After America (27 page)

Anyway, he didn’t need a stack of polls to know that Blackstone was dividing the nation, literally and figuratively. How many times had General Franks warned him that if Blackstone secured control of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast, their efforts on the eastern seaboard would be pointless? The true border of the United States would end right about where Kansas City rested in the heart of a dead nation. How many times had Kipper put off confronting this inconvenient truth?

The problem, as he understood it, was that a good many folks felt Blackstone was doing the right thing down in Texas. Even in Seattle, where he was regarded with equal measures of fear, scorn, and distrust, there had been some grudging support for his move to seize the Panama Canal back from the gang lords who had taken control of it after the Disappearance.

“Defend as far forward as possible,” Mad Jack had argued. It was the sort of stuff that made headlines, or “generated political capital,” as Culver said.

More unsettling than that, however, had been the foreign support he’d garnered. Eight countries, including Israel, had opened consulates in Fort Hood after Blackstone had secured the canal, and although their consuls were officially accredited to the federal government, it was no secret that the diplomats worked directly with Blackstone’s people, cutting the State Department out of the process. Worse still, they were providing Blackstone with operating capital, technical expertise, and political support in exchange for the right to extract oil, technology, and salvage without the fees imposed by the federal government on the western seaboard.

Kip stared unhappily out the window at the plains of Ohio. All this and now a pirate war that may or may not be the start of a holy war the like of which had all but torn France asunder a few short years ago. The president had no doubt that Colonel Kinninmore would be turning the city upside down as he attempted to find any evidence that the fighting there was not just an opportunistic attack by a pack of scavengers who’d decided to band together for as long as it took to convince him the city wasn’t worth retaking. But what if he did find evidence of a new threat on the eastern seaboard? Kipper almost wished the plane would never land, because then he wouldn’t have to face the consequences of whatever was coming for him in the next few days.

Instead he sighed and took in the view, such as it was.

Patches of black ruin from a city with no name stretched across the horizon below
Air Force One.
Some of the firestorms had expanded out of the cities and into the surrounding burbs and rural areas, chewing up hundreds of square miles of land in spite of the presence of snow back in March 2003. He could see the steel and concrete stumps of what might have been skyscrapers and highways below. Back in Seattle, in Barney Tench’s office, there was a map of the United States covered with graphics representing such areas. Dead zones, they were called. Yet Kipper could see plants and trees struggling to take dominion where humanity once had reigned supreme.

He knew that in the unaffected areas of Ohio’s flat, glaciated landscape, nature was coming on with a vengeance. The well-defined borders of thousands of farms gone fallow, the extensive road network, it was all disappearing as Mother Nature wiped away the more fragile traces of human settlement. The ruins and the intact smaller farm towns still loomed large on the vast checkerboard of the land below, but they were utterly lifeless, and he wondered sometimes whether they could be reclaimed before brute creation took over again.

“D’ you think I made a mistake, letting those diplomats into Texas?” he asked Culver as he stared out the window at the thin sliver of golden light on the western edge of the world.

Jed seemed a little nonplussed at the unexpected tangent, but he waved off Kipper’s obvious self-doubts.

“It was a close call, Mister President. Fort Hood is our second biggest population center and Texas is our largest territory in the Wave-affected zone in terms of population. We have a lot of homesteaders down in Texas. And those foreign missions aren’t full embassies, just small offices, Charge d’ affaires and a couple of honorary consuls—”

Kip cut him off gently.

“You’re covering for me, Jed. You didn’t want to accredit any of them as I recall. Said it’d be a big mistake. What’s different now?”

Culver sized him up, a look Kip had come to recognize. He was about to get a straight shot to the head.

“The difference is, sir, that they are there now. And if we withdrew recognition of those offices, chances are, their governments would just ignore us and keep them open. It would serve as a demonstration of our weakness. It’s better that we just leave them there for now, conniving with Mad Jack, and deal with them once we’re done with him.”

A steward, an air force staff sergeant, appeared at Kip’s elbow with a tray of sandwiches and two cups of cocoa.

