Kipper rolled his eyes. You would have thought they’d have been content with the collapse of the global economy. That had wound back carbon emissions to early-twentieth-century levels once you corrected for the one-off addition of the toxic firestorms back in ’03. But no, the Greens had the swing votes in Congress, and they had proved themselves to be entirely ruthless in using their numbers to play off the old Republicans and Democrats. They were even worse in many ways. Their party discipline was kind of frightening. Probably it had something to do with that weird messianic fervor they all seemed to share. In private, he and Jed often referred to them as the Borg, and he was very much looking forward to leaving them behind when his term was over. The next president of the United States could argue with them about who should actually be running Reconstruction. In his darker moments he really hoped Sarah Palin would run. They deserved each other.
“Mister President?”
Kip turned away from the window and found a young woman waiting at the door with a clipboard.
“The chief of staff is here, sir. And your secure link to Pearl Harbor will be up in the conference room in five minutes. Oh, and Mister Tench is here early. I’ve given him a doughnut and a coffee downstairs.”
The president laughed out loud.
“If Barney is early, you’re going to need some more doughnuts. Tell him I’ll be down as soon as I can.”
He thanked the young lady and said good morning to Jed as he bustled into the room, also carrying a doughnut. Kipper wondered where they came from. Surely they weren’t being flown in from Seattle.
Jed was hauling around a couple of ring binders under one arm, which he dropped onto the bare, rather cheap-looking desk. The office was remarkably spartan for the nation’s chief executive, but Kip liked it because of the great view it afforded him of the reclamation work. From the southwest corner of the building, it was possible to see the rail yards of North Kansas City, the planes coming into Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport, and the skyline of Kansas City, Missouri, proper. Trucks and buses rumbled down Highway 210 laden with workers, salvage, and supplies. A good many horses and bicycles could be seen plying the roads as well. If he looked due west, it was possible to see the restored and fully operational North Kansas City federal medical facility. Kipper felt a pang of guilt, knowing that some of his soldiers were in there struggling for their lives. He needed to get over and see them before he returned to Seattle. Turning away to the east, he could see the stream of smoke rising from Hawthorne Unit 5’s power plant, which provided power for the entire metro area. He hoped he would be able to get out there before the end of the day and personally see how things were going. Or to micromanage the chicken shit and put everyone’s teeth on edge, as Culver put it.
“Good morning Mister President,” said his chief of staff, who was dressed in a perfectly pressed charcoal-gray three-piece suit. Kipper wore chinos and a blue denim shirt, a casual ensemble that was justified in his mind, by all the site visits he’d be making later in the day and possible because his wife was not there to hassle him into a monkey suit.
“Any good news out of New York overnight?” Jed asked. “I’ve been caught up with Treasury.”
“Nothing I’d call good,” said Kip. “Forty-eight confirmed dead on our side, mostly from the clearance teams we saw yesterday. About as many again badly wounded and enormous destruction of the city between Union and Madison squares. The casualties will be flown out to Northtown Medical later today.”
“I see,” Culver said. “Any news of enemy casualties?”
Kipper rubbed his eyes, which were grainy and red. He never slept well the first night in a new bed at the best of times, which these weren’t.
“Six hundred plus, according to the cav. But there’s plenty more where they came from. Including our mystery men. We’ve apparently got an updater coming from Colonel Kinninmore later in the day about that. And what about you, Jed? What complications do you have for me this morning?”
He meant it to be a joke, but it came out a little surly and undignified.
“Sorry,” Kip added. “I’m tired and pissed off. And I have forty-eight very sad letters to write later today.”
Culver joined him at the panoramic windows to look out over the city.
“Well, you know my views on that,” he said.
“And you know mine,” Kipper shot back with a slightly warning tone. “It is not a waste of time, Jed. It is something I have to do. They’re just short notes, but I know they mean a lot to the families.”
Thankfully, Culver chose to ignore yet another of their old arguments.
