Winter Kill - War With China Has Already Begun

by Gene Skellig

  So when Janie-Lee kept saying: “King Derwin must have his crazy magicians working again, because Oobleck’s falling!” Amy just laughed it off. Janie-Lee had a wonderful imagination, and loved the Dr. Seuss stories that Amy read to her at bedtime. With none of the adults interested, Janie-Lee tried to get Bartholomew Neumann interested.

  “Hey, Bart, you can be Bartholomew Cubbins, and help me warn the kingdom about the Oobleck!”

  “Thanks Janie-Lee, but I’m too busy to play right now. Go tell Bobby, he’ll help you warn the Kingdom!”

  “But Bartholomew, you’re the only one who can make the adults believe me. It really is Oobleck, and it’s dangerous. Please come see the Oobleck!” She put her little hand in Bart’s. Even though he was twenty-one years old, he still loved the story which he had been named after.

  “OK, Sweetie, I’ll play Oobleck with you.”

  Amy heard this, and smiled. Young Bart had grown into a man in the six years he’s spent in the HOTH, but he was still a boy at heart. With so few small children around the HOTH, little Janie-Lee had so few playmates.

  About five minutes after Bart and Janie-Lee disappeared to the penthouse level, shouts came down the stairs.

  “Dad! Amy! It’s true! There really is Oobleck falling! We finally have something new coming down from the sky! Come look. I’ve got some here!” said Bart, excitedly holding up his hand as proof. It was covered with asparagus-colored slime.

  “What the?” Amy said.

  “Where’d you get that?” Geoff asked his son.

  “Janie-Lee was right. There’s Oobleck falling from the sky. We went to the upper deck; the snow is covered with it. It’s sticking to everything! The sky is filled with it!”

  It didn’t take long for everybody to look outside and see that the sky really was filled with a greenish mist. It also seemed that the Oobleck might be dangerous. It had a pungent odor, and made breathing difficult. Bart was quickly developing a skin rash, sore eyes and complained of a burning sensation in his throat. So Casey and Amy got everybody busy sealing off the HOTH and activated the Lung to filter out the mysterious liquid.

  Zlata took charge of the analysis of the substance and, with Amy and Old Mr. Skinner, they carried out a series of tests in the laboratory next to the infirmary. Everybody was worried about chemical warfare. They waited with baited breath while the most qualified people worked on the problem.

  While the initial tests were being run, Geoff and Manfred got on the radios to confirm that Oobleck was falling all over the Pacific Northwest. It soon started to be reported farther inland. It appeared that Oobleck was coming in off the Pacific Ocean, until Geoff got a report that a similar substance was coming down in North Africa. The name “Oobleck” stuck, as it truly was a new kind of weather with all the characteristics of Dr. Seuss’s slimy Oobleck.

  When Dr. Skinner confirmed that the substance was not radioactive, and Amy confirmed that none of the Biological and Chemical Warfare Detection Strips reacted to the green goo, there was a great deal of relief. It took a lot longer for Zlata to come out with her preliminary chemical analysis.

  With only the simple resources of the small lab, all that Zlata could do was some alkalinity tests and a crude form of atomic emission spectroscopy. As she explained it, without a Mass Spectrometer or at least Gas Chromatography, all she could do was identify the elements present. When she first sprayed a fine mist of Oobleck into a flame, she was surprised at the extremely violent combustion that occurred. She tried again with a diluted sample and compared the spectral lines to color charts in some reference textbooks in the lab.

  The results indicated that Carbon, Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum, Calcium, Hydrogen, Iron, Sulphur and Nitrogen were the elements involved. It was definitely a volatile substance and seemed to be in the process of oxidizing. Samples brought in from outside turned from green to brown even when submerged in water. Zlata performed other tests and identified that the main component of the substance was an odorless crystal with a solubility of 118g/100g water at zero degrees C, pH of 5.4, and a melting point of 170C.

  After the lab team provided a list of findings, Geoff and Manfred broadcast the information on the radio nets. They also asked if anybody had more sophisticated equipment to work with.

  While they waited for more information, a white-board was brought from Ops to the lab, where those with any experience with Chemistry tried to work out what the Oobleck was. Zlata put the elements and relative proportions up on the white board, and listed the physical properties of the substance. Stumped, she looked at Amy and the others for ideas.

  “Have you looked at it under a microscope?” Amy asked.

  “Yes, but only briefly. All we can see is a core of colorless crystals being affected by a green substance which ultimately changes to brown as it oxidizes,” Zlata said. “Our microscope isn’t powerful enough to show us much more than that, but there are these odd cup-shaped objects mixed in with the green and clear materials.”

  “But, at its core, there is a colorless crystal right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have two or more substances. One is green, and turns brown when it oxidizes, even under water. So it can’t be getting its Oxygen from the clear substance, right? So it’s a reducing agent. Let’s assume it’s associated with Iron, OK?”

  “I’m with you, go on,” said Zlata.

  “Suppose it’s Iron Sulphate? - FeSO4,” said Amy.

  “Well.” Zlata looked at a copy of the periodic table, and then looked something up in a few textbooks. “If it were the heptahydrate, melanterite, then it would be blue-green as long as it had all 7 water molecules. The Iron could oxidize, turning the agglomeration increasingly from green to brown,” Amy reasoned, mapping the chemical reaction on the white-board. “So that works for one side of the equation, but what about all that Silicon, Carbon and Nitrogen?”

  “I bet if you wash out those cup-shaped items you’ll find they are aluminosilicates, and the clear substance is simply Ammonium Nitrate,” said Amy.

  “Ammonium Nitrate?” asked Zlata. “Wait a minute, that could work!” she said, as she mapped out the Al2SiO5 and NH4NO2 alongside the FeSO4. “Yeah, Amy, that pretty much accounts for all the constituent elements. How did you come up with this?”

  “Well, when you nearly blew yourself up in the lab I kept my mouth shut, but it made me think about all those warnings on the fertilizer bags we use in the green-house.”

  “You meant those ‘34-0-0’ bags?” asked JJ.

  “Yeah, it’s great for boosting crop yield, but have you ever read the warnings and handling instructions?” asked Amy.

  “No, I don’t handle the stuff,” said JJ.

  “Well I do. If you don’t use a mask and gloves when handling the stuff, as we do in the greenhouse when we mix up those batches of nutrient solutions for the hydroponics, you would get the same symptoms young Bart has after he started playing with Oobleck. Add that to Zlata’s small-scale explosion, and voila!” said Amy.

  “OK. So what’s your theory about the silicon cups?” asked Zlata, working through some formulas on the white-board.

  “Vesicles,” said Amy.

  “Why?”

  “Because you said that green stuff, maybe Iron Sulphate, is oxidizing and changing brown. So before it falls as Oobleck it has to be cut off from oxygen, right?”

  “Yes, it has to be in an anoxic state,” said Zlata.

  “So suppose that there was an aluminosilicate vesicle with Ferrous Sulfate and other reagents trapped inside. Somehow the vesicle breaks as it falls, and the Iron Sulfate begins to oxidize.”

  “That could be part of the puzzle. Vesicles would protect the reagents from the oxygen and dryness of the upper atmosphere, but would not account for the Ammonium Nitrate.”

  “Why not, Zlata?” asked Amy.

  “The chemical process to fix nitrogen, to produce ammonia and to combine that with nitric acid, is technologically challenging. For this to occur on the scale we are
seeing would be an impossible technological feat,” explained Zlata.

  As Amy considered this, there was a strange silence in the room. Everybody watched as Zlata began furiously writing symbols on the white-board that bore no resemblance to the inorganic chemistry that they had been exploring.

  “Eureka! I’ve got it!” said Zlata, ecstatically.

  “What is it?” Amy asked.

