Chapter 10

J. Edgar Hoover Headquarters Building, Washington D.C.

Special Agent Francis Schuman in charge of Operation MANTRAP was going over in her mind what she had just learned from her counterpart in the CIA. All the U.S. spy satellites were still up there, but there were very few analysts qualified to study the images they were gathering. Searching for men or a man using satellite surveillance was almost impossible.

Most satellites did not have the resolution required to tell the difference between a man and a woman from that distance. The search for who had caused the Blue Plague had top priority so she only had the part time services of one analyst searching for men. It appeared hopeless, much worse than a needle in a haystack. More like a needle in a hundred haystacks as that one analyst was searching the entire world for one man a man who may not even exist. If that were the case, mankind was doomed.

If there were only one man left on the planet, it could take a hundred lifetimes to find him, even if he were outside all day and night long. If he was in doors most of the time, it was impossible. One part time analyst was not going to find a man except by blind luck. She had doubts there were any men left. There were no clues indicating there were any men left. She was afraid she had an extremely hopeless task ahead of her.

During safer times she would have feared for her career, but with the hopeless way things were now, a career made little difference. She was just going through the motions like most of the other surviving women.

There was a general malaise about everything that all survivors were feeling. It seemed that there was no point. If women could not restart the human race, it was all over. It seemed a waste of what little precious time was left to look for men, or try to pull the country back together. If they all died in the next few years what difference would the wasted effort make, but they had to try.

If it were not that women were naturally clannish and tended to pull together in a crisis, the U.S. would have followed the rest of the world down into barbarity. American women were not as docile as their sisters. They would go down fighting if they went down.

Since the U.S. was one of the few countries that had women in the services and in government, it was the only real power left in the world. In most countries, there were only smatterings of small local governments left. There was nothing approaching even a county or state government.

She had gotten the TV networks to carry public service announcements about her search and even guested at America's Most Wanted, which was still on television, although with a new host. So far no real leads had turned up, but women were aware and on the lookout for men all over the country.

If a man was hapless enough to get seen, they would probably get turned in to a local or regional government. Her biggest fear was that if a man existed, he could be in danger from foreign governments or left over criminals looking for the biggest score of their lives... and then there were the kooks. There were always kooks.

Truth is, the FBI was much smaller now. The majority of the bureau had been male. Over 75% of the remaining women had been in staff positions, they were in clerical, archiving or fingerprinting type jobs. When it came to field agents, few had been women, and even fewer had been trained well and been competent.

There were less than a hundred women scattered around the entire country that were agents. The whole continent could not be adequately protected, the country was just too damn big. Many of the women in staff positions had died. There seemed to be some strange relationship to intelligence in the women that had survived. Most female agents had miraculously survived whereas non college educated staff positions were now almost totally empty except for the new girls recently hired to help out.

The only saving grace was the fact that women and girls were by nature pretty non-violent and a curious side effect of the die-off was that it seemed few criminals survived. It was probably related to the intelligence thing, but who knew?

Unfortunately some of main staff positions had to be filled by active agents because there were not enough survivors among the staff. A lot of cross training was going on so that more people could do more jobs.

Francis herself had escaped cross training headache only because of the importance of what she was doing. Almost all agents had other duties they were responsible for that were not considered the normal job of agents. This meant that they all had even more work to do. 14 and 16 hour days were the norm now.

It reminded her of one of her old Navy boyfriends jokes: "We that have done so much for so long with so little; are now required to do the impossible with absolutely nothing."

She finished drafting a bureau wide memo to all agents concerning MANTRAP. Foreign agents and subversives and criminals may cause harm to a man if they find one. It was paramount that the FBI or competent civil authority finds any existing men first. Another less classified version of the memo was going out to all police and sheriffs departments. The plague had done one thing. It permanently got rid of the glass ceiling in all police and other law enforcement agencies.

Holly Hill, Florida

Beth and Sandy had contacted all the girls and Mrs. Owens. Everyone was coming over today for a big barbecue. Since we had a high security fence we deemed it safe enough for me to do the cooking on our parents gas grill. Hiding under the awning should be safe from prying eyes if there were any satellites remaining. The chicken was already marinating and we were waiting for the others to arrive.