“The press isn’t too bad this morning,” he said, choosing to plow on in his usual pragmatic style. “They’re getting right behind us in Manhattan. Calling it the Battle of New York.”
“Has anyone started speculating on this business of the—” Kipper checked his notes. “—the fedayeen involvement?”
“Not yet,” said Culver. “But it’s early days, and there are half a dozen or so reporters and war bloggers embedded with our guys and Schimmel’s militia over there. If it’s a live issue, they will get onto it before long.”
Kipper gazed down at the hospital where casualties would be arriving from New York throughout the day.
“Good,” he said. “Maybe they can get us better info than official channels. You know, if they’re writing and filing their stories from the front.”
Culver looked skeptical.
“Unlikely, sir. If they’re embedded, all of their reports are going through our links and getting censored by our intel guys. They’re not going to let raw data like that get out to the public till they’ve had time to work out their own spin.”
“That’s actually kind of a pity, Jed,” Kipper said, and meant it. “Sometimes it’s good to get an alternative reading of a situation. What chance you reckon any of these embeds might be able to file independently, via satellite phone or something?”
“I suppose they could,” said his chief of staff. “But it’s unlikely they’d ass fuck the army like that. The embed system works for them. Increases traffic to their sites. Mostly, they won’t jeopardize that relationship. They’re on board. Look at what happened after the attack. I was wrong to think the casualties from Castle Clinton would turn them against us. Even Arianna is baying for pirate blood now. I think staying behind while we evacuated the casualties on your chopper really helped.”
Kipper frowned.
“Jed, it wasn’t about spinning the story. Those people would have died.”
“I know, I know,” he apologized. “But someone has to think the ugly thoughts in this administration, Mister President, which brings us to Blackstone. I’ve had a few ideas …”
“Just hold that thought, Jed. We can work through your Texas problems later today.”
“My Texas problems?” Jed replied archly.
“Yes.” Kipper smiled. “Yours. Didn’t you get the memo? I’m sure there was a memo. Anyway, that’s for later. Right now I want to talk to a man about a bomb.”
“You’ll have to wait, Mister President,” said Jed Culver with a touch of satisfaction. “It’s only three a.m. in Honolulu, leaving plenty of time to work through my Texas problem.”
The man charged with guarding and maintaining the strategic deterrent of the United States of America found himself staring out at a light blue Pacific sky not long after sunrise. A glass of juice sat untouched on a paper napkin on his desk while he waited for the video link to tie him in to his commander in chief. While he waited, Admiral James Ritchie looked over the latest updates from the Pacific Fleet’s deterrent force of Ohio-class submarines, six boomers in all, down from a pre-Wave total of eighteen, deployed in a pattern to allow maximum coverage of all potential targets on the face of the globe. After sixty years during which the awful specter of nuclear war sometimes seemed to be the only thing preventing it, some people had grown awfully blasé about tossing atomic weapons at each other. The death toll from Israel’s first strike in 2003 was no
w conservatively estimated at six hundred million as the secondary die-off continued. They had decimated humanity.
But who was he to think ill of them, having played his own part in firing a nuclear warning shot across the bows of Hugo Chávez a few days later?
The Russians had nuked three of their own former republics six months after that, and of course the Indo-Pakistani War had killed another two hundred million before the surviving nuclear powers intervened with a threat of general annihilation for both countries. Meanwhile Brazil had restarted its nuclear weapons program for the South American Federation, something Ritchie knew long before the news media did. And nary a week went by without the Australian ambassador calling on him to inquire about transferring two of those decommissioned boomers into her country’s rapidly growing arsenal. Some days Ritchie thought it was a blessed wonder that anyone was still alive on this poor little planet.
“Links secure,” an army communications officer said on the twenty-six-inch widescreen, breaking the admiral’s train of thought.
