First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  What else? If there was going to be a firestorm, we’d have felt it already. A flash burn from the ultraviolet? Possible but, like the radiation, nothing to be done about it.

  Then there was the overpressure, shock waves in the air and maybe the ground, too. How big they might be was also defined by megatonnage and inverse squares. They were coming at the speed of sound, 750 or so miles an hour. That made them due here in about seventy seconds, and I’d already wasted, say, half a minute screwing around and watching the fireworks. Forty seconds left to do something.

  All around me, the Old Line people were staggering in circles or standing still, mostly blinded and unable to help themselves. I grabbed the elbows of two wandering off toward the parking lot and into the direction of the blast. They promptly sat down on the curbing around the garbage maw. We had to get under cover. I looked up at the corrugated siding of the plant and debated taking everyone inside. When the shock came, it might punch all that metal right through the steel frame and wrap it around the machinery inside. I had seen the moving pictures from White Sands and Yucca Flats—frame houses exploding into kindling wood while the ground rolled under them.

  Thirty seconds now.

  About fifteen men were working in the plant, I knew. Some of them were coming out the side doors. “Get back,” I shouted to them. “Go through to the east side and get down!” The foreman, identifiable by his red hardhat, took one look toward that still-hanging fireball, waved at me, and shoved his crew back inside.

  It would take too long to gather up the blinded managers out here and herd them around the building. I tried. I pulled them to their feet, pushed them in the right direction, explained that a big wall of sound was coming this way. They just whimpered, said their eyes hurt, wanted to sit down and worry about the radiation, began walking off again in different directions. They were all going to die, flying away on the wind like dead leaves, unless I found some close place of shelter.

  Behind the wall that had sheltered me? The ground wave would bounce us up and the air wave serve us against the building like tennis balls. Of course, we could hide down in the concrete garbage maw. I looked into it. Walls sloping at forty degrees and slimy with pieces of garbage. This was going to ruin a few three-piece suits.

  Fifteen seconds.

  I started pushing them into it and they resisted. They could smell the rot down there, probably remembered the sharp edges of the screw conveyor, too. All I could do was agree with everything they said and just keep grabbing and pushing.

  Ten seconds.

  Doury fought me and I lifted him bodily over the curb, let him slide on his ass in the slime. Maybe a second too late I told him to try braking with his heels, to bend his knees, to get his feet between the blades on the conveyor. One or two were more aware and began climbing in themselves.

  Five seconds.

  As I put my own leg over the curb, the air all around suddenly thinned out, as if God was taking a deep breath. The papers and cans on the sill opposite pulled free and flurried past me toward the storm. I jumped.

  Underpressure preceded overpressure by half a second. The wavefront came with a skull-knocking boom riding on the echoes of the loudest sounds you’ve ever heard: train wrecks, stamping plants, dentist’s drills, air horns, fire sirens. That wave of sound pounded six-inch-deep dimples in the metal siding over our heads. Dust, grit, paper, and leaves swirled down on us.

  I landed in a heap at the bottom of the maw. The curve of the screw blade cut a finger-wide gash in my shin. That was our only visible injury so far, but we would be seeing a lot more.

  If this was Armageddon, then Washington would catch three of four MIRVs just for luck. Baltimore, not fifteen miles east and north of us, would have its own bombs. The whole BosWash Corridor, in fact, would be getting slagged. Somewhere—perhaps sitting in a shelter far below that red cloud, or interrupted at a political rally in Minneapolis, or flying in Air Force One high over the Rockies—the President would be trying to contact his scattered or now-dead advisors. Somewhere in the Iowa corn, perhaps, flights of missiles might even now be launching on computer control. The incineration of the world was seconds away.

  Poking my head up over the concrete lip, I could only stare at the fading glow, the already wind-smeared cloud, and wait for the inevitable second, third, fourth … nth blasts. At the back of my mind, like a clown knocking on my coffin lid, was the thought that I was spending the most important—and final—minute in American history inside a garbage maw.

