President Mary Randall had the misfortune to launch her reelection campaign touting her supposed victory over the climate crisis with the passage of PRIRA then presiding over the catastrophe of the Great Eastern Flood. To get into the missteps of FEMA here is a bit much, but suffice it to say she took much criticism in the press and from the Democratic nominee, Senator Love, while also suffering broadside attacks for her failures to curb terrorism and illegal immigration from Jennifer Braden. Braden had recently stated, without evidence, that Randall had ordered the CIA to supply the al-Bawadis with smart bullets, and her rabid followers launched this baseless theory into the mainstream. However, as soon as Senator Russ Mackowski dropped out of the race and endorsed Randall, the Republican Party locked arms, and Randall accrued an insurmountable delegate lead. Braden’s rants grew more unhinged, and political prognosticators deemed her buried when she unleashed her taunt, “You dirty brown bitch,” at the president during the last debate. The scene at the Republican National Convention was particularly troubling as Braden’s followers, armed with assault rifles, attempted to surround the convention center in Charlotte.
On July 16, Seth and I happened to have a social occasion with Alice McCowen, former director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Though our relationship began on rocky ground during the maneuvering around PRIRA, we became allies in its failed effort and a mutual respect emerged. McCowen also began a relationship with my friend and mentor Jane Tufariello. All three of us now viewed one another as survivors of the wreckage left behind by that devastating legislative fight. Alice and Jane had us over for dinner, and it was difficult not to slip into talk of the loud and unpleasant election dominating the news. Alice was particularly irate at what she saw as the efforts to destroy her former boss and friend, the president:
“Before I left, I told Mary, the campaign staff, everyone, this whacko-bird, the Hot Nazi, she’s not to be taken lightly. And they all got caught flat-footed. I didn’t drag the Republican Party kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century to be a part of this horseshit. Meanwhile, everyone knows the Dems’ golden goddess first-female-feminist-idol Hogan basically watched a live feed of a guy getting tortured for thirty-six hours without blinking. The Beltway talks about how Mary doesn’t have the stomach to fight terrorism but look at the psycho act she had to follow.”
Jane put a hand on her arm: “Okay, Alice. Enough.”
“What? Hogan was one bloodthirsty cunt.”
Seth was laughing, finding this exchange very amusing, though I was irritated by the cross talk. It was at this moment when all of our phones, watches, and glasses issued simultaneous notifications of the events that would effectively end Mary Randall’s chances at a second term.
That night Seth remarked: “Twenty thirty-two is one of those years you have to turn off the news alerts.”
All we knew then was that a series of IEDs had destroyed a manufacturing facility in La Grange, Illinois. By the time Seth and I took a driverless home, several incendiary devices had set ablaze a processing plant for diluted bitumen in Fort McMurray, Alberta, while also nearly causing a forest fire. Multiple residents of Fort McMurray were injured, nearly a thousand evacuated, and forty-three structures destroyed. Finally, as we watched the news back at our condo, a third attack was reported at the Tucker Anacortes Refinery, seventy miles north of Seattle, when a missile struck the catalytic cracking unit. Seth gasped:
“A missile? What the hell is happening?”
The Anacortes attack had something new as welclass="underline" fatalities. Two workers were killed in the strike.
Images played on a loop of the smoldering manufacturing plant in La Grange, the fire burning in the Canadian night, and the wrecked refinery in Washington, smoke and dark obscuring the damage. It was assumed on all the major networks that this was the work of the same faction responsible for the attacks on coal plants in the Midwest two years earlier, and both American and Canadian intelligence soon confirmed this. The media grappled for a nickname as catchy as the Ohio River Massacre but only managed the “July Surprise.” Before I went to bed that night, I received a call from the FBI requesting my presence in Anacortes.
Following the coal plant attacks of 2030, at the behest of Ms. McCowen, I began consulting with the task force pursuing eco-terrorism suspects. I already had a relationship with the FBI ever since they opened a case into the various death threats I’ve received since PRIRA was thrust into the spotlight. This is how I met Special Agent John Chen, a task force leader, and he has sought my perspective on the motives and thinking of the so-called Weathermen ever since. He feels they follow the science, economics, and politics of carbon pollution closely, and that I might provide insight into their thinking.
I arrived the next afternoon in Anacortes, a pristine town that abuts Puget Sound in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains, and checked into my hotel.
Special Agent Chen sent a car for me the next day. At the refinery, I filled out the access-control log and donned booties, though we were to remain on the demarcated entry and exit paths of the crime scene. SWAT officers with MP5 submachine guns surrounded the perimeter, scrutinizing my visitor’s badge when we passed. Agent Chen greeted me with very little small talk:
“If there was any doubt after Ohio, this about wraps it up. These are not campus activists.”
“The complexity of geolocating a missile strike should narrow down potential suspects.”
“Not as much as we wish. Plenty of unscrupulous firms out there that will sell you discreet rush satellite tracking—every jihadi group in Africa and Arabia can buy them now. We think they 3D-printed most of the components and assembled the missile themselves, then launched it from a boat in the sound. Guided it via remote control the same way they did drones up in Fort McMurray. Satellite images haven’t been helpful yet because of the weather, but we’ll see.”
Agent Chen’s manner is lockstep professionalism. He is the consummate “by-the-book Boy Scout,” as my colleague Dr. Anthony Pietrus, who’s had previous dealings with Chen, once said. His silver hair was parted on a knife’s edge at the side of his head. He wore glasses and a pen in a plastic pocket protector on his shirt, a prosaic style even I would hesitate to adopt, regardless of its clear utility. I asked him:
“And the men who were killed?”
“Two workers in the cracking unit. A call came in to the refinery roughly thirty minutes before the missile hit, and the facility operations manager initiated an evacuation. Those two either didn’t hear the alarm or simply failed to heed it—we’re not sure.”
We approached the charred, burned hole in the side of the building. The missile had struck the base of the fluid catalytic cracking unit. Without this unit in operation, a refinery amounts to little more than a temporary storage facility for useless crude oil. Part of the wall had collapsed, and metal twisted into the sky. Orange hazard tape surrounded the site, and forensic chemists and other investigators in Tyvek coveralls combed the area while agents swarmed the scene with guns on their belts and clipboards in their hands. In the wreckage, I could see an intact coffee mug with the Seattle Seahawks logo, charred by fire, sitting atop a pile of blackened brick. Police drones swarmed overhead, surveilling the area. With their whirring rotor blades, they always appear to me as angry insects. I said:
“These fatalities were accidental then.”
“Depends on how you look at it. When they blew up those coal plants in Ohio, and grandmas cooked in their homes at the height of summer, was that accidental?”