After America

by John Birmingham

  All he needed to make this day perfect was a gun in his hand and directions back to the front line.

  35

  Kansas City, Missouri

  President James Kipper felt a surge of pride at the sight of Kansas City Power and Light’s restored Number Five generator pumping sanitized white smoke into a clear blue sky. Standing in the parking lot of the Hawthorne plant, on the banks of the Missouri River northeast of the city’s still-deserted urban core, he could indulge himself in the guilty pleasure of forgetting for a moment about Mad Jack Blackstone and the horrors of New York, along with the frustrations of politics and the trouble he was in with his wife. For just a few moments, standing next to his oldest friend, Barney Tench, listening to the hum of the transmission lines and the excited burbling of his entourage, he could wallow in a giddy glee rarely experienced since the Wave.

  Creation.

  The simple joy of creation had been the engine of his life for as long as he could remember. His earliest memories were of building things. Not just wooden blocks and LEGO towers but giant, messy backyard earthworks and dams and pretend farms and shoebox factories and tree houses and secret dens. As a child he had always gone that one step further, driven by what he now recognized as an innate desire to reach out and shape the world. My poor mother, he thought fondly. Oh, how her garden beds had suffered.

  “So, boss,” Tench said, gesturing at the massive Hawthorne Unit Five smokestack. “What do you think?”

  “Impressive,” Kipper replied. “You know how much I love a big honkin’ power plant, Barn. What’s our status?”

  Barney gestured at the drab tan structure of the main plant building with a jelly doughnut swiped earlier from the catering table. “With Unit Five fully manned and operational,” he said, “we’ll have close to four hundred megawatts of juice. Plenty for now.”

  “Cool. More than enough,” Kipper agreed. “What about the gas turbine facility on the east side?”

  Barney looked over his notes. “Ah … from what I understand, I think that’s meant for the summer months when everyone is, er … was running their AC. It is in pretty good shape and could provide backup power on demand. We’re still sorting it out, but the coal generator was easier since she’s so much like the ones we got back in Seattle.”

  “Relatively new, isn’t it?” Kipper asked.

  “Yeah. Umm, perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, boss, but this plant has a history of bad luck: a fire back in the nineties that knocked out the transmission lines and an explosion which destroyed the original Unit Number Five,” Barney said.

  Kipper nodded. “That explains why everything is new, then. What about Units One through Four? Will you be bringing those back online?”

  Tench shook his head. “Naw, there’s no need for them. Besides, they’d been idled for decades before the Wave. What I really need are more linemen to restore the grid.”

  “I thought we had an on-site training program,” Kipper said.

  Tench nodded. “We do. Hell, there’s a community college not more than a mile away with everything you need for a program. Classes were in session when the Wave hit, so we were literally able to pick up the program and restart it in place with new apprentice linemen. Thing is, those folks won’t be ready for at least a year. In the meantime, the work is waiting. Can we get any more warm bodies from Seattle City Light?”

  “Doubt it,” Kipper said. “In fact, they’re screaming to get their people back as soon as possible. Got their own repair issues to deal with, and they’re shorthanded, too.”

  Loud metallic squeals and screeches heralded the approach of a train backing into the power plant. Bumping down the tracks past the reinforced checkpoint, the cars were loaded with coal bound for the generating facility. Coal was still the most plentiful means of energy production within the United States, and early in his term Kipper had rammed a bill through Congress providing a fast track to citizenship for any suitably qualified migrant who would work the mines in Wyoming. Watching the three big ATS diesel locomotives slowly hauling the massive line of hoppers into the plant, he recalled the arm-twisting and distasteful outright pork barreling Jed had used to sideline the Greens’ bloc vote on that one. They didn’t oppose the immigration program per se, of course, but they wanted those immigrants to focus on restoring large swaths of the country to a prehuman state. Forget about power generation or anything resembling a twentieth-century standard of living.

  Kipper shook his head. He loved the wilderness as much as any man. More than most, probably. Hell, the first thing he was going to do when he finally escaped from executive office was take himself off into the mountains for a week on his own. Barbara permitting, of course. But to hear the Greens tell of it, he was doing more damage just bringing this one plant back on line than all the firestorms of the post-Wave period.

  He sighed. Couldn’t they see what a beautiful fucking thing this was? How much better it was going to make life for the people stuck out here in the boonies? And how KC itself was so important to resettling the interior and reaching out to the East? But of course thinking about the East only led to thinking about New York, and for now Kip was determined not to harsh his own mellow, borrowing a phrase his daughter had brought home from school the other day. Seattle and its fucking hippies, he thought.

  As Barney burbled on about the logistics of this small corner of his empire—“The maintenance facility down on Front Street is fairly well stocked, and the city’s P&L did a pretty good job of archiving their work. Only real problem’s been figuring out the quirks of Unit Five. Once we get that hashed out, we can probably move on to restore Iatan in Weston, Missouri”—Kipper gently took him by the elbow and steered his reconstruction tsar back toward the catering table. The presidential entourage, about fifty people in all, including his Secret Service detail, all turned and moved with him like a flock of birds in slow motion.

  For a change, the heavier armored fighting vehicles of the Secret Service response teams were absent and his own detail was dressed in jeans and denim shirts. Only their sunglasses and earpieces marked them out as bodyguards. Besides the black Suburbans and half a dozen Reconstruction Department pickups, the car park was full of trucks and support vehicles sporting the logo of Cesky Enterprises, one of the rising stars of the post-Wave economy. Pakistani and Filipino migrants worked the catering line, doling out something that was supposed to be Kansas City barbecue among other local treats. Kipper took one discreet whiff of the beef ribs and decided that though they might have been made in the city this morning, it definitely wasn’t KC barbecue as he understood it. It smelled like curry. The dark-skinned, bright-eyed young woman wielding the tongs flashed a mouthful of blindingly white teeth at him.

  “The barbecue has some extra spice today, Mister President.”

  “I’m sure it does, ma’am,” Kipper said. “But I haven’t even had my breakfast doughnut yet. Do you know if Mister Tench has left any for the rest of us?”

  She pointed toward the far end of the trestle table, where Kipper could see Jed guarding a precious stash of leftover crullers, muffins, and glazed twists. His chief of staff fixed the recon boss with a forbidding glare.

  “I think my wife’s been talking to him,” Barney stage-whispered to the young serving girl.

  “She needed to,” said the president, backhanding Tench in the gut. “So how many hours of power a day does the city get?”

  Tench took a guilty bite of his glazed doughnut and sucked down a mouthful of rare and precious coffee before answering. The doughnuts, Kip had discovered, came courtesy of a local franchise owner for LaMar’s who had been out of the country when the Wave hit. The coffee, he had no idea, but given how difficult it was to get, he’d resolved to limit himself to just one cup so that the plant workers might enjoy the leftovers. Barney wiped a small dollop of jam from his mouth before continuing.

  “Right now we get close to eighteen hours a day. More if the trains are consistent. Sometimes that’s not the case, though, beca
use you’re dealing with train crews from India who are used to doing things their own way. They’re efficient and hardworking, but they’re, well …”

  “They just have their own way,” Kipper finished for Barney. “I know. You take the help you can get. And India’s been a godsend for us.”

  “True enough,” Tench said. “There is one problem, though, boss. A big one.”

  Kipper waited as his good mood threatened to curdle and sour.

  “No one’s been paid for three weeks. Some folks, I just found out, got over four months of back pay on the books. Granted, many of them are refugees who are happy to have three hots and a cot, but it’s not sustainable,” Tench said.

  Kipper sighed. Money. You had to spend money in order to make money. And to spend it, you had to have it or borrow it. He was the first to admit that finances were not his strong suit, but he didn’t need a Nobel Prize in economics to understand that the implosion of the world economy, the total collapse of the banking and financial markets, had real-world effects down on the ground, in this very parking lot.

