After America (48 page)

“This will mean war with the Slavs as well.”

Ozal showed him a pair of open palms.

“Yes, it will,” he said. “But once we have driven off the Americans together, the Slavs will be easy pickings for us. They may not even put up a fight. We shall see. But whatever shall happen, you have the promise of the emir that for your help in defeating the Americans that part of the city and all its plunder shall be ceded to you in equal measure. What say you? Do you still have the stomach for this fight?”

Yusuf Mohammed sat very still. He had known as he stole up from the river toward the camp of his emir that any information he could gather would go to his credit when it came time to plead for a second chance. Now, sitting here in this room surrounded by the ghosts of hundreds of Americans, in a city haunted by millions of others, he was struck by just how forgiving Allah could be.

He had thought himself borne along on a current carrying him to ignominy and doom, yet it was all part of God’s design. He had been meant to survive the American assault. He had been meant to wash up in the part of the city controlled by the Slavs who had refused to join in the holy campaign against the Americans. And he had been meant by God to walk a path that delivered him here into this room to cement an alliance with these men who were obviously vital to the emir’s plans.

All he needed to make this day perfect was a gun in his hand and directions back to the front line.

Kansas City, Missouri

President James Kipper felt a surge of pride at the sight of Kansas City Power and Light’s restored Number Five generator pumping sanitized white smoke into a clear blue sky. Standing in the parking lot of the Hawthorne plant, on the banks of the Missouri River northeast of the city’s still-deserted urban core, he could indulge himself in the guilty pleasure of forgetting for a moment about Mad Jack Blackstone and the horrors of New York, along with the frustrations of politics and the trouble he was in with his wife. For just a few moments, standing next to his oldest friend, Barney Tench, listening to the hum of the transmission lines and the excited burbling of his entourage, he could wallow in a giddy glee rarely experienced since the Wave.

Creation.

The simple joy of creation had been the engine of his life for as long as he could remember. His earliest memories were of building things. Not just wooden blocks and
LEGO
towers but giant, messy backyard earthworks and dams and pretend farms and shoebox factories and tree houses and secret dens. As a child he had always gone that one step further, driven by what he now recognized as an innate desire to reach out and shape the world. My poor mother, he thought fondly. Oh, how her garden beds had suffered.

“So, boss,” Tench said, gesturing at the massive Hawthorne Unit Five smokestack. “What do you think?”

“Impressive,” Kipper replied. “You know how much I love a big honkin’ power plant, Barn. What’s our status?”

Barney gestured at the drab tan structure of the main plant building with a jelly doughnut swiped earlier from the catering table. “With Unit Five fully manned and operational,” he said, “we’ll have close to four hundred megawatts of juice. Plenty for now.”

“Cool. More than enough,” Kipper agreed. “What about the gas turbine facility on the east side?”

Barney looked over his notes. “Ah … from what I understand, I think that’s meant for the summer months when everyone is, er …
was
running their AC. It is in pretty good shape and could provide backup power on demand. We’re still sorting it out, but the coal generator was easier since she’s so much like the ones we got back in Seattle.”

“Relatively new, isn’t it?” Kipper asked.

“Yeah. Umm, perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, boss, but this plant has a history of bad luck: a fire back in the nineties that knocked out the transmission lines and an explosion which destroyed the original Unit Number Five,” Barney said.

Kipper nodded. “That explains why everything is new, then. What about Units One through Four? Will you be bringing those back online?”

Tench shook his head. “Naw, there’s no need for them. Besides, they’d been idled for decades before the Wave. What I really need are more linemen to restore the grid.”

“I thought we had an on-site training program,” Kipper said.

Tench nodded. “We do. Hell, there’s a community college not more than a mile away with everything you need for a program. Classes were in session when the Wave hit, so we were literally able to pick up the program and restart it in place with new apprentice linemen. Thing is, those folks won’t be ready for at least a year. In the meantime, the work is waiting. Can we get any more warm bodies from Seattle City Light?”

