Three Degrees: Book 1, The Tempestas Series

by Jim Wurst

  Three

  Degrees

  The Tempestas Series

  BOOK 1

  Jim Wurst

  Copyright © 2020 Jim Wurst

  All rights reserved.

  Published in New York City by the Brooklyn Writers Press,

  an imprint of the Brooklyn Writers Co. LLC.

  www.brooklynwriterspress.com

  The Brooklyn Writers Press supports copyright. Copyright promotes free speech, inspires creativity and encourages the sharing of ideas. Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it, in any form, without permission. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the by-product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  TITLE: Three Degrees, The Tempestas Series — Book 1

  ISBN: 978-1-7345724-6-9 (e-book)

  ISBN: 978-1-7345724-7-6 (paperback)

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2020918833

  2nd Edition

  For Elena, who will be 55 in 2052

  Early in the 21st century, the scientific community reached the unanimous conclusion that climate change was inevitable.

  To avoid large scale and irreversible damage, the warming of the planet had to be halted at less than two degrees centigrade.

  SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 2052

  CHAPTER 1

  An elderly couple sat on a bench near the Jefferson Memorial, the morning sun not yet becoming uncomfortable. They reminisced about the Tidal Basin and the cherry escalade of their youth. The Potomac had swallowed the Basin. The 2035 blight finally killed all the trees.

  The couple watched a young couple stroll by. As is natural, the old noticed the young more than the other way around. A fine match, they thought. The man was tall and thin, his skin a deep mahogany, and he moved with an air of confined Washingtonian authority. The woman as if she’d walked off a Diego Rivera mural had mocha skin, straight black hair and Hispanic origins.

  “What a lovely couple,” the elders thought together as 40 years of unity will allow, “I wonder if they have any children? What lovely children they would be. What a mixed palate. I wonder what color our grandchildren would have been if Richard and Mary had been able.”

  The young couple walked on.

  “I better hurry,” he said, “The senator said wants an early briefing. When do you leave?”

  “This afternoon. We have to start early in Seattle.”

  “I hate it when you fly, Elena.”

  “How do you campaign without flying sometime? Holo-conferencing gets you just so far. Sometimes you have to make personal appearances. You have to... what’s the old expression?”

  “Press the flesh.”

  She grimaced at the thought. “Lilly hates that.” Touching strangers. Then she noticed the strangers on the bench. Not too many left of that age, she thought. Elena had a generous nature, but she shared a common reflex of her generation when she happened upon that generation: what did you do to stop this?

  CHAPTER 2

  Sensors attuned for color, density and motion picked up an image. From 3,000 kilometers up it looked ugly. The young technician taking the readings called her boss to look at it. “Well, I’d rather be above that then under it.”

  “Or in it.”

  They were looking at a sludgy brown cloud, roughly 200 kilometers long and 30 wide. Its origin, the Chinese mainland and at a heading of 35 degrees Northeast; it would cross Japan by the next day.

  “We tell Tokyo?”

  “Yes, that’s protocol. Tokyo has to be aware of it but transmit the data anyway. They’ll have a better idea of what is in the cloud. Besides, it’ll be up to them to ask Beijing about it. Any chance of it missing the mainland?”

  “Not without a radical wind shift. She pointed to a storm gaining strength north of the Philippines, “the most likely source is that storm center. The winds could push it closer to Japan but it’s on the same heading as the cloud and far enough south to miss it.”

  The Lucky Dragon 8, equipped with the most modern communications system and one of the last, large fishing ships was not in Japan. It was out at sea and the captain knew it was in the direct path of a storm.

  He only had terrible options to consider. He could reverse course and head back to Japan. That was the safest but also the worst economic one. He could stay the course and ride out the storm, which would allow him to follow the fish but put the ship at risk. Or he could head south, try to get out of the storm’s path and still find fish. The fish were important, so he gambled on the latter.

  The Lucky Dragon was as successful as it was because it was designed to sweep up whatever was left down there. The giant nets that hung down from extensions on either side of the ship were large enough and strong enough to snag even a small whale. It could also snag a large whale if there were any left, which would have been a problem. The captain could fight the whale and follow the tradition of the Pequod or release the net and lose half a billion dollars of equipment and fish. Some would call that revenge, but despite the name of the ship, the captain was not superstitious. But he could count, so he ordered a southern setting. It was all about the fish.

  CHAPTER 3

  Oh, he loved the feel of wood. Fewer things made of wood meant the old pieces were in high demand. He could afford it, but in his public space, there was no need to remind people that he could have what they could not. But the desk had to be wood. Cherry, from a time when cherry grew thick enough to make furniture. It was his father’s first desk, and Senator George Cranston brought it with him with every victory. I’ll use the Resolute desk in the Oval, he thought and save this one for my private office. “What confidence! What vision!” the campaign advisor in his head said. “What an ass,” said the rest of the choir.

