It had occurred before daybreak, at about 5:20 A.M. local time. The earliest postings were from insomniacal passengers and crew on coast-to-coast red-eye flights, reporting a sudden flash so bright it dazzled them from hundreds of miles away. This had faded too rapidly for people to snap pictures of it, but descriptions had been tweeted and Facebooked via the planes’ onboard Wi-Fi systems, and retweeted and reposted a millionfold by the time Corvallis saw them.
One Larry Proctor, a blogger who knew his way around the military and intelligence world (or so it seemed, anyway, based on a quick scan of a blog he’d been maintaining ever since his last tour of duty in Qatar), had picked up some traffic that had leaked to the civilian Internet from a .mil site, making a cryptic reference to a possible radiological event in southeastern Utah. Personnel stationed at nearby military bases were reporting that leaves were being canceled and units being mobilized. All of this was probably supposed to be kept under wraps, but nothing could prevent spouses and teenage kids from chattering about it. Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl’s emoji-splattered post, featuring grainy driveway footage of her camouflage-decked mom heaving a duffel bag into the back of a pickup truck and burning rubber down the street, went viral and was shown over and over on network news sites for lack of anything more definite from the actual scene of the disaster. Moab was a long way from anywhere, situated at an X made by the Colorado River and a two-lane highway. No Internet or phone traffic was coming out of it.
Corvallis took all of this in while putting on his caligae, the sandal-like marching boots of the Roman legionary, and pulling his kit together as efficiently as was possible while focusing most of his attention on his phone. He had been sleeping in his linen tunic, overwrapped with his wool cloak. It was cold up here in the mountains and so he pulled the latter garment around him before stepping outside the tent. This weekend’s event was an informal, light-duty sort of affair, family friendly. They’d set up their camp in a meadow, but a phalanx of modern RVs was visible a quarter of a mile down the hill, in a parking lot at the road head. Generators were purring and electric lights shining down there. Corvallis stuffed his gear into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged down the slope. He smelled bacon cooking in one of the RVs. Through its window he saw a television monitor showing live network coverage—the RV had a satellite dish mounted to its roof. He slowed down and looked in through the window. The video feed was from LAX, where the first of those red-eyes had apparently just landed and disgorged its passengers. News crews were waiting to gang-tackle witnesses as they emerged from security. Most of the people on that flight had slept through the event, and many didn’t want to talk, but one alert fellow—a fashionably scruffy actor who had been flying from New York to L.A. for a job—had seen the flash in the corner of his eye while playing a game on his phone, and switched it over to video camera mode in time to capture the roiling orange mushroom cloud. So the first broadcast video of the destruction of Moab was simply a close-up of this man’s phone, held in his shaking hands. And, as far as it went, it sure enough looked like a mushroom cloud.
Corvallis walked across the parking lot to his Tesla, threw his duffel bag into the trunk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. His phone connected to the car’s onboard systems and the big video screen in the middle of the dashboard came alive. He dialed the twenty-four-hour hotline for his jet company and told them he needed emergency transportation from Missoula—the nearest town of consequence—to San Jose. They put him on hold. He did a quick scroll through emails and saw a lot of stuff, but nothing that couldn’t wait; the important thing was for him to get on the plane. So he shifted the Tesla into forward driving mode and began gliding silently across the parking lot, headed for the road that would take him down the mountain.
By the time he had reached the highway, the jet dispatcher had come back on the line and let him know that a pilot was en route to Boeing Field. The jet was being fueled. It would be in the air promptly and would probably get to Missoula before Corvallis did.
During the ensuing hour-long drive down the Bitterroot Valley, he mostly resisted the temptation to look at the screen, and instead listened to the radio. This was jammed with emergency coverage, as alarming as it was vague. One would think it would be an easy matter to simply go to Moab and look at it and report back. But all helicopters within an hour’s flying time of ground zero had already been spoken for by mysterious entities, and pilots were being warned not to fly anywhere near Moab for fear of radioactive contamination. Much of the radio coverage simply consisted of reporters summarizing what was turning up on the Miasma. Pictures of military roadblocks were being massively upvoted on discussion forums. Comment-thread geeks were zooming in on details and pegging various items of equipment: radiation detectors, dosimeters, containers of pills you were supposed to swallow in the event of radiation exposure. From time to time they would cut away to the financial desk for a report on the inevitable stock market crash. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was already suspended for the day. Foreign leaders were expressing grave concern and offering assistance. A jihadist website had apparently posted a video describing the annihilation of Moab as a warning shot, and making it known that they had another such weapon planted in a major American city.
By the time Corvallis reached the outskirts of Missoula, that passenger at LAX had sold his mushroom cloud footage to the highest-bidding network. While stopped at a red light, Corvallis watched it on the dashboard video. It had been taken from hundreds of miles away, so was pretty small in the original clip; the network had zoomed it in (“blown it up,” in the inartful phrase of an anchorwoman) and enhanced it.
They did not get to savor the exclusive for long. By the time Corvallis had reached the airport, another network had come through with even better imagery from a truck driver’s dashboard camera. Apparently the driver, having witnessed the mushroom cloud from twenty miles outside of Moab, had turned his vehicle around and driven back out to the next town where he could get Internet access.
Security waved Corvallis through to a private parking area, and he sat in his car and watched the trucker’s video while the flight crew took his baggage out of his trunk and stowed it in the jet’s luggage compartment. This footage was a lot better than the cell phone video but still left a certain amount to the imagination. The truck had not been pointed squarely at Moab when the bomb had detonated, and so about half of the mushroom cloud was cropped off the right edge of the frame. But it was very obviously a mushroom cloud and you could see its interaction with various layers of the atmosphere as it rose above Moab, and in otherwise dark parts of the frame you could see how Moab-facing hillsides and mountains were lit up by it.
He handed the Tesla off to one of the ground crew for parking, then walked about fifty feet to the jet. One of the pilots was already in the cockpit doing his piloty things while the other was getting the luggage hatch squared away. A flight attendant, whom Corvallis vaguely recognized as Bonnie, was standing at the top of the steps. He wasn’t sure where the jet company obtained people like Bonnie, but his working hypothesis was that they were fashion models who had turned thirty. They lived in a world that was as disjoint from his world as ancient Egypt, even though it coexisted in the same time and place. In rare moments, such as when Corvallis climbed the steps into his jet and greeted Bonnie or one of her colleagues, his world glanced off of hers, and if he wasn’t too distracted he might sneak a look at her and ponder the sheer differentness of their respective existences.
Today, her passenger just happened to be a tech geek who, while technically not a billionaire, might as well have been one. He happened to be wearing the tunic and cloak of a Roman legionary, but it might as well have been jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie.
Bonnie’s welcoming smile faltered a little when she saw how he was dressed, but she bore up well under the shock and seemed to have recovered her professionally mandated persona by the time his caligae crossed the plane’s threshold. His iron hobnails clacked on the exotic hardwood flooring until he reached the aisle of the main cabin, which was carpeted.