Without Warning (46 page)

They slowed down to negotiate a large but docile crowd that had gathered at the Fort DeRussy parklands for a food-distribution point run by the army. A dozen trucks were parked in a line before an avenue of olive-drab tents. Soldiers were unloading hundreds of boxes, stacking them in neat piles guarded by colleagues toting rifles. It was still a bizarre, unnatural sight, Americans lined up like victims of a Honduran earthquake to score a bowl of rice or a jar of baby food. Jed pushed the images out of his mind and returned to his papers, making some untidy margin notes on a briefing he had to deliver later that day to a phone hookup between the attorneys general of the surviving states.

Admiral Ritchie was adamant that the armed forces could not continue drifting through the constitutional limbo into which they had been cast. It was not simply a matter of requiring political direction for the course of the hot war they were now fighting in the Middle East. There were security nightmares springing up like poison weeds all over the world as well as some very basic and uncomfortable questions of sustainability for those forces that remained in existence.

“How do we keep going?” Ritchie had asked Jed late last night.

Culver thought the admiral might as well have asked, “Why should we keep going?” He couldn’t imagine what was holding together a fighting force that had nothing to fight for anymore, and increasingly lacked the money to do so.

Immediate survival, he supposed. But if and when the immediate peril was no longer, what then? A nation of ten million people—that was the rough estimate of living, breathing American citizens left in the world—a nation that small could not sustain a military even a fraction the size of the one it had at the moment. Especially not with most of the country sealed off behind an impenetrable and utterly mysterious barrier. Frankly, Jed doubted whether the area that remained unaffected on the continent was viable in the medium term anyway. He grunted almost imperceptibly as he briefly thought of all those people stuck in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver. None of them could be certain some natural fluctuation in the event horizon wouldn’t consume them in the blink of an eye, although by that measure, of course, nobody on the planet could really feel safe.

You had to wonder how much of the chaos wrapping itself like giant bat wings around the world was due to the effect of that uncertainty rather than the unsettling effect of simply removing at one stroke the massive political ballast represented by America. Oh, screw it. It was undergrad bullshitting, all of it. The only thing that mattered was fixing the problems he could fix, and for now that meant stabilizing the remnant power of the United States and securing the immediate future of his family.

He flipped open his laptop and began to compose an e-mail to Ritchie. He wanted to bounce a few ideas off the admiral before the conference call in the afternoon.

He typed very deliberately, using the informal style of address he’d cultivated in his dealings with the navy man.

Jed stopped tapping keys and stared out the window at the passing scenery for a moment. They had turned onto the freeway, which was largely deserted, save for a few Hummers heading downtown from Pearl, and the National Memorial Cemetery was slipping by on the right. He had a great-uncle buried up there. Uncle Lou, on his mom’s side. He’d meant to visit the grave site sometime during his vacation but had never made it. He was sure his forebear would understand. Lou Stafford had been killed on Wake Island, the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He’d fought when all seemed hopeless. Given his life so that Jed and his kids could live free. You had to wonder what the old guy would have made of all this, thought Culver, before reminding himself that Lou Stafford was only nineteen when he died. Not much of an old guy, really. The lawyer nodded a quick greeting, which would have to do for now.

He went back to his screen, wondering about the difficulties of assembling a convention along the lines he was proposing. The very nature of the three surviving states might pose problems. Hawaii and Washington, particularly the western half of the state, were very liberal, Democratic-leaning, and, in the case of the latter, not particularly pro-military. Seattle he found notoriously smug and self-righteous, although that might have changed by now. The eastern, agricultural portion of Washington, right up to the event horizon, was heavily Republican, although many of those people had already relocated into temporary shelters in Seattle. Hawaii had no oil, no real agriculture, and no industry, but it did have a strong military presence. The maritime power alone concentrated here was still greater than that of any other country in the world. Washington had agriculture, industry, and refining capacity but no oil. Alaska had no agriculture, plenty of oil, and decent refining capacity but very little else, particularly people, and what people it did have tended to be very conservative, libertarian Republicans.

He just didn’t know whether they could all get together.

With Massachusetts and Mississippi gone, you could award a blue ribbon
to Alaska and Washington for taking the “polar opposites” prize. Jed figured that Washington, with its much larger population and resource base, would resist Alaska having a virtual veto over any measures necessary to act within a constitutional framework. And Alaska, for its part, might well see itself as the last bastion of rugged individualism, and would have limited interest in submitting to a drastically revised federal system highly tilted toward nanny-statism.

It was going to be worse than the First and Second Continental Congresses, that was for certain. It was going to make the argument over issues like the Articles of Confederation and how much of a person a slave represented look like a middle-school debate class. There wasn’t any George Washington around to hold the delegates together or come up with the various compromises they’d need. Any constitutional convention with the three remaining players was going to be a first-class WWE smackdown cage match.