  What no one could know at that instant, neither I nor anyone else in the country, was that this one was the single bomb to go off that day. But only hours of waiting, watching, and praying, hours of tense quiet, would tell that. And in the meantime, the whereabouts of the President, Vice President, members of the Cabinet, and leaders in Congress had to be confirmed. And first, of course, somebody had to locate the officials, the senior staffers, undersecretaries, newsmen and anchors, who would do the confirming. Washington was buzzing like a beehive that had been smoked, pounded, and burned—and no one could find the queen.

  President Geddes was dead. He had been holding a meeting of his full Cabinet, including Vice President Stokes, in the White House not more than a mile from ground zero. But all the staff members who might know this detail of the President’s daily schedule were also in the White House and also dead. So it took a while for the nation to piece together who was alive and who not.

  A collateral but more strategically critical question for the nation to answer was: Who had launched, or placed and detonated, the bomb? We will never know. However, it is certain—almost certain—that no incoming missile had been detected by the Eastern Seaboard’s radar net.

  Like the rest of the Federal government, the Pentagon and the Department of Defense had been strangled by the Twenty-ninth Amendment. Their functions had been either eliminated or distributed piecemeal to any State or private enterprise that could fund or afford them. The nation’s standing army had stood down; its bases and materiel were auctioned to local National Guard units. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System had been subcontracted to the Air Traffic Control network, which itself operated on a State-by-State basis only loosely coordinated into regions. The Eastern Seaboard net insisted that they saw nothing, and if there was anything to see, it was on the other guy’s screens.

  The U.S. nuclear arsenal had actually been left intact after the Twenty-ninth Amendment. It was operated by the new International Strategy Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, paid for out of the Congress’s tiny General Fund. Rumor had it that fees paid by citizens under the Firearms Registration and Testing Act of 1999 actually went to keep the missiles in fuel and oxidizer. The fact that some bright-eyed lieutenant sitting in a silo under Missouri did not launch against the Russians or someone else handy is either a tribute to the intelligence of the 2,000-odd officers who remained in the U.S. Air Force, or the fault of inadequate funding. Certainly no one was left alive in Washington to either call for or call off a retaliatory strike.

  If the radar saw nothing, then the bomb may have come from a low-flying, Cruise-type penetrator. Or it might have been locked in the trunk of a car parked by terrorists, the infamous “Islamabomb.” The country waited days and weeks for someone to claim it, or take secondary action, or at least make good on the U.S.’s time of confusion. But nobody did.

  What was the megatonnage? My uneducated guess, based on the force of the shockwave by the time it reached me, was thirty-something. Experts later published a figure of fifty megatons. It was a dirty blast at ground level, they said, evidence of a terrorist’s implant instead of an incoming missile strike. The mushroom cloud sucked up a lot of dust and dumped hot fallout over the Atlantic and into the Gulf Stream. Fish died on the Grand Banks and in the Irish Sea for months afterward. The Europeans were understandably upset.

  To this day, analysts have picked over the world situation in the weeks and months preceding 4:09 p.m. EST, December 19, 2002, looking for s
ome clue, some precursor to the bombing. Nothing very convincing suggests itself.

  “Nonsense, my boy. We know exactly who did it,” my Uncle Aaron boomed when I tried to argue this lack of causes with him.

  I had run into Aaron Scoffield, my mother’s younger brother, walking down Charles Street in Baltimore at about eight o’clock on the evening of The Day. Finding him was a relief because he was a congressman from Oklahoma now serving as House minority whip. If anyone was going to be in Washington the day before the Christmas recess, twisting arms to get those last-minute votes, it would be Uncle Aaron. What was he doing in Baltimore? I could guess by the loose knot in his tie and the smudge of dusky powder on his collar tab that he had been enjoying a midafternoon quickie at an uptown hotel somewhere near the Washington Monument. Far uptown.

  “Well then, who?” I asked.

