Dry Ice (3 page)

Inside the destroyed barn, both horses reared wildly, lashing out at the sides of their stalls in their panic to escape. Two of the three cows had managed to break the loose halter ropes tethering them to their spaces along the milking wall. Loose tools and equipment, now airborne, slammed into them, stabbing, gouging, buckling them, making the maddened thousand-pound beasts crash into walls as they did their best to stampede out of what was left of the barn. Maggie watched in horror as the Holsteins were lifted off their feet and slammed into the solid fieldstone back wall of the structure. Whether they were killed or just stunned, the fight in them died and the cows’ limp bodies were sucked into the furious sky. The third, her young, gentle Jersey, fought insanely against the rope that kept her in place until she, too, was picked up by the wind. The halter, the rope, and the ring it was attached to, embedded into the stone wall, held the frantic, flailing beast earthbound, but the wind would not surrender her. In disbelief, Maggie watched as the heifer’s head was ripped from its body. Blood and tissue spewed into the storm as the carcass was carried aloft. The head, held together by its halter, smashed over and over again into the wall like a gory tetherball.

A roar like that of a jet engine filled her ears as the center of the storm bore down on her, and the tree Maggie clung to began to shudder and rock. Closing her eyes, she tightened her grip, snaking her arms and legs around the massive trunk and holding on to it with every bit of strength and fear left in her. Her mind was numb, too stunned even for prayer.

The tree heaved with the wind, buckling the ground surrounding it, and then the huge gnarled roots beneath her snapped, reluctantly relinquishing their century-long claim on the earth. Maggie opened her mouth to scream. Choking clods of soil filled her mouth, stifling her. The wind held her fast against the tree. Breathing became nearly impossible. Then the massive elm heaved again and began to fall. The aching rasp of roots being ripped from the ground surrounded her. She burrowed her body into the tree as if desperate to become part of it as the tree rose, then crashed to the ground. It began to slide.

The shed-sized root ball, finally unconstrained, provided an irresistible challenge to the wall of air pushing against it. The elm began to pick up speed as it skimmed the ground with Maggie still clinging to it, an inconsequential payload on a surface-hugging missile.

The roar of the wind now overrode all other sound. Maggie felt a ferocious pain as her eardrums burst. Breathing was a herculean effort. Her fingers were numb from the intensity of their grip on the tree; the muscles in her arms and legs were on fire.

An errant lightning bolt struck the ground nearby. The tree split in a violent explosion of fire and wood that flung Maggie into the windstream. Her first sensation was a stabbing shock, her second a miraculous peace. No sharp tree bark against her abraded, bleeding skin, no throbbing pain. There was just the wind that carried her—

The impact when Maggie landed knocked all the breath, all the life from her body. For a moment, her corpse laid face up, draped limply over the low stone wall of the pasture nearest the house. Then Nature flipped the lifeless shell of battered flesh to the sodden ground, where it flailed erratically for a moment. The wind caught its most aerodynamic angle and sent it skidding across the muddy, puddled pasture, just another piece of debris.

CHAPTER
3

It had been just under three months since she’d been sworn into office, and President Helena Hernandez had finally gotten comfortable in the large oval room, if not the larger-than-life role. Navigating the debris-strewn trail of not-so-natural disasters left behind by her predecessor, Winslow Benson, was perilous enough; doing it as the first female
and
first Hispanic—and a
cubana
at that—president only made the journey that much more exciting. Terrifying, if she wanted to be completely honest, which was something she hadn’t been in decades, not since being sworn into her first term on the Miami-Dade school board thirty years ago.

Helena looked at her secretary, Maribeth Wonson, with a mix of confusion and disbelief. It wasn’t yet five o’clock on Thursday morning, but she’d gotten up and showered an hour ago, then had a live radio interview with a German journalist. She’d hoped to go back to bed for half an hour, but Maribeth’s words had just negated that.

