Chapter 29
2:35 p.m.
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center - Bluemont, Virginia
The meeting was chaos. It had dragged out for well over an hour now.
Thomas Hayes was trying to preside over an unruly mob of frightened people. It wasn’t working. These were smart, clever, inventive people for the most part, normally the best and brightest. But fear had shut down their creativity, and it was choking off their initiative. They couldn’t even figure out where everybody was. Hayes could barely believe how disorganized the evacuations were.
An aide was making a report. “Sir, at approximately 12:30 p.m., the Airborne Communications Command aircraft, codename Nightwatch, took off from Joint Base Andrews and flew west. It is currently over eastern Missouri, cruising at forty thousand feet.”
