“All the problems this country has right now,” she said, “and his answer is spending lots of money we don't have, on new military technology that hasn't been invented yet, to keep on fighting wars the way we wish we could fight them so that we can pretend that this is still the twentieth century. Is that worth a lunch?”
“Sure thing.” Then: “But I should have guessed. It's stupid, but it's a familiar kind of stupid.”
“Now don't you try to back out on lunch.”
“Last thing on my mind, babe. Still, this country's been trying to solve its domestic problems by boosting its military budgets and throwing its weight around globally for a long time already. This is just one more step in that direction—and it's the kind of thing superpowers on the way down usually do.”
She glanced up at him. “Okay, I'll bite. Give me an example.”
“You're on. The British Navy put I forget how much of its annual budget into battleships before the First World War, so they could sit in harbor straight through most of the war and then go out to fight a useless battle off Jutland. Care to guess what the British Navy did to get ready for the Second World War?”
She glanced up at him. “Build more battleships?”
“Got it in one. If they'd put their money into antisubmarine technology, they wouldn't have been at the mercy of the U-boats until we bailed them out. If they'd put it into aircraft carriers, the way we and the Japanese were doing, they wouldn't have had their clocks cleaned in the first weeks of the Pacific war. If they'd done both, Britain might still have an empire today.”
“Were they just about bankrupt?”
“After the First World War? They owed us a lot of money, but they weren't as bad off as we are now. So Gurney has even less excuse than they did.” He shook his head. “So where do you want to have lunch?”
25 December 2029: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
By all accounts, it was shaping up to be the least cheery holiday season in America's history. McGaffney himself didn't care much one way or the other—for him, 25 December was just another day—but the editorial staff back in Brisbane wanted stories with a holiday spin, and he wasn't going to disappoint them.
He strolled down the mostly empty street. The big building next to him told a story all by itself: an old factory from Pittsburgh's glory days, it had been abandoned when the city's heavy industry went offshore in the Reagan years, got turned into a block of condos when Pittsburgh hit its second wind around 2000, and now stood mostly empty again, with only a few units still occupied. The city's population was right around half of what it had been in 1970, and after the stock market crash, no one was even pretending that better days would be back any time soon.
A newspaper vending box sat on the corner, the image on the screen switching back and forth between the latest headlines. He glanced at the thing as it showed GURNEY: MILITARY BUILDUP KEY TO PROSPERITY followed by MULLER: HEARINGS TO GO FORWARD. Both those were hot stories; Gurney's plan to get America back on its feet by way of big new defense outlays was coming in for savage criticism everywhere outside of his party's tame media outlets, and even some of those were making unenthusiastic noises. How that would play out when Congress met in the new year was a good question.
As for the hearings, Rosemary Muller was the new chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the media had been yammering for days about whether she'd pursue hearings on the East African War or knuckle under to whatever pressure Gurney's administration might be bringing to bear on her. The hearings would be a circus, McGaffney knew, and he'd already made plans to cover them.
He kept walking. A little further, according to the map he'd downloaded, the built-up area gave way to old industrial brownfields. The city government website insisted that those were empty—ready for development, even—but McGaffney thought he knew what he'd find there. He passed a long-vacant warehouse tagged with gang graffiti, turned a corner, and stopped to take in the scene.
Tents spilled across the open space between the street and the Monongahela River: well over 1,000 of them, a patchwork of fading colors interrupted here and there by grays and browns where someone had scavenged wood and shingles to put up something more permanent. There had been tent settlements around most large American cities for years, but never this large and never this many.
Close by, just off the road, a couple of pickup trucks had pulled over, and a crowd had gathered around them. McGaffney walked toward the crowd, and smelled the aroma of hot soup a moment before he caught sight of the folding tables and the dozen or so people handing out bowls to the crowd. A church group, he guessed, and circled around until the sign on one table confirmed it.
The church group ladled out soup, and the crowd pressed forward; a low murmur of conversation rose here and there, but that and the occasional noise of cars on nearby roads were the only sounds. No one seemed to notice McGaffney at all. He noted down the name of the church on his tablet, screening the action from view inside his coat—no need to attract attention to something that could be stolen and fenced for ready cash—then found a place to wait until the soup was gone and he'd have the chance for an interview or two. Looking over the crowd again, he thought: helluva Christmas.
17 January 2030: Arlington, Virginia
“Thank you for agreeing to meet me,” said the bland-faced man.
Bill Stedman nodded. “It wasn't an easy decision,” he admitted. “I'll be burning a lot of bridges if I testify—and of course there's been plenty of pressure.”
“Gurney's people, I assume.”
“Among others.”
The little café was empty except for the two men and a single bored waitress; the clock on the wall showed three in the afternoon, too late for lunch and too early for the going-home rush. Stedman had hoped for that, for more than the usual reasons. Since Senator Muller announced that she was going to go ahead with hearings on the East Africa War, he'd been bombarded with phone calls and emails pressuring him not to testify. The administration was scared, no doubt about that, and he knew they had good reason to be: if word got out about just how many bad decisions had been made and how many overpriced Pentagon toys had failed to measure up in combat, Gurney's plans to rebuild US military superiority would go out the window, and take his presidency with them.
“But you're willing to go ahead?” the bland-faced man asked.
“Yes,” Stedman told him. “I've thought it over, and I'll do it.”
“Thank you,” the bland-faced man said again. “Mrs. Muller will be happy to make whatever arrangements you need. She'd like to schedule your testimony for mid-April, if that works for you.”
Stedman pulled out his phone, checked his calendar, nodded. “That'll be fine. The sooner you can let me know exactly when, the better—I'll need to review my files and make sure I have all the details ready.”
“The committee's particularly interested in the planning stage. There'll be people from the Pentagon on the stand to talk about what happened on their end, but they'll be asking you about what happened in the White House.”
“Gurney's people will try everything they can to slap executive privilege on that,” Stedman warned him.
“They're welcome to try,” the other man said, with a thin smile that suddenly took all the blandness out of his face. “We've got them by the short hairs, and there's not much they can do about it.”
“I hope you're right,” Stedman said.
6 February 2030: The Capitol, Washington DC
“Mike,” said Vice President Bridgeport, “this thing stinks. I mean that.”
They were sitting in the vice presidential office in the Capitol Building. Some vice presidents rarely set foot in the room except for formal functions, others used it for their legislative duties; Bridgeport had no intention of being cut out of the Congressional loop, and made it his home base, hosting meetings there with senators and representatives and trying to pull together some practical response to a nation in disarray. Gurney's fixation on the military left
a vacuum in domestic policy, and Congress was being drawn into it.
Still, there were domestic policies that might help, and then there was this: the New American Prosperity Act, which established an expensive new social welfare system and loaded most of the financial burden for it onto the states. Bridgeport had frowned when he'd read the first drafts of it, and his opinion hadn't gotten any less dour as it worked its way through committee, picking up support as it went.
Senator Mike Kamanoff, Senate majority leader that year, leaned forward. “Pete, we've got to do something. Have you seen the latest polls? If we can't come up with some kind of fix for the economy, I don't know if any of us are going to survive the next election.”
“I know that,” said Bridgeport. “But screwing the states isn't going to help. You know what kind of budget crunch they're in.”
“You know what kind of budget crunch we're in. If tax revenues drop any further we're going to have to hold bake sales to keep the lights on.”
“The states are in the same bind,” Bridgeport pointed out.
“They can find the money.”
“Try telling them that.”
“Pete—” Kamanoff gestured, palms out. “You know the situation as well as I do. One party won't accept any tax increases, the other side won't accept any spending cuts, and the economy's in the toilet, so both sides have to dig in their heels or they're going to get reamed by the voters. Everybody wants something and everybody wants the other guy to pay for it. So we spin our wheels and go nowhere, or we do something like this—” He tapped the piece of paper in front of him. “—that might actually pass.”
“And won't do a bit of good,” said Bridgeport. “Not if the economy's going to get socked with another round of state budget cuts and defaults. You can't just keep on piling one unfunded mandate after another on top of them. Tell you what—instead of this thing, let's get you, Phil Schick, the big names from both sides of the aisle right here in this room, put together a bipartisan commission, make whatever deals we have to, and actually do something that might make a difference.”
Kamanoff considered that for a moment, then shook his head. “Too slow, too uncertain, and I don't trust that bastard Schick as far as I could throw him. No, we're going with this.”
Bridgeport gave him a bleak look. If he'd kept his Senate seat, he knew, there were ways he might have been able to fight it, but as vice president he had few options. “Well, it's your call. How soon do you want me to discuss this with Gurney?”
“Soon. I'm pretty sure we've got the votes in both Houses, and if he's going to balk or want changes, the sooner I know that, the better.”
8 February 2030: Nashville, Tennessee
The two of them, grandfather and grandson, walked most of a mile before either of them said a word. There were only a few cars in the lot where they left the car, and fewer people in the park around them.
“This ought to do,” said Bill Stedman.
His nineteen-year-old grandson gave him a worried look. “Are you in trouble?”
“Well—” Stedman considered it. “Probably not. I'm going to be testifying to a Senate committee, and there are some people who aren't too happy about that.” He glanced at the boy. “I don't think there's going to be any trouble—but if something happens, there's some stuff I want to go public in a big way. You're the family computer geek, and I figure you probably know someone who can help with that.”
“Yeah,” said the boy. “I've got some friends.”
“Good.” Very casually, in case they were being watched, his hand brushed the boy's, and a thumb drive passed from one to the other, found its way into the boy's pocket.
The boy turned to face him. “Grandpa, do you need to go dark? I mean, really dark?”
Stedman considered that, too. “Going dark” was hacker slang, he knew that much—it meant dropping out of sight of the authorities. There were supposed to be a lot of people who had done that, slipping into the crawlspaces of society for one reason or another.
