Soto Cano Air Base, about ten miles south of Comayagua. Like Musso himself, and Admiral Ritchie, whose superior, Admiral Fargo, had been in Washington this morning, Pileggi had found herself thrust into the rumble seat by the absence of her own boss back in the US. It reminded him of war games in which he’d had a very minor part back at the start of his career, role-playing a massive Soviet nuclear strike that all but destroyed the United States and her government.
Franks was the ranking officer among them, but he deferred to Ritchie, who wasn’t burdened with managing a looming war in the Middle East, and who had the full resources of PACOM at his disposal. The admiral, like all of them, appeared tense and when he spoke it was with a clipped tone that Musso recognised. He heard the same serrated edge on his own words whenever he opened his mouth at the moment.
‘I’ll recap what we
Musso watched four heads, including his own, nod in a acknowledgement.
‘As of three hours, fourteen minutes ago, an event of unknown origin appears to have wiped human habitation from an area estimated at just over four million square miles…’
Tusk Musso found his throat closing involuntarily. His wife and children were deep inside that four million square miles. His whole country was, close enough. His life.
‘We have not yet mapped the exact perimeter of the effect,’ Ritchie continued. ‘But we have good estimates that it lies in a very rough ovoid shape that covers ninety per cent of the contiguous US mainland states, half of Canada, and all of Mexico above a line extending from a point a few miles south of Chilpancingo on the west coast to Chetumal on the east, and extending through the Gulf to transect Cuba seventy thousand metres north of Guantanamo. Of the larger cities on the contiguous mainland US, only Seattle appears to lie outside the area. We’re still checking on Olympia, a bit further south. Things are confused there. The Governor’s office has declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and called out the National Guard.’
Musso couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. Nor could Susan Pileggi, he noted. He hadn’t seen any mention of Seattle in the news bulletins. As if reading his thoughts, Ritchie explained.
‘General Blackstone at Fort Lewis sent troops into the local media outlets to forestall a panic. The… uh… Governor and deputy are… unaccounted for. So too are some of the city council people for Seattle. Apparently they were at some conference in Spokane, behind the event horizon. An estimated three hundred and fifty million people were caught within the affected zone,’ Ritchie continued. ‘At this stage we have no information or even speculation about what may have happened to them, whether the effect is permanent, or stable, a natural phenomenon, or technologically based. We’ve been monitoring the reaction from any potentially hostile governments and none are behaving in any way that would give rise to a suspicion that they played any role in this.’
‘What’s happening in Beijing?’ asked General Franks.
Ritchie appeared to direct his answer to a spot just over Musso’s shoulder as he addressed the image of Franks on a screen thousands of miles away. ‘The army is pouring onto the streets in every major provincial capital, General. Martial law has been declared but none of the PLA’s force-projection assets have been mobilised. Nonetheless, our own counter-strike forces are at Def-con 2, just in case.’
Ice water pooled in Musso’s guts. Ritchie had ordered his nuclear submarines to stand ready should the need arise to reduce the communist giant to a vast crematorium. It raised an immediate question: who would authorise any such strike? Again, Ritchie seemed to be one step ahead of him.
‘I’m afraid, before we proceed any further,’ he said, ‘we need to discuss where the executive authority now lies.’
‘There’s no designated survivor?’ asked Tommy Franks.
Ritchie shook his head.
The further into this they got, the bleaker it grew, thought Musso. The ‘designated survivor’ was a Cabinet member nominated to remain apart from the other – was it sixteen or seventeen? – people in the presidential line of succession, a civilian analogue of the chain of command. The system only really operated when the executive was gathered in one place, such as during a State of the Union address, but now wasn’t the time to play semantics. If they couldn’t legitimately find somebody to step into the office of President, then any military actions they took would have no legal basis.
‘Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Labor, is in Geneva,’ said Ritchie, ‘at a UN conference. But she is specifically barred from the line of succession because she’s not a natural-born citizen. As best we can tell, there is nobody from the line… available.’
‘You mean “alive”,’ said Musso, unable to accept the euphemism any longer. ‘There is nobody else
Silence greeted him, and Musso immediately regretted his lack of tact. There was a reason why he was never going to ascend to the rarefied heights of a theatre command, the same reason he’d been slated for forced retirement in the next twelve months. Finally, General Jones broke the moment, speaking from Brussels.
‘Well said, Tusk. The world’s been knocked flat on its ass wondering what hit it. But that’s going to change within a day or two. And all hell is going to cut loose. You can bet on it.’
‘Gentlemen, if I might?’
The testosterone had been ramping up very quickly. The intrusion of a softer, female voice seemed to calm things a little. Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi smiled out of the monitor at Musso, at all of them.
‘We all took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. No matter what catastrophe has overtaken us, that oath and the Constitution still stand. Millions of American citizens are still with us. Some of them back home, in the unaffected Northwest. Most of them scattered around the world. I don’t know the exact figures but there must be, what, four or five million Americans overseas on any given day? There are embassies, consulates, military bases and personnel – the sinews of government, if you will. But it is a government
Pileggi spoke with controlled passion. Nobody spoke at all until Tommy Franks’s thick Oklahoma drawl poured out of the speakers.
