Tyler pulled on his hair so hard some of it came out. “Why have you been holding out on us? Do you have any idea how much time you could have saved us if you’d just shown us that sooner?”
Carson turned to Scala. “Yeah. Care to come clean, agent? How did you get that, and why didn’t you mention it until now?”
Scala went red. “It’s my copy. 905T4 was a secondary objective, like I told you. I had a copy, and since you had your own I held on to it when we split. This is how I got in and out of the facility securely, before you guys showed up. I didn’t realize it could help with the software.”
Scala surrendered the key to Beth and backed off to sit out of the way while the techies got back to work. She looked embarrassed, and Dana sat primly across from her, enjoying the moment.
Beth and Tyler argued for a few minutes about how best to get the code out of the electronic key, but their debate was cut short when the man with the large belly and wild beard showed them a port in the back of each drive it could fit into. “I keep telling you guys the hardware’s more important than the software. I was building my own primitive servers while you guys were still figuring out Windows 3.1. You have to pay attention to the hardware you’re working with!”
Shortly after that there came a moment where the entire room went silent, and then several nerdy shrieks of glee echoed throughout the high school basement.
“You got it?” Carson asked.
“We’re in, man!” Tyler shouted.
Dana went to fetch Mason, and they all crowded around Beth’s laptop screen.
“Okay,” she said, fingers fluttering over the keyboard as she ran commands to manipulate the data in the files. “There are several hundred terabytes of data here, so what I’m going to do is search for references to 905T4 and see if we can piece together some idea of what got sent to that particular device instead of getting left behind on all these drives. That should point us toward the most relevant pieces of information.”
She soon had a list of files and they began pouring over each one individually. The group got two other computers running and split the files between them. With a few people at each station, they began calling out relevant points as they found them in the mass of information.
It seemed that the data facility had received an hourly stream of intelligence reports from a spectrum of government and military teams. There were reports tracking VIP’s all over the world, showing their movements and who they were talking to, what they were saying, and what they were spending money on. There were in-depth analyses of political groups’ interactions with each other, and threat assessments of a myriad of terrorist and rogue groups both international and domestic.
“Okay, now we know the nature of what we’re looking at,” Beth called out after twenty minutes of scanning. “We don’t have unlimited generator time. Run a search on your files for terms like ‘correctionist’, ‘electro-magnetic pulse’, and ‘power grid’. That should lead us to the juicy stuff we’re interested in.”
“Yeah,” Carson added, “and the names Coulter, Deep Thaw, and Cheyenne Mountain.”
Within minutes they were piecing together a story, shouting out revelations across the room to each other one by one. It was not an encouraging narrative.
Carson found himself growing deeply, almost rabidly angry. When they first cracked the drives, he had considered sending the others out of the room and examining the data with just his fellow agent, Scala. After all, what they were doing amounted to treason. But he reminded himself that they were way beyond that now, and as he read the communications that had gone back and forth in the hours prior to the lights going out, he began to learn what real treason was.
Bilateral. That was the word. For as far back as he could remember, the Right and the Left had been at each other’s throats. If there had ever been any spirit of compromise, it was a note in a history book. Democrats and Republicans had grown more bitter in their vitriol, more elaborate in their lies, and both sides had fostered a twisted sense of self-righteous moral superiority that utterly prevented anything like real progress. But somehow, a select few on each side had quietly decided to compromise, and kept their compromise so secret that no one suspected.
Decemvirate. Another word. There were ten of them, and they were so secure in their little world, so certain that no one could penetrate their curtain, that they had given themselves a cute little name. Carson gritted his teeth at the irony, the sneering pseudo-intellectual congratulation in the word, the Latin suggestive of ancient Rome and the dying republic that Cicero had tried to save. Cicero had seen that the republic of his day was hopelessly corrupt, that a cure was impossible, and therefore that a clean sweep must be made, that political power must be centered in one powerful figure who could actually get things done. He didn’t like it, but he understood it.
Hail, Caesar.
It was a seductive idea. The frustration at stalemate led naturally to consideration of alternatives, even the consolidation of power (only for the duration of the emergency, of course!) under one monarch. Or, in this case, oligarchy. That these shadow figures would use a Romanism illustrated their hypocrisy; they saw themselves as saviors of classical republicanism, but only by means of rank totalitarian power, none of which would be relinquished once the republic had been ‘saved’.
Once Carson had the word ‘decemvirate’, he quickly found references to the members of the group and their communications. They didn’t name each other outright, but by looking at which offices the communiques had been routed through, they became clear enough. Several of them even used their government-issued devices to send the communications, trusting to their code phrases and mutual protection to keep them from every facing scrutiny.
Some of the names were more familiar than others. Two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a retired chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Two powerful Senators and a representative. Carson didn’t recognize all the names, but there was obviously a reason they were on the list. These were the real powers in Congress, the spiders at the center of the web, the ones who manipulated so subtly that no one could see it. Between them they had enough influence over the nation’s intelligence apparatus, the military’s upper echelons, and the political parties that they were virtually untouchable. A quick email or phone call hinting at terrible consequences would have snuffed any hint of a leak or an investigation.
