The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargon-bluster, and in the end it all came to ‘We don’t know shit’.
‘The phenomenon remains non-responsive to magnetic resonance scans,’ said Professor Griffiths. He was a small, round, red-headed toad of a man who’d added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso’s existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave. ‘The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transubstantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential remains non-obvious
As he burbled on, the general surreptitiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in a few days earlier from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso’s time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfil.
‘Our investigations continue,’ the scientist concluded.
Man, I hope that’s a conclusion, thought Tusk. ‘Any questions?’ asked the Marine, getting to his feet and addressing the room.
Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went, and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.
‘Very good,’ said Musso hurriedly. ‘Bang up presentation there, doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don’t feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise -’
‘Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you’ve established along the line of the phenomenon -’
‘Is not open for discussion… Sergeant!’
A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.
Tusk relaxed slightly. He wasn’t being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realisation that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack shit about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.
He was a five-star pain in the ass.
‘Okay,’ said Musso, with more relief than was seemly. ‘I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?’
‘Coming online now, sir.’
‘Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up.’
General Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over bloodspot on his shaved head. He’d knocked a small divot out of himself fucking around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that’d come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.
Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental US at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance hit, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op centre was now resigned and sombre. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Massive pile-ups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called ‘Flyover Country’, in the Midwest. Where there should have been cattle or horses, there were charred spots and grassfires, especially in west Texas.
Mega-fires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed – at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centres at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in Kansas City. An airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. The number of population centres lost came to thousands, however, once you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.
‘Miami on the right-hand screen, KC to the left, General.’
Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn’t look much alike and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the centre of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career, for some joint-forces training with the US Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced and he certainly wasn’t eager to go back there any time soon.
‘Okay,’ said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. ‘This is a highlights package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks.’
Fifteen men and women had squeezed into the small room for the briefing, including Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi, who’d flown up from Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras the previous day. The senior SOUTHCOM representative sat in the front row with a notepad and pen at the ready. She and Musso were supposed to present a plan to Ritchie that evening to evacuate any and all US citizens who wanted to go, from South and Central America to an as-yet-undetermined location. It meant moving hundreds of thousands of people God only knew where. But certainly not to Gitmo. It already had a diabolical refugee problem.
Musso thumbed a control stick and brought up the first set of images. Still shots from the downtown areas of both cities. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing new to report here,’ he announced. ‘Just better imaging than we’ve had so far. The power grid in both cities has failed, meaning there’s less chance of a catastrophic urban firestorm starting up, although spot fires continue to break out here and there for whatever reason.’
Musso examined the Kansas City screen, which displayed the footage of a burnt-out Quiktrip on Armour Boulevard, across from a post office and a couple of larger buildings in Northtown. He never could keep all of Kansas City’s various townships and municipalities straight when he was there. The Heart of America Bridge along with the Paseo and Hannibal bridges showed evidence of multi-vehicle pile-ups, some of which had combusted and later burnt out in the schizophrenic weather of the Midwest. A train had derailed on the ASB Bridge next to the Heart of America and dumped itself into the Muddy Mo. One of the towers, he couldn’t tell which one, looked like it had been slashed with something – probably a Cessna or a Learjet from Downtown Airport.
On the other screen, a Walmart Supercenter on 88th Street in Miami had been reduced to a smouldering shell. Several watercraft in a variety of flavours and sizes had washed up on the beaches and canals. Musso couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between these images and those stolen from blasted landscapes throughout the Balkans and in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. There was one major difference, of course: no bodies.
‘We chose these two cities for the Hawks, partly because they remain comparatively undamaged, and also because local weather patterns have temporarily cleared away some of the pollutants that are choking the air pretty much everywhere else. That won’t last.’
He thumbed the control again, and the twin displays appeared to blink, as they switched to a different video stream.
‘You’re now looking at imaging taken from Montgomery, Memphis and St Louis as the first bird made its way up to KC
The screens reformatted into a series of windows, all showing bleak, grey landscapes that reminded Musso of photographs of old industrial towns, where soggy ash and acid rain permanently blanketed the landscape, leaching the colour from everything. A couple of low grunts and a curse or two were evidence that some capacity to be surprised remained in his audience.
‘This nuclear-winter effect has been replicated across the continental US, although not uniformly. As you might expect, the concentrations of airborne pollutants are most dense at the source, and data from our weather satellites indicates that a significantly thick tail measuring about a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles extends east from each of the largest cities to have burned. In some areas of the country, in certain parts of the Rockies and on the West Coast well to the north and south of the LA Basin, the concentration of particulates is not yet at critical levels. Because of a low-pressure system sitting off the coast this last week, Seattle did suffer some contamination from the mega-fires that burnt out Portland and Spokane, but that system moved east and dragged a good deal of the plume with it.’
