Warday Read online

  I had an episode of angina pectoris at that time and was not present at the meeting with the NEACP Commander. When I returned to the Presidential suite, it was to find that the aircraft would have to land in fifteen minutes, and this landing would have to be accomplished on a beach off the coast of North Carolina, due to our inability to reach an airfield. If the NEACP was destroyed on landing, the United States would lose its ability to respond properly to a Soviet attack. If this plane was forced to keep the command, we would have to fire Minuteman before crash landing, whether or not the Soviets had fired. The vulnerability of this one aircraft could force us to use our missiles or risk their loss.

  The President then ordered NEACP transferred to the alternate aircraft, which was operating out of Offutt AFB in Nebraska.

  This aircraft reported severe EMP damage and refused the command. The President then attempted to raise HQ NORAD/ADCOM Combat Operations Center in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and transfer to them, but this communication was not encoded properly and was also refused. We could not find the proper coding card, and to this day I wonder if the war could have been averted if we had found it.

  The President had a key to turn to fire Minuteman. He put his hand on this key and ordered the NEACP Commander to inform him when we were within one minute of touchdown. We commenced placing the command to Cheyenne Mountain every ten seconds, hoping against hope that the transfer of authority would eventually be accepted. We attempted to relay the transfer via the alternate airborne command post, but there was no protocol established for that, and the available chain of command did not have the authorizations necessary to create one. We began to try to communicate with the Vice-President, but he was en route to the U.S. Government Emergency Command Control and Communications Center in Maryland, from which he was supposed to govern the country if the President became a casualty. We did not yet know that the EMP pulse had caused his helicopter to crash, with the loss of all aboard.

  It was agreed that Secretary Forrest would replace the President at the key, should the President experience a physical problem in the next few minutes.

  Soon we began to see a long, narrow island below us. We were informed that this was our destination, and we would be landing not far from Kitty Hawk.

  The President ordered a check of the Minuteman communications system, and the arming of the proper missiles. We were told by SAC that fourteen B-52s were holding at their fail-safe points despite EMP damage, and could proceed with their mission. They were ordered to do so.

  NSA then informed us that a suspicious satellite, also previously thought to be a communications device, was ejecting devices over South Dakota that, astonishingly, might be nuclear warheads.

  Without a word, the President then turned the key and initiated the Minuteman firing sequence. The time was 1636.28. At 1636.51 we received confirmation via UHF that the missiles were away. At 1637.06 Cheyenne Mountain told us that twenty-one nuclear devices had detonated in the missile fields in South Dakota. The Mountain then ceased to signal. The Soviet warheads had been fired from satellites. We had no knowledge of such weapons. Another few seconds and Minuteman would have been destroyed on the ground. Our alternative would then, as the Soviets well knew, have been to go to the city busters aboard our submarines and risk escalation to the destruction of our own population centers, or surrender.

  At that point the President had to be attended by his physician, due to difficulty breathing.

  At 1641.11 NORAD informed us that the Soviet SS-18s were launched from forward soils on the Kamchatka Peninsula. At 1642.40 we received a pulsed load showing the exact targets and throw times. Washington. San Antonio. New York. More for the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Oddly, Omaha was not on the list.

  We were then told by the NEACP Commander to fasten our seatbelts, as the huge aircraft would be attempting a landing in the sand in two minutes. We left the command post and sat in the briefing room, where there were fewer sharp objects and access to the outside was quicker. We were given fire-resistant coveralls and breathing apparatus.

  A few minutes later the pilot began counting down from twenty. There was a sort of soft, surging sensation, then a stronger and stronger pull to the left, then the sound of equipment breaking far below as the belly of the aircraft was torn out. I left my seat, thinking that the plane had stopped, only to find myself hurled against the ceiling. I then fell amid a cascade of ceiling panels. I was in the aisle beside the President. I was covered with blood. I got to my feet and began trying to make my way down the aisle, which was full of plastic ceiling panels. Then a hissing sound started, and foam fire-extinguishing chemicals began pouring out of nozzles in the front of the cabin. There was another abrupt shift of position and we were almost on our side. There was a strong smell of kerosene.

