“We’re fine, General. Shook up, but fine.”
Jessica felt the tension in her neck ease as the words crackled out of her cellphone. The Kentucky Dam, holding back the combined waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, was intact. If it had gone, pouring both Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley into the Ohio, it would have created a colossal wall of water that would have turned the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys from Evansville to Memphis into one long, blank, lifeless smear of mud.
“I want the dam surveyed for damage,” Jessica said. “And every other dam in the area.”
“Yah. I’ll get right on it.”
“I need to make some other calls right now. But let me give you my number— call me only if you’ve got bad news, understand? If things are fine, I don’t want to hear from you.”
“You betcha. Guess you’re kinda busy down there, yah?”
Jessica grinned. That you betcha, spoken in a classic Red River of the North accent, was far from a proper military response. But the Army Corps of Engineers, though operated by the military, was not entirely a military outfit. Most of the people who worked for Jessica in the Mississippi Valley Division— engineers, inspectors, architects, and lock masters, surveyors, boat captains, equipment operators, and managers— were civilians, and not subject to military discipline. Entire Corps districts saw a person in uniform only rarely.
A clash between military and civilian cultures was a constant possibility. Jessica preferred to think of this not as a disadvantage, but as a stimulating opportunity for cross-cultural discourse.
Jessica disconnected and batted moths away from her flashlight. She was squatting on the lawn in front of her headquarters building, looking at maps and lists of phone numbers spread out on the grass. Flashlights and the headlights of vehicles were the only illumination.
She called the Clarence Cannon dam again, and received no reply. “Fuckingskunksuckingsonofabitch,” she muttered rapid-fire. Too many critical installations were out of communication.
“General Caldwell?” The voice came out of the darkness. Jessica looked up to see a man approaching. He wore civilian clothing and his eyes glittered strangely from behind thick glasses.
“I’m General Frazetta,” she said as she rose to her feet. Caldwell had been the name of her predecessor, a tall, burly man who looked more like a sandhog than an engineer.
“I brought this, General. I knew you’d need it.”
He held out something that glittered in the headlights. Jessica reached out a hand and something metal and heavy was placed in her palm. A heavy double-ended chrome-plated wrench.
“Took me a long time to find it,” the man said. “But I knew you’d need it.” He gave a serious nod, then faded back into the night. Jessica looked down at the wrench in her hand, then at the dark silhouette of the spectacled man as he vanished into the night.
The earthquake had shaken people up. She had met relatively few people since the quake, but a disturbing number of them weren’t behaving rationally. It was as if the disaster was so far outside their experience that they had no way of reacting to it logically; the scale of the thing had unstrung their minds.
Something had to be done for these people, she thought. There were probably thousands of them.
But she had other things to do first.
She squatted down into the light of the headlights and began to press buttons on her satellite phone.
*
An aftershock woke Charlie some time after midnight. The BMW trembled on its suspension as the earth shivered for a good three minutes.
Earthquake, he thought. It was an earthquake.
How strange. Earthquakes were only in California and Japan.
He could still see downtown Memphis glowing red on the horizon, beneath a spreading gloom of smoke.
Charlie blinked and stroked the stubble on his chin. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He felt feverish.
More than the earth was moving, he knew.
Prices were moving.
He needed to get a grip, he thought. Prices were moving. There was money to be made. He needed to get to his desk and make some sales.
Stocks were going to plummet, he thought. Which meant there were going to be all sorts of cheap bargains to be picked up.
America, he further considered, was going to need to rebuild. Which meant that they would need dollars. Which meant that Charlie needed to buy dollars right now, because lots of investors were going to panic when they heard about the quake, and they would try to sell their dollars. So Charlie would buy, because the Federal Reserve was going to have to buy billions of dollars to finance the reconstruction, so the dollar would eventually go up, and he would profit. Which would result in depressed prices in places like London and Tokyo, as American dollars came home, so he’d have to start shorting those markets.
And bonds. He needed to talk to his bond traders. Because the Fed would be loaning out its dollars at very low interest rates to finance reconstruction, and that would mean higher bond prices.
He considered other side effects. He would buy oil, lots of it. Refinery capacity would be reduced, and the price would be up. And foodstuffs, because a lot of agricultural land had just got trashed, so food prices would be rising.
He needed to move right now, because the whole situation could change by the time the markets closed tomorrow.
He picked up the cellphone again, tried to call Dearborne. Nothing. He called some of his traders. Nothing but silences.
Move! he thought, and pounded the car wheel in front of him with his fists.
Nothing moved in the still night. Nothing but the drifting cloud of smoke overhead.
*
As dawn approached, the news from the quake zone only grew worse. Huge fires raged out of control, both in cities and national forests. Communication and transportation were shattered. Millions in need, and no way to get aid to all of them.
“Mr. President,” Lipinsky said finally, “I am afraid that the limits of our efforts are very rapidly being reached. There are large sections of the country— mostly rural— that will be on their own for some time. We cannot get help to them, not with our efforts concentrated in the cities.”
The President licked his lips. “We can put more soldiers in the disaster area,” he said. “Call up more reserves. Bring the National Guard in from other states ...”
Lipinsky shook his head. “We can't put in more soldiers until there's a way to move them into the field, and to supply them once they get there. Right now we can only move our people into the badly damaged areas with helicopters, and we only have so many, and they have to divide their limited time between rescue, supply, and delivering our rescue teams to their objectives. Helicopters are also very delicate— they spend more time in maintenance than in the air.” He gazed into the President's face. “Sir, I recommend that you address the American people. Tell them frankly that many of them cannot expect our assistance for some time to come. I think they will be safer for that knowledge.”
The President clenched his teeth. “It is not my job,” he said, “in the midst of the worst disaster in history, to tell the taxpayers of the most powerful nation in the world that their government can't help them!” He realized he was shouting, that the Situation Room had fallen silent.
He looked at the crowd of people for a moment, then realized how tired he was.
“Five-minute break,” he said, turned, and left the room.
He went to one of the rest rooms, moistened a towel in cool water, and applied the towel to the back of his neck. His kidneys ached. He closed his eyes, then had to open them because he began to sway with weariness. He stared into the hollow-eyed scarecrow that stared back at him from the mirror.
“Let Lipinsky be wrong,” he said.
He was the President, his mind protested. The President of the most powerful nation on earth.
So why was he feeling more helpless than any other time in his life?