Foreign Enemies and Traitors (50 page)

“No, never.”

“You ever read about chaos theory?”

“Sure, a little.”

“It’s related to that.  Risk, randomness, fractal geometry…it’s sort of where mathematics meets philosophy.  Anyway, a black swan event is something nobody thinks is possible, like a black swan in nature.  All swans are white, right?  That was a certified known scientific fact forever—until they found black swans in Australia.  You can’t even imagine a real black swan, until it hits you between the eyes.  Planes taking down buildings on 9-11, that was a black swan.  The constitutional convention coming out of nowhere—that was a black swan.  The global financial collapse, that was one too.  After they happen, everybody has an explanation, but never before.  Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but foresight is blind.  The twin earthquakes sure as hell were black swans.  All the experts said that a big Midwest earthquake should happen only about every five hundred years.  They said that like it meant we had another three hundred years to go, counting from the last big New Madrid quakes.  Like earthquakes follow human schedules.  So much for experts! 

“Hell,” said Doug, warming to his subject, “we got attacked by a whole damn
flock
of black swans, and the experts didn’t see a single
one
of them coming.  Nobody believed any of this could happen.  But it did!  When it comes to predicting these off-the-bell-curve events, the experts were all wrong, wrong, wrong.  Speaking of bell curves, some people call these black swan things ‘fat tails.’  That means a big fat bulge out on the skinny edge of the bell curve, where things should be astronomically rare.  Fat tail events happen all the time out in the real world, but the experts can never see them before they hit, because they don’t fit their probability models.”

“Like the ‘hundred-year floods’ that happen twenty years apart,” said Carson.

“Exactly.  I read
The
Black Swan
back at the University of Maryland for a statistics course I was taking.  I’d love to read it again someday.  When I read it back in college, it seemed kind of far out.  Not anymore.  I’m a big believer in black swans now.  What you can’t see
can
kill you.  What you can’t even
imagine
can kill you—or wreck your country.  You think that just because your country has been chugging along pretty well for two hundred years, it’ll keep on going forever, nice and easy.  Like some kind of American birthright, or natural law.  But black swans are out there—even if you can’t see them, or predict them.  And they can change
everything
.”

“Doug, you have got to write a book about this.”

“Maybe I will.  But who’s going to read it?”

“I would.”

“Thanks.  I’ll start tonight.  Or today, or whatever time it is.”

Carson checked his watch.  “It’s half past noon.”

“It never changes in here.  It’s easy to get disoriented and lose track of time.”

“You were telling me how you dropped out of college and got drafted.  So, how did you wind up in Tennessee with Boone Vikersun?”  Phil Carson understood that this might be a sensitive topic if the young man was still supposed to be serving on active duty in the Army.

                                                       
16

His weak coffee long since finished,
Doug reached under the table
for a plastic water bottle and took a drink.  “Well, I was stationed in Missouri at Fort Leonard Wood when the first earthquake hit.  It was December 15, at ten o’clock in the morning.  Saturday.  I was outside the barracks, throwing a football around with some buddies.  It lasted for almost five solid minutes.  The first really big shaker, I mean.  There were aftershocks that went on for days, and you never knew if they were the start of another big one.  We were two hundred miles from the epicenter, and it was still almost strong enough to knock you off your feet.  You couldn’t stand up, you had to sit down.  I was outside, and you could see land waves, like rollers on the ocean.  Not that high, but you could actually see them, see the land rolling.  It was pretty amazing.  When you can’t trust the old terra firma under your feet, what can you trust?  Anyway, most of the troops at Leonard Wood were put on buses and sent to St.Louis.  St. Louis didn’t have too much direct earthquake damage, but the power was out and the gas and water were down.  A lot of fires started, and they just kept getting bigger.  And as soon as the power and lights went out, you might say that the civil order fell apart pretty fast.”

                Carson said, “When I was down in Panama, I saw some video of the damage.  It hit between St. Louis and Memphis, right?”

