Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (7 page)

“Sergeant Berry, please have a seat. Arthur, you want to stay after all?”

As Berry sat next to him, Adamson fixed him with a glare so icy that the sergeant would have soiled his uniform pants if he had been doing anything other than staring straight ahead like a deer in front of the most powerful headlights in the world. “Madam President, I believe that I will be of use in this conversation.”

“Excellent!” the President said, and then continued to her Science undersecretary, “Please forgive the interruption, Bob. Let’s finish your briefing, and then we can have our brainstorming session.”

Nye nodded and picked up where he had left off, talking about the frequency of any electromagnetic wave that would disperse in such a pattern. Even though she couldn’t hear it, Hampton knew, she just
knew
, that half the occupants of the room were thinking something nasty about a President who started out as a high school teacher and “community organizer” and was now showing her faith in hippie techniques like brainstorming. She was the widow of a war hero and senator, but she was still the epitome of touchy-feely to her opponents, as well as to many of her supporters.

There was nothing funny about 400 million deaths, but there was definitely something amusing about twenty Masters of the Universe sitting at a table and grumbling because they were going to have to
think
in front of their peers. It was like teaching school all over again.

***

The brainstorming session resulted in a list on the room’s huge whiteboard. No ideas were rejected out of hand, although scoffing noises could be heard from the Vice President following any suggestion that did not include the words “terrorist attack”:

•                 
  Cthulhu
  
•                 
  Solar activity
  
•                 
  Mini black hole
  
•                 
  Radioactive meteor
  
•                 
  Terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Muslim terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Russian terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Chinese terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Possibly Chechen terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Accidental nuclear weapon explosion
  
•                 
  Intentional nuclear weapon explosion
  
•                 
  Ozone depletion
  
•                 
  Alien attack (non-Cthulhu)
  
•                 
  Spontaneous radiation discharge
  
•                 
  Mad scientist
  
•                 
  Superbloop
  
•                 
  Magic
  

After a bit of back and forth between several impromptu factions over how “magic” would be defined, the list was whittled down in Phase II of the exercise to just four options, plus two that President Hampton told everyone not to consider, since they were added during a break by Vice President Steele:

•                 
  Intentional or accidental nuclear explosion
  
•                 
  Terrorist attack
  
•                 
  Superbloop
  
•                 
  Cthulhu
  
•                 
  Russia or China
  (crossed out by Steele)
  
•                 
  Russia
  AND
  China (emphasis Steele’s)
  

Since Navy Secretary Admiral Benjamin Harper had dichotomized the “nuclear explosion” concept to the deliberate explosion of a nuclear warhead (which could have been a test which no one had been told about) or the accidental explosion of an unidentified nuke-powered ship or submarine, the President asked the Admiral, “Could a nuclear explosion cause this number of casualties? And these
types
of casualties? Your frank assessment, please, Ben.”

The Navy secretary answered truthfully and immediately. “No, Madam President. The
Tsar Bomba
, a weapon tested only once by the Soviets in 1961, produced the biggest explosion in history. It was a bit more than 50 megatons. It ripped stone roofs off houses in villages 100 miles away and disrupted radio broadcasts all over the world for almost an hour.”

The President and most of the military chiefs and advisors in the room nodded soberly at this information, some of them already knowing the details of the famous test and some, like the President, only learning them now. Hampton broke the silence: “Roofs off of houses in the Russian steppes. Static on radios. Lots of heat and destruction over what, a hundred-mile radius?”

The Admiral said, “Give or take a few.”

She nodded again. “What about beyond that? Anybody get, I don’t know, nosebleeds five thousand miles away? Any mass deaths from aneurysms?”

“No,” he said. “I was merely putting it forth in the spirit of our brainstorming session.”

“Very good—exactly what we need to make brainstorming a success, actually. Some of these ideas will peter out when we try to expand on them. Some will appear stronger the more we discuss them,” the President said, obviously using language she had used in her (some grumbled to themselves) hippie-dippie Montessori teaching days. “So every idea is a good one, Mister Secretary. Thank you for the contribution.”

Since the Secretary of Homeland Security had—second only to the Vice President—most strongly supported the “terrorist” angle, the President asked her, “Teresa, what could possibly be the point of this kind of attack by terrorist groups?”

Secretary Farr was ready for the question, but perhaps not as sure-footed in her answer as the Admiral had been. “The point of terror attacks may not be to kill the most people,” she said, knowing that this was a fact of which everyone in the room was familiar, but she had to add the corollary: “As their name implies, their actions are made to induce terror among whomever they are targeting. Make them paranoid and willing to give away their own freedoms in exchange for security. I know it may seem a bit ironic—”

“‘Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither,’” interjected the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. “Abraham Lincoln said that.”

The President said, “Actually, it was
Benjamin Franklin
who said, ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’”

The congressman wanted to say,
Actually, you can go fuck yourself
.

Secretary Farr ignored the evil eye that the congressman was trying to sear the President with and continued, “I know it may seem a bit ironic that the head of the Department of Homeland Security is talking about terrorists causing a public overreaction and freedoms being curtailed in the name of security, but an event of this magnitude calls for clear-eyed analysis.”