  I reached up and attempted to rouse the President. He was lolling against his seatbelt. Two airmen came in and began cutting him loose. Others led me and Mr. Forrest and the various other White House officials from the aircraft.

  Moments later we found ourselves in a hospital tent that had been inflated by the plane’s medical orderlies some yards from the aircraft, which lay on its side, its left wing bent and leaking kerosene, its right wing washed by the sea.

  The President was brought in just behind us and laid on a tarpaulin. When his face mask was removed, it was discovered that he was dead, from a broken neck.

  At 1654 we heard a long, crackling rumble from the north. I knew that this was the sound of the Soviet weapons detonating over Washington, two hundred miles away.

  I remember that a big crowd had gathered, and the local volunteer fire department soon arrived.

  Zone of Nowhere

  People change when they see a Dead Zone. Once observed, a Dead Zone becomes a kind of personal secret, like a private disfigurement. There is something awesome and terrible about the sheer power it takes to create such destruction. It is impossible not to change when you have the first-hand experience of seeing a vast wasteland where a city of a million people once existed.

  One Dead Zone was San Antonio, the city where I was born and spent my youth and where my family lived before Warday.

  In 1990 I pulled enough strings with the military to be granted a flyover of San Antonio. After two years, radiation levels were sufficiently low to permit aircraft to approach the cratered areas without much danger. The U.S. Army—South Texas Military Area Command—apparently makes such flyovers several times a week, sometimes for officials and foreign visitors, but also, I think, for a deeper reason. Even when the aircraft are empty of visitors, there remains the need to continue some human presence.

  Entering a war zone—so called, I suppose, because it is a special place produced by war—is usually not possible overland. Radiation is only one problem; navigating rubble and half-collapsed buildings is by far the greater difficulty. Only the centermost circle of the blast area is smooth—the result of the vaporizing effects of the explosion.

  San Antonio is not going to be cleared. There is no need. No one wants to live there, and the potential for salvage is limited. Nonmilitary visitors are confined to helicopter flyovers. To take the tour, I had to travel to Austin and then down to San Marcos, which is a combined Army and Air Force installation. It is the command headquarters for the San Antonio War Zone. After half a day of having my paperwork processed, signing waivers of liability, and undergoing low-level interrogation about my journalistic interests, I was put on a jeep and driven to the flight line. I boarded a six-passenger helicopter with Army markings.

  My escort, the only other passenger on the flight, was a cheery captain who had made the trip dozens of times before. He kept up a mostly one-sided chatter all the way to the zone: “You’re not going to believe this place. It’s a symbol of immense, total power. And the bombs used weren’t even the largest the Soviets could have used.” He sounded like a schoolkid reciting from memory.

  He made sure I was aware that no photographs were allowed. I knew that; my camera had
been impounded before we left.

  Why no pictures? Certainly there were no secrets to be revealed. The extent of the damage was well known. But I could understand the restriction. There is a pornography associated with such wanton, total destruction.

  Since the war, a new terminology has emerged to describe the areas of nuclear destruction: Dead Zone, Red Zone, Orange Zone, Blue Zone, Green Zone. Painted signs, each with a skull at the center, reflect the varying levels of invisible death.

  What Army photographs the captain showed me were curiously bland. Each had apparently been taken at a high altitude and showed only a flat, empty San Antonio, devoid of detail. Emptiness says little. It is the remaining detail that reveals the devastation.

  Just ten miles out I noticed the first signs of the war: huge areas of rolling land devoid of any standing vegetation, blackened by what must have been a massive fire. Another few miles and there were collapsed heaps of charcoaled rubble, the remains of houses and barns that had stood in the rural areas outside the city. Then, to the right of the aircraft, we could see in the distance the uninhabited town of New Braunfels, a burned jumble of structures.

