Читать книгу New Earth: Project O.N.E. - R.D. Ph.D. Pittman - Страница 5

President Owen Betts slumped at his desk in the oval office, oblivious to the array of advisors on the couch in front of him. So many questions kept circling in his mind. How could they prepare? Could they prepare? How do you break it to the world’s population that civilization might end without creating a panic that would, itself, end civilization? How could he maintain enough control to save what could be saved? Clearly this all had to be kept under wraps now—you don’t tell people a disaster is coming until you can tell them what can be done to avert it. Should he tell other heads of state? They would need a chance to prepare, but the more people who knew; the more likely it was the news would leak.

What about the upcoming election campaign? Should he run again? It would be a huge distraction, but it might create a frenzy of investigations if he announced he wasn’t running. Somebody would probably break under the pressure, that famous unnamed White House source.

The President rose from his desk and walked to the windows that looked out onto the White House grounds, his hands clasped behind his back. He stood there for a few moments, then turned to National Security Advisor Arlen Hendry.

“Arlen, implement COP at Mount Weather. Selection only—no contacts, just compile the lists and locations, and give me timeframes for implementation and the hierarchy who are essential to implementation. Can you have that to me end of business tomorrow?”

“It will be on your desk, Mr. President.”

“Allen,” the President said. “Mount Weather is your facility; I want you to put in place an operational readiness test that is to last at least one year. That way you can ramp up operations without raising suspicions of the staff.”

FEMA Director Allen Haverty nodded. “That will be no problem. I will set it in motion immediately.”

“Gentlemen, I cannot emphasize how critically important secrecy is in these early days of preparation. Robert track news leaks and shut down any sources of potential early disclosure. Do what you deem is necessary. Constitutional guarantees are essentially suspended, involuntary detention is on the table, do you understand?”

“Yes Mr. President,” Attorney General Simons replied.

“Admiral Torrance, work closely with Arlen on military redeployment without raising concerns or suspicions of your command staff, I know that won’t be easy, but we will need our troops here on US soil. Has your man from California arrived yet?”

“He just landed twenty minutes ago. I understand they’ve put him in the Roosevelt room.”

“Bring him in; I’d like to meet him.”

Two minutes later, the secretary ushered a stranger into the office. He was in civvies, looking a bit rumpled, but you could still see the military bearing under the clothes. Old habits die hard.

“Mr. President,” Torrance said, “May I introduce Major General Alex Hanken.”

“General, Admiral Torrance told me of your inadvertent eavesdropping on the two professors. Probably just as well. You know the situation we’re facing.”

“Yes sir.”

“What you need to do is direct a total redeployment of our military forces back to stateside. We may need them here at home. Then, we’ll need survival shelters for key government, military, and civilian personnel along with all the attendant supplies and equipment to literally restart the country. It’s a pretty tall order, so we managed to push through an order to congress to jumpstart you to a four star, you’ll need the muscle of the rank to deal with some of the lower ranking generals. So how say ye General Hanken?”

“Mr. President, it will be my honor to serve our country.”

“Good, Evan and Arlen will fill you in on the details the next few days.” The President then moved to the center of the room. “Gentlemen, diplomatic missions worldwide are going to start getting inquiries as to why we are redeploying our military. Any suggestions as to how we respond?”

After some thought. “Sir if I may?”

The President glanced back at Hanken. “Go ahead General.”

“Simply put, we can’t afford to be the world’s policeman any more. Or less simply put, we are maximizing our utilization of existing manpower and resources to better meet present-day challenges affecting our country.”

Torrance smiled. “I couldn’t have said it better Mr. President.”

“Evan, you didn’t tell me that Alex was a politician as well, though that statement was a little concise for a politician. But it’s a start.” President Betts paused until he had everyone’s undivided attention. “Gentlemen, thank you all. We all know what we have to do, and we have precious little time to do it in. So get started. Evan a moment?”

The others filed out while Admiral Torrance stayed standing. When they were gone, the President waved Torrance into a seat. “Quite an impressive man, Hanken. Good choice.”

“Thank you sir,” Torrance said. “Actually he was my third, after a former Quartermaster Corps General and a logistics chief from Halliburton.”

“Really? Why him then?”

“He called my office before we had a chance to contact the other two, and I learned he already knew about the ….upcoming event. I knew this had to be need-to-know as possible, so I brought him on board.”

“Oh. Well I would have liked first choice on this, but you’re right about the security. He’ll have to do.”

Alex was parked on an uncomfortable chair in a nondescript office in the Pentagon. There was a briefing book and a carafe of coffee in front of him, and a stack of briefing books to his right. He’d been getting up to speed for about six hours now, and still felt like he was only scratching the surface.

At the moment it was the Mount Weather facility located about 45 miles west of Washington D.C. in the mountains of Virginia, 1,725 feet above sea level. Mount Weather was central to COP-- Continuity of Operations, the government’s plan to restore order to the country after a calamitous event by ensuring the executive branch, key military and civilian personnel survived. The facility itself was located 1,400 feet underground, was originally built in the heyday of the cold war but underwent extensive reconstruction beginning in 1993. There were now dorms for staff instead of cots, cafeterias, meeting rooms, self-contained power generators, food and equipment warehouses, even an electric tram. Not to mention a fully equipped ER and operating room, to be staffed by surgeons covering several disciplines, and a complete two chair dental clinic. There was an extremely sophisticated communications system linked to satellites and high gain microwave antennae, an onsite full production television studio for broadcasting, a four-lane bowling alley, a theater with over two thousand movie titles, a video game arcade, and a putting green with an electronic golf driving range. As this was to be the nerve center for the government after a disaster, there existed a massive computer complex with a network of petascale processor computers running everything.

The President, the Supreme Court justices and cabinet members had private rooms. The facility got its water from an underground freshwater lake, and there were sufficient stores of food to last the entire staff nine months. Staffing levels were projected to be somewhere between thirteen hundred and twenty one hundred total which included a thirty-five man Marine detachment and fifteen Navy Seals. The facility was spread out on five levels taking the total depth of the facility to almost fifteen hundred feet or about two hundred fifty feet above sea level. A guillotine gate and a ten foot high, twenty foot wide, five foot thick blast door that took nearly fifteen minutes to open or close protected Mount Weather’s entrance. The Congress, key administration, and military staff were to be sent to several other locations in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania though their facilities were not nearly as nice or sophisticated as Mount Weather’s.

And yet, sophisticated as the facility was, it was only the beginning. It would keep the executive and judicial branches alive, and the others would preserve the legislative. But what good were the three branches of government if there were no people to govern. Or if the people were teetering at starvation levels. That was the real problem he had to tackle.

And then there was the knowledge that was hanging around in the back of his brain, the dark, brooding facts that he wasn’t ready to consciously face.

No matter what he did, people would die in the tens or hundreds of millions, or even billions. The very best he could hope for—the very best—was to save enough pieces that humanity would recover and not be wiped from the face of the earth.

He poured another cup of coffee and pulled down another briefing book, this one on how Japan rebuilt its infrastructure after the bombings that ended WWII.

Admiral Torrance and Arlen Hendry strolled along the path leading around the White House.

“So,” Hendry said. “Does the President really believe we can keep this under wraps once we start moving pieces around?”

“We’d better, for all our sakes. Otherwise we could end up turning our guns on our own people. I’d rather turn my gun on myself.”

“Evan,” Hendry said slowly, we both know a lot of people are going to die anyway. Panic will set in at some point,” Hendry took in the beauty of the rose garden and tried to imagine what things would look like just a few years hence. “I can’t help but wonder if there is a history to be written afterwards how will we be portrayed? Hitler could come off looking like a saint compared to us!”

“Yeah. Listen, call me when you’re going to get started, and I’ll go over the force level reports for redeployment contingency plans.”

“How soon can your man Hanken have those plans ready?”

“I’m shooting for seventy-two hours.”

“You think Hanken is up to this?”

“I do. Remember he masterminded the movement of nearly two hundred thousand troops for the Iraq War that included all the various coalition troops, along with tanks, planes, field hospitals, maintenance units, supply trucks and ships, their routes, and all the attendant critical personnel to support each segmented mission. Yes I’d say he is up to it.”

“All right then. My office annex on Thursday, say around nine a.m.”

“See you then.”

Ted Jeffers, FBI Director, wondered why the Attorney General Simons had asked for an immediate meeting with him, and was surprised to see Donald Cray, the CIA Director, waiting in the outer office when he arrived. Attorney General Simon’s secretary showed them both in immediately.

“Ted, Don,” Simons said. “Thanks for coming on such short notice. Let’s step into my secure office for this conversation.”

As they seated themselves in the smaller, electronically-shielded inner chamber, Jeffers got a sick feeling in his stomach he was going to be asked to break the law somehow. This time he would refuse.

“Gentlemen, I am hereby putting you on notice that under the US Secrets Act the President has granted me discretion to discuss a matter of urgent national security, and you are on notice that, under no circumstances, may you discuss with any other individual, unless authorized to do so directly by the President or his designee, the contents of what I am going to divulge to you. Nor are you to take any action that could arouse suspicions concerning this matter. This conversation is being recorded, do you agree to continue?”

Both men acknowledged by answering yes.

The Attorney General then proceeded to lay out for them what was coming. Cray began wringing his hands. Jeffers kept shifting in his chair from one side to the other, fighting the urge to get up and do something…anything.

Simons quoted the President as saying the Constitution was essentially suspended. They had to do whatever was necessary to keep anyone unauthorized from learning anything about this. He provided a list of the known persons who knew of this matter and ordered them all to be put under heavy surveillance.

“Bob,” Cray said with a voice laced with iron control, “Just how far do we go to keep this out of the public eye?”

“Don, listen carefully. You are authorized to use any and all means at your disposal to carry out your objectives.”

“Forced detention?” Jeffers asked.

“Yes.”

“Terminal force?” Cray asked.

“Yes. Even against the innocent. Gentlemen, consider what happens if this gets out. We’re talking total anarchy, food riots, murder sprees, chaos at home and abroad, and a complete and total breakdown of civilized behavior worldwide. One possible result would be that no one—none of humanity—survives. We are the best and last hope for any possible recovery after the event, the front line of defense.”

“Sir…Jeffers asked. “Our families?”

“Immediate families will be assigned as critical personnel to the Mount Weather facility.”

“Immediate families?”

“Spouse and children only. I’ll need immediate action plans on your parts to be submitted in person by Thursday at 10:00 a.m. That’s all.”

As Jeffers and Cray walked down the long corridor of the Justice Department Jeffers was the first to speak.

“Holy Christ Don.”

“I know.”

“How am I going to keep 6,500 agents from finding out if I’ve got them out there trying to stop the revealing of something they’re not supposed to know anything about? That makes no fucking sense!”

Cray held up a hand. “Ted, I’m…I’m still trying to restart my heart. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

“Well, think. I’ve been given an impossible task. Any help with it would be appreciated.”

“Okay, look. Remember the broken pie theory? Give each a little piece, not the whole thing. The whole pie gets eaten, but not by any one individual. Set up your teams, give them each a separate task, but have them report results directly to you, and not share with anybody else in the department.”

“Yeah. I’d already gotten that far, but I can just imagine my senior guys and gals chafing for trying to hide something from them. They’re smart enough that they don’t follow orders blindly.”

“Let them chafe. We’re talking terminal Cretaceous Event here, a change in ownership. If we don’t survive, it will just be the goddamn roaches and ants left. Besides you’ve got the easy job. When we start military redeployments, I’m going to have every agent of every major power, friendly and unfriendly, sniffing around to find out why. At least your people are under your orders.”

“This could be the world’s largest and last cluster fuck,” Jeffers said. “Jesus mother of God, I’ve never ordered someone killed.”

“Well Ted, come down to our range at Langley and we will show you how to kill with the best of them.”

Jeffers stopped. He was scared to death and Cray was joking about it all? Maybe that’s what he had to do to stay in his job. Maybe Jeffers should try it.