The U.S. had been a net exporter of energy for some time, but the commodity pricing of oil still rocked and rolled based on global factors. How much oil was coming out of Siberia? What craziness was going on in the minds of OPEC? How were the Arabs, Jews and Iranians behaving this week?
American gas on the American mainland was secure. But the American commodities market was not secure at all.
Rising tides lift all boats, as the saying went. But plunging tides also dumped all boats in the mud. With the price of oil skyrocketing, the first boat to hit the seafloor had been the Union Pacific Railroad.
The venerable, old railroad’s sickly stock had been propped up for years by cheap diesel fuel and the coal transport market. But coal had become a swearword for the eco-minded denizens of America. Coal transport, from mines to power plants, meant a hell of a lot to Union Pacific Railroad and their shareholders. When diesel fuel doubled in price, the railroad stock fell off a cliff, and their fuel contracts hit stop-losses, giving the fuel suppliers a chance to renege on their deals. The ensuing contractual stutter-step temporarily halted all rail movement in the western United States, which meant that coal couldn’t get where it needed to go. No matter how much the eco-social-justice crowd hated coal, the dirty fossil fuel still provided thirty percent of the power for their electric cars and cappuccino makers. Like a family with an awkward, homeless uncle, America couldn’t just abandon coal without first figuring out a sensible game plan. But, the collapse of the energy market had rendered these questions moot. Union Pacific and the coal it shipped had taken a premature dirt nap, and Dutch had no idea how a president was supposed to fix things when markets convulsed entirely on their own.
On the opposite side of the political divide from the eco-minded, the ultra-right citizen militias had been on edge lately. While they generally liked Dutch as president, the militia types couldn’t stand the federal government. The week prior, there had been an unfortunate shooting between a militia group in Texas and a federal park ranger. Five men had died. On top of that, the dirty bomb attack in the Middle East had the alt-right screaming “false flag operation” though it wasn’t clear who they thought had secretly orchestrated the bombing. For all Dutch knew, they could be right. He’d seen stranger things in his time in politics.
As fate would have it, the biggest power plant supplying Orange County and the eastern third of Los Angeles County sat on a hotbed of militia activity: the town of Delta, Utah—one of the same power plants that missed their coal shipment because Union Pacific Railroad lost its diesel supplier. The Delta, Utah power plant was hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. But losing that chunk of electricity during the end of summer in sweltering Los Angeles basin had an impact nobody might’ve imagined.
When air conditioners ground to a halt in Orange County and L.A., on top of the problems with the stock market, some urban Californians took to the streets looting and rioting, with social media accelerating the civil unrest into another iteration of the L.A. riots.
At that juncture, the details got fuzzy for Dutch, which was a sure sign that someone in the chain of bureaucracy had been obfuscating his information. Dutch’s money was on the latest loud-mouthed, Hollywood actor-slash-governor of California. He and Dutch hadn’t seen eye-to-eye, even though the President was raised in rural California before being swept away by the Ivy League scene on the East Coast. The President had grown up in the tiny mountain town of Bishop, California, a far cry from the metropolitan scramble of Oakland, where the California governor went to high school.
Somehow, in a heavy-handed attempt to make sure that the coal supply was restored to the power plant in Utah, the Governor of the State of California sent National Guard vehicles into a neighboring state to see that the coal arrived.
By some perverse stroke of luck or genius, the militia group in Delta captured the California National Guard’s advance force and blockaded the town. Dutch didn’t know if anyone had died in the conflict, but he knew that once the Delta Desert Patriots pointed guns at American servicemen, there had been no turning back for the little town and its erstwhile patriots. As far as Dutch knew, the town and the power plant were still locked down by camouflaged radicals.
This morning—which seemed like yesterday to Dutch—there had been so much crisis on his desk that he hadn’t had time to address the militia group seizing control of a town and a power plant. Before he could get to it, someone rushed into the Oval Office and turned on Fox News, where Dutch and his staff witnessed the first nuclear weapon ever used against the United States of America.
Dutch could follow the bouncing ball from the Saudi Arabian attack, to the failure of Union Pacific Railroad, to the shutdown of the power plant. He could even see how the destruction of a major oil pumping station and tanker loading facility in the Middle East could cause the stock market to hiccup. Many corporations had been flying high for years on cheap gas. Expensive gas would hit a lot of stock prices.
But how did a small militia in a tiny town in Utah come to play such a pivotal role in escalating civil disorder in Southern California? What the hell did any of this have to do with the nuclear attack in L.A.? Could the Iranians have mounted the nuke attack in L.A. as a follow up to the Saudi nuke? Why would one be a dirty bomb and the other be a fission bomb? And why would the bombs be three days apart?
Now in his mid-sixties, President Dutch McAdams had seen his share of weird chains of events. Life is long and strange, he liked to say. Not every puzzle piece fit into a puzzle. Random chance resulted in peculiar, sometimes spooky combinations, like the triggers that started World War One or even the financial collapse of 2008; Black Swan Events, as economists liked to call them.
People imagined that random chance played out more evenly than it actually did. While flipping “tails” ten times in a row was unlikely, in practice, it happened surprisingly often. Human history flipped tails ten times in a row with regularity, and then mankind paid the price with interest.
There might be no connection whatsoever between the two nuclear devices. Or it might be a nefarious plot. Or it all might be a series of hapless accidents. Dutch might find the link tomorrow or he might never find it. Even the president wasn’t omniscient, he knew all too well.
But Dutch had been elected by the people of America to diagnose problems and fix them, and he would be damned if he wouldn’t do exactly that.
4
Dutch awoke at 5 a.m. on Air Force One, his cell phone vibrating, overfull with an alarming stream of text messages.
After hours of pawing through unsatisfying slivers of news, he and Sharon had finally called it a night. They continued their three thousand mile circuit over America that would keep them away from the coast, where an enemy submarine could conceivably shoot them out of the sky. As soon as the military had more solid answers on the attack, they would return home to Andrews Air Force Base and Washington D.C.. The glamor of the airplane had already worn off and Dutch yearned to be on the ground.
To his knowledge, they had never done this before—moving a president to “WarFlight Status” during a heightened threat. President Bush had spent only three hours in the air after the 9/11 attacks, and that had been to get him from a grade school in Georgia to Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska.
Dutch lifted his window shade and looked out into the still-dark morning sky, the slight orange scrim of dawn etching a line to the east of their flight path. Two red lights blinked in the distance, probably the E-4B Nightwatch that served as a flying command center in case of nuclear war. Thank God the secret service hadn’t dragged him onto that plane instead of Air Force One. He and Sharon would never have gotten a good night’s sleep in the super-spy command center. It would’ve been worse than trying to sleep in a hospital.