A hollow opened up in the admiral’s chest and filled with heat, but it subsided quickly, and he was left with a loose feeling in his bowels and a giddy, almost guilty, sense of relief. His only child had been scheduled to fly out of the US this week for a year’s travel through Europe and Asia. But Nancy was a bit of a free spirit – an ‘airhead’, he might have said were she anyone other than his own – and organisation was not her strong point. She was just as likely to miss a flight as catch one, and her trip had already been rescheduled twice for that very reason. Ritchie had spent the entire day trying to cope with the end of the world while stomping down on a feeling of utter hopelessness for his baby girl. He had spoken to nobody about it. Everyone had people somewhere back home and his first responsibility was to the nation, not to himself or even his family. But he shivered uncontrollably as tears filled his eyes, hot and stinging, and he had to hold his breath to forestall a sob.
Damn, he cursed silently. What a time to crack up.
‘You all right, sir?’
He kept his eyes shielded from the driver by pretending to stare out the window at plastic barricades that were going up around the Governor’s mansion. What the hell were they in aid of? They wouldn’t stop the Wave if it came rushing at them from over the horizon, and the populace was more likely to storm a well-stocked 7-Eleven than the state legislature.
‘I’m okay,’ he grunted, when he had his voice back under control. ‘It’s just a message from my wife, that’s all. Our daughter is fine. She flew out of Chicago this morning, before this business hit.’ Ritchie wasn’t sure why he felt the need to say anything. Perhaps to make it seem real to himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d normally discuss with anyone outside of his family, let alone a driver from the car pool.
‘That’s great news, sir,’ said the young sailor behind the wheel, a new guy Ritchie had met only forty minutes ago. He sounded genuinely happy and Ritchie couldn’t help but wonder where the lad hailed from and whether he had family back Stateside himself.
‘Thank you, son,’ he said, as they pulled up at the edge of a crowded parking lot. ‘But a lot of people weren’t as lucky as me today.’
The lot was packed solid. Men and women in expensive-looking business wear hurried about with no apparent reason to their movements. He supposed that the civilian arm of government had gone over to emergency procedures as quickly and completely as the military. Until now, he’d been concerned only with the latter, but the Governor’s office had requested his presence at this meeting as a matter of the highest urgency and Ritchie had seen no alternative to attending. Apart from Olympia and Seattle, which were perilously close to the event horizon, and Alaska, which was sparsely populated and still largely undeveloped, Hawaii was pretty much all that was left of the United States. But while she could defend herself, given the concentration of military forces in the islands, Ritchie wasn’t sure she could feed herself for much more than a few days. And with a quarter of a million men and women to pull out of a war in the Middle East, he really didn’t need to be distracted by food riots in his own back yard.
‘Shall I park here, sir?’ his driver asked. ‘You don’t want to get jammed in, is all, Admiral.’
‘No,’ said Ritchie. ‘Good point. Take the car back out of here. Get yourself something to eat, and then park somewhere in the District, but not here. This place is a mess. I’ve got your number, I’ll call you when I need you.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
Ritchie was pleased to see that the sailor checked the charge on the car’s cell phone before answering. Just because he was young didn’t mean he was dumb.
‘I’m sorry, sailor. What’s your name? I didn’t catch it in the rush before.’
‘Seaman Horvath, sir.’
‘Okay. Good work, Horvath. Take a break. I suspect I’ll be a little while.’
Stale sweat, fading perfume, and air re-breathed so many times it tasted sick and wrong. The contrast with his own headquarters couldn’t have been starker. Ritchie hit the corridors of the state capitol and ran headlong into mayhem. Spiralling turmoil seemed to be the general operating principle, the sort of witless hysteria you might expect on amateurs night at a Chechen bordello. Ritchie was buffeted by staffers and aides as they double-timed from office to office. A woman swerved to miss him, all elbows and high heels, and crashed into a copying machine that had apparently been pushed into the hallway. She spilled a couple of hundred loose-leaf pages over the carpet, cursing like a chief petty officer as she dropped to the floor to gather them up.
Hundreds of voices competed in the cramped space as people spoke over and past each other, all of them convinced their own particular order, request or fragmented rumour was the most important piece of that moment’s puzzle. The media were everywhere, wolf packs of TV and print reporters threading through the upheaval, firing up shoulder-mounted cameras and thrusting microphones into the face of anybody who seemed remotely responsible for anything. Ritchie gripped his briefcase a little harder and pushed forwards lest -
‘Admiral. Yo! Admiral, is the military taking over? Is there going to be martial law?’