President James Kipper appeared on the big Sony display, his image slightly pixelated and jerky. Chief of Staff Culver sat in the background, pen in hand. There seemed to be nobody else in the room, which looked like some sort of hotel conference space. Ritchie had worked with Kipper’s administration long enough to know the president’s informal ways, but there were times he wondered whether the president understood he wasn’t just running a city council department anymore.
“Mister President,” Ritchie said. “Mister Culver.”
Kipper waved, and Culver nodded.
“Admiral,” said the chief of staff. “Good to see you again. Did you get that package I sent you?”
Ritchie held up his untouched glass of juice. “Yes, I did, sir. I appreciate the gesture.”
“And did you have a chance to look over my query concerning the use of special weapons in tactical situations?” Culver asked.
“Neutron bombs, Admiral,” the president interrupted. “Let’s not be coy. He means neutron bombs. I want the option for New York if necessary. To cut down on our casualties.”
Ritchie winced inwardly. He had indeed received via secure Pandora link the e-mail about the use of neutron weapons in the pacification of the eastern seaboard. “Yes, sirs, I received your message,” he said.
“So what’s your opinion?” Kipper asked, leaning forward into the camera. You had to hand it to James Kipper. He did not fuck around.
Neither would Ritchie. He shook his head. “I am sorry, Mister President. The option is no good. Most of the weapons you’re referring to were demobilized and destroyed at the end of the 1990s. I’ve spoken to my engineers about the matter, and they tell me that it might be possible to build a weapon or two for the purposes you had in mind, but we are probably looking at months, untold millions of new dollars, and questionable effectiveness of the warhead when it’s made, anyway. Furthermore, even if it worked as advertised, it’s not like the old movies, Mister President. It won’t just vaporize the enemy. There is still a significant heat and blast effect that will knock flat a huge part of the city, and even then, even with massively enhanced lethality from increased radiation, many of the enemy will recover from the lethal dose and enter a walking dead phase.”
Ritchie paused at that, struck by an odd image running through his mind: pirates with AK-47s lurching through the streets of Manhattan like zombies.
“Walking dead … ase?” Kipper asked as his image and audio faltered a little. “Wha … at?”
“I’m sorry, Mister President. You’re breaking up. If you’re asking what the walking dead phase is, it’s exactly what it sounds like,” Ritchie replied. “The enemy so targeted and not killed immediately will recover from an initial bout of illness and survive free of any symptoms for a period that could last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks in any given case. During that time they could cause a great deal of havoc, especially given that they’d know they had nothing left to lose.”
Kipper rubbed the bridge of his nose as though he had a bad headache while Culver shifted through his papers.
“What about other weapons?” Culver asked. “Have you had an opportunity to survey our options?”
Ritchie nodded. “I talked to the chemical warfare folks over at Twenty-fifth Infantry before you called. The United States was already in the process of demobilizing and destroying our biological and chemical stockpiles when the Wave struck.”
Kipper looked up at the screen, then back at Culver, his face deeply lined with fatigue.
“I understand there are small stockpiles at locations I can disclose via encrypted text transmission. However, there remains the same question as to whether or not those weapons are viable for use,” Ritchie said. “Moreover, their tactical value may well be degraded by the specific theater conditions. Despite the mythology, neutron weapons were conceived of as a defense against Soviet armor massed out in the open, not as a way of denuding enemy cities of all life. Plus, of course, it’s not an insignificant thing, opening this particular chest of wonders, Mister President. I would like to place on the record my very strong advice that we do not even consider going down this road.”
The president stared off to the left somewhere, as though looking out a window, perhaps. When he turned back to the screen, he asked, “Are those weapons secured?”
“The facilities are,” Ritchie replied. “We do not have a full inventory of all of the weapons and their status, but that is mainly a human resource issue. The depots themselves are secure.”