He sighed, already exhausted at the prospect of tying all this together in a neat package with a bright bow that everyone would want to own.

The trick to making this work, he wrote to Ritchie, will be to cram all the wildcats into the bag before they know what’s happening.

The key, he thought to himself, is George Washington. If a modern George Dubya didn’t exist, Jed Culver was going to have to invent him.

He was an operator, possibly a crook, and definitely not to be left alone with the small-change jar. But Admiral James Ritchie couldn’t help but warm to Culver the more time he spent with him. There was no reason they should get along, a patrician New Englander from old money with a long family history of noblesse oblige, and a scheming carpetbagger from the bad end of the bayou. Certainly naïveté didn’t come into it. Thanks to Colonel Maccomb of the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, Ritchie was well aware of what kind of a creature Jed Culver was.

A fixer.

He was the operator your troubled multibillion-dollar company called in to quickly and quietly clean up the mess left behind by your recently departed and grotesquely incompetent CEO. He was the man who procured the difficult export license in the hopelessly corrupt but fabulously oil-rich Third World shithole. Or the development approval for your six-star resort on the ecologically fragile tropical island. Or the seemingly impossible negotiated truce between the warring stone-age tribes that was interfering with the profit margins of your hardwood logging operations in the New Guinea
highlands. If that didn’t work, he hired the heavy hitters who protected your oil-drilling operations in Africa without cutting too deeply into your budget.

Jed Culver was a rolled-gold son of a bitch.

That said, Ritchie had a gut feeling that when the big questions were asked, this glad-handing sack of shit would actually give you a straight answer, especially if that answer was something you didn’t want to hear. Perhaps he was a bit like old Joe Kennedy in that way. Ritchie, an avid reader of historical biographies, thought he recognized something in Culver that FDR might have seen in the old bootlegger when appointing him to head the SEC way back in the Depression—a thief you could trust.

The admiral kept all these thoughts to himself, of course, as Culver walked around his office, speaking from notes with his expensive jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up, and tie raffishly askew. Was the ruffled, big-doofus thing just part of his routine? Probably. With a guy like Culver you had to figure that
everything
was part of the routine. But still, he seemed blessed, if that was the right word, with a frightening appreciation for the worst aspects of human nature, and how they might still be turned to everyone’s advantage.

“The only intact chain of command we have left,” said Culver, in his soft Southern drawl, “is, of course, your own. But by constitutional tradition, your entire chain remains subordinate to civilian rule and, let me just check back with you, ladies and gentlemen …”

Culver looked up from his notes and smiled at the small group of military officers in the room. “Y’all ain’t planning a coup d’état, are you?”

From anyone else it would have been a dangerous gamble, an insult to people who had pledged their lives to defending the Constitution, but Culver had a way of smiling and somehow twinkling his eyes that added an unspoken, “Naw, of course you ain’t, you’re
good
old boys and gals. The Best.”

Ritchie even noticed a smile attempting to creep around the corners of the deeply fissured face of General Murphy, the senior army officer on the island. But, for professional reasons, Murphy had long ago banned any semblance of a sunny disposition from his person, and he managed to crush the small grin stone dead. It had no discernible effect on Culver, who carried on.

“Fact is, though, folks, given the scale of disaster we face, precise legality
will
have to give way almost immediately to practicality. As the esteemed Justice Jackson pointed out in
Terminiello v. Chicago,
the Constitution is not a goddamned suicide pact. If we are going to survive we need good government and quick. And given that nobody is much interested in fashioning a military dictatorship out of the ashes of the old Republic, I would suggest that for practical purposes it will initially resemble a patchwork of small-and bigtown
mayors, the surviving political and administrative leadership, law enforcement, and perhaps … no,
definitely,
some religious and community leaders with a large following. Whatever government comes into being out of this nightmare has to
arise
from the ground up, rather than be
imposed
from above.”

“Fine words, Mr. Culver,” rumbled Murphy. “Brings a tear to the eye. But we’re in deep shit, and we need to dig ourselves out of it,
muy pronto.
Adapt, overcome, and drive on.”

There were nine military officers in the room. The senior marine nodded in agreement with Murphy’s brusque comment. Again, however, Ritchie watched with sneaking admiration as the lawyer let the rebuke wash over him, even turning it around.

“Damn straight,” said Culver. “We need this done yesterday. Hell, we needed it as soon as that energy thing crashed down on top of us. But we have to accept that, as scared and fucked up as people are right now, especially those poor bastards who are close enough to the Wave to be able to see it, they
will
adapt. There
will
come a day when it’s not the first thing they think of when they wake up in the morning. And they will go back to the old ways of doing things, of each against the other and damn anyone in between. It’s just our nature. So whatever we set up now has to have the elegance of our first constitutional principles. It has to allow for the better angels of our nature to sing, because Lord knows the demons are going to be a massed fucking choir over the next little while.”