Past the elevator, the elegant decor of the corridor gave way suddenly to the bare functional look of a military facility. Uniformed Air Force staff snapped to attention as Weed came through a heavy door into the National Emergency Command Center. He returned the salutes, waved them back to their stations, and went to the desk of the duty officer. “Anything out of the ordinary?”
“No, sir. Admiral Waite asked to be told as soon as you arrived. Should I notify him?”
Waite was at Raven Rock, another part of the ring of nuclear shelters that had surrounded Washington since the Eisenhower years. “Please. I'll have my office running in a few minutes; let him know he can contact me there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” Weed glanced around the room, nodded and left.
On the far side of the elevator, he slowed, considered his options. He could hear a muffled sound from the sitting room that was almost certainly Andie sobbing, and he didn't want to deal with that, not just then. Instead, he went through a nearer door into what would have been the Yellow Oval Room in the White House and was more or less a facsimile of the Oval Office in this replica. The computer on the desk was already on; he tapped the mouse to wake it, waited while the screen came up, started clicking on icons to bring up the data and message feeds he needed. A quick glance over the windows as they came up showed him that everything was proceeding as it should, the nation's nuclear forces ready if they were needed.
If, he thought grimly. If the Chinese would only come to their senses, none of it would be necessary.
And if the ultimatum passed and they still refused to listen to reason?
He brushed the thought aside, hooked the chair out with one foot and sat at the desk.
SEVENTEEN
18 September 2029: Arusha, Tanzania
“Japan alone among nations has suffered attack by nuclear weapons,” said the old man on the television screen, “and it is Our deepest wish that no other nation should share that same bitter experience. We ask—no, We plead—that the leaders of the contending powers step back from so terrible an abyss.”
McGaffney glanced at the woman sitting next to him on the sofa, a Japanese photographer—Fumiko something-or-other; he didn't recall her family name—whom he'd met and bedded a few days earlier, just before the nuclear crisis began. She was staring at the screen in something like shock. He thought he could guess why. It wasn't every day that the Emperor of Japan called a public press conference to address the governments of the world.
The news program cut back to the anchorman, then to the United Nations building in New York. Secretary General Vo Nguyen Tranh was offering to mediate between the three hostile nuclear powers, saying most of the same things Emperor Naruhito had. A minute or so later it cut to a graphic that showed who had what nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and underlined the very real possibility that a few billion people were about to die.
“Please turn it off,” the photographer said. “I can't watch any more of this.”
“Too right.” He reached for the remote, pressed the off button; there wasn't any point in switching to another channel, since the same news would be on all of them.
With the television off, the hotel room was startlingly quiet, the street outside the window no less so; usually Arusha in September was one big buzzing mass of activity, but not now. It was, McGaffney knew, as safe as any place on the planet; even if the Americans tossed a warhead or two at Tanzania out of spite, Arusha had no targets of military or industrial importance, just a great many tourist hotels, a great many charities and other nongovernmental organizations, and at the moment, no shortage of terrified people.
The photographer was trembling, he realized. He shifted toward her, put a tentative arm around her shoulders; she crumpled against him and clung. They would be making love again soon, he guessed. He'd seen that often enough in places hit by wars and disasters, the raw Darwinian drive to perpetuate the species shoving every other consideration out of the way.
Too right, he thought. It certainly beats waiting to see if the politicians are going to blow us all to hell. He lifted her chin with one hand, gave her a kiss.
18 September 2029: Trenton, New Jersey
Jim Lattimer, the mayor of Trenton, looked up from his desk in the emergency shelter when the police captain came in. “What is it?”
“We've got trouble.” The man's face said as much. “Crowds on the streets in Central West and Chestnut Park.”
The mayor gave him a tired look. “Get some people out there and tell ’em to go home.”
“No dice. We've tried to get Homeland Security to release any of our guys, and they won't budge.”