  Reality came from the intercom. “Senator? It’s time for your daily briefing.”

  “Send him in, Nancy.”

  His assistant, Nancy Liu, promptly entered with a young man by her side. He had made this visit many times before but still was ill at ease. Not because he was in awe of this man who wanted to be president (that would have been ridiculous) but because he was on official business and anything like relaxation was inappropriate. He carried a small, thin metallic attaché case close to his side. Nancy directed him to a chair directly in front of Cranston while she took a chair to the side. Rogers was a severe young man, severe suit, severe haircut, severe posture. A half-dead dog across the street would see him and think “Fed.” Rogers was a young and ambitious Secret Service agent. He had no field experience but was angling for something special. He was an armed bureaucrat. Rogers sat down so fast that Cranston didn’t even have time to get up and shake his hand. So there was Cranston, half-standing with his out-stretched hand unshaken. Rogers did his best imitation of someone with social graces and jumped up and shook the senator’s hand.

  “Good morning, Senator.”

  “Good morning scanned the news today and have seen nothing special. What’s secret?”

  “Senator, please, you know the protocol.” Cranston did this every time and every time Rogers never learned. He opened his case and took out a small computer with a screen camera but no keypad. “Agent RR, reporting. 08:45, location Bruin station,” he said to the device, “All secure.”

  “Should I tell you again how much I dislike my codename?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, sir.”

  “I mean, seriously. Who’s that supposed to f
ool? I went to college at UCLA. How long is some genius going to take to add two and two?”

  “Senator, please, this has been protocol for decades. You are cannot change it.”

  “If I’m elected president, can I pick my codename?”

  “No, sir, that is the prerogative of the Secret Service.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be president then.” Even Rogers found this amusing, which was something Cranston couldn’t allow. “So what’s Dr. McDowell’s codename, Dragon Lady?”

  “Sir! We would never…” Now Nancy was grinning too. That was the last straw. “I am on a schedule, sir, this material is time-sensitive.”

  “Go on, go on. When I’m president, I’ll request you for my detail so I can harass you every day. How about that?”

  “I’m not in the personal protection unit, sir, I…” Rogers finally went on the offensive, playing the only part of the game he could control. “National Security Weekly Briefing, September 21, 2052. Briefing by RR. Present, Senator George Cranston. Voice and biometric recognition, please.” He turned the computer towards the candidate and with professional seriousness, he said, “George Cranston.”

  “Present, Nancy Liu, special assistant to the Senator. Voice and biometric recognition, please.” He repeated the procedure.

  “Nancy Liu.”

  “Recognitions confirmed.”

  Satisfied with the results and comfortable that the terrain now favored him, Rogers began reading from his tablet.

  “The Siberian fire appears not to have spread. There is still no confirmation as to the cause of the fire. Particulate matter will drift over the Arctic and Alaska within five hours. Methane levels have peaked at orange. We will know by then if it is a solely a forest fire as claimed by Moscow or some industrial accident that set off the forest fire.”

  “The border between Iran and the Caliphate is calm. Severe sandstorms continue to make troop movement and flights hazardous. Nothing new of significance to report.”

  “They will announce first reports on the European harvest tomorrow, 0800 GMT. Our estimate is that the harvest will not be below expectations in the key food groups. We do not expect major changes in the stock markets or social indicators.”

  “There are several weather conditions forming in the Northern Hemisphere: one hurricane is forming southeast of Cuba, another west of Grand Bahamas. Neither appears at the moment to endanger the US mainland. Three storms are forming in the north Pacific it is too soon to know where it will land but the Yukon is the best guess. The North Atlantic is quiet.”

  “In the Southern Hemisphere, two storms are forming in the South Pacific, one in the Indian Ocean. Typhoon 14 made landfall at 0430 GMT 200 kilometers north of Santiago de Chile. Damage was minor.”

  “Accra is in its 23rd day of plus 35 degrees Celsius temperature. The WHO is detecting signs of a waterborne disease spreading, possibly a strain of SARS. This is worrying. If this does progress as predicted, we will face the possibility of a pandemic, panic and attempted flight. The African Protection Force is mobilizing to seal the city.

  “The voluntary migration in Kenya is nearly complete. 250,000 people have moved from the Kenyan desert to Tanzania. We estimate that 20,000 people died this past week. They have reported no significant incidents.”

  “This concludes the national security briefing for Senator George Cranston, presidential candidate for the Federalist Party.”

  He turned off his computer, satisfied with a job well done.

  “That’s it? Nothing from China, Mexico?”

  “No sir, were you expecting something?”

  “What’s that stinker coming out of China I saw this morning?”

  “Routine industrial pollution. Nothing but wind currents is causing the cloud to have that oblong form.”

  “No radiation?”

  “No, sir.”

  The agent trained to say only what was necessary and the politician who always wanted more stared at each other silently, one knowing that he had to stop and the other refusing to acknowledge it.

  “Well, okay,” Cranston said. “Thanks.”

