AFTER FOUR MONTHS OF LIVING with a nuclear bomb in the hold of their sailboat, even the Koran’s promise of seventy-two bare-breasted virgins wore a little thin. When they left the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, dying in an atomic flash sounded like a small price to pay for even one virgin, much less six dozen. Now, with the end near at hand, the unspoken truth between the two Filipino villagers was that neither of them felt particularly eager to die.
They decided to wait for a sign from Allah before completing the last twenty-six miles of the voyage to America. The two villagers, far from home, anchored on the east side of Catalina Island, just a handful of hours from the bustling coast of Los Angeles, California.
They had been loitering there for nearly two months and, amazingly, nobody had so much as spoken to them.
Njay and Miguel had settled into a daily routine. Wake up. Defecate off the side of the boat. Make tea. Defecate off the side of the boat. Fish all morning. Nap. Fish all afternoon. Defecate. Eat fish. Sleep.
The journey from the Philippines had gone exactly as planned, which amounted to a miracle in sailing. Nothing ever went exactly as planned. The well-provisioned sailboat had contributed to their successful journey. Neither of the men had ever sailed in a boat so well stocked. The boat even came with a desalination filter sufficient for a couple of months. With such a fine craft, they had been able to set a simple tack into the north-northeast trade winds directly at the coast of California. For fifty-eight days, they kept the boat pointed on a steady course, barely having to trim the sails. It had been the easiest sailing of Njay’s life.
But time was running out. Both men felt sick. They suspected the desalination filter had worn out and was letting a small amount of salt into their drinking water. The other possibility was that the crate-sized nuclear bomb in their hold was leaking radiation.
Their village imam had given Miguel and Njay simple instructions, but Njay suspected the instructions had come from the light-haired, tall man who had been skulking around their village for months. Everyone seemed to know that gossiping about Tall Man would be a violation of obedience to the imam. Njay concluded that the man must be Middle Easterner or Russian, given the nature of their mission. No Pacific Rim nation would risk war with America.
In truth, Njay knew little of the world outside his island chain, but he’d been taught much about America, with its Special Forces murderers and its weapons of unimaginable power. The United States lorded over the Pacific, threatening to blow their enemies back to the Stone Age. Like a disease consuming the hearts of man, America plagued the world, and Islam would cure it. Such a plague could be stopped by the tiniest of medicines: one small boat and two small men could vaporize the Hollywood movie stars and shake the Wall Street skyscrapers. In Allah’s wise path, giants were often felled by pebbles.
The two Filipinos talked about sailing into Avalon Bay for another desalination filter, but the risk of being discovered, especially considering their almost non-existent English, was too great.
Njay and Miguel spoke endlessly about God’s will while crossing the ocean and then fishing off the coast of Catalina. Would Allah really want them to sacrifice their lives if it wasn’t necessary?
Based on their time in Catalina, it didn’t seem like Americans worried much about the coming and going of sailboats in their waters. Over four months, the two men received nothing more than hearty waves from other boaters. Perhaps they could sail into Long Beach Harbor, tie up their sailboat, set the bomb to explode, then walk into America. Surely there were other Filipino Muslims in America who would shelter them.
They even discussed how to build a time delay device for the bomb. They pulled the crate below decks apart, only to find that the bomb was a steel box with a single green button. The box had been welded shut, and the men hadn’t brought any tools capable of cutting steel. The button protruded through the metal box and through the slats in the crate. Their instructions had been simple: sail into Long Beach Harbor and press the button.
They talked about a time delay device where a candle could burn through a rope and release a hammer to swing into the button. The contraption could give them a few minutes to get clear of the bomb. If they ran, they might make it.
They didn’t know how big the explosion would be, nor did they know if a hammer strike would sufficiently depress the button without breaking it. Of course, it could not be tested in advance.
The men eventually set their time delay idea aside and put the decision in the hands of Allah. They listened to American radio as they fished, talking into the evening about how a sign from Allah might appear.
The sickness had them both concerned. Their daily defecations into the ocean were audible from everywhere on the boat, and they agreed the sickness was worsening, compelling them to relieve themselves more often.
Time grew short.
• • •
[Two Weeks Ago]
Mongratay Province, Afghanistan
Jeff Kirkham’s adrenaline spiked before he even knew why, his subconscious recognizing the blue-white trail of a rocket-propelled grenade as it whistled into his column of trucks. The low growl of a PKM machine gun and a swarm of AK-47s joined the chorus as the battlefield roared to life.
This had been the wrong place to drop overwatch, and it had been Jeff’s bad call. He rocked forward, squinting through the filthy windshield, hoping he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. Some of his best men were in the Corolla, still the lead vehicle, and they were hanging way out in the wind.
Jeff rode in the passenger seat of the command truck toward the back of the column with his shorty AK wedged between his butt and the door. Only the medical truck lagged behind them.
Endless hours of experience and training kicked in, and Jeff launched from his seat, slamming the passenger door forward, pinning it with his boot to keep it from bouncing back. He cleared his rifle and rolled out of the truck, scrambling for cover behind the rear axle. None of their vehicles offered much in the way of cover, and their best play was to fight through the ambush. Getting everyone turned around and moving back the way they had come wasn’t an option.
As soon as Jeff reached the rear of the column, he ran into Wakiel, a tall, sinewy Afghan from the Panjshir Valley. They had worked together for years. In broken Dari, Jeff ordered Wakiel to gather his squad for a flanking maneuver. Wakiel chattered into his radio and, within a few moments, the assault squad piled up behind the medical truck, ready to roll.
Jeff didn’t remember the Dari word for “flank,” so he just stabbed a knife hand up and to the left. His Afghani assaulters knew what to do and they were hot to fight.
The twelve of them, including Jeff, sprinted up the closest ravine, working to gain altitude so they could drop down on the Taliban-infested ridge line. As he pounded up the hill, Jeff could see the Corolla getting mauled in the middle of the bowl. One glance at the car told Jeff he would have men to mourn when the dust settled.
At forty-three years of age, it almost didn’t matter how fit Jeff was. Running straight up a mountain in body armor at seven thousand feet made him feel like a lung was going to pop out of his mouth. He had been born with the furthest thing from a “runner’s physique.” Between his Irish genes and a thousand hours on the weight bench, Jeff could fight eyeball to eyeball with a silverback gorilla. He had no neck, a foot-thick chest, huge arms, and thighs the size of tree trunks. Like most of the Special Forces operators getting on in age, Jeff didn’t mind a bit of a belly bulge sticking over his waistband. His enormous upper body mass and the belly bulge added up to dead weight, though, when running up a mountain in Afghanistan in the middle of a fire fight.
