Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  “Exactly right. It cuts the power of the government right off at the knees. People are finally starting to figure this out, and boy, do the politicians up in D.C. ever hate it.”

  “What about the South, the emergency zone?” asked Carson. “Which constitution are they following?”

  “Basically, General Mirabeau speaks for the emergency zone. He is the e-zone. He’s the only law down there that matters. They haven’t had an election in three years. I don’t know how he really feels, I don’t think anybody does, but I don’t think he’s committed one way or the other. As far as I know, he hasn’t rejected the new constitution, but why should he? He rules like a king from Louisiana to Georgia. He makes up the laws as he goes along, under his own emergency powers act. It’s easier for him to avoid making trouble with Washington. What would it gain him? Washington can’t force him to do anything, so it’s a standoff. Personally, I think General Mirabeau is just for General Mirabeau.”

  Carson said, “The folks here in Tennessee can’t be happy about the new constitution.”

  Doug asked, “What difference does it make if they’re happy about it, when they’re under martial law?”

  “Did people really turn in their guns?” asked Carson.

  “Here, or up in the federal states? Up north, people didn’t have much choice. The police already knew where most of the guns were, from all kinds of computer records and registration lists. Most people up north turned them in. At least it looked that way on television. People had no alternative. It was either turn them in or get arrested. Or take a chance on having a SWAT team make a midnight visit. Maybe some folks up north buried their guns, I don’t know. If they’re buried, they’re still buried, I guess. But they’re not much good when they’re in the ground.”

  “Nobody fought back?”

  “Some hardcore types went down shooting, but not many. I was right there; I was still up in Maryland then. There were a few shootouts on the news, but not a lot.”

  “What about you, Doug? What did you do with your guns?”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t have any guns to turn in. My family was pretty liberal, and they were always against guns in general. You know, growing up in Maryland, my family blamed guns for violence in society. I never touched a real gun until after I was drafted.” Doug finished wiping down his rifle’s barrel assembly, rejoined it with the lower receiver, and pushed the two cross pins through.

  “What about here in the South?” Carson asked.

  “Oh, it was way different down here. Even after the new constitution was passed, the local sheriffs wouldn’t cooperate with the feds, not when it came to gun control. They wouldn’t set up collection centers like the city cops did up north. Then they had the hurricanes and the earthquakes, so things just worked out differently down here. The local police down here could barely find enough gasoline to drive around, much less to go out on gun raids. Not that they wanted to anyway. With all of the looting, people needed their guns—the local police understood that. Taking people’s guns away wasn’t a priority down here. After the earthquake, the feds couldn’t even bring food in, so they sure as hell couldn’t come in looking for guns. So anyway, folks down here are mostly still armed, just like before the Second Amendment went down the tubes. And with what happened after the earthquakes, people damn sure wouldn’t give up their guns. Guns mean survival—life or death. If people didn’t understand that before the quakes, they sure know it now. They won’t give up their guns now, no matter what the law says.” Doug Dolan picked a loaded thirty-round magazine up from the table and slid it into the rifle. He stood the weapon up on the table, pulled down the charging handle, and let it fly home with a rasping metallic snap, chambering a round. “And I won’t either. At least not while I’m alive.”

  “And that’s why the feds are coming down so hard on Kentucky and Tennessee?”

  “That’s what most folks think,” replied Doug. “If the feds can’t get Kentucky and Tennessee and the Carolinas whipped into shape, they’ll never be able to get control of the Deep South, what they call the emergency zone. That’ll leave General Mirabeau in charge, except he’s not really under Washington’s authority. All Washington really controls now is the Northeast and the Midwest, from Maine to Minnesota and down to Virginia—and Virginia is shaky. There’s a lot of mountains in Virginia, just the same as eastern Tennessee, Kentucky and the Carolinas.”

  “Mountain folks are a different breed of people, that’s been my experience.”

  “Mr. Carson, the federal government is just an empty shell anymore, and that’s how I think it looks in most of the country. It’s hollow, it’s all rotten inside—it just hasn’t collapsed yet. Why should General Mirabeau obey Washington if Washington can’t even get a handle on Kentucky and Tennessee? And if they can’t get Kentucky and Tennessee under control, then they can forget about the Northwest. They’d never have a chance of getting control out there. Not while the East is still divided. That’s why Kentucky and Tennessee and the Carolinas are so important. If Washington can’t even get their own backyard cleaned up, they can forget about the Northwest. I think that’s why Tambor was willing to bring in foreign troops. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks—it’s make-or-break time. The whole world is watching. If he can’t get control east of the Mississippi River, then the federal government is finished, and everybody knows it.”

  “Well that’s sure something to ponder,” said Carson. “The end of the United States of America.”

  “Maybe America died a long time ago, and it just took us this long to realize it.” Doug shouldered the reassembled rifle, aimed it at the ceiling of the cave, and sighted along its barrel. “Hell, we already lost the Southwest without a fight. Yeah, I think the America you knew is long gone.”

  “That might be right. You know, you’ve got a lot of ideas, a lot of insight for a young man. Maybe someday you could write a book about all of this.”