“Shit.” The mayor thought for a moment. “Do we still have any of our choppers? Mount a PA system on one and do it that way.”
“Yeah, we can probably do that. I'll get on it.” The police captain went back out, leaving Lattimer to wrestle with all the other details of a city in crisis.
It was a mess, no question. All regular radio and television programming had been preempted by prerecorded Homeland Security spots hammering on a handful of points—stay home, take shelter indoors, you are safer where you are than out in the countryside or on the highways. The freeways had been closed to civilian traffic anyway, following crisis plans dating back to the Eisenhower era, and National Guard and Homeland Security forces had been called out to barricade the onramps in urban and suburban areas.
Huge swathes of the internet had been blacked out by federal order, along with most long distance telephone services, so there was basically no news other than the drumbeat of official messages. Lattimer scratched his head, glanced over the latest—he'd told one of the kids in the IT department to find a way around the internet blackout, no questions asked, and the kid had managed to get a steady trickle of news from overseas. The people out there in the streets didn't even have that much. If the feds wanted to create panic, Lattimer thought, they were going about it the right way.
An hour later, the police captain was back. “Well, we did it,” he said. “We're still doing it. Care to guess how much attention they're paying?”
“Not much else we can do,” Lattimer told him. “I'll see if I can get something out of Homeland Security.”
He was just finishing a long and useless call with the local Homeland Security official when the captain was back; the man's face was gray. “Big trouble,” he said. “Really big. Cell phone traffic spiked.”
“So you snooped.”
“No shit. Phone and text both. We've got a rumor panic, big time. They're saying that somebody got news through from someplace overseas. Negotiations broke down and the missiles are about to fly. That's what they say.”
“Jesus.” Lattimer drew in a ragged breath. “I want the cell phone network shut down. Official business only until further notice. We can't let that spread.”
“Yessir,” said the captain, and hurried out of the office.
It was the logical response, but it was also the worst thing Lattimer could have done. On the crowded and gritty streets of Trenton, thousands of people who were in the middle of phone and text conversations all lost signal at the same moment, and that was enough to start the panic Lattimer was trying to stop. South of downtown, in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, someone started shouting that the feds and the city government and everyone else were leaving them there to die; someone else started walking north; that was all it took. Before long the crowd had become a terrified mob running toward the nearest onramp to US Highway 1, the quickest route across the river into Pennsylvania.
Manning the barricade on the highway was a detachment of National Guard soldiers from the Trenton arsenal, kitted out in black riot armor. The more experienced among them looked up, alarmed, as the first dim murmur of the oncoming crowd echoed off the concrete. The sergeant in charge turned at once and went back behind the barricade. “Lieutenant, we got trouble.”
The lieutenant was a Homeland Security officer with no
experience handling troops in the field. “What's up, Mac?”
The sergeant motioned with his head. “Ever wonder what a mob sounds like? Listen.”
The murmur was getting louder. “Get ’em ready,” the lieutenant said.
The sergeant turned and started shouting orders. Soldiers scrambled back behind the barricade and leveled their guns along the highway as the mob came into view: a wall of humanity coming toward them at a dead run.
The sergeant grabbed a bullhorn and stepped in front of the barricade. “Stop!” he bellowed. “That's an order. Go back to your homes. This highway is closed.”
The front ranks of the mob slowed, but the pressure from those further back pushed them forward. There were thousands of them, filling the parkway back as far as any of the soldiers could see.
“Stop!” the sergeant repeated. “Go back. You're not gonna be any safer on the other side of the river.”
The crowd was mostly at a standstill by then, with its front rank less than two yards from the barricade, shouting and pleading at the soldiers. A lean young man stepped out from the crowd, and shouted at the sergeant in a voice that carried over the noise: “You fucking liar! The bombs are coming—you think we're gonna let you leave us here to die?”
The sergeant raised the bullhorn again to answer, but at that same moment the young man whipped a pistol out of his pocket and shot at the sergeant. As he crumpled, the crowd surged forward against the barricades. The lieutenant, who had been watching the exchange from behind the line, panicked and shouted an order, and the soldiers opened fire into the crowd.
The next few minutes were a chaos of screams, pounding feet, and blood. There was no second rush at the barricades, no second volley: just panic, and then the pavement spattered with blood, the bodies of the dead and wounded, and a few dozen others crouching over these latter.
As the corporal called in for a medical team, the sergeant got up, slowly, from in front of the barricade.
“Jesus, Mac,” said the lieutenant, who had come forward to the line of the barricade. “You okay? I thought the kid wasted you.”
“Nah,” he said. “Bruised all to shit, but let's hear it for riot armor.” Then he raised his head and saw the highway. “Oh fuck,” he said then. “There's going to be hell to pay for this.”
18 September 2029: Mount Weather, Virginia
“How many?” Weed asked, horrified.
“Thirty-seven dead,” the aide repeated. “More than 100 wounded—they're not sure how many more. Trenton tried to send paramedics into the neighborhood, to try to get care to the walking wounded, and they got fired on.”
“That's bad.” Weed tried to clear his thoughts; there had still been no word from the Chinese, and the wait was chewing on his nerves. Back when the plans to close the freeways were drawn up, he wondered irritably, had anyone ever thought about how people would react?
“Have Homeland Security find out if the city government needs anything,” he said finally. “But this has got to be kept out of the media. We can't afford that kind of PR disaster. Frieda, see to it.”
“Sure thing, boss.” The press secretary left the conference room. The aide gave Weed an uncertain look, then left also.
Ellen Harbin watched them go, turned to Weed. “Mr. President, I'd like to suggest that that's an overreaction. If anything, the news ought to strengthen our position overseas. Nobody is likely to doubt your resolve if word of this gets out.”
“The rest of the world won't be voting in 2032,” he reminded her. “Let it go. What were you saying about the Iranians?”
She reached for the portfolio on the table, pulled out papers she'd pushed into it in a hurry when the aide and Frieda Thaler had arrived. In a low voice: “There's a real possibility they're about to launch an invasion of the Gulf. The Revolutionary Guards units we've been tracking since the beginning of the month—”
“The ones they moved to the Iraqi border.”
“Exactly. Satellite data shows them making preparations for an assault. They may think they can take advantage of the crisis.”
Weed considered that. “Or they're stone cold crazy. Got it.”
“Once the Chinese back down, we may have to tackle that right away,” she warned. “Having the Saudi oil fields in Iranian hands would be a disaster—and there's the risk of a general Mideast war if Turkey gets involved.”
Weed nodded. “Got it,” he repeated. “Get in touch with Bateson and get some options drawn up—and not a word to anybody about this Trenton thing. That could be a major mess.”
Unfortunately for Weed, it was already too late to contain the news. Two decades of cat-and-mouse games with NSA and a baker's dozen other federal agencies that wanted to keep the internet under some kind of control had spawned an entire outlaw web—the Undernet, the media called it, once the phrase “dark web” became passé—that could more or less evade government censorship. Even the draconian curbs imposed at the beginning of the nuclear crisis barely slowed the Undernet down. Within minutes of the shooting, the first reports began to spread; photos taken by cell phone cameras in the crowd soon followed, and the lack of any media coverage allowed terrifying rumors to move unhindered. Somewhere in the process, the events in New Jersey that afternoon received their enduring name: the Trenton Massacre.
18 September 2029: Wichita, Kansas
The surface streets were gridlocked. Major Roy Abernethy could see that much from where he stood on the onramp; there were cars jammed nose to tail going every which way. The Homeland Security broadcasts were still telling everybody to stay home and keep their heads down, but not too many people were listening. Half a dozen cars had come up the onramp, tried to back off, and gotten stuck between the barricade and the traffic behind. It was a real mess, no question.