And before he could dive into a side passage or broom closet, one of the packs had suddenly fallen on him. Bright white light seared the backs of his eyes, temporarily blinding him and forcing him to squint against the harsh glare.
‘Admiral, are you here to take over? Are you going to run the emergency response?’
Ritchie couldn’t see who was asking the damn fool questions, but he could sense a sudden press in the crowd around him as maybe a dozen or more reporters turned their attention towards the only symbol of authority in the immediate area: a man in a short-sleeve khaki Navy uniform sporting four stars on his collar. A jabbering crush of journalists surged towards him and, without thinking, he barked out an order.
‘Stand back, please. Have some dignity, would you!’
Ah, damn it… He’d reacted instinctively, allowing his dismay and surprise at the chaotic scene to get the better of him. But to his relief, it actually seemed to work. There was a noticeable lessening of the disarray immediately around him and Ritchie made an impulse decision to go with it.
‘First off, drop the lights, please. I’m not answering any questions standing here like a piece of roadkill in the spotlight. Secondly, hell no – I’m not here to take over. What’s up with you people? You’re not children, so stop acting like them. Governor Lingle asked me here this evening to discuss what aid the armed forces of the United States of America might render to the civil power. And that is it. I don’t declare martial law. I don’t give orders – I follow them. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to do just that.’
Before he could step off and continue his journey, however, a small bird-like woman with enormous black hair pushed a microphone into his path. ‘What can you tell us about what’s happened on the mainland, Admiral?’ she asked. ‘Have the military been monitoring the phenomenon? What are you going to do about it?’
Ritchie was tempted to push past her, but he couldn’t help but notice how the ambient roar that had filled the entire building just a few minutes earlier had died away completely. A flicker of colour behind the phalanx of reporters answered any questions he might have had about why. He could see himself on a television monitor in a room across the hall. This was probably going out live across the island. Possibly around the world. The urge to sit down, sigh and rub his eyes was nearly overwhelming, but these people needed leadership and certainty just as much as any bunch of kids taking fire from the enemy. In the absence of anyone to provide that leadership, the buck seemed to have fetched up at his feet for the moment. The admiral didn’t see any point in fudging the issue. He slowly bent down and carefully placed his briefcase on a desk, the black, dead eyes of the TV cameras following every move. It gave him time to compose his thoughts. When he stood up again he spoke into near silence.
‘Something terrible has happened back home,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me – my family is originally from New Hampshire… I can’t tell you a lot of what you need to know right now. I can’t say exactly what has happened, how or why. But you are right. We have been looking hard at this thing, throwing every asset we have at it. We’ve lost some more people in doing that, but I want to emphasise one very important point: much of our armed forces were outside of the continental US as of this morning. They remain intact and ready to make any sacrifice, to take any action necessary to protect you, the American people who are listening to this. Our friends and allies are helping us too, and with that help we will get through this. I promise you.’
A beat of half a second’s silence followed his speech before the media pack erupted again, firing questions and demands for information at him. He was just about to wave them away when a booming Southern accent cut through the pandemonium.
‘That’ll be all for now, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You heard the admiral – he does have a very important meeting to get to. Governor Lingle will address you all live right after it. And no, I can’t say for sure when that will be, but you’ve definitely got a couple of hours to go get your horses fed and watered.’
The man’s voice was so powerful, his delivery so sure, it quelled the incipient press riot almost immediately. Ritchie was grateful, but bemused. As a resident of the islands, he was familiar with some of the public faces of the state administration, even though Governor Linda Lingle had not long been in office. But this massive, roaring bear of a man was new to him, and Ritchie didn’t see how he could have missed such a figure – or a voice.
He was impeccably, if heavily, dressed in a three-piece, blue pinstriped suit and he took Ritchie gently but firmly by the elbow and propelled him through the ruck of journalists. ‘Keep smiling,’ the man muttered. ‘Don’t let your fingers get anywhere near their mouths. And check to see if you still have your wallet and watch on the other side.’
