“If you’ve just picked us up and have not yet registered, we need to get some information from you.” The voice on the radio paused, then sounded indignant. “FEMA guidance is that airwaves are currently for emergencies only and not for personal calls.”
Spencer scratched his rough beard and spoke into the mike, excited and annoyed at the same time. “Okay, but right now I need to speak with someone from the solar satellite division at JPL. We are a federal installation and this is important business.”
The radio fell silent for several minutes. Spencer hoped the battery wouldn’t die before the FEMA people got back to him. He tapped his fingers on the metal bench, waiting, waiting. Romero looked at him and shrugged. Finally, the woman’s voice returned. “Hello, White Sands? Part of JPL was hit by the rioting. We should be able to get someone back to you shortly, if you’re still on the air. Can we get some information from you for our files?”
Spencer pushed the microphone over to Romero. “Go ahead and help them out,” he said.
As Romero grinned and started to answer their questions, Rita raised an eyebrow at Spencer. She cocked back her hat and let her braided hair fall down. “You’ve got more up your sleeve than just getting this microwave farm back on line.”
Spencer tried not to smile as he ducked outside to scan the desert restlessly. “If we can get this receiving station back up again, wouldn’t it be nice to increase the amount of power we beam down? Keep us on line for hours at a time. Just think of those twenty satellites sitting at JPL, all finished and waiting to be sent into orbit. If Nedermyer hadn’t deep-sixed the acquisition process, they’d be here already… or maybe even up there.”
Rita spat a wad of tobacco off to the side. She seemed to be aiming at a small lizard, but the glob struck a rock instead. The lizard scurried away.
“Now I know you’ve flipped a byte,” she said. “Say those satellites still work—they’ve been in a clean room and they’re vacuum sealed, so I can buy that—and just suppose we could somehow get them a thousand miles from LA to New Mexico. Then what do we do with them? We still need to get them into orbit. Are there some rocket launchers left here at White Sands that I don’t know about?”
She trailed off as Spencer looked toward the north, toward Oscura Peak. A long thin housing for the five-mile-long electromagnetic launcher ran up the side of the mountain.
She started laughing as it hit her. “I don’t believe it. You’re crazy! Absolutely nuts! It’s one thing to change parts in a simple AM radio and make it work. It’s a thousand times harder to change out every single seal and joint in our microwave farm. But to bring those satellites cross country and use a launcher that’s only worked once? They need to finish that thing before it can launch our satellites into a high enough orbit! And how the hell do you think we’re going to get those satellites out here—by wagon train?”
Spencer stopped humming to himself. He was disappointed she had guessed it so easily. “How did you know?”
Chapter 42
Clear blue but smudged with clouds, the Napa Valley sky hung over the tourist train station. But, son of a brick, the tourist trade had sure gone belly up.
Rex O’Keefe didn’t really miss the crowds, the automobiles, or the fat self-styled wine conoisseurs who hopped from one winery to the next, gulping the free samples and rolling the fancy names on their tongues. Rex liked the world better this way. Peaceful, uncomplicated, giving him a chance to kick back and relax. When the food ran out, he’d probably be all uptight again, but he tried not to think about that just yet.
Leaning back on the old wooden bench, Rex took a sip of red table wine—Gamay Beaujolais 1991, liberated from the Sandstone Crest winery, best served at room temperature (which was about all he could get these days, now that refrigeration was out of the question). He rolled the wine on his tongue, swallowed slowly to feel the warm bite, to taste the oak.
In front of him, bright in the morning sunshine, the refurbished old steam locomotive sat in front of him on the tracks. Steam Roller. He admired the train, wishing the day would go on forever. And because of the petroplague, it just might. Nothing much would change around here for a long time.
For the moment at least, Rex had everything he could want—plenty of wine, the run of the tourist train station, and no one to bother him now that the weekend crowds fought for survival in the big cities rather than taking a leisurely ride through wine country on an authentic turn-of-the-century steam train.
He had pulled all the dried food and snacks from the refreshment stand, adding to his own stockpile in the small home behind the station. He figured he’d stashed enough food to get by for half a year. The eating would get dull, imported water crackers and some cheese, canned vegetables to supplement whatever he could scrounge from his garden, bottled mineral water. But there was plenty of wine. He would survive.
At forty-five and without a family, Rex O’Keefe’s world extended little beyond the railroad tracks and the train station, even now after the petroplague had caused the old Steam Roller to gasp her last breath, unless he could find some other lubricants and gaskets.
He hadn’t cared much for the people when they came around anyway. What was the point being boot-licking and nice to strangers who would never come by again? The locals themselves never bothered to ride Rex’s train; they had their own tourist industry to watch over.
Rex was content to be alone with his memories. From the time he’d been old enough to own an electric Lionel until he got his first job at 14 stoking wood on the refurbished Steam Roller, Rex had lived for the day when he could work on the trains.
But now the damn locomotive just sat there, unable to move, stalled in place.