He shook his head, walked back from the barricade to the field headquarters. The men of his detachment were piling out of the big National Guard trucks all along the freeway, relieving a Homeland Security unit that had been on duty for more than twenty-four hours. All the onramps to Interstate 35 had to be kept blocked, orders said, so the freeway was available for military and emergency traffic—not that there was much of that. Just one more clueless order from Washington, he thought.
“Hey, boss,” said Sergeant Chip Lansberger. He was standing outside the parked truck that served the unit at a field headquarters. “Something you probably ought to read.”
Abernethy climbed into the back of the truck, glanced over the shoulder of the tech at the comm terminal, stopped cold and then started reading again. “This is bad,” he said to Lansberger.
“No kidding.”
Abernethy turned to the tech. “Anything else come through about that?”
“No, sir.”
“Let me know if that changes.”
“Yes, sir.”
He jumped back down from the truck, looked back down at the gridlocked streets and the desperate people—all of them dead in moments if the bombs started flying and one came down over Wichita. Exactly why, he asked himself, am I following these orders?
No answer came to mind. He shook his head again, hoped that things would somehow work out.
18 September 2029: Austin, Texas
“Fred,” said Terry McCracken, “that's not good enough.”
When McCracken used those words, everyone in the state government dove for cover. On paper, the governor of Texas had less power than his peers in other states—McCracken was fond of reminding people that his home state was the only territory ever admitted to the Union that fought a civil war of its own, the Regulator-Moderator War of 1839–1844, over whether to have any laws at all—but a politician with enough charisma and ruthlessness could turn the office into a powerhouse. McCracken's opponents had plenty to say about his faults, but most of them admitted that he'd managed to become the most powerful politician Texas had seen since the days of Lyndon Johnson.
He listened for a while, then interrupted the man on the other end. “Fred, I don't care. I r
eally don't. You know and I know that this is gonna blow over sooner or later—yeah, Weed's a douche bag, but he's not enough of a douche bag to blow up the goddamn planet. You get me a line through to Trenton, and I can promise that you'll still be doing business in this state once this mess is over. You follow me? Thank you.”
Earlier that day he'd fielded the first worried calls from friends and political allies here and there in Texas. There were rumors that federal troops somewhere had fired into a crowd; there were rumors that the same thing had happened in more than one place. After the first three calls, he'd done the smart thing and called his teenage granddaughter, who was able to get something off the Undernet in minutes and tell him that whatever it was had happened in Trenton, New Jersey. That was enough; McCracken had friends in the New Jersey statehouse, and all he needed was an open long distance line—for official business, certainly, though he knew the feds wouldn't see it that way.
He got through on the second ring. “Sam? Yeah, this is Terry. Look, I know you're busier'n a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest, but I just heard about the business there in Trenton. What the hell happened?”
He was silent for several minutes, then, listening, and finally said, “Jesus Christ. I hope those sumbitches don't try that kind of thing here.” Another long silence. “Jesus,” he repeated. “Well, thank you, Sam. You got Laura someplace safe? Good. You keep your head down, and we'll talk once this mess is over.”
McCracken hung up, stared at the desk ahead of him for a while. It was all too easy to imagine what would play out if something like that happened in proud, gun-loving Texas. He picked up the phone a moment later, and called the state Homeland Security office.
The governor's staff in the room outside knew that something was wrong when McCracken's voice got loud enough to hear through the office door. They started giving each other worried looks when they heard every word he was saying—or more precisely shouting—into the phone: “Look, goddamnit, this is serious. Your boys start shooting at Texans, they're gonna get return fire, and you're gonna be—” Then, silence. When he slammed down the phone a moment later, with a roar of polymorphous profanity impressive even by Texas standards, they knew that an epic explosion was on its way. Two junior staffers who knew they wouldn't be missed got up, without making a sound, and fled from the room. The others sat in terrified silence and waited for the blast.
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