“Thank you, son,” Culver said, scooping up two thick wedges of corned beef on rye. Somehow the food scarcity that had trimmed Kipper’s waistline seemed to have missed Jed’s. The man still sported the double chin of someone used to expensive dinners and long lunches. Kipper took one sandwich and his drink, talking around mouthfuls of food.

“I don’t think Blackstone is really crazy,” he said. “Not like everybody says. I think that whole Mad Jack routine of his is just a smoke screen. Distracts people from his real intent.”

“And what would his real intent be, Mister President?”

Kipper drank some of his cocoa before answering.

“I think he’s just a very old-fashioned guy, Jed. He sees a chance to take the country back to what he thinks of as its roots. And some of that stuff is good, you know. Respect for institutions and authority. Civic duty. The frontier spirit. All that Kennedy stuff about asking what you can do for your country rather than the other way around. It’s no different from what we’ve been talking about since the election.”

“But?” Culver prodded.

“But he gets things confused. This business of running off our homesteaders. He’s not. He’s only running off some of them.”

“The ones with the wrong skin color.”

“Yes,” said Kipper. “Jack Blackstone looks back on an older, simpler America and likes what he sees. He’s trying to remake it down there, but he’s making a big mistake. He’s confusing people with ideas. He looks at a Mexican, someone like … who was that guy … the first one on the list you showed me …”

Culver had to juggle his sandwich, coffee, and laptop computer, along with a manila folder, but he eventually dug out the piece of paper he wanted.

“Uh, Pieraro,” he said. “Miguel Pieraro.”

“Yeah. He looks at Pieraro, and he sees an alien. A fucking peasant. Someone not of his world because he looks different. He talks different. Hell, yes, he probably thinks differently about some things because of the world he grew up in. But this Pieraro guy, God rest his soul, I didn’t know him, but I do know that he went through our homesteading selection process, which means he is not just some wetback peon with an eye to an easy score. We don’t let just anybody into that scheme, Jed. You know they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to
want
it and work for it. Really fucking hard. This guy—” He waved his corned beef on rye at the piece of paper Jed was still holding. “—he had to jump through hoops of fucking fire, backward, singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ just to earn the right to sit the tests that weeded him out from all the losers and pretenders looking to work the program for a free ride. This guy, all of those people we choose for homesteading, they’re committed. Their allegiance isn’t in question, nor their skills or suitability. But Blackstone won’t see that. He confuses the idea of America with an old and seriously out of date image of America. They’re two different things. Miguel Pieraro, he died for the idea of America.”

Culver began a slow hand clap. “And if you would just stop being so fucking reasonable and get off your ass and out on the stump and give that same fucking speech ten times a day, perhaps people might start seriously questioning what is going on down south, if you’ll excuse me, Mister President.”

Kipper took Culver’s rebuke in good humor. He needed someone like this shifty, misanthropic bastard watching his back.

“I long ago accepted the fact that you are inexcusable, Jed,” he said. “But useful because of it. That’s why I’m going to leave Mad Jack to you for the moment. I can see this oozing fucking mess in New York is going to be with me night and day. I wasn’t looking for a stand-up fight there. You of all people know that’s not my way. But we’ve had one forced on us, and I do not intend to lose. You have Tommy Franks break out his plans for retaking the city—I know he’s got them in a bottom drawer somewhere—and have him meet me in KC. No, scratch that. There’s no reason to waste his time in transit. Just schedule a vid link to Fort Lewis. I want to go through the options. I also want the latest from that Colonel Kinnymore—”

“Kinninmore,” Jed corrected him.

“Yeah, him, on whether this is a coordinated attack by offshore interests, government or private, whether it is some sort of crazy holy war spin-off from France or the Israeli strike, or whether those fucking pirates have just finally gotten their shit together. Whatever the case, I want options for taking that city.”

“Well, the options are simple, Mister President,” Culver explained in a somber tone. “You can use men or you can use ordnance. The more men you use, the more of them die. But it does less damage to the infrastructure. The more ordnance we drop, bombs and missiles and so on, the more of our own we save, but much less of the city is left standing. You take that logic to its end point, we just pull out and nuke the place from orbit.”

