Fiona covered her mouth, stifling a snort.
“I did it last time,” Ellis whined. “You never make Fiona do the yucky stuff.”
“Yeah, that’s because I like her best.” Jeremy ruffled Ellis’s hair. “Fiona, unload what you can from the back of the truck. And, Ellis, don’t forget to lock the drain. That campsite host in Alabama threatened to bar us from the park after it popped out last time.”
Jeremy hooked up the Airstream’s electrical extension cord to the campsite’s thirty-amp connection box and flipped on the power switch. He then removed a water hose from a storage compartment and connected one end to a faucet and the other to a spigot underneath the camper. As he did so, Ellis retrieved a ten-foot section of collapsible plastic sewer pipe from the bumper storage and attached one end to the camper’s black- and gray-water-dump connection and the other to the campsite’s septic system. “It’s hooked up, Dad. Now I’ve got to wash my hands, or we’ll both catch your wife’s wrath.”
Jeremy grinned. Smartass.
With a thirty-gallon freshwater tank and a twenty-gallon black- and gray-water tank, it wasn’t absolutely necessary to find a full-hookup campsite. They could always dry camp, using the freshwater sparingly and then dumping the wastewater at a public dump station after they left the campground. However, they had learned early on that, with three females in the family, camping was a lot more bearable if you didn’t have to worry about dumping the RV’s holding tanks every couple of days. Despite Judy’s admonishments to conserve water, an American family of four could do a lot of flushing. So anytime they were staying longer than three days, they searched until they found a site with full hookups.
A twenty-five-foot Airstream Excella was the perfect size for a couple. When that couple had two preteens, it grew a little snug.
A tiny living area at the front of the camper held a Lilliputian-sized couch that folded out into the bed he and Judy shared. To the left—the driver’s side—a swing-out table for four was mounted to the wall. The kitchen provided a three-burner propane stove and oven, a small refrigerator-freezer, a double sink, and a slide-out pantry. Three storage cabinets were mounted above the stove and sink. A bathroom, complete with a commode, a sink, and a shower the size of an airline toilet, was situated midcamper. A storage closet sat across from it. The far end of the camper housed two twin beds, each with slide-out storage below. They were separated by a narrow walkway.
As Jeremy and Ellis busied themselves with their tasks, Fiona unloaded bicycles, folding chairs, and the family fishing gear from the back of the truck. Judy readied the inside of the camper for a week’s worth of close-quarters habitation. The space was cramped for a family of four, but they managed. And they loved it.
Just as Judy stepped out the door with two beers in hand, the ground shuddered. The Airstream leaped a foot into the air, and an unseen hand knocked Judy back into the camper, body-slamming her onto the floor. Pans and dishes flew out of the cabinet above the sink and bounced across the stove and countertop.
Simultaneous screams erupted from Ellis and Fiona. Then all grew still and eerily quiet.
Jeremy, stunned, raced into the camper and helped Judy up. “You OK?”
“What the fuck was that?” Judy muttered. “Were we just in our first-ever earthquake, or did you ram the truck into the Airstream?”
Jeremy put his arm over Judy’s shoulders. “Well, it wasn’t the truck, so I assume we just got a taste of what it’s like to live on the West Coast.”
Judy smoothed her hair and smiled at Jeremy. “You do realize that we are almost seven hundred miles from the coast.”
As Jeremy and Judy stepped back outside, the twins picked up their toppled bicycles. People poured out of campers in surrounding sites. Plates and trays of food that had been sitting on picnic tables now littered the ground. The roof of a pop-up trailer next door had collapsed in upon itself. The ubiquitous squirrels and chipmunks had disappeared, and not a single bird was chirping.
Judy frowned and rubbed her backside. “You know my ass is still a little sore from that dribbling.”
The twins sniggered. Fiona grinned and pointed at Judy. “Mom said ‘ass.’”
Judy chuckled. “Watch your mouth, young lady. My butt hurts, and yours will too if you keep using that kind of language.”
They all laughed.
Judy hugged Jeremy and then took charge. “Jeremy, start the fire, and I’ll put the inside of the Airstream back together. We need to get supper going before it gets too dark. Besides, I’m starving.”
