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Washington, DC–9:50 p.m.
Tug Grimes is dining with his wife at one of Washington DC’s finest restaurants. It is a rare evening. The Secretary of Defenses’ busy schedule rarely allows for a quiet evening out. Tug’s wife, Joan, planned the special date night; Tug had promised not to miss it.
The restaurant is bustling with the Capitol Hill elite. It’s a favorite location for legislators and lobbyists. Joan looks around the large dining room and spots Secretary of State, Joyce Pritchett. Tug recognizes several members of Congress and a few other cabinet members scattered around the restaurant. Charles Adams and a group of Japanese men occupy a large table near the front.
“You could have chosen a quieter spot for our night out. I thought you wanted something intimate,” Tug inquires.
“It’s close to the White House. I knew if I chose this restaurant, I’d have better odds of you keeping our date,” Joan answered with a sly smile. “Besides, it doesn’t hurt for all the power brokers to see you out with your wife. It humanizes you.”
“Humanizes me?” Tug’s band vibrates. He reaches to touch in, but Joan puts her hand on his arm. Tug looks at the display, then looks to Joan. “It’s the vice president. He never calls this late. It must be something urgent.” Tug hesitates.
“My loyal, disciplined, military man. Your dedication is why I love you. I just hope Cliff Baker leaves some of the evening for me... us.”
Tug touches to accept the call. Cliff is talking as soon as Tug touches in. “Tug, I need you and General Mahon in my office in an hour. It’s urgent. You know I wouldn’t be calling you if it weren’t—”
“Mr. Vice President, it’s late. I’ll give Jack a call and I’ll be there as soon as he can join us.” Tug wants to finish dinner and spend time with his wife. He promised tonight to her and intends to keep his promise. “Sir, if it’s about the Perth messages, we can get to the bottom of that—”
Cliff interrupts Tug mid-sentence. “It’s about the damned ARC. I need to know if you stand with me and the United States of America. Do you honor the oath you took to protect it, or are you with those Arcadian bastards?” Cliff stops talking, letting silence hang in the air.
The question catches Tug off guard. No one has ever questioned his honor or loyalty. “Sir, I am the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. My duty is to serve the president and our fine nation. I do not recognize any government called Arcadia, and never will.” Tug sits straight, almost at attention.
“OK. I thought so. But, glad to hear it, just the same. Get yourself and Jack here ASAP. We need to fight this.”
“Yes, sir, as soon as we can, Mr. Vice President.”
Tug stops the call and winks at his wife. “Sorry, dear. One quick call.” Tug places a call to General Jack Mahon. The call is not answered. Tug tries again with the same result. He squeezes Joan’s arm affectionately. “Jack isn’t answering. He’s probably having dinner with his wife and kids. Let’s order dessert.”
“Don’t you have to call Cliff back?”
“After dessert, dear. If I call too soon, he’ll think I didn’t try hard enough,” Tug says with a wink.
A sudden jolt and violent shaking overtakes the building sending plates in the kitchen smashing to the floor. Windows shatter. Women scream. The ceiling buckles, sending slabs of plaster to the floor. Heavy chandeliers in the dining room swing wildly and crash to tables below. When the shaking starts, Tug grabs his wife, pulling her with him under the table.
A rolling wave passing through the ground follows the strong jolt of the quake. Tug thinks for a moment that he’s on a ship at sea. The rolling and shaking last a few violent seconds. All is quiet for a moment before the fire and security alarms in every building across the city go off. Seconds later, police and fire sirens blare. A massive earthquake has struck Washington, D.C.
Tug lifts his wife from beneath the table. The dining room looks like it was bombed. People rush for the exit. Some people limp from wounds. The air is full of dust. Chandeliers that haven’t fallen hang by thin wires. Large pieces of the ceiling are missing, exposing the rafters above. Tug holds Joan close. He leads the way carefully, allowing others to pass them to the crowded front doors.
They walk past a couple sitting motionless in their booth along the restaurant wall. A heavy wooden beam fell onto their table. The table gave way, severing the legs of the couple, as it crashed to the floor. Tug can tell by their skin color that the two are dead. Joan gasps at the sight. They look like nicely dressed ceramic dolls, sitting still and lifeless. Tug pulls his wife forward.
Tug Grimes is not one to panic. He is patient. People have jammed the doors of the restaurant. Tug hangs back. One beam has fallen, but the building is not collapsing. Tug hears a distant rumbling sound. The sound becomes a deafening roar. Joan looks at Tug with fear and horror in her eyes, as the front of the building explodes under the force of a tremendous gust of blazing hot wind sending their bodies flying across the shattered restaurant.
The wind strips the roof off the one-story brick building, flying away into the darkness. Bodies of people at the front of the restaurant explode with the glass and bricks. Tug loses his grip on Joan’s hand as the blast hurtles them through the air. Tug’s body hits the back wall of the restaurant as it collapses, cushioning his fall. Tables and chairs pile over him in a heap of debris. It’s over in seconds, but it takes the old military man a few minutes to push the pile of rubble off his body.
“Goddamn. That was a big one!” Tug says as he pushes a table off him. He tries to stand. His side hurts. “Ouch, damn it! Feels like I broke a few ribs.” He coughs, clutching his side.
The air is thick with dust.
“Joannie, where are you, girl?” he cries out. He hears a weak cry from under a jumble of tables, chairs, and accumulating dirt. Gritty dirt is everywhere piling up, deeper by the second. “Hold on. I’ll get you out of there,” Tug says, as he pulls furniture and bricks from the area where he hears his wife crying.
