The Executive Order

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About the Author

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It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this to the real Brian McLane, my friend, my teacher, and the most courageous person I have ever known. Few people have fought so hard and made an impact on so many lives for so long. Brother, brother.

Prologue

FRIDAY, JULY 11, 2026. PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

It was twenty minutes after eight on the island of Oahu. The morning mist Hawaiians call Kupanaha was starting to lift over the waters of Pearl Harbor. According to legend, this was just the ghosts of the deepest waters cautioning all who traveled the seas to be wary.

The sky was the clear blue of an angel’s eyes. The first Navy-operated ferry from the beach had just arrived at the USS Arizona memorial, which gracefully spanned the remains of the battleship sunk by the Japanese on a cold December morning. The ferry carried 128 properly solemn visitors from numerous countries, including Japan, who had come to pay their respects to the 1,102 men entombed in the wreckage. Many of them were standing at the railing looking at the renowned “black tears,” the eerie drops of engine oil that had been bubbling up from the ship for more than eight decades. Some people referred to them as the last breath of the dead.

Without warning, the memorial shivered. The earth seemed to growl. The ocean bubbled. The six park rangers stationed at the memorial exchanged curious glances. The senior officer was reaching for the emergency phone when the first explosion erupted. It was followed an instant later by two more massive explosions.

The jagged remains of the great warship Arizona rose off the ocean floor. Shards of rusted metal ripped through the water and into the air, slicing into bodies in a rain of death. The massive concrete memorial lifted from its moorings as if being pushed upwards by Neptune’s hand. It flipped onto its side, and shattered.

Those visitors and rangers who survived the initial blast were tossed into the water. Several of them were crushed instantly by the debris.

Then the sea caught fire.

Thousands of gallons of released oil gushed to the surface. It ignited with the whoosh of a fire racing through dry forest, turning the harbor into a boiling cauldron. The screams, then the pleas of the victims ended quickly, and mercifully. Of the 128 visitors and six guides at the memorial that morning, eight survived. Even that number was considered a miracle.

Minutes later the bones of the men who had died on that Sunday morning in 1941, ash-gray bones that had rested undisturbed for most of a century, began drifting up on the beach.

FRIDAY, JULY 11. MORGAN CITY, LOUISIANA

The early afternoon sun was sparking diamonds of light in the ripples of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River. It was twenty minutes after one on a steamy July afternoon. A cloud bank the color of hardened cement was forming on the horizon. The shrimpers were mostly out of port working, but a threatening weather forecast had limited the number of pleasure boats on the river. In the nearby swamps, visitors drawn to the area by the popular cable program Swamp People were happily slapping mosquitoes as flat-bottomed boats glided through the dense marshes. Just a bit downriver, the chinquapin run had just begun on Flat Lake and fishermen were pulling out panfish fast as they could toss a line, while paddlers and kayakers were working their way across the four-mile-wide lake. On the banks of the river, small groups of picnickers and sun worshipers were resting on blankets and brightly colored towels.

The boaters, the fishermen, the picnickers, and the sunbathers had no way of knowing that almost thirty miles upstream, without warning, nine of the eleven 44-foot-wide concrete and steel gates comprising the massive Old River Control Structure had begun rising, freeing the pent-up power of the mighty Mississippi. Billions of gallons of water surged through the opening gates, following the natural course of the river, creating a massive wave of churning energy.

The Army Corps of Engineers had built the ORCS in the 1950s to control the Mississippi River, to prevent it from joining the Atchafalaya channel and carving a new shorter, steeper path directly to the Gulf of Mexico. It had mostly successfully fought nature, keeping the Great Muddy on its historic path between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Designed partially by Hans Albert Einstein, son of the great mathematician, it had corralled the Mississippi River system, ensuring it would remain the world’s most significant navigable river highway.

The shift supervisor in the control room made a heroic but futile effort to override the system, trying desperately to manually close the gates. There was no response. Finally, cursing with the frustration of a doomed pilot in the last seconds of flight, he activated the emergency warning system.

“Oh my god,” he whispered, watching the raging waters overwhelming the Atchafalaya.

The people along the banks of the river or at play on Flat Lake and other nearby lakes may have noticed the leaves of the cypress trees rustling. Some of them certainly would have felt a new urgency in the gentle current. In Morgan City, a broken traffic signal had caused an irritating traffic backup, and several motorists began honking.