He wasn’t about to let Wakiel and his guys get away from him, so Jeff drove harder up the sand and moon dust, his boots filling with gravel and debris, his throat burning like he was sucking on a blow torch. They had been pushing up a ravine and, as they crested the hill, Jeff could see they were now above the Taliban force.
“Shift fire. Shift fire.” Jeff coughed into the radio as his assault team reached the top. Jeff knew his men would plow straight into the Taliban positions without considering that their truck column below, with more than a dozen crew-served machine guns, was pounding that area with everything they had.
“Shift fire, copy?” Jeff heaved for air, trying to gulp down oxygen and listen intently at the same time.
“Roger. Shifting fire up and right,” one of the other Green Berets with the column replied, no doubt running up and down the string of trucks trying to get control of sixty adrenaline-crazed Afghani commandos and their belt-fed machine guns.
With his command job done, Jeff launched into the fight himself, hammering rounds from his AK and catching up to his men. They leapfrogged from one piece of cover to the next, driving down on the Taliban positions.
Jeff dove behind a huge boulder and flopped to one side, crabbing around the rock and catching a full view of the battlefield. By climbing high up the hillside, he and his assault team had side-doored the Taliban force and he could see lengthwise into several foxholes filled with enemy. Jeff pushed his AK around the edge of the boulder and dumped rounds into one open foxhole after another, dropping some men to the ground and forcing others to leap out of their trenches and flee into the open. When they did, the truck column in the valley below cut them to pieces.
There was no stopping the carnage now that the smell of blood was in the air. Jeff leapt from behind the boulder, ran forward and fell hard into a hole, stomping a dead man’s open guts. The mushy footing caused Jeff to tip and slam into the wall of the ditch. The stench of the man’s open bowel hit his face like a slap, making him grimace and turn his head.
The gunfire slowed. Jeff could see four or five surviving Taliban running away over the ridge. The hillside and ridge were littered with bodies. Jeff crawled out of his foxhole and maneuvered over to Wakiel.
“How are the men?” Jeff asked in Dari.
“Is good,” Wakiel panted in broken English, coming down from the rush of the last murderous drive.
“ Katar . Danger,” Jeff reminded him. Wakiel nodded.
Jeff had been in hundreds of gunfights and he knew that winning the fight was only the beginning of the work. Policing up the bodies, and figuring out which of them were dead and which were waiting to blow the victors up with a hand grenade, would take hours. There was nothing glamorous about policing a battlefield.
It took three hours for Jeff and his guys to clear the field, and they lined up ten dead Taliban in a row, their AKs, PKMs and RPGs piled beside them. A couple of Jeff’s indigenous “ Indij” guys started taking pictures with their trashy cell phones, holding dead guys up by their hair. They needed the pictures to match against the “most wanted” list. Still, the grisly scene made Jeff turn away.
He looked back at his column of trucks. He could see three black body bags lying outside the lead Corolla—the car that had contained his Amniat scouts, some of his best friends and finest warriors. The medics were smoking cigarettes instead of working on his men, which meant Jeff had lost more friends.
Jeff’s body felt drained, like a fist unclenching. He would complete this last mission, and then he would leave Afghanistan and warfighting behind forever.
He had been in command of the column of fifteen trucks for three days, and road dust coated his face and the inside of his nose, dragging on every breath. For hours on end over the last three days, his binoculars had come up and down searching for an ambush, like genuflecting to the gods of war.
Lift the binos. Scan the horizon. Scan big rocks. Scan all potential hiding places. Lower the binos. Check the position of his trucks. Repeat every ninety seconds, forty-five times an hour, five hundred times a day.
From the center of his head to the marrow of his bones, fatigue dogged him. A fighter could only stay hard for so long. For him, it had been twenty-eight years.
Driving for days had worn him down to a nub. The rocking motion of the truck and the chemical body odor from the men commingled with exhaust fumes, kicking his motion sickness into overdrive. Even so, seventy lives depended on him staying rock solid, and now men had died on his watch.
The distance to the Forward Operating Base wasn’t the problem. They could have made the drive in ninety minutes going balls out, but the province crawled with Taliban and Jeff’s column was anything but low profile: fifteen Toyota Tacomas, painted desert tan, each one of them with a Russian-made belt-fed machine gun bolted to the truck bed.
Jeff had ordered his Amniat scouts in the beat-up Corolla to range out every ten kilometers to reconnoiter the road ahead. Since the scout vehicle looked just like every other piece of junk in this desert, he had hoped the Taliban wouldn’t waste bullets on it. Three of Jeff’s best Indij fighters had been crammed into that little car.
For eight hours, the column had run with two overwatch trucks fanning out to the left and the right, up on the ridge tops, covering the column with their big fifty-caliber belt-fed machine guns. That meant a lot of stop-and-wait inaction as the overwatch trucks maneuvered into new positions. The column would drive a kilometer, wait fifteen minutes for overwatch to set up, then drive a kilometer more. The process yanked on the column like a ball and chain, but it had to be done. Without covering fire, they could find themselves on the death-eating side of an ambush.
War is work, Jeff had been telling himself, manual labor. It wasn’t just physically exhausting. It was the waiting that ground the soul down—constant stress and usually nothing to show for it. He knew he was an excellent warfighter, a manual laborer of death and destruction with an iron will. He could control the chaos like few men on earth, and it was this unwavering faith in his own competency that powered Jeff through long, tedious missions like this one.
Now, with the ambush sprung, the battle finished and several of his men dead, Jeff was no longer feeling that same bullet-proof self-confidence.
Wakiel walked over to Jeff, smoking a cigarette.
“I guess that was a bad place to get ahead of our security element,” Jeff said in English.
Wakiel knew Jeff well enough to understand and replied, “ Khalash , Jeff.” It was Dari for “finished,” but today it meant “farewell.”
After this mission, Jeff headed home forever, back to the other world—the world that didn’t smell like the inside of an Afghani’s lower intestines, the world where he could stay clean, sleep in on a Sunday with his wife, and take in the fresh smell of his sons’ hair first thing in the morning.