  “I’ve thought about it.” He propped the rifle against a crate behind him, within easy reach. “Did you ever hear of a book called The Black Swan?”

  “No, never.”

  “You ever read about chaos theory?”

  “Sure, a little.”

  “It’s related to that. Risk, randomness, fractal geometry…it’s sort of where mathematics meets philosophy. Anyway, a black swan event is something nobody thinks is possible, like a black swan in nature. All swans are white, right? That was a certified known scientific fact forever—until they found black swans in Australia. You can’t even imagine a real black swan, until it hits you between the eyes. Planes taking down buildings on 9-11, that was a black swan. The constitutional convention coming out of nowhere—that was a black swan. The global financial collapse, that was one too. After they happen, everybody has an explanation, but never before. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but foresight is blind. The twin earthquakes sure as hell were black swans. All the experts said that a big Midwest earthquake should happen only about every five hundred years. They said that like it meant we had another three hundred years to go, counting from the last big New Madrid quakes. Like earthquakes follow human schedules. So much for experts!

  “Hell,” said Doug, warming to his subject, “we got attacked by a whole damn flock of black swans, and the experts didn’t see a single one of them coming. Nobody believed any of this could happen. But it did! When it comes to predicting these off-the-bell-curve events, the experts were all wrong, wrong, wrong. Speaking of bell curves, some people call these black swan things ‘fat tails.’ That means a big fat bulge out on the skinny edge of the bell curve, where things should be astronomically rare. Fat tail events happen all the time out in the real world, but the experts can never see them before they hit, because they don’t fit their probability models.”

  “Like the ‘hundred-year floods’ that happen twenty years apart,” said Carson.

  “Exactly. I read The Black Swan back at the University of Maryland for a statistics course I was taking. I’d love to rea
d it again someday. When I read it back in college, it seemed kind of far out. Not anymore. I’m a big believer in black swans now. What you can’t see can kill you. What you can’t even imagine can kill you—or wreck your country. You think that just because your country has been chugging along pretty well for two hundred years, it’ll keep on going forever, nice and easy. Like some kind of American birthright, or natural law. But black swans are out there—even if you can’t see them, or predict them. And they can change everything.”

  “Doug, you have got to write a book about this.”

  “Maybe I will. But who’s going to read it?”

  “I would.”

  “Thanks. I’ll start tonight. Or today, or whatever time it is.”

  Carson checked his watch. “It’s half past noon.”

  “It never changes in here. It’s easy to get disoriented and lose track of time.”

  “You were telling me how you dropped out of college and got drafted. So, how did you wind up in Tennessee with Boone Vikersun?” Phil Carson understood that this might be a sensitive topic if the young man was still supposed to be serving on active duty in the Army.

  16

  His weak coffee long since finished, Doug reached under the table for a plastic water bottle and took a drink. “Well, I was stationed in Missouri at Fort Leonard Wood when the first earthquake hit. It was December 15, at ten o’clock in the morning. Saturday. I was outside the barracks, throwing a football around with some buddies. It lasted for almost five solid minutes. The first really big shaker, I mean. There were aftershocks that went on for days, and you never knew if they were the start of another big one. We were two hundred miles from the epicenter, and it was still almost strong enough to knock you off your feet. You couldn’t stand up, you had to sit down. I was outside, and you could see land waves, like rollers on the ocean. Not that high, but you could actually see them, see the land rolling. It was pretty amazing. When you can’t trust the old terra firma under your feet, what can you trust? Anyway, most of the troops at Leonard Wood were put on buses and sent to St.Louis. St. Louis didn’t have too much direct earthquake damage, but the power was out and the gas and water were down. A lot of fires started, and they just kept getting bigger. And as soon as the power and lights went out, you might say that the civil order fell apart pretty fast.”

  Carson said, “When I was down in Panama, I saw some video of the damage. It hit between St. Louis and Memphis, right?”

  “Closer to Memphis. It’s two hundred fifty miles from St. Louis to Memphis, and the quake’s epicenter was fifty miles north of Memphis. Just below Missouri’s ‘boot heel,’ but across the river in Tennessee.”

  “Is that near New Madrid? The news I heard said it was almost as bad as the big New Madrid quake, back in the early 1800s.”

  “It was in 1812. New Madrid is in Missouri, just above the boot heel. But it doesn’t matter exactly where the center was. It was almost an eight on the Richter scale for about a hundred miles around the epicenter. Midwest earthquakes are a lot worse than California ones. I mean, they’re wider; they cover a lot more territory with the full power. We sure felt it at Fort Leonard Wood, and we were two hundred miles away. Like I said, most of our available troops went to St. Louis, to try to restore civil order. My battalion was held back because we had the assault bridges. We were staging up for bigger and better things.