“Si, jefecita.” Jeremy walked toward the back of the truck. “I’m on it. Ellis, Fiona, see if you can scrounge up some starter kindling while I get the firewood. And remember—”
“Be bear aware!” the twins shot back as they clawed the air in front of one another and, giggling hysterically, disappeared into the underbrush.
Easily accessible firewood was somewhere between scarce and nonexistent in most public campgrounds. For that reason, they always carried a supply of precut and split oak or hickory in their truck whenever they planned on having a campfire.
After the fire had burned down a bit, Jeremy placed a folding wire grill over the center of the embers. Judy came out of the camper carrying a tray loaded with brats, buns, chips, drinks, and a small boiler filled with sauerkraut. Jeremy grilled the brats and heated the sauerkraut. When he proclaimed the dogs “ready to bark,” they gathered around the dying campfire and began to eat supper.
After a few mouthfuls, Jeremy cleared his throat. “OK, let’s review the plan for tomorrow. We get up at first light. At this time of the year, that’s five a.m.”
Fiona and Ellis looked at one another, horrified.
“Are you kidding?” Fiona moaned. “Haven’t you read about that eight hours’ sleep thing?”
“Yeah,” Ellis chimed in. “Good luck getting Mom up at zero dark thirty.”
“Yes, you two, it’s god-awful early,” Jeremy said. “But we want to mix and mingle with the wildlife before the other tourists start clogging up the road. I’ll set up the coffee pot tonight and start it as soon as I wake up in the morning.”
Judy jumped into the fray: “You ladies can fix us bagels and cheese and some fruit for breakfast. While you’re doing that, I’ll make sandwiches to take with us for lunch.”
Oblivious to the twins’ stereophonic chattering, Jeremy continued: “We should be on the road by six. It’s a good fifty miles from here to Old Faithful. On park roads, that’s at least an hour and a half’s driving time, and we’ll want to stop along the way to take photos. So we can plan on being at the geyser around nine. It erupts every thirty-five to one hundred twenty minutes. I have no idea where nine a.m. is on that cycle. We’ll find out when we get to the Old Faithful Lodge gift shop.”
Just then, another tremor rolled beneath them, this one a lot less violent than the bucking they had experienced earlier. It felt more like someone trying to arouse a sleeper by shaking the bed. Still a little unnerving—except for the wide-eyed, giggling, twelve-year-old twins.
“I suspect that’s an aftershock from the e-ticket ride we had earlier,” Judy noted. “Jeremy, why don’t you break our ‘no phones when we’re camping rule’ and check yours to see if there’s any news about today’s quake.”
“Mom’s breaking the rules,” Ellis hissed to Fiona. “Can we use the phone too, Mom?”
Judy raised an eyebrow. “Not a chance, Ellis. We’re looking for information, not sharing Twitter notes.”
Jeremy retrieved his iPhone from its mount in the front seat of the truck and turned it on. He stopped midstride on his way back to the campfire. “Damn! They had a quake along the coast north of San Francisco that registered six point three on the Richter scale and another one, a six point eight, between Seattle and Portland. The parks-and-recreation folks decided that the Seattle-Portland quake might trigger a tsunami,
so rangers evacuated the Mendicino campground just in case. The first tremor we felt must have been the aftershock from that one.”
“That was no aftershock,” Judy said. “If it was, I sure don’t want to be around for the real deal.”
“Did anyone get hurt?” Fiona asked, frowning.
“Sounds like it,” Jeremy replied. “Rockslides all along Highway One, and a Luther Burbank bridge span collapsed over the One Oh One in Santa Rosa. A ruptured gas line is blazing in Petaluma, and power outages stretch from Monterey to Bodega Bay and as far east as Sacramento. It looks like we picked a good time not to go to California.”
Fiona’s eyes grew wide, and Ellis chewed on her bottom lip.
Judy looked from the girls to Jeremy. “OK, that’s enough bad news for tonight. Turn that thing off, and let’s look at the stars.”