  The captain told me that former residents often tried to return and resettle. They would go to the edges of the restricted zones and camp there, sometimes for months. I saw one such camp, a clutch of threadbare tents, and thought they are the people at the edge of the ocean.

  As we headed for the first Ground Zero, or GZ as my guide called it, the last of the rubble passed beneath the helicopter. There were few buildings or houses left fully intact, though the contours of the land were varied enough to have made the destruction erratic. Closer to the center of the city there was only rubble. The downtown area, which had consisted of twenty or so tall buildings, now looked like a forest that had been reduced to haggard stumps.

  For the first time the impact of a Dead Zone struck me: there was incomprehensible madness here.

  Scattered through the rubble were remote stations installed by the Army to monitor radiation and intruders. With their metal roofs painted bright orange, they looked like toys left by a child on a gray carpet.

  We quickly came up on the first of three GZ craters, which, even two years after the explosion, still shimmered in the sunlight from the fusion of soil, metal, concrete, and other melted materials. In the distance, perhaps eight miles away, we could see another GZ casting its own eerie dazzle.

  “You should see them at night, under a full moon,” the captain said. “You’ll never forget the sight.”

  We circled around and around, but I couldn’t identify a single landmark. Where were the parks, the schools and universities, the shopping centers? And what about the Alamo?

  Though I stared out the window of the helicopter, I saw nothing. Instead, a flood of memories came back to me. I remembered summers in San Antonio, the backyard cookouts with my family and drive-in movies on warm evenings. I remember thinking as a child, as children do, that nothing would ever change and that my parents would live forever. Now I wondered what had happened to my bedroom, to the house I had lived in, to my old high school?

  Were the students and teachers vaporized on Warday, or merely crushed by flying stone and metal? What had happened to my family? What had happened to Whitley’s?

  My family and friends have stayed in my thoughts all these years. I lost my mother and a dozen other relatives in San Antonio on Warday; perhaps a dozen more disappeared or were lost in the postwar migrations to safer parts of the country. My wife, Vivian, disappeared in the exodus from Austin. I haven’t given up my belief that she is alive somewhere, looking for me, as I have been looking for her all these years.

  The fact that I had lost a home, a car, a career, and a thousand small possessions didn’t even occur to me, especially as I looked at what was left of San Antonio. Instead, like most people in America, I thought of faces that were no longer there. And of family histories and small treasures burned away.

  The landscape came back into view again. I could see the outlines of shopping centers, portions of streets, and enough of a building here and there to guess that it had been a school or a church or a store. One large shopping center, at the edge of a blast area, was a flattened ruin surrounded by a vast field of congealed cars melted into the asphalt of the parking lot.

  I had intended to take notes or record impressions as I flew, but I just sat there. My silence seemed to disappoint the captain. Without realizing it, he had begun to take a certain pride in the drama of his tour. He asked if I wanted to see more. “How about Kelly Air Force Base? You can see the shadows of twenty B-52s and four C-5As on the runway. Really weird.”

  I shook my head.

  Back in San Marcos I was given a color enlargement of the San Antonio zone taken from three miles up. On the back in red letters was stamped, WARNING, NO PUBLICATION. There isn’t much detail; it is a dark gray moonscape.

  “Sorry it’s not from a lower altitude,” the captain apologized, “but at least you have a memento of your visit.”

  RUMORS

  The Road to Aztlan

  Jim and I are on a train between Dallas and Austin, passing through Waco. I remember Waco as a small, intense city in the heart of the cotton-growing country. The parents of our friend Jay Westbrook lived there in the sixties, and the three of us used to be invited up for occasional weekends—usually after Jay’s mother had been to the apartment we all shared in Austin and had become concerned that we were too thin.

  The train rattles along at about forty-five. It’s clean, but pretty worn. Twelve Amtrak chair cars and a baggage car. There is no diner and no snack bar, and air conditioning is provided by keeping the front and rear doors of the cars open. The windows cannot be opened, for these prewar cars were built with many assumptions that no longer hold true. The trip will take two hours and thirty minutes station to station, with four stops.

