When Maggie had announced she was buying out her grandparents, she’d stunned everyone she knew, including her parents and siblings, all of whom were firmly ensconced in the sprawling suburbs of various large and interchangeable American cities. But the decision had been easy: she’d loved visiting the farm as a child and the thought of her grandparents selling it to the soulless behemoth Flint was more than she could bear.
The land was too good to be destroyed by Flint’s chemicals and greed. Flint’s local land acquisition executives—gangsters, in her opinion—had seen things differently, and had done everything they could to get her off the land. They’d filed frivolous lawsuits designed to bankrupt her, but she’d succeeded in having most of them thrown out. Knowing the local judges had helped immeasurably. They’d sprayed the fields that bordered hers so heavily with herbicides and fertilizers that it had delayed organic certification on part of her land for more than a year. She’d solved that by devoting a strip a few acres wide along the entire perimeter of her farm to native prairie grasses and had that area specially designated as a wildlife refuge, which forced Flint to back off on its chemical use. She’d filmed Flint aircraft flying over her land and spewing something over her fields. The local TV news station had been happy to air the footage before sending it up to their network and loading it onto YouTube.
As tiresome as Flint’s war games were, Maggie knew the company would keep up its efforts to oust her from her land. She’d sworn to herself that she would keep fighting back until she didn’t have any fight left.
She walked the twenty-five yards along the pasture fence to the house as she dislodged the foam earplugs that kept her sane while on the tractor. At the western horizon, a dim glow hinted at the setting sun that lay behind a thick wall of ominous clouds. They had begun to accumulate in the last hour, and they looked bad. Real bad. Low, thick, and heavy, clouds like that only meant one thing: a storm would be here soon. It would be a gullywasher. Maybe worse.
In the last few minutes, the sky had begun brandishing the greenish glow that too often presaged a tornado. News that twisters were forming in the area wouldn’t surprise Maggie. It was the right time of year for them and the unseasonable temperature fluctuations the region had been experiencing in the past few days were priming the residents for a big hit. Days dawned warm and grew scorching by late morning, and then the temperature would plummet twenty degrees in five minutes a few hours later. Sometimes, it was a lather-rinse-and-repeat day and that sequence would happen two or even three times. It was weird, but there was no such thing as normal weather in this part of Indiana, and there never had been.
Maggie had seen too often what havoc those roller-coaster temperatures could do, how fast they could stir up a tornado. And she’d seen the damage twisters could inflict. In the last few days, there had been tornadoes all over the state, but most had been fairly small and hadn’t done much beyond tearing up fields and blowing down a few trees.
That may be the only upside to having nothing but factory farms for miles in every direction: there’s no one for the tornadoes to kill and no homes to destroy.
The cynicism that had become her new best friend brought a wry curl to her mouth as she clomped up the quaintly sagging wooden steps leading to the back porch—she couldn’t bear to fix them, they’d been that way too long—and sat on the top step to pull off her mud-caked, steel-toed boots. They were a long way from the Ferragamo pumps she used to adore, just like her new wardrobe staples of heavy jeans, waffle-weave thermals, and plaid wool overshirts were a far cry from the Armani suits and Kate Spade bags she’d worn with such high-powered pride.
They’re just different uniforms.
Maggie peeled off her two layers of thick cotton socks and let the cooling air waft around her bare toes, then stood and walked into the small clapboard house. Ten minutes later she was back on the porch with a glass of iced tea in her hand, with clean shorts and a T-shirt on her freshly showered body.
There was a menacing stillness to the air now, a heaviness she didn’t like. The sky was darkening rapidly, but not to the gorgeous purply blue twilight she’d gotten used to seeing. The color was edging toward a vicious, venomous green, backlit by an unearthly yellow brightness that defied logic.
The wind picked up suddenly, blowing hard. A pot of geraniums she’d just planted last week crashed off the porch’s middle step and shattered. The large leaves served as sails as the plant swirled dizzily across the gravel drive, scattering dirt as it went. Maggie glanced at the heavy Bilco doors that lay near the corner of the house. They led to the root cellar, the only safe place in a bad storm.