“Say that again.” Helena sat back slowly in her chair—John F. Kennedy’s chair. It did make her back feel better. Not to mention what it did for her soul.

“The secretary of defense is on the phone. He’d like ten minutes.”

“What does he want to talk about?”

“Afghanistan. There’s been a setback.”

This was what Helena liked about Maribeth: her perpetual serenity, her utter unflappability. When Maribeth was around, it always seemed okay to stop for a deep breath in the face of dire news. The downside was that Maribeth’s face never revealed the true severity of a situation. The announcement of an imminent nuclear attack would likely be delivered in the same calm, quiet tone with the same pleasant smile.

Helena shifted her gaze from her secretary’s face to the fireplace opposite her desk and then along the smooth, curved expanse of the room’s pristine walls. Her eyes came to rest on the small modern bronze of Atlas that stood on a tall table outside the door to her private study. She’d asked for the sculpture to be placed there so she could remind herself that she was not the first person, nor would she be last, to feel as if she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She loved looking at it. The clean, hard lines of the Greek god’s straining muscles and tendons seemed to impart their strength to her. She welcomed it as she continually, privately reassured herself that her presence in this room, her right to occupy it, was more than a victory of class or race or gender. Being here was an honor, a privilege, and an immense obligation. Privately, she also knew it was a tribute to her tenacity.

Just being in this room soothed her, although everything she did here impressed itself heavily upon her mind, and frequently her soul, an immutable burden. Helena prayed daily for the strength of Atlas. She would need it when she took this call. Her secretary of defense was no trusted ally. His appointment had been her first surrender to the reality of Washington politics; his approach to life and war necessitated a blatant compromise of her core values. She considered his presence in her Cabinet an expedient, and politically necessary, evil.

Helena brought her gaze back to Maribeth. “When’s my next opening?”

“Now.”

With a minute nod of her head, Helena replied, “I’ll take the call.”

She picked up the handset of the secure phone on her desk and heard the operator announce her presence on the line.

“Good morning, Ms. President. Thank you for taking this call.”

“You’re welcome, Secretary Bonner,” she replied coolly. “What can I do for you?”

After a split second’s hesitation, the former admiral cleared his throat. “A freak storm in northeastern Afghanistan triggered huge floods in a remote valley. The region is sparsely populated, and the damage is somewhat contained, but the government is concerned that the region’s entire population may have been wiped out. It will impact the elections, ma’am.”

Just hearing the word made Helena’s eyes narrow. Delaying the elections was her SecDef’s highest priority—in direct contradiction to her own. She frowned. “Floods? Isn’t it still winter over there?”

“Yes, ma’am. We don’t have a lot of information yet, but it appears that there was some unseasonable high-altitude warming that triggered a critical melt of the glaciers in the northern border territory. Two mountain ranges surround a long, narrow valley. We’re still reviewing satellite data to get a better idea of what happened.”

“Where did it happen? I mean specifically.”

“The Wakhan Corridor.”

Helena felt her mood plummet further. The region was the only bright spot in that grim, decimated country.

“
Was” is right
. “What’s the situation on the ground?” she asked, picking up the fountain pen Maribeth always placed next to the phone. She uncapped it, drew a slash of blue on the memo pad nearby.

“It’s obvious from the latest satellite comms that entire villages have disappeared. The recon teams we deployed hit the ground a little while ago and the images they’re sending back show deep flows of mud and ice. None of the footage shows any survivors. Communications were wiped out.” He paused. “I’ve already spoken to President Wardak, and let him know that, at his request, we will deploy additional units to assist his personnel in the search-and-recovery efforts.”

“Thank you.”

“If I may, Ms. President, I’d like to remind you that all of the Americans in the region are civilians. Most of them are from Flint AgroChemical. Intelligence estimates indicate there could have been as many as thirty of them in the affected region when the storm hit.”

The president let out a long, silent breath. The secretary of defense’s effort to refrain from gloating was obvious. Helena could practically feel his joy and loathing through the phone, and she had to fight the urge to let him know the latter sentiment was mutual.