                “Closer to Memphis.  It’s two hundred fifty miles from St. Louis to Memphis, and the quake’s epicenter was fifty miles north of Memphis.  Just below Missouri’s ‘boot heel,’ but across the river in Tennessee.”

                “Is that near New Madrid?  The news I heard said it was almost as bad as the big New Madrid quake, back in the early 1800s.”

                “It was in 1812.  New Madrid is in Missouri, just above the boot heel.  But it doesn’t matter exactly where the center was.  It was almost an eight on the Richter scale for about a hundred miles around the epicenter.  Midwest earthquakes are a lot worse than California ones.  I mean, they’re wider; they cover a lot more territory with the full power.  We sure felt it at Fort Leonard Wood, and we were two hundred miles away.  Like I said, most of our available troops went to St. Louis, to try to restore civil order.  My battalion was held back because we had the assault bridges.  We were staging up for bigger and better things. 

“While we were waiting around, we were watching television every chance we got.  Cable news.  Some of the base was on generator power, so we could watch satellite TV.  There was rioting and looting in St. Louis and Nashville, but the video coming out of Memphis was the worst.  Video shot from helicopters.  It was like the end of the world down there.  It seemed like half of that city was unreinforced masonry—brick—and most of it went down.  Even regular wood-frame houses were shaken to pieces.  All kinds of natural gas lines go through there; it’s like a big energy corridor from the Gulf to the Northeast.  Well, at least it
was
.  The gas pipelines broke in a million places, and a lot of Memphis burned to the ground.  Then it was the chemical plants.  They had all kinds of chemical plants and fuel farms along the Mississippi, and the ones that didn’t burn spilled.  It was a mess!  And smack in the middle of all of that, a million people.  No electricity, no drinking water, no gas stations or supermarkets open, roads blocked, bridges down…you couldn’t imagine such a place.  And that’s where we were going.”

“It sounds like Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana,” Carson said.

“Oh, it was much worse.  New Orleans wasn’t on fire after Katrina.  And New Orleans had a big rescue effort going in after just a few days.  FEMA was ready and waiting to go into New Orleans, because you can see hurricanes coming a week out.  Earthquakes catch you totally off guard.  The worst earthquake damage went for more than a hundred miles around the epicenter, and it just
nailed
Memphis.  There was damage everywhere, from Little Rock to Nashville to St. Louis.  Memphis was just the worst-hit major city, so it got the most media attention. 

“My unit spent until Christmas at Fort Leonard Wood.  We were watching television news reports all the time we weren’t on duty.  Most of the film was shot from helicopters.  It was too dangerous to land in Memphis.  Any helicopters that landed were swarmed with people trying to get out.  So many people would grab on that they couldn’t lift off the ground.  And when they did airlift people out, where could they put them?  You can’t just drop them off in a field—that just moves the problem from A to B.  They dropped pallets of food and water bottles, just hovered and threw them down, but that caused riots.  Every time they dropped pallets of food or water in Memphis, it was like
Mad Max
—survival of the fittest.  The law of the jungle.  Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.  Women and children last.  They did hundreds of airdrops, but it was just a drop in the bucket, and the meanest thugs got it all anyway.  No way could we land and set up distribution centers, not right after the first quake.  We had to wait to go in with a big enough force, that’s what my battalion was gearing up for.  It was just dog-eat-dog on the ground in Memphis.  And it was freezing cold, remember.  A lot of the city burned for days, and some chemical dumps burned for weeks, so the air was horrible.”

“And no food, and no drinking water,” said Carson.  “I can’t imagine what it must have been like in there.  It must have been hell in Memphis.”