Time to go.
Turning to the screen door, she whistled for the dogs. She’d last seen them cowering under her bed.
The wind gained strength steadily, its sound changing from a low moan to a high-pitched keening. Underlying it now were the first rising notes of the county’s tornado sirens, which hit their drone-like crescendo in seconds and held it.
She whistled for the dogs again, but the sound died on her tongue as the sky commanded her attention. On the not-so-distant horizon, a thin black vertical line danced sinuously, maniacally, against the backdrop of the vertiginous clouds. Maggie’s stomach dropped. On land this flat, the horizon was only about three and a half miles away. A tornado could cover that distance in a New York minute.
She bellowed for the dogs, knowing she—they—had to get into the storm cellar now.
The tornado grew as she watched. Wider, taller. She was frozen with awe for critical seconds until the adrenaline rush hit her brain and every synapse fired at once. As she turned to run for the safety of the cellar, the winds pummeled her, shoved her against the peeling wood siding of the house. Her head smacked into the edge of the door frame, setting sparkles of pain dancing at the edges of her vision. Ignoring the throbbing sting on her forehead, she ran along the porch, the wind urging her along, and leaped over the railing.
Holding on to the wood with one hand, Maggie flung out her other arm for stability. In that spread-eagled moment, her baggy shirt and shorts captured the stream of air blasting her from behind. She lost her balance—and gained momentum.
Stumbling, nearly cartwheeling as she fought clumsily to regain control of her limbs in the face of the merciless wind, Maggie passed the heavy metal doors that led to her only possible sanctuary. She couldn’t turn back. The wind wouldn’t let her. She knew then she’d never reach the strong cellar walls that would have sheltered her. She’d have to face the storm in the open.
Her terror was a thing alive. The air that bullied her was turning black, becoming thick and fragrant with the earth she’d plowed earlier. Fine particles of soil bit into her skin like the teeth of a thousand evil gods, lodging in her streaming eyes, her screaming mouth. The screech of the wind was wild, and sounded like the demons in the Hell she’d grown up hearing about. The rapidly dropping air pressure was making her eardrums fit to burst.
Her body slammed into the huge elm she’d climbed as a child, that her father and grandfather had climbed as children. The impact knocked the breath out of her, nearly knocked the sense out of her. She didn’t care. The tree was solid and Maggie clung to it. The rough, striated bark scraped her cheek raw as she looked over her shoulder, turning her face into the wind. The nightmarish vision before her drove all thought from her mind.
A spinning, sucking cone of darkness moved toward her as if with a purpose, as if she was what it so angrily wanted to consume.
From behind the barn, a burst of flapping, alien color rose into the churning air. It took Maggie a minute to realize that the henhouse had exploded, and the chickens were being pulled into the storm. The roof of the barn tore away from its walls with a scream that was nearly human. Shingles and beams spun up into the sky as the barn wall nearest her began to shake and shimmy. One by one the wide boards came loose as if pried by unseen fingers and were flung into the raging river of wind.
Inside the destroyed barn, both horses re
ared wildly, lashing out at the sides of their stalls in their panic to escape. Two of the three cows had managed to break the loose halter ropes tethering them to their spaces along the milking wall. Loose tools and equipment, now airborne, slammed into them, stabbing, gouging, buckling them, making the maddened thousand-pound beasts crash into walls as they did their best to stampede out of what was left of the barn. Maggie watched in horror as the Holsteins were lifted off their feet and slammed into the solid fieldstone back wall of the structure. Whether they were killed or just stunned, the fight in them died and the cows’ limp bodies were sucked into the furious sky. The third, her young, gentle Jersey, fought insanely against the rope that kept her in place until she, too, was picked up by the wind. The halter, the rope, and the ring it was attached to, embedded into the stone wall, held the frantic, flailing beast earthbound, but the wind would not surrender her. In disbelief, Maggie watched as the heifer’s head was ripped from its body. Blood and tissue spewed into the storm as the carcass was carried aloft. The head, held together by its halter, smashed over and over again into the wall like a gory tetherball.
