And it wasn’t going nearly as smoothly as they had hoped. Hence the notepad, outlining a few details of the contingency plan Archive and the group of distinguished illuminati had enacted.
Members of the group had been arriving via various means at the largely self-sustaining enclave at Lost Man Lake Ranch in a steady stream since the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and the large ranch house – more a resort than anything else, elegantly appointed in addition to its self-sufficiency – now supported more than two dozen members and their families.
They hadn’t all agreed on the best course of action right away, of course. There had been lively debate, as would be expected among a crowd of self-made millionaires and internationally recognized personalities. But they had eventually wound up in vehement agreement with each other on the best way forward.
And despite the disconcerting news about the way society was reacting, they stuck by their earlier decision to destroy the financial juggernaut. The choice had been based on what Art Levitow, the brilliant quantum physicist whose device had disabled the computers and satellites that ran the banking system, termed a “mathematical inevitability.” Debt-fueled self-dealing always ends in bloody revolution, he’d claimed.
After Levitow rattled off a long list of countries whose fiat economies had collapsed spectacularly over the past century, Protégé wasn’t inclined to argue, and Levitow’s logic had formed the basis of Protégé’s decision to participate in the “bloodless devolution” they’d hoped to pull off.
But there was blood.
Protégé shook his head, images of street rioting and bloodied, hungry, frightened citizens flashing through his mind. True, the casualties were small in an absolute sense. The news channels were reporting just shy of a thousand deaths nationwide. Roughly a normal month’s worth of automobile accident fatalities. Not an epidemic, by any stretch, but Protégé couldn’t help feeling a sense of responsibility.
But much better than your average revolution, he thought, turning back to the page of Archive’s notes.
The phone rang. Archive answered, and put it on speakerphone. “General Williamson,” he said.
“Hello, old man,” a deep African American voice intoned. “I’d never have signed up for this if I realized how much work I was creating for myself.”
Archive laughed his easy, mirth-filled laugh. “But you’re well-staffed, I trust. After all, you are charged with ensuring the safety and security of the entire North American continent.”
“That I am,” said the commander of Northern Command, or NORTHCOM in military parlance, the joint organization comprised of units from all four military branches. “I must say I’m more than a little apprehensive about my ability to fulfill my charter, though. Things appear to be on an uncomfortable vector at the moment.”
Archive chuckled. “Is that four-star speak for ‘going to hell in a hand-basket?’”
“Sure is.”
“So you’ve made the call to embed the counterinsurgency teams?”
“Absolutely. Moving out from Norfolk and San Diego, mostly.”
Protégé listened intently, studying the flow chart block containing the words “Spec Ops COIN Units,” written by Archive’s ridiculously expensive Montblanc pen just minutes ago.
“So you’re using the SEAL teams, then?” Archive asked.
“Primarily, yes,” Williamson answered. “Special Operations Command is heavily committed overseas at the moment, and the bulk of them won’t be back home for another forty-eight hours.”
“And you’re confident they’ll make the adjustment to operating in American society?”
“I am,” Williamson said. “Though there will undoubtedly be problems. You can’t send twenty year-old kids overseas to live with Afghani tribesmen for a year and then expect them to assimilate seamlessly into a group of fragmented American gangs who are all trying to fill the power vacuum.”
Archive exhaled, a concerned look on his face.
“But they will figure it out,” the general said. “They’re good at what they do.”
“Do we have an idea of which gangs are emerging as regionally dominant?”
“It will probably come as no surprise that the gangs best positioned to prosper during the financial freeze ended up being the ones with an existing infrastructure. So the drug cartels are branching out, and starting to take over food delivery and other services.”
Archive nodded. “Makes good business sense.”
“And it’s a great way to gain social legitimacy,” Williamson said. “My orders to the special operators were to support and amplify those kinds of efforts, while doing their best to avoid participating in the more negative behaviors endemic to the particular groups they’re infiltrating.”
“Well said. Won’t the local gangs be suspicious of newcomers?” Archive asked.
“Certainly. But they’re the only real functioning social structure at the moment, and they’re recruiting like mad. Less than a quarter of our law enforcement officers and firefighters are on the job, because they’re all at home trying to take care of their families. So there’s nobody else to deal with problems as they crop up, and the gangs are starting to provide basic necessities, using their existing underground networks to move those goods around. We’re also seeing the suburban middle class take on a labor role in support of the infrastructure effort.”
Archive smiled. “What an amazing juxtaposition.”
“Absolutely,” Williamson said. “And I’m relieved to learn that the kind of spontaneous organization we hoped for is actually taking place.”
“But there’s a bit more bloodshed than we’d hoped. Can we fix that?”
“Not quickly. I’m afraid the casualty numbers will continue to climb. My special operators will be able to reduce the violence to some degree, but I only have so many of them, and it’s a big country. My strategy is to focus on the big population centers, to keep them from erupting in open conflict while people organize themselves to meet their own needs.”
Archive considered. “I think it actually helps that most law enforcement officers are at home. That makes them less visible to the gangs, who are habituated to viewing authority as enemies.”
