Michael Walsh - Early Warning

The Black Widow. Not the fastest supercomputer in the world anymore-that honor probably went to the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the principal birthplaces of the American nuclear program during the Manhattan Project, which boasted a processing rate of 1.759 petaflops. Home computer users had gradually accustomed themselves to bits and bytes and megabytes and even gigabytes, but supercomputing took speed to an astronomical new level. FLOPS-floating point operations per second-were the new benchmark, measured in teraflops (10 12flops) and petaflops (10 15), or one quadrillion flops. But the dreaded Widow was still plenty fast enough, and she never slept, on guard against America ’s enemies throughout each dark, dangerous night.

Most of the bed-wetters at the New York Times and elsewhere in what was left of the American establishment took it as a given that the Black Widow and other components of the “illegal eavesdropping” program were listening to them. In the solipsistic world of the Good Gray Lady and other pillars of the Democrat-Media Establishment, everything was about them. They woke up in the morning and went to bed at night believing in vast right-wing conspiracies; in forces bent with hostile intent on depriving them of their civil liberties; of the presence in America of a huge, inimical mass of people who were only a beer and a shot away from joining the KKK and the Michigan Militia. From dawn til dusk they shook with terror at the hidden-but so transparent!-motives and emotions of their fellow citizens, and fled to the embrace of their shrinks and grief counselors and the hosts on MSNBC at the first available opportunities. It was so much easier than facing the reality that people they didn’t even know-enemies they hadn’t met yet-were out to kill them. Much more comforting to suspect the couple down the street, the ones with the New Hampshire flag on their car bumpers: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

For his part, Danny and the rest of his old crew from the 160th SOAR had learned from bitter experience to fight the battle in front of them. And then hit the bars instead of the psychiatrists’ couches. Easier that way, cheaper, and if the medical reports were to be believed, healthier all the way around. He wished he could have a drink, but it was still too early and besides, his daughter was standing right there in front of him. Not the enemy, but the person he loved most in the entire world.

He punched in the magic words. “Now I have,” he said.

She was wiser than he, and probably smarter. She had had to do a lot of growing up fast in the past nine months, part of her rude and premature confrontation with the everyday horrors of the world. No matter how you tried to protect your child from reality-and wasn’t that what parenting was, in the end, all about?-reality had a way of intruding whenever it wished, as if God or the universe of whatever was hell-bent on reminding mere puny human beings that they controlled the ongoing nihilist narrative, not the snarky screenwriters, not the smarmy politicians, not the small-minded editorialists who left downtown Los Angeles and went home not to Angelino Heights, which would have been a five-minute drive, but to Brentwood, or West L.A. or Flintridge or Pasadena or even Montecito or Santa Barbara.

Jade declined to follow his thoughts. Instead, she stood there in the doorway, waiting. Finally he understood. He opened his arms to his daughter, and she ran to him.

For a long time, they held each other, no words necessary.

He made up his mind quickly. “Honey,” he said, “we have to go now.”

Jade was young, but she was smart. She didn’t have to ask where they were going. All she knew was that, this time, he was taking her with him.

Teterboro, New Jersey

Devlin felt the pingback before he heard it. “Showtime,” he said to Maryam.

He took out a PDA, a special, modified BlackBerry just like the one the president used. Tyler famously did not want to give up his mobile device, and so rather than go without he’d asked some of the best minds at the agency to come with an uncrackable device. Whether it was in fact uncrackable was open to conjecture, and in any case Devlin assumed that the NSA could crack it anytime they wanted to; if Tyler thought no one would be monitoring his conversations he was probably very much mistaken. The point was, Devlin had one just like it, but insofar as he could make it, it was better and even more secure.

The message was from Seelye, officially authorizing him into action. Not that that really mattered, since he’d already decided on his course of action, knew they had no other choice. Under the terms of his deal, he could do what he wanted when he wanted and if the government didn’t like it it had two choices: terminate him or live with it. It was not a privilege he abused, but rather insisted upon, and there was no one to gainsay him. As long as Seelye held his job, Devlin was both his boy and his master.

“Punch up every point of subterranean access to Manhattan,” he told Maryam, who was already working the computers, calling up every map the NSA and other governmental databases had on file.

Few civilians realized it, but the island of Manhattan was riddled with tunnels: automobile tunnels, steam tunnels, train tunnels, subway tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; it was a wonder that the island hadn’t collapsed into New York Harbor of its own weight. But Manhattan bedrock was stern stuff.

“That’s how we get in, huh?” she said. Her eyes were aglow with an eagerness to get into the fight, an eagerness that nearly matched his own, although he would never let it show. The Angel of Death had no emotion when it was time to wield his sword.

“That’s how I get in,” he corrected. “The zone is red hot, and you’re more useful to me elsewhere.” Her face fell, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say: he was the boss.

At another computer, Devlin took stock of the situation: Times Square was a battleground, with the cops engaged in a running firefight with an unknown number of assailants. Inwardly, he shuddered. This had been one of the planners’ worst nightmares for years, but the attack on Mumbai a few years back had upped the stakes significantly. Conventional wisdom had been that a suicide bomber or two might self-detonate near the TKTS booth, killing scores of tourists and causing panic. But the Pakistani-directed attacks on Mumbai by members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization, changed everybody’s thinking: Mumbai, like New York, was surrounded by water, and it was by water that the attackers had come, putting ashore in small boats and bringing death with them. And now they were here.

He punched in Seelye’s secure number on the computer and waited for the randomly generated redirects to conclude. “Are you ready?” came the voice from the computer speakers.

“Assessment.”

“The attacks are still coming; they’re not just limited to Times Square as we first thought. There’s been reports of gunfire on the Upper East Side, at the 92nd Street Y. We’ve got all the bridges and tunnels sealed, except for the Holland, which has been bombed.”

“How bad?”

“The Manhattan side; otherwise, the structure is intact. Remember they plotted to do this at least once before, back in 2006, when they thought they could flood lower Manhattan by taking out the tunnel. The FBI broke up that plot, and the sensors, plus the no tractor-trailer rule, have kept the bad stuff out.”

“ Mission objective?”

There was a pause as the man who had raised him after the deaths of his parents at the 1985 airport massacre in Rome considered his next words. “I don’t know. Tyler thinks you’re a miracle worker.”