  Rogers stayed as stone-faced as possible, collected his gear and bade a formal goodbye to the candidate. Nancy escorted him out. Once the door closed, Cranston remained seated, calm, unhurried. It was less than two minutes before Nancy reentered with Sean. Cranston pointed to the chair Rogers had just vacated. All stayed silent until Cranston said, “Ok, Nancy, I’ve got three speeches to go over this morning, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered.

  “No recent additions? Nothing before my 11am call with Dr. McDowell?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Fine, show me the speeches.”

  The disconcerting thing about this routine office conversation was that neither one of those moved nor did anything matching their words. Nancy had no speeches, Cranston wasn’t reaching for them. It was as if they were practicing lines from a play. Only Sean – Cranston’s 360 – was mobile. He went to the chair, took out a small box and pen from his pocket. Carefully examining the chair, he pulled out from the seat cushion a small, metallic wafer. Waving the stylus over the wafer, he put it in the box. For the first time, someone said something that matched their actions: “All clear.”

  With that, Nancy relaxed and slumped in a chair. Cranston, the public politician with the glad hand and ready smile, gone. Cranston, the private politician with the short knife and claws, spoke. “Anything new on that son-of-a-bitch?”

  “No, sir,” Sean said, “He’s clearly not acting on his own, we have to assume he is following instructions from higher ups.” He replaced the wafer.

  “Yeah, assume” Cranston said as he mentally sharpened his knife.

  CHAPTER 4

  Zhidoi mattered. It never smelled nice. Air still burned the eyes; there wasn’t much to look at. But as an industrial city in the central Chinese highlands, it had always been important to the country. If the word lyrical could ever apply here, it could apply only because of its important to history’s imagination. It stood at the headwaters of two great rivers: the Yangtze and the Mekong. Those storied waterways that helped define the peoples and history of Asia began their lives as humble streams in these mountains. Otherwise, it was a grim city, sacrificing whatever beauty or elegance it might have on the altar of greater production.

  The engineer’s apartment was a weakened version of the impressive constructions of the 2010s. His skills meant he had certain privileges, but he lacked the family and political connections to do better than the minimum. Minimum in this case meant a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen suitable for boiling rice and tea and not much else. There were windows, but no one would care what they looked over.

  The engineer tried to swipe the key card precisely right so he could get into the apartment quickly. With his hands trembling, it took three tries. Not bothering with the light but concerned with the locks, he pushed a chair against the door and ran to the bedroom. From a panel in the headboard, he removed a thin computer and turned it on. Carrying to the kitchen counter, the closest level surface, he heard the footsteps he knew were coming.

  As long as there have been boots - probably longer, really, Romans had sandals - the running stomp of the boot meant the same thing to hunted humans as did the howl of the wolf to a hunted animal. Stomp, a crash at the door, more stomps. “Ready to transmit” finally appeared on the screen. The engineer removed a tiny chip from his glasses frame and worked it into a special slot in the computer. Despite being much more delicate than the key card, he succeeded on the first try. No more stomping, just crashing.

  “Loading,” the computer announced.

  Another crash. Their battering ram, a good deal stronger than his door.

  “Transmitting,” the computer reported.

  The door was now splinters. The chair, toothpicks. The engineer sc
rambled to the bedroom, leaving the computer to its own devises. He forced the window open but had only one leg when the soldiers with night-vision goggles rushed in and fired. Rather than bullets, a stream of goo shot out. The shooter directed the stream up and down the engineer’s body as if he was watering an uncooperative lawn (not that the soldier had ever seen a lawn). The engineer fell to the floor, his arms pinned to his sides, unable to reach up to his neck to relieve the stranglehold of the now solid goo. A soldier came over and cut the goo from his neck. Death was not part of the orders. Meanwhile, another soldier spotted the computer and with his laser pistol fired at the keyboard. With a fiery phsst, the computer stopped transmitting.

  CHAPTER 5

  He was the only president most Americans knew. Because of the assassination of President Branson in 2041 less than one year into his term, Vice President Thomas Ailes became president and reelected twice, thus having served longer than any president other than Franklin Roosevelt. And now, finally, he had to step down. But stepping down and leaving were not the same things. President Ailes had had more than ten years to shape the federal government into his image, so he wasn’t going to just walk away. The Doctrinists controlled Congress, most state houses and the courts. He had more than a few options in his pocket.

  Ailes was in his second favorite room. The Oval was first, but the Situation Room was where a president got to be more than a head of state. He was a god, the world one computer command away. He ruled here even more than he ruled above ground. Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs hesitated before raising his voice. Ailes gloried in the power of this room. He had no interest in sharing it with anyone. Only Ailes’ Chief of Staff would not hesitate to speak, but he rarely saw the need. He was Ailes’ fixer and right-hand man from the start. His silence was legendary, his power more so. Serene, silent. He could have been a Buddha if Buddha’s father was a golem.