“Concur,” Williamson said. “Make no mistake, though. There are some really bad people in those gangs. We need to be very careful about how we approach this situation. It’s extremely tenuous.”
“What are your marching orders from the top?”
Williamson snorted. “Disastrous.”
“He hasn’t.”
“I’m afraid he has. It won’t be announced for a few hours, and I’m stalling for more time. But the President has issued a verbal order for me to institute martial law. We’re activating the National Guard.”
Archive’s expression turned sour. He shook his head. “That may be unrecoverable.”
“I don’t think so,” Williamson disagreed. “I’d say we’ll get ahold of half of our guardsmen in the next forty-eight hours, and not even half of them will report for duty within the next couple of days after that. And due to some inherent inefficiencies in the congressionally-mandated structure of my command, which I won’t make any real effort to mitigate, actually getting them deployed in numbers could take me up to a week.”
“I thought they were supposed to be anywhere in the world in seventy-two hours,” Archive said.
Williamson laughed. “That’s what the Guard Bureau wants us to think. Truth is, we’d be hard-pressed to send them anywhere inside a month, and that’s without trying to get them to leave their spouses and children at home in the middle of a social meltdown.”
Archive smiled. “Sounds like it’s not quite a straightforward proposition.”
“Which works to our advantage at the moment,” NORTHCOM said. “Besides, I don’t have any food reserves to hand out to civilians, so my soldiers would just be milling about on street corners, making a spectacle of themselves.”
Archive pondered. “All things considered, it sounds lik
e we’re actually in decent shape. You have things well in hand, General.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Williamson said. “But I think we’re moving quickly in the right direction, and I plan to move extremely slowly in the wrong one.”
Archive laughed. “I’m glad you’re on the job to walk such a fine line.”
“I won’t last forever. If the President survives the crisis, I’m sure my head will be one of the first to roll.”
“You’re always welcome at the Ranch,” Archive said.
Protégé nudged the old man and handed him a small slip of paper torn from the notepad, on which he had scrawled a single word: Stalwart.
“Heavens me, I’d nearly forgotten,” the old man said. “General, we’ve got one of our own in a dire situation in rural Oklahoma. He called us late last night. He was captured by a local band of toughs, and they’re murdering people. Is there any chance we can send help?”
“I’m afraid not,” Williamson said. “If he was in a major city, I’d be able to send someone. But I can’t afford to divert my men from the urban areas out into the sticks. It’s just too touch-and-go in the cities right now.”
Archive nodded. “I understand. We’ll hope for the best.” He thanked the general and signed off.
Protégé let out a breath. “Sounds like this thing could go either way.”
Archive agreed. “I hope this doesn’t turn into Rwanda.”
“That would be one way to solve the overpopulation problem,” Protégé said grimly.
“But not one I would want to be responsible for.”
22
Near Ardmore, Oklahoma
“I think I’m going to puke,” Brock said, stepping away from the corpse in the rest stop men’s room.
Sam lifted the paper towel covering the dead man’s face. “Is this Mike Charles?” she asked.
Brock shook his head, lifting his shirt to shield his mouth and nose from the powerful stench. “Definitely not.”
Sam peeled away a shard of blood-soaked paper towel covering the man’s chest, revealing a gaping wound where his innards once were. “Twelve-gauge, I’d guess,” She said, shaking her head. “Shot from up close, judging by how tight the pattern looks.”
“Looks like it did the trick.”
Sam searched the corpse for a wallet or a set of keys, but found nothing she could use to identify the body, or provide a clue as to why the man might have been killed.
She looked at the floor. It was covered in bloody footprints of all shapes and sizes, just like the larger anteroom. Who murders a man and then walks around barefoot in his blood? It was macabre. And it went against basic human nature. “I count at least a dozen different footprints around here,” she said.
“This is creeping me out.”
Sam nodded. “Either it was some ritual cult killing, or there’s something else going on.”
“My money’s on ‘something else,’” Brock said. “I don’t think rest stops are big cult gathering locations.”
“All the empty cars in the parking lot are bothering me, as are the barefoot footprints. I think a bunch of people were locked in here with the corpse.”
Brock shivered.
Sam followed a string of partial footprints out the door of the anteroom, across the narrow sidewalk, and into the dry grass of the rest stop. All of the footprints crossed the sidewalk and headed into the grass at roughly the same point. “Looks like they all headed out into the field,” she said, following the faint impressions remaining in the dry grass.
The trail stopped abruptly, just a few feet in front of a set of tire tracks.
Holy shit!
Sam thought she’d figured out what happened to all the people.
She straightened up and stared at the rest stop entrance. “Brock, do you remember that rental truck that was leaving as we arrived? What direction did it turn on the frontage road?”
“Turned right,” he answered. “Why?”
“I think it was full of people.”
Sam matted the accelerator and peeled around the corner leading out of the rest stop parking lot and onto the frontage road, then angled toward the highway on-ramp. She didn’t have any idea how much time had elapsed since they’d passed the rental truck on their way into the parking lot, but she was grateful for the dearth of highway exits in the rural section of I-35. There was still a chance they’d be able to catch up to the truck despite its head start.