“Apocalyptic, that’s the word.  When you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got a lot worse.  I was in the headquarters company, so I had a little better idea about what was going on.  Some of my friends were in communications; they let me know what was really happening.  The whole earthquake rescue operation was totally botched.  FEMA was just overwhelmed, and they did almost everything wrong.  It didn’t help that so many highway bridges were down.  You just couldn’t get relief convoys in.  People coming out of Memphis had to walk, because their cars were out of gas or they were stuck in massive gridlocks.  Too many roads were cracked, and too many bridges were down.  Anyway, not very many people got out of Memphis in cars, not after the first big quake.  It’s not that every single bridge collapsed, they didn’t.  But enough did that it turned the evacuation into a permanent gridlock.  Thousands of people got out by walking…but they weren’t exactly greeted with open arms out in the country.  A lot of the black refugees were shot on sight.  At least I think they were black.  Everybody looks black after they’re lying on the ground dead for a few days.  That was what we saw on television, back at Fort Leonard Wood.  The TV networks all had their news anchors up in helicopters, filming it.  Dead black people on the ground, everywhere.

“Well, we finally got our orders to move out the day after Christmas.  We went with our equipment on trucks, and worked our way down into Arkansas in a two-hundred-vehicle convoy.  So many highway overpasses were down that we had to keep making detours, which was a real problem because every time we slowed down, we’d get swarmed with refugees.  And that was in Arkansas, which wasn’t half as bad as Tennessee.  We crossed the Mississippi north of Memphis, on barges.  Tugboats pulled us across, going back and forth like an amphibious landing.  Some of the chemical plants were still burning, two weeks after the quake.  The air was so bad it burned your eyes and made your lungs ache.  It was like D-Day meets
Apocalypse Now
.”

“Is it true that all the bridges above Vicksburg are still down?”

“Down, or unusable.  Well, there’s a new cable-stay bridge at Cape Girardeau that came through the quakes, but that was the only one.”

“So, what was the problem?  Why didn’t you cross there?”

“The problem is the river doesn’t go under it anymore.  There’s just a lake there now.  The river cut a new channel, a few miles west of the bridge.  The quakes made a lot of new channels.  The Ohio and Tennessee rivers too.  Paducah was wiped flat when the Kentucky Dam failed.  That sent all of the water in Kentucky Lake down into the Ohio like a tidal wave, straight through Paducah.”

“Kentucky Lake is huge,” Carson noted.  “It goes practically all the way across Tennessee.”

“It
was
huge.  But not after the dam collapsed.  It was just an earthen dam, built way back during the Great Depression.  Cairo, Illinois, is gone, just plain gone.  And I don’t mean just the buildings, I mean the land
under
the buildings—it’s not there anymore.  It’s under water.  That’s where the Ohio meets the Mississippi now, right where Cairo used to be.  That happened after the first earthquake, a year ago on December 15.”

“Damn…”

“So our battalion made it across the Mississippi on barges.  Our mission was to put a temporary bridge across the Wolf River, and another one on Nonconnah Creek.  Have you ever heard of them?”

“No.”

“Well, they both run into the Mississippi.  The Wolf runs along the north side of Memphis, and the Nonconnah along the south side.  Most of Memphis lies between those two rivers, and of course the Mississippi River is on the west.  Memphis was practically an island once those bridges went down.  All of Western Tennessee was basically an island when the big river bridges went down, so that made Memphis an island on an island.  The only way out of Memphis across dry land was straight to the east between the Wolf and the Nonconnah, through suburban towns like Germantown and Collierville.  Our mission was to open a supply route from Memphis straight south into the state of Mississippi.  Getting a bridge over the Mississippi River was out of the question, that’d take years.  The Ohio and Tennessee rivers weren’t much better, those bridges were down too.  Interstate 55 was going to be our main supply route from Mississippi into Western Tennessee.  The highway runs straight south from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, and then New Orleans.  Our mission was to bridge the Wolf and then the Nonconnah, to open up the route down into Mississippi.”

“I thought General Mirabeau sealed the state border.”

“He did, to refugees coming out of Memphis.  We were opening up a route to bring in relief supplies.  I have no idea what kind of coordination happened between Mirabeau and Washington, or what kind of deals were made.  At the time, we were just operating under our original orders: put temporary bridges over the Wolf River and Nonconnah Creek, and open up I-55 from Memphis down into Mississippi.”