The Golden Hour (2 page)

KITTY HAWK, OUTER BANKS, NORTH CAROLINA

MONDAY, 5:42 A.M. EST (EASTERN STANDARD TIME)

It started, unsurprisingly, with the low buzz of a BlackBerry. Judd slowly opened one eye. The phone was lying facedown on the nightstand just six inches from his nose. Its little blinking green light, barely perceptible during the day, illuminated the pitch-dark room in half-second intervals.
So much for vacation.

He grabbed the vibrating phone and studied the caller ID. It was flashing “202” but nothing more. A scrambled number from Washington, D.C. He swung his legs off the bed and sat up. Stealing a quick glance to make sure Jessica was still sound asleep, he pushed the answer button with his thumb and whispered into the phone, “This is Ryker.”

“This is White House Operations. What is your confirmation code?” asked the robotic, clearly military voice on the line.

He paused. “Turquoise Mobutu Seven.”

“Good morning, Dr. Ryker. Embassy Bamako is reporting a probable coup overnight in Mali. As of oh five hundred, we have
no reports of violence, but there are military roadblocks around the city and the whereabouts of President Maiga are unknown.”

“Okay,” was all Judd could squeeze out, still shaking out the cobwebs.

“State is setting up a task force to run our policy response, and we should have a new Ops report in about an hour.”

Finally waking up, he asked, “Is it Diallo or Idrissa?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Who is behind the coup? Is it General Oumar Diallo or General Mamadou Idrissa?”

“We don’t know yet, sir. The ambassador and the station chief should have more information soon.”

“Okay, thanks for letting me know. Please tell Larissa James she can reach me on my phone if she wants my input as news rolls in.”

“Ambassador James is the one who asked us to bring you in. A car will be at your location at oh six hundred. They are twelve minutes out.”

He exhaled a deep breath, and sat up straight.

“If that’s your office, it better be goddamn important.” Jessica was awake. “Don’t they know it’s your first day of vacation in a whole year?”

Judd tried to tap her reassuringly, but unable to see in the dark, he just patted the blankets while speaking back into the phone. “Okay, thanks. I’ll look out for the car.” And he hung up.

“Car?”

“A coup in Mali. I can’t say any more. I, um, I don’t
know
any more. I’m sorry.” He got up and started to get dressed. “It
shouldn’t be more than a day or two. The kids won’t even notice that I’m gone.”

“I will,” snapped Jessica.

Judd clipped his BlackBerry onto his belt and picked up his go bag, which was already sitting by the door. He planted a long kiss on Jessica’s lips and then turned to leave.

“Don’t let Rogerson push you around,” she said. “Don’t let him fuck you again,” she added, stopping Judd in his tracks. He turned, gave her a slight, unconvincing nod, and then silently walked away.

As he stepped out of the rented beach house onto the sand driveway, he cursed himself for not setting up the coffeemaker to be ready for just such a possibility. Just as he considered going back in to make a quick double espresso, he saw four beaming headlights approaching in the dark, barreling up the driveway. An all-black Chevy Suburban rolled up and abruptly stopped beside him. A tall, thick man with short hair and a wire looped behind his ear silently exited the front of the vehicle, quickly surveyed the area, then opened the back door while removing the go bag from Judd’s grip.

Judd squinted at the bright lights from inside the cab. “Good morning, sir,” said a young man inside whom he didn’t recognize.

“Morning. We need to stop and get coffee.” He ducked his head and climbed in.

The security officer closed the door, stealing one more glance around, then slid into the car, which was already accelerating. Judd turned around in his seat and waved good-bye to Jessica.

From the bedroom window, she watched the behemoth and its lifeless blacked-out windows speed away.

NORTHBOUND I-95, NORTHERN VIRGINIA

MONDAY, 9:35 A.M. EST

Judd checked his watch. Nearly ten hours since the coup.

Judd had been on the phone and thumbing his BlackBerry since he left his family at the beach house.
Futility.

The conflicting rumors had been flying on the Internet like a desert wind funnel: President Maiga had been poisoned by the Saudis, al-Qaeda had attacked the palace, the whole coup was a hoax, the Algerians had sent a brigade over the border, the CIA had bundled Maiga into a car and driven him to a secret prison in Timbuktu, and . . .

Judd shook his head.
None of it can be true, of course.