And they obviously thought of themselves as patriots. They actually loved their country, or the version of the country they dreamed of. Disillusioned, even horror-struck, at the direction the country was plunging, they had taken action. But they had decided that lawful, open action was no longer feasible. It wasn’t enough, it couldn’t make it through the political chaos and the crowd-pleasing and the check and balances. The only way forward was backward, to hit the reset button and start over. Do it right this time.
It had taken a few years, lots of cash, and plenty of corruption. All of which was available in Washington. A few of the details were a little fuzzy, but reading between the lines Carson and the others learned that the U.S. military had developed a cutting edge super-EMP delivery system, enabling massive spread or pinpointed bursts. The Decemvirate had ultimately employed both on their own nation and, confirming Carson’s experience, after the first wide-spread attack took out the three national power grid, it had been followed within hours by a second to mop up the vehicles, generators, and outlying substations the first had missed.
Even with a top secret next-gen EMP capability, the Decemvirate knew that they couldn’t bring every local power structure down. So they had arranged for a massive series of local, on-the-ground attacks, using mercenaries and hired criminals to cause localized chaos. It had been a delicate, time-consuming task, but after starting the word-of-mouth spread of the plan throughout the shadowy worlds of extremist cells, anarchic militias, and criminal organizations, the word filtered down to very low levels. That something way bigger than 9/11 was goi
ng down, and to be ready to take advantage of it. Individual cells had their instructions for decapitation strikes on military and government installations, infrastructure hubs and recovery resources, anything that would cause more chaos. One of their first targets, all across the country, had been to destroy every power plant and substation.
Soon even street thugs and crime bosses with no connection to terrorism or government plots knew enough that when the lights went out and didn’t come back on, it meant that they were free to go to town. Open season. Take out the cops, take out the local government, destroy the remaining infrastructure. Make sure none of it could be brought back online until the new world order was formed.
Of course the FBI and the NSA gathered rumors of the threat. One document in the trove was a detailed catalog of those reports, with a status update on how far up the chain each one had gotten. But the Decemvirate had been careful not to leave any traceable details that would make this rumor any more credible than all the false ones they’d put out. And they made sure they were three steps ahead of the rest of the government, spreading misinformation all along the way. With everything secret and nothing shared between agencies or made transparent to the American public, it wasn’t hard to sow confusion and delay. And they didn’t need their secrecy to last forever. They only needed to delay a leak as long as it took to arrive at zero-hour. As long as the secrets of 905T4 stayed in the dark, no one would ever be able to look back at they did.
It was a master stroke of planning and execution, several years in the making, and their effort had succeeded. Too well, in fact, too wildly. The Decemvirate had not anticipated such complete breakdown, or at least the difficulty of returning the nation to life after its swift and brutal demise. They viewed themselves as deft surgeons, putting the patient into cardiac arrest to be resuscitated at will. But things hadn’t worked out quite that smoothly.
Carson thought he understood why. The Decemvirate had overestimated the American peoples’ ability to weather crises and rebound, as they had in past eras like the Great Depression and the World Wars. They had underestimated the pervasive, decades-long erosion of morality, constitutionality, and the American sense of self which had practically guaranteed a deeper fracture than they had intended. Carson saw that most of their estimates had been far too conservative. The measures advocated to rapidly regain control had been pebbles thrown in the path of a tidal wave, and not enough of the Decemvirate’s long-standing power structure remained to be called upon.
The power grids had remained dark. The bloodshed had metastasized too quickly. Politically, they had moved quickly to put all the pieces in place, but there was no one to appreciate their efforts. They were ready to establish a new government according to their agenda, but the irksome citizens wouldn’t stop fighting in the streets of every city long enough to pay attention to the new political structure. They didn’t recognize patriotic genius when they saw it, wouldn’t understand that the new order was better than the old.
Things had gotten so out of hand that the whole plan had become farce, a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. But Carson had no sympathy for the shadowy overlords. You didn’t start a fire in a barn and hope it only burned the straw and not the building. This fire had spread until it was an inferno.
Finally the Correctionist movement had gotten on its feet and gained some power. Starting in the Midwest with where a population of desperate people had begun looking for an opportunity to join anyone who offered stability and power, they began to move outward. It was hailed regionally as the savior of the country, the grassroots movement that would offer hope and peace to the areas that accepted it. No one suspected it of being manipulated, steered, and monitored by the Decemvirate, because no one knew they existed. The Correctionists were supposedly bringing their own version of law and order to the country, but there was a tight hand on the leash the whole time.
There was more. The Correctionists would be used to pacify population centers and centers of industry and production piece by piece, area by area, allowing communication and resources only for those areas which demonstrated loyalty to the new regime. Cities were important. Rural areas were bypassed, partly because of fewer people, and partly because rural America was traditionally the most resistant to authoritarianism. The irony was that the Correctionist army was largely drawn from rural areas, duped Americans who thought they were working for peace when in fact they were pawns in a game that would turn on their kind all too soon.
After nearly five hours of searching and studying, Beth powered off her machine. Carson looked over and noticed that her body was shaking. She covered her eyes and quietly got up and left the room. Tyler was sitting in the corner in a gloomy funk, shaking his head and murmuring to himself.
Scala had an expression of cold fury written on her face, and it was mirrored exactly by the one on Dana’s hardened visage. Brunson and Khalil were standing with their arms folded, angry glares nearly melting the computers that had revealed the truth to them.
Mason was sitting quietly and sighing to himself. Then he got up and left the room without a word.
And Carson realized that he had a choice to make. This was the turning point in the whole ordeal; he had finally cracked the nut that was 905T4, understood what Coulter and his Decemvirate leaders had been so careful to conceal and obstruct. But now that he knew the truth, it wasn’t as easy as flipping a switch and reversing it all.
If he did nothing, or if he turned the evidence over to someone who had been compromised, like Tamare, it was likely that the Correctionists would achieve their goals. Whether the Decemvirate was steering it or not, American civilization would be restored at the edge of the sword. The bloodshed would cease and a semblance of order and normality would return as the infrastructure was gradually repaired and a new political system enforced.
There were powerful reasons to support that outcome: innocent people were dying every day, children starving and dying of preventable causes, and the entire nation was vulnerable to further attack from outside. If he used this knowledge to bring down the Decemvirate, to counter the Correctionist movement, those causes might be all frustrated at once. Was he willing to beat back the progress the Correctionists had made, oppressive as it was?
It wouldn’t be the same America. No matter how centralized the federal government had become in the last several decades, it would become even more centralized. Powerful, totalitarian, authoritarian. The ideology would be forced on them by a small group of people, who despite their best intentions would be committing the heinous act of forcing the American people to submit.
Goodbye, old, wild, free America. Hello, new, glistening, pre-packaged America where everyone could live their lives in allotted installments. Restoring America to its old state would take years, even decades, and much blood would have to be spilled. It might even be impossible. The closest America had come to this kind of existential crisis was the Civil War, only this time there wasn’t a functioning government that represented the people, and there was no Abraham Lincoln.
If America had enemies, this would be the time to take advantage of. If Carson delayed, or made the wrong choice, questions of American autonomy might become null and void under a foreign military regime.
But if he spread the truth, America’s confidence in government and authority would forever be shattered, irrecoverable for a thousand years. The violence, the hunger, the fear would all continue for the foreseeable future, and any stability and progress to be made would have to be accomplished by the people themselves—the very people that had failed to keep the nation from ruin during the early days of the crisis. Carson and his compatriots might labor for their entire lives to restore order and in the end achieve nothing. It would be – it already was – a modern Dark Age. No one would ever learn the truth about what had happened; America would continue to suffer and evolve through suffering into some future state of existence, whether better or worse no one could tell.
If he somehow mad
e the truth known to the American people, itself a dubious proposition, it would only serve to destabilize everything further, with the Correctionist movement imploding, and the chaos and blood would continue unabated.
He felt his identity as an American, as an employee of the now ludicrously-named Department of Homeland Security, and as a Deep Thaw agent, slipping away. He was just a man holding the truth in his hands. He had a choice to make.
Fate laid her hand on his shoulder, heavy and cold.
Chapter 11: Turn Inward
Carson lay on his belly in the sagebrush, scanning Cheyenne Mountain through a pair of binoculars. When he was done, he passed them to Dana, who lay next to him. She took her time, then passed them to Brunson, next in line on her right.
No one spoke. A chill wind moaned and rattled down from the western mountains and across the flats, carrying the scent of damp earth, snow, and sage. It was a sad, tail-end-of-winter wind, and the perfect accompaniment to the cold, sullenly gray afternoon. Carson shivered, despite his layers, and thanked his stars that, as far as winters went, this had been a fairly mild one. A harsher winter would have killed many and perhaps rendered their operation unfeasible.
After cracking the data drives that held the Decemvirates’ secrets, Mason had put out the call to a number of highly motivated militia units and armed citizens he had contact with, with instructions to prepare for a decisive strike against the Correctionists. Then they had set about gathering the intelligence they would need to mount an assault on Cheyenne Mountain.
It was the not only the regional nexus of Correctionist control, through General Tamare and a newly arrived Correctionist general named Maughan, but it housed the communications apparatus that would allow them to spread the truth throughout the country. There were no more news broadcasts or cable channels, and the populace would have little confidence in them if there were. But Cheyenne Mountain held communications links that could put direct messages in the other regions of the United States within minutes. And for this planned outburst of truth and righteous rebellion to outmaneuver the Correctionists, it had to be sudden, overwhelming, and total.
Assault on Cheyenne Mountain (Denver Burning Book 4) Page 8