Rex stood on tired legs and sauntered out to the behemoth that sat frozen on the tracks. Painted a deep black, the Steam Roller burned wood in her furnace, heating water in the boiler to drive one of the last locomotives that had not transferred over to coal or diesel. He could smell the creosote from the railroad ties, the old deteriorating oils on the driving wheels, the caked soot from the furnace.
Even motionless, Steam Roller was a sight too pretty just to look at. Rex pulled a red bandanna out of his blue-and-white railroad overalls—the clichéd outfit the tourists expected him to wear—and began to polish the brass pistons.
He ran his hand along the metal siding, then boosted himself up to the engineer’s cab where he tried to work the controls. For a moment he imagined himself riding the tracks as the train chugged through the valleys, a throbbing rhythmic rattle as the wheels passed over crossings. The lush green vineyards extended on either side of the cab, pale vines stretched out along wires in flickering razor-straight rows that looked like optical illusions stretched out to the hills.
Blinking his eyes, Rex reached up to grab the steam release, when a low voice came from behind the cab, startling him. “Shame to let a beauty like this rust away.”
Rex whirled, opening and closing his mouth as if he expected the right words to fall automatically out. He took a second to focus on the stranger: a bearlike man, built short and stocky, with blotchy dark skin and not a hair on his head. The stranger’s scalp had been freshly shaved; even the eyebrows were gone.
Rex felt the sour taste of wine claw up his throat. He said hoarsely, “Yeah, she’s my train. What do you want?”
The bald man said nothing, only turned to look over the train, admiring it. Rex wanted to leave, to go back into the station, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t leave the locomotive unguarded. What if the strange man was a vandal or something? The bad taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away.
Rex hadn’t had much trouble in the week or so since the plague struck the wine country north of San Francisco. The train station was away from most of the town buildings, and he didn’t have anything marauders would want.
Rex waved an arm, shooing the man away. “You shouldn’t be here. This place is closed.”
The bald man hauled himself up into the engineer’s cab beside Rex and r
an his hand along the wooden console, the controls. “How long since you fired her up?” His voice was confident, as if accustomed to taking charge of such a vessel.
“Uh?” Rex stopped at the question. “Started the train? Are you crazy? Nothing runs anymore.”
“Well, I probably am crazy. But this train was built long before we started using petroleum products for everything. It was designed for other alternatives, no matter what you’ve been using lately,” said the man. “With a few people to help, we could get this train running again.”
“We? Whose train do you think this is?” Rex cocked his head to one side. “You are a crazy man!”
The squat stranger raised the folds that used to be his eyebrows, wrinkling the shaved skin on his forehead. “You got any other plans for it?”
* * *
Two days later, when Rex believed the stranger meant what he said, he persuaded the Gambotti brothers and Frank Haverson and Jerry Miles to leave their vineyards and spend a few hours in the afternoon joining in the effort.
They took apart the Steam Roller’s gear box, the piston shaft, the axle, and the controls. Forced by a long screwdriver and steady pressure, each item reluctantly opened up. Smelly lard and gobs of fat, skimmed off the surface of a boiling pot brought in from the Gambotti vineyards yielded enough lubricant for the first round.
The bald, dark stranger spoke little, sweating and working harder than two of them combined. Rex tried to keep up. The stranger became obsessed with getting the train working again.
Rex couldn’t pinpoint when the stranger took control of the effort, nor did he care. They worked from the first light of dawn until they could no longer see in the dark. The stranger ate his water crackers and vegetables in silence. Given the choice, he drank mineral water instead of wine.
Rex O’Keefe took a long gulp from his cup—Gewürtztraminer, this time, a bit young but bright and fruity—and watched the swarthy man with the shaved head. The man put down his empty plate, lit a candle, and went back outside to work.
Rex wondered what burden the stranger bore that drove him to work so hard.
Chapter 43
Armed guards, once discreetly hidden behind banks of high-tech observation equipment, now openly patrolled the White House complex. Barricades cut off foot traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue to the north and E Street to the south. The Old Executive Office Building and the Treasury Building served as heavily fortified buffers to the west and east.
Hunching down, Jeffrey Mayeaux walked in the middle of his team of escorts through the wrought-iron gate. Leather patches on the hinges served as makeshift lubrication for the gates. More sophisticated artificial lubricants could have been shipped in from the Department of Commerce’s NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland, but those were being stockpiled for emergency use.
Mayeaux thought of the briefing given to him while he was driven back to Washington with a military guard. Four of the convoy trucks had succumbed to the petroplague during the three-hour drive.
As of an hour ago, President Holback was officially declared dead. Short-wave radio transmissions stated that some sort of mob action in Qatar had killed the president and his escorts, then burned the American embassy in retaliation for the petroplague ravaging the Middle East oil fields.
With the breakdown in communications, none of this could be incontrovertibly confirmed, Mayeaux knew. But none of that would let him off the hook. He was going to be sworn in as the actual president, not just the acting Commander-in-Chief. No pomp, no ceremony—just an emergency action. The world was turning into one giant dog turd, and it was being plopped right in his lap.