The scratch on his head was bleeding again, forcing Musso to reach for another tissue with which to dab it. He patted down his pockets, unable to find one, until Colonel Pileggi passed him a Kleenex from a handbag down by her feet.
‘Thanks, Susan. Feels like I’m bleeding out here.’
‘Don’t worry, General. Chicks dig scars.’
A strained chuckle ran through the tightly packed group and eased just a little of the utter hopelessness that had begun to take hold. Musso turned back to the briefing with at least some sense of purpose.
‘Okay. Average temperatures under the particulate cloud are up to twenty degrees cooler than average, although again, that varies from one locale to another. The variations are much more pronounced inland than by the sea, and proximity to a major source has an effect too.’
‘That solves Gore’s global-warming problem,’ Major Clarence snorted.
‘Quiet on deck!’ Lieutenant Colonel Stavros shouted.
Musso ignored the distraction and brought up satellite coverage of the Eurasian landmass.
‘The plume has moved across Europe and is within two days of reaching the eastern seaboard of China. It is largely contained within the northern hemisphere between thirty and sixty degrees latitude. The climatic effects are less severe than on the North American continent, but they remain significant, and I’m told they’ll probably deteriorate for another two to three weeks, before stabilising for six to twelve months.’
‘There’s a lot of wriggle room in those figures, General,’ said Pileggi, as she looked up from scribbling in her notebook.
‘Enough of a margin to mean the difference between a lot of people living and dying,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve been on at PACOM to tighten them up, but that’s as good as they’ll commit to for now. You know what scientists are like,’ he added, shaking his head. The spectre of Professor Griffiths still haunted the briefing room.
The display returned to top-down street scenes in Miami and KC. Not a living thing moved anywhere in either city.
‘The weather data is important to us because it directly affects our mission: the evacuation of all US citizens who want it, to a secure location, as yet to be determined.’ Musso turned to Pileggi while he dabbed at his cut again. ‘Your airfield is going to be vital in that effort to move from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Colonel, especially if we evacuate to Australia, New Zealand or our allies in Asia.’
‘I understand, sir. If I may – what about defence assets?’ Pileggi asked. ‘Castro is gone, but Chavez isn’t. I do not have any air cover to speak of outside of our allies in the region, and their air power isn’t quite up to dealing with Hugo if he gets froggy. Plus, we’re going to need to secure the Canal.’
‘I know,’ agreed Musso. ‘I’ve been on to PACOM about that too. Pearl’s promising whatever they can spare, but at the moment, that’s nothing.’
The colonel persisted anyway. ‘If they’re serious about the refugee problem they need to find that brigade to secure the Canal,’ she said. ‘My staff have planned our side of any evacuation based on being able to ship people through Panama. If the government collapses – which is a pretty good bet – that canal is going to stop working. These locks are a century old and require ground crew to run them. At some very narrow points, the ships are actually pulled by tugs. All of these locations are extremely vulnerable to attack.’
Musso threw up his hands. ‘I know all about it, Colonel. But at the moment, it’s a tenth-order issue for them. I’ll see what I can do to change that. We need to plan for the worst, though.’
‘There are some contingency plans, but they are almost uniformly awful,’ Pileggi went on. ‘Some ships could try to head to Nicaragua and cross there. Most of Nicaragua can be crossed by travelling upriver to a point where the trip overland to the Pacific side is maybe eight to ten miles. The navy could pick up folks on the other side, but it would require heavy combat power on the ground to secure any transit, especially if Nicaragua goes under. Alternately, a convoy could sail around the tip of South America. But that route is vulnerable to Chavez and his navy. I also imagine there will be a significant rise in piracy throughout those waters should there be a breakdown in state control. Another option is to disembark any civilians on the Atlantic side of the Canal Zone, where our own forces could establish a defensive position of sorts. Those civilians would then be escorted overland to the Pacific side or to a useable airfield. Another nightmare.’
‘I’ll talk to Ritchie,’ said Musso.
There was no avoiding it. Over a hundred civilian craft lay at anchor down in the bay, most of them carrying US nationals who’d gravitated to the nearest and most obvious symbol of American power still in existence in this part of the world. Just feeding them and supplying enough fresh water each day was a Herculean challenge. They couldn’t stay. But getting them there was a non-trivial problem too. From Musso’s perspective, maintaining control of the Panama Canal was still a number-one priority for the United States. At least in the short term. He was responsible for the transport and protection of any American refugees who requested it, and that meant putting most of them through Panama. Where they went after that was a matter for diplomatic negotiations underway in Pearl.