convinced that definitive data was still lacking, that it would be folly to try to predict another massive quake. Weston was voicing the majority opinion. He’d done so with increasing support since the crisis had started.
Holleran went on. “From what I’ve read, triples aren’t all that unusual in intraplate settings like the one here. There were triples as recently as 1990 in the Sudan. The largest was a magnitude 7.3. The smallest a 6.7. They hit over a five-day period. In 1988, a rural area in Australia recorded three in the magnitude 6 range over a twelve-hour period.”
“We’ll have a panic on our hands if it leaks out we were even having this discussion,” Weston said. “We don’t need mass hysteria.”
“I’d say we already have it,” said Holleran. “How can we scare people any more than they already are?”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 15
7:00 A.M.
PRESIDENT NATHAN ROSS STARED AT HIMSELF IN the mirror in the closet-sized galley of Big Green, the VH-3D Sikorsky based at Camp David. He was a depressing sight. The dark puffy rings under his eyes had been there for days and seemed to get deeper with every additional hour he went without sleep.
He’d never liked his five-o’clock shadow. It was too heavy, too much like Richard Nixon’s. And well into his second term, he sometimes thought he was almost as unpopular. His administration had been plagued by a series of domestic difficulties—worsening race relations, the increasing bipartisan sniping over affirmative action programs, yet another Medicare crisis, and the ever-present budget deficit. Very little of substance had been accomplished. Unable to find sound bites in the mire of such complex issues, the media had inevitably turned to his personal life. Much of the recent news coverage had dealt with the few women he’d invited to the White House for dinner or taken out for an evening to the National Gallery. A widower, he hadn’t dated for years and suddenly found himself fair game for the tabloids.
The youngest governor in the history of Illinois, Ross was also the youngest president. He was fifty-two with two years to go in his second term. In some respects he’d been lucky, damn lucky. The economy had been robust for most of his presidency. There’d been no major international crises and his party still controlled Congress.
No major problems—until this one.
His national security adviser had called the disaster the gravest crisis the country had faced since the Civil War. Ross hadn’t believed him. Not even when he sat in the NSC operations office in the basement of the East Wing and watched the early television reports from the cities hardest hit. Filmed at night, the footage mainly showed fires burning. After a while, it all looked the same. There was no perspective, no focus.
But after visiting these cities in daylight, Ross thought his adviser, a vituperative former marine, had nailed it with his Civil War analogy.
They’d made three stops the day before: Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. He’d spent a couple of hours on the ground in each city. The extent of the devastation had made him physically sick, in St. Louis especially. He’d been there several times on fund-raisers. The famous Gateway Arch, the monument to westward expansion that had towered 660 feet over the Mississippi River, was twisted sideways and leaned toward the river at a forty-five- degree angle. Three of the city’s largest hospitals had been demolished. Forest Park and Tower Grove Park were being used as tent cities for the thousands who’d had to move out of their damaged homes.
Ross remembered the bodies they’d removed from one of the hospitals. More than two hundred of them lined up along a sidewalk under blankets, sheets, newspapers—any covering the rescuers could find. Again, he thought of the Civil War. A photograph of the dead piled up at Gettysburg, lying shoulder to shoulder in the grass, blue and gray alike. There was no way they could reach all of the dead, much less the injured.
The heart had been ripped out of the Mississippi Valley. Eleven major pipelines that carried oil and natural gas from the Texas and Oklahoma fields to the East Coast had been shattered. Nine of them crossed the Mississippi at Memphis or just south of it. Some of the pipes were still burning. The whole waterfront was on fire.
The East Coast and frigid New England had enough petroleum reserves to last barely a week. Temperatures were well below freezing. In a few days, millions of people were going to be hurting in ways that couldn’t be imagined.
There were other problems, all of them grievous:
Grain shipments couldn’t flow down the Mississippi. Fallen bridges had closed the river to barge traffic in eight places.
The financial and bond markets were a shambles. Wall Street had suspended trading indefinitely.
The insurance industry had been all but wiped out. There was no way they could cover all the losses from the earthquake and related damage. They’d started calling in their bonds, which of course wiped out the bond market, which in turn financially ruined hundreds of municipalities that depended on bonds to fund all manner of public works.
And yet all of these problems paled when Ross remembered those mangled bodies in St. Louis.
He wondered what it would be like in Memphis. He’d been told to prepare for the worst.
Ross splashed water on his face. He was a handsome man with light gray eyes, a strong jawline, and black hair graying at the temples. He was just over six feet tall, a little overweight, and prone to overeating. He’d swum thousands of laps in the White House pool to hold the line at a thirty-eight-inch waist. He had to admit, staring at himself one last time in the mirror, that he looked like hell.
In a couple of minutes the chopper would be putting down in Memphis. He wanted to meet with the USGS and university people there. He’d brought along his national science adviser. Steve Draper.
As Ross stepped out of the galley, he was confronted by his chief of security, Phil Belleau. Belleau had been with the Secret Service for twenty years. Ross liked to tell him he was the only man he’d ever met who didn’t have a neck, absolutely didn’t have one. The big head seemed to balance like a ball on his shoulders. He looked like an all-pro defensive back.
Belleau was angry. Ross knew why.
“Mister President, for the last time. We can’t guarantee your safety. We’ve got ten men with you and another fifteen already on the ground. It’s total chaos down there. Anybody could take a shot at you. There’s no police force to speak of. No security. You were a fool the way you walked into those crowds in St. Louis.”
Ross let him get it out of his system. He probably deserved it. And Belleau was about the only man he’d let talk to him that way.
“Better get used to it, Phil,” Ross said when the agent had finished venting. “I… have… got… to… be… seen. These people have got to know they’ve still got a federal government to turn to. It’s about all they do have right now.”
Belleau, an emotional, spontaneous man, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He had to make him understand. “Mister President, a lot of people are damned mad,” he said, softening his tone. “Out of their heads with anger. They’ve lost everything. Some have lost their families. A lot of them have lost homes, their businesses, jobs. Some of them are going to blame the government, blame you personally. Blame you for not giving them any warning. Blame you for not having enough emergency supplies ready or for not getting their homes rebuilt overnight. Blame you for whatever the fuck they can think of. Any one of them could try to kill you. So for the record, I’m asking you again to meet with the people you’ve got to meet with in Memphis. Do it in private, not out in the open. Then get the hell out. Memphis isn’t a city anymore.”
“I read you loud and clear, Phil,” Ross said. He put a hand on the agent’s shoulder. “Just do your best. And hell, you know anybody wants to shoot me, they ought to go for my ass. It’s a bigger target.”
Belleau grinned in spite of himself. “We better get belted in,” he said, glancing at his watch. “We’ll be landing in less than a minute.”
The Sikorsky circled the University of Memphis campus, banking so the president could get a look at the damage. Hundreds of people were on the ground, digging through the rubble. He saw the rows of dead bodies lined up along a sidewalk and closed his eyes. It was St. Louis all over again.
Rage hammered at him, a blind rage directed against a natural force that he hated with every ounce of his being. He knew it was a foolish, draining expenditure of emotion, but couldn’t help himself. He needed to direct his