  “Look, you guys spread the word that we think the Oobleck is made in vesicles, and contains Iron Sulphate and Ammonium Nitrate, and request confirmation from the UBC Profs. I have some experimenting to do to confirm my theory, but it works!”

  By the time the university professors confirmed the chemistry, and asked for any theories about the origin of the substance, Zlata had it all mapped out. She called everybody into the great room to explain what she had deduced.

  What she told them made them all very afraid. They didn’t want to get their hopes up only to find out later that she was wrong. It seemed too good to be true.

  “We’ll get others working to test my theory, but I’m certain that this is good news. A wonderful new kind of weather is falling from the sky! Oh let the wondrous Oobleck fall!”

  “Can you please explain what you mean?” said Granny-G.

  “For something to be falling out of the sky, now, six years after the war, it has to come from the stratosphere. All the dust and debris in the Troposphere, the lower level of the atmosphere where liquid water is present, was washed out fairly quickly. Yet the sun remained blocked out by the billions of tons of dust up in the stratosphere. It has to be coming from the stratosphere, where all that super-fine dust has been trapped, blocking out the sunlight all this time.

  We now know what the Oobleck is, and I think I know how it is being manufactured, and by whom.

  “By whom?” Are you crazy, this stuff is falling all around the world. Nobody has the technology for this. It would be impossible even before the war!” said Amy, frustrated.

  “OK, not exactly ‘whom’,” said Zlata. “But it’s being made by little guys I call ‘Nekataves’. The Nekataves are bacteria in the stratosphere, and they make the Oobleck inside tiny vesicles that formed out of the materials injected into the stratosphere by the atomic blasts,” she said with satisfaction.

  “First of all, why are you so happy about this? And second, how can anything be alive in the stratosphere?” asked Mr. Skinner.

  “OK, I can see you all looking at me like I'm crazy. So I’ll slow down and take it step-by-step,” Zlata said, calming herself. “First, the bacteria. In the decades before the war, scientists had confirmed that as many as twenty different types of bacteria and fungi were alive and well in the stratosphere. Russians, Americans and Europeans all confirmed it by sending up small rockets and high-altitude radiosonde balloons to take samples and return them for analysis. Some of you may not know this but, despite the low atmospheric pressure, the temperature in the stratosphere ranges from minus twenty to plus fifty C. So there are these vertical currents of air which tend to loft particles higher and higher, which partly accounts for how difficult it has been for the dust and debris to settle out of the stratosphere. Material from volcanic eruptions and forest fires is theorized as constantly populating the stratosphere with life. These organisms live, spread and rain down back down on us in microscopic quantities. But now, with billions of tons of material added to the stratosphere, these tiny organisms suddenly had a lot more material to work with.

  The materials from the cities vaporized in the blasts provided, among other things, tiny grains of aluminosilicate and other materials which the air currents and a force atmospheric scientists call ‘Gravito-photophoresis’ lifts the materials higher and higher into the stratosphere.

  Perhaps because of electrostatic charges, or for other reasons, these grains coalesced into larger clumps which included sulfuric acid and other materials in the toxic smoke. Then the stratospheric microorganisms got to work. Suddenly, protected from the dryness of the upper stratosphere, in the oxygen-free interior of these vesicles, new reactions began to occur.” Zlata paused to make sure she was not going too fast. The blank look on people’s faces told her that people were struggling to understand.

  “Put another way, when you throw all sorts of food and energy into an environment, life responds to it. The life forms may be tiny but they have had six years to interact with the increased supply of materials. Now add the fact that the damaged ozone layer means that huge amounts of ultra-violet radiation cause these organisms to mutate, and you wind up with some unexpected life forms up there. At least one of them is a nitrogen-fixing bacteria, like the Rhizobium bacteria only much hardier. Anyhow, these vesicles wind up full of Ammonium Nitrate and Iron Sulphate. They agglomerate into larger and larger blobs which eventually become too heavy to stay aloft.”