  Most of our fellow passengers are business people. The cotton industry in Waco is booming. With the collapse of cotton imports from Egypt and other countries, the local growers are finding their product much in demand. Jim tells me that Governor Parker is hoping to make cotton and cotton products a net export item in the Texas economy soon.

  We are asking our fellow passengers about Aztlan, the Hispanic Free State that stretches roughly along the Texas–Mexico border from Piedras Negras to New Mexico. We intend to go there via Austin, San Angelo, and Odessa, with a stop in Austin to interview the Governor. But our fellow passengers are not encouraging.

  MRS. TOM MULLIN: “I had a sister lived in El Paso and all of a sudden one day she turns up at our house in Waco with everything she owns in a shopping bag. She just got kicked out by the Mexicans, she says. And a lot of people weren’t so lucky. They got hanged from street lights. And in Roswell—the Indians went in there and just about tore the place apart, the way I hear it.”

  JODY PICKEREL: “It’s probably not really a separate country from Mexico. The way I see it, Mexico went in there and started something. We mighta forgot the Alamo, but they never did. They remember the Alamo and they want all of Texas back. Unless Parker gets on the stick, they’ll be in Austin before too long, or maybe even up here in Waco.”

  LIZ PICKEREL: “He’s right, it’s a Mexican thing. You have to remember that they didn’t get touched by the war. They still have an army and everything. They’re in good shape down there, except for the money troubles and the food troubles and… well, I take that back, they’re in bad shape. But that just makes them all the more dangerous.”

  CARLOS GONZALEZ: “I am on my way to Aztlan right now. You know what I am doing there? I am selling clothes. That’s right, clothes I bought in Atlanta. I have them on this train. Seven hundred good, strong pairs of overalls. You think I’ll get a nice price?

  You bet I will! Fifty Aztlan pesos each, and you know you can change them things for good Japanese yen. Americans don’t want to trade with Aztlan. Everybody’s scared. Like, this train doesn’t go south of Odessa. You’ll find out. I
have to take a truck down from Odessa. The train goes on that old Santa Fe freight track up through to Albuquerque. They fixed up those tracks last year. Before that they ran buses.”

  MINDY SCHWARTZ: “I don’t really know much about it. I live in Odessa, and we don’t much go to El Paso anymore. I really don’t think about it.”

  TOM LEGAN: “You two gringos are going in there? Lemme tell you, they cleaned house last year. No gringos allowed. They hanged ’em if they stayed. You’re a couple of assholes, you know that? They’ll hang you if the bandidos don’t get you first. Fifty miles south of Odessa the trouble starts. You try to stay on I-20 down there the other side of Monahans, and them bandidos are going to carve up your asses. That’s all I got to say about it”

  The train pulls into the station in McGregor, which serves as the stop for Waco. There is a lot of bustle, people getting off and on, men wearing weathered jeans and straw hats, carrying duffels full of possessions, people pushing carts loaded with baggage, children crying, voices rising in joy or sorrow at the partings and returns.

  About three-quarters of the passengers get out. We buy Cokes on the platform. We will eat out of our backpacks, to save money.

  Five minutes later the train is full again, with a few people sitting in the aisles. We pull out exactly on time. Like many of the other passengers, Jim and I have our homemade lunches. The train is due in Austin at 4:07. It had better be on time, because our interview with Oliver Parker is scheduled for 4:30.

  When the wind is from the south, I understand that the corrupt odor of San Antonio is sharp on the Austin air.

  INTERVIEW

  Oliver Parker, Governor of Texas

  You know, Whitley, the fact is that some of the states are becoming separate countries. We have the beginnings of a military structure right here in Texas. I’m pushing a bill that will place the U.S. Third Army, the Twelfth Air Force, the state national guard, and the highway patrol under the overall authority of the governor’s office. I consider this the most important single thing I’ve done so far in my administration.