  The United States was broke. Living off the stored capital represented by its empty cities and silent infrastructure, it could not pay its debts, had refused to, indeed, for the last three years, in complete contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s advice to the Founding Fathers. An act of treachery according to some of its creditors that could even have led to armed conflict in one case, had China not fallen into civil war. His fine temper of the morning spoiled, Kipper tried to recapture some of the optimism by turning back to the plant and basking in the view again. He tried to convince himself they would get out of this with the same hard work and native ingenuity that the men and women who were reclaiming this city had shown. This wasn’t the first time America had been laid low. The nation had been born virtually bankrupt, yet it had managed to climb to the top of the heap in less than two centuries. If they played their hand right, they could recover from this mess as well.

  They had to.

  “Barney.” Kipper put his hand on his friend’s meaty shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Your people will get paid. You have my word on it.”

  But he had no idea how.

  An hour later the convoy of Secret Service black Chevy Suburbans made its way across the Chouteau Bridge over the Missouri River. A dredge was visible to Kipper’s left, docked alongside Harrah’s Casino. Construction equipment and workers toiled to restore the Muddy Mo’s traffic channel to navigable status. Trains rumbled along the rail line on the north side of the casino complex. Laden with salvage, food, and cattle, they were bound for a central processing point in the river bottoms on the eastern side of North Kansas City, which had ample warehouse and light manufacturing space to accommodate them. A makeshift train station for passenger traffic had been established at the casino to augment the main facility at Union Station on the other side of the Missouri River. New workers, most of them participants in the Federal Homestead and Resettlement Program, had brought their families in search of a fresh start.

  To Kipper’s right, they passed a complex of buildings and a BP gas station surrounded by an earthen berm topped with sandbags. A couple of army Humvees rolled out and headed south toward the Kansas City Southern rail yard.

  “Local troops, militia,” Culver said, taking note of the small fort.

  “None of us are local anymore,” Kipper said. “What are they doing here?”

  “Securing the railroad, I suspect,” Culver replied. “They patrol as far as Fort Leavenworth. From there an army detachment takes over.”

  Kipper watched the storm clouds building on the horizon, pleased with the progress.

  “We’re getting there, Jed,” he said.

  “Are we?” Culver asked. The chief of staff had his old briefcase open and was poring over piles of documents. “If we pay Cesky’s men at Hawthorne, then other workers elsewhere will demand the same. Budget’s a zero-sum game at the moment, Mister President. We can’t borrow money; there is no one who will lend us anything near the amount we need. We can’t just print it. Economy’s like fucking ground zero, if you’ll excuse my French.”

  “I promised them they’d get paid,” Kipper said. “We have to make it happen. Not just here. Everywhere. That bastard down in Fort Hood doesn’t seem to have any trouble raising money and spending it. He’s even using our currency, the sorry son of a bitch. And he’s getting loans! Goddamn Saudis advanced him that big one just last week.”

  Jed looked up from his paperwork.

  “He’s selling off assets to fund consumption, Mister President. Remember how we talked about him overreaching? This is just an example of it.”

  “They’re our assets, Jed.”

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the game, sir. And we do not have the means to enforce our rightful possession yet. Now, as to Tench’s problem, you know there is significant opposition to the appropriations for restoring coal-fired power plants,” Culver said. “The Greens are united with the Northwest Democrats on this one. They’ll keep the money for Hawthorne tied up for months if they have to.”

  “Can’t we find a way around that?” Kipper asked.

  Culver nodded. “Sure. Sandra Harvey wants one of her Borg drones appointed secretary of energy. Greens also want more of their people over at EPA. And they want EPA fully empowered. Give ’em that and you’ll get your money. But then either your new crazier EPA or your new crazier energy sec will shut down that shiny new power plant we christened this morning and insist on installing thousands of solar cells in its place. Should only take about eighteen years to replace the lost wattage. And a coupla billion new dollars. But they’ll want to sell off another aircraft carrier soon, anyway, so maybe the folding stuff won’t be a problem.”

