Jack Mars - Situation Room

“Are you worried about me?”

Luke shook his head. “No. I’m not worried. I know you can handle yourself. It’s just that we haven’t been seeing much of each other recently, and if I can just look at my phone and see where you are, it’s almost like being there with you.”

“But I can’t see where you are,” Gunner said. “So how am I supposed to feel close?”

Luke reached into his pocket and came out with another GPS unit, this one bright blue. “See this? I’m going to put it on my key ring. When we get back to the hotel, I’ll load the app into your phone, and then you can always know where I am.”

Gunner smiled. “I like that idea, Dad. But you know we could always just text each other. Do you even text? I know that a lot of people your age don’t.”

Now Luke smiled. “Yeah. We can text. We can do both.”

For Luke, it was a bittersweet feeling to be with Gunner up here. Luke had grown up without a father, and now Gunner was doing much the same. The divorce with Becca wasn’t finalized, but that was coming. Luke hadn’t worked for the government in two months, but Becca was adamant: she was going through with it anyway.

In the meantime, Luke had Gunner two weekends a month. He did everything in his power to make sure those weekends were chock-full of fun and adventure. He also did everything he could to answer Gunner’s questions in an even-handed, yet optimistic way. Questions like this one:

“Do you think we can do something like this with Mom one day?”

Luke stared out at the sea. Questions like that made him want to jump off this cliff. “I hope so.”

Gunner perked up at the slightest hint of possibility. “When?”

“Well, you have to understand that your mom and I are having a little disagreement right now.”

“I don’t understand,” Gunner said. “You love each other, right? And you promised you were going to quit your job, right? Did you really quit?”

Luke nodded. “I did quit.”

“See, Mom doesn’t believe that.”

“I know it.”

“But if you can make her believe it, then…”

Luke had quit, all right. He had quit and gone completely off radar. Susan Hopkins had promised to leave him alone, and she had honored that promise. He had also been out of touch with his old group at the Special Response Team.

The truth was, he was enjoying his time away. He had gone back to basics. He rented a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains for two weeks and spent nearly the entire time bow hunting and fishing. He bathed by jumping off the cabin’s back dock each morning. He grew a beard.

After that, he spent ten days in the Caribbean, solo sailing through St. Vincent and the Grenadines, snorkeling with sea turtles, giant stingrays, and reef sharks, and diving a couple of shipwrecks from more than a hundred years ago.

At the end of each little trip, he would give himself a day to make it back to Washington, DC, and pick up Gunner for the next dad and son adventure. Luke had to admit, being retired agreed with him. A year from now, when he ran out of money, it wasn’t going to be all that agreeable, but for now, he couldn’t think of a bad word to say about it.

“Are you and Mom going to split up for good?”

Luke detected the slightest tremble in Gunner’s voice when he asked that question. He got it, he really did. Gunner was afraid. Luke sat down on the rocks with him.

“Gunner, I love both you and your mom very much. The situation is complicated, and we’re working through it the best we can.”

That wasn’t necessarily true. Becca was cold to Luke. She wanted a divorce. She wanted full custody of Gunner. She thought that Luke was a danger to Gunner and to her. She had practically threatened to get an order of protection against him. She was being unreasonable, and she came from a family with a lot of money. She could pay for a long and bitter custody battle, if need be.

“Do you want to be with her?”

“Yes, I do. Of course I do.” It was the first lie Luke had told Gunner in this conversation. The truth was harder to ascertain. At first, he had. But as time passed, and Becca’s position hardened, he became less sure.

“Then why don’t you just come to the house and tell her? Send her roses or something, like every day?”

It was a good question. It didn’t have a simple answer.

Inside Luke’s backpack, a telephone started ringing. It was probably Becca, wanting to talk to Gunner. Luke reached inside the pack for the satellite phone he kept with him at all times. It was the only nod toward remaining on grid that he had made. Becca could always reach him. But she wasn’t the only one. There was one other person on Earth who had access to this number.

He looked at who was calling. It was a number he didn’t recognize, from the 202 area code. Washington, DC.

His heart dropped.

It was her. The other person.

“Is it Mom?” Gunner said.

“No.”

“Is it the President?”

Luke nodded. “I think so.”

“Don’t you think you better answer it?” Gunner said.

“I don’t work for her anymore,” Luke said. “Remember?”

This morning, before they had left to come on this hike, they had watched TV news footage of the dam failure in North Carolina. More than a hundred confirmed dead, hundreds more missing. An entire mountain resort had been washed away by a wall of water. Towns downstream from there were being evacuated and sandbagged as fast as possible, but there were likely to be more casualties.

The incredible thing was a dam built in 1943 had simply malfunctioned after more than seventy years of nearly perfect operations. To Luke, that smelled like sabotage. But he couldn’t imagine who would want to target a dam in such a remote area. Who would even know it was there? If it was sabotage, then it was likely a local issue, some group of militia members, or maybe environmentalists, or maybe even a disgruntled former employee, pulling a stunt that went horribly wrong, and with tragic consequences. The state police or North Carolina Bureau of Investigation would probably have the bad guys in custody by the end of the day.

But now the phone was ringing. So maybe there was more to it.

“Dad, it’s okay. I don’t want you to quit your job, even if Mom does.”

“Is that so? What if I want to quit? Don’t I get any say in the matter?”

Gunner shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, a lot of people died in that flood, right? What if I was one of them? What if Mom and me both died? Wouldn’t you want someone to figure out why it happened?”

The phone went on and on, ringing. When voice mail picked up, the phone stopped ringing for a few seconds, paused, and then started ringing again. They wanted to speak to Luke, and they weren’t going to leave a message.

Luke, thinking of Gunner’s words, pressed the green button on the phone. “Stone.”

“Hold for the President of the United States,” a male voice said.

There was a moment of silence, and then her voice came on the line. She sounded harder than before, someone older. The events of the past few months would age anyone.

“Luke?”

“Hi, Susan.”

“Luke, I need you to come in for a meeting.”

“Is this about the dam failure?”

“Yes.”

“Susan, I’m retired, remember?”

Her voice lowered.

“Luke, the dam was hacked. Hundreds of people are dead, and all signs point to the Chinese. We are on the verge of World War Three.”

Luke didn’t know how to respond to that.

“What time will you be here?” she asked.

And he knew it was not a question.

6:15 p.m.

United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC