Digital Winter (11 page)

LOS ANGELES
POPULATION 4 MILLION

Harold Dack was unlike his peers. He loved driving a school bus. The noisy children made him feel young again. Sure, they could be nuisances, but those nuisances would one day run this world. The burdens of work and family would settle on them soon enough. Let them make noise as long as they didn't fight.

The elementary students had been stuck in school for hours while teachers waited for the power to come on. Finally, school had been canceled and the bus summoned early. Those who had adults waiting for them were released, and those who didn't were allowed to stay at the school until parents or guardians could retrieve them. That meant Harold's bus was only half full.

Traffic on the side streets was still light, but the major roads were still slow—a slight improvement over the gridlock of an hour ago. Fortunately, Harold's route avoided those areas and focused on larger streets through residential areas. Still, he had a few intersections to get through. With traffic lights working again, the jam at those junctures had thinned.

He had just missed making it through one intersection when he had to stop for a red light.

Children clamored. Harold looked in his review mirror. Two girls sat in the back, singing something they heard on the radio. Three children looked at cell phones, texting the world at an unbelievable pace. Four children listened to iPods. It made Harold shake his head. The digital world had created digital kids.

He looked up at the traffic light just in time to see it turn green. He pressed the accelerator and moved into the intersection.

Halfway through he noticed the green light blink out. Then he heard the rumble. The squeal of tires. The scream of a young girl.

The grill of a large panel delivery truck entered the intersection. Harold caught a glimpse of the driver looking at an electronic device in his hand.

It was Harold's final image.

CHICAGO
POPULATION 2.8 MILLION

Chi-Town was known for many things: Chicago dogs, the Cubs, and interesting politics. Little known was the city's other claim to fame: It sported more movable bridges than any other city in the country. Tom Silcox was a native, born and reared in Chicago proper, as had been his parents and grandparents and several more generations of ancestors. His family tree included relatives who had seen the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroy their homes and businesses.

He didn't know if it was proper, but he felt proud about that. Unlike his distant relatives who made their living selling dry goods, Tom was no businessman. He never developed a taste for it, which was the reason he had spent the past twenty-two years in the Chicago Department of Transportation. He started as a laborer and became a mechanic, working on the city's forty-plus mechanical bridges. It was another point of pride for him. Not many men could claim to work on drawbridges.

Chicago's extensive river system required a creative approach to bridge building. In the warmer months, hundreds of boats moved along the 156-mile river system. Larger boats required more clearance than fixed bridges could provide. Since the 1800s, Chicago bridges had been rising and lowering or pivoting to allow watercraft safe passage.

During his years of service, Tom's interest in the city's bridge system had grown. He even entertained thoughts of writing a book once he retired. “There is a lot of interesting stuff about them bridges,” he said to anyone who would listen. Over the years, fewer people had shown interest. The world had become enamored with digital phones and portable computers. People shuffled through life with earbuds crammed into their heads or phones pressed to their ears. They had no interest in such things as movable bridges.

Silcox pulled his car to the first of five drawbridges that spanned the Calumet River. Altogether they opened 30,000 times a year, yet he still loved watching their graceful rise and fall. Precision counterbalances made it all possible.

Most of the bridges along the Calumet were not manned full-time. Employees drove from bridge to bridge, opening them as needed. Silcox entered the operations building, shaking off the cold from his short walk from his vehicle.

A large yacht with a tall mast motored slowly down the river. It was art on water. Silcox had learned to admire boats from a distance. Even if he had saved every penny he earned since leaving high school, he wouldn't have been able to buy such a craft. But he was good with that.

On the panel before him was a large red button. He pressed it and heard the warning horn blaring outside. Another button lowered the traffic barricades with their flashing red lights. Silcox fixed his eyes on the vehicles already on the bridge and waited for the last to clear the span. Then he activated the motors that added the power to move the large counterweight down. The counterweight did almost all the work—the motors just controlled the rise and fall.

Each half of the span began its slow rise. The dance had begun. He turned his attention back to the yacht. The skipper must be in a hurry. Silcox was seeing more wake behind the vessel. Several smaller boats motored past it, not needing to wait for the bridge to rise.

Suddenly, the sound of the railroad-like clang at the barricades fell silent. The lights in the control room that had been driving back the gloom of the January sky went dark.

Silcox snapped his head back around. The bridge was closing again. He snapped up a pair of binoculars and trained them on the approaching craft. He focused on the boat's bridge. No one was manning the helm. A man dressed in white had his back turned to the bow and was listening to another as he motioned energetically with one hand and held a drink in the other. The man in white, whom Silcox assumed was the hired captain, seemed uncomfortable. The other man was a “toucher,” frequently touching the skipper's arm to keep his attention.