  We were still together after midnight, sitting by a hastily strung telephone in the Postal Express office on the first floor of the Federal Courthouse, off Fayette Street. Grim-faced young men and women walked past and every few minutes the phone buzzed with another congressman returning Scoffield’s calls to private numbers. So far he’d gotten eighteen Republicans and a dozen of his fellow Democrats. Out of 433.

  “The Russians, of course.”

  “But that’s crazy! What provocation did we give them?”

  “What do they need, boy? Just another turn in this Fifty Year’s War we’ve gotten ourselves into. We appear to be weak right now. That damn-foolish Tax Repeal amendment gives them ideas. Maybe they can win on a sneak attack. Provocation enough. It’s worth one bomb as a probe, isn’t it?”

  “Unless we retaliate. Anyway, their reconnaissance satellites can just about look down our silos and see we still have—”

  The phone cut me off. Aaron’s face went from weary contempt to soft apology two seconds after he put the handset to his ear. I could guess that, instead of reaching a living member of Congress, he’d called a widow or an orphan. He talked a few minutes in consoling tones, then put the phone down.

  “—we have missiles active,” I pushed on. “Same as we can see theirs.”

  “But do we have the will to use them? Are we still a nation, or a raggle-taggle of States who will debate foreign policy for six weeks before returning a shot? Oh, I tell you, the States’-Rights men are in hog heaven on the Hill. Any Russian worth his vodka would try just one bomb to see how that gaggle react.”

  “Yeah, but not Washington. You launch a probe against the periphery, something your opponent does not absolutely have to fight for. Like the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor.”

  “I thought we all agreed the Japs did something stupid there,” Aaron countered. “Provoking Roosevelt without finishing off the American will to resist.”

  “Well, yes, but they could hardly have delivered a knockout punch. …”

  “Right, they didn’t possess nuclear technology. Whosoever did this probably thinks they have knocked us out.”

  “But not the Russians, Uncle Aaron.”

  We would have gone around and ’round on this argument, except the phone was heating up and my leg was beginning to throb again. I had spent half the evening trying to find someone who would stitch up my wound. It seemed that every doctor, nurse, mobile unit, and medical tech within 300 miles had moved in toward the blast perimeter to help the survivors. I had gritted my teeth and swabbed the gash with rubbing alcohol, tied a handkerchief around my shin and, when that bled through, reinforced it with a napkin snaffled from the dinner tray they had brought over from the Lord Baltimore Hotel.

  The point I was trying to make with Uncle Aaron was that while States’ Rights may have risen triumphant from the ashes of the Twenty-ninth Amendment, the Federal government was hardly weak or confused. The pay-as-you-go society was paying off. Its system of licenses and fees was operating in an economy that had mushroomed after the terrible tax and interest burdens of the national debt were lifted. The Federal government was becoming rich beyond dreams. And, once it had discarded the involuted snail shell of the Federal bureaucracy, the men still in power could make hard decisions faster than ever before. Congress still proposed and passed laws for the common good and defense, and sent them to the President for approval or veto. The only difference was, they delegated the tasks of monitoring and enforcement to the individual States, instead of to a ziggurat of fiddling bureaucrats.

  But now that system had been smashed, not by law or amendment but by a thermonuclear device. Over the next hundred days, I would see the reins of government flopping while men scrambled to recover them.

  At about 5:30 in the morning, with a cold, gray dawn still almost two hours away, Speaker of the House McCanlis called to order the last session of the 107th Congress, sitting jointly in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on the top floor of the Federal Courthouse. He had appropriated Chief Judge Mabel Benwick’s personal gavel for the occasion.

  George McCanlis was a man fully in command. His huge lion head had the right bend of gravity and sorrow as he spoke both to those present in the room and to the videocams recording for posterity. He declared that, with only fifty-four representatives and thirteen senators, they lacked a quorum in either house. “However, the tragic circumstances being what they are, I am convinced we have a quorum of those members still among the living.

  “Before us, ladies and gentlemen, we have four orders of business. In the interests of expediency, and lacking full representation from any of our committees, I hope you’ll permit me to outline our immediate agenda.

