Michael Walsh - Early Warning

And fuck everybody who didn’t understand that simple, fundamental principle of America and Americanism.

Again, Hope felt violence welling up inside her-a violence that she thought had long since been bred out of her, beaten out of her, beaten out of the America she had been born into, an America she had grown up with, an America she had been raised to think of as good and noble and true and honorable. And yet for years, they had been telling her-they, the impersonal they that ran the media, that ruled in Washington, that she saw every night on her TV set, the chirping anchors and the serious graybeards, the snarky commentators who celebrated what she had grown up to think of as deviancy, shoved it right in her face. She had often wondered, sitting at home with Jack watching the TV, why they let them get away with this, when she finally realized that the “they” she had long assumed were in charge of the America she had once known were no longer the “they” in charge, that the moral rules had changed, without even an election, that the rules were new, that the snarky commentators were on the other side, that without even so much as a press release, the power structure had changed, and she and everybody else she knew had suddenly come up on the short side of the equation. How did it happen, and how did it happen so fast?

Had her country gone from American dream to nightmare in her lifetime?

That was a question for another time. Right now, she had to figure out how to get out of here and how to get her kids out of here. It didn’t matter if she died, it only mattered whether she could save them

And, by God, she would-no matter how much “they” tried to drive God out of her life, and the life of a country whose money proclaimed “In God We Trust.” At that moment, Hope swore to herself that, if she lived, she would contest every local seat, every county board, every state house and senate sinecure, every national office, even the presidency itself. From now on, she would be their worst enemy. And they had no one but themselves to blame, because, finally, they had driven her to it. What a mighty force the American people could be, once aroused.

Emma’s hand was in hers. The pain was suddenly gone. Nothing could stop her now.

“Atta girl, Ma!” shouted Rory.

They ran. Not caring what was in front of them in the darkness, not caring whether it was popcorn boxes or movie posters or even dead bodies. The only thing that mattered now was to get to the exit, still vaguely but bravely illuminated against the carnage they knew lurked below.

If only they could make it before the building totally collapsed. If only they could cross the few short yards, no matter what her physical condition. Hope knew she could do it, and prayed passionately that her children could follow. She had never prayed much in her life, beyond the pro-forma Protestantism she had grown up with, a religion that didn’t much matter, like any religion, in times of peace. But now they were up against a religion that very much did matter in times of war, a religion that welcomed war, no matter if it was only a tiny minority, as the newspapers kept telling her, no matter if it was only a fraction, a fraction of a billion was a very large fraction and it was that fraction, she knew, that was causing them all this trouble.

The exit sign-

“Come, on Emma!” shouted Rory. “Come on, Mom!”

They ran. The building groaned once more. They ran faster. A small amount of ground, which on the outside you could leap over in a flash, not less than a heartbeat away. A heartbeat, one tick missed and you were gone, one tick missed and you were meeting your maker if Maker there was to meet.

Hope didn’t want to find out. She was not yet ready to put her faith to the test. Not ready to be able to answer Abraham’s challenge, not disposed to be confronted by an altar upon which she was supposed to sacrifice her children, not even one of them. They would all get out, or they would all die trying.

And then, against all odds, her phone rang.

Under the Hudson River

Few civilians knew that the Hudson River was crisscrossed by tunnels, those both successful and in use, and those failed and long since fallen into desuetude. The old North River-that had been its name until the mid-20th century, reflecting its origins as part freshwater river and part brackish estuary, like the East River-had been the object of man’s desire to simplify the crossing from Manhattan to Jersey for more than two hundred years. The Hudson and Manhattan Tunnels dated back to 1874, when the first attempts were made to dig beneath the silt of the river bottom and snake a tube across to the west side of the island. Because the technology was not up to the task, those early efforts collapsed, but they remained beneath the water today, unfinished and unused. Until now.

Devlin approached the edge of the water. He had committed to memory the old maps Maryam had showed him aboard the plane and, triangulating with his GPS device, knew precisely where they were.

He would have less than two minutes to find the old opening, long since buried in the river and under about ten feet of water. When the tubes eventually were successfully built-the railroad they had once served had become the PATH trains from New Jersey, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which also controlled the other bridges from Jersey, as well as the late World Trade Center-most of the aborted tunnels had been simply left to rot. But bits of them had been incorporated into the design and, if the maps were correct, there was still access. All Devlin had to do was dive down, locate the ingress, and try to hold his breath long enough to get in.

There was no entry from the Jersey side. When Tyler had issued his order to close off the city, all trains had immediately stopped running. Both the passenger vehicle tunnels had been choked off at the Jersey end as well. And, since he did not officially exist, there was no use trying to pull rank on the PA cops. He was going in, and he was going in invisibly.

Diving was something else few people knew anything about, except divers, of course. What seemed like just a short distance-say, a hundred feet-might as well be a mile to a diver. The pressure grew exponentially with every few feet down, and while man may well have originated in the primal soup, he had long since accepted his fate as a breathing biped. Water might be fun at the Jersey shore sixty miles south of where he was standing, but at this point, it was an enemy.

Across the river, Devlin could see the smoke rising from where Times Square would be, to the north of where he was now standing. The prevailing winds were from the west, as usual, so he couldn’t smell anything, but he knew from his survey of the situation aboard the Gulfstream that the world’s most famous intersection was now very likely uninhabitable. The acridity of the smoke, the ongoing gunfire, the rapidly spreading fires were sure to destroy the place, and not even the best men in the NYPD and the Fire Department were likely to be able to stop it. How many times did this have to happen, he wondered, before the United States was ready to go on offense? To hit back, hard, to lay waste to its enemies without the albatross of the lawyers and the JAGs perched on its shoulder, warning, hedging, caviling?

He took a deep breath, then exhaled. Then another, deeper breath, expanding his lungs, prepping them for what was to come.

But whom to attack? In the world of asymmetrical warfare, it was impossible for the leaders of nation-states to make their decisions. There were no diplomatic establishments to deal with, no ultimatums to be issued and then either accepted or ignored. The country was fighting a shadow army, led by invisible commanders, troglodytes who could issue their commands from cell phones and sat phones in far-off caves in countries that only existed as diplomatic fictions. Sometimes it seemed that most of the world was a giant Potemkin village, a simulacrum of a country; only kick down the false front to reveal the savage beating heart behind it, so filled with jealousy and hatred.