Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Sid hit the top of the car with the thud, but didn’t feel a thing. “I think my legs are fucked, Lannie,” he said, but Lannie wasn’t listening. Instead, he was pulling Sid through one of the shattered windows, out of the car and into the street. The pavement was burning hot. Lannie hauled him to his feet.

“I can’t walk, Lannie. I can’t.” The pain was excruciating.

“I don’t give a shit,” shouted Lannie. “You walk, I carry you, it doesn’t matter. We gotta get out of here.”

The two men were face-to-face. Amazing how all that had divided them didn’t matter anymore. Not ethnicity, not religion. It was a cliché, but it was true: right now, they were both Americans, fighting for their lives and their country.

“Whoever these fuckers are,” Lannie was shouting, “I am personally going to fuck up their shit two times.”

Through his pain, Sid Sheinberg smiled. Lannie was such a Brooklyn boy.

Byrne managed to grab his radio, but he knew before he tried that he wouldn’t get through. Everything around him was on fire, and he knew enough from all the war-gaming they’d done that Times Square probably wasn’t the only place in the city that was burning right now.

What was it Sid Sheinberg had said about the cyberattack-a redirect through Mumbai. Byrne’s mind raced, trying to intuit what was going on. In 2008, a group of ten Pakistani-trained terrorists had attacked Mumbai and held the entire city hostage for nearly three days, killing nearly three hundred people before the Indian police managed to take them down, killing nine and capturing one.

As Byrne tried to shake some sense back into his head, he repeated that to himself: ten gunman had held one of the world’s largest cities hostage.

Oh, Jesus.

A Mumbai-style attack was one of the CTU’s worst nightmares. A handful of killers who didn’t care whether they lived or died could do tremendous damage, not simply in human terms, in the number of lives taken, but in psychological damage. The Indians had been used to it, since their country, with its huge Muslim minority, had been subjected to ongoing horrific attacks of terrorism for years. Mumbai had been hit repeatedly, including a nasty series of train bombings in 1993 that killed more than two hundred and fifty people and wounded seven hundred others. True, periodically the Hindu majority wreaked its terrible revenge, but even bloody retaliation hadn’t stopped the ongoing conflict between two irreconcilable beliefs and political systems.

And we thought it couldn’t happen here, thought Byrne. Secular America was beyond such petty religious squabbles; nobody, not even the twelve nuns left in the United States, took their faith that seriously anymore; we mourned Michael Jackson, not Jesus, and suffered along with the contestants and judges on American Idol. And yet we worried. Which was one of the reasons why, in the wake of 9/11, Manhattan ’s defenses had been hardened and strengthened. And what good had it done?

He realized he had his.38 in his hand, his father’s gun, and was running toward to the destruction now, east, toward the wreckage that could only have come from a car bomb, and toward the gun battle he could hear in the distance at Times Square.

And then he heard the explosion behind him, to the south, and he knew they were in for it now.

Washington, D.C.

Tyler ’s reeling presidency couldn’t take much more of this, thought Army Seelye as they gathered in the Oval Office: the president, Seelye, and Byrne; plus the SecDef, Shalika Johnson; Celina Sanchez, the National Security Advisor; the DNI, Lamont Sutton; Colangelo from Homeland Security; and General Higgins from the Joint Chiefs. Even Col. Grizzard, the man with the football, was present.

Seelye felt a sense of despair wash over him. These were the best minds of the Republic, or should have been. They owed that, at least, to the American people who were paying their salaries and trusting in them to do the right thing, which was, first and foremost, protect them. Instead what the great American people got was this collection of hacks, time-servers, and affirmative-action appointees, most of whom couldn’t get a job in the private sector unless it had something to do with their brother-in-law or a government contract. It really was pathetic when you thought about it: that more than two centuries of American History had come to this.

The old Tyler ’s first instinct would have been caution, wait and see; the new Tyler, emboldened by his success last year in stopping the EMP attack on the east coast, would want to hit back, strike out. But this Tyler was already a different man-one who saw his political death staring him in the face. There was no way out of this. No matter how much worse things got in New York, the damage was already done. Hassett might as well start measuring the Oval Office for new drapes, especially with the endorsement that sonofabitch Jake Sinclair already ringing over the airwaves.

“What’s the situation?” asked the president, as if he didn’t already know. He looked at Seelye to begin the briefing.

“A short while ago, the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department came under a coordinated denial-of-service attack from various points overseas,” Seelye began. “As you know, NYPD has been given extraordinary latitude in defending the city, especially after we all let them down so badly on 9/11. And, as you also know, they’ve been extraordinarily successful in preventing further attacks-at least fourteen that we know about.” On the silent TV screens, images of a burning New York danced to the unheard words of the network anchors’ professional, dispassionate concern.

“But today was different. We’ve seen coordinated cyber-assaults before-hell, the DoD gets them on a daily basis, mostly from China. Our infrastructure is also routinely probed, including the electrical grid, computer networks, and the water supply. While we’re sleeping, our enemies are awake, trying to take us down, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. You’d think we’d all learned that by now, from 9/11.”

That part was bureaucratic ass-covering. Seelye knew that Tyler would now turn on Sutton and Colangelo, and he was right.

“God-fucking-damn it!” exclaimed the volcano, exploding from his chair behind the Resolute desk. “Ladies and gentlemen, the American taxpayer spends a hellacious amount of money on us annually, and the only thing that John and Jane Q. Fucking Public expect in return is that we keep their asses safe. And now,” he gestured at the TV sets, “we’ve let them down again…I’ve let them down again.”

“Sir,” began Colangelo. This was not going to look good for Homeland Security, and the Secretary was leaping to the defense of his turf. Would that he would leap to the defense of his country with such alacrity. “With all due respect, my department has done everything in its power to-”

“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” shouted Tyler and Seelye flashed back to the late Senator Bob Hartley, Tyler ’s friend from across the aisle, whom he had left to hang out to dry in the interests of state, and so caused his death. Seelye wondered how heavily that weighed on the man behind the desk.

“If I may, sir,” interjected Sutton. The Director of National Intelligence was another accretion from the aftermath of 9/11, part of the defensive political reaction to the disaster: the creation of yet more bureaucratic bullshit, sold to the American public as a great leap forward in the defense of democracy.

“You may not,” snapped Tyler. “I know what you’re going to say, what you’re all going to say. We don’t have the right equipment. We don’t have enough manpower. We don’t have enough money. Nobody in this town ever has enough men and matériel; nobody ever has enough money. The American people throw it at you like women throwing their panties at a rock star, and still it’s not enough. It’s never fucking enough. I sign the budget authorizations and yet we still have secretaries that don’t talk to each other, crap-assed equipment that sucked back in 1984, and a metastasizing bureaucracy of vampires that hoovers the life out of our countrymen while it fucks them in the ass and doesn’t even give ’em the courtesy of a reach-around.”