The sweet-sour smell of shit wafted past his face, and Jeff searched for the offending stench, noticing a green, chunky glob on his boot. With nowhere to wipe it off, Jeff’s aggravation peaked, his only solace that he was leaving this endless parade of rot and ruin.
Jeff vowed to never again smell the guts of a man, to never again face the buzz of angry bullets, and to never again watch friends die violent deaths. Back in the real world of America, Jeff would put a net around his family and tie it down tight. The demons of chaos and destruction would forever infest Afghanistan, but they would not follow him home. Whatever affection he had once had for the life of a soldier, it was over. Now he would make damned sure his family lived in peace.
“I am so sick of fighting death every day,” Jeff said, looking at his Afghani friend for the last time.
The Afghani barely understood his English, which was the only reason Jeff allowed himself to put words to his fatigue.
Wakiel nodded and returned to smoking his cigarette.
• • •
Bandar Charak
Hormozgan Province, Iran
Present Day
In the end, Afshin Asadi would explode a dirty bomb over Saudi Arabian soil, not because of his religion or his politics, but because he couldn’t stand to leave a project unfinished.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the same place where he kept information on how to operate his microwave oven, Afshin knew he would go to paradise by sacrificing his life, if it came to that. He accepted the information without any particular interest.
Some might look at Afshin’s story and draw the conclusion he had been imprisoned by a cruel government, a regime that would shackle a mentally challenged, but genius young man to an ignorant religion. In their rush to repudiate Islam, they would miss the point.
Truth was, Afshin already lived in paradise, and his government was doing him a favor by confining him to a workshop with a prototype nuclear device. Every morning he awoke with a burning desire to move the project one step closer to completion, and every night he lay down deeply satisfied by the work he had completed. On any given day, he might have tested a candidate polystyrene as a suspension material, or machined a new trial shield panel. Each small step toward completion scratched an itch deep in his soul, and he went to sleep happy as a man could be—in his case, as happy as an autistic man could be.
Five years previously, as Afshin studied at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, one of his professors had asked him to visit during office hours. When Afshin arrived at the meeting in his professor’s office—more a cubbyhole than an office—another man was wedged into a seat in the corner between piles of papers. The strange man wore a crumpled suit coat and a yellowing dress shirt. He was balding and peered over a pair of thick-framed glasses.
The stranger introduced himself, and Afshin failed to note his name, more interested in the big Western-made calculator poking out of the man’s shirt pocket. Calculator Man peppered Afshin with engineering and physics questions, beginning simple and moving toward more complex. Afshin answered plainly, without wondering for a single second about the purpose of the meeting.
More than a month later, the same man interrupted a Thermal Engineering lecture. The teacher’s aide pulled Afshin from class and Calculator Man showed him out the front door of the university to a waiting taxi. Afshin never saw the school, nor his family, again.
He might have enjoyed seeing his family, but he never requested it. Afshin feared interrupting the work, worried they might pull him off the intensely gratifying process of designing and building an entirely novel type of nuclear weapon. Nobody had ever exploded a dirty bomb before and the technical requirements for the explosive, and the radioactive shielding, ran deep into the speculative.
Afshin’s father had served in the Iran-Iraq War, and his mother was a nomadic Iranian exposed to “yellow rain” during the war. His mother died of bone cancer, and his father was revered by their town as a war hero, though it only seemed to matter during patriotic holidays.
Afshin had no assistants and almost no supervision. His food and support were provided by government people who appeared occasionally to make sure his tools ran properly and that he was alive and well. When he needed a new end mill or, on the rare occasion when he wanted a pornographic magazine, he placed the order. Nobody bothered him about the pornography, even though it was technically illegal in Iran. The Lebanese porno magazines simply showed up in the bottom of the next box of tooling and raw materials. But the work was almost always more satisfying than the porn, and he took little time off to masturbate.
One day, after five years of laboring over the Russian surplus strontium-90 thermal generator he had been provided as a source for radioactive material, Afshin looked down at his stainless steel workbench and beheld a completed, highly sophisticated dirty bomb. It was no larger than the mini-refrigerator where he kept his sodas, and it weighed just under ninety kilos. The radiation pouring off the casing measured barely more than exposure to the sun in the upper atmosphere.
Two days after completing his bomb, Afshin heard the buzz of a small aircraft taxiing outside. The sounds of small aircraft were commonplace, since his workshop and living quarters were located in an airplane hangar. But this airplane approached his building, heralding the coming of his boss, Calculator Man.
By now, Afshin knew the professor’s name: Ostãd Mumtãz Shahin Nazari. Professor Nazari had visited Afshin many times over the last years, receiving updates on progress and vetting Afshin’s data and material requests. Afshin assumed the professor held some rank in the science or military ministry, though Iranian state government interested Afshin about as much as women’s magazines which, was to say, not at all.
This visit was different from previous visits. For one thing, the bomb was complete. For another, Professor Nazari appeared to be dying. Afshin didn’t ask, but he guessed that cancer was consuming his supervisor. For two reasons, Afshin’s life was about to change, and that stressed him to distraction.
“ Salaam alaikum, ” the professor greeted him and took his hand. Afshin looked downward in a show of respect.
“ Salaam, Professor. I am finished.” Afshin continued to gaze at the concrete, uncomfortable with looking directly at other peoples’ faces.
“Yes, my young friend, you are.” The professor released Afshin’s hand and shuffled to the work table. “It is beautiful. Allahu Akbar.”
Afshin felt his face flush red with pleasure. Indeed, the device was beautiful and it was gratifying for the professor to say so. Afshin had nothing to say, so he remained silent.
“Are you prepared to test it?” the professor asked, caressing the aluminum casing.
“Yes, Jenaab.” Afshin applied the honorific, pleased to have his work acknowledged.
“Afshin, I feel I must tell you, what we are about to do is more than a test. It is a victory for Islam. We shall detonate the device on the Wahhabis and their American pipeline. As we kill the pipeline, we kill the link between the Americans and the Saudis, and we force Persia to finally take a stand. Our government has lost the will to act and, like during the war with Iraq, they hold back, afraid of the West. The Saudis push their Wahhabist agenda across the globe, building schools and mosques in every corner of Islam: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, and even America itself. They are the true enemy, but our government refuses to strike. With this bomb, we shall force the ayatollahs to take up the sword Allah has given them. Then the Persian Empire can resume its rightful place. Will you give your life to that cause?”
