I gave up this morning. Exercise Top Officials 2 has eaten my lunch, or rather my breakfast. Oh, sure, I was up early enough, I got the coffee started and then went back to lie down just for a moment.

Then some flaw in the space-time continuum occurred, a temporal fugue. I suddenly was nearing six o’clock. I don’t know what happened to Vicki Barker and the usual update from the BBC at five. My usual station was a void on the airwaves, nothing there. No classical music blending into vigorous discussion of the issues of the day to come. I had to change stations and was stuck with NPR’s Marketplace on some other station further down the dial. Like I care about what the Fed said on the topic of interest rates and the value of the dollar in relation to the trade deficit. I had nothing on the Saudi bombers and nothing on our exercise that was all over the news yesterday. Talk about disorientation. Nothing is right. I have run out of bacon, and I have no backup. Zip. This morning might have to be done on eggs alone. I steeled myself for the hardship. I normally have the morning planned out to a gnat’s ass, but TopOff has kicked mine but good.

So I have no plan right now and I have every expectation that this is going to be a very busy one. This is the day that our Department is under the microscope. The first two days of the exercise dealt with the detonation of a radiologic “dirty” bomb in Seattle. We have a hundred VIPs coming to visit our Command Center, twenty-five of them Very VIP. They are going to show up around lunchtime, just as the simulated terrorist-inflicted plague in Chicago rises to a crescendo. This has been quite a year for fiction in America’s Second City. First there was the musical and now there is the plague.

The simulated crisis in Seattle ran out of gas after the videoconference ended. I gave up last night around nine. My Boss grandly announced to the participants on the national Video teleconference that I would be available to take tasking and requests through the night, as though I was some sort of disc jockey. He signed off, told me he had a dinner to get to and swept out of the Command Center.

I gave it a decent interval, long enough for him to clear the building. I left some instructions for the watch officer. I had to be simple and direct with the overnight crew. They are good kids and they have good hearts, but the Boss called me early yesterday to complain that they had not called the people in Seattle during the night. That was my first crisis yesterday, the first of many. Eventually I got to the bottom of that one, coming to the simple realization that the exercise cell in Seattle had closed down for their night, and with the three time zones involved there was no one present to answer questions at our seven o’clock on the East Coast.

I was a little concerned that the Boss’s head might explode that day, the way his face gets all flushed. When I was relatively confident that the Republic would stand through the night I took the elevator down to the garage.

There was no traffic going home and in a couple minutes I was standing in front of my sink, pouring a dose of Gray Goose vodka. It was already after nine and I was wired and tired. No sleep for a while, I knew, and I further knew I would pay for it in the morning. Which I am now. The certain knowledge that the three confirmed exercise cases of the black death will mushroom into hundreds today is not a pleasant prospect. The images of the destroyed apartment buildings in Riyadh melt into the simulated news from the Emergency Rooms of the hospitals that are playing our little simulated exercise in combating biological warfare. There will be thousands infected in Chicago, that broad-shouldered city that works out there in the Midwest.

The simulated terrorists hit O’Hare and Union Station and the United Center with an aerosolized version of the bacillus and the people have processed it and grown it in their bodies and now the simulated pipe must be paid. We have done a pretty good job, I thought, before I slept. We have come up with a recommended course of treatment, pre-staged the stockpile of Cipro, deployed the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams and embedded our headquarters staff in the Regional Emergency Operations Center. Chicago is almost in our time zone, much better than faraway Seattle. They might even stay awake all night, the better to serve self-important Washington.

I am hoping that we will have a paper triumph over simulated disease today, and the tours I will give of our bustling high-tech Command Center will help to assure the visiting Congressmen and bureaucrats that we are prepared and ready to deal with the unthinkable. That our links to the State and local health officials are firm and well oiled, and that we have the appropriate drugs in the right places to deal with any contingency.

Considering we have had a year to get ready for this, I would be mildly surprised if we did not. But get ready, Chicagoland. Here we come. Ready or not.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra