I had shifted into journomatic. Whatever sense of panic or fear or distress or even sympathy I should have been feeling wasn’t there. I had no time to waste on emotions. That wasn’t my job. Gather, organize and filter, spew it out. The adrenaline had lifted me into a different consciousness: Once again I was operating on training and experience. In an odd way it was like being in combat again; I was right in the middle of it with no time to realize I was right in the middle of it.

The reports continued from a plain outside Morgan City. The city itself had been inundated. A debris field had flowed into Flat Lake. A minute earlier I had never heard either name; after this no one would ever forget it. Jet-skiers, swimmers, picnickers, boaters and fishermen, the whole gamut of people working or enjoying a day on the water—gone. Just gone. A male reporter was standing in front of two police cruisers blocking access to a highway, explaining that the entire area was in lockdown. No one other than first responders was permitted on what was left of the roads. What was left. It was too soon for any damage assessments. “Everything is just gone,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. He tossed his free hand in the air. “The whole city, it’s gone.”

Initial reports indicated the dam had been blown up by a sudden explosion, but that was just a bad guess. Authorities now believed it was a cyberattack. Techno-terrorists had hacked the computer system controlling the Old River Control Structure. Without warning, the huge steel gates suddenly had begun opening. Inside the control room the staff had made a heroic but futile effort to manually shut them; one of them was quoted as saying, “We never had a shot.”

The reporter was holding his palm against an earpiece, committing the broadcast sin of looking down to focus on what he was hearing rather than looking into the camera. He was repeating information in bursts, not worrying at all about turning it into sentences. Watching him, I could feel his despair.

Frankie B. Goode carefully set another cup of coffee in front of me. Frankie was my deskmate, sitting directly across from me. Frankie was a burly, round-faced guy; I always thought he had a vague resemblance to the man in the moon, if the man in the moon had a mustache. On some days I spent as many as twelve hours watching him twisting the drooping ends of his handlebar stasch while he reached for the right words. He carefully avoided tipping over the growing tower of used cups on the corner of my desk as he sat down. I already held the office record at twenty-eight, but this stack looked promising. Some people were betting I would make thirty. “Anything?” he asked.

I shook my head. “You?”

“Nada,” he said softly.

On a large monitor, the Louisiana reporter kept going, but whatever he was hearing in his ear was shaking him up. He was fighting to maintain his composure. He swiped at the corner of his eye. The engineers in the control room had engaged the emergency alert system, he reported; maybe it had saved some lives. No way of knowing. Those people who heard it had only a few minutes to respond. People usually eat up most of that time looking around curiously, trying to figure out what that warning means.