Even under normal conditions, he’d never felt comfortable coming into the White House’s snobbery—a Southern boy, he didn’t have the right background, attend the right schools, or come up through the political system in the right way. The White House staff had treated him with disdain only a few days ago—now Mayeaux looked forward to putting them in their places. From now on, he was going to have to take his pleasures wherever he could. He wondered how the kitchen would react to a request to serve Creole red beans and rice every Monday, as was traditional.
A maintenance woman unrolled heavy-gauge emergency telephone wire across the top of the West Wing; flanked by MPs, Navy personnel lugged baskets of food across West Executive Avenue to the White House Mess.
“This way, Mr. Speaker.” The Secret Service escort motioned him toward the heavily guarded side door. Any other time, the President-to-be would have been received at the front of the White House like a conquering hero, chauffeured through the yawning gates to where the Marine guard stood stiffly at the front. The side entrance was reserved for lowly political appointees. But with the turmoil in the city and rumors of snipers, Mayeaux wanted to make himself as small a target as possible. He didn’t need all the fuss. Hell, he didn’t even want the job.
A crowd of politicians stood just inside the door. A slight smile came to Mayeaux as he recognized the former President’s Chief of Staff, the Science Advisor, the Budget Director. He had seen the others before, but they were too far down the food chain to elicit acknowledgment.
The Chief of Staff steered him past the Situation Room and up the stairs. “Mr. Speaker, we’re required to swear you in before updating you on the status of the current emergency. Things have deteriorated and require some drastic decisions.” The Chief of Staff had too much of a “trust me” tone. Mayeaux would see to it that good old Weathersee took his place, pronto!
“We’ve already frozen our borders,” Mayeaux said. “I was told that the National Security Council is recommending martial law across the entire country, confiscating all untainted oil.”
The Science Advisor nodded grimly. “Yes, but it might get tougher still. This is the moral equivalent of fighting a war. Our nation is on the verge of collapse.”
Mayeaux paused and studied their grave expressions. What the hell was he supposed to do with an attitude like that? “Gentlemen, I have absolutely no intention of letting the United States break apart, if it is within my power to stop it.” He extended his palm, indicating for them to lead the way and get a move on.
They took Mayeaux through the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, past military campaign streamers, polished wood, fine art, and a Nobel Peace Prize on display. A lanky man with long sideburns stood by the Secret Service agent outside the door. He carried a Bible and seemed nervous; he must be one of the lower officials in the Justice Department dug up to administer the oath of office. Figures, they wouldn’t get the Chief Justice for him.
The group moved into the Oval Office, filling the room. A row of bushes blooming with flowers outlined the Rose Garden just outside the window. Mayeaux could see the jogging track that encircled the south lawn; a walkway led to the outdoor swimming pool. It seemed too perfect, too good to be true.
He didn’t want to be here.
The lanky man with the Bible cleared his throat. “Please raise your hand and swear on the Bible, Mr. Mayeaux.”
“Right.”
Jeffrey Mayeaux repeated the man’s charge, mouthing the oath as it was said to him. The words meant nothing; they were just another set of guidelines to follow, just as his Congressional oath or marriage vows. It wasn’t the words that mattered, it was the position, and what he could do with it. He mumbled “So help me God,” and felt no different. With the minor scandals dogging him throughout his past two terms, he had never dreamed he would keep his Congressional office, let alone fall face-first into the presidency! He wasn’t ready for this.
As others in the room shook his hand before leading him to the situation room, the Science Advisor’s comment stuck with him. This crisis was like fighting a war.
Well, in war, the Commander-in-Chief needed to be obeyed. Mayeaux couldn’t afford to have his staff second-guess him. The first thing he would do was fire these throwbacks from Holback’s administration and surround himself with people he trusted. Finding a good Vice President was high on the list.
“Mr. Speaker—I mean, Mr. President,” the Chief of Staff corrected himself, “we need to get to the Situation Room.” He moved to the door.
“In a minute,” Mayeaux said. “I have a few things I want to discuss first. A few changes.”
Chapter 44
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
FROM: ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY
SUBJECT: PETROPLAGUE-AFFECTED MATERIAL
ADDENDUM 3, CONTINUED
We have again revised our list to include the following items:
Toys
Sixpack beverage can rings
Photocopy machine bodies
Tupperware
Polyethylene food wrap
Handles/knobs/buttons
Toothbrushes
Hair dryers
Garment buttons
Hair brushes
Coffee makers
Watch faces
Most clocks
Videotapes
Movie film
Photographs
Floppy diskettes
Adhesives
Faucet gaskets
Electrical switchplates
Laminate films
Orange highway cones
Plastic buckets
Shower curtains
Plastic tarpaulins
Varnish coatings
Marquee lettering
Driver’s licenses, laminated IDs
Petroleum jelly
Credit cards
Lighting fixtures
Athletic balls
Wastebaskets
Disposable diapers
Adhesive tape
Plastic utensils
Garment buttons
Chapter 45
On horseback, Todd led Iris quickly away from Stanford, out of the city of Palo Alto, and across the South Bay flatlands. Although he wasn’t certain where he wanted to end up, he knew they had to head east, away from the Bay area cities.
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