Afshin understood every word. He was a genius, after all. At the same time, he couldn’t care less about religion or the Persian Empire. What he cared about, above all else, was seeing the device tested. He couldn’t continue living without seeing the bomb detonate. If he died in the process, that concerned him very little.
“Yes, Jenaab ,” Afshin answered.
“Good, my son. I do consider you my son.” The professor smiled. “I must also tell you this. The Guardian Council has not authorized this detonation. We will move forward without approval. My own time is at an end and I am afraid that, without me, our leaders will endlessly dither. We know the righteous path, you and I, and we must act for our country’s future. Do you agree, pesar ?”
“Yes, Jenaab ,” Afshin said for the third time.
“Very well. Please bring the device to my airplane.”
Afshin lifted the bomb with a small electric winch hanging from the metal rafters and lowered it onto a pallet truck. He wheeled the bomb out the large door of the hangar, the dying man resting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. The bomb rolled across the tarmac into the sunlight, toward the waiting Cessna.
1
“ A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict; the term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a finance professor, writer and former Wall Street trader. Black swan events are typically random and are unexpected. ”
—The Event Chronicle
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
August 16, 2016
“WE NEED TO BURN DOWN the forest to open our fields of fire,” Jeff Kirkham declared as he scanned the hills over Oakwood, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Jason Ross smiled, but his brow furrowed. “Why is it always burning stuff down with you special ops guys? That’s the same thing Chad said—burn the forest down to open up fields of fire. I brought you up here to tell us where to dig defenses, not to burn down my forest. Jesus, we do have neighbors. That’s a town down there and I don’t think they’d be happy with a forest fire.”
Jeff stared out at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, but his eyes hardened, as though searching the hills of Afghanistan and Northern Iraq. Those places had left their mark—Jeff’s face had endured so much windburn and sunburn that he had developed a permanent squint—not to mention the deeper marks they had probably left.
“Well, then, Chad and I agree on one thing, at least,” Jeff said, dropping the subject of burning the forest for the time being. “I don’t like this location for an OP/LP,” he stated flatly. Jeff was the kind of man who didn’t flinch when it came to contradicting another person and upsetting his applecart.
Jason ’ s voice jumped a bit, betraying his frustration. “What ’ s an OP/LP?” He had already marked out locations for the defensive fortifications, based on his best guess while Jeff was overseas.
“Observation post/listening post,” Jeff explained. “If we’re going to build defensive positions, we need to start by setting up early detection. Then we can figure out fixed defensive positions, but right now we need to work on communication, roving patrols and a Quick Reaction Force.”
Jason sighed, mentally abandoning the work he had already done and conceding to Jeff’s knowledge and experience. “I only understood half of what you just said,” Jason told Jeff. “Just tell me what we need to do next.”
Jason Ross owned the Homestead, as well as the land around it, for hundreds of acres. Both men were on the Homestead steering committee, and Jeff had been invited to handle security and defense. So, while Jason actually owned everything the eye could see, he was reluctant to countermand Jeff. After all, Jeff had been asked to join the Homestead for his expertise in mountain warfare.
“What’s on top of that ridge?” Jeff pointed east.
“It looks down into Tellers Canyon, and Tellers Canyon drops into Salt Lake City, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s all Forest Service land. I don’t own it.” Jason waved generally eastward.
“Who gives a crap what you own and don’t own?” Jeff looked straight at Jason. “We’ll own whatever we want to own if the stock market keeps dropping. Let’s head up top. That’s where we should place the OP/LP.”
“Okay.” Jason surrendered. Jeff might occasionally be wrong about this kind of thing but, if he was wrong, there were probably only a dozen men in the world with enough knowledge to credibly disagree with him.
After all, Jeff had seen the Apocalypse firsthand in a dozen countries. He had trained armies—small armies to be sure—but armies nonetheless. He had taken life with every weapon known to the modern battlefield. With the help of his Green Beret buddy, Evan, Jeff developed some of the most advanced gunfighting training in the era of the assault rifle.
To say Jeff was a twenty-eight-year Green Beret wouldn’t come close to describing just how much warfighting he had survived. There were volumes about Jeff that Jason didn’t know—much of Jeff’s past was shrouded in the kind of secrecy that demanded don’t ask, don’t tell.
“Is this really going to happen?” Jason shouted over the engine of their off-highway vehicle (OHV) as they rattled and bounced to the top of the canyon.
“Is what going to happen?” Jeff shouted back. Half the time, Jeff Kirkham guessed at what other people were saying. He had been left nearly deaf in one ear from too many intimate encounters with Karl Gustav rifles and C4 plastic explosives.
“Is society really going to collapse?” Jason asked as they emerged from the oak forest. A 100,000-acre panorama opened up before them.
“It’s happened throughout history,” Jeff explained as they climbed out of the OHV and took in the view. “Just because we haven’t seen civil disorder in the U.S. in a long time doesn’t mean we’re immune to it.” He counted on his fingers. “The Revolutionary War. The Civil War. The Great Depression. We came very close to a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We enjoy the patina of security here. It’s an illusion, a trick of human psychology. Just because we don’t see chaos in our daily lives doesn’t mean it’s not right below the surface. Plus, who says we’re entitled to safety? The rest of the world doesn’t have safety. Why should we?”
“That dirty bomb that went off last night in Saudi Arabia… You think the effects could reach us here?” Jason asked again.
“We’ll see. Almost everything you can think of comes from oil. Plastic, roads, heat. Even your OHV vehicle is eighty percent oil in one form or another. The price of oil affects everything in our modern world. If Costco closes, we’re fucked.” Jeff finished his lecture, pulling out a small pair of binos to check something out on the horizon.
Jeff had two modes: stony silence and meticulous lecture―holding forth on historical and geopolitical nuances of one thing or another. For a quiet person, he had unusually big opinions.
“Costco? What’s Costco got to do with anything?”
Jeff lowered the binos but kept gazing at a spot on the mountainside.
“We’re too weak as a nation. If we were hardened, like Afghanis or Kurds―or even our grandparents who made it through the Great Depression―a failure of the stock market wouldn’t be such a game changer. We would go back to growing food in our yards and raising goats in city parks. But we’re the weakest society the world has ever seen. If the system fails, people will go ape shit. Any cop will tell you: there is a fine line between civility and savagery. When Costco closes in the middle of the day, that’ll be our cue that the credit card machines aren’t running and we’re screwed.”
“I hope you’re wrong.” Jason shook his head.