Those people on the river heard it first. A growing rumble, as if a fleet of jumbo jets was thundering across the sky. Then they would have felt the river rising. The massive wave hit Morgan City first; within minutes the curious trickle of water in the streets had become a flood, catching people in their cars or in shops, overturning trucks and buses and smashing them into storefronts, an unstoppable rage carrying tons of debris and bodies into Flat Lake.

Billions of gallons of water barreled forward, playing in this new freedom, racing toward the Gulf, changing the river’s course forever. Carrying with it everything in its path. Boats were capsized as easily as toys in a bathtub; fishermen, sunbathers, and picnickers were swept up and carried downriver. Within a half hour Morgan City ceased to exist, as did several smaller towns in the floodplain. Highways, railroad tracks, bridges, and gas and oil pipelines crossing the Atchafalaya were destroyed, disrupting the nation’s flow of natural gas. The lack of water flowing into the Mississippi forced refineries, petrochemical plants, and two nuclear power plants to shut down immediately, leaving millions of people with only emergency power sources. As sediment flowed into that river, barges carrying vital grain and materials to the Gulf sunk into the mud.

By the time the floodwaters reached the Gulf of Mexico, much of its strength had dissipated. A news helicopter in the air to film a police-preparedness drill followed a sixteen-wheeler for miles as it bounced off buildings as easily as a pinball hitting bumpers, until it finally crashed into a pleasure boat and settled on its wheels in the middle of a parking lot.

Washed-out roads made it impossible for rescue, recovery, and repair crews to get near the damage for several days. Initial estimates put the number of dead and injured at more than 23,000. It would be several months before the roads and energy systems were mostly restored, at an estimated cost of $45 billion.

FRIDAY, JULY 11. NEW YORK CITY

It was twenty minutes after two in the permanent twilight of the Lincoln Tunnel. Its three tubes had been cut into the bedrock beneath the Hudson River beginning in 1934 to connect New York to New Jersey and the “west of the nation,” as Fiorello La Guardia had proudly announced. Not unusually, the two lanes of traffic in the northern tube leaving Manhattan were backed up to a standstill; apparently a rental van had stalled just before exiting into Weehawken. Three men were leaning casually against the emergency catwalk guardrail, ignoring the cacophony of angry horns, presumably waiting for assistance. Then, oddly, a white Bronco stopped alongside the stalled van, blocking the second lane. Three more men quickly got out of that car. The Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel was now effectively sealed.

The six men appeared to be in no rush. They were practiced and prepared. One of them opened the rear doors of the van and handed each man an automatic weapon. Each of them fired a burst into the tiled ceiling to test his weapon. Shards of broken tiles rained down. The drivers who were trapped directly behind them realized what was happening, got out of their cars and started running back into the tunnel. They were screaming, warning people to run, run, run. The terrorists let them go, pleased they were spreading the desired panic.

After checking their weapons one more time they started walking back into the tunnel, firing several rounds into every car. One of the terrorists climbed onto the catwalk and fired down through the car roofs as he casually walked along. Some people escaped; many more did not. It made little difference to the killers; their objective was to create terror on a level no one would ever forget.

Those people trapped in the tunnel scrambled for their lives. They threw off their jackets, they ran out of their shoes, but they ran. They squeezed between cars, the most fit among them running on top of the cars, chased by the incessant chattering of automatic rifles, the echoes inside the tunnel magnifying reality. They ran as fast as they were able, which in many cases was not fast enough. They clogged the narrow spaces between cars, then began pushing others out of their way; if someone fell, he or she had little chance of getting up. Taxi and limousine drivers abandoned their passengers, but a Pakistani Lyft driver carried a grandmother from Linden a full half mile to safety on his back. The crush was so great drivers were unable to push open their doors against the human tide. Many of them escaped through their sunroof.

The fleeing mob made it impossible for the soldiers and police officers who had been positioned on the Manhattan side for just such an attack to get into the tunnel. There was nothing they could do but help people get to safety. But from the Weehawken end responders began moving cautiously into the hell, moving slowly, wary of booby traps. The firing coming from deep inside the tunnel seemed relentless, the echoes reverberating through the entire tube.