He pulls a chair from the pile and sees the dirty face of his wife. She’s in pain. When she spots her man, the grimace on her face becomes a shaky smile. “I think my arm is broken, but I guess I’m OK.”
Tug digs through the debris to get his Joannie free. She extends her good arm. He lifts her, putting an arm around her waist to steady her, as he tries not to show how much pain he is in. Blood drips down Joan’s dirty face from a cut on her forehead.
“Well, I must say, you’re a sturdy broad,” he says. Joan’s arm is in an unnatural position looking ghastly. A grisly bloody bone is sticking out. “You look all right, except that arm. We’d better get that fixed up. Can you walk?” Tug asks, helping his wife move through the debris. Tug coughs again, trying to ignore his pain.
Joan limps forward, held by her husband. “I don’t think I’ll recommend this restaurant to my friends.”
Tug smiles. That’s his girl. “What? It’s the perfect spot for an adventurous date.”
“I’ll admit, the service was explosive, but you never got your dessert.”
Tug holds his wife tighter. “I’m just glad we were together when whatever the hell this was happened.”
Tug stands under the dusty sky in the middle of what was one of the finest restaurants in Washington, DC. He looks around surveying the destruction and yells out, to no one in particular, “What in the hell just happened?”
As if in answer, Tug’s government-issued black SUV rolls up, stopping in front of the blown-out building. His driver steps over what remains of the brick wall that was the front of the restaurant, trudges through the debris, and makes his way to the Secretary of Defense and his wife.
“Are you all right, sir?” The driver asks as he rushes to help Tug with Mrs. Grimes.
“We’re alive, Dennis.” Tug notices his driver has made it through the explosive episode without a blemish. “My, don’t you look spiffy. How’d you get through this without a scratch?” “I parked in the structure down the street. The reinforced cement wall protected the SUV. Let me help you. We need to move; fallout is accumulating fast.”
They hobble out the front of the building and into the SUV. Tug and Dennis makes sure Joan is comfortable on the rear passenger seat. Tug gets in next to her. Dennis puts the SUV into four-wheel drive and gets the vehicle moving through the accumulating dirt.
Tug taps Dennis on the shoulder. “Get to the White House, pronto!”
The city is wrecked. The rock and brick facades of buildings have fallen, leaving heaps of debris scattered across sidewalks and into the streets. Gas mains are broken. Fires flare in hundreds of buildings. Police cruisers and fire trucks across the city get stuck in the gritty fallout, now a foot deep.
Tug surveys the damage. He hopes in the light of day it won’t be as bad as it looks now, but he knows he’s being optimistic. The city is in ruins. What was not blown over, now burns. The quake lasted only seconds. The city could have survived that. It was the super-heated blast of air, traveling five hundred miles per hour that blew this major world capital over like a stack of Jenga blocks.
Joan gazes at Tug’s rugged face. A face that remains calm and confident in the face of death and destruction. “Should you call Cliff, now?”
“I need information before I call. He’ll expect me to know what the hell happened.” Tug touches his band. No Service flashes. Tug leans forward to his driver. “Dennis, do you have the sat phone?”
Dennis pulls the sat phone from its charging cradle and hands it back. “Here you go, Mr. Secretary.”
Tug calls his office at the Pentagon. No one answers. Next, he calls the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Clive Armstrong. He doesn’t answer. He calls Jack Mahon again. No answer. Tug is getting pissed off. “Where the hell is everyone?” He calls The Watch, part of the State Department’s Operation Center and someone answers.
“Hello. This is Tug Grimes, Secretary of Defense. Do you folks know what the hell happened?”
“Mr. Secretary. We have reports of a massive explosion of undetermined origin, southwest of Baltimore BWI airport. I-95 North and the 495 Capital Beltway are closed or jammed. We have no additional information, sir.”
“That was one hell of an explosion. There was a major earthquake, followed by a high-speed air blast that ripped DC apart. There’s more than a foot of fallout covering everything. It will be tough for emergency vehicles to get around town. I saw burned bodies in the rubble. Check for radiation. Are we under attack? Who the hell would nuke us?”
“DC ripped apart, sir?”
“Buildings are down. Fires everywhere. The death toll will be huge. I’ve seen ordinance. Hell, I’ve had it fall all around me, but nothing like this. The city is ruined.”
“Sir, per our emergency protocol, I have sent an alert to all branches of the military, all security forces, Homeland Security, and FEMA, but I’m only getting a response from local authorities. I’ve checked, and our networks are intact. Cellular circuits are down, but satellite and fiber are up. No one is responding. It’s strange, sir.”
“Very strange. You and your team keep calling. I want you, or the officer in charge, to call me as soon as you have confirmation on what the hell caused the explosion. We are on high alert. Understood?”
Tug calls Cliff Baker’s office. The call takes longer to connect than normal, but Cliff answers. “Tug. What the hell was that?”
“I’m trying to get a handle on it, Mr. Vice President.” Tug updates the vice president on the information he has learned.
“What kind of explosion? It must have been huge. The White House shook like a baby rattle. Secret Service swooped in and moved us to PEOC. Come to the EBR when you arrive.” Cliff pauses for a moment and asks. “Were we attacked?”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was nuclear. My gut tells me it isn’t, but for the life of me I don’t know of any bomb, other than a nuke, that can cause the damage I’m seeing here. We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Can you have a medical team meet us? Joan is injured. There are other strange things going on. I think it’s best to discuss in private.”