The twins gave each other a high five. “Maybe next year we could go surfing in Arizona,” Ellis said to her sister with a weak smile.
Colter Bay Campground sat approximately 6,887 feet above sea level. At that altitude, in the rarefied, unpolluted, ground-light-free air, the stars seemed to explode out of the coal-black heavens. The atmosphere was so thin and distortion-free that they didn’t twinkle. They burned. They stretched from horizon to horizon and seemed to go on forever.
Jeremy focused on one particular spot in the sky. Just when he thought he saw the last star, another appeared out of the darkness.
Ellis, in her folding chair, tilted her head back. “Mom, they’re beautiful. Are there more here than there are in Tennessee?”
“No, you dummy,” Fiona snarked. “It only looks like that because we are so high up that we’re closer to them.” She slid three marshmallows on her stick and reached for another one.
Judy smiled at Ellis. “Actually, baby, these are the same stars we see at home. We can see them better here because the air is clean and a lot thinner, and there aren’t any streetlights or cars giving off light pollution.” She pointed at the brightest star she could see. “That one is the North Star. It’s really the planet Venus, but folks didn’t know that when they were handing out names.”
“Ha! I’ve got fifteen marshmallows on my stick, Fiona.” Ellis elbowed her sister. “Bet you can’t beat that.”
Judy shook her head and grinned. “So much for an astronomy lesson.” She gazed skyward again. “This is, without a doubt, the most spectacular night sky I have ever seen.”
It would be the most spectacular night sky anyone in the Northern Hemisphere saw for a long, long time.
4
Foggy Bottom, Washington, DC
Two years before the day of
With a security guard and a worker from the Facilities Maintenance Department, David rode the elevator to the eighth floor of the United States Department of State’s north wing and then took the stairs to its roof.
The maintenance worker unlocked the stairway door. “People don’t come up here much anymore. I can’t remember the last time we used the heliport,” he said.
Located in what was known as the Foggy Bottom section of the nation’s capital, on Northwest C Street, the Department of State housed its operations in a monstrously large complex sprawling the equivalent of two city blocks. It had taken David weeks to become even remotely familiar with the building’s hallway labyrinth. Some employees spent their entire careers without seeing half of its 1.4 million square feet of office space.
The three men went up the two flights of stairs, unlocked another door, and then stepped out onto the roof of the tallest section of the building. “It’s over here, sir, to your left.” The facilities man motioned David toward a large yellow circle with a faded red H in its center.
It was one of those rare days for DC: warm, sunny, and almost cloudless. David looked to the east at Kelly Park and then south along Constitution Avenue to get his bearings. A light, pleasant breeze blew from the northwest.
The helicopter would be flying into the wind to approach the helipad. David took out his cell phone and checked the time. It was 11:28. As he waited, he reflected on the worsening situation in Mexico and Mark Littleton’s alarming comments about who might be involved. The east coast mafia? The CIA? David would have to move this up on his priority list as soon as he returned from his meeting with Ballard.
The whup, whup, whup of rotor blades roared overhead. Looking northwest toward the Jefferson Memorial, David saw an AgustaWestland AW160 cruising over the Tidal Basin toward him. Ten seconds later, it nosed up and settled as gently as a fourteen-thousand-pound box of moving parts could settle.
If the landing was any indicator, the pilot was good. David remembered an adage his buddies used to spout in his army days: “Either you’re a world-class helicopter pilot, or you’re crap on the ground.”
David had no desire to be crap on the ground. That’s why he had chosen Army Intelligence instead of flight school. His choice hadn’t dampened his interest in aeronautics, however.
As soon as all three of the AW’s wheels touched the ground, the rpm of its two Pratt & Whitney engines slowed. So did its rotor speed and the wind that was pushing David backward and playing havoc with his tie. The starboard passenger door slid open, and a man David had seen on TV but never in person jumped out. Hustling over to where David was standing, the man stuck out his hand and shouted over the engine and rotor noise, “Mr. Secretary, Judson Ballard. Let’s get on board and out of this tornado.”
The AW160’s copilot got out and supported each of the two men as he climbed into the copter’s passenger compartment. The copilot slid the door closed, significantly reducing cabin noise.
