One Year After

she and Ben chattered away to each other in the language of mothers with their toddlers; the two understood every word exchanged, while the rest of the world just listened, smiled, and didn’t understand a single word of the happy gibberish.

He felt a deep swelling of pride but also anguish. It was the torment all loving parents feel when they see their child making a difficult and perhaps dangerous decision as an adult when, in memory, they still see the small innocent child of years long gone.

one life, he had spared others anguish and deterred a descent into anarchy.

is a game as ancient as recorded history. Promote a troublesome thorn up and out of the way if you cannot crush him, and then, once gone, impose whatever was planned in the first place.

We are asleep again, while North Korea tests nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, Iran is not far behind, and ISIS, a movement as brutal and psychotic as Nazism, emerges. It had never been my intention to write a sequel to One Second After, but wherever I spoke that was always a question: What happens next? I resisted for five years; my publisher, Tom Doherty, and his senior editor Bob Gleason dropping major “hints” that they wanted more. During those years I did give them a book which

Promote a troublesome thorn up and out of the way if you cannot crush him, and then, once gone, impose whatever was planned in the first place.

John’s standard maneuver to ask someone to help him, especially in a moment of crisis,

for vermin like him certainly did breed like lice and had been a plague since the first day that someone had figured out that while some labored, others would “administer.

He knew far too many like Fredericks who, while mouthing platitudes, actually held everyone in secret disdain, because they as “leaders” knew what was best “for the people.

and in so doing strip our community clean not just of our able-bodied defense force but even our ability to provide ourselves with a proper harvest this fall, thus forcing us onto the federal weal in meek submission to its authority?

I have reached the conclusion he lacks that moral authority, and sadly, by extension, I must include in that now those who appointed him to his post. They are not lawful orders, and most certainly they are not moral orders.

For several months after 9/11, people heard it wherever they went, and then a cynicism seemed to take hold with some who mocked it and said it should be changed because it was too warlike or just expressed hatred of the country in general and turned their backs on any patriotic display.

You are no longer in the halls of the White House or wherever you served, whomever you were assigned to. This is not some public relations job where you bullshit a stupid press corps and when the questioning gets too tough, you say time is up.

So any order from on high, regardless of its moral worth, must be obeyed. Is that what America has really become? Did we let it slip away an inch at a time before we were attacked, and now we are finally driving straight off the cliff once and for all?

Terrorists, Dale? I recall before the war when it became politically incorrect to use that term when it came to real terrorists and ironically then applied to those who were not—and look at what it finally got us.

Machiavelli said a prince had to transcend traditional morality for the greater good of those he led.

We did have a lot to do with it. We had all grown so fat, so complacent, and we always let someone else worry about such things, even though we knew that those we allowed to be in charge were far too often incompetent—or worse, self-serving and blind in their arrogance.

there is another launch against the United States.” “Wish we had made that message clearer before the Day,” Makala said softly, her voice filled with bitterness.

The only thing ensuring our security is the certain knowledge that our nuclear boomers are still out there under the seas ready with swift retaliation if