They were secured, as Ritchie well knew, by a cluster of W62 and/or W78 thermonuclear warheads surrounding the perimeter of each facility. These warheads, with a yield of 170 to 300-plus kilotons, were in turn surrounded by another perimeter of antipersonnel weapons and watched by satellite and hardwire video surveillance. The warheads were arranged in a way that ensured maximum destructive yield over a facility such as the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah or the Johnston Atoll Strategic Weapons Reserve in the Pacific Ocean. Part of Ritchie’s job was to secure all such weapons of mass destruction by any means possible. Since his 1,000-strong Strategic Command Security Force was not nearly enough to even begin to garrison all the sites, it was logical to simply booby-trap them, especially given the fickle nature of loyalty these days within certain elements of the U.S. Army. Blackstone’s siren song reached all the way out into Ritchie’s command, though he was confident that most naval personnel remained immune to the charms of terrorizing migrants in Texas.
If Mad Jack ever got his hands on a nuclear weapon, however …
“I know ground operations aren’t your thing, Admiral,” said Kipper, “but do you have any thoughts on the current problem? In New York, I mean.”
Drawn away from contemplation of his daily nightmare, Ritchie shook his head.
“I am afraid there will be no easy solution, Mister President. There never is. I will offer this for consideration: How long will the bulk of New York City last without human intervention? We have found significant natural deterioration of the places we’ve already resettled. Am I correct?”
The president nodded.
“Even if we were to secure the New York City area, and even I agree that it has to be secured somehow, just how long will it be before we need all of the possible living space?” Ritchie asked.
Culver leaned forward. “If current immigration trends continue and our birthrate remains nominal, perhaps a hundred years from now.”
Ritchie nodded. “By that point, Mister President, we would need to demolish what is there and build something new. Well, not us, of course, but you know what I mean. Nature will have destroyed the city for us even if we are able to drive the pirates out.”
“What do you suggest, Admiral?”
Ritchie backed away from suggesting anything. The idea of mushroom clouds consuming a dead city full of memories and pirates was just too much.
“I have no easy solution, Mister President. That is the best I can tell y
ou.”
Kipper did not look happy, and part of Ritchie urged him to leave it at that, but he couldn’t. “Do you mind if I speak freely, sir?”
The president seemed surprised he’d asked, but then, he was neither a military man nor a career politician.
“No. Go on,” he said.
“Mister President, I understand it is a terrible thing sending men and women into combat. If you are a halfway decent human being, it should weigh on you like no other decision you will ever make in your life. But sir, just because it is emotionally difficult and morally challenging, it is not necessarily wrong. Those men and women were not press-ganged into service. It was not just a choice for them. It was and remains a calling. And sir, no nation on earth can hope to survive long without people who will answer that call. No nation can hope to survive if it does not respect what they have offered and do the hard things that history sometimes asks of us. Sometimes, Mister President, there is no answer but blood.”
James Kipper stared out at him from the screen, his hands held together as if praying, pressed against his lips. He seemed to be weighing what Ritchie had said. After a moment he replied.
“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll think on that some more.”
28
New York
“CLAYMORE!” Milosz shouted. He squeezed the clacker three times. The intersection before him lit up with a flash and a roar of three claymore antipersonnel mines set up to optimize the body count. When the dust, the smoke, and the ringing in his ears cleared, he could see an intersection full of shredded offal and bone where screaming asswits had been.
“This is like the shooting of monkeys in a barrel, yes?” Milosz shouted as he exchanged an empty magazine for a full one. “Except we are these fucking monkeys. No racial offenses to be intended, Wilson.”
Tracer fire punched into the polished stone column behind him, chewing out chunks of powder and sharp, stinging fragments of marble. An armored truck sporting the logo of the Wells Fargo Company lurched into the intersection with a 12.7-mm DShK mounted on top. A rail-thin Somali worked the machine gun around the intersection, spraying the walls with heavy fire. Sergeant Veal laid down return fire with his M240, firing off short bursts of 7.62s while his partner worked her radio. Veal’s rounds shattered the armored glass of the truck.
After America Page 29