A roar like that of a jet engine filled her ears as the center of the storm bore down on her, and the tree Maggie clung to began to shudder and rock. Closing her eyes, she tightened her grip, snaking her arms and legs around the massive trunk and holding on to it with every bit of strength and fear left in her. Her mind was numb, too stunned even for prayer.
The tree heaved with the wind, buckling the ground surrounding it, and then the huge gnarled roots beneath her snapped, reluctantly relinquishing their century-long claim on the earth. Maggie opened her mouth to scream. Choking clods of soil filled her mouth, stifling her. The wind held her fast against the tree. Breathing became nearly impossible. Then the massive elm heaved again and began to fall. The aching rasp of roots being ripped from the ground surrounded her. She burrowed her body into the tree as if desperate to become part of it as the tree rose, then crashed to the ground. It began to slide.
The shed-sized root ball, finally unconstrained, provided an irresistible challenge to the wall of air pushing against it. The elm began to pick up speed as it skimmed the ground with Maggie still clinging to it, an inconsequential payload on a surface-hugging missile.
The roar of the wind now overrode all other sound. Maggie felt a ferocious pain as her eardrums burst. Breathing was a herculean effort. Her fingers were numb from the intensity of their grip on the tree; the muscles in her arms and legs were on fire.
An errant lightning bolt struck the ground nearby. The tree split in a violent explosion of fire and wood that flung Maggie into the windstream. Her first sensation was a stabbing shock, her second a miraculous peace. No sharp tree bark against her abraded, bleeding skin, no throbbing pain. There was just the wind that carried her—
The impact when Maggie landed knocked all the breath, all the life from her body. For a moment, her corpse laid face up, draped limply over the low stone wall of the pasture nearest the house. Then Nature flipped the lifeless shell of battered flesh to the sodden ground, where it flailed erratically for a moment. The wind caught its most aerodynamic angle and sent it skidding across the muddy, puddled pasture, just another piece of debris.
CHAPTER 3
It had been just under three months since she’d been sworn into office, and President Helena Hernandez had finally gotten comfortable in the large oval room, if not the larger-than-life role. Navigating the debris-strewn trail of not-so-natural disasters left behind by her predecessor, Winslow Benson, was perilous enough; doing it as the first female and first Hispanic—and a cubana at that—president only made the journey that much more exciting. Terrifying, if she wanted to be completely honest, which was something she hadn’t been in decades, not since being sworn into her first term on the Miami-Dade school board thirty years ago.
Helena looked at her secretary, Maribeth Wonson, with a mix of confusion and disbelief. It wasn’t yet five o’clock on Thursday morning, but she’d gotten up and showered an hour ago, then had a live radio interview with a German journalist. She’d hoped to go back to bed for half an hour, but Maribeth’s words had just negated that.
“Say that again.” Helena sat back slowly in her chair—John F. Kennedy’s chair. It did make her back feel better. Not to mention what it did for her soul.
“The secretary of defense is on the phone. He’d like ten minutes.”
“What does he want to talk about?”
“Afghanistan. There’s been a setback.”
This was what Helena liked about Maribeth: her perpetual serenity, her utter unflappability. When Maribeth was around, it always seemed okay to stop for a deep breath in the face of dire news. The downside was that Maribeth’s face never revealed the true severity of a situation. The announcement of an imminent nuclear attack would likely be delivered in the same calm, quiet tone with the same pleasant smile.
Helena shifted her gaze from her secretary’s face to the fireplace opposite her desk and then along the smooth, curved expanse of the room’s pristine walls. Her eyes came to rest on the small modern bronze of Atlas that stood on a tall table outside the door to her private study. She’d asked for the sculpture to be placed there so she could remind herself that she was not the first person, nor would she be last, to feel as if she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She loved looking at it. The clean, hard lines of the Greek god’s straining muscles and tendons seemed to impart their strength to her. She welcomed it as she continually, privately reassured herself that her presence in this room, her right to occupy it, was more than a victory of class or race or gender. Being here was an honor, a privilege, and an immense obligation. Privately, she also knew it was a tribute to her tenacity.
Just being in this room soothed her, although everything she did here impressed itself heavily upon her mind, and frequently her soul, an immutable burden. Helena prayed daily for the strength of Atlas. She would need it when she took this call. Her secretary of defense was no trusted ally. His appointment had been her first surrender to the reality of Washington politics; his approach to life and war necessitated a blatant compromise of her core values. She considered his presence in her Cabinet an expedient, and politically necessary, evil.
Helena brought her gaze back to Maribeth. “When’s my next opening?”
“Now.”
With a minute nod of her head, Helena replied, “I’ll take the call.”
She picked up the handset of the secure phone on her desk and heard the operator announce her presence on the line.
“Good morning, Ms. President. Thank you for taking this call.”
“You’re welcome, Secretary Bonner,” she replied coolly. “What can I do for you?”
After a split second’s hesitation, the former admiral cleared his throat. “A freak storm in northeastern Afghanistan triggered huge floods in a remote valley. The region is sparsely populated, and the damage is somewhat contained, but the government is concerned that the region’s entire population may have been wiped out. It will impact the elections, ma’am.”
Just hearing the word made Helena’s eyes narrow. Delaying the elections was her SecDef’s highest priority—in direct contradiction to her own. She frowned. “Floods? Isn’t it still winter over there?”
“Yes, ma’am. We don’t have a lot of information yet, but it appears that there was some unseasonable high-altitude warming that triggered a critical melt of the glaciers in the northern border territory. Two mountain ranges surround a long, narrow valley. We’re still reviewing satellite data to get a better idea of what happened.”
“Where did it happen? I mean specifically.”
“The Wakhan Corridor.”
Helena felt her mood plummet further. The region was the only bright spot in that grim, decimated country.
“Was” is right. “What’s the situation on the ground?” she asked, picking up the fountain pen Maribeth always placed next to the phone. She uncapped it, drew a slash of blu
e on the memo pad nearby.
“It’s obvious from the latest satellite comms that entire villages have disappeared. The recon teams we deployed hit the ground a little while ago and the images they’re sending back show deep flows of mud and ice. None of the footage shows any survivors. Communications were wiped out.” He paused. “I’ve already spoken to President Wardak, and let him know that, at his request, we will deploy additional units to assist his personnel in the search-and-recovery efforts.”
“Thank you.”
“If I may, Ms. President, I’d like to remind you that all of the Americans in the region are civilians. Most of them are from Flint AgroChemical. Intelligence estimates indicate there could have been as many as thirty of them in the affected region when the storm hit.”
The president let out a long, silent breath. The secretary of defense’s effort to refrain from gloating was obvious. Helena could practically feel his joy and loathing through the phone, and she had to fight the urge to let him know the latter sentiment was mutual.
Her administration’s support of Flint’s innovative agricultural programs in several deeply rural areas of Afghanistan had infuriated and disgusted Secretary Bonner and caused their first serious clash only weeks after his rapid nomination and congressional confirmation as secretary. The Afghan upcountry hit by the flood was more politically stable than most regions in that ravaged country. Bonner viewed any nonmilitary involvement there as dangerous despite knowing that the local populations weren’t open supporters of the Taliban, and still lived a lifestyle more medieval than modern. He had been adamant that there was no reason to change that; bringing them into the twenty-first century would also bring them into the conflict, he’d argued. Providing new infrastructure and nurturing new wealth in the region in the form of crops and livelihoods would backfire by attracting the wrong element, and then his already stretched troops would have to be deployed to defend the long, treacherous, porous borders from newly interested parties, such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and opium traders.
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