Situation Room. Jack Mars

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СКАЧАТЬ knew the place. When Susan was Vice President, the large sunlit chamber had been her conference room. In the days after she took the oath of office, it rapidly transformed into an on-the-fly Situation Room.

      It had been formalized, too. Modular walls ran the length of the room, covering the old windows. Giant flat-panel video screens had been mounted at five-foot intervals. A larger oak conference table had been brought in, and on the wall behind the head of it was the Seal of the President. There were about two dozen people inside when Luke and Kat walked in, a dozen at the conference table, and more in chairs lining the walls.

      The gender change was evident here as well. Luke remembered sitting in here being briefed about the missing Ebola sample two months ago. Of the thirty people in the room at that time, Susan might have been the only woman. Twenty-nine men, half of them big and burly, and one small woman.

      Now maybe half the people were women.

      Susan rose from the head of the table when Luke walked in. She was different, too. Harder, perhaps. Thinner than before. She had been a fashion model in her earlier life, and she had carried baby fat on her cheeks right into middle age. That was gone now, and she seemed to have developed crow’s feet around her eyes almost overnight. The bright eyes themselves seemed more focused, like laser beams. She had spent her entire life as the most beautiful woman in the room – by the time this presidency was over, that might no longer be the case.

      “Agent Stone,” she said. “I’m glad you could join us.”

      He smiled. “Madam President. Please. Call me Luke.”

      She didn’t return the smile. “Thank you for coming.”

      Standing at one of the large screens was Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor. Luke had met him once before. He was tall with broad shoulders. His head was perfectly bald.

      Kimball offered him a handshake. If Kat Lopez’s shake was firm, Kurt Kimball’s was granite. “Luke, good to see you.”

      “Kurt, likewise.”

      The atmosphere was tense. These people hadn’t spent the past two months camping and sailing. Even so, Luke had flown down here from Maine at a moment’s notice, and dropped his son off with his angry, soon to be ex-wife, who saw all of this as reinforcement of the reasons she was divorcing him. You might think they’d offer him a little more warmth.

      He decided to go with the flow. Hundreds of people had died this morning, and the people in this room, as least, thought it was a terrorist attack.

      “Shall we get down to it?” he said.

      “Please have a seat,” Kimball said.

      A seat at Susan’s right flank had miraculously appeared, and Luke took it.

      On the screen, a photo of a large dam appeared. Large wasn’t quite the word. Massive was more to the point. A six-story building sat in front of the dam, the control center, with six partially open floodgates below it. The building was dwarfed by the dam rising behind it. Along the edge was a hydroelectric power generating station with row after row after row of transformers.

      “Luke, this is Black Rock Dam,” Kurt Kimball said. “It is approximately fifty stories tall and impounds Black Rock Lake, which is sixteen miles long, four hundred feet deep, and at any given time holds about ten billion cubic feet of water. As you probably saw on the news, just after seven a.m. this morning, the six floodgates you see along the bottom opened fully, and remained locked open for three and a half hours, until technicians could de-couple them from the computer system that operates them, and finally close them manually.”

      Kimball used a laser pointer to indicate the floodgates.

      “If you look at the gates in relation to the building, you will see that they are quite large. Each one is ten meters tall, which means that six three-story-high jets of water were released all at once. The water pressure of Black Rock Lake sent the flood downstream at approximately twenty miles per hour, which doesn’t sound all that fast until you’re standing in front of it. Until this morning, the Black Rock Resort stood three miles south of the dam. The resort was made almost entirely of wood. The initial wall of water completely destroyed the resort, and as far as we know, the only survivors were a handful of people who left early to hike to the top of the dam, or to take drives on nearby scenic roads.”

      “How many people were staying at the resort?” Luke said.

      “There were two hundred and eighty-one guests listed in their online reservations system. Perhaps twenty of them either left the resort before the flood, or never arrived there for one reason or another. All of the others were swept away and are assumed dead. Combined with other disasters downstream, it will be several days before we have any kind of accurate body count.”

      Luke got that odd familiar feeling. It returned like an old friend, one that you hadn’t seen in a while and were hoping not to see anymore. It came as a sickness in the pit of his stomach. It was death, the deaths of innocent people, minding their own business. Luke had dealt with it for far too long.

      “Did anyone try to warn them?” he said.

      Kimball nodded. “Workers in the dam’s control center called the resort on the phone as soon as they realized the floodgates were open, but apparently the flood had already reached there by the time they got in touch with anyone. Someone did pick up, but the conversation ended almost immediately.”

      “Jesus. And what were the disasters downstream you mentioned?”

      A map appeared on the screen. It showed the lake, the dam, the resort, and additional towns nearby. Kimball indicated a town. “The town of Sargent lies another sixteen miles south of the resort. It’s a town of twenty-three hundred people, and a gateway for visitors to the National Park. Most of Sargent is situated on a small hill, and the town received slightly more warning than the resort. They got enough warning, in fact, that the town emergency sirens sounded before the flood came. With an added sixteen miles to travel, the floodwaters hit with somewhat less force in Sargent, and many of the houses and buildings in town withstood the initial force of the flood and were not washed away. Many of the low-lying houses were, however, quickly inundated. More than four hundred people from Sargent are currently missing and presumed dead.”

      Luke stared at the screen as Kimball’s laser pointer fell on the towns of Sapphire, Greenwood, and Kent, each one somewhat farther from the dam than the one before, and each one the site of a disaster in its own right. The scale of it was devastating, and although the floodgates were closed, the flood itself was going to continue traveling south and downhill for the next several days. Two dozen towns had been evacuated, but more fatalities were practically guaranteed. Some people in remote areas wouldn’t leave, or couldn’t.

      “And you think hackers did this? How is that possible?”

      Kimball glanced around the room. “Does everyone here have clearance to hear this next part? Can we please sweep anyone out who doesn’t have clearance?”

      Low murmuring went around the room, but no one moved. “Okay, I’m going to assume that anyone here belongs here. If not, it’s your ass. Remember that.”

      He turned back to Luke.

      “The dam was built in 1943 to generate much-needed electricity during the war. It was built and is operated to this day by the Tennessee Valley Authority. For most of the dam’s life, the floodgates were operated by controls less sophisticated than your garage door opener. About twenty years ago, TVA started looking at ways to save money by automating their dams. Control centers СКАЧАТЬ