  “While we were waiting around, we were watching television every chance we got. Cable news. Some of the base was on generator power, so we could watch satellite TV. There was rioting and looting in St. Louis and Nashville, but the video coming out of Memphis was the worst. Video shot from helicopters. It was like the end of the world down there. It seemed like half of that city was unreinforced masonry—brick—and most of it went down. Even regular wood-frame houses were shaken to pieces. All kinds of natural gas lines go through there; it’s like a big energy corridor from the Gulf to the Northeast. Well, at least it was. The gas pipelines broke in a million places, and a lot of Memphis burned to the ground. Then it was the chemical plants. They had all kinds of chemical plants and fuel farms along the Mississippi, and the ones that didn’t burn spilled. It was a mess! And smack in the middle of all of that, a million people. No electricity, no drinking water, no gas stations or supermarkets open, roads blocked, bridges down…you couldn’t imagine such a place. And that’s where we were going.”

  “It sounds like Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana,” Carson said.

  “Oh, it was much worse. New Orleans wasn’t on fire after Katrina. And New Orleans had a big rescue effort going in after just a few days. FEMA was ready and waiting to go into New Orleans, because you can see hurricanes coming a week out. Earthquakes catch you totally off guard. The worst earthquake damage went for more than a hundred miles around the epicenter, and it just nailed Memphis. There was damage everywhere, from Little Rock to Nashville to St. Louis. Memphis was just the worst-hit major city, so it got the most media attention.

  “My unit spent until Christmas at Fort Leonard Wood. We were watching television news reports all the time we weren’t on duty. Most of the film was shot from helicopters. It was too dangerous to land in Memphis. Any helicopters that landed were swarmed with people trying to get out. So many people would grab on that they couldn’t lift off the ground. And when they did airlift people out, where could they put them? You can’t just drop them off in a field—that just moves the problem from A to B. They dropped pallets of food and water bottles, just hovered and threw them down, but that caused riots. Every time they dropped pallets of food or water in Memphis, it was like Mad Max—survival of the fittest. The law of the jungle. Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. Women and children last. They did hundreds of airdrops, but it was just a drop in the bucket, and the meanest thugs got it all anyway. No way could we land and set up distribution centers, not right after the first quake. We had to wait to go in with a big enough force, that’s what my battalion was gearing up for. It was just dog-eat-dog on the ground in Memphis. And it was freezing cold, remember. A lot of the city burned for days, and some chemical dumps burned for weeks, so the air was horrible.”

  “And no food, and no drinking water,” said Carson. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like in there. It must have been hell in Memphis.”

  “Apocalyptic, that’s the word. When you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got a lot worse. I was in the headquarters company, so I had a little better idea about what was going on. Some of my friends were in communications; they let me know what was really happening. The whole earthquake rescue operation was totally botched. FEMA was just overwhelmed, and they did almost everything wrong. It didn’t help that so many highway bridges were down. You just couldn’t get relief convoys in. People coming out of Memphis had to walk, because their cars were out of gas or they were stuck in massive gridlocks. Too many roads were cracked, and too many bridges were down. Anyway, not very many people got out of Memphis in cars, not after the first big quake. It’s not that every single bridge collapsed, they didn’t. But enough did that it turned the evacuation into a permanent gridlock. Thousands of people got out by walking…but they weren’t exactly greeted with open arms out in the country. A lot of the black refugees were shot on sight. At least I think they were black. Everybody looks black after they’re lying on the ground dead for a few days. That was what we saw on television, back at Fort Leonard Wood. The TV networks all had their news anchors up in helicopters, filming it. Dead black people on the ground, everywhere.

  “Well, we finally got our orders to move out the day after Christmas. We went with our equipment on trucks, and worked our way down into Arkansas in a two-hundred-vehicle convoy. So many highway overpasses were down that we had to keep making detours, which was a real problem because every time we slowed down, we’d get swarmed with refugees. And that was in Arkansas, which wasn’t half as bad as Tennessee. We crossed the Mississippi north of Memphis, on barges. Tugboats pulled us across, going back and f
orth like an amphibious landing. Some of the chemical plants were still burning, two weeks after the quake. The air was so bad it burned your eyes and made your lungs ache. It was like D-Day meets Apocalypse Now.”

  “Is it true that all the bridges above Vicksburg are still down?”

  “Down, or unusable. Well, there’s a new cable-stay bridge at Cape Girardeau that came through the quakes, but that was the only one.”

  “So, what was the problem? Why didn’t you cross there?”

  “The problem is the river doesn’t go under it anymore. There’s just a lake there now. The river cut a new channel, a few miles west of the bridge. The quakes made a lot of new channels. The Ohio and Tennessee rivers too. Paducah was wiped flat when the Kentucky Dam failed. That sent all of the water in Kentucky Lake down into the Ohio like a tidal wave, straight through Paducah.”

  “Kentucky Lake is huge,” Carson noted. “It goes practically all the way across Tennessee.”

  “It was huge. But not after the dam collapsed. It was just an earthen dam, built way back during the Great Depression. Cairo, Illinois, is gone, just plain gone. And I don’t mean just the buildings, I mean the land under the buildings—it’s not there anymore. It’s under water. That’s where the Ohio meets the Mississippi now, right where Cairo used to be. That happened after the first earthquake, a year ago on December 15.”

  “Damn…”

  “So our battalion made it across the Mississippi on barges. Our mission was to put a temporary bridge across the Wolf River, and another one on Nonconnah Creek. Have you ever heard of them?”

  “No.”