by Bobby Akart
“Yes, please. Thank you.” Chapman thought for a moment and then he asked, “What happened in Paris as we were leaving? It looked like all the lights went out.”
She didn’t have a definitive answer for him. “The pilot mentioned it briefly when he gave me instructions to start cabin service. He thought it had to do with the unusual warm weather in Europe. You know, air conditioners overwhelming the system.”
Chapman knew that wasn’t the case because temperatures had fallen back to slightly below normal in the last few days. He studied the woman’s face to determine if she was lying to cover the truth. She seemed to genuinely believe her statement, so he didn’t press her any further.
The pause in their conversation created an opening, so the blonde flight attendant got down to business. “Would you mind if she takes a picture of us? You know, for my Instagram?”
Chapman shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
She handed her coworker a small Canon compact camera and quickly sat on the armrest next to Chapman. She cozied up against his shoulder and provided him a sultry smile. Chapman joined in the fun until the photo was snapped, and he noticed Isabella standing in the galley with her arms crossed, giving him the death stare.
The flight attendants were about to leave him alone until he stopped them. “Hey, um, if you don’t mind, will you take these with you?”
He gathered up the snack trays and all the plastic knives, just in case.
Isabella returned as the flight attendants departed, and she immediately claimed her guy by bending over to plant a kiss on his cheek. She got settled into her seat, and Chapman handed her their next round of drinks.
He was about to speak when she raised her hand to stop him. She reached into the seat pocket in front of her and retrieved one of the small plastic knives.
“You forgot this one, amoureux,” she said with a devious smile to her lover. “It is a lesson learned, Monsieur Boone. Always let your adversary think he has taken something, while keeping a secret for a later time.”
“Is that an old French proverb?” he asked.
“No, it is a rule of survival. Now, what did you learn? And I want to hear every detail. Are we in agreement?” Isabella tapped the plastic knife on the tray table next to her drink.
“Oh, absolutely.”
Chapter 18
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
Antarctica
It’s like no other place in the world. At the center of the Antarctic, the geographic South Pole was a barren desert of snow. It was literally the coldest place on Earth, and the U.S. scientific research station located high atop an icy plateau nine-thousand feet above sea level was considered the leader among the scientific community on the desolate continent.
The South Pole was the only place on the planet where the sun would shine continuously for half the year and remained completely out of sight for the other half. However, despite the harsh and unwelcome conditions, it was a much sought-after assignment for climatologists and geologists.
Half the year, the South Pole station housed around two hundred scientists and support personnel. There was a restaurant-grade commercial kitchen, a mess hall, a gym, and a greenhouse within the climate-controlled facility.
The South Pole winter was extraordinarily dull for the inhabitants of Amundsen-Scott. During the South Pole winter, the sun sets in February and doesn’t rise again until November. Only a skeleton crew inhabits the station during this period of time, known as winterovers. The temperatures outside are so cold that most aircraft couldn’t land. The hydraulics on the plane’s skids were only rated to minus-sixty degrees and were subject to catastrophic failure in the event temperatures dropped below that, as they frequently did.
Or used to, anyway.
For the past year, Dr. Amber Hagood had watched the planet self-destruct with the help of man. The polar ice caps were melting at an alarming rate, at least as far as scientists were concerned. Together with her associates at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Dr. Hagood had developed an ice sheet model several years prior that revealed in the next two hundred years, the melting would occur at an ever-increasing rate due to climate change. The projections revealed the planet would experience a sixty-three-inch rise in global sea levels.
During a presentation to a group of NASA oceanographers at a conference in Pasadena, she warned that humanity should’ve been retreating from the coastlines decades ago. Yet homes and businesses crowded the world’s seashores nonetheless.
She stared at the four computer monitors mounted on the walls of her cubicle. They revealed a series of graphs depicting sea levels at various monitoring stations around the planet. Next to these graphs, average temperature readings were shown. The correlation simply wasn’t there. The amount of sea level rise didn’t match any known models associated with the overall warming of the planet. In fact, average temperatures had been dropping around the globe in the last several years.
Her job was to figure out why.
Daily life at the South Pole was taxing on the mind and the body. For some reason, this particular winterover had been especially difficult for Dr. Hagood, despite it being her tenth. She was dedicated to keeping the world abreast of the threats we faced from climate change, and therefore she committed her life to her work. That meant remaining on the job every day of the year, regardless of the warnings her superiors and psychologists gave her.
She hadn’t slept well for the last couple of months. She frequently tossed and turned at night, wondering what the monitoring stations around the world would reveal the next day. Hoping new data might reveal an answer to the weather anomalies.
On this particular morning, she found herself especially alert and aware of her surroundings. She began to see her job at the South Pole to be of extraordinary importance. A feeling of empowerment came over her that she couldn’t quite understand. It was like an awakening.
