She unclipped the phone and turned to Sergeant Zook.
“Report to the motor pool,” she said, “and sign me out a Humvee.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I want a report on what you find there, particularly the earth-moving machines. I want to get the roads open around here so that our own personnel can report for duty.”
She looked at the faces around her. “I hope some of you have experience in operating bulldozers and graders, gentlemen.”
The colonels and majors looked at each other uneasily.
Zook trotted off, then stumbled as the sudden shearing force of an aftershock almost took him off his feet. As the earth began to growl, Jessica stood in place, feet braced apart, knees bent slightly. The ground felt liquid below her feet, like Jell-O. Vertigo shimmered in her inner ear. There was a crash in the headquarters building as something very large fell. The aftershock faded, though the uneasy sensation in Jessica’s inner ear continued.
“Come with me, gentlemen,” Jessica said, and began walking for the headquarters building. Jessica opened her cellphone, punched in her father’s number in New York, and was delighted to hear a ringing signal. Her mother answered: Jessica told her that there had been a severe earthquake, that she and Pat were fine, but that she was very busy and couldn’t talk.
“I know,” her mother said. “It’s been on TV.”
“What do they say, Ma?”
“They don’t seem to know much of anything.”
“Do they know what cities have been hit?”
“We felt it here.”
Jessica was horrified. “You felt it in Queens?”
“Your grandfather’s Toby jug—the one he got in England during the war—it fell off the shelf and broke.”
“In Queens…” Jessica’s mind whirled as she tried to understand the scope of it all.
“The TV says they can’t raise anyone in St. Louis or Memphis. None of their, what d’you call ’em, affiliates. Chicago got shook up, and Kansas City. And this place that’s named after the syrup, you know…”
Jessica looked at the phone in disbelief. “Syrup, Ma?”
“Kayro! That’s it.”
“Cairo.”
“They said they got a radio message from someone in Kayro, wherever that is, and the town got knocked down and flooded.”
Well, it would be. Cairo was at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio and practically surrounded by water. Protected by flood walls, but an earthquake would breach those easily enough. Jessica paused in front of the headquarters’ glassed-in front. Most of the glass was broken or shattered. Jessica’s mother began complaining about the incompetence of the Korean family that had just bought the grocery on the corner.
“I gotta go, Ma,” she said. “I got work to do.”
“Call when you can.” Jessica’s mother sounded resigned. “You know how we worry.”
“Love you. Bye.”
She closed the cellphone, clipped it again to her belt. Her staff were looking at her.
“The earthquake was big enough to break crockery in New York City,” she said. “St. Louis and Memphis are out of communication, and that leads me to suspect that it was the New Madrid fault that slipped.” Jessica looked up into their eyes, and wondered why every person she’d ever served with was so much taller than she. “This means, gentlemen,” she said, “we’re going to be coping with a three-hundred-year event. Maybe even a thousand-year event. Which means that we are involved in a calamity akin to that of a major war, with bloodshed, property destruction, and damage to communications all on a similar scale.”
Colonel Davidovich, her second-in-command, blew out his cheeks in surprise at this notion. Jessica spoke on.
“We’re going to have to assume significant damage to Corps installations throughout the MVD. As soon as we get into communication with the outside, I want to check the dams first—I want a complete list, however many hundred there are.” Walls of water pouring down river valleys from broken dams was the vision that frightened Jessica most.
“We’re in Vicksburg,” she went on, “which is built on a bluff—reasonably solid ground, even if there’s no bedrock. But most of the Mississippi Valley is built on goo. We’re going to have to assume that the damage we’ve seen here is probably on a lesser scale than has been inflicted elsewhere.” Her staff looked at the building behind them, with its shattered windows and ominous-looking cracks, and for the first time looked intimidated.
“What I need now is an evaluation of the buildings here—HQ in particular. I want to know if it’s safe to reoccupy the building. And even if the building is safe, we’re still going to have to break some tents out of stores. So who’s qualified to do an assessment?”
Davidovich and a couple others raised hands. She looked at Davidovich, said, “Right, you take charge of the survey party. Report to me when you’ve reached a conclusion about HQ.” Davidovich drew the others off for a quick briefing. Jessica looked at the wreckage of the porch.
“I’m going to go to my office,” she said, “and get some maps and phone numbers.” She felt a presence hovering behind her and turned to see her husband. Pat wore an expectant look.
“Once the battery’s charged,” she said, “I guess you can head on home.” He looked dubious. “Not much for me there,” he said. “And I’d as soon not have to make that drive alone.” He rubbed his face. “Maybe I can make myself useful.”
Jessica thought about it. “Right,” she said. “In the absence of proper communications protocols, I hereby appoint you my message-runner.”
“Jeb Stuart,” Pat reminded, “had a banjo player on staff.”
“He was in another army,” Jessica said, “but I’ll take that suggestion under advisement.” The Situation Room was still filling up. The Vice President’s helicopter would be landing at any time. The National Security Advisor was in the building but had not yet arrived. The Secretary of the Interior was in Alaska, and the Secretary of Defense was on a tour of the Balkans. The Secretary of Labor was on his way from West Virginia. The head of the Forest Service and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were stuck in traffic on the Alexandria Bridge, but hoped to be present within the hour. But Boris Lipinsky, the Ukrainian-born head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had arrived at the same time as the President, and he and the President had a lot to talk about even without the others.
“We have less than three thousand employees in FEMA, sir,” Lipinsky said. “We depend for the most part on volunteers, and on personnel supplied by other agencies.”
“What can you do now?” the President said.
Lipinsky spoke slowly, with a pronounced Ukrainian accent. His blue eyes were vaguely focused on empty space, as if he were reading his words from an invisible TelePrompTer.
“Normally we act only in response to requests from the governors of individual states,” he said. “But when I felt the shock earlier this evening, and received confirmation from the National Earthquake Information Center that a major quake had occurred, I alerted the staffs of the Catastrophic Disaster Response Group and the Emergency Information and Coordination Center.”
“We have to assume,” he continued, “that any emergency services in the affected areas will have been swallowed up by the catastrophe and be able to achieve very little of substance. The citizens can count on no help from the police, from National Guard, from hospital and ambulance services, or from electrical, transportation, or sewer workers unless they are sent in from outside the area.” Any emergency services swallowed up by the catastrophe… The President found the thought stupefying. He was a modern man, and the thought of existence without any of the most basic modern comforts—shelter, police and fire protection, electricity, running water, the telephone, television—it was almost beyond his conception.