“Doubt it,” Kipper said. “In fact, they’re screaming to get their people back as soon as possible. Got their own repair issues to deal with, and they’re shorthanded, too.”

Loud metallic squeals and screeches heralded the approach of a train backing into the power plant. Bumping down the tracks past the reinforced checkpoint, the cars were loaded with coal bound for the generating facility. Coal was still the most plentiful means of energy production within the United States, and early in his term Kipper had rammed a bill through Congress providing a fast track to citizenship for any suitably qualified migrant who would work the mines in Wyoming. Watching the three big
ATS
diesel locomotives slowly hauling the massive line of hoppers into the plant, he recalled the arm-twisting and distasteful outright pork barreling Jed had used to sideline the Greens’ bloc vote on that one. They didn’t oppose the immigration program per se, of course, but they wanted those immigrants to focus on restoring large swaths of the country to a prehuman state. Forget about power generation or anything resembling a twentieth-century standard of living.

Kipper shook his head. He loved the wilderness as much as any man. More than most, probably. Hell, the first thing he was going to do when he finally escaped from executive office was take himself off into the mountains for a week on his own. Barbara permitting, of course. But to hear the Greens tell of it, he was doing more damage just bringing this one plant back on line than all the firestorms of the post-Wave period.

He sighed. Couldn’t they see what a beautiful fucking thing this was? How much better it was going to make life for the people stuck out here in the boonies? And how KC itself was so important to resettling the interior and reaching out to the East? But of course thinking about the East only led to thinking about New York, and for now Kip was determined not to harsh his own mellow, borrowing a phrase his daughter had brought home from school the other day.
Seattle and its fucking hippies
, he thought.

As Barney burbled on about the logistics of this small corner of his empire—”The maintenance facility down on Front Street is fairly well stocked, and the city’s P&L did a pretty good job of archiving their work. Only real problem’s been figuring out the quirks of Unit Five. Once we get that hashed out, we can probably move on to restore Iatan in Weston, Missouri”—Kipper gently took him by the elbow and steered his reconstruction tsar back toward the catering table. The presidential entourage, about fifty people in all, including his Secret Service detail, all turned and moved with him like a flock of birds in slow motion.

For a change, the heavier armored fighting vehicles of the Secret Service response teams were absent and his own detail was dressed in jeans and denim shirts. Only their sunglasses and earpieces marked them out as bodyguards. Besides the black Suburbans and half a dozen Reconstruction Department pickups, the car park was full of trucks and support vehicles sporting the logo of Cesky Enterprises, one of the rising stars of the post-Wave economy. Pakistani and Filipino migrants worked the catering line, doling out something that was supposed to be Kansas City barbecue among other local treats. Kipper took one discreet whiff of the beef ribs and decided that though they might have been made in the city this morning, it definitely wasn’t KC barbecue as he understood it. It smelled like curry. The dark-skinned, bright-eyed young woman wielding the tongs flashed a mouthful of blindingly white teeth at him.

“The barbecue has some extra spice today, Mister President.”

“I’m sure it does, ma’am,” Kipper said. “But I haven’t even had my breakfast doughnut yet. Do you know if Mister Tench has left any for the rest of us?”

She pointed toward the far end of the trestle table, where Kipper could see Jed guarding a precious stash of leftover crullers, muffins, and glazed twists. His chief of staff fixed the recon boss with a forbidding glare.

“I think my wife’s been talking to him,” Barney stage-whispered to the young serving girl.

“She needed to,” said the president, backhanding Tench in the gut. “So how many hours of power a day does the city get?”

Tench took a guilty bite of his glazed doughnut and sucked down a mouthful of rare and precious coffee before answering. The doughnuts, Kip had discovered, came courtesy of a local franchise owner for LaMar’s who had been out of the country when the Wave hit. The coffee, he had no idea, but given how difficult it was to get, he’d resolved to limit himself to just one cup so that the plant workers might enjoy the leftovers. Barney wiped a small dollop of jam from his mouth before continuing.

