40
THE GLOBEMASTER carrying Lanier’s NNSA group and their equipment had landed by the time Lanier and his crew returned to Hunter. They crawled out of the Strykers, loaded their hazmat suits into red decontamination bags, and got into Army staff cars. Lanier rode with Colonel Paul Mann, Wethersfield’s adjutant, to an empty Fort Stewart barracks, where one of Lanier’s Los Alamos deputies was supervising the setting up of a laboratory and an incident operations center.
The landscape flashing past the car looked to Lanier like a small town: shopping mall, restaurants, a movie theater, bowling alley, museum, chapel, neighborhoods with kids’ playgrounds. The cars stopped in front of the three-story brick barracks, which had been vacant, held in reserve for occupancy by potential troop surges.
They walked up the front stairs, entered a wide foyer, and turned to the left into the barracks orderly room. Lanier’s communications director, Debra Knowlton, was removing equipment from an aluminum box.
Lanier introduced the colonel to Knowlton, a short, sturdy woman whose blond bangs curtained her frown.
“I’ve seen your rules, Colonel,” she said, pointing to a document behind glass in a black frame hanging on the door. “I’m afraid I’ve got to break a couple.”
“What?”
“That one in particular.” She touched the glass at a line saying, Soldiers will only use one appliance cord per extension. Cords will not run under rugs or across doorways where they may be walked on.
“Our regulations specifically—”
“I think we’ll need a couple of the fort’s electricians, Colonel,” Lanier, sensing a potential argument, interrupted. “The Globemaster delivered our own standby generators. But we’d like help from the local talent—like those guys who ended the blackout.”
Mann nodded and excused himself, saying that he would send a captain from his staff to be Lanier’s liaison to the Army. If I could deal with the Taliban, he thought as he left, I certainly will be able to handle these people.
Lanier stood at the table where Knowlton was installing gear, put his laptop on the table, and described the circuit he had temporarily arranged to transmit the Stryker preliminary survey.
“And now you want all the secure transmissions to what’s his name?—Falcone?—shifted to here?” She made a sweeping gesture taking in the room.
“Right,” Lanier said. “This will be NEST headquarters until further notice. We also need a hotline to the guy who is the incident commander, Admiral David Mason.”
“Where is he?”
“Last I heard he was on a Coast Guard cutter heading for the Savannah River,” Lanier said.
“This is looking like a damn complicated exercise.”
“It’s not an exercise, Debra. This is the real thing.”
“Honest? I thought it was looking pretty damn realistic. Wow! So it’s real! Okay, I’ll get the details from Falcone’s people on how to keep in touch with Mason.”
*
THE Trumbull, a new U.S. Coast Guard cutter on antidrug patrol off Virginia, had just stopped a ship and seized 11,000 kilos of cocaine when her captain received an urgent message from Coast Guard headquarters: another cutter was on the way to take over the patrol because the Trumbull had a new mission.
An hour after Lanier told Falcone about the probable radiation level in Savannah, Admiral Mason boarded a Coast Guard helicopter and was flown out to the Trumbull, along with a White House communications video cameraman and two National Security Agency technicians ordered to Savannah by Quinlan.
Mason had been around Washington long enough to know that the ubiquitous cameraman came with the incident commander job. As what Falcone called “the face of the catastrophe,” Mason realized that he had been given the role of White House face, the person who gave the world the idea that the Oxley administration was responding to the disaster. The NSA technicians, who had been briefed on Trumbull electronic capabilities, went straight to the command and control center.
Mason met with the captain in his quarterdeck office, dismissed the video cameraman, and laid out all he knew. Mason, who was only a high-ranking passenger, could not tell the captain what to do. The captain of a ship cannot be told to hazard his ship, especially for public relations purposes. But, as commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Mason knew all there was to know about the Trumbull, which was officially called a national security cutter. She had an underwater sonar array designed to scan for such potential underwater hazards as mines and swimming suicide bombers.
While the Trumbull steamed toward the mouth of the Savannah River at twenty-five knots, Mason convinced the captain that the river held no danger. The Trumbull’s sonar could be used to detect debris as the ship ascended the Savannah River. As for radiation, Mason pointed to the fact that the ship was equipped to defend itself against chemical, biological, or radiological attack by locking out a dangerous atmosphere.
Finally, there was the question of the safety of the Trumbull’s crew of nearly one hundred men and women. The captain agreed that Mason could address the crew over the ship’s intercom system. And Mason agreed that the video cameraman could cover the address.
The chief boatswain’s mate hit the intercom system button and piped the two notes that sounded throughout the ships, signaling, “All hands!” The captain of the Trumbull introduced Mason by his two titles—commandant of the Coast Guard and the presidentially appointed incident commander.
“Fellow Coast Guard men and women,” Mason began. “We are sailing toward dangerous waters. Savannah has been severely damaged by what appears to some kind of nuclear device. Our air station seems to have been hard-hit, probably destroyed. President Oxley has asked me to go to the scene, and I have chosen to go there aboard your ship.