Another glance at the self-closing bridge sent Silcox's stomach to the basement. Without a thought, he slammed his hand on the emergency siren.

Nothing.

He sprinted from the enclosure, shouting as loud as his fifty-six-year-old lungs would allow.

Too late. The towering mast approached its doom.

Silcox screamed again, this time catching the crewman's attention. The man followed Silcox's outstretched arm. A moment later, Silcox heard the inboard engines throttle down, go silent, and then roar as the captain reversed the propellers.

The mast hit the bottom beams of the bridge, and the bow of the yacht pitched up. The man with the drink fell backward and down the companionway to the lower deck.

The top of the carbon mast shattered, falling aft of the bridge and onto the deck. Silcox sprinted back to the control and picked up the phone—at least that was working—and made two calls, one to 911 (it was busy) and the other to his supervisor.

On the yacht, the captain had regained control and held a microphone to his mouth. On the aft deck, passengers surrounded the fallen talker.

No one touched him. He didn't move. His drink glass rolled along the deck.

Monica McKie had just begun to unwind. The morning had been filled with tension, something she thought she would have grown used to by now. She hadn't. Over the past two years she had carefully cultivated a public image befitting a woman in charge of Homeland Security. Always calm, visibly determined, unflappable, and focused. Her husband once quipped, “Monica talks at a 150 words a minute with gusts to 200.” It always got a laugh. These days she had to think before speaking, choosing her words more carefully because the wrong choice could explode in her face.

She had followed the advice of consultants brought in to make her more appealing to the media and the public. She had held elected office at the congressional level and served as Idaho's governor for two terms before being appointed by President Barlow to head the DHS. She had the legal training for the work and had helped lower crime in her state by a healthy 12 percent.

Being the director of Homeland Security involved more work than all her previous public offices combined. And the fragmentation—oh, the fragmentation. So many things to watch, so many groups to track, so many congressional leaders and senators to appease. Add to that the number of governors who wanted her ear and money to secure their borders. To look at her, McKie was a professional woman with short, graying hair, clear blue eyes, and a thin frame. She could look like a grandmother, which she was, or a high-powered exec, which she also was.

When she returned to her office on Nebraska Avenue, she spent a few moments wallowing in the mixed waters of relief and embarrassment. No one would say she overreacted. After all, USCYBERCOM kicked their people into high gear. The problem warranted it. She was glad it was over. The thought of massive power outages was the stuff of her nightmares.

On her desk were dispatches from field personnel. DHS had offices all over the United States and oversaw the work of the US Coast Guard, FEMA, TSA, customs, and many others. The many heads of Hydra, each with its own appetite.

When she accepted the job, she knew it would be difficult and unwieldy. Two years later she still loved it. Most of the time. At the moment, she wished she were spending her days being Nanna to three grandkids—something that would hold her interest for a week. She loved her family, but she was wired to lead. Most likely she would be buried with her desk.

She rose and moved from her office to the large conference room to meet with department heads. She hoped to get a complete picture of all that happened.

She was three steps down the hall when the lights died. So did McKie's patience.

E
ight minutes. Jeremy Matisse couldn't wrap his brain around the thought. He read the hastily written report. He had sat in on the videoconference meeting with Secretary Monica McKie at Homeland Security and another that afternoon with the president and his advisors. Everyone wanted answers. No one had any. Not the NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security; not the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and not the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a congressionally directed company that regulates the 500 power companies in the US. The Department of Energy was clueless as well. USCYBERCOM had no answers, and it was their job to know such things. Between them and DHS, cyber attacks should never reach this extreme, yet Jeremy and his boss sat in light provided by generators.

General Holt rubbed his face. “I should have retired last year when I had the chance.”

Jeremy shrugged. “I guess you could still play golf during the daylight hours.”

“You're not trying to be cute, are you, Colonel?”

“I've never been very good at cute, sir. I assume I've failed at it again.”

“Eight minutes, Jeremy. How does the North American continent go dark in eight minutes? It's not possible. For years we've run scenarios, Homeland's cyber unit has done the same, and so have the various associations of power producers. Sure, we could create scenarios that led to massive blackouts, but not the whole country. Not that fast. Not all at once.”

The same frustration ate at Jeremy. Outages occurred all the time, leaving an average of 500,000 Americans without power but only for a short time. And such outages were regional—a city here, a part of a county there. A nationwide outage was thought impossible. Jeremy had said so himself many times.

He hated to be wrong. Especially this wrong.

Jeremy stood at the back of a large room manned by scores of uniformed workers—Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines. Each cyber warrior's attention was fixed on computer monitors or on the huge operations monitor on the far wall. The room was dark and smelled of warm electronics.