Her administration’s support of Flint’s innovative agricultural programs in several deeply rural areas of Afghanistan had infuriated and disgusted Secretary Bonner and caused their first serious clash only weeks after his rapid nomination and congressional confirmation as secretary. The Afghan upcountry hit by the flood was more politically stable than most regions in that ravaged country. Bonner viewed any nonmilitary involvement there as dangerous despite knowing that the local populations weren’t open supporters of the Taliban, and still lived a lifestyle more medieval than modern. He had been adamant that there was no reason to change that; bringing them into the twenty-first century would also bring them into the conflict, he’d argued. Providing new infrastructure and nurturing new wealth in the region in the form of crops and livelihoods would backfire by attracting the wrong element, and then his already stretched troops would have to be deployed to defend the long, treacherous, porous borders from newly interested parties, such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and opium traders.

The discussions had been unpleasant, but Helena had not been persuaded by his arguments.

“What else?” she asked tightly. “What about the elections?”

She heard murmurings on the other end of the call, as if he were speaking to someone not on the line. “Ms. President, President Wardak just announced that he has postponed the elections until the situation in the Wakhan is stabilized.”

“And how long will that be?” she snapped.

“He’s suggesting two months at the earliest, ma’am. Most likely it will take longer than that. The area is very remote, as I said, and earthquake-prone.”

Helena felt her temper rise and tamped it down before it shot to her tipping point. Two months would put the date of the elections right about at the time the military—
her
military commanders—had wanted them to take place.

How convenient. But how in the name of the Mother of God did he make it happen?

The thought startled her with its vehemence. She snapped abruptly upright in her chair.

Staring at Atlas, hard, Helena felt a cold finger of dread skitter across the back of her neck. Like people everywhere in the country—in the world—she’d heard the rumors about weather machines and rogue weather events after Hurricane Simone devastated the Eastern Seaboard and Katrina battered the Gulf Coast within months of each other.

The following year she’d gotten onto the House Intelligence Committee and had learned which of the scary, way-out-there stories were rumors and which were only called that to hide the eerie truth. In closed-door hearings, the committee had heard testimony that yes, Russia had had moderate success keeping rain from falling on their flamboyant May Day parades and that China, too, had been able to keep rain at bay to some degree during the Olympics. But the committee members had been assured by everyone who appeared before them that, despite small triumphs in line with what their Communist counterparts could do, the prospect of any nation using weather as a weapon was a far-off goal. Even the HAARP installation in Alaska, they’d been told, hadn’t been able to accomplish that.

However, those assurances had been made years ago, when the other side of the aisle controlled the White House—and the flow of information on the topic was controlled by none other than then-admiral Frederick Bonner, who had risen through the ranks of the Navy as an atmospheric scientist before setting his sights on the Pentagon’s E-ring. And since Helena had become president, there hadn’t been a reason to broach the subject of weather manipulation.

Until now.

“Secretary Bonner, you described this as a ‘freak storm,’” she said, scratching the words onto the memo pad.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And the region shares a border with China? I believe you called it ‘porous.’”

“Yes.”

“Could those things be connected in any way?”

His hesitation was slight, almost undetectable. Helena could picture the look of wary shock on his craggy, treacherous face. “Ma’am?”

“Would the Chinese stand to benefit from the destruction in this valley? Or from the elections being postponed?”

“Not that I’m aware of, ma’am.”

It was coldly gratifying to hear such caution in a voice that, moments ago, had to conceal its jubilation. “Check into it and report back to me.”

“You want me to— You think China did this? Made the storm?” he blustered.

Helena let a cold smile shape her mouth. “You sound incredulous. That I find disingenuous at best, considering your former job, Secretary Bonner.” She paused. “I don’t believe in coincidences. I would imagine you don’t, either. Weather manipulation has been discussed for decades, and the Chinese have been playing with the idea as long as we have. I want to know what your experts think about my question.”

“But—”