by John Barnes
She looked around the room, and said, “This is the first official meeting of the governors of the Reconstruction Research Center. Both the Temporary National Government in Athens and the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia want me to remind you that we are funded and supported by both governments. The official minutes will show that we sat down, talked about our jobs, had lunch, and adjourned. Please read the official minutes Sherry gives you, because we all want to tell a consistent story.
“Unofficially, over here in reality-land, kids, this is the story.” She looked around the room and smiled. “We’re going to put our country back together. We’re going to put civilization back on its upward track, in technology of course, but also in decency, justice, and living together in peace and freedom—and in whatever it is we need to understand about the Daybreak event to ensure nothing of the kind happens again.
“Bambi Castro, Larry Mensche, Quattro Larsen—you’re my senior field agents. I will say go find this out, go do this, and you will. And I know it’ll get done. We’ll be recruiting what amounts to a small army of people to work for you; think about what kind of people you want, what they have to be able to do, and what you want them to know, because to the limits of my resources, they will be recruited and trained exactly as you say.
“Leslie, James—you’re my information people.”
“Librarians,” James said. “To be a librarian for this operation is to be at the heart of it, and I’m proud to have the title.”
Leslie added, “I promise I won’t start dressing frumpy if it’ll make you feel better.”
Heather nodded. “You’ll also have all the resources and people I can find for you; your job is twofold. One, preserve and correlate everything the field agents, scientists, and whoever else learn about our strange new world; two, find out what the world needs to know and make it available. Neither job will be easy—”
“But we will love both of those jobs,” Leslie said.
“I’ll hold you to that.” Heather nodded to Chris Manckiewicz. “You are not the first, nor will you be the last, supposedly independent news source to be subverted. I will try to use only truthful propaganda and to muscle the Pueblo Post-Times around only as much as necessary and only for good ends. We can be sure my success will be imperfect; your most important job may be to forgive me.
“That brings us to Dr. Arnold Yang, officially our director of research, nominally the supervisor of Mota Eliptica, and actually our specialist in Daybreak itself—what it was, or whether it still exists in some form, how to defeat it, how to build the counter-Daybreak if we need it. And he’ll be assisted by Izzy Underhill, here.” Keep reminding myself not to call her Roth. “Izzy’s pretty quiet, but Arnie assures me that most of the information we have about Daybreak traces directly to her.”
“So that’s what we’re really doing. Any questions?”
“Do you think we’ll undo Daybreak in our lifetime?” Larry asked.
“Undo it? If you mean, it will be like it never happened—never. If you mean, get back to the same technical level, I don’t know, but I know we’d better start.”
Arnie asked, “You don’t really believe that Graham and Cam will keep their word perfectly, do you? I know we’ll have people out in the field to watch them, but for right now, don’t you think it’s pretty likely that both of them are cheating just a little, here and there, on an a-little-won’t-hurt or technically-this-is-in-bounds b asis?”
“I’m sure that’s happening,” she said. “Furthermore, both of them will be having trouble getting some of the underlings to comply. And we’ll be nagging them all the time about it. And the next people in their positions will almost certainly not have the sort of scruples and be as sentimental as they are.” For example Allie would’ve stared Chris down with all the sympathetic expression of a rattlesnake, and gone right ahead. And it’s not just her, there’s fifty more of her at Olympia and fifty more at Athens, any time we want to see them. “But for right now, luckily, this country really doesn’t want a civil war, and Graham and Cam don’t have the heart to push them into it. Give most of our people a world where they can comfortably make their own way, and not think too much about abstractions, and a lot of people will find a way to be happy. That is what we have to count on.
“No, we haven’t removed the prospect of war, and we haven’t made real peace yet. But we’ve given people at least a summer away from it, and then it won’t be fit fighting weather, and after that, well, the horse may talk. So I’m not going to despair because we haven’t solved all the problems or made Right the Eternal Victor. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve just won a big victory for a lot of things I believe in, that I think most of our people believe in: good home cooking, comfy clean houses, honest work you get paid for, making things easier for the kids than they were for us, letting your neighbor go to the devil in his own way, and some time on the back porch to read the paper and drink beer and argue with the neighbors.”