“My job is to maintain a connection between the people of the disaster area and the rest of the American people. This I will do aboard the Trumbull until such time that I can establish a site ashore.
“You all undoubtedly are concerned about radiation. The Department of Energy’s experts on nuclear weapons have entered the disaster area and report a relatively light radiation aftereffect. Because we have radiation-detection gear aboard, we’ll be able to make our own measurements and react accordingly.
“We plan to moor at a point in the Savannah River outside the disaster area. I can assure you that none of you will be put in an area where there is a radiation hazard.
“Finally, I want to assure you that I am a passenger aboard the Trumbull. Your captain is still your captain. Some of you may be assigned to duties aiding me in my role as incident commander. I am sure we’ll work together in the grand tradition of our motto, Semper Paratus. I take it as a good omen that many years ago the lyrics to our Semper Paratus march were written by Captain Francis Van Boskerck in the cabin of a cutter docked in Savannah. As he wrote and as we proudly sing, “‘We’re always ready for the call.’”
The boatswain piped, “Carry On,” and the video cameraman rushed to the Trumbull’s control and command center, which had established a direct channel to the White House communications office. He streamed Mason’s speech, preceded by a Coast Guard cameraman’s view of Mason’s helicopter arrival. Within an hour, the finished product—Mason, sternly confident, and the Trumbull, “ready for the call”—was being broadcast again and again on TV channels throughout the world.
White House press secretary Stephanie Griffith followed through with a conference call to television news producers. “Admiral Mason,” she told them “will issue progress reports twice a day on the Department of Homeland Security’s response and recovery operations. The reports will be streamed to all of you.” Off the record, she said that Admiral Mason was working on making arrangements to allow accredited correspondents to enter the disaster area. The producers, with great relief and anticipation, realized that the Savannah news blackout was over.
41
THE TRUMBULL moored at Port Wentworth off Hutchinson Island, north of downtown Savannah. By then, Fort St
ewart’s troops under Major General Wethersfield were rolling into Savannah. Medical units set up inflatable structures for combat hospitals with their own electric generators. Military police aided Savannah police officers who had begun untangling traffic jams. Strykers and military ambulances carried Army and local emergency medical aides to sites where Army reconnaissance patrols had found survivors.
Penny Walker arrived at Savannah International Airport with the first contingent of the Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA responders: emergency medical volunteers equipped for search and rescue. Other workers headed into the disaster area in commandeered airport buses to set up rows of large white tents for centers where food, water, and radiation-resistance pills were distributed. Electrical engineers began searching for functioning transformers and ways to restore electrical power. They also laid out a network for connection with the electrical systems of two aircraft carriers arriving at Tybee Island, near the mouth of the Savannah River. Still at sea and heading for Port Wentworth was a Navy hospital ship.
Walker had hoped to see Admiral Mason, but they were only able to talk on a secure and official communication network. Both agreed that a meeting would not justify use of scarce resources. She made her temporary headquarters at the airport, which also became the assembly area for the growing corps of FEMA workers.
Falcone had handed over to Walker and Mason the on-the-scene humanitarian needs of Savannah. They would respond to the President and Ray Quinlan, who wanted real-time information, especially casualty estimates and assessments of radiation effects. Quinlan, never forgetting that the President was running for reelection, had his own political demands, such as a presidential visit to Savannah. That decision would have to come from Savannah, not from Falcone in Washington.
Mason was handling the disaster, and Quinlan was handling Mason. In President Oxley’s name, Quinlan directed General Wethersfield to assign a squad of infantrymen to the mission of finding Victoria Anna Meredith and getting her to the Trumbull so that Mason would have a surprise human-interest story for one of his briefings. Quinlan assigned the NSA technicians to the task of establishing a press center in a dockside warehouse near the Trumbull.
Although the official “organizational design document” showed Falcone in the top box of a neatly laid out hierarchy of boxes, a realistic version of the design document would show new little boxes quickly sprouting in many places. The Army … Homeland Security … Mason and his Coast Guard cutter … Lanier and his NEST … Quinlan and his presidential campaign—each was running its own Savannah operation.
Falcone saw the reality in a way different from all the other forces responding to the Savannah disaster. He saw a war. There were dead and wounded. There were U.S. military forces moving on land and sea. There was DEFCON One. It all added up to war. But who is the enemy? And who will help me find the enemy?
The answer to his last question was Lanier.
*
FALCONE called Lanier from the Situation Room soon after Lanier arrived at the Fort Stewart barracks.
“Dr. Lanier, this is Falcone. A most urgent call.”
“Well, for ‘urgent’ let’s dispense with ‘Doctor.’ Call me Rube.”
“Okay, Rube. This is Sean,” Falcone said. He felt that the swift shift to informality somehow gave them a sudden new confidence in each other. “I realize that Savannah needs all the help we can give its people. But I want to stress that there’s nothing more important than finding out who did this. Who is our enemy? A lot depends on that, as you can imagine.”
“Accusation. Retaliation. What can happen then is almost beyond imagination,” Lanier said. “Let me give you a quick rundown on what we’re doing right now about what we call attribution—and what you rightly call our enemy. Dr. Liz Dalton is the nation’s leading expert on attribution. If anyone can get you the answer, it’s Liz.
