"That's great, Sherren." Kerry exhaled slowly. "Do they know about any of the others? Have they seen them?"
"No, no they don't," Sherren said. "Everyone got separated, they said. They're all taking showers. They're covered in that white stuff. They said a lot of people went south, too, toward the battery."
Kerry watched the red led's slowly change to green. Too few. "I'm really glad to hear that, Sherren. How are you all doing? Are you all right? Do you need anything?"
Sherren's voice sounded calmer today. "We're doing okay, you know? We needed some clothes so we went out and got some. We got bagels. The dog carts are there. People are out there. You can't stop this city. People are in shock, but we keep going."
Kerry thought about the empty streets she'd traveled through the night before. "You sure do."
"I'm sure the rest of the office will be here any time now," Sherren said, confidently. "We're going to get some coffee on. I wish we could get the phones working," she added. "I know some of our customers need us."
"Miami exec, this is Miami telecom," a new voice broke in. "We're handling the inbound 800 service trunks for New York. We can get messages to the people there, if you can get us a mailing list built."
"Oh, that would be great!" Sherren said. "You can get calls out, if you try hard enough. Or maybe if they have email, we can email them. That works a lot better than the phones."
Kerry nodded. "Good idea." She glanced at the screen. "Miami server ops, are you on?"
"Yes, ma'am," a quiet voice answered. "We're here."
"Build a list based on the reported list onscreen." Kerry said, after a brief pause. "And get that to telecom."
"Will do."
"Miami exec, this is LA Earth station. I have Newark Earth station on landline. They need generators. They've got a seven day estimate on repairs to the power station there. Someone told them it was sabotaged."
"Oh my god," Sherren said.
"Miami exec, this is Miami ops," Mark's voice replied. "That needs industrial. That little trick you and I pulled ain't gonna cut it."
Kerry tapped her pen on the desk. "Shouldn't their facilities operator be handling that?"
"Miami, no one's doing anything there. Everyone's been sent to staging to go into the city." LA Earth station reported. "If we want help, we need to do it ourselves, that's what they were told."
"Right." Kerry scribbled a note on her pad. "Let me get in touch with APC. Everyone's going to be hitting the usual providers let's try the high tech ones."
"Ms. Stuart?" Nan stuck her head in the door. "I have some president or other of AT&T on the line for you."
"Tell them hang on a minute." Kerry finished writing.
"Miami exec, this is Danny. The bus is here." Danny sounded relieved. "Man, are we glad to see that," he added. "We're waiting for clearance to start going in there, but we're going to need some help."
"Danny, we're almost there," Mark said. "Hang in there, buddy. I got ten people with me."
Ten? Kerry glanced at the screen, then back at her paper. "Hope that's a big RV," she muttered under her breath. She looked up. "Okay, you can transfer whoever it is from AT&T here." She pointed at the phone. "Thanks."
Nan disappeared.
"Mark, we're looking for you man," Danny answered. "Did you say you have a truck? We haven't been able to shake loose and get that plywood yet."
"No prob," Mark said. "Miami exec, any word on when we can get into lower NY?"
Kerry keyed her mic. "Let's concentrate on DC for now since we have access to the facility. With all the damage in Manhattan it could be a while."
"Miami exec, this is Lansing," the Michigan center broke in.
"Hold on, Lansing. I have to take a call." Kerry put her mic on mute and hit the speaker phone. "Kerry Stuart."
"Ms. Stuart?" a man's voice answered. "This is Charles Gant from AT&T. I think we met at that technical conference in Orlando a few months back."
"We did." Kerry nodded. "What can I do for you? I assume this is something critical."
Gant sighed. "Much as I'd rather be asking you to meet me for coffee and chat about high end routers, it is a critical issue. I just want to bounce a question off you, since I know of all the private providers you guys are the biggest."
"Okay." Kerry picked up her bottle of water and took a sip. "I'm listening."
"We lost everything in lower Manhattan," he said. "I think you probably know that, since we had a lot of tie-ins to you."
"We know," Kerry said. "We have almost nothing at all coming in to our three nodes in the region. A lot of customers are affected."
"Well, let me give you the laundry list," Gant said. "We lost the triple pop. Verizon said nothing's recoverable. They also lost their West office. Power's out for the area, including all the cell towers and the ones that do have power either don't have backhaul or are overloaded."
"Wow," Kerry murmured.
"I got my counterpart at Sprint on the other line. Between us, we lost everything overseas, and so did MCI."
"We realized that," Kerry said. "We had to backhaul a lot of overseas financial via our southern circuits."
There was momentary silence. "So how badly are you affected?"
Kerry took another sip of water. "We obviously can't service the local accounts in lower Manhattan, and we lost our major switching office in the Pentagon." Then she stopped speaking.
There was another moment of silence. "So you have service otherwise? Transatlantic?"
"We have data service, yes," Kerry confirmed. "We rely on your interchanges, and the other Telco's for phone service, naturally, so that's down, but we're backhauling everything else across our redundant links, or sending it up to the birds."
"Interested in renting some bandwidth?" Gant asked, in a wry tone. "We've got nothing between New York and our main service centers. I can't even guess what's down because our systems can't connect." He cleared his throat. "I figured I'd ask you before everyone else does."
Kerry thought about all the times she'd had to browbeat the Telco vendors for everything from bad circuits to late ones. "How much do you need?" she asked. "And what would it take for you to get a tie into our Roosevelt Island node?"
"I'll take ten meg if you have it." His voice sounded utterly relived. "I think our substation on the island can carry the traffic over. I can check but my notes here show we're in the same building."
Mentally, Kerry did a quick calculation. Dar had provisioned a larger than normal spare of bandwidth in the area, thankfully, but she knew there'd be more requests to come. This was just the first. "We can do that," she said. "Get me your LOA and I'll send it to my internal provisioning group."
"God bless you." Gant sighed. "Sorry if I sound overwhelmed, but damn it, I am," he said. "My brother is missing in that mess and I can't think straight."
"Charles, I'm glad we can help," Kerry said gently. "We have some people missing ourselves. Most of our office in Manhattan was in the Towers for business meetings yesterday morning."
"My god."
"So we're sweating right along with you," Kerry said. "And speaking of that, could you possibly do me a favor?"
"If I can, for sure," Charles said.
"My Rockefeller Center office is down hard," Kerry said. "Any chance of getting one of our lines up?"
"Give me the circuit ID," he answered instantly. "We've got service near the Rock. You probably are just terminated closer to the triple--to where the triple was."
Kerry typed a question into her search applet, and was rewarded with a number. "Here it is." She gave it to him. "It would help the people left there. Most of them lived down in the affected area and can't go home."
"You got it, Kerry," Charles said. "Expect that LOA in the next five minutes."
"Call me if you need anything else," Kerry said. "Talk to you later." She hung the phone up, and went back to her screen. She clicked her mic on. "Miami exec to New York, you still on Sherren?"