“I would love to be wrong, but I’m not.” Jeff dialed in the binoculars again, scoping a distant target. “Who’s that?” He passed the binos to Jason.
Jason picked out two figures standing beside four-wheelers higher on the mountain. “Oh, yeah. Those guys are the Beringers. They own cabin land a couple of canyons over.”
“Are they friends of yours?”
“No, not friends. We’ve had a couple of nasty run-ins over the years.”
“Run-ins?” Jeff reached for the binoculars again.
“Long story. They’re locals. They’ve lived here in Oakwood for a few generations. They were offended when I bought this land. They used to think of it as their own private hunting preserve.”
“Tell me about the run-ins,” Jeff persisted.
“We used to keep a hunting tent at the top of the canyon. After we asked them to stop trespassing, one of their clan broke into our equipment locker and crapped all over the handles.”
Jeff lowered the binos. “They literally shit on your equipment locker?”
Jason shrugged. “They’re rednecks. Down on their land, they’ve built a ghetto survival retreat—they’ve got foxholes, buildings made out of pallets, tripwires. It’s like a scene out of Deliverance .”
“What did you do about them shitting on your locker?” Jeff drilled down.
“We let it go. Eventually they quit coming over the mountain to hunt.” Jason’s answer made him feel self-conscious, like he had compromised his “man card” by not making the Beringers face consequences for their disrespect.
By all accounts, Jason was a man’s man. Tall and broad of shoulder, he had taken care of himself, working out daily, lifting weights and completing a handful of half-ironman triathlons over the years. He had been an Eagle Scout and, since boyhood, he had spent a large chunk of his life in the woods. But even a “man’s man” felt self-conscious around Jeff Kirkham. No amount of civilized outdoorsmanship compared with two-and-a-half decades living in the muck as a Green Beret.
“Those Beringer people can’t stay,” Jeff concluded, not inviting discussion.
“I’d like them gone, too, but they own that land. I don’t see how we can run them off their own land without inviting others to do the same to us.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Jeff handed back the binoculars with a blank smile.
That smile made Jason uncomfortable. It implied gamesmanship. It hinted at a desire for a chess match, like something out of a Kipling novel, a penchant for cheating, a pleasure at defeating others through superior maneuvering. Nothing implied by that smile put Jason at ease with Jeff Kirkham.
Jason was well aware that American Special Forces operators cheated. They fought at night with night vision and air support. They used technological advantage to win with grotesque dominance over the enemy. Top-tier Green Berets were often loaned to the CIA, where the deeds ran dark and deep. Jeff had almost certainly triggered foreign insurgencies by employing carefully set layers of intrigue and connivance. He had spent a lifetime in the mind-bending juxtaposition where an operator’s personal reputation and integrity among Americans was everything. That same operator would smile at a terrorist across the table, call him brother, use him like a dishrag, then radio in an air strike to kill him.
During the decades Jeff fought for his country using every trick in the book, Jason built wealth and honed his ability as a leader of enterprise. He made a career out of full disclosure and fair dealing. He had been taught early on that virtue won most battles on the fields of commerce and had made a great deal of money through cooperation, collaboration and respect.
Jason didn’t know the half of Jeff’s career, and he suspected Jeff had spent time within the shadowy elements of the United States government. Jason worried that the same subterfuge might someday be turned on him .
He looked at Jeff for a long moment. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. What befell the Beringers could easily befall the Ross family , Jason thought to himself.
“What?” Jeff’s thin smile broke a little wider. He seemed to have an idea of what Jason was thinking.
“Hmm, nothing.” What more could be said? Trust and ruthlessness danced a dangerous dance, especially now that the Ross Homestead might live or die based on Jeff’s judgment. If the stock markets stayed closed, the world that Jason knew—the world of win-win contracts and business-casual lunches—was about to morph into something far more primitive. If that happened, it would be a world Jeff knew from the ground up, and a world Jason knew not at all.
Jeff headed back to the OHV and Jason followed. They drove down the hill toward the “Big House” but, halfway home, a lanky guy with long hair stepped to the edge of the OHV trail and waved them down. Teddy worked for Jason Ross, handling construction projects, landscape and heavy equipment work. Jason pulled over and Teddy propped his arms across the door of the vehicle.
“Morning, gentlemen,” Teddy said, glancing from Jason to Jeff.
“Jeff, this is Teddy, our head of facilities. He runs all the grounds and construction projects. He’ll be the guy digging your observation posts.”
“Howdy do.” Teddy shook Jeff’s hand. “So, do you guys want to see the holding ponds? We’re filling them with water right now for the first time.”
Jason blinked. The water project wasn’t something he wanted Jeff to see, but Teddy jumped the gun, more friendly than cautious. Jason and Teddy had agreed their water system would be top secret, but the cat was out of the bag now, so Jason went with it.
He popped open his door and Jeff followed suit, stepping out of the OHV and following Teddy down a narrow trail. The oak brush opened into a small clearing with several large excavations, lined with a black plastic sheet covered in river rock.
“Check out our secret reservoir, gentlemen,” Teddy said. “The ponds will hold eighty thousand gallons of spring water and they’ll be home to hundreds of trout and bluegill.” Teddy had tucked the reservoir into a tiny meadow encircled by a tangle of oaks, hidden from view everywhere but inside the clearing. No doubt it would become a refuge for deer, elk and turkeys.
Once Teddy got going, he was hard to stop. He bragged about how he worked this project for the last two months so they could get the Homestead off municipal water. It would save a few thousand bucks a month and it would make the property self-sufficient, pulling water from a buried spring, stringing it across the mountainside beneath the maples, and dribbling it into this picture-perfect pond—much better than relying on the city for water.
“I borrowed the design for the spring from Eivin Kilcher in the TV show, Alaska: the Last Frontier .” Teddy had watched the show several times, then dug a bigger version of Eivin’s spring-fed well. “I planted six huge plastic pipes standing on end, punched small holes in them, surrounded the whole shebang with gravel, then re-buried it.”
Sticking his chest out, Teddy kept talking. “Natural spring water will irrigate the whole property starting tomorrow.”
While Jason shifted from foot to foot, Jeff stood like a statue. Teddy waxed philosophical about his water project.
“Most people don’t think about water pressure. They only think about getting water to their mouths. But ground water isn’t very helpful. A person can drink ground water with a purifier, but that’s about all they’re going to do. Gardening, washing clothes, showering―those tasks require water pressure . When a guy plans on carrying water to his garden by hand, he’s not thinking about how many calories he’ll burn carrying the water. He would have to eat every last plant, and then six times more, just to replace the calories spent hauling water.”
