'You learned well, boy. I could only wish that all of my pupils learned their lessons as well as you.' He produced a series of papers from a pocket in his shirt, unfolding them and handing them out to each of the bandit leaders in turn.
'Yusuf Mohammed was very careful not to be seen as he made his way back to us,' Ozal said. 'As he moved through the Slavs' territory and came to understand what he was seeing, he made maps just as he had been taught. These are copies of those maps my men developed from his field sketches. They reveal the location of at least four warehouses, three of them Russian, one of them Serbian. They are clearinghouses for their salvage operations here in Manhattan and so are always well stocked with the finest loot. They are yours for the taking… after we have driven the Americans from the city. When that is done, you have the promise of my emir that we will help you take this treasure but will claim none of it ourselves.'
The bandit leaders exchanged a quiet look. The African spoke for them all.
'This will mean war with the Slavs as well.'
Ozal showed him a pair of open palms.
'Yes, it will,' he said. 'But once we have driven off the Americans together, the Slavs will be easy pickings for us. They may not even put up a fight. We shall see. But whatever shall happen, you have the promise of the emir that for your help in defeating the Americans that part of the city and all its plunder shall be ceded to you in equal measure. What say you? Do you still have the stomach for this fight?'
Yusuf Mohammed sat very still. He had known as he stole up from the river toward the camp of his emir that any information he could gather would go to his credit when it came time to plead for a second chance. Now, sitting here in this room surrounded by the ghosts of hundreds of Americans, in a city haunted by millions of others, he was struck by just how forgiving Allah could be.
He had thought himself borne along on a current carrying him to ignominy and doom, yet it was all part of God's design. He had been meant to survive the American assault. He had been meant to wash up in the part of the city controlled by the Slavs who had refused to join in the holy campaign against the Americans. And he had been meant by God to walk a path that delivered him here into this room to cement an alliance with these men who were obviously vital to the emir's plans.
All he needed to make this day perfect was a gun in his hand and directions back to the front line.
35
Kansas City, Missouri President James Kipper felt a surge of pride at the sight of Kansas City Power and Light's restored Number Five generator pumping sanitized white smoke into a clear blue sky. Standing in the parking lot of the Hawthorne plant, on the banks of the Missouri River northeast of the city's still-deserted urban core, he could indulge himself in the guilty pleasure of forgetting for a moment about Mad Jack Blackstone and the horrors of New York, along with the frustrations of politics and the trouble he was in with his wife. For just a few moments, standing next to his oldest friend, Barney Tench, listening to the hum of the transmission lines and the excited burbling of his entourage, he could wallow in a giddy glee rarely experienced since the Wave.
Creation.
The simple joy of creation had been the engine of his life for as long as he could remember. His earliest memories were of building things. Not just wooden blocks and LEGO towers but giant, messy backyard earthworks and dams and pretend farms and shoebox factories and tree houses and secret dens. As a child he had always gone that one step further, driven by what he now recognized as an innate desire to reach out and shape the world. My poor mother, he thought fondly. Oh, how her garden beds had suffered.
'So, boss,' Tench said, gesturing at the massive Hawthorne Unit Five smokestack. 'What do you think?'
'Impressive,' Kipper replied. 'You know how much I love a big honkin' power plant, Barn. What's our status?'
Barney gestured at the drab tan structure of the main plant building with a jelly doughnut swiped earlier from the catering table. 'With Unit Five fully manned and operational,' he said, 'we'll have close to four hundred megawatts of juice. Plenty for now.'
'Cool. More than enough,' Kipper agreed. 'What about the gas turbine facility on the east side?'
Barney looked over his notes. 'Ah… from what I understand, I think that's meant for the summer months when everyone is, er… was running their AC. It is in pretty good shape and could provide backup power on demand. We're still sorting it out, but the coal generator was easier since she's so much like the ones we got back in Seattle.'
'Relatively new, isn't it?' Kipper asked.
'Yeah. Umm, perhaps I shouldn't mention this, boss, but this plant has a history of bad luck: a fire back in the nineties that knocked out the transmission lines and an explosion which destroyed the original Unit Number Five,' Barney said.
Kipper nodded. 'That explains why everything is new, then. What about Units One through Four? Will you be bringing those back online?'
Tench shook his head. 'Naw, there's no need for them. Besides, they'd been idled for decades before the Wave. What I really need are more linemen to restore the grid.'
'I thought we had an on-site training program,' Kipper said.
Tench nodded. 'We do. Hell, there's a community college not more than a mile away with everything you need for a program. Classes were in session when the Wave hit, so we were literally able to pick up the program and restart it in place with new apprentice linemen. Thing is, those folks won't be ready for at least a year. In the meantime, the work is waiting. Can we get any more warm bodies from Seattle City Light?'
'Doubt it,' Kipper said. 'In fact, they're screaming to get their people back as soon as possible. Got their own repair issues to deal with, and they're shorthanded, too.'
Loud metallic squeals and screeches heralded the approach of a train backing into the power plant. Bumping down the tracks past the reinforced checkpoint, the cars were loaded with coal bound for the generating facility. Coal was still the most plentiful means of energy production within the United States, and early in his term Kipper had rammed a bill through Congress providing a fast track to citizenship for any suitably qualified migrant who would work the mines in Wyoming. Watching the three big ATS diesel locomotives slowly hauling the massive line of hoppers into the plant, he recalled the arm-twisting and distasteful outright pork barreling Jed had used to sideline the Greens' bloc vote on that one. They didn't oppose the immigration program per se, of course, but they wanted those immigrants to focus on restoring large swaths of the country to a prehuman state. Forget about power generation or anything resembling a twentieth-century standard of living.
Kipper shook his head. He loved the wilderness as much as any man. More than most, probably. Hell, the first thing he was going to do when he finally escaped from executive office was take himself off into the mountains for a week on his own. Barbara permitting, of course. But to hear the Greens tell of it, he was doing more damage just bringing this one plant back on line than all the firestorms of the post-Wave period.
He sighed. Couldn't they see what a beautiful fucking thing this was? How much better it was going to make life for the people stuck out here in the boonies? And how KC itself was so important to resettling the interior and reaching out to the East? But of course thinking about the East only led to thinking about New York, and for now Kip was determined not to harsh his own mellow, borrowing a phrase his daughter had brought home from school the other day. Seattle and its fucking hippies, he thought.
As Barney burbled on about the logistics of this small corner of his empire-'The maintenance facility down on Front Street is fairly well stocked, and the city's P amp;L did a pretty good job of archiving their work. Only real problem's been figuring out the quirks of Unit Five. Once we get that hashed out, we can probably move on to restore Iatan in Weston, Missouri'-Kipper gently took him by the elbow and steered his reconstruction tsar back toward the catering table. The presidential entourage, about fifty people in all, including his Secret Service detail, all turned and moved with him like a flock of birds in slow motion.
For a change, the heavier armored fighting vehicles of the Secret Service response teams were absent and his own detail was dressed in jeans and denim shirts. Only their sunglasses and earpieces marked them out as bodyguards. Besides the black Suburbans and half a dozen Reconstruction Department pickups, the car park was full of trucks and support vehicles sporting the logo of Cesky Enterprises, one of the rising stars of the post-Wave economy. Pakistani and Filipino migrants worked the catering line, doling out something that was supposed to be
