Part Twelve - Senior Year, Spring Semester
Spring of 2001 started out about the same as any other, except that we knew our time with CARP was coming to an end and that we were going to go out into the real world within just a few months. Everything was right on the precipice of our adulthoods getting started.
The offer for the house in Woodside Glen had gone through, and so our overly large collective family would have a location waiting for us when we graduated. On the weekends, we'd go to make repairs and adjustments, to install new carpeting, to do repairs to the fences, to replace the plumbing and just generally decorate the house. None of us had any furniture to call our own, having lived in te dorms for so long, and suddenly we had a whole house we needed to fill, even if we weren't allowed to live in it until after we'd graduated.
By this point, CARP was starting to feel a little oppressive. We all could feel the firm hand of Dr. Igarashi pushing us towards the final steps she thought we should be taking. I was surprised at how much influence the good doctor was exerting on where people were considering going and what they were considering doing.
I've talked to a lot of college students in the intervening years, and most of them tell me how during the last few months of their final semester, a sense of fear creeps in, the openness of their options almost terrifying in how unguided it is.
We at CARP felt exactly the opposite.
Most students had interviews set up at one of half a dozen or so companies, usually guided there by Dr. Igarashi. A handful of students had been pushing hard to make sure the good doctor didn't have total control of their lives, wanting to live and work in certain parts of the world that Dr. Igarashi didn't think were the best fits for them. It was, perhaps, the most frustrating that I'd seen for the CARP populace overall, but in the end, it was difficult to argue with the doctor's experience and wisdom.
One of the people who won out against Dr. Igarashi was Brianna. The good doctor wanted her, and by extension me as well as both my and Bri's partners, to relocate to Washington, D.C. It was a decision that we would make as a family, and one we revisited just a few shorts years later when Bri was called to take on the role of the ambassador to France, our first overseas posting. We'd be there for a couple of years before coming back to the US for a couple more and then being given our most recent posting of Ambassador to China, where we've been for the last few years. When the attacks started on previous graduates of CARP, we returned to the States, to get ourselves better situated in a defensible position. While we didn't feel like China was behind the attacks on the former CARP students, we couldn't really be sure.
Yes yes, I'm dodging around what you really wanted to talk about, the failure in your operations that lead to Bridgepocalypse. I wish I could tell you that if Agent Shetterly had listened to me more closely, we wouldn't have had that incident, but honestly, I consider myself one of the smartest people in almost any room I walk into, and I certainly didn't see it coming.
I'll walk you through how I first heard about it, which, I imagine, is how most people did. On March 15, 2001, Julia shook me awake out of bed and told me something horrible had happened and that I needed to come see it on television.
This was, of course, the destruction of the George Washington Bridge, connecting New York and New Jersey. They were already estimating casualties to be in the thousands. Large foundational charges had been set up sometime the night before, and the upper level had collapsed onto the lower level, and parts of the lower level had collapsed into the Hudson River. It was clearly a terrorist attack, and the deadliest one in our nation's history.
And it was only the beginning of that long and terrible day.
We'd only been awake for maybe five minutes after the GW Bridge had collapsed when the news cut from the east coast to the west coast, where a car bomb had detonated in the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge right in our very own Bay Area, and while firefighters had rushed to quell the problem, there was now a giant 100-foot hole in the bridge, stopping traffic from going either way.
That was the point I began to get worried. It was starting to ring bells in my head for a project I hadn't thought about in years. Will Bierko's freshman year study project had been about what he called Linchpin Theory, how any system anywhere in the world was always flawed by the number of vulnerable points it had, and how few redundancies it had to correct for those vulnerabilities. His example, sadly, had been the bridges in the United States. Despite the constant uses our bridges are under - do you know more than a million vehicles a day travel over a bridge in the United States? - they are woeful states of disrepair, and when it comes to fragile linchpins in our nation's infrastructure, they were, as Will identified, the easiest ones to disrupt.
I'm sure Julia, Abi and Chelsea thought I was insane as I ran from the television to my desk and opened up my filing cabinet. Sure enough, just where I'd left it was a copy of Will Bierko's freshman thesis paper, including the most important bridges to target, and the ones that would just be for show, to make a visual splash. Looking through Will's research, I remember saying out loud, "They're going to cut to Ohio any second now."
"What are you talking about, Josh?" Julia asked me.
"I... I know what this is..." I said, and just as I'd predicted, the news channel said it needed to cut to another report of another bridge being attacked, and that was the Brent Spence Bridge, connecting Ohio with Kentucky, one of the most active bridges in the United States in terms of freight. "This... this is Will's freshman big idea paper. It's going to be somewhere between ten and twenty bridges total, and it's going to bring commerce to a fucking standstill in this country for months."