Traffic was agreeably sparse. It wasn’t like the city people were fleeing to the barren plains to meet their suddenly-urgent need for food and water, but there were still a few cars about, driving at a far more Oklahoma-esque pace than Sam could tolerate at the moment. She used the horn, the lights, and the shoulder to work her way northbound around the annoyingly slow rural drivers.
Engine whining, the small rental car crested a promontory and rounded a gentle curve in the highway, heading toward an underpass. “There!” Brock pointed out the passenger window. A UHaul truck was making its way up the exit ramp toward the cross-street.
“Dammit!” Sam had already passed the exit. She recalled having read a road sign a mile ago informing her that the next off-ramp wouldn’t appear for another five miles.
That wasn’t going to work for her. She checked her mirror, slammed on the brakes, and turned hard to the left, bouncing and jolting over the shoulder and across the dusty median. Brock barked as the jerks and bumps jostled his wounded thigh.
The tires chirped as they regained their grip on the pavement on the southbound side of the highway. Sam charged across the interstate and up the opposite exit ramp, engine protesting as she climbed the hill toward the overpass intersection.
As they approached the stop sign at the top of the hill, the UHaul truck drove right in front of them, heading west on the crossroad. “Sweet!” Brock exclaimed. “Now what?”
“Good question.” Sam considered her options as she fell in behind the van, following at a good distance in order to avoid arousing the driver’s suspicion.
They were in a rental car, which lacked the stopping power of a set of police lights. She considered pulling abreast of the driver’s door and trying to flag the truck down, but it seemed a risky proposition. If the driver was hauling a moving truck full of frightened pink flesh, he probably wouldn’t be inclined to stop for a friendly chat in the middle of nowhere with a random stranger wielding a badge of some sort.
Plus, if her suspicions were correct, and the truck contained enough people to account for all of the abandoned cars at the rest stop, it would undoubtedly take more than a couple of toughs to corral everyone. So she and Brock would likely be outnumbered.
And there was at least one shotgun in play, and at least one asshole with the willpower to use it in anger, if the bloody mess in the rest stop building was any indicator.
“I don’t like the odds right now,” Sam said. “I think we bide our time and look for an opportunity.”
The noontime sun beat down on the Oklahoma prairie, and Sam felt the little car’s air conditioner kick on, straining the undersized engine and causing a noticeable loss of acceleration power.
She followed the moving truck at a nonthreatening distance, lamenting the fact that she was forced to engage in a single-car tailing operation. In the counterespionage world, a single-car tail was an invitation to get caught, lose the mark, or both. In rougher parts of the world, it was a great way to get killed. The pros used teams of at least half a dozen cars, all connected via radio and cell phone, to keep tabs on a target vehicle without announcing their presence.
But you play the hand you’re dealt, Sam thought. She suspected that the economic terrorist strike that had set off the financial meltdown was just a prelude to something else. It would be too easy to exploit the power vacuum and ensuing chaos, and even if the terrorists’ original plan wasn’t to take over the country, some enterprising asshole with means and an appropriate lack of scruples would certainly hatch a bright idea at some point.
So her suspicion of a deeper plot’s existence sparked a keen interest in having a conversation with Mike Charles, the DoD muckety-muck who, before disappearing, had traveled to Fort Worth to watch a live demonstration of the beam-controller doohickey at Langston Marlin’s factory, an event that was followed very closely by the theft of the same doohickey.
The thieves had made use of Charles’ access badge and PIN, which suggested that Charles was either rolled and squeezed by the thieves for his access credentials, or that he provided those credentials willingly, and was part of the plot.
Sam suspected the latter, for the simple reason that Mike Charles had used his status as a senior DoD civilian executive to authorize a cargo aircraft to land at Langley Air Force Base, in Hampton, Virginia.
That was an interesting little tidbit to Sam, because the photon death rays, or whatever the hell the science geeks called them, appeared to have been sitting at Langley Air Force Base when they zapped several billion dollars’ worth of communication satellites.
Right across the street from the four-star’s headquarters building, to be precise. Sam’s first impression of General Hajek wasn’t favorable – a bit too heavy on the standard patrician chauvinist bullshit, and a bit too light on cooperation and forthrightness – so she found herself including Hajek in the universe of possible co-conspirators.
But the moving truck. That was a curveball.
Mike Charles might not even be one of the passengers herded like cattle into the back of the UHaul – if that’s indeed what had happened to the owners of all of those abandoned cars at the rest stop – but Sam had no other leads regarding his whereabouts. Charles could easily have stopped momentarily at the rest stop, switched cars to throw off any investigators, and continued north on his merry way while the financial world continued to turn to molten slag around him.
That would suck for Sam, especially with no manpower back at DHS to work on an electronic trace of Charles’ cell phone to provide clues to his location. Apparently, the on-call Homeland cyber investigation team had taken a powder due to all the chaos in DC.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 152