The Year of the Locust

by Terry Hayes

Clifford Montgomery was a tall and imposing man then, still in his late sixties, and not frail and shrunken by the colon cancer that would take his life a few years later, the first president—apart from those who were assassinated—to die in office in almost a hundred years.

There were only seven people in the world who were privy to one of America’s most closely guarded secrets. All of them were in the Situation Room that day, and none of them spoke; they were acutely aware, so I learned later, that on a Thursday afternoon in Washington they were face-to-face with history. Without doubt, implementing Falcon’s suggestion would change the nature of warfare forever.

In more ways than one, a new day was dawning.

Against overwhelming odds, we had found Kazinsky.

People should have paid more attention—to the rats. Then again, in hindsight it’s always easy to see the writing on the wall.

He didn’t know it—nobody did then—but the changes that were affecting every cell of his body were throwing off a huge amount of energy, far more than normal mitochondria ever did, and that was being converted to heat.

We’re riders on the storm; that’s all we are and can ever hope to be… Riders on the storm.