Most of what Couture had just announced, the Joint Chiefs already knew. What they did not know was why the defense condition had been escalated again. The moment the army had verified a nuclear explosion in southern New Mexico, the US military had been ordered to DEFCON 3, but the last time the US had stood at DEFCON 2 was during the three-week Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched surprise attacks against Israel, only to be driven back into their own countries before a cease-fire was reached. DEFCON 2 was the last stage before nuclear war, and no one seated at the table had yet heard anything to merit an escalation of this magnitude.
“Within the hour,” Couture continued, “everyone in this room — myself included — will be airlifted to Edwards Air Force Base, where a command center is being prepared. All submarine captains are being alerted that a nuclear strike on the District of Columbia may be imminent.” Couture shifted his gaze to a pair of navy admirals. “These vessels are not — repeat, not—to assume Cocked Pistol status without a direct order from the president aboard Air Force One, where he will remain for the foreseeable future.” Cocked Pistol was the code name for DEFCON 1: clearance to use nuclear force.
“In addition, the Russian Federation and the Republic of China have been put on notice. There has been no provocative language, but the president has made it to clear to both nations that the United States will remain poised to defend itself with full military capacity in the event that Washington, DC, is destroyed.”
By now the Joint Chiefs were exchanging pensive glances.
Couture pulled out his chair, taking a seat and lacing his fingers on the tabletop. “Now, here is the reason we are at Fast Pace, gentlemen: there is an active two-kiloton RA-115 loose within the United States, and we have no idea where it is.”
“Jesus,” muttered a buzz-cut Marine Corps general, clicking a pen and rocking back in his seat. “So they’re real.”
“What’s an RA-115?” asked the Coast Guard admiral seated next to him. “Never heard of it.”
“Until now,” the Marine said, “nothing more than a rumor — a Cold War legend.”
“It’s a Russian suitcase nuke,” Couture explained. “We’re pressing the Russians to provide us the necessary intel, but so far they’re vacillating. Regardless, CIA has determined — to within what they consider a ninety-five-percent certainty — that the New Mexico Event was the result of a belowground detonation of one of two of these damn things. From what CIA has pieced together, it looks like Chechen insurgents paid one of the Mexican cartels to let them cross through a tunnel under the border. The reason for the president’s immediate departure is that one of these Chechens is reported to have brought the other device into the country seventeen days ago.”
“Good God!” said the pallid-looking vice chairman, General John Pickett. “With a seventeen-day head start, it could be anywhere.” He had arrived at the Pentagon only a half hour earlier, having been in hospital for the last three days with an intestinal virus he’d picked up during a recent visit to Pakistan.
“What went wrong with the other bomb, General?” asked the Marine. “Does CIA have any idea why it went off?”
“It’s still open to conjecture at this point,” Couture replied. “We do know, however, that the ICE office in Albuquerque received an eleventh-hour tip about some kind of special shipment coming across the border. The call was received a couple of hours before the blast, and it’s beginning to look like the local ICE team out there may have made a late-night interdiction raid on the tunnel. The fact that thirteen ICE agents have gone missing seems to support the theory, and CIA is guessing that our Chechen friends must have detonated the bomb as a result.”
The Joint Chiefs began to talk among themselves.
Couture elevated his voice. “There’s no way we can sit on this, gentlemen. The president will address the nation from Air Force One within the hour. He’s going to lay it on the table. He’s going to announce that we suspect a nuclear weapon to be loose within the United States.”
“There’ll be mass exodus,” someone muttered. “DC and Manhattan will be a pair of ghost towns by this time tomorrow.”
“Not to mention LA,” someone else remarked. “Chicago.”
Couture rocked back in the chair. “Very possible. That’s why the president’s decided to declare martial law in each of the cities you’ve just mentioned. With luck and God willing, that will be the extent of it, though you can bet that all arms of local law enforcement will be stretched to the limit on a national level. This is exactly what we’ve been fearing, gentlemen. Our nuclear chickens have come home to roost.”
15
The declaration of martial law in the cities of New York, DC, and Los Angeles the week before hadn’t shaken the local populations up all that much. Many citizens had, in fact, welcomed the decision. And it helped that the army hadn’t marched in like jack-booted Nazis. General Couture — following the example set by Lieutenant General Russel Honoré (aka the Ragin’ Cajun) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — had made it crystal clear that the army’s mission was to protect the citizenry and to look after them, not to treat them as the subjects of an occupation. For the most part, the soldiers did very little other than maintain a constant presence, making routine patrols into the outlying areas while leaving the duties of law enforcement to the police whenever possible. In general, there was a sense they were all in the same boat. Because if a nuclear bomb did happen to go off, the shock wave, fire, and radiation would make no distinction between military and civilian personnel.
However, the same type of accord did not exist within the Windy City. For reasons that no one had so far been able to pinpoint, there had been immediate friction between Chicagoans and the 82nd Airborne Division, particularly on Chicago’s South Side — the side that Jim Croce had once sung about as “the baddest part of town.” Where the other four cities had lost about a third of their populations to voluntary evacuation, the vast majority of Chicagoans chose to stay put, and they simply resented a military presence in their neighborhoods.
“We Chicagoans can take care of ourselves!” the city’s angry mayor declared to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We don’t need an army of occupation rumbling through our streets — this isn’t Baghdad. And we’ll be damned if we’re going to let these terrorists scare us from our homes!”
The next night, gunfire was exchanged in southern Cook County, Illinois, between looters and soldiers. By the end of the third day of occupation, the official civilian death toll stood at thirty-two, which compelled the mayor to go back on television, this time urging his constituents to cooperate with the army. But the genie seemed to be out of the bottle by then, and some on the military side expected the violence to increase once disgruntled citizens became better organized.
For this reason, the 82nd began to circle the wagons in the southern zones outside the city, setting up FOBs (forward operating bases) from which patrols could operate. Division headquarters remained downtown. Signs sprang up at the FOBs with proverbial names such as Fort Apache and Fort Necessity, provoking General Couture to blow his stack during an early-morning inspection, ordering the signage taken down immediately.
“This is not an us-against-them paradigm, Major!” Couture growled at a veteran combat officer fresh in from Afghanistan. “And you’d better get that through your head. Nobody told you this was going to be a walk in the park—no occupation ever is! — but we’re all Americans here, and your men will conduct themselves accordingly, or you will find yourself in a world of hurt! Do I make myself clear?”