The BlackBerry was hot in his hands. But it wasn’t yielding what Judd craved. For the real information, Judd knew he must wait until he got back to Washington. For the classified videoconference with the ambassador.

Things had been much easier, clearer, when he used to work with numbers. Hard data.
Instead he now received a steady stream of assessments. Best guesses, usually. Or, all too often, deliberate
misinformation.
Lies.
But he suppressed any thoughts of returning to his old life yet. No giving up.

Judd took off his glasses and dropped the BlackBerry in his lap as he tried to clear his head by staring out the window. He spied the road sign announcing their approach to the Beltway, the sixty-four-mile-long, eight-lane highway that encircled the nation’s capital. Inside this moat was the globe’s ultimate game of power and influence. To the outside world the key combatants were the public faces, the senators, the press secretaries, and the Sunday-morning TV talking heads. Inside the Beltway, the real action was a layer or two deeper among the Capitol Hill committee staffers, the K Street lobbyists, the wonks deep in the bowels of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Mostly unseen, they made the day-to-day decisions, wielding the power of the United States government.

How different from the genteel campus of Amherst College. Life had been good. Teaching two classes a week, running a small team of graduate students collecting data for his research on political conflict in South Asia and Africa, and taking long walks with his wife and their two young boys in the Berkshires. He’d been within a two-hour drive of his hometown in Vermont, his grandmother at the family house in Burlington, the ballgames at Fenway Park.

The call almost exactly one year ago, so early on a Saturday morning, should have been the first warning sign. . . .

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

ONE YEAR EARLIER

“Judd Ryker, this is Landon Parker, Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. I’m calling from Washington. I didn’t wake you, I hope?”

“Uh, no, of course not, Mr. Parker,” Judd lied. The alarm clock blinked a cherry-red 7:55.

“Let me get right to the point, Ryker. The Secretary’s policy planning staff is setting up a new rapid reaction unit inside the department. They have been impressed with your work on crisis response times, especially your conclusions about the Golden Hour. We’d like to bring you in for a briefing.”

Judd sat up. “Well, thank you. The new papers on Sri Lanka and Rwanda are only based on preliminary numbers, and haven’t even been published yet. I wouldn’t really call them conclusions. I should have firmer results late next year when all the data is back from Colombo and Kigali. The Golden Hour is still just a theory.”

“How about Monday, nine fifteen?”

“The day after tomorrow? In Washington?”

“Yes. Here at the State Department.”

“Well, I am supposed to teach a class that afternoon, but I can try to find someone to cover.”

“Good. See you Monday morning, Ryker. Someone will meet you in the lobby to clear you into the building and bring you up.” Click.

—

Forty-eight hours later, Judd was standing in Foggy Bottom, a soulless zone of bleak office buildings on the western edge of Washington, D.C. He was wearing his best navy blue business suit, although the slight fray in the cuffs and the distressed-leather satchel slung over his shoulder hinted at his academic vocation. His tousled brown hair and retro G-man glasses also exposed him as a mere visitor to this particular neighborhood. Jessica had examined his outfit as he left for the airport and proclaimed, with approval, that he was appropriately shabby and “nerd cute.”

Judd strolled up to the Harry S. Truman Federal Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of State, trying to suppress his unexpected nervousness. From the outside, the building appeared colossal, gray, and nondescript, hidden behind the gaudy American Pharmacists Association and the more elegant and subtle National Academy of Sciences.

As Judd stood on Constitution Avenue and looked up Twenty-second Street toward the security barriers, he realized that he had been standing in the same spot a few years earlier when he brought his kids to see the four-ton bronze Albert Einstein memorial. He hadn’t even noticed the State Department headquarters just half a block away.

After passing through airport-like security and a tedious ID check, he was given a bright orange badge emblazoned with
ESCORT REQUIRED
and was instructed to hang it on a chain around his neck. Once inside the lobby, he recognized the nearly two hundred flags from watching the nightly news.

An elderly heavyset woman with a long gray ponytail, who reminded Judd of the grumpy librarian at his elementary school in Vermont, approached him. “Dr. Ryker? I can take you up to the conference room.”

In the elevator, Judd flipped through the charts he had printed out and ran through his presentation in his head. He had told this story a hundred times in seminars and over departmental dinners, but for some reason his palms were sweating. The elevator doors opened, and he was led down a long and drab hallway of flickering fluorescent lights to a door labeled 7-4504. The escort turned the handle and motioned for him to enter. “I’ll wait for you here.” Judd paused and took a deep breath.
I can do this.
Then he stepped inside.