“Even as we speak, Liz is in a portable laboratory here assaying scrapes from radioactive bits of debris. I doubt if she will have much trouble determining the samples’ composition, including isotopes—the nuclear configurations of the atoms in the samples.
“That’s step number one. After she gets what might be called the fingerprint of the nuclear device, she needs to identify the fingerprint. And that’s where the job gets really tough. She then has to turn to information from outside our laboratory.”
“Is there anything we can do about getting that information?”
“Negative. Even on the most secure phone in the world I wouldn’t want to go into details. But let me say that we have—what Liz has right here—is essentially a nuclear fingerprint database, based on material plucked out of the air and from land and sea for many years.”
“Sounds as if we’ll get the identity pretty soon.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Lanier said. “There’s a lot of intel involved. Ambiguity abounds. We’ve done a lot of drills on attribution. This is the first time we’ve had to deal with a real nuclear event.”
“Okay. We’ll stand by. And we’re lucky to have you, Rube. Goodbye.”
42
FALCONE LEFT the Situation Room and returned to his desk. Now that Penny and her staff were in Savannah, he had his office back. But the disaster had turned him into a commuter shuttling between the claustrophobic tensions of the Situation Room and his office. His desk was stacked with reports, which had been flying in like meteors.
One glance showed that Mae Prentice had put the most important reports on the top. Thank God for Mae, Falcone thought. The indispensable Mae called herself his secretary, despite the White House personnel director’s insistence that she was officially the national security advisor’s office manager.
The information that the reports contained was fragmentary, and almost all of it of it was bad. NATO’s Article V—an armed attack against any member would be considered an attack against them all—was welcome. The Europeans were “all Americans now,” as the French had proclaimed after the nine-eleven attacks. Nice to have friends in a time of trouble, Falcone thought. But he knew that the support of NATO nations could potentially be trouble for President Oxley.
I’m looking at a gift horse in the mouth and I don’t like what I’m seeing. They’ll expect us to take collective action. Sure, there’s security in numbers. But that means twenty-eight nations will have to agree on a plan of action. If one objected, no action could be taken by the organization. And if the U.S. decided to go it alone.…
Falcone cleared with the President an order to the White House switchboard to direct all incoming calls from foreign dignitaries to his office for the next three hours. Ostensibly, this would give Oxley time to rest and reflect on the crucial choices before him. But Falcone really feared that pledges of support from other nations could be a trap that Oxley would find hard to escape. Even a mere thank-you-for-your-concern could be interpreted by the caller as an implicit agreement that Oxley would consult before making a decision.
Falcone himself would be tied down in the Oval Office monitoring the calls so he could rebut anyone trying to make such a claim. This would take him away from his job of coordinating everything. He began making a list of calls that he would have Oxley review later.
As expected, Presidents Wang Xi Chang of China and Vladimir Khorkovsky of Russia publicly declared their horror over what had happened and pledged support for the American people in their time of tragedy and need. Simultaneously, as Falcone expected, they called for restraint until all of the facts could be established because a rush to judgment could produce a world calamity.
Stall. Delay. Defer. Anything to stop Oxley from making a unilateral decision. It was wise of them to do so, but coincidentally, Wang Xi Chang and Vladimir Khorkovsky were also the leaders who had direct ties to all of the suspects: North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran.
Countries would release an avalanche of documentation that shifted blame to someone else. Each country would strive to create a record showing that its leaders had done everything to prevent this catastrop
he. Like it or not, Falcone was the point man, and if he discreetly questioned motives or claims, he would be taking all the arrows in the chest for the President.
The best of the scant good news was a report from Admiral Mason that he had set up an information campaign, using leaflets, vehicles with loudspeakers, and door-to-door calls by soldiers, members of Georgia National Guard units, and local volunteers. The town criers, as he called his crew, had mostly succeeded in getting people to remain calm.
Given food and water and assured that Savannah was healing, most people agreed to stay in their homes until they received word of the all-clear. Electrical power had been restored in some neighborhoods. Two local radio stations had resumed broadcasting and local television stations were expected to be back on the air in less than a week.
FEMA took over Skidaway Island State Park, on the coast south of Savannah, and set up a refugee camp of tents and trailers. FEMA chose two golf courses as burial sites, one for mass burials and the other for transformation into a new cemetery with individual graves for identified victims. The work of identifying and burying the dead was supervised by specialists from the Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii and the mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Interfaith ceremonies preceded mass burials. At Falcone’s insistence, an imam from the Islamic Center of Savannah took part in the ceremonies.
Elsewhere in the country, there had been violent incidents. But surprisingly, the panic had started to subside and now there were only isolated reports of people still trying to flee their cities.
Falcone knew, however, most Americans were waiting for their president to make a decision. To take action. To find the bastards who did this. Rage was building. The people would not wait much longer. At any moment they could be taking to the streets in mass protest. And Senator Stanfield was ready to make sure of it.
Blink of an Eye Page 24