“Thanks. Good work, Teddy.” Jason turned to walk back to the OHV.
Teddy finally picked up on Jason’s cues. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, guys.” He reached over and shook hands with both men. “I just wanted you to see this. I thought you’d want to know we got it done, you know, especially with the problems going on in the stock market and all…”
“Absolutely,” Jason said, “we’ll sleep better knowing we have our water situation figured out. Thanks. Great work. Let your guys know I said ‘thanks.’” Jason started back along the trail.
“Cool. I’m going to get back to it.” Teddy awkwardly shook hands with Jeff again and returned to his Bobcat excavator.
“So you have spring water and a reservoir?” Jeff asked as they climbed into the OHV.
“Yeah. I haven’t had time to catch you up on Homestead improvements since you got back from Afghanistan. I can brief you whenever you have a minute.”
Jeff had only been invited as the newest member of the Homestead steering committee the week previous. Nobody on the committee knew Jeff particularly well, but there was no denying how useful he might be as a member of their preparedness community. Still, Jason had been careful not to tell any one person everything about the Homestead. Outside of family, trust only extended so far.
Prior to Jeff’s last deployment to Afghanistan, Jason had given Jeff and Tara Kirkham a tour of the Homestead, launching into “The Conversation” with the couple. Many times before, and with many other couples, Jason had broached the conversation about survival and preparedness. He had even become pretty good at sneaking up on the big reveal ― that they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a survival compound, barely concealed behind the fancy architecture and the wrought iron gates of the Homestead.
Ross knew from experience that “The Conversation” could take many interesting turns. Once, when talking to a young doctor and his wife, the couple had somehow gotten it in their heads that the awkward conversation was working its way toward an invitation to swing with Jason and his wife. When the truth finally emerged, the couple’s relief had been palpable. Being asked to join a survivalist group was apparently much less awkward than being asked to wife swap.
With Jeff and Tara, “The Conversation” went a lot more smoothly. The couple had firsthand experience with the decrepitude of government, and Jeff had witnessed his share of post-apocalyptic suffering overseas. Considering their three children, Jeff and Tara didn’t take long to warm to the idea of contributing to a hardened facility near their suburban home. Plus, the work that had already been completed on the Homestead would have impressed anyone.
The orchard covered dozens of acres and included over a hundred fruit trees, plus a small vineyard. Scattered around the property were seven greenhouses, all with LED grow lamps and solar back-up power. The greenhouses contained almost four thousand square feet of raised planter beds with year-round gardening capability.
The summer garden was a work of art, with another two thousand square feet of raised grow space neatly laid out in square-foot garden plots and giant Grecian urns. The tomato garden was more than eighty feet in diameter and sat on a beautifully stacked-stone retaining wall, towering over the gated entrance to the property.
Everywhere the Kirkhams looked, there were heavy groves of berries, fruit trees and vegetables. Wherever possible, Ross required the landscape to be fruit-bearing and edible.
Nestled behind the orchard, the property played host to a small herd of livestock. Ross bought into partnerships with four local farms scattered around the neighboring valleys. Every so often, a farmer would come by with a horse trailer and drop off a few more goats, sheep, chickens or ducks, just to top off the Homestead herd.
While they kept farm animals on the Ross property in small numbers, there was nothing small about their rabbit production. One of the finest buildings on the property was the rabbit warren. The entire building held dozens of stacked rabbit cages and feed systems.
The Ross clan and their friends hunted wild game on the Homestead. Elk, deer and turkeys wandered the property in great abundance, with wild deer and gobblers meandering through the orchards daily. They had hunting and butchery down to a science and the only meat served on the family table was killed on their property or grown on one of their farms.
Along the base of the woods that jutted from the east of the gardens, tens of thousands of bees browsed the gardens, turning out light, fragrant honey. As an avid gardener herself, Tara Kirkham had been openly impressed by the gardens and the bees.
The Kirkhams didn’t seem to have a better plan at the moment, and the Homestead offered an alternative to “riding it out” solo if things went sideways. Jeff and Tara tentatively agreed to help with the Homestead, at least until everyone had a chance to feel out the new friendships.
That had been a few months back, and Jeff had spent most of those months overseas. He had barely returned home from his last deployment and, within weeks, a bomb went off in Saudi Arabia and the stock market started doing the herky-jerky.
Sooner than anyone would have preferred, the world took a precarious turn and, as Jason Ross drove the OHV down the hill, he looked straight ahead, uneasy with the formidable presence of Jeff Kirkham beside him. Like it or not, circumstances had forced them into relying upon one another—like two lions caught in the same enclosure, circling, never quite comfortable enough to lie down.
• • •
Federal Heights
Salt Lake City, Utah
Jimmy McGavin fingered the bump on his throat for the ten thousandth time and, for the ten thousandth time, he told himself that he needed to get it checked by a doctor. He had sliced it off shaving more times than he could count, but it always came back, dark and ominous.
Looking at himself in th
e mirror, two conflicting emotions washed over him.
First, he liked the way he looked in a suit and tie. He was a commercial realtor, respected by his friends. He had done a masterful job of providing for his family. Living in Federal Heights was no small feat. Financially, he had achieved more than almost anyone else in his high school graduating class.
Second, even in the double-breasted suit, he made himself a little sick. There wasn’t much of a man left behind those hanging jowls and pasty white skin. He rarely got outside and he almost never exercised, short of the once-quarterly trip to the gym. With work, church and mowing the yard on the weekends, he felt like a beast of burden. The edgy young man who once stole a neighbor’s car for a joy ride was gone forever. He couldn’t even remember the last time a woman looked at him with lust.
Other men treated him like he wasn’t the slightest bit dangerous. By smiling at everyone and doing whatever it took to keep other people happy, he had allowed the dangerous in him to erode to a point where he no longer carried the scent of a real man.
In a Hail Mary attempt to restore some part of his virility, he insisted that his wife allow him to go deer hunting with his brothers each year. She always complained, citing the dozen things that needed to be done around the house. They never talked about it plainly, but anything that might vaguely threaten her dominance in their marriage, like owning guns, speeding on the freeway or deer hunting, she fought with a relentlessness that only a woman with an expanding waistline could understand.