It was like a portal to another world. The brightly lit conference room had dark cherrywood paneling with a bank of six large flat-panel monitors along one wall.
Just like in the movies.
About a dozen men and women, all in dark suits, were sitting in high-backed leather chairs around the table. Behind them, in a concentric ring, sat younger suits, reading papers or thumbing dials on their mobile phones.
They look like my students.

No one said a word to Judd or even acknowledged his arrival. He took an empty seat at the table and waited.

A minute later, at exactly nine fifteen, a tall man walked in
briskly from a side door. He was in his late thirties and had small round glasses and short-cropped hair. Immediately, the room went silent and the man nodded to no one in general, and then approached Judd.

“Ryker, I’m Landon Parker. Thanks for coming in. We’ve got no more than ten minutes, so I’ll spare introductions. You’ve got the Secretary’s planning staff here, plus the heads of each of the major regional and functional offices.”

Parker turned to the others. “Folks, this is Professor Judd Ryker from Amherst College.”

Back to Judd. “Okay, Ryker. The floor is yours. Take three or four minutes to leave time for questions.”

“I’ll try to make this quick. Thank you, Mr. Parker, for asking me to come here today.” Judd stood up for emphasis. “In emergency medicine, a trauma patient’s chances of survival are greatest if they receive professional care in the hospital within sixty minutes after a severe multisystem injury. This is known as the Golden Hour.”

Judd scanned the room, hoping for hints of recognition. Nothing. He continued, “Although there is some debate about the precise length of time of the Golden Hour, the principle of rapid intervention in trauma cases is universally accepted. If you don’t get help very quickly, you die. It’s that simple.” Judd nodded, but still no reaction from the audience.

“I believe we have found the same principle to apply to international political trauma. We can’t run experiments in a lab, but we can pick up patterns in the data. The numbers can tell us.” Pause.
My undergrads love that line.

Judd waved his arms as he got more excited. “Using data over the past forty years, we studied two hundred thirty cases of political crisis in low- and middle-income countries. We found that the probability of resolution declines significantly over time. In fact, time is more dominant in the statistical analysis than ethnic cleavages, type of regime, or the other standard political variables.” Judd waited a moment, to give the crowd time to let that settle in.
Am I losing them?

“Most interesting, the time-resolution correlation is not linear. In plain English, this means we have found clear tipping points in time. For the outbreak of a civil war, the critical period is about thirteen or fourteen days. After two weeks, the chances of a speedy resolution decline by more than half. Similarly, if an illegal seizure of power by the military is not reversed within about four days, the chances of reversal over the next year drop by eighty percent.” Judd paused for effect. “In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the Golden Hour for a coup d’état is just one hundred hours.”

Satisfyingly, this led to murmuring and scribbling among the crowd.

“I must stress that these results are still preliminary, and I have teams in Asia and Africa collecting additional data.”
Caveats. I have a reputation to protect.

“Are you finding differences across regions? Is Africa different from south Asia, or are they all pretty much the same?” asked one of those seated at the table, without identifying himself.

“No, we haven’t found any of the regional variables to be statistically significant,” responded Judd.

“Did anything change with the end of the Cold War or 9/11?”

“Good question. We haven’t broken the data into periods. We could try that. I just don’t know.”

“What is driving the results on coups? How can you explain what’s so special about timing? I understand the idea of a Golden Hour, but why does it exist?”

“We don’t really know. We can theorize that it probably has something to do with the dynamics of consolidating power after seizure. The coup makers must line up the rest of the security forces and maybe buy off parliament and other local political leaders before those loyal to the deposed president are able to react and countermove. It’s a race for influence. But these are just hypotheses.”

“What about international intervention? Does it matter if an external force gets involved diplomatically?” asked one staffer.

“Or militarily?” interjected another.

“We don’t have classifications for intervention, so it’s not in there,” replied Judd. “The numbers can’t tell us. So, we don’t know. I guess we could—”

Parker interrupted abruptly. “But in your expert opinion, Ryker, does it matter? Would it make a difference? Does the United States need to find ways to intervene more rapidly in emerging crises in the developing world? Can we prevent more wars and coups by reacting more quickly?”

Judd looked around the room at all the eyes locked on him.
My numbers don’t answer that question. Isn’t that what you guys are here for?

