She asked about the protocol for ammonia inhalation victims.
“We’re going to release her in a little bit. She should take liquids, nothing solid, until the burns heal. Her burns aren’t bad, but they’re internal, so food would definitely make her uncomfortable. We’re guessing she’ll be feeling a lot better in a few days.”
“Is there a doc I can talk to?”
The nurse shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you would not believe what we’re dealing with. Your girl has a head cold compared to what we’re seeing down in trauma.”
About ten minutes after he left, Emma awakened. As Lana helped her daughter climb out of bed to use the bathroom, her phone rang. For what had been such a common occurrence, it sounded extraordinary, almost miraculous.
She got Emma settled quickly and answered it. Donna Warnes from Holmes’s office was calling. Power had returned across the country exactly twenty-four hours — to the second — after the grid went down. The deputy director of NSA wanted Lana to come to Fort Meade as soon as possible.
Then Donna delivered the big news: Congress would be convening within the hour. There was talk of declaring war. But there was a huge obstacle: With the country bleeding, burning — and with thousands dead and thousands more dying — no one, not even America’s finest military minds, knew where to point the guns.
CHAPTER 4
Lana helped Emma through the crowded, noisy hospital lobby, eager to get her daughter home and safely settled so she could head out to Fort Meade as soon as possible.
The child was a little woozy from painkillers, and Lana had to hold her close as they started down a sidewalk that bordered a packed parking lot. She explained that their car was a few blocks away.
The high heat hadn’t hit yet, but the sun still felt uncomfortably warm until they found the shade of maples a few minutes later. With cool air on her damp skin, it seemed surreal to Lana that such horrors could have struck on a bright, beautiful, and seemingly normal summer day.
Emma, on the other hand, appeared only dimly aware of her surroundings.
Just as well, her mother thought, considering what they were about to drive past on the way home.
She helped Emma into the passenger seat and hurried around the car, eager for the A/C but annoyed by the initial blast of broiling air that had been heating up under the hood.
She had to remind Emma to put on her seat belt. The girl nodded but still looked a little out of it. When she fumbled with the device, Lana helped her. Typically, Emma would have minded anything she perceived as meddling, but she leaned back and closed her eyes.
“That’s a good idea. Take a nap.”
But as soon as Lana pulled away, Emma stirred.
Within minutes, smoke heralded the grisly train collision and raging fires. Then, to make matters worse, a troop transport truck turned onto the road right in front of them. Lana had a bad feeling about that, quickly confirmed when the vehicle braked, stopping all traffic behind it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Emma stiffen when a soldier lowered the tailgate, offering a view of body bags stacked several feet high. Men and women loaded nine more victims aboard.
“What happened here?” Emma asked, mostly mouthing the words.
Lana kept it brief and as appropriate as possible, a challenge with a massive train wreck and nationwide devastation. She reminded Emma of what Tanesa and her friends had done to save her mom’s life and the lives of so many others. The girl nodded solemnly as the soldier closed the gate of the troop transport truck and it pulled away.
But Lana quickly realized that it was like finding yourself stuck behind a school bus, because every block or so the truck stopped again. Instead of opening its door to boisterous children, though, the vehicle idled as the soldier lowered the tailgate so rescue workers could load more body bags. There was no way to get around them — and no mystery about the victims in the smaller bags or where they came from: Passenger train cars still burned in the distance.
As the troop transport pulled away again, Lana thought of Congress convening in the midst of this mayhem to consider a declaration of war. She wondered if the country was required by law to identify the enemy before such an act could be passed. It was such a basic question, yet in all of U.S. history, she doubted that it had ever come up. Why would it have? But that question, more than any other, had to be hanging over every discussion at the Capitol today. Congress would never declare war if it had to leave a big blank space where the name of the enemy should be. It would be hard to imagine a more blatant display of powerlessness.
A large part of her mandate at NSA would be trying to determine the aggressor. She’d handled cyberforensics on many other cases for the agency, including the North Korean breach in ’09 and the mostly hapless attempts by Iran to strike back at ongoing U.S. sabotage of its nuclear ambitions.
Much as she loved her daughter, Lana wanted to help her country respond to the crushing toll of the invisible invasion. She’d arranged for a friend to come over and take care of Emma.
The radio came alive with a man’s dulcet tones, not the monotonic computer voice that had delivered the heavy-handed propaganda she had heard earlier. It sounded like NPR had managed to get itself back into broadcast mode in remarkable fashion.
“I once lived in your country. It was in Detroit, not so long ago…”
A foreigner, she figured, though his accent was light. Probably commiserating with America in its time of greatest need. She remembered similar expressions of sympathy after 9/11, and made no effort to search for another station. She found his easy emphasis soothing, and thought he could be narrating a children’s book; but then she realized that he was telling the most terrifying tale she’d ever heard:
“… all your military power cannot protect you now. It will only leave you cold and dead. That is because our cyberwarriors have leveled the playing field of war, and they have done it for the cost of one of your attack helicopters.
“I am not exaggerating, America. Look at what we have done with so little. We have killed more than fifty thousand of you in twenty-four hours, almost as many as all the U.S. soldiers who died in the Vietnam War, and that lasted eleven years. It will be weeks before you can confirm that number, but we are confident of its accuracy because we calculated the impact of every action we took.”
Lana was torn between wanting—needing—to listen, and exposing Emma to such a horrific recounting of those murderous hours, most of which the girl had spent sedated in the hospital. With a quick shake of her head, she reached to turn off the radio, but Emma put out her hand to stop her. Lana relented.
“They were terrible deaths. You do not even know the many ways your fellow Americans died. But we do. Again, that was because we planned so carefully and for so long. Thousands are still dying. This morning and tomorrow morning and for many mornings to come, they will wake up to chemical contamination that will last years.
“We warned your leaders about our plans. They never told you. We announced to them that we would shut you down for a full day…”
“That’s a bald-faced lie!” Lana said to Emma.
The girl didn’t respond, even with a nod. She leaned closer to listen.
“They thought we were bluffing. We even told them exactly when it would happen. They still didn’t tell you. So from now on we will speak directly to you. We now have the means to do so, and if we are blocked, we have other ways to communicate to large numbers of you. We want to talk to you directly because we do not trust your leaders. You should not, either. They are deceitful, and their intransigence is killing you. Not us.
“We have made our requests clear. America must withdraw all its troops and military hardware to its borders and abandon all its foreign bases…”