The Illuminati

by Larry Burkett

  “A tsunami!” Frances repeated as she tried to decipher what that meant. “How could a tsunami just appear from nowhere?”

  “It’s from the earthquake in Japan,”Maury shouted as he reached for the phone. “I’ll call Los Angeles International and see what they have.” Even as he spoke, he punched the auto-dialer to ring the head of the National Weather Service station at LAX.

  The calm greeting from the L.A. tower told Maury they were oblivious to the potential disaster.

  “L.A.Weather. Robert Atkins here.”

  “Bob, this is Andy at Point Magoo. Do you guys have anything on your long-range radar at about 210?”

  “Yeah we do, Andy. But we thought we were having an echo blip on the system so we dropped back to the seventy-five mile range. Why do you ask?”

  “Because what you saw is not an echo!” Maury screamed into the phone. “It’s a tsunami heading toward the mainland.”

  “A tsunami? That’s impossible,” Bob replied. “This thing just popped up on our screen a few minutes ago. It’s got to be an echo.”

  “I’m telling you it’s for real, Bob. It’s from that quake in Japan, I think. Probably surged underwater until it hit the shallows. That thing is going to hit the area in less than an hour. You need to get all the planes you can in the air!”

  Atkins sat at his desk without responding for several seconds. Was Maury kidding him? He had never heard him say or do anything that was nonprofessional. But a tsunami? “Look, Andy, I appreciate the call, but you must be wrong. How could a tsunami make it across the Pacific without us knowing it? Besides, we would have been warned well in advance.”

  “Bob, you’ve got to believe me! It’s a tsunami! The biggest I’ve ever heard of, and it’s going to hit your area in forty-seven minutes at its present speed. The kid from Cal Tech was right. The earthquakes, the tsunami . . . we’re staring at the result.”

  “That was just some wild theory, Andy. Our guys in Washington said to forget it. We’re looking at some sort of computer snafu.”

  “Look . . . cycle your radar over to long range and start tracking this thing and you’ll believe it! You need to get every plane in the air and then try to get your people out of there!”

  “Yeah, well, thanks a lot for the tip, Andy. I’ll see what I can do,” Atkins said as he leaned back in his chair. I can just see the inquisition in Washington if I empty L.A. International on a tip that a tidal wave might hit, he thought as he sipped his coffee. No way I’m going to do that with three years left to retirement. His thoughts drifted to the home he and his wife, Sara, had just bought down in San Diego. Not on the beach, he reflected, but close enough to walk on it anytime we want to.

  “Wait, Bob!”Maury shouted as the phone went dead. He knew his counterpart at the airport weather station was not going to listen. He hung up the phone and tried to decide what to do.

  The next twenty minutes were pure frustration as Andy Maury attempted to call everyone he knew at the Weather Bureau in Washington. All he got was a lot of “I’ll tell him you called when he returns, Mr. Maury.”No amount of pleading or cursing could get even one of the secretaries to alter her normal routine. His shouting about a tsunami might just as well have been a casual warning about an impending rain storm. Nothing he said had impressed them. Naturally, he thought. They live three thousand miles from the Pacific.

  Maury was not the only person trying to alert the nation. At the office of the president in Washington, D.C., the phone rang. Clarence Barrett, the president’s appointment secretary, answered it: “President Kilborne’s office.”

  “Clarence, this is Andrew. I need to talk to him right now!” Secretary of Defense Andrew Singer, a no-nonsense ex-chairman of the joint chiefs, had been chosen by Kilborne to restore some discipline in the demoralized ranks of the military, which had been decimated by budget cuts. Recently he had been trying to ferret out what appeared to be a secret society among some of his most influential military leaders. General Gorman, chairman of the joint chiefs, had reported that several top ranking officers were engaged in secret meetings outside the normal service protocol. If he didn’t know it was the top brass of the United States military, he might have thought it was the beginnings of a military coup, he had told the president earlier. But that was not the subject of this call. He had just gotten word that one of his boomers had gone down in the Pacific. And even more frightening was the report of missile subs lost by the Russians and Chinese, who had probably been shadowing his sub.

  “What’s it about, Andrew? He’s in conference with some Senate group.”

  “You need to get him out! One of our boomers is down and so are two other subs—one Russian and one Chinese.”

  “I’ll get him!” Barrett said immediately. What now? he puzzled. He trembled even as he considered it. World tensions were at an all-time high since the depression hit. He punched the interrupt code reserved for messages of the highest priority.

  President Kilborne leaned over to his interoffice phone, glad to get a short respite from the verbal lashing he had been receiving from the Senate leaders because he had ignored Bob Lowe’s earthquake warnings. It still hurt as he remembered how Lowe had shafted him. “Yes, Clarence, what is it?”

  “Mr. President, Andrew Singer is on the hot line. I think you need to talk with him. It’s urgent.”

  The president pressed the mute switch as he turned back to the senators, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes.” Even as he spoke, Barrett, who had opened the office door, was directing the irritated senators out of the Oval Office.

  “I’ll be back, Mr. President,” the senator from Ohio said very curtly. “You still have some explaining to do if you want my support.”

