electricity, and cease the burning of fossil fuels. In essence, we need to clear the air, literally, of both radiation and petroleum by-products if a first step in ending this disaster is to be made.
“I have just signed an emergency executive order stipulating that all cellular communication towers and power plants in the United States of America will be shut down as of midnight tonight. Except for hospitals and designated emergency personnel, the use of portable generators is banned. The driving of vehicles will also be prohibited, and any violators are subject to arrest. The heads of other major industrial nations, among them the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Japan, have agreed to do the same. You will be informed of any and all further instructions. This two-week cessation is essential to allow our scientists to confirm the causes of human- animal conflict, and for us to formulate a coordinated plan for the future. Thank you for your cooperation. God bless America, and God bless us all.”
Chapter 89
WHEN THE PRESIDENT’S speech came on, Charles Groh and I were downstairs in the Navy Mess, drinking coffee and trying to brainstorm. It was more of a light brainshower—we were too spent and frazzled to stir up a storm.
Really, we were just waiting and watching until the minute hand oozed into place to form the perfect backward L of nine o’clock, and we followed the scuttling commotion into the adjoining stainless steel kitchen and gathered with the crowd of kitchen staff where they stood, vigilant and hushed, beneath a TV mounted to the wall.
When the broadcast was over, the crowd dissolved into anxious murmurs.
“The power’s going out, and the army is going to lock people up for driving their cars?” said a portly black chef. Somebody switched off the TV. “
He seemed skeptical. Everyone did. I was skeptical, too, and I was the primary architect of the brilliant new plan.
“How does it feel?” said Dr. Groh as we arrived back at our table in the nearly empty dining room.
“How does what feel?”
“To finally get what you want,” he said. “You’ve been trying to warn people for how long? A decade, almost? Now they’re listening. It’s got to be pretty weird to finally get what you want.”
“I just hope it’s what we need.”
I drank the last of my coffee and looked at the sludge in the bottom of the paper cup as though I were a gypsy reading tea leaves. I thought about it. My feelings were definitely of the mixed variety. I was glad the idiotic carpet-bombing campaign had been stopped, but the problem was that my petroleum-radiation-pheromone theory was still just that: a theory.
There was a strong possibility I could be completely wrong, or only half right. It was impossible to rule out other factors contributing to the problem. It was even possible that radiation, electricity, and petroleum had nothing to do with it—that we’d just been barking up the wrong tree. (Ha-ha.) Science is like that. It doesn’t have the answers. It guesses, tests, and guesses again. I had my guesses, and now they were going to be tested. Turning off the world’s lights was an unprecedented, historic event. What if it didn’t work?
“It feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, Charles,” I said. “I’m pretty much scared shitless.”
Dr. Groh shrugged.
When we returned to the Cabinet Room for another round of meetings, everyone seemed dazed, exhausted. But it was the kind of upbeat dazed and exhausted you see in people racing to meet a deadline, the pizza-box-and- black-coffee all-nighter, the burned-out look of dedicated people in the final push of getting something difficult done.
When the president walked in, a spontaneous burst of applause filled the crowded room.
But as the energy secretary whistled through pinched fingers, I kept my hands at my sides. This wasn’t the end of something. This was just the very beginning of what I anticipated was going to be a long, hard journey. I couldn’t quite join in the self-congratulation just yet.
Because letting the public know was one thing.
Getting them to comply was quite another.
In order for this to work, people had to actually stop using electricity and driving cars.
Would they?
It all depended upon people observing the new emergency ordinances. Realistically, there were nowhere near enough boots on the ground to enforce these contingency laws—so all we could do was to count on people to cooperate. In officer training, one of the first things they tell you is to never give an order unless you’re sure it will be obeyed. If a law cannot be enforced, it’s easy for it to crumble. As Frederick the Great said, diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.
As the president found her seat in the middle of the room, I tried to think of other instances in which Americans had been called upon to sacrifice for the good of the country. Or of the world, as the case may be. World War II is a good example. I also remembered all the charity and camaraderie that had abounded in New York after 9/11. It could happen again, right?
I crossed my fingers under the table as President Hardinson cleared her throat. I hoped so. I prayed so.
It was all up to us now.
Chapter 90
BECAUSE OF ELECTRICAL load and supply concerns, large-scale power grids take time to shut down without damaging the equipment. It isn’t until twelve hours after the president’s stated deadline that the US grid has fully powered down.
The rolling blackout catches some people unawares. Water pumps fail in some areas and people are stuck in elevators as everything grinds to a standstill.
And then there is silence, and darkness.
But most people are ready for it.
By 2100 EDT, every power plant, airline, and factory in the United States and Europe is powered down, as well as every commercial cellular communications site. In the United States, army units are deployed to stop all vehicular traffic. For the first time ever, the US Air Force Space and Missile Systems satellite that monitors nighttime data shows only blackness where those twinkling crystalline spiderwebs of light used to be: New York, London, Paris. Dark.
At the break of rosy-fingered dawn in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, Barbara Hatfield wakes inside a shipping container that her zoological research center used for storage. The primatologist locked herself in it almost three weeks ago in order to avoid being ripped asunder by gorillas or the rhinos that appeared out of nowhere.
She is in big trouble. The container is a broiler by day and an icebox at night. Her food has run out. There is only one gallon of water left. She is weak, hungry, dehydrated. Isolated from the goings-on in the rest of the world, she does not understand why no one has come to her rescue. Why has the supply plane not been here in three weeks? Isolation. Hunger. Deprivation. Fear. She is feverish, hallucinatory, the borders between reality, nightmare, and dream blurring and dissolving. She is being punished in some way by God, abandoned in the jungle to suffer and die.
With great effort, she rolls over onto her hands and knees, crawls to the hole in the container by one of the hinges, and peeks through the slit of vision it offers her.
What she sees amazes her. In the clearing near the edge of the tree line, she can see the gorillas. But the females are present again. When the craziness started, all the females seemed to have disappeared. Now they are back. The gorillas are no longer menacing. They are doing what they usually do: eating, mating, playing with their children, lazing in the grass.
