After: First Light (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 0) Read Online Free Page B

them all, leaving only Rachel. And Rachel was his hope. They’d maintained an uneasy correspondence hidden from Laurel, but Franklin felt a desperate need to leave some sort of legacy. Rachel wasn’t exactly a convert, but at least she was kind enough to humor his occasional emails.
    “Well, you better research the solar storm,” Charlie said. “Even though you can only trust half of what the mainstream media tells you.”
    “They feed you just enough of the truth to keep you stupid.” Franklin was suddenly anxious to get off the radio. “but I’m on it.”
    The evening seemed to have grown warmer.

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Maj. Arnold Alexander slid the NASA report into a manila folder. He was a fastidious man with a neatly clipped moustache, narrow-set eyes, and a heavy chin that gave him the aspect of a perpetual scowl. Which made it easier for him to disguise the scowl he was currently biting back.
    “Worst-case scenario,” Henry Gutierrez was saying. The major thought the curly-haired man was far too fond of the word “scenario.” Gutierrez had used it at least five times since the meeting had begun.
    “Doesn’t look like much of a scenario to me,” Alexander said. He secretly chafed at the power wielded by this little pencil-pusher. As chief of Homeland Security’s Office of Infrastructure Protection, Gutierrez had risen through the ranks on departmental politics, not experience or merit. But in the terrorism era, army officers like Alexander had to defer to bureaucrats like Gutierrez. The abstract goals and elusive enemies of the last decade of U.S. warfare paled in comparison to the invisible threat the Department of Homeland Security was created to stop.
    Alexander’s people fought a war of flesh and blood, but Gutierrez fought a war of emotion. And that emotion was fear, the side that always won in the end.
    Maj. Alexander was not only outranked, he was outnumbered in the compact Homeland Security boardroom. The third person at the conference table, Ellen Schlagal, was from the Office of Cyber Security and Communications. She had scarcely spoken after accepting a cup of black coffee, and she turned the cup before her in small circles, mostly staring into the drink’s surface. When she did look up, her intense blue eyes swept both of the men’s faces like an emergency beacon.
    “We can educate the public about the problems, but of course that opens the door to opportunists,” Gutierrez said.
    “It’s either that, or when somebody’s cell phone goes out, they start blaming terrorists, and then we have a full-on panic,” Alexander said.
    “If we announce in advance that blackouts are coming, we might have a panic anyway. A stock market crash, ammunition stockpiling, food hoarding.”
    Alexander rubbed his moustache in annoyance. “Let’s say that a terrorist group has a planned mission, more or less ready to roll. And they find out major cities might lose their electricity and communications. That would be the perfect time to swoop in and pull off an attack. Not only would they benefit from the chaos, the odds of getting caught—assuming they weren’t packing suicide belts—go way down.”
    “That’s still just a theoretical risk,” Gutierrez said.
    “But that’s what your whole department is built on,” Alexander said. “Something that might happen. Might .”
    Schlagal finally spoke. “I agree that NASA’s data isn’t convincing enough. Solar flares can knock out some satellite reception, but the worst we’ve ever experienced is short-term disruptions, usually measured in minutes and hours, not days.”
    “But the electrical grid is a little more fragile than the satcomm systems,” Guitierrez said. “It’s an interlinked system of more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines. It’s like a spider web. If you knock part of it out, it’s hard to sew back the missing threads.”
    “But you can just plug in parts and keep rolling,” Alexander said. “Fill in the gaps