She was dressed in a pair of fleece shorts and a tank top she’d received for Christmas last year from a not-so-secret Santa, a married man who let the isolation of his first time as a winterover get to him and had become lonely at night. She’d rebuffed his advances, but kept the gift nonetheless.
Dr. Hagood raced out of her sleep pod and made her way into the operations center, the central research and communications hub of Amundsen-Scott. She banged away on the keyboard until she’d produced the research results that were now before her. She searched the data for clues. The team at the South Pole research center had always focused their efforts on the floating monitoring stations found in the world’s oceans. After all, their goal was to identify rising sea levels and use the results to confirm the conclusions reached by decades of researchers before her.
All of a sudden, her brain told her to look outside the box, as they say. Beyond the usual suspects. Find the needle in haystack. The odd man out. The clichés for an inconsistency were endless.
Dr. Hagood’s mind was operating like a supercomputer that just got a kick in the pants by a power surge. Her fingers frantically beat on the keyboard as if her time was about to expire. It wasn’t, at least not today, anyway.
She searched the databases of the world’s most prominent environmental research partners. The McMaster Institute in Canada. Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre. The Helmotz Centre in Germany and the Grantham Institute in London.
“There have to be anomalies in the other direction,” she whispered aloud although she was the only scientist in the operations center. Everyone’s attention, their primary focus, had always been instances of warming around the planet. Warming temperatures meant melting ice. Melting ice meant rising seas. The narrative had been set in stone.
But what about abnormal cold? What if there were instances of extraordinary cold trends to counteract the warming?
As she downloaded the data and began to plug it into the propriety software she’d developed to create a model utilizing hundreds of research stations around the globe, her eyes grew wide and perspiration began to form
on her forehead. The software triangulated areas of the planet that had been experiencing unusual freezing trends over the last five to ten years. She linked the locations together to create a pattern.
Dr. Hagood shook her head repeatedly as the numbers began to reveal a new theory. A model began to take shape on her center screen.
“How can this possibly be? Have we been making the wrong assumptions all along?”
She leaned back in her chair and tapped the top of her mouse with her index finger. She leaned forward to create a global map view of her results. This only resulted in her becoming more perplexed.
The map revealed both hot spots, or areas where temperatures had been trending much warmer, as well as cold spots, where temperatures were continuously moving toward subantarctic norms or below.
Yes, Greenland, the Arctic Circle, and Antarctica had all been experiencing warmer temperatures. But areas of Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, and even West Central Africa were experiencing frigid temperatures.
“Quadropolar? Is that even possible?”
The Earth has more than two magnetic poles, but only two of them were dramatically obvious—North and South. This was known as a dominantly dipolar system. The basic physics of magnetic fields, whether on a large scale like the planet, or on a small scale like a horseshoe-shaped magnet, resulted in a dipolar system.
What was not commonly known was the fact the Earth actually had several weaker magnetic poles—eight of them, in fact. Known as octupoles, these localized geographic regions barely affected life on Earth, with the lone exception of the South Atlantic Anomaly.
Dr. Amber Hagood had begun to piece together the puzzle of the profound impact the pole shift was having on the planet. She sought answers and she was beginning to find them.
The only problem was that there was nothing she or anyone could do about the coming catastrophe for humanity.
Chapter 19
Riverfront Farms
Southeast Indiana
Squire was exhausted from playing video games with his grandkids. He wished he could bottle their energy and sell it, or drink it up for himself. As he reached his sixties, he was still able to handle his duties around the farm, but he found himself tiring at night. He’d begun experiencing diarrhea, loss of appetite, and he was now pulling his belt a notch or two tighter.
Squire blew it off as an age thing or stress related as the farm suffered from the prolonged drought. The note coming due was hanging over his head, and that consumed him throughout the day.
After dinner, he allowed the grandkids to play a little, and then he shuffled them off to bed. He wanted to check the news for updates on the situation overseas and to make his own determination if Chapman’s concerns were warranted. He got settled in his chair with a mug of decaf coffee and began flipping through the channels. He quickly learned the situation in Europe had taken a turn for the worse.
CNN International was broadcasting live from Paris, where looters and rioters were out in force. The country was under siege as young people took advantage of the power outage and the overwhelmed Police Nationale, who were responsible for Paris and other nearby urban areas.
The French national guard had been called out to protect the historic museums, churches, and points of interest, leaving shop owners to largely fend for themselves. The scene was similar in Southern Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine as opportunists sought to disrupt government operations and enrich themselves.
The scene shifted back to the CNN Atlanta studios, which featured a roundtable discussion with three scientists, including one from Australia. Squire turned up the volume so he could listen to the exchange.
“Without being overly dramatic, but by simply stating facts, if a geostorm of this magnitude hits the United States, you can kiss modern life goodbye. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field as protection against the Sun. It is, quite frankly, a ruthless solar-wind-shredding machine that enables us to maintain life on our planet.