Judson slid into the forward-facing passenger seat on the port side, slipped his arms through the shoulder harness, and then glanced at David. “It’s great to meet you in person, Mr. Secretary—David,” Judson said. “I’ve personally been looking forward to this for a long time.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” David replied as he fumbled with the unfamiliar harness. “I feel like I’m truly in the presence of greatness.”
“Now, don’t go getting all diplomatic on me, David. I’m just an old country boy.” Judson chuckled and slapped David’s knee. “Reminds me of something Golda Meir once told an ambassador when she was the Israeli prime minister. She said, ‘Don’t be so humble; you’re not that great.’”
The pilot increased the throttle, eased the AW160 off the helipad, and swung its nose to the west. Seconds later, they were scooting across the Potomac and Roosevelt Island, then northwest toward Maryland.
“We’re heading about fifty miles northwest of here, toward Catoctin Mountain, and the Farm, our Washington-area headquarters,” Judson said. “It’s about ten miles south of Camp David. We’re cruising at one hundred ninety miles an hour, so we should be there in less than twenty minutes. Less time than it would take you to get to the White House from your office. We used to have an AW139, but we decided to trade up about a month ago. If I’m not mistaken, you’re the first person who isn’t a member of Envision-2100 to fly in it.”
“You said ‘we.’ Does that mean this is Envision-2100’s helicopter?”
“The helicopter, the Farm, and a slew of other real property assets belong to Envision-2100. It’s one of those dichotomies of our organizational philosophy. We disdain the way megacorporations take advantage of gaping loopholes in government tax laws. Percentage-wise, compared to the average working citizen, those corporations pay nothing.” Judson sighed. “Then we go and do the same thing. One of many, many inequalities that we—I’m talking about our government now—need to address and change. And, David, facilitating and guiding those changes is what Envision-2100 is all about.”
David shifted his gaze to the right and watched the horizon below the copter whiz by from the pilot’s perspective.
The AW160 sliced its way through the air at an altitude of twenty-five hundred feet, slightly east of t
he path set by I-270. As they flew over Frederick, Maryland, the pilot veered due north toward the heavily wooded Catoctin Mountain—or what passed for a mountain in the relatively flat Maryland countryside.
A couple of minutes later, they slowed and banked to the west as they descended onto what appeared to be either a pasture or a huge front yard. David got a glimpse of a large but rather modest two-story wooden building standing between the forest and the meadow. It looked like an old resort hotel from the late forties.
Once the copter was on the ground, the pilot reduced its engine speed, and the copilot got out. He opened the starboard passenger door as Judson unbuckled his seat belt and harness. Judson swept his hand toward the building. “Welcome to the Farm, David, formerly the Catoctin Mountain Inn.”
“Nice,” David replied, following Judson out of the copter.
“It’s a relic of days past, for sure, but she’s got good bones,” Judson said. “We snatched her up during the big real estate bust, from the grandson of her original owner. The family boarded up the hotel and moved to Texas years ago. Like any empty building, it was slowly starting to disintegrate.”
David and Judson headed toward the hotel.
“We renovated the interior, replaced the wiring, slapped a coat of paint on the outside, and started maintaining the grounds full time,” Judson continued. “We saved a fine old landmark, got Envision-2100 a base of operations, and did so for next to nothing.”
“Impressive,” David said.
As they neared the hotel’s main entrance, four people—three men and a woman—walked through the large double doors and onto the veranda to greet them. David recognized each face from newspaper or magazine photos or fleeting introductions at social events. It occurred to him that he had met and talked to the tall, attractive woman at the front of the line on more than one occasion.
Judson clapped David’s back. “David, let me introduce you to the Envision-2100 board.” He turned to face the welcoming crew. “Although he doesn’t need an introduction, folks, this is David Stakley, the US secretary of state.” He swept his arm toward the woman. “David, this is Melissa Gibson. I think you two have met previously. Melissa is our past president and, as is the custom with our board’s executive rotation, passed the reins to me last January.”
Out of Crisis Page 2