But instead he sat up straight, turned to look Landon Parker directly in the eyes, and said simply, “Yes.”

—

And that was it. A few thank-yous and handshakes, and everyone left. Judd’s escort took him down the same elevator and out to the lobby. He dropped his orange security badge into a clear plastic container with a slot at the top, not too dissimilar from the ballot boxes he’d seen used for voting in Nigeria. He walked back down Twenty-second Street for one more look at Einstein and to hail a cab.

The return trip to Ronald Reagan National Airport was only seven minutes. He might even catch an earlier shuttle back to Logan. As the taxi drove behind the Lincoln Memorial and over a bridge, he thought he might just make it back to Amherst in time for class.

Once in Virginia, the cab looped around and headed south, down the George Washington Parkway along the Potomac River. Judd looked over the water at the Washington Monument. For a brief flash, between the trees, he could even make out the Capitol building off in the distance.

The park along the riverbank was mostly empty, save a few joggers and an attractive young woman walking a yellow Labrador. Behind the dog walker, two dark green army helicopters in tight formation banked sharply over the river, then turned to the west and flew directly over Judd’s taxi. Turning in his seat to follow their course, he noticed, sitting low and squat, a colossal stone-colored office building surrounded by an ocean of parked cars. The Pentagon.

The exit for Reagan was almost immediate. As he stood in
the security line and waited to take off his shoes, he wondered whether any of this was worth it.
All this effort for ten minutes in a conference room?

Settling into a chair in the departure lounge, he was reminded of his old professor and advisor, BJ van Hollen, who had urged him to take an interest in public service. His mentor had even offered to help Judd find a good job inside the U.S. government applying his analytical skills to solving real-world puzzles. Professor van Hollen had been openly disappointed when Judd opted for the academic life.

At least I have a good story for BJ. He’ll be impressed the State Department called me. Why not?

Judd pulled out his phone and dialed a number. After several rings, a weak raspy voice answered, “Huuhh-looooo?”

“BJ? Is that you?”

“Yes,” was the soft reply, followed by a series of coughs so loud and violent that Judd was forced to hold the phone away from his ear. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Judd. Sorry to call you out of the blue. You sound terrible.”

“I know. I’ve been a little sick.”

“I didn’t know. Is it serious?”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. And don’t say anything to Jessica. It’ll just worry her. We don’t need that.”

“Guess where I am.”

“Here in California?”

“No. Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m in Washington, D.C. I just finished briefing the State Department on my conflict metrics.”

“Oh, really? That’s excellent news.”

“They called me.”

“It’s about time, too. I’m very proud. I’m sure Jessica is very proud.”

“They were really interested in the Golden Hour. Asked lots of tough questions. I just thought you’d be pleased I was helping do something real.”

“I am,” said van Hollen before unleashing another barrage of coughs.

“BJ, you sound like you’re dying. I hope you’re seeing a doctor.”

“At my age, I’m seeing too many doctors. I’m tired of it. Judd, congratulations on the State Department. I’m sure they appreciated your help. And thank you for letting me know. Is Jessica with you?”

“No. She’s home with the kids.”

“Is she working again?”

“A bit. She took time off when Noah was born and all the travel became too much. But she’s starting to work again. A coffee project in Ethiopia and rice somewhere in southeast Asia, I think. I’m never sure where’s she’s going. I can never keep track.”

“Good for her,” he said, sounding increasingly weakened. “I’ve got to get off the phone now. I’m sorry. Send my love to Jessica.”

“I will. Thanks. And good-bye, BJ.”

“Good-bye, Judd. Au revoir.”

Judd slumped back into the airport chair. Satisfied the day wasn’t a total loss, he relaxed, half reading through some papers he was supposed to be grading and half scanning the crowds for George Stephanopoulos or David Gergen.

Judd’s flight was finally called, and he stood in line again,
waiting to board. As he approached the front to hand over his ticket, his phone rang. The caller ID flashed “202” with no other numbers.
How odd,
he thought. Handing his ticket to the attendant, and trying not to drop all the papers, he wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder.

“Uh, hello?”

“Ryker, this is Landon Parker. That was impressive. Especially the Golden Hour for a coup and the hundred-hour thing. Very illuminating. And timely, too. The Secretary is in Brussels today for the NATO summit and will be announcing a new State Department Crisis Reaction Unit. She is also going to announce the director who will launch and lead this effort. That person is you. Ryker, do not get on that plane.”