“You see, Earth cruises around the Sun at about sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, constantly bombarded by a constant stream of plasma particles ejected by our star. It’s akin to a speeding motorboat displacing water as it steams across the ocean. In the scientific community, we call it bow shock because of its similarity to a boat forcing its way through stubborn waves.”
The interviewer interrupted with a question. “How does the magnetic field work against these solar winds?”
“As the solar wind crashes into Earth’s magnetic field, the bow shock slows it down, resulting in a nice warm breeze. When the magnetic field weakens, as it appears to be doing, the Earth will continue to be bombarded by a hot, soupy plasma of protons, ions, and electrons ejected from the Sun. These winds blow all day and in all directions, blasting out of the Sun at speeds up to five hundred miles per second and temperatures approaching three million degrees.”
“My god,” exclaimed the interviewer. “You’d think that would be more than enough to bake our planet into a pile of ashes.”
“Well, actually, it is. Venus is a prime example of that. Our planet and its atmosphere remain largely unscathed thanks to the strong magnetic field. However, as is being reported, that may be changing as a result of this pole shift.”
The interviewer took a deep breath, and the camera zoomed in on her concerned face. “Let’s shift gears for a moment. Assuming this pole shift is the root cause for the magnetic field weakening, we can now tie it into the leaks from the White House that all air traffic in the United States will be grounded within the hour.”
The Australian scientist interrupted. “Yes. The pole shift has disrupted our global positioning systems, and the functionality of our satellites in low-Earth orbit can be disrupted by the solar matter. Furthermore, if North America were to take a direct hit from a geostorm similar to the one experienced in Europe …” His voice trailed off before continuing. “Well, it would be lights out.”
Squire stood and began to pace the floor in front of the television. He moved quickly to the stairwell and took a couple of steps up toward the bedrooms to listen for any activity from the grandkids’ rooms. It was quiet, so he made his way back to the television.
CNN was continuing to show images depicting societal collapse. Police in riot gear used water cannons to repel protestors, who countered by throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks. Fires were burning out of control. Images of looters racing out of retail stores with arms full of merchandise ran on a continuous loop with a chyron at the bottom of the screen that read Paris in Chaos.
Squire had seen and heard enough. He muted the television and tossed the remote into his chair. He checked his watch and was astonished when he realized how long Sarah and Carly had been gone on their shopping trip.
He wasn’t annoyed at the length of time they were taking. He was glad and proud that his wife had persevered despite his obvious pushback. He regretted his bad attitude and would let her know by apologizing as soon as she got home.
He wandered through the downstairs, soaking in the information that he’d garnered from the news reports. He tried to imagine a world without power and closed his eyes to shake away the visuals.
Squire stopped and smiled as he recalled the words attributed to his ancestor Daniel Boone. He whispered to himself, “All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife. Thank you, Lord, for blessing me with all three.”
Chapter 20
Northwest Ontario
Canada
“Karl, you awake?” asked Levi in a whisper. He’d lain awake for hours after the guys finally calmed down. He’d replayed the events of the day in his head, trying to make sense of how the pilot could’ve flown so far off course that he mistook the wilderness for a lake.
“Are you kiddin’? Eddie snores like a moose in heat.” Karl adjusted his body so he could look in Levi’s direction although it was pitch black inside the cramped tail section of the airplane.
Levi laughe
d. “I tried nudgin’ him from time to time, and he’d stop for a minute. Then the freight train came rollin’ down the track again.”
Karl chuckled. “Whadya thinkin’?”
“A million things, but mainly I’m tryin’ to figure out where the hell we are. That old pilot seemed to know what he was doin’. How did he miss a lake as big as the one at Smoky Falls?”
“Do you think he got distracted talkin’ about that planet Nibiru garbage?”
Levi subconsciously shrugged. “I dunno, maybe. I remember he said it was taking longer to get to Smoky Falls than he expected.”
“Blamed it on the headwinds, right?” added Karl.
“Yeah. He talked about terrain warning systems or somethin’, and then he said the GPS would guide him to the lake.”
“The plane was all over the place,” said Karl.
“I was watching the altimeter. He had a bead on his landing strip, or lake. At least according to the GPS.”
“Well, all I know is the trees grabbed a wing, and the next thing you know, here we are, splat.”
“And lost,” said Levi. “Hey, did you bring your Garmin?”
“Nah. I didn’t think we’d need it since the guides would be taking us everywhere. Eddie didn’t either. Said he forgot it.”
“Eddie forgot everything,” said Levi as he gently whacked the back of his head against the inside of the airplane. “Including winter clothes. We’ve gotta find your—”
A loud thump against the tail section of the plane stopped Levi from speaking.
“What was that?” whispered Karl as he jostled Eddie in an attempt to stop his snoring.
THUMP!
“Shit!” Levi rolled over on his belly and readied his rifle. Karl quickly followed his lead and pulled the bolt action on his .308.
The sound of heavy feet walking outside the back half of the airplane could be heard until the entire tail section rocked back and forth.