“Agreed,” the President said. “So why would terrorists do this? Causing panic and loss of freedoms was the aim of 9/11, of the 7/7 London underground attack. Of car bombs that kill a hundred people at most. What’s the point of killing
400 million
people, for God’s sake?”

“It would be to achieve the same ends, but on a much bigger scale, of course. I mean, I could see the Palestinians doing this to force the Israelis into giving back the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, maybe the Chechens, something global like that.”

“Then why wouldn’t they try to strike their enemies directly? Because their weapon was
too
powerful?”

“That’s a possibility,” Farr said, but didn’t sound convinced herself. “However, Madam President, Admiral, General … no terrorist could even in theory possess this powerful of a weapon. Heck, no
nation
has this kind of weapon.
We
certainly don’t. I can’t see twenty allegedly oppressed ethnic minority group members having the resources to even take down another skyscraper anywhere in the world, let alone to somehow create an explosion
millions
of times stronger than the biggest bomb ever exploded. Also, nuclear radiation doesn’t instantly wrap around the surface of the world like this. It’s not any kind of bomb I’ve ever heard of.”

As the words
I’ve ever heard of
sank in to the men and women around the table, all eyes turned to Marine Corps Major General Jack Patterson, head of the NSA. The man in charge of The Shadow Factory itself.

The President said gently but with authority, “Jack? Anything you care to share with us? I believe everyone here is cleared above top secret.”

Patterson motioned to indicate Sergeant Berry and also the new A/V technician. “Not everyone,” he said.

Adamson asked the tech and Sergeant Berry to please step out for a moment, along with the staff members who lined the walls in anticipation of their bosses’ needs. They all moved toward the door, but the President held up a hand to Berry before he could get up from his seat and said, “Sergeant, if you would stay, please.”

“I-I’m not cleared for—”

“He’s correct, Madam President,” Adamson said. “Enlisted personnel are not cleared for top secret or above.”

“I see. General Adamson, General Patterson, what is the beginning rank for officers in the Marine Corps?”

“Second Lieutenant,” they said almost in unison.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Sergeant Berry, I am giving you a field commission. You are now Second Lieutenant Berry. I’ll take care of the paperwork later, but can we get him his new uniforms and such?” She waited for a nod from the head of the Marines, then turned to Berry again and said, “Have a seat, Lieutenant.”

When the staff members and enlisted men and women had all filed out, Hampton turned again to the NSA chief. “Well, Jack? Is there anything like this bomb in our arsenal? Or anyone else’s arsenal?”

With something of a dramatic pause—the NSA was used to collecting information, not disseminating it—General Patterson shook his head and said, “No, Madam President, there is not, neither in ours nor in anyone else’s. But there’s a good reason for that.”

That perked up everyone’s ears. After a few seconds, the President said, “And that reason is … ?”

“It’s
impossible
. Radiation travels in a straight line—in other words, it
radiates
,” he said, meeting the eyes of the President and her military chiefs. “I suppose sufficiently strong radiation from some kind of superbomb—something
much
stronger than anything ever even conceived of—could go
through
the Earth, but it couldn’t wrap around the planet like an armada of ships traveling the oceans.”

The President, used to being in control of conversations since her teaching days, could not help herself from saying, “So, it’s
impossible
. Meaning those millions of people are no longer dead.”

“I said such a
bomb
was impossible, Madam President. Obviously it happened, so it’s not only possible—it’s actual.” Patterson looked again at the Joint Chiefs and their leader. “To repeat my answer to the President’s question, gentlemen: Whatever this Event was, it was not crafted or executed by human hands. It was no bomb and no nuclear accident. It is something entirely new to our experience, almost an extinction event, but one about which the National Security Agency has never thought to run simulations or worked out a contingency plan as we have with killer meteors, nuclear war, runaway pandemics. The singularity of this Event makes a zombie apocalypse look like a stone-cold–sober eschatological possibility.”

The room fell silent once again. Everyone knew that the two most familiar—the two most plausible—the two most actionable, we-can-do-something-about-this—theories had been thoroughly shot down. It was not a bomb, and it was not a nuclear explosion of any kind. The President removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I suggest a short recess, people. My brain is about to boggle right out of my skull.”

***

Fifteen minutes passed, during which almost no words were spoken; then it was back to business. “Doctor Tyson,” the President said, “you suggested during our brainstorming session that this could be some kind of ‘Superbloop.’”

Tyson nodded, looking to all the room that he wished to hell he hadn’t.

“What would cause such a thing? Extra-strong glacial movement? Could that cause such a weird radiation output? I mean, if it’s even radiation at all?”

“To be completely honest, I don’t know. Bob and I put out some feelers during the break to various scientific entities entrusted with studying the weirdest possible situations. These are
scientists
, mind you, Madam President, men and women who are as meticulous in their research methods as anyone in the world.”

“I don’t know if I like this preamble.” There were a few laughs in the room, including from Tyson and Nye.