his jacket. He thought about packing a bag, but on the way to work, only yesterday, he saw a man beaten to death by the soldiers. The man was in a car with his family, the trunk tied down to keep the bags from spilling out, and he’d stopped at the new gate that had been installed after the army fenced off the village. The gate was the only way out now. He’d heard the man and the soldiers exchange sharp words, and then, as he tried to glance over without being terribly obvious about it, he saw the man pulled from the car and beaten down with rifle butts. Even from a distance, it was clear the soldiers kept driving the metal into the man well past the point it was necessary.
All of which was why he’d driven the truck right through the gate without slowing down. He just plowed through the metal. All during that night there had been the intermittent sound of gunfire. At one point there was something from the direction of the mine that must have been an explosion. He couldn’t sleep, and then, finally, just after four in the morning, he crept from his apartment and snuck through the night. The streets and alleys were empty and dark, and the factory was quiet. There was no fence around the parking lot where the trucks were sitting, and the key was in his hand before he even noticed something was wrong.
There was a single light on at the corner of the building, and though the yellow bulb was strong, it wasn’t enough to do more than cast shadows over the parking lot. He suddenly wished it were brighter but tried to bury the thought. He knew he was just spooked from the stories and rumors and from the influx of soldiers and the new fence, from the sound of shots and explosions in the night. He should really calm down, he thought, and then he laughed to himself. Why should he calm down? Those all seemed good reasons to be spooked. He took the last few steps to the truck and had his hand on the door handle when he heard the sound. It was a sort of scraping. No. Something quieter than scraping. Like the sound of a leaf being blown across pavement. Or several leaves. He looked around, but there was nobody there. And then he noticed there was something wrong with the light. No, not the light, but the shadows. Over there, maybe twenty paces away, one of the shadows seemed to be moving a little, pulsing. He watched it, fascinated, and it wasn’t until a thread of black seemed to fall out of the shadow and unspool toward him that he broke from his reverie.
He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t care. Even though he’d dithered on it, he realized he’d already made his decision the moment he stole the key to the truck, and he didn’t see any value in waiting to find out what exactly it was he’d decided to run away from. He pulled himself into the cab, and as he was jumping in, he felt something brush across the back of his neck and then his neck felt all icy. He swatted at it, and something small and solid banged off his hand. Then he was inside the truck, key in the ignition, foot on the gas, leaving whatever the shadow was behind him.
He drove carefully through the village, toward his sister’s apartment. He hadn’t told her about the plan. He knew she would have told her husband, and her husband wasn’t the sort of man who could be trusted with a secret. But he also knew that if he just showed up at the apartment with the truck, his sister would be able to persuade her husband to make a break for it. He didn’t like his brother-in-law very much, but the man was not completely stupid.
But as he turned onto his sister’s street, it was clear that things were more wrong than even he had thought. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed the glow from the portable lights, but once around the corner, the brilliance of the lights showed the street in stark relief. There were five or six army trucks already parked and dozens of soldiers running with rifles. He saw somebody down on the ground, but the artificial color of the lights meant that it took him a few seconds before he realized the black pool around the body was blood. And up ahead, was that a tank? Oh my god, he thought. It was a tank.
Without even thinking about it, he turned the wheel and took the truck through the alley, turned the wheel again until he was headed out of town, mashed his foot against the accelerator and smashed his way through the gate. He was lucky that the soldiers had expected him to stop. They fired at him—the back window was shattered—but the truck seemed to be running fine and he hadn’t been hit. He was fine.
That had been an hour or two ago. He’d lost track of time. But if anything, now that he’d put some distance between himself and the village, he was more than fine. He was great. The back of his neck was bothering him where something had hit him in the parking lot, but he couldn’t see what it was in the mirror. He could feel a small bump with his fingers, maybe a cut, but it was more numb than sore. The real problem was his stomach. He could feel it roiling. He supposed it could be the flu, but more than likely it was just anxiety. Who the hell knew what he’d just escaped from, but he was pretty sure he was never going to see his sister again, never hold his nephew or his niece. He had to choke down a sob, and then he had to choke down another round of gagging.
He wasn’t fine.
But he was alive.
He dug the bottle of water out of his jacket pocket, fumbled with the cap, and took a swig. It felt good and seemed to settle his stomach for a minute, but then it happened again, another surge of nausea.
Maybe he would pull over, just for a couple of minutes. Give himself a chance to be sick by the side of the road. Then he’d feel better.
Suddenly, there was a brilliant light behind him. Like a camera flash. He glanced in the rearview mirror, but the light hurt his eyes. He looked forward again and realized he couldn’t see much more than the echo of the light. He slowed the truck down and then stopped it so he could rub his eyes. The light outside was already fading, and whatever it had been hadn’t damaged his vision. There were ghosts of the landscape imprinted on his eyes, but they were already swimming away. And there, again, the surge of nausea. This time he didn’t think he could keep it down, and he scrambled out of the truck.
As his feet hit the ground he turned to look back toward the village, toward where the flash of light had come from. But it wasn’t a flash of light anymore. It was a lick of fire lighting the heavens.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center,
Twentynine Palms, California
Lance Corporal Kim Bock checked her rifle. Again. She knew there wasn’t any p
oint, but this was the first time she was leading her unit in a live-fire exercise, and checking her M16 calmed her down. She’d trained with the M16A2 in basic, but she’d been issued the M16A4 once she made it out to California. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two rifles as far as she was concerned, at least not when she was out on the range. She did like that she could remove the carrying handle when they were in the middle of exercises.
She was crouching and trying to relax. The sun was a motherfucker, but it was okay in the shade. She’d played catcher on her high school softball team, and she could stay in a crouch for a long time without getting uncomfortable, but the three men in her unit were sitting down on the concrete slab. Private First Class Elroy Trotter had his eyes closed, and for all Kim knew, Elroy might actually be sleeping. He never seemed to get excited one way or the other. The joke was that even while having sex Elroy probably looked bored. The person who first made that joke, Private Duran Edwards, was a black kid from Brooklyn who was a lot smarter than any of the other officers seemed to recognize, and Kim was glad Duran was in her unit. At first she’d had a bit of a thing for the third man, Private Hamitt “Mitts” Frank, but having him in her unit was like pouring water on a fire. Only smoke remained. She could see how the two of them might have ended up a couple in civilian life, but as part of a unit, it was different. They were a team. She was lucky. The whole crew was cool; none of them seemed to think it was a big deal that a woman was the fire team leader. She knew that early on, when the armed forces first started slotting women into combat units, there’d been some blowback. There’d been a couple of high-profile incidents in the army, but even in the Marines it hadn’t been all sweetness. Kim had still been in middle school when women were given equal status, though it was recent enough that some of the older generation still clearly hadn’t adjusted to Marines with tits in the line of fire. Elroy, Duran, and Mitts were her age, though, and they’d gone through boot camp with her. Maybe they secretly didn’t love the idea of taking combat orders from a woman in general, but since it was her, they were okay with it. They were familiar with Kim, and that made all the difference. Familiar with the fact that she was physically fit, able to compete with most of the men, familiar with the fact that she was smart and good at making quick decisions. They’d probably have accepted a different woman as their lance corporal, but it really did matter that they knew her. They trusted her to keep them safe.
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