  “And they fall down as Oobleck!” said Amy, suddenly as excited as Zlata.

  “Right, and on their way down, they encounter the extreme cold of the Tropopause. The liquids inside freeze and expand, cracking the vesicles into the tiny cups we saw under the microscope -” Zlata had continued, until Amy interrupted again.

  “And the Iron Sulphate leaks out and coats the vesicle green. Soon after landing, it oxidizes, and turns brown!”

  “Ladies! Amy! I see you share Zlata’s excitement about the source of the Oobleck, but, other than the scientific breakthrough Zlata may have had and explaining where this stuff is coming from, why are you so damned happy about it?” asked Casey.

  “Because, Boss, it’s the beginning of the end!” said Amy.

  “The Nekatave process, or whatever scientists will ultimately call it, has given the Earth a way to clean out the billions of tons of smoke and debris from the stratosphere. Without this mechanism, the material could stay up there for centuries. Now it’s falling. We’ll do calculations and communicate with other scientists but, I can tall you right now, that millions upon millions of tons of Oobleck are falling. The dust in the stratosphere has to be disappearing extremely fast now.”

  “You mean the sky will clear soon?” asked Granny-G.

  “That’s right! Whatever has been going on up there for the last six years has reached some critical point and has started a cascading effect. Nobody ever predicted it could happen, but here it is!” Zlata said, while Amy nodded in agreement.

  “So you are saying that the nuclear winter is over?”

  “Far from over, Granny-G. And I need time to analyze the rate of deposition, track the increase in solar insolation and the changes to the weather patterns. But yes, it will happen a lot faster now than we ever expected, or even dared to hope.”

  “So what will the effects be, on the ground?” JJ asked.

  “I think we’ll see sunshine within a month. With it will be dangerous levels of Ultra-Violet radiation, we’ll need to track it, and come up with protective head-gear and goggles, but who knows whether the Ozone layer is repairing itself or not. I suspect that it will be manageable, but plants and animals will probably have more mutations and problems than in the past.

  The jet-stream will migrate back north into Canada and we’ll see the sea temps begin to rise gradually. This will bring increasing rainfall to the Island and begin to melt the snow in the lower levels. Snow accumulation in the mountains will increase again, but down here we’ll see snow melting very fast. It may take a few summers, but we’ll have above-zero temps starting this June, and lasting till September or so. After that, winters will be mild, but perhaps a bit snowy at times. In a few years, we’ll have clear roads and things will really explode after that.” Zlata said this with a whimsical expression that begged the question.

  “Explode?” asked Tanya.

  “Yes, in more ways than one. First, when soil meets sun again, with all of that Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer soaked into it, life will explode. Plants will grow like wildfire.”

  “And the other way?” asked JJ.

  “Ammonium Nitrate is highly volatile. Oobleck that dries t
o dead vegetation will add an explosive quality to the inevitable forest fires. So the forests will also explode.

  36

  SNAKE HEAD

  02 June: 7 Years After NEW

  It took seven years to find where General Bing was. Even when found by western forces, they had no way to kill him. If they couldn’t kill the Snake’s Head, there would be no way to defeat the larger beast.

  General Bing had been elevated to the post of Chief of PLA General Staff after General Wang’s orchestrated heart attack right before the war began. Exactly as planned, General Bing was given emergency powers. He wasted no time in utilizing this unlimited gift, first arresting and executing the surviving members of the Communist Party, and then throwing the full weight of Chinese national resources into his global war effort.

  OP PLAN XIALONG, Little Dragon, had been a strategic success. Little Dragons and follow-on Special Forces had seized control of the vast majority of their objectives worldwide. The local resistance had been a nuisance in some areas, particularly the Pacific Northwest, however additional follow-on forces were soon dispatched to reinforce those areas where Chinese forces were at risk of losing their foothold.

  Under their new leader, China was fighting a very long war which would not be over until China had achieved total victory.