His self-appointed guardian operated as a gentle but unstoppable battering ram, carving a path not just through the crush of reporters and cameramen, but on through the throngs of civil servants beyond them, many of whom stood and gawped at Ritchie when he passed by, almost as if he were some kind of celebrity.
‘Guess I’ve had my fifteen seconds of fame,’ the admiral said.
‘Not if you got any more performances like that up your sleeve,’ his companion replied somewhat grimly. ‘Wish I could get a few others to turn it on like that. Jed Culver, by the way. Of the Louisiana Bar. Originally – I run a consultancy out of DC of late.’
Ritchie awkwardly swapped his briefcase from one hand to the other and they shook. ‘Admiral James Ritchie, Mr Culver. You didn’t sound like a local boy.’
Culver steered him around a corner and past a couple of security guards. The two uniforms were doing a good job of pissing off a dozen or more staffers who insisted they had good reason to be admitted to the inner sanctum. That’s what this part of the building felt like. It was less crowded, much quieter, and events didn’t seem to be spinning out of control quite so badly here.
‘I was lucky enough to be on holiday with my family,’ Culver explained. ‘My immediate family at least, thank God. Anyways, I saw the news this morning and figured I would lend a hand if they wanted. Lingle’s main press handler was Stateside.’
‘You’ve done a lot of press management then?’
‘Oh yes. Real press too. Hard men like Jimmy Breslin and Chip Brown, not like these pussies. That was a great speech before, you know. Really nailed a few heads to the wall. That’s what we need right now – a big goddamn hammer and a whole bucket o’ nails to get things secured ‘fore they start flying off all over.’
They pulled up outside a closed office door. There was an indefatigable energy to Culver that one couldn’t help liking. A lot of spare mass was expensively hidden away under that designer suit, but he looked like a man who could plough on for days at a time without a break. The island was probably lucky to have him. The heavy-set lawyer rapped on the door and waited half a beat before pushing on into an anteroom furnished with two desks, behind which sat a couple of very stressed-out young women. One had three phones clamped to her ears and was writing notes on multiple pads. The other woman was stabbing at her telephone’s keypad, listening for a second, slamming down the receiver, and repeating the process all over again.
‘Governor ready?’ asked Culver. ‘I got the admiral. Pulled him from the mouths of the lions by my own hand.’
The second receptionist, the one having so much trouble making her call, nodded at them. ‘Go on through, Mr Culver,’ she said tersely. ‘They’re waiting.’
As the big man led him through, a thought occurred to Ritchie. ‘Why pack the suit, if you’re on holidays, Mr Culver?’
The lawyer smiled back over his shoulder. ‘Ah, you’re a man who thinks like my good wife, sir,’ he replied. ‘Come on, meet the Governor.’
Culver seemed unnaturally assured of his place, given that he was little more than an interloper, but he’d obviously been of some help to the administration through the madness of the last twelve hours. There was any number of legitimate government officers trapped behind the velvet rope down the corridor who had more claim to be here than him. But here he was, and there they were, frozen out by a couple of state-sponsored bouncers. In a way, it gave Ritchie some hope. Perhaps things weren’t as shambolic as they seemed.
Governor Linda Lingle was waiting for them just inside the office, flanked by a couple of suits. Her eyes were framed by the same haunted appearance he was beginning to recognise on everyone. If he looked in the mirror he’d doubtless see the same expression staring back.
‘Admiral, thank you for coming down,’ said Lingle, sounding very tired. ‘I understand you must be very busy. Please, sit down. We’ll get on with this as quickly as we can.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Ritchie, shaking her hand and then those of the other people in the room, whom the governor introduced as heads of various departments.
‘How did the city look to you, Admiral, on your drive down here?’ she asked.
Ritchie didn’t see any point in using weasel words. ‘Your curfew isn’t holding, ma’am. It’s being widely ignored. The state troopers and police are using a very light hand. I wouldn’t say there was panic on the streets, but the shops will run empty very soon, and then you’ll see some real fear and probably some violence. There’s a lot of people trying to get out, tourists, I suppose – although, who knows. If you want my advice, do everything you can to get them on a plane with all dispatch.’
Lingle nodded and pursed her lips. Her staffers’ reactions were mixed. One bristled, two others nodded vigorously. Jed Culver remained impassive.