  Kilborne sighed as he punched the talk button. Maybe I don’t want your support, he thought. Maybe I don’t want this job anymore.

  “What’s up, Andrew?” the president asked as he mentally braced himself for more bad news. Maybe I won’t have to worry about the next election, he contemplated. One more disaster like that press conference, and the Democrats will probably lynch me.

  “We’ve lost a missile sub in the Pacific, Mr. President. And the Russians and Chinese have lost the attack subs that were trailing her.”

  Kilborne sat up straighter. “Did we have an exchange?”

  “No, sir. None that we know of, and the monitors on the radiation satellites show no signs of nuclear detonation.”

  “Thank God,” Kilborne said with obvious relief. “Then what happened?”

  “We don’t know, sir,” the ex-general, nearly twice the age of the president, replied. “As well as I can determine, we had a distress call from our boomer saying they were caught in a subsurface current of some kind. The next thing we heard was the sub breaking up. The Russians reported much the same thing. The Chinese aren’t saying anything at present, as normal. They just lost one-third of their total sub force, so they’ll be hot. We’ve already sent them assurances, through channels, that we didn’t sink their sub.”

  Thank God, it wasn’t an exchange, Kilborne thought as he tried to piece together what this might mean. Just then his secretary broke in over the intercom again.

  “Mr. President, Dr. Patrick Holmes is on line two. He says it’s most urgent. I told him you were talking with General Singer and he says it’s related.”

  Dr. Holmes, head of the U.S. Oceanographic Committee, which coordinated all the industrial nations to manage the oceans, was the most knowledgeable government official on international use of oceans. His office managed hundreds of surveillance satellites and underwater pollution detectors to see who was dumping their wastes in the oceans and harvesting more fish than allocated. The committee operated much like an ocean cartel, controlling the use of the common seas. He also had the best communications with the various scientific groups from each country.

  “This is the president,” Kilborne said slowly and deliberately as he transferred over to line two of his private phone.<
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  “Mr. President, I just received word from our monitoring station in the Eastern Pacific that a three-hundred-foot tsunami is headed toward the California coast. It will hit in less than thirty minutes.”

  “What! Are you sure, Patrick?” the president shouted, in spite of himself.

  “Very sure, Mr. President,” the young oceanographer said. “The wave traveled across the Pacific in the trenches until it hit the shallows. Now it’s bunching up. The surface wave is traveling at over three hundred miles an hour.”

  “Just what Wells’ program predicted!” Kilborne shouted in anger. A chill ran down his neck when his mind moved from political strategy to the impending natural disaster. He leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “What do you suggest, Patrick?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing we can do now.”

  4

  PANIC

  “I want every radio and television station in Southern California to go to emergency broadcast,” President Kilborne instructed his civil defense director, Craig Newball, over the phone.

  “Why,Mr. President?” the startled Newball questioned as his feet fell off the desktop and hit the floor.

  “A tsunami will strike the California coast just above Los Angeles in less than twenty minutes,” Kilborne snapped impatiently. “Notify everyone who can do so to head inland. And Craig . . .”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” the elder member of the civil defense team replied breathlessly.

  “I want a full contingent of civil defense people mobilized in California immediately. Call Crow and have the National Guard brought out. If he gives you any static, tell him I’ll nationalize them if I have to.”

  They really did a job on Crow, too, Kilborne thought. Whoever they are . . . .

  For ten minutes some radio and television stations in Southern California blared out an emergency alarm, but nearly three-fourths of the stations wouldn’t interrupt normal programming to carry the message. A few disc jockeys assumed it was some elaborate practical joke and simply ignored it, and many of the listeners thought it was just another test of the emergency broadcast system. It didn’t really matter because the Californians who did believe the broadcasts were scarcely into their cars when the gigantic wave struck.

  The unbelievable force of the wave as it hit the shore, bringing with it tons of debris from the sea, shook mountains as far inland as San Bernardino. The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth II, anchored at the Los Angeles harbor as floating casinos, were swept up in the wave and flung miles inland, along with thousands of other vessels. The sound of the wave was bone chilling. Everything in its path was swept before it. Buildings and houses alike collapsed under billions of tons of water crashing inland at nearly three hundred miles an hour.

  The wave penetrated nearly three miles inland before the fury of the tide beat itself out on the hills and valleys surrounding the greater Los Angeles area. Farther to the south, in the less-populated communities along the coast, scarcely a person survived the roaring torrent of salt water. As the water rushed back to the ocean, it carried with it homes, cars, and people; few would ever be recovered from the depths of the Pacific.

  Even as far north as San Francisco, the ocean rose nearly twelve feet, causing massive damage to sensitive ecological systems. Buildings collapsed as their foundations were undercut by the rushing water. The bay area suffered an estimated $3 billion in damage. Some three thousand lives were lost.