“No,” he said after a moment. “No, I don't think there's actually going to be any trouble over this. I just want some insurance in place.” He gave the boy a grin. “We better get back to the car and get those groceries, so your mom doesn't start wondering if we're up to something.”
20 February 2030: The Capitol, Washington DC
“Pete,” said Governor McCracken, “you've got to shake some sense into these morons. Half the states in the Union are about to go broke anyway. I mean that literally; in Texas we're only getting about two-thirds the tax revenues we're used to, and we're better off than most. We can't afford the unfunded mandates we've got already, and this goddamn thing—”
“I know,” said Bridgeport.
“Then why the hell is Congress going ahead with it?”
The governor of Oregon tried to insert herself between the irate Texan and the vice president. “Terry, it's not as though Pete's backing the bill.”
“You're the goddamn president of the Senate!” McCracken said, right over her head.
“And if it comes to a tie,” said Bridgeport, “I'm voting no. You have my word on that.”
McCracken opened his mouth to say something, stopped, and said, “Thank you, Pete. That's about the first reasonable thing anybody's said to me since I got off the plane this morning.” Then: “What's the chance that it'll come to a tie?”
“In the Senate? I can't be sure, but not as good as I'd like.”
The governors—there were an even dozen of them, and word was that every other state governor and every state legislature backed them—didn't look pleased by the news. “I get that,” said the governor of Michigan. “Everyone we've talked to says, ‘Well, we have to do something.’ ‘Then do something,’ I keep saying. ‘Don't just tell us to do something, when we're doing as much as we can already.’ They just look at me.”
“Beltway syndrome,” the governor of Oregon said. “If you want to know where Julie Blau gets her ideas, I have some suggestions.”
Bridgeport tried not to wince. Blau was the hottest of the new standup comedians, and she was doing skit after skit on her nightly podcast about Beltway syndrome, an imaginary disease that infected politicians exactly seventy-two hours after they arrived in Washington and instantly reduced them to drooling, slack-jawed idiocy. The phrase was popping up everywhere from social media to the evening news just then, yet another marker of the nation's impatience with the federal government's ongoing gridlock.
“Have you talked to Gurney?” Bridgeport asked.
“Oh yeah,” said the governor of Michigan. “We wasted our time there, too. He read us a little lecture about how the way to solve the country's problems is lots of defense jobs. If signing the thing gets Congress to cough up money for the new carrier fleet, that's all he cares about.”
“Pete,” said McCracken, “something's got to give. I mean it. Things can't keep on going the way they're going.” The big Texan's voice took on a rumbling note that reminded Bridgeport uncomfortably of distant thunder. “If Washington can't get its goddamn act together, something's going to give.”
2 March 2030: Camden, New Jersey
McGaffney crossed the empty parking lot toward the mall as rain splashed down around him. Ten years earlier it would have been snow, or so people had been saying all week: one more sign of the same shifting climate that had the western half of the United States hammered by drought and winter rains falling in the Sahara for the first time in millennia. One more change, he thought, in a world where more and more things stubbornly refused to stay put.
The main doors of the mall, as he'd guessed, were boarded up. He turned and went toward the next set of doors, found the same thing, and kept going. Sooner or later—
He got halfway around the complex before he saw someone step out through a little service door in an otherwise blank wall, out of sight of casual traffic. Whoever it was saw McGaffney at that same instant, and ducked back inside. McGaffney grinned, walked over to the door,
and tried it. It was unlocked, as he'd guessed, and he pulled it wide open.
“G'day!” he called into the half-darkness inside. “Name's Tommy McGaffney. I'm a reporter from Australia—mind if I come in and talk to some of you?”
There was no answer for a moment, and then a gaunt young man in Army surplus clothes stepped into the light. “McGaffney? Didn't you visit the camp in Shinyanga?”
McGaffney blinked and then grinned. What were the odds of that? “Too right,” he said, trying to remember the man's name. “You're—wait—Wallace, wasn't it? Corporal Wallace.”
“Yeah, that's me.” He allowed a smile. “I guess you travel a lot. What'cha want to talk to us about?”
“How the American economy's gone down the crapperoo,” McGaffney said.
That got him a sour laugh, as he'd guessed it would. “Come on,” the young man said. “You wanna know about that, you'll get an earful.”
Inside was a narrow hallway, and then a court surrounded by what had once been little boutiques. The place had been abandoned for years, McGaffney guessed: a third-rate shopping mall thrown up by promoters, leased to overenthusiastic retail chains, and then left twisting in the wind as the economy slumped year after year and people who didn't have money stopped spending it. Until the stock market crash, though, nobody had started moving in. Now there were families living in the boutiques—McGaffney could see faces peering out at him from the shadows—and the long-dry fountain in the middle of the court had been turned into a fire pit for cooking what food there was.
The young man led McGaffney straight to the fountain, where a middle-aged woman wrapped in a coat that had seen many better days was feeding sticks to a fire. She gave McGaffney a wary look as he approached.
“Momma,” the young man said, “this guy's a reporter from Australia. I met him at the camp in Tanzania.”
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