“Right now we get close to eighteen hours a day. More if the trains are consistent. Sometimes that’s not the case, though, because you’re dealing with train crews from India who are used to doing things their own way. They’re efficient and hardworking, but they’re, well …”

“They just have their own way,” Kipper finished for Barney. “I know. You take the help you can get. And India’s been a godsend for us.”

“True enough,” Tench said. “There is one problem, though, boss. A big one.”

Kipper waited as his good mood threatened to curdle and sour.

“No one’s been paid for three weeks. Some folks, I just found out, got over four months of back pay on the books. Granted, many of them are refugees who are happy to have three hots and a cot, but it’s not sustainable,” Tench said.

Kipper sighed. Money. You had to spend money in order to make money. And to spend it, you had to have it or borrow it. He was the first to admit that finances were not his strong suit, but he didn’t need a Nobel Prize in economics to understand that the implosion of the world economy, the total collapse of the banking and financial markets, had real-world effects down on the ground, in this very parking lot.

The United States was broke. Living off the stored capital represented by its empty cities and silent infrastructure, it could not pay its debts, had refused to, indeed, for the last three years, in complete contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s advice to the Founding Fathers. An act of treachery according to some of its creditors that could even have led to armed conflict in one case, had China not fallen into civil war. His fine temper of the morning spoiled, Kipper tried to recapture some of the optimism by turning back to the plant and basking in the view again. He tried to convince himself they would get out of this with the same hard work and native ingenuity that the men and women who were reclaiming this city had shown. This wasn’t the first time America had been laid low. The nation had been born virtually bankrupt, yet it had managed to climb to the top of the heap in less than two centuries. If they played their hand right, they could recover from this mess as well.

They had to.

“Barney.” Kipper put his hand on his friend’s meaty shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Your people will get paid. You have my word on it.”

But he had no idea how.

An hour later the convoy of Secret Service black Chevy Suburbans made its way across the Chouteau Bridge over the Missouri River. A dredge was visible to Kipper’s left, docked alongside Harrah’s Casino. Construction equipment and workers toiled to restore the Muddy Mo’s traffic channel to navigable status. Trains rumbled along the rail line on the north side of the casino complex. Laden with salvage, food, and cattle, they were bound for a central processing point in the river bottoms on the eastern side of North Kansas City, which had ample warehouse and light manufacturing space to accommodate them. A makeshift train station for passenger traffic had been established at the casino to augment the main facility at Union Station on the other side of the Missouri River. New workers, most of them participants in the Federal Homestead and Resettlement Program, had brought their families in search of a fresh start.

To Kipper’s right, they passed a complex of buildings and a BP gas station surrounded by an earthen berm topped with sandbags. A couple of army Humvees rolled out and headed south toward the Kansas City Southern rail yard.

“Local troops, militia,” Culver said, taking note of the small fort.

“None of us are local anymore,” Kipper said. “What are they doing here?”

“Securing the railroad, I suspect,” Culver replied. “They patrol as far as Fort Leavenworth. From there an army detachment takes over.”

Kipper watched the storm clouds building on the horizon, pleased with the progress.

“We’re getting there, Jed,” he said.

“Are we?” Culver asked. The chief of staff had his old briefcase open and was poring over piles of documents. “If we pay Cesky’s men at Hawthorne, then other workers elsewhere will demand the same. Budget’s a zero-sum game at the moment, Mister President. We can’t borrow money; there is no one who will lend us anything near the amount we need. We can’t just print it. Economy’s like fucking ground zero, if you’ll excuse my French.”

“I promised them they’d get paid,” Kipper said. “We have to make it happen. Not just here. Everywhere. That bastard down in Fort Hood doesn’t seem to have any trouble raising money and spending it. He’s even using our currency, the sorry son of a bitch. And he’s getting loans! Goddamn Saudis advanced him that big one just last week.”

Jed looked up from his paperwork.

“He’s selling off assets to fund consumption, Mister President. Remember how we talked about him overreaching? This is just an example of it.”