Below The Beltway

First of all, if you missed last night’s episode, you can watch it for free here or watch the rerun on Saturday night.

The good citizens of Jericho, Kansas seem to be adjusting well to the new government that has appeared in their midst. After all, the war with New Bern is over, the power is back on, food is back on the shelves. Everything seems to be getting back to normal.

But there’s something lurking beneath the surface and there’s something just not right about the Allied States of America.

The President is coming to visit, but he’s not a President anyone has voted for. Instead he’s former junior Senator from Wyoming who seems pretty comfortable with leaving two centuries of Federal Government behind. Whether he’s his own man or a pawn of men behind the scenes is unclear, but, in either case it’s clear that the ASA is a very different place from the nation whose legacy it has appropriated.

As the town prepares for the President’s arrival, we get our first hint of what might be going on. The Cheyenne Government has delivered a new history textbook to the school and it substantially rewrites American history in the decades before the bombs. The Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam were, under the new history, failures of will and the old USA failed because it didn’t have the will to confront it’s enemies. History is written by the winners, and, in the ASA, the winners have a very different view of history.

Then, the President (Code Name: Condor) arrives and immediately invites Jericho’s Mayor to represent the town in a new Constitutional Convention. Apparently, the old one is just too inconvenient for him.

Jake Green, the new Sheriff in town, meets up with a reporter from the Modesto Bee (now the second largest newspaper in California apparently) following the President’s tour. It’s clear that this reporter knows he’s under the thumb of the Cheyenne Government and that they’re probably lying to people, but doesn’t seem to think he can do anything about it. He also us some new information; something called the Hudson River Virus has made it’s way across the Mississippi and, that the Mississippi itself is now called the “Blue Line” because it’s patrolled by U.N. peacekeeping troops.

Meanwhile, Hawkins and his old sidekick Chavez are in the middle of a plan. For awhile, it seemed like they were conspiring to assassinate or kidnap the President, which seemed foolish. What they were really after, though, was information to convince Texas not to side with the ASA. Specifically, the information to prove that the official story about the attacks is a lie and that the nuclear attack on America was, in fact, a coup d`etat accompanied by mass murder.

When Chavez is captured and it looks like the plan will fail, Jake enlists the reporter who bites at the chance to get the inside scoop on the greatest crime in the history of the world. Alas, he talks to someone and ends up dead.

In the end, Hawkins and Jake help Chavez escape and he heads off to Texas in the hope that treason will not triumph.

So, where do we stand on the questions I asked last week ?

1. What involvement did the ASA President have in the conspiracy behind the attacks ?

As noted above, this is unclear, but the suspicion has to be that he was in on it all at some level. Otherwise, his absence from Washington on the day of the attacks was one hell of a coincidence. Call this one unresolved.

2. Even after a devastating nuclear war, how did a junior Senator from Wyoming get access to the launch codes for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles ?

We still don’t know the answer to this completely, but there were a few hints dropped. In his speech at the Jericho Battlefield, the President said that after the attacks, the remnants of the Federal Government were “paralyzed and unable to act” so he took it upon himself to send a message to the world — presumably referring to the nuclear attacks on Iran and North Korea — that America would retaliate against her enemies.

Given the security surrounding the use of nuclear weapons, which presumably was in place at the time of the attacks, it’s still unclear how he was able to do this and why military commanders would obey his orders.

3. Who was responsible for the Electromagnetic Pulse that wiped out electricity ?

No clues given.

4. Who’s in charge in Columbus and what role did they have in the Federal Government ?

Given what the ASA’s President said in his speech, it’s clear that whoever is in charge in Columbus is someone who claims the Presidency of the United States by operation of law — most likely a member of the deceased President’s cabinet.

And here’s some additional questions based on what we’ve learned:

1. How was the ASA Government, including it’s civilian contractors at Jennings & Rall, able to assemble such an organized force of civilian and military infrastructure so quickly after a devastating nuclear attack ?
2. What is the Hudson River Virus ? Pandemic or biological weapon ? (It appears we’ll learn something about this next week)
3. What is Operation Boxcar ?
4. Why are there U.N. troops on what appears to be the border between the USA and the ASA ?

Previous Posts:

Reconstruction: Jericho 2.1