Over the course of the next two hours, it turned out to be fifteen bridges across the continental United States, and it was estimated to cost over three trillion in damages to the United States economy, as it took most of the next year to rebuild the core transportation arteries.
The thing Will had pointed out in his paper was that the interior of this country is
fragile
.
It wouldn't be hard to bring it to its knees for a while with just a couple of key strikes, and if you went even just a little bit further, it would make it even harder. With fifteen bridges being out of commission, the amount of freight being moved around the inside of America was brought to a standstill. Everything had to be rerouted, and some heavily trafficked areas were suddenly almost inaccessible due to the surviving roadways being congested to death.
One thing that was a little surprising was how low the casualties were. There had been a concerted effort to get people to move away from the bomb areas a minute or two before they'd blown by pumping out flumes of smoke, enough time for cars to stop and not get near the sections that would collapse. They weren't entirely casualty free, obviously, but it was clear an effort had been made, because all of the sections of the bridges were destroyed within the span of 90 minutes, and each had a couple of minutes of warning smoke before they went, even as early as the first bridge.
That said, as the bridges continued to fall, I realized that the five sheets of paper I held in my hand with Will's paper on them were now the most radioactive things on the planet.
It wasn't just the fact that Will had listed out the bridges and that his list and the bridges that had been hit were a near perfect match, or that Will had documented how to best ensure how to keep casualties low, a procedure that include just a couple of minutes of warning - long enough for people to pull back, but not long enough for them to interrupt things - it was the fact that it was
fifteen people
.
The exact number of students who hadn't returned for their final year of CARP.
I needed to contact Agent Shetterly, but I didn't trust the phones on campus, nor did I have any faith in my new flip cell phone being safe. And the last thing I wanted to do was be seen reaching out to the FBI on that day.
The nation was in shock, and classes were cancelled for that day and the next day, simply because the wall-to-wall news coverage was relentless. Three different terrorist groups tried to claim credit for the attacks, but come Monday, the President got on television and informed the American public that the attack had been perpetrated by a group of radical Japanese cultists who believed the end of the world was nearly upon us, and they needed to shock America into waking up. They were called Zero Tomorrow. According to the President's speech, they had been 'dealt with' and no further attacks would be forthcoming, but information about the group was sketchy at best, and the President stated that they wanted to be in a state of heightened awareness regarding all the nation's transportation.
For the next six months, the news coverage seemed to focus on two things exclusively - The Great Rebuilding and The War On Cults.
The War On Cults was an insane pursuit for the next year, because as much the press tried to make a feast out of it, it was really barely a snack. There had been a growing concern about cults, both in America and worldwide, since the late eighties and early nineties, but nothing had ever truly gotten completely out of hand, so they'd been mostly sliding underneath the radar apart from things like the Branch Davidians and the Heaven's Gate cult that simply caught the public eye for whatever reason. But now? Now the nation was in full-fledged cult hunt mode in a way that the nation hadn't seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
In a refreshing change of pace, the country didn't seem to get too tangled up in the fact that Zero Tomorrow had been a Japanese cult, and so the hunt for extremists somehow managed to generally avoid taking on a racist tilt, at least in the aggregate. The cults the government was working to deal with were doomsday cults, a bunch of them tied to the upcoming end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, despite the fact that any scientist with half a brain and half an hour worth of research could disprove the nonsense.
People, it seems, are hardwired to expect the end of the world, despite the fact that it's never happened, which is the thing that always amused me the most. When it comes to life after death, sure, I can accept and understand where people might make those jumps, but this unshakable belief that the end of the world is coming? I still don't understand it.
I suppose it doesn't help that we helped refine how to
manufacture
it.
That was something that definitely concerned me in the weeks that followed, just how much it seemed like the United States government was following another paper I'd seen years ago, about crisis management and control, and how establishing a scapegoat with little appreciable power was where you started. They were almost note-for-note following a thesis paper from another CARP student, one a few years younger than me.
I wanted to get the information to Agent Shetterly as soon as I could, but I also wanted to make sure my tracks were covered, so I waited for nearly a week before I slipped off to a pay phone in a beat up part of the Tenderloin in San Francisco and called, leaving a message on Shetterly answering machine that I had information he definitely wanted to hear. I told him if he wanted to meet, I would be at Buster's on Sunday night at 11 pm, and we could talk then and there. The airlines had shut down for a couple of days when the bridges went down, but it became clear they needed to reopen as fast as possible, and so I think they were only closed for thirty or forty hours.
To his credit, Agent Shetterly didn't stand me up.
That said, when I began to explain to him what was going on, I'm not sure how much he believed me either.
He'd flown in from Washington, rented a car and driven up from SFO into the city, so he was on east coast time and understandably a little bit cranky, but the more I talked, the more he seemed to wake up a bit. When I put down my copy of Will's thesis paper in front of him, I was able to slowly watch him read it and see his eyes growing wider and wider.