  Jed’s smirk was almost purely evil.

  Kipper felt a Godzilla headache coming on, sharpening itself within the dark recesses of his mind. He had a war to fight against men who’d carve up and eat the old bones of his country, which he was trying to rebuild and rehabilitate. Sandra Harvey’s Greens and their allies on the far left of the Dems, of which he’d once been a member, should be on his side. Some of Harvey’s people in particular had been instrumental in the revolution that had swept Blackstone out of Seattle without firing a shot. Yet they stood in the way of every effort to repopulate the Wave-affected United States. More than a few of them even argued that those areas should be allowed to go fallow and wild.

  Forever wild, their motto went. Forever free.

  The fucking wing nut faction of the Republicans, in contrast, wanted everyone above the age of sixteen years drafted, school prayer made mandatory, Roe v. Wade overturned, every migrant expelled, the borders closed, wars launched on half a dozen problematic foreign powers, and a settlement with Blackstone that would probably see the crazy fucker in the Western White House before Kip and Barb had finished packing their suitcases.

  And Jed wondered why he was reluctant to commit to a second term in 2009.

  The convoy passed under the Highway 210 overpass and climbed the ramp back toward North Kansas City. As they moved west toward the town, it was possible to see the mass of humanity disembarking from the salvaged Amtrak passenger cars. Faces looked up at the convoy of black Suburbans, most of them dark, some covered in bandages and scars. Kipper expected Jed to speak up and harass him once again about the numbers of refugees they were taking from the atomic ruins of India, but for a mercy his chief of staff remained silent, allowing Kipper to retreat back into his own thoughts.

  Watching the new arrivals spill from the passenger cars, blinking in the unexpectedly fierce light, looking nervous but hopeful too, Kip was assailed by a raft of questions. How do you deal fairly with immigrants from a culture so significantly different from your own? How do you provide jobs for them while ensuring that your own population is also employed? How do you pay the bills? What solutions are fair and equitable as opposed to being merely effective or, worse, in the case of Blackstone, genuinely harmful?

&nbs
p; We need these people, Kipper told himself. We need them to buy into America, our America, or we’re finished.

  36

  Berlin

  “You had better put this on,” Mirsaad suggested, holding out a blue and gold head scarf as they walked through the car park underneath his apartment building. “No sane woman would go uncovered in Neukölln these days.”

  “What, not even Angela Merkel?” Caitlin teased.

  “It is very unlikely she would set foot there,” he said. “Such an action would be considered inflammatory.”

  Caitlin dutifully tied the scarf around her head, thinking that at the very least, with a pair of dark sunglasses, it would provide a basic measure of camouflage should Baumer have anybody on the lookout for her. Plus, of course, Mirsaad was correct. Going into a shariatown uncovered was just asking for trouble. Begging for it, in fact.

  “We should take my car,” he insisted, regarding her black BMW with open envy.

  “I won’t argue with that,” Caitlin said. “We don’t need to attract attention.”

  She had what she needed from the vehicle already, having kitted up in the airport hotel back at Tempelhof an hour earlier. She wore a long black leather coat that was loosely belted to conceal the twin Russian machine guns nestled at her flanks in Gerty’s bespoke combat harness. Her pistol she wore at the hip, with extra clips for all three guns secreted throughout her coat, adding noticeably to the weight. For good measure she wore a spring-loaded blade on her right wrist, and the packet of cigarettes in her left breast pocket was half of a powerful binary explosive. The other half was sealed inside a plastic disposable lighter in her right breast pocket.

  They climbed into Mirsaad’s vehicle, a rusted, beaten-down old Lada with the logo of his community radio station stenciled amateurishly on both front doors. The car was full of children’s toys and smelled of boiled cabbage. He smiled apologetically.