Then the explosions started.

As the terrorists moved past deserted cars, they casually tossed time-delayed grenades through broken windows or now-open sunroofs. They moved slowly and deliberately, stepping over bodies, being in no hurry to meet their own certain death at the mouth of the tunnel. The cars well behind them began exploding. Large segments of concrete fell from the roof, blocking access for those responders.

The attack continued for almost an hour. It ended when the terrorists finally reached the perimeter formed just inside the mouth of the tunnel by the U.S. Army-NYPD joint antiterrorism squad. After a brief firefight, the attackers blew themselves up. The explosion blew a massive hole in the tiled ceiling and bedrock, arousing fears of a complete collapse.

The tunnel held.

At the press conference at the site hours later, Police Commissioner Rogers said his people believed all of the attackers were dead but admitted that conflicting descriptions from survivors made it impossible to even determine with certainly how many of them there had been. Mayor Rose was forced to admit that it was possible, although not probable, he insisted, that one or more of them had escaped by joining the fleeing survivors.

Four hundred and fifty-six bodies were eventually recovered; many of the victims had been trampled to death. Optimistic Port Authority officials predicted, with luck and good weather, the tube could be reopened within four months, while damage to the tristate economy was guesstimated at “more than $28 billion.”

1

This is my all-time favorite Far Side: Two turkeys are sitting at a small round table. There are cups of coffee in front of both of them. One of them, wearing black-rimmed glasses, is reading a newspaper dated Tuesday, November 23. In the distance a coveralled farmer carrying a hatchet is walking toward them. The caption reads, “I always feel sorry for those chickens.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Please, don’t ever say that.

Looking back, the damage that had been done to American democracy by the Trump administration was almost incalculable. It was as if someone had lifted the Constitution out of its bulletproof, moisture-controlled sealed case in the Rotunda of the National Archives and edited it with a Sharpie. First Amendment? Ah, not so much. Fifth Amendment? Nobody needs all that stuff. Fourteenth Amendment? Don’t worry about it. With the grace of a defensive tackle at a ballet recital, Donald Trump and his sycophants had undermined the foundations of our republic; they had introduced new forms of vulgarity to the political system, inflicted terrible damage on the authority of the judiciary and the credibility of the media, coarsened the national dialogue, and emboldened hatred in all of its disguises. The Trump administration was the political version of the comedian’s fabled Aristocrats—the most vile, repugnant act in history.

Whatever chance at reelection Trump might have had disappeared with his fumbling response to the pandemic. I remember playing Covfefe Scrabble his last few months in office: any combination of letters that looked like it might be a real word was legal. Jenny and I had just started dating and I usually zayed her! Trying to find the right person to follow Trump was like watching a blind man in a dark room stumbling to fit a plug into a socket. There was no right answer.

In those last days of that administration I actually believed the worst was over. According to the pollsters, “any breathing person” was about 10 points more popular than Donald Trump. “Any dead person” was only 6 points more desirable. Ah, the innocence of a middle-aged journalist.

The big question was how much of the chaos was permanent. One terrible night in the sandbox years earlier we’d been dropped into a firefight to reinforce a patrol that had been ambushed. When we hit the ground, I looked around at the wounded and the dying and wondered, Where the hell do I start? That was what the whole world was wondering six years ago: Where does America go from Trump? My boss at the Pro, Howie Bernstein, summed up the problem in his most colorful journalese, pointing out, “You can’t push crap back up an asshole.”

In retrospect, it didn’t really matter who came next. We could just as easily have elected the grizzled old guy with the missing teeth who took the tickets at a traveling carnival as the Democrat. In a desperate effort to return to normalcy, the Biden administration shined up old ideas and pretended they had discovered gold. But those officials who filled the so-called Black Hole of Leadership either didn’t fully understand the extent of the damage or lacked the capability to respond to its economic aftermath. Our national foundations had been destroyed and even MacGyver with a 102-piece Craftsman tool kit couldn’t fix it. An anonymous poster on Facebook compared the Dems to housekeepers walking into a hotel room after the Stones had spent a week there. It was as hopeless as trying to glue a patch on the Titanic. Any chance they might have had to keep the ship of state afloat ended with the drought and resulting famine that plagued half the world.