She had always been the knife’s edge in their partnership—the carbon steel to his hickory grip. While Dutch struggled to think three moves ahead, Sharon did it in her sleep.
“May God have mercy on their souls,” Dutch intoned, the finality of their struggle finally dawning on him.
Epilogue
Within hours of the death of Air Force One, a new struggle unfolded—primal, ruthless and never-ending. If ever he forgot the brutality of their new life, Dutch had only to look at his son and the stump of his left pinky finger. Gone was the boy who studied French and loved video games. His son had learned the lessons Dutch wanted him to learn, but those lessons had come at a horrific cost—evaporating the twinkle in the boy’s eye and hurdling him into the calloused manhood he would likely need to survive.
Several weeks had passed and winter closed in on southern Idaho. Fleeing from the dangers of civilization, their caravan of three Strykers and three Humvees struck deep into the gray shale deserts of Idaho and Nevada, seeking refuge as far from human habitation as possible. In the end, it was the Shoshone-Paiute Indians of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation who took them in. Despite their deeply troubled history with the United States, the Shoshone-Paiutes graciously offered a home to the U.S. government in absentia, giving the president and his people medical care for their wounds, fresh food and above all else, secrecy.
Three miles outside of town, wedged between a reservoir and a mountainside, the McAdams family, their secret service detail and twenty-five young men from Mountain Home Air Force Base and the Idaho National Guard set up a heavily-armed garrison; protecting themselves and defending the entryway to the tiny Native American town of Owyhee, Nevada. Their ability to crush marauding gangs with high-tech weaponry more than made up for the nuisance of having strange, white faces in town.
The McAdams and their team set out into the wilderness with two communications specialists from Mountain Home, together with their SINCGARS Humvee. The communications men joined the president’s entourage in order to monitor events, and perhaps someday to reconnect with fragments of the government and military. For now, Dutch didn’t think he had anything to say to the military commanders in the field that they couldn’t come up with on their own.
As Dutch McAdams sat atop a Stryker armored vehicle, performing his turn on guard duty, Sharon joined him. Dutch pulled her close and wrapped his heavy parka around them both, steeling them against the snowstorm building on the northern horizon.
“It’s beautiful,” Dutch said. “I’d forgotten how majestic it is to live outdoors.”
Sharon smiled. “I might enjoy the majesty of it more when I finally forget what a hot shower feels like. I’m still grieving what was.”
“Our family made it, Sharon. We’re incredibly blessed.”
“Except Robbie,” she corrected. They sat in silence for a moment, remembering their friend.
“I spend a lot of time thinking about what I could’ve done differently to change things. Maybe if I hadn’t called troops into the cities the riots would’ve burned out and food shipments would’ve resumed. Maybe if I’d never appointed Sam Greaney in the first place things might’ve ended a lot better.”
“I’ve been thinking about it too, Dutch.” Sharon regarded the coming snow flurry. “No civilization ever lasted forever. Sooner or later, every great civilization convinces itself that it’s entitled to more. When human selfishness exceeds our ability to care for others, we reap the whirlwind… We call forth the storm. Dutch, it didn’t just happen. We called it up. No president was ever going to stop that.”
Dutch thought back to the expression on her face as she watched the fiery death of Sam Greaney and his commandos—an execution she had arranged. That memory struggled to exist in the same universe as the graceful woman sitting beside him, her cold-dappled cheeks flushing red in the winter wind.
The first, fat snowflakes settled on Dutch and Sharon, blown from the storm, traveling probably five miles before making landfall.
“Time for you to get indoors,” Dutch unwrapped his parka from around her shoulder.
“What’s one more squall?” She chuckled and pulled his parka back around herself. “They come, and then they go. You and I, and hopefully our kids—we’re the kind of family who steps into the storm.”
Sneak Preview
Prologue:
Santa Catalina Island, California
Near Avalon Bay
Two Weeks Before the Black Autumn Collapse
After four months of living with a nuclear bomb in the hold of their sailboat, even the Koran’s promise of seventy-two bare-breasted virgins wore a little thin. When they had left the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, dying in an atomic flash sounded like a small price to pay for even one virgin, much less six dozen. Now, with the end near at hand, the unspoken truth between the two Filipino villagers was that neither of them felt particularly eager to die.
They had decided to wait for a sign from Allah before completing the last twenty-six miles of the voyage to America. The two villagers, far from home, anchored on the east side of Catalina Island, just a handful of hours from the bustling coast of Los Angeles, California.
They had been loitering there for nearly two months and, amazingly, nobody had so much as spoken to them.
Njay and Miguel had settled into a daily routine. Wake up. Defecate off the side of the boat. Make tea. Defecate off the side of the boat. Fish all morning. Nap. Fish all afternoon. Defecate. Eat fish. Sleep.
The journey from the Philippines had gone exactly as planned, which amounted to a miracle in sailing. Nothing ever went exactly as planned. The well-provisioned sailboat had contributed to their successful journey. Neither of the men had ever sailed in a boat so well stocked. The boat even came with a desalinization filter sufficient for a couple months. With such a fine craft, they had been able to set a simple tack into the north-northeast trade winds directly at the coast of California. For fifty-eight days, they had kept the boat pointed on a steady course, barely having to trim the sails. It had been the easiest sailing of Njay’s life.
But time was running out. Both men felt sick. They suspected the desalinization filter had worn out and was letting a small amount of salt into their drinking water. The other possibility was that the crate-sized nuclear bomb in their hold leaked radiation.
Their village imam had given Miguel and Njay simple instructions, but Njay suspected the instructions had come from the light-haired, tall man who had been skulking around their village for months. Everyone seemed to know that gossiping about Tall Man would be a violation of obedience to the imam. Njay concluded that the man must be Middle Eastern or Russian, given the nature of their mission. No Pacific Rim nation would risk war with America.
In truth, Njay knew little of the world outside his island chain, but he’d been taught much about America, with their Special Forces murderers and their weapons of unimaginable power. The United States lorded over the Pacific, threatening to blow their enemies back to the Stone Age. Like a disease consuming the hearts of man, America plagued the world, and Islam would cure it. Such a plague could be stopped by the tiniest of medicines: one small boat and two small men would vaporize the Hollywood movie stars and shake the Wall Street skyscrapers. In Allah’s wise path, giants were often felled by pebbles.