‘I don’t want to see any more troops on my streets. In fact, I’d prefer not to see any out there at all, Admiral, and I’m sure you’d rather not have to employ your people here either, but it might not be a bad idea to prepare for the worst anyway. I’m sure you must have a plan in some bottom drawer somewhere for this sort of thing.’
‘Not really,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘But there’ll be something somewhere about aid to the civil power in situations of extreme crisis – such as a mega-tsunami or super-volcano, or similar catastrophes. It shouldn’t be beyond our abilities to adapt. But, Madam Governor, if I may, there is a related issue I’d like to raise very briefly, that of executive authority.’
Culver and Lingle did an odd, unrehearsed double act. The lawyer leaned forward keenly on his chair, while the governor rubbed her eyes and sat back in her own.
‘Go on, Admiral,’ she said.
Ritchie snapped open his briefcase and handed over a sheaf of documents. ‘I had the JAG office here run up this brief for you, ma’am. It’s about the line of succession. Realistically, the President isn’t coming back. Nor any of the cabinet or other nominated successors. In terms of elected officials who can assume the office of Presidency, as best we can tell right now it’s you, the deputy governor in Anchorage, or maybe the Speaker of the state house in Washington.’
‘Oh,’ said Lingle, as an uncomfortable stillness wrapped itself around the room. ‘So, which one of us?’
Ritchie glanced over at Culver, who was now watching him like a rattler. ‘Frankly, ma’am, it could be any of you. There is no statute or precedent covering a disaster of this magnitude. Between you and me, we may have to make it up as we go.’
Jed Culver eased himself back a little. His shoulders, which had been noticeably hunched up, relaxed.
‘He’s right, Madam Governor,’ the lawyer offered, unbidden. ‘Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Labor, is in Geneva – I checked – but she is not a native-born citizen and so is specifically barred from the office. There is no procedure for dealing with this. Even a nuclear war would not have decapitated the government as cleanly and completely. The admiral is correct. We need to make it up as we go. And we do need to act. I’m sure Admiral Ritchie is thinking of his comrades in the Gulf, and that’s only reasonable, but there are still millions of US citizens who haven’t been taken up, or whatever, by this thing, and they need to be protected.’
‘But can we protect them from the Wave?’ she asked. ‘My understanding is that you have no idea what it is, Admiral.’
Before Ritchie could answer, Culver butted in again. ‘That may be so, ma’am, but that’s not what I mean. Maybe that thing will gobble us all up before breakfast. In which case, too bad. But the world is a cruel and unusual enough place, even without bad Star Trek episodes suddenly leaping off the screen at us.’
One of the younger aides couldn’t help himself. ‘There was a Star Trek episode…?’
Culver shrugged. ‘I’m extemporising.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Lingle, raising the sheaf of papers. ‘I’ll read these tonight, I promise. But you’ve seen what’s happening out there. My immediate responsibility is to the people of Hawaii. That’s who I was elected to serve and protect, and, for now, that is the extent of my office. Admiral, I can understand, given the situation in Iraq, why you need to resolve this, but for now can I suggest that you simply use whatever chain of command has survived the day. You know what you have to do and how to do it. I presume you won’t be going ahead with any attack?’
Everyone in the room was suddenly staring at him, hard. Ritchie had spent decades in the military and every cell in his body rebelled at the idea of having to discuss operational issues in a forum such as this, but what choice did he have?
‘Madam Governor,’ he began, ‘given the circumstances, no, at this stage we are not intending to commence hostilities. For one thing, as I’ve made clear, we have no executive authority to begin a war.’
‘Bush signing a bit of paper wouldn’t have given you -’
‘Quiet, Jim,’ Lingle snapped at the staffer who’d spoken out of turn. ‘It’s not the time or the place. Go on, Admiral.’
Ritchie ignored the distraction. ‘But in any event, that decision may be taken out of our hands if the Iraqis themselves attack.’
‘Is that likely? It would be suicide for them.’
‘Yes, ma’am, it would,’ agreed Ritchie. ‘But rationality went down the toilet today.’
A few moments’ silence followed, with everyone locked inside their own thoughts.
‘Well,’ Lingle said at last. ‘As I said, you have an intact chain of command – use it as necessary. For now, we have our own problem right here. These islands cannot feed themselves. There isn’t going to be any food coming from the mainland and people are going to starve if we don’t get it from somewhere else, and soon.’