“Waall.” Larry grinned. “Let’s find us a fish in this ol’ pond.” He watched as Jameel expertly lowered the pincerlike grab on the end of its double chain. The first snatch came up empty, and Jameel made modest alterations to the turret position and tried again. A light shifted from green to red on the plywood display.
Jameel’s laugh boomed from beneath the brim of his Chicago Cubs cap. “Got ourselves a fish here, skip.”
“Better reel her in, then.”
Electric motors whined. Brown river silt, by now disturbingly radioactive, floated upward as the chain retracted. In the midst of the rising brown mushroom Larry could see the silver glint of a fuel assembly. An older one, fortunately, one that had cooled considerably in the decades it had been sitting in the holding pond. Larry had dropped radiation detectors into the pond to locate areas of radioactive tranquility, and this was one of them.
With the fuel assembly still held safely below the surface of the borated water, the machine skimmed back on its tracks to the fill bay on the far end of the building. There, after three tries, Jameel managed to drop the fuel assembly into one of the slots on a thick-walled steel transport flask. The flask, when full, would then be passed out of the Auxiliary Building onto a barge, and then carried down the river, with other flasks, to the holding pond of the Waterford Three nuclear plant in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Waterford Three was a new reactor, had only gone online in 1985, and had reserve space in its holding pond.
Which would soon be full. But there were other nuclear facilities in the country, other holding ponds. All of Poinsett Landing’s dangerous children would find a home in the end.
There was a little click as Jameel activated the solenoid that released the fuel assembly, then a whine of electric motors as he raised the grab on its chain.
“Get us another fish, sir?” he asked.
“You bet,” Larry said. “I want another dozen before the day is over.” The President sat in his suite at the rear of Air Force One and watched the clouds through his window. The clouds were far below, very white, and danced an interesting pas-de-deux with their shadows on the green land below. The President was returning to Washington from having made his inspection of Poinsett Island, and he was doing what he preferred to do nowadays, which was to stare at unexceptional things in a perfectly tranquil, uninterested way.
The visit to Poinsett Island had been entirely symbolic, he understood that. He hadn’t a thing to do with rescuing the power station, and his presence made no difference at all to the level of safety at the plant. His appearance was just a way of telling people not to panic. If the President wasn’t scared of the big, bad nuclear plant, the public shouldn’t be, either. His appearance assured the people that things were in hand. It associated the President with a specific way that things were getting better, and therefore led to increased confidence in the country and in the economy, and of course higher approval ratings. It was his first trip out of Washington since the death of the First Lady. That had symbolic value, too. The trip told the nation that he was putting his personal sorrows behind and getting on with the business of the country.
His visit to Poinsett Island had been both meaningful and meaningless. It was nothing in itself; it was a waste of time and jet fuel and didn’t contribute to the solution of the national crisis one iota, but on a symbolic level it stood for a great deal.
What the President hadn’t quite worked out yet was what it all meant to him. He was beginning to suspect, however, that it didn’t mean much of anything.
It was all clouds, floating past his window. Earthquakes, swallowing the world. Clouds and earthquakes, he thought, were almost the same thing. Sort of. Weren’t they?
There was a knock on his door. “Come in,” he said.
Stan Burdett’s bespectacled face peered around the door. “Urgent phone call, sir,” he said. “The Secretary of State.”
The President looked idly at the battery of communications apparatus with which his suite had come equipped. Stan entered the room, picked up a phone handset, pressed some buttons, and handed the handset to the President.
“Secure line, sir,” he said.
“Oh, good,” said the President.
“Mr. President?” The Secretary’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I’ve got a situation here.”
“Right, Darrell. What can I do for you?”
“The Chinese have just announced that in three days they will test-fire a number of their medium-range ballistic missiles over the island of Taiwan, to land in the Pacific.”
“Oh,” the President said. “Oh my.”
“This is an overt military threat, Mr. President. This is a direct challenge to our resolve and to our overseas commitments. The Chinese are testing us.”
“Best not flunk, eh?” the President said.
There was a buzz from another handset. Stan picked it up. “Stan Burdett.” he said. Then he looked at the President and told him the call was from the National Security Advisor.
The President realized that the Secretary of State had been talking nonstop while his own attention had been directed toward the other phone, and said, “Hold on, there, Darrell, I have another call.” He put the second phone to his other ear and said, “Joe, I’ve just heard. Darrell’s on the other line.”
“We cannot afford to lose Taiwan, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “It is too completely integrated with our own economy. They produce countless small electronic components that are incorporated into American brand-names. If Taiwan is lost, a lot of American manufacturing goes with it.” Well, the President thought, his hawkish Secretary of State and his dovish Security Advisor actually agreed with one another. This was a no-brainer. “Better not lose Taiwan, then,” the President said into both phones.
“Those bastards!” the Secretary was shouting into his other ear. “They’ve been planning this for weeks!
I’ve got it figured out! Remember just before the big quake, when the Chinese sold a lot of dollars and sent Wall Street into a tumble? They were making a point! They were trying to show that they could fuck with our economy, and that we had better think twice before we tried to interfere with their attempt to intimidate Taiwan!”
While this speech was going on, the President looked at Stan and said, “Stan, could you arrange a conference call? This is giving me a headache.”
“We should mobilize the Seventh Fleet!” the Secretary said finally, when they were all on the same secure line. “Send our ships into the area of the Pacific where their missile will land, and dare them to try anything!”
The Advisor cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mr. President. What if the Chinese actually fire? That would be a shooting war.”
“They wouldn’t dare!” shouted the Secretary.
“If we dare them to shoot, that puts ammunition into the hands of their people who would want to shoot. And our military options are extremely limited in that eventuality. For one thing, our nearest real base is Pearl Harbor. And for another, we won’t be able to fly sufficient sorties off our carriers, not with the shortage of jet fuel that we’re experiencing.”
“Jet fuel?” the President said in surprise.
“Mr. President,” the Advisor said, “we’re been flying so many relief supplies into the disaster areas that there’s a worldwide shortage of aviation fuel. The refineries are cranking it out as fast as they can, but our reserves are very low.”
“What you are saying,” the President said, “is that we have to keep the Chinese off Taiwan, but we can’t fight a war over it because all our planes would fall out of the sky.”