Jimmy knew that, if it weren’t for the four or five days hunting each year, he might actually kill himself, so deep was the silent despair of his life. So he made the hunting trip happen regardless of the crap his wife dished out.
Occasionally, he would go down to the basement, open his gun safe and hold his Savage 30-06 rifle, working the bolt a couple of times to enjoy the feel of it, stirring up the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner. He knew he wasn’t much of a hunter, but those motions and smells restored something in him. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep him moving, enough to keep him plodding forward.
Today there wasn’t time for a trip down to the basement. He noticed a worrisome number of messages on his cell phone, even before 8:00 a.m. That meant his investor clients were calling, trying to figure out how to manage their money during the shift in the markets. Because he was a commercial real estate professional, folks turned to him when stocks became unstable. With the dirty bomb attack last night in the Middle East, the market would be doing backflips, and that meant one thing for him as a commercial realtor: opportunity.
On his drive into South Valley, Jimmy tuned to CNBC Radio, hoping to catch news of the stock market. Right away, it was obvious something big was going down, even bigger than the bomb.
The SEC had executed a market-wide trading halt, something Jimmy didn’t remember ever happening. The Dow had dropped over twenty percent in two hours in response to the news of the nuclear attack on a major energy resource.
According to the radio, the dirty bomb exploded near the city of Abqaiq , Saudi Arabia, at the head of the East-West Pipeline, destroying the pumping station and raining radioactive fallout over a wide region, including the oil tanker pumping stations at Al Juaymah. The same pumping stations had been attacked with car bombs by Al Qaeda in 2006, but nobody could say for sure who was behind last night’s attack. There was no evidence of a missile launch. Suspicions, of course, ran toward Iran, but the Iranians emphatically denied responsibility.
The actual damage to the world petroleum supply was unclear, especially since the Saudi royal family wasn’t providing much information. Even so, enough was known to trigger a reaction from the markets: a bomb had hit the East-West Oil Pipeline, and an unknown number of oil fields and docking facilities had been destroyed or otherwise closed due to radiation.
The result was an overnight forty-three dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil, more than three times the largest single-day jump ever recorded. Energy experts were screaming that such a price increase was unjustified—that new oil capacity in the United States and Canada would more than make up for the loss. But nobody was listening to the experts at this point.
Oil prices had previously reached historic lows and the global economy had been building a bubble on the back of cheap gas. With cheap energy becoming expensive energy overnight, nobody could predict how it would impact anything, from the price of feed corn to the value of Apple Computer stock. The confusion had only one direction to go―panic.
The SEC pulled the plug on all stock trades in the United States, and the other stock exchanges quickly followed suit. The markets went dark.
Jimmy knew enough about markets to know this was bad—really bad. He considered turning his car around and heading back home. He shook off the rumble in the pit of his gut and kept heading toward the office. His boss wanted him there to help put out fires. Jimmy was working a $4.2 million property deal that was supposed to close tomorrow. It was anyone’s guess how the bank was going to respond to the market closures.
Things would be fine, Jimmy told himself. He stared out his car window as he drove south along the Interstate 215 belt route looking out over the Salt Lake Valley. It was a gorgeous day. The fall-dressed mountains towered over the freeway, fresh and pristine. The valley below bustled with activity, its inhabitants going about life like any other day.
It was hard to picture the number of people living in the Salt Lake metropolitan area. He knew the number—more than one million people—but he couldn’t imagine what a million people actually looked like. From the freeway, high on the bench, he could see businesses, parks, homes, and office buildings stretching out all the way to the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of the valley. A shallow bowl cradled Salt Lake City, rimmed by granite-capped mountains, ten miles wide by twenty-five miles long—and it held that multitude of people, all going about their business.
How unfathomable would it be if a single bomb eight thousand miles away could disrupt the lives of a million souls in Salt Lake City on this perfect day? The idea seemed ludicrous.
Something tickled the back of Jimmy’s mind—a book he had read when he was in college. More accurately, it was a book he’d skimmed. Jimmy had taken an upper-level economics class and his professor recommended a book as extra credit— The Coming Dark Age , by an Italian economist, Roberto Vacca.
Jimmy needed the extra credit, so he’d bounced around the book barely well enough to sound knowledgeable. It had been an awful read, but the main idea suddenly reappeared, in the mystical calculus of memory, twenty-five years later.
The author had argued that the post-industrial world was actually more fragile than the pre-industrial world—that relatively small disturbances could push complex, modern society off the edge of a socio-economic cliff. The old economy, where people grew their own food and fixed their own cars, was capable of absorbing bigger hiccups, much like Third World countries do every day, but because each person in Western civilization only knew how to do his or her specialized job, and because they demanded an extraordinarily high standard of living, the author argued that people would freak out and burn society to the ground if a big enough “black swan event” shocked the system.
The example that came to Jimmy’s mind was trucking. He had heard somewhere that stores held only three days of food on hand at any given moment. If an interruption occurred in finance, and a truck driver wasn’t convinced that a paycheck awaited him at the end of his run, he wouldn’t make the drive. He would go home instead. If a lot of truck drivers shared the same lack of confidence at the same moment, grocery stores would run short of food and people would panic, hoarding whatever they could find and leaving stores wiped out. Along with hoarding would come rioting and, with rioting, would come even greater fear. After a big enough surge of fear, all the systems of modern society would crash.
Jimmy looked over the valley and thought again about those million people. What would they look like jammed into a stadium? He tried to picture it.
He had heard statistics at a Rotary Club meeting last winter: the million people of Salt Lake City required about twenty million gallons of clean water each day. They consumed over two thousand megawatts of electricity. They each ate two thousand calories of food per day. Almost all of that food came from far away—a good portion from Mexico and Brazil, some five thousand miles over water and rails.
What if the threads of finance, food and electricity all broke at once? Could the spider web of modern society crash to the ground?
This idea defied Jimmy’s imagination. Modern society had always made it possible for more and more people to live healthy, abundant lives. The old economist had written his doom-and-gloom book back in the seventies. But the prosperity of the United States since then had utterly disproved his warnings. Things had continued better than ever.
Still, in light of what he was hearing on the radio, Jimmy wondered. Could economic dominoes—energy, banking, transportation, communications, law and government—fall because of some weird event half-way around the globe?
It seemed impossible, especially on this fine day, in his fine car, wearing his fine suit.