  “First, we must regain that duly elected representation as soon as may be practicable. Toward that end, I have authorized telegrams to be sent to the governors of those States which have lost sitting members of this body so that they may hold special elections on or about the first Tuesday in April. That date will allow sufficient time for candidates to announce themselves and become known to their electorates.”

  It would also, as we were to discover, allow McCanlis and his coterie sufficient time to weld together the sort of government they desired.

  “Second,” he continued, “we must consider our colleagues in the Senate. We are reasonably assured of the death of Vice President Richard Stokes, who was duly sworn as president of that body. Now, lacking a bare seventh of their members, those senators here present may feel some embarrassment about naming a president pro tem. Therefore, I propose that until such an election in April shall bring up their numbers, the Senate continue to sit in joint session with this house.”

  What McCanlis was omitting, of course, although he knew it perfectly well, was that a certain number of freshman senators, as well as newly elected representatives, were waiting in their home States to be sworn in as the 108th Congress on January third. That omission—purposeful or not—would confound the legitimacy of the incoming Congress for many months.

  “Third,” he said, “we must appoint a special committee to propose, in accordance with the Constitution of these United States, the names of candidates to fill out the vacated term of President Martin Geddes, who has likewise been declared officially dead.”

  Uncle Aaron, three rows back in the spectator seats, was shaking his head slowly side to side. I wondered briefly about his reaction, until I’d worked it out for myself: McCanlis could more easily have proposed himself as acting chief executive and taken office this same day. He had the votes right here, and Aaron knew it. Most of the surviving congressmen and -women seemed to be from the Rust Bowl Conservatives, of the same stripe as McCanlis. (Had there been a secret caucus, held outside Washington, last evening?) Anyway, that the Speaker should name a committee to propose candidates could only mean he had some deeper game to play. And that might mean more trouble for everyone than an outright grab.

  “Fourth and last,” McCanlis said, “we must prepare for a full investigation of yesterday’s tragic events. As this body, in my own opinion, lacks sufficient members to fill a second extraordinary committee, I propose that we request a commission
be appointed by the governors of the adjoining States of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to sift the ashes, as it were.”

  Evidently, McCanlis was not quite as concerned as either Uncle Aaron or I was about who had launched or placed the bomb that destroyed Washington. A governor’s commission would take months simply to convene—not an effective forum for either strategy or diplomacy. I hoped the boys under Kansas were still watching their screens.

  Then a chilling thought occurred: Would a … could a … nascent dictator arrange to bomb his own capital? With a nuclear device? To take power in the confusion? And cover the traces—those not already fused to glass in the rubble—with a ponderous official committee?

  No, even McCanlis would not. Could not.

  “Now, I know all of this proposing is quite a mouthful. I hope our secretary pro tem can formulate these sentiments into an orderly set of motions that you, my colleagues, can second, discuss, and then vote in favor of.” The wink and nod McCanlis gave the front row was only partly humorous.

  The measures were seconded and approved in half an hour. Discussion took only ten minutes of that, and Aaron Scoffield was ruled out of order six times in three of those minutes. I marveled that the 107th Congress was certainly an orderly place to work in.

  Uncle Aaron had no staff—all dead in Washington—so I agreed to stay on in Baltimore and help him during the transition. He began that very day, saving three hours for sleep in the morning, to pull together a coalition that might beat McCanlis. He had eighteen Democrats and a handful of leaning Republicans to work with.

  On the other side, McCanlis’s party was not made up entirely of fools. They would back him on a tariff bill or States’ Rights, but in deciding the presidency, they just might think for themselves.

  As the history books tell it, thirty-four potential candidates were named between then and March 29. The lobbying went on night and day, over meals, side by side in the men’s room, in the hallways outside of the courtroom—which remained their meeting place all that time. Bearing Uncle Aaron’s card, I made concessions to Helpfuls, cornered Hesitants, and confronted Hostiles. I made more promises than I can remember, and some of them my uncle never knew about.