Izzy cleared her throat. “You know, that’s kind of a Daybreak image.”
She shrugged. “It’s kind of a Daybreak world. I don’t like it, but they won, and we have to admit it. We’re stuck living the Daybreak program for some decades or centuries; we might as well live it fat, prosperous, peaceful, and content.” She stood, enjoying once again the subtle shift that her balance had taken. “And speaking of fat and content, I’m about to go enjoy eating for two. Anybody want to come along and help celebrate peace? You too, Izzy, my treat till we regularize paying you.”
The young woman was still quite shy, but she nodded and seemed pleased to be included, especially once she knew that Bambi and Arnie would be coming along. The four of them strolled out into the pleasant Rocky Mountain spring, mostly just enjoying a day with less fear than they had had in a long time.
Heather heard the running feet behind her and the habits of a lifetime kicked in; she turned and crouched, ready to fight. The two young people running after them froze.
It was a couple in their early- to mid-twenties, a man with a mountain-man beard and long brownish hair, and a young woman with longish red hair, a pleasant, chunky Earth-mother figure, and large brown eyes. Each wore trousers and a belted jacket that was probably copied from a karate gi, with a thin underjacket and a heavy outer one—the coarse fabric was probably home-woven—and low moccasins. Scanning automatically for identifiers in case she ever needed them, Heather noted that the young man was deeply tanned—he must work outside—and the woman’s left hand hung a little funny, as if she were wearing her wrist wrong.
“I’m sorry we startled you,” the young man said. “Back at your building they sent us running after you. My name’s Jason, and this is Beth, and back at the office we were told to say we had a Code Fourteen Matter for you—”
Code Fourteen. Heather almost whooped; two heavily involved former Daybreakers for Ysabel and Arnie to study. Two more chances to see to the bottom of this.
“We were just going to lunch,” Heather said, “and it’s a special enough occasion that I feel like taking people to lunch, so why don’t you come along. Have you seen the newspaper today?”
“Peace,” Jason said. “Yeah. That’s so great.”
“Well,” Heather said, “Dr. Yang, here, will be one of the main people you will be talking with, along with Ms. Underhill.”
Ysabel smiled nicely. “Call me Izzy. Everyone does, or they will if I tell them.”
Since “Code Fourteen Matters” could not be talked about in public, instead the group spent some time getting to know Jason and Beth, who, it turned out, had been living a carefully anonymous life in Antonito, until they had spotted the ad in the Weekly Wrapper. They seemed likeable enough, and after lunch, Arnie and Ysabel took them off for their first extended interview.
“Well, that’s more progress,” Heather said. “Surprising how much of that there’s been lately. I almost feel like I’ll be able to take my maternity leave with an easy conscience.”
“Shh,�
�� Bambi said. “Murphy hears us.”
“Oof. And so apparently does the kid who just kicked me. Hey, little person, don’t be too eager to get out here; we’re not going to be ready for you.”
As they settled into the room where they’d be staying while Arnie and Izzy debriefed them, Beth observed, “I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing, and now I feel sure we are.”
“Ha. You’re just as tired as I am of manual labor.”
“Well, yeah, a bed and meals just to be hypnotized, and talk and talk and talk—that’s a pretty good deal,” she admitted. “There’s hot showers here you don’t gotta chop no wood for, baby. How freakin’ cool is that?”
“I may never come out until I’m one big wrinkle.”
“Let’s take our showers together, then, so we share all there is. I’ll wash your back if you’ll wash mine.”
Later, after they had made love and cuddled up in the strange bed, Beth said, “Even with peace, and being that we found our way here, and everything, I’m still kinda scared.”
“About what?”
“Just that it’s different.” She turned to press against him more firmly, and said, “But I’ll get used to it, baby, I’ll get so brave. Besides, it’s kind of cool that the big leader-lady here, what’s her name, that big lady with the auburn crew cut—”
“Heather.”