• • •
Levan, Utah
Union Pacific Railroad Yard
By 11:00 a.m., there were already a hundred fifty semis piled up in the yard, waiting to offload coal from the biggest coal mine in Utah, the SUFCO mine in Sevier County. But there were no trains, which meant no coal could be offloaded.
Because of endless government dickering and countless environmental impact studies, the mine and the railroad had been struggling unsuccessfully for sixteen years to get a short-line railroad to connect the SUFCO mine with the town of Levan. Each day, six hundred semis drove from Sevier to Levan, an unnecessary trip of eighty-five miles.
Dante Morales, director of the yard where the coal transferred from the trucks to rail cars, had been yelling at everyone he could at Union Pacific headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Those hundred fifty trucks waited like ugly prom dates for a train to arrive. So far, nothing. Still no train.
In the previous months before the market crash, Union Pacific Railroad found itself in a precarious position, getting both lifted up and dragged down by energy markets, like a kite made out of hardwood.
Coal shipping was Union Pacific’s bread and butter, but coal was out of favor with the politicos in Washington, as well as every other state and municipality. Little by little, cleaner fuels were choking out the market for coal and Wall Street traders knew it. At the same time, the price of diesel—the fuel used by trains—had dropped so low it made Union Pacific’s profit-and-loss statement look almost rosy.
Most stock wasn’t traded by a bunch of old ladies tinkering with their retirement accounts. Most stock trades in the modern age were executed by razor-sharp experts. Most of the Union Pacific Railroad trades were being done by men who knew the exact strengths and weaknesses of UPR, diesel costs, and the coal markets.
When oil prices skyrocketed in the morning hours of trading due to uncertainty in the Middle East, the stock experts bailed out of Union Pacific like fleas off a drowning dog, knowing the railroad’s profit-and-loss statement would turn tits up.
Dante Morales knew nothing of stocks. He only knew that things had gone nuts in his coal yard. From his steel-cube office, he could see the yard was completely jam-packed with trucks full of coal, and they were lining up along the highway for a mile. The last time he lined up trucks on the highway, the Utah Highway Patrol and the state environmental protection douchebags had filed a formal complaint and he almost lost his job.
In a fit of exasperation, Dante called his counterpart at the SUFCO coal mine. “Turn those trucks around, Bill. We got no trains, and both our asses will be grass if we don’t get those trucks off the highway.”
“What do you mean, we got no trains?” Bill stammered. “You mean the train’s late?”
“No, Bill, I mean there are no damned trains. Not today. If they haven’t left Las Vegas by now, they’re not coming. You can leave a hundred trucks here in the yard, but all the rest need to go back right now.”
The guy at the mine couldn’t get his mind around what he was hearing. “That can’t be. Check again.”
“I already checked all goddamned morning, and there isn’t a single locomotive between here and Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s going on, but it has something to do with Union Pacific stock taking a dump and the West Coast diesel pricks screwing them on their contract.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Bill explained. “That coal gets burned by the power plant down in Delta and eight other power plants in Utah. It’s not like they keep a bunch of coal sitting around out in the weather. If we don’t get that coal up north, right fucking now, lights are going to start flickering in California and all around Utah. Then our asses will really be in a sling.”
“Of course I know what the coal is for, Bill. But I got no trains, so the power plants are just going to have to make do with what they got until the bean counters over at Union Pacific get their heads out of their asses. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your goddamned trucks off the highway. Thank you!” Dante slammed the phone in its cradle and turned back to the window, praying the Utah Highway Patrol was tied up at a donut convention.
Dante had never placed a call to the Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah before, but some industrious soul had written the phone number on a Post-it note and taped it to the side of his computer years ago. He had been looking at it, meaning to throw it away for as long as he could remember. It felt like destiny when he finally called the number.
“Hello.”
“Hello, is this the power plant in Delta?” Dante asked.
“Yes. Who’s this?” came the guarded reply.
“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard for Union Pacific. Who am I talking to?”
“Ron Weber. What can I do you for?” Weber asked.
Dante didn’t quite know how to say it. “I just wanted to make sure you knew there wasn’t any coal coming today.”
“What are you talking about?” the man asked.
“Union Pacific isn’t running trains today. Some kind of headquarters SNAFU.”
“Bullshit,” Weber cursed, echoing Dante’s own thoughts.
“Well, have you seen any trains today? Have you?” Dante asked him.
“I’m not sure. Can you hold on, Mr. Morales?”
Dante waited almost ten minutes before another person picked up.
“Hello. This is Senior Operations Director Dale Price. Who are you?”
“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard,” Dante repeated.
“Hello, Dante. Where’s our coal?” the senior operations director wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat.
“As I was telling your man, the coal is sitting here in trucks, but the trains aren’t running today.”
“That’s not possible. We have a contract with Union Pacific that guarantees daily delivery,” Price said firmly.
Dante knew he had pretty much reached the edge of his pay grade. “I let my license to practice law lapse some time back, so I’m not much help with your contract. I just thought you’d want to know that your coal is sitting right here outside my window instead of on its way to your plant.”
“I understand,” the senior engineer replied. “Thank you. I need to get off the phone and make some calls.”
“Okay. Have a good day.” Dante hung up. It occurred to him that “have a good day” was probably a stupid way to end that conversation.
• • •
California Governor’s Office
Sacramento, California
Within three hours, the mayor of the City of Los Angeles was on a conference call with three power company commissioners and the California governor. The governor asked the obvious question: “Why don ’ t the trucks just drive the coal to the power plant?”
The Intermountain Power Plant in Delta was actually owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and seventy-five percent of the power produced poured directly into southern California via the HVDC Intermountain transmission line that carried twenty-four hundred megawatts at a blistering five hundred kilovolts from middle-of-nowhere Utah to the city of Adelanto, California.
How California had convinced Utah to host their dirty coal power plant was one of the seven wonders of American political chicanery. In any case, when the senior operations director in Delta, Utah called his boss, he placed the call to the 213 area code: Los Angeles, California.
Since the Intermountain Power Plant supplied an enormous amount of power directly to the three-and-a-half million homes of Los Angeles, Anaheim, Riverside, Pasadena, Glendale and Burbank, the call was taken seriously.
Nobody on the conference call had an answer to the governor’s question, so he repeated himself. “Why don’t the trucks with the coal just drive to our power plant and drop it off?”
Sometimes the simplest answers can be the hardest to see, especially when hog-tied by bureaucracy and wrapped in decades of procedure. Sometimes the simplest answers can also lead straight down the road to hell.