“From orbit?” Kip asked, genuinely confused.

Jed smiled, a real smile this time, if tired. “Sorry, classical reference.”

Kipper nodded slowly and took a few moments to himself. He wondered idly just how much of New York City he really did need intact. Manhattan, for sure, and the ports. But did he need the entire metropolis? Even with the uptick in immigration and naturalization of refugees from the Indo-Pakistani War and with thousands of Europeans leaving the Old World every month, it would still be years, if not decades, before they could occupy all the infrastructure in just that one city. By then, the ravages of time would require a total rebuild, anyway.

These thoughts he pondered as the C-40 Clipper continued to hum along, attended by her escorts. F-16s, he remembered; the pilots liked to call them Vipers. Far to the north the moon glinted on a large body of water dusted with low wisps of cloud cover, and he wondered whether that might be the southern extremity of the Great Lakes.

“Remind me, Jed,” he asked quietly. “Did the military ever actually develop one of those neutron bombs? You know, kills the people but leaves the city standing.”

He watched Culver’s face turned a slightly pasty shade.

“I don’t know, sir. I suppose I could ask.”

“You do that,” said the president.

The escorts topped up their fuel tanks one more time somewhere over Illinois before making the run into Kansas City. The last dim light of day had fallen well below the horizon when Corporal Peckham, the younger of the two brothers on his detail, appeared at Kipper’s side and bent forward to whisper that the city was visible on the horizon.

“Thanks, son,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and sliding carefully past Jed Culver, who had fallen asleep beneath a drift of briefing papers. Everyone was worn out and ragged, drained by the adrenaline backwash from their experiences in New York. However, Kipper had specifically asked to be informed when KC came within view. After traversing an empty, burned-out wasteland, he wanted to see a living metropolis, all lit up, as they came in on their final approach.

KC, of course, was not just one city but a cluster of them. Most people, even in the post-Wave world, still confused the city with the state of Kansas. However, the largest part of the city was on the eastern side of the Missouri-Kansas border, straddling the two rivers so named. The resurgence of barge traffic on the rivers was key to the agricultural revitalization of the American Midwest. Together with the network of rail lines that snaked through yards in the West Bottoms and in North Kansas City, the region below was easily the best place to engage as far east as possible.

Kip made his way into the cabin, telling the air crew to carry on with their jobs as they came to attention.

“Good evening, Mister President. You here for the view?” Colonel Terri Lowry, the pilot, pointed out of the cockpit toward the lights on the horizon. “You can see the skyline at my one o’clock. We are presently following U.S. Highway 169 on approach to Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. If you look, you can see that the streetlights are all working and we have some vehicle traffic down there.”

“Thank you,” Kip said. Indeed, he did see a convoy of vehicles crawling along the highway toward the skyscrapers of the city, most of which were still dark. The semi trucks were hauling something in covered flatbeds, most likely grain from the last harvest. From this altitude, he could see the lights of the federal court house and the city hall, where the Midwestern Restoration Authority was headquartered.

“Can you take me for a spin?” he asked.

“We can certainly take an orbit of the city, as instructed, Mister President,” Lowry said. “Wheeler Tower, this is
Air Force One.
We’ll be orbiting the city for a visual inspection. Copy?”

“
Air Force One
, this is Wheeler. Traffic pattern is clear. Orbit at your discretion.”

“Copy that, Wheeler.
Air Force One
out.” She banked to the west, crossing over the mansions of Briarcliff West and across the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Below, salvage crews were working through the night to restore the ruins of the Fairfax Assembly Plant. A random lighting strike back in the Wave year had ignited a fuel storage farm near the factory, creating a firestorm that had severely damaged the facility in spite of the heavy rain. Kipper recalled that all the plant’s useful items were to be transferred to the Claycomo Ford plant in the Northland, where vehicles and equipment were systematically stripped for usable parts, inventoried, and stockpiled in limestone caverns through the area. If time were not a concern, he would have loved a tour of the facility, but he had other pressing issues.