“Yeah, Heather, it’s cool that she’s totally pregnant. Means she thinks there’s hope, don’t you think?”
“Babe, of course there’s hope. This is America.”
AFTERWORD
Presidential Directive 51 is real, but despite what you may read on the web, it is probably not anything to fear. The unclassified part of Directive 51, like its predecessors, specifies what we will do in case of “decapitation”—sudden destruction of the top echelons of the Federal government.
President Bush signed it into existence in 2007, replacing the Clinton Administration’s Directive 67 (1998), which replaced George H. W. Bush’s Directive 69 (1992) and Directive 37 (1990). The earliest continuity-of-government directive whose existence is public seems to be Reagan’s Directive 55 (1982). It is believed that the first continuity-of-government policy may have been issued as a classified Executive Order in 1947 or 1948 by President Truman.
To his credit, George W. Bush was the first president to make any substantial part of a continuity-of-government directive public. All continuity-of-government directives prior to Directive 51 remain entirely classified. Much—we citizens don’t know how much—of Directive 51 itself is classified, on grounds that an enemy who knew our national survival plans prior to an attack would be in a position to do much more harm.
By its nature, continuity-of-government planning violates the separation of powers, which, you probably learned in high school, is a cornerstone of Constitutional government. The Constitution gives Congress the power to determine the succession to the presidency, and puts the President or his subordinates in charge of carrying out the will of Congress.
But Congress cannot know which of the president’s officers would survive a decapitation attack, what resources would be available, or what the situation might be. Therefore Directive 51, like every succession directive or executive order before it, provides that in case of an unprecedented disaster, a specific Federal official will become a temporary dictator, with nearly unlimited power and a mission to restore Constitutional government as quickly as possible. The person on whom this terrible responsibility might fall is to be called the National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator, or NCCC. We do not have an NCCC as I write this; the office exists only if the worst has already happened, a practical precaution so that the NCCC cannot take power arbitrarily.
Directive 51 designates the person in charge of assuming power as NCCC after a disaster; at the moment I write this, it is to be the Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In normal times, this is the person who ensures that DHS personnel are assigned to appropriate duties and coordinates things like high-level meetings and major long-term projects. The reason for designating the DHS Chief of Staff as the NCCC-in-waiting is that the job entails:1. a very high security clearance 2. extensive knowledge of security/military/police/intelligence operations in progress, and 3. no direct responsibilities during an attack.
Or in short, this is the person who knows the most while having the least to do; the best-informed person we can afford to send out of Washington just before the nuke goes off or the gas is released. In all probability, the NCCC-in-waiting will be the holder of some different office by the time you read this—presidents change and there are innumerable reasons for designating one office or person rather than another—but the general principle of the best-prepared least-essential person has been followed for at least a quarter century.
Like any imaginable continuity-of-government policy, Directive 51 gives the NCCC the power to decide and do whatever is necessary without check or balance. Our only protection against the obvious potential for coup, corruption, suppression of all our liberties, deliberate aggressive war, concealment of high crimes, and other abuse up to and including the abolition of the Republic is the honor of the individual designated as the NCCC, the good faith of the surviving Federal officers, and the commitment of the American people to Constitutional government.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would have been much less fun to write without occasionally being able to run ideas past my small coterie of armchair strategists: John E. Johnston III, Trent Telenko, Tom Holsinger, John Ringo, Mike Robel, Kevin O’Donnell Jr., and Jack Greene. I would particularly like to thank Rick Willett for an extraordinarily thorough and accurate rescue of the text, and Michelle Kasper for wonderful patience in allowing him the time and space in which to do it. I also received much help from some other people who prefer, for a variety of good reasons that I must respect, not to be acknowledged by name.
About the Author
John Barnes is the author of The Return with Buzz Aldrin.
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Barnes, John, 1957-
eISBN : 978-1-101-18629-9
1. United States—Officials and employees—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Fiction. 3. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 4. Regression (Civilization)—Fiction. 5. Political fiction. I. Title.
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