Джейсон Росс: The Last Air Force One

It never ceased to amaze Dutch how Sharon could compartmentalize stress. While he had been dealing with an existential threat to the United States, his wife, daughter and son had been looking through old photo albums back in the guest section of Air Force One. Sharon must have grabbed the albums when their secret service detail scooped them up for emergency transport to Andrews. Sharon always took the long view for the family. If the country was going to be nuked, she damn well wasn’t going to lose the photo albums.

“Daddy, I didn’t know you were a mountain man,” Abby gleamed at her father.

“That’s overstating things a bit, honey,” Dutch rested his hand on the back of her auburn hair, taking emotional refuge in her youth and beauty. He and Sharon had gotten a late start on parenting; both getting through college, grad school and a good chunk of their careers before beginning their family. During the married-without-children time, Sharon earned her degree in clinical psychology, which had unexpectedly become a secret weapon during Dutch’s career in politics.

“Your father spent several summers working as a hiking guide for an outfitter out of Lone Pine, California, the Gateway to the California High Sierras. All summer long, he’d hike people up the highest peak in the continental United States, Mount Whitney,” Sharon smiled at Dutch, no doubt remembering the summer they first met on one of those hikes. By the look in her eyes, he was ninety-nine percent sure they were both thinking about the same hammock, a bit off the same hiking trail, on the same cool, summer day in the Grouse Creek drainage. It was a minor miracle they were both virgins when they married two years later.

“Dang, Daddy, you were a babe!” Abby said, a little too loud. Several of the secret servicemen chuckled in the row behind the first family.

“My dad made me take that summer job. He thought I was growing up a little too privileged. He said that no son of his would be raised with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

“Hey, that’s the same thing you say to me,” Teddy chided, softly punching the President of the United States in the shoulder.

“I say that because my dad was right. Who knows how I would’ve turned out if it weren’t for that summer job. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to become a man—the school of hard knocks teaches you some things you can’t learn any other way.” Dutch couldn’t help but insert a bit of parenting agenda into the conversation. He’d been trying to talk his son into joining the Marine Corps for two years. Instead, Teddy meandered his way through his undergrad, studying French at Boston University.

“Well, there’re many ways to get there,” Sharon tempered. “Grandpa Chuck preferred the gritty, cowboy path, which is probably why they still live on a ranch.”

“So you rebelled against the mountain life, Dad?” Teddy counter-argued. “You moved to the East, went to Princeton and became a Boston man? Everyone thinks you were born and bred in Massachusetts.”

Dutch stepped back and rested his hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “But I’ve got the gravel trails of the California High Sierras in my soul, buddy… enjoy the photos. Don’t miss the one where I’ve got my shirt off. Your old man once had a six-pack.” Dutch threw a quick jab that became a feather slap on the side of Teddy’s head. “I love you guys.”

Sam Greaney came marching down the hallway toward Dutch and his family, pushing shockwaves of urgency ahead of him.

“Dutch. The Saudis just buried the Iranians in a massive airstrike, probably reacting to the dirty nuke against their pumping station. The Iranians are mounting what retaliation they can. So far, nobody’s hit Israel, but things are heading that direction.”

Dutch put his hands on his hips and stared out the tiny window, searching for answers in the clouds. He took a deep breath and followed Sam Greaney toward the communications center.

“Dutch, you can’t use federal troops in American cities. They are mostly protests. With the possible exception of L.A., you don’t have legal justification.” Zach Jackson stepped back from the president’s desk with his hands on his hips. “President Bush and Congress modified the Insurrection Act to allow the president to call in federal troops to fight terrorism in the United States, but that ENTIRE amendment was repealed in 2008. Gone . Like it never existed. And there’s no way to get Congress to pass something like that on the timeframe you need. The House and Senate are tossed to the four corners of the earth right now. Can’t you use state guard to contain the protests?”

“We’ve already seen what happened in California with guardsmen,” Sam Greaney argued, wiping his face with the handkerchief he kept tucked in his pocket. “They’ve been totally combat-ineffective. They can’t even get their weekend warriors to report, much less execute on a coordinated mission.”

“But not all states will be as uneven as California,” Dutch pointed out.

“Sure,” Greaney chimed in. “Some states have crackerjack guard units and they might slam the door on rioters in those states , but what about the others? Social media shows up in every corner of the nation. Those people —the ones we’re fighting here—have real time coordination. We need to take control of this situation and stamp it out everywhere, all at once. We can’t abide half-assed solutions, and it’s got to happen tonight. Federal troops are the only force with the command and control we need.”

Silence descended as Dutch thought it through. A year from now, when the urgency and fear of this day was just a vague memory, he would be called upon to answer for this decision. He’d seen it happen after 9/11. The nation had galvanized and taken action after the tragedy, but the unity didn’t last forever. Things returned to normal. People forgot. Congress returned to its aisles. At some point in the future, accountability would be measured out, especially when the Democrats had some time to think it through. If he broke the law now, it would end his career and taint his legacy.

“I need you to find me a way, Zach,” Dutch weighed in. “I think it’d be unrealistic to trust the people, or even the states to clean up this mess on their own. The job falls to us. We’re the ones who hold the levers of the greatest political and military force in the history of the world. We can make this turn our way. Unless we employ the right amount of force in the right places, things could spiral out of control. Let’s get to work. I need legal justification to send troops into our cities and I need it now.”

As the day wore on aboard Air Force One, reports of the outages on the East Coast rolled in like a Biblical plague. Some technologically-savvy staffer set up an electronic map of the United States on the big screen in the conference room, and the power outages burned black holes in the otherwise chestnut map.

Orange County, Los Angeles and San Diego were dark. Initially, it had been the Delta, Utah power plant that had caused the outage, but now civil disorder in Southern California raged unchecked, and power failures were occurring due to violence, absenteeism and destruction of public works. The only good news was that blackouts weren’t Southern California’s biggest problem anymore. The mass exodus out of the region created a much bigger problem, and it wouldn’t matter now if the power came back on or not.

The blackouts east of the Mississippi were bumbling around the map like a dog who’d stolen too many rum balls. Depending on the power engineering software used in any given part of the grid, and the state of maintenance of that software, the virus made more or less headway against security countermeasures.