“That’d be a question for Secretary Avenall. The last contact we had with him was ten hours ago in D.C..”
Dutch looked at D.C. on the television screen, a red area with tentacles reaching toward Richmond, Baltimore and even Frederick, Maryland, with the Secretary of the Treasury buried somewhere in the middle.
“Let’s reach out to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, then. Thank you, Sam.”
“No problem, sir. We’ll win this. Things are looking good. Troops are on the move and they’re making a difference.” Sam Greaney again promised. “We have over four hundred thousand combat troops in-country, and no sane civilian throws rocks at a Stryker armored fighting vehicle.”
16
Like a nervous suitor at a father’s door, Air Force One circled over the heartland of the United States, unable to return to D.C. and unwilling to give up its mission. Seven days after the crash of the stock market, the President and his retinue still hadn’t touched ground.
Dutch had received three military briefings each day for the last seven days, and he had come to know the feeling of Thor, unable to lift his hammer.
Launching troops from their bases had triggered an entirely-unexpected effect: civilian truck drivers drove home and stayed there.
Such a devilishly-forgettable factor—uncomplicated men with a demanding job and significant autonomy. Truck drivers had no reason to risk themselves or their trucks in the midst of riots, during a military show of force.
The Los Angeles riots of 1992 had demonstrated the foolishness of a truck driver entering a city while it rioted. Reginald Denny had been dragged from of his semi-truck cab and beaten while news cameras filmed overhead, which forever burned one simple truth into the minds of truck drivers: there are no medals pinned to the chest for delivering product during a riot. Only potential beatings.
While Sam Greaney battled the current war—civil disorder from rolling blackouts—the next war slipped in under their noses. Within days, they faced catastrophic food shortages. Rioters were no longer hapless teenagers and opportunistic gangbangers. Now their mothers and grandmothers lined up to shout at the army and national guard troops. Rioting had gone mainstream.
What had once been demonstrations in a hundred metropolises became serious civil unrest in nearly every city over ten thousand people. A hundred riots became twenty-six hundred riots within forty-eight hours of sending troops into the big cities. Regular Americans could abide a power outage during early fall. What they could not abide was hunger.
The sheer size of the United States contributed to Dutch’s defeat. 400,000 combat troops sounded like a massive number—enough to defeat any army in the world. But helicopter gunships and Tomahawk cruise missiles don’t stop angry fathers and mothers, and troops on the ground can’t be everywhere at once. In squads of thirty, 400,000 troops can only hold 13,000 street corners in 2,600 cities. If each city has a hundred such street corners, then infantry can only cover five percent of a city while desperate urbanites loot out the other ninety-five percent. Panic-stricken Americans didn’t need to defeat soldiers in order to steal supplies. They only needed to move over to the next block.
Before the collapse, when doomsayers talked about grocery stores only having food for three days, they hadn’t factored in hoarding. The moment blackouts extended past a couple of hours, people raced to the markets and vaporized everything remotely edible. Stores that attempted to lock their doors were broken down and overrun. People who came late for the frenzy went crazy with fear, committing criminal acts of petty violence and theft that would’ve been inconceivable a week earlier. The specter of empty shelves drove good people into a very bad place. And the panic devolved with each passing day, going from bad to apocalyptic.
Sam Greaney wasn’t coming entirely clean about the state of the troops. Dutch had set up a back-channel communication with three Army generals—friends from college. In a half-dozen satellite phone conversations, Dutch gathered the truth: that absenteeism in the troops had skyrocketed. The “four hundred thousand American combat troops” had declined to something approximating half that number. Especially among national guard units, men and women returned to their families rather than guard street corners while they watched their own cities burn.
Robbie Leforth, the President’s chief of staff, sat in the Oval Office on Air Force One and Dutch could smell him. Robbie looked like shit. While the President and first lady had a suite full of clothing, Robbie hadn’t had a chance to grab more than the one suit he was wearing.
“What’s the shower situation, Robbie?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re on severe rationing, and the flight crew is allowing only one shower per four days. I know I must look and smell awful.”
Robbie had been an exceedingly loyal chief of staff, and somehow seeing his friend wrinkled and oily brought the nation’s predicament all the way home for Dutch. Millions were suffering hunger and violence miles below the gleaming airship. The thought hung on Dutch like a clouded nightmare, a memory of some almost-forgotten sin. But his dirty assistant could not be denied, and he nearly brought tears to Dutch’s eyes.
“You know, Robbie, you’re a good man. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you for your service to this country,” Dutch choked up.
“Thank you, sir. It’s an honor, particularly to serve you.”
Dutch waved away the compliment. “What’s the latest news on your family?”
“Thank you for asking. Michelle and Regina are with my parents in Maine. I haven’t heard from them in two days. The cell towers must’ve stopped working in that part of the state. As you know, Jeremy is stationed in Germany. I got through to him and he said something about Muslim immigrants causing trouble in Stuttgart.”
Dutch furrowed his brows. Unchecked European immigration had been a ticking time bomb, and he could easily see Muslims rising from the civil disorder as an organized threat. Hopefully, he was wrong.
BOOM, SNAP!
Dutch heard a massive bang, something he had never heard before on an aircraft. He rushed into the hall and headed aft, where he could now hear screams and shouting. As Dutch rounded the corner of the conference room, he ran into two secret service agents who immediately threw him against the bulkhead and placed their backs to his, pinning him to the wall.
The shouting receded, and the screams turned to sobs. Dutch squirmed underneath the weight of the secret servicemen and worked his way out between them enough to capture the scene in the office staff section of the plane. Once again, the secret servicemen and the protective detail for the secretary of defense were pointing guns at one another. A man in a business suit lay face-down on the cabin floor, a huge burgundy pool beneath his head. Dutch’s daughter, Abigail, stood hiding in Sharon’s arms, weeping uncontrollably.
“Abby, are you okay,” Dutch shouted over the din.
“Yes, Daddy. I’m fine. I’ll be okay,” she sobbed, then pitched into a fit of coughing.
“What happened?” Dutch demanded of the secret serviceman still pinning him to the wall—Daniel Brooks, he recalled, the chief of his detail.
“Sir, the man on the ground grabbed your daughter and threatened her with a knife from the galley unless we landed the plane in D.C.. We refrained from shooting so as not to risk the integrity of the airframe, as we’re trained, sir. This… cowboy, sir, took a shot with his M4.” The secret service man pointed his chin at a Delta operator from the SecDef’s detail.