  Disaster relief teams were flown in from every part of the country, as well as from Canada and Europe. In an effort to control the marauding bands of looters drawn to the disaster area, civil defense armies were formed out of National Guard units from around the country. The fighting between civil defense troops and heavily armed gangs became so intense that units of the U.S. Army had to be flown in to reinforce the National Guard troops. The scene in Southern California took on the appearance of a war zone. President Kilborne authorized the troops to shoot on sight anyone found looting or molesting another citizen. Civil rights groups, led by the national Civil Liberties Union, screamed that such action was a violation of basic human rights. In the wake of the devastation, few Americans lent a sympathetic ear to the protesters.

  As the marauders expanded their territory to neighboring states, it appeared that a civil war might break out for control of the area. Automatic weapons were in such demand by frightened citizens that they became the currency of the day. An M-19 automatic assault rifle sold for as much as ten thousand dollars on the black market.

  Viewed from the air, the coast of California from just north of Los Angeles to south of San Luis Obispo, looked as if a nuclear blast had hit the area. All the structures that once had housed businesses and residences were swept into the sea or deposited along the coast for several hundred miles, creating navigational hazards to ships that were bringing in relief materials. Pirates, both American and Mexican, terrorized the coastline in power boats modified for use as assault crafts. Ships approaching the California coast were in constant danger of being boarded and pirated. The U.S. Navy had to provide heavily armed cutters to patrol the shoreline in support of the relief ships. Even so, small-scale naval battles were fought as the pirate boats often matched a cutter’s firepower. Even the redirection of several larger naval vessels did not deter the pirates. Their smaller crafts were no match for the navy’s bigger ships, but their speed and maneuverability made them difficult targets.

  Full-time television coverage saturated American viewers with scenes of the ravaged west coast. The blame for the disaster was placed clearly upon President Kilborne and Governor Crow. The nightly news carried interviews with leading government officials who were demanding Kilborne’s resignation. It was fruitless for Kilborne to even attempt to appear in public. Friends and families of the victims in California, gathered outside the White House, shouted and screamed obscenities at him whenever he was seen. The media refused to provide any time for the president; for all intents, he was a man without a country.

  Seeing what had happened to Kilborne, Crow attempted to shift all the blame on to the president, even going so far as to insinuate that California officials had plotted to keep the disaster from the public at the president’s orders. Both men’s ratings plummeted in the polls.

  Senator Mark Hunt addressed the nation regularly on the need for a strong president to lead the nation out of the economic crises caused by this natural disaster. In an interview on The Nation’s Leaders, a program that achieved an unprecedented first place in the prime time ratings, he said: “Fellow Americans, we face a time of the gravest danger. The man who will lead this country in the coming years will either be a savior or a devil. As of today, the government has run out of funds to operate. Years, and even decades, of misusing public money has bankrupted the wealthiest country on earth. I would like to say here and now that I don’t believe that President Kilborne, a long-time Democratic ally, purposely deceived the people of this nation. He simply lacks the leadership ability to handle the situation. His earlier indecision cost thousands of lives; further indecision may cost our freedoms.

  “I have offered a bill in the Senate banning the possession of firearms. I acknowledge that the Constitution gives Americans the right to own and bear arms, but our founding fathers could not have foreseen armed gangs of criminals looting and raping their neighbors under the protection of our Constitution. I also realize that there are special-interest groups within this country that oppose my bill. To them I would say, ‘Go to California, and then tell me about your right to bear arms. What about the rights of honest citizens terrorized by armed criminals?’

  “As president I will authorize the army to arrest and confine anyone found carrying a weapon that can be used against another person. I will restore law and order to this grand nation.”

  Following Hunt’s address on television, the media provided scenes of the new battle lines in California where armed bandits were assaulting a town. Women and children were being gunned down; horrifying
scenes filled the screens of American homes. Skillfully sprinkled in between the graphic scenes were on-the-spot interviews with hysterical mothers carrying dead and wounded children. Screaming mothers cried,“Help us! We need to get rid of all guns!”

  In another segment, Mark Hunt interviewed a well-known psychiatrist about the proposal to ban all firearms. “I believe the psychological advantage will swing to the public. The criminals will know that carrying firearms will result in their arrest and conviction. I would say it would be a definite plus for all Americans.”

  The nightly Insta-pol showed an overwhelming 88 percent of all American viewers approved the senator’s bill. Calls flooded the Senate and House, demanding its immediate passage. Within two weeks, the bill banning possession of all firearms became law. Kilborne vetoed the bill, stating that he believed it to be unconstitutional.

  When the new poll results came in, they showed that Senator Hunt’s commanding lead virtually eliminated all other candidates from the upcoming presidential primaries. Clearly Mark Hunt was to become the next Democratic candidate for president of the United States. The more tightly the depression gripped the nation and the more violent the criminal element became, the more Americans were convinced the country needed a strong, dynamic leader who could restore order.

  The only issue left to be answered in the Hunt campaign was that of his vice-presidential running mate. Cal Rutland had advised Hunt to delay selecting his running mate. He didn’t need a strong candidate since he was miles ahead in all the polls, and a weak candidate might hurt him before Kilborne and Crow were eliminated in the primaries.

  This issue was the subject of a meeting between Hunt, Rutland, and two members of a group of investors that had backed Hunt’s political career for the past three years. The meeting was held at Hunt’s expansive summer home in Boone, North Carolina.