NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  The President raised his eyebrows at Kramer. “I’d say that evidence is pretty darn persuasive, wouldn’t you agree, Herbert?”

  Kramer’s lips were taut and drained of all colour. “It tells me that ammonia levels are going up. It does not tell me they’ve reached a point that justifies such drastic action. Are we sitting here round the table at this moment choking on ammonia? No, we are not.”

  Chris sighed audibly and looked away.

  Terry felt a surge of irritation. “With respect, Dr. Kramer,” he said, “that is looking more and more like a lucky accident. And we’re fast running out of luck.”

  Chris returned his gaze to Kramer. “Herbert, this ground has been trodden a number of times before. All the indications are that the situation will become incomparably worse within weeks. The international experts in the Institute – the Institute of which you are the Director – can’t be expected to bring their research to a successful conclusion while the air they breathe is filling with ammonia. Like Bob said just now, even after they’ve reached a solution we still have to grow up the material in bulk. Finally we have to distribute it around the world. That requires aircraft and – as you may be aware – both internal combustion engines and jet engines are designed to burn oxygen, not ammonia. For all those reasons we have to take action in advance of the stage you’re talking about. The idea of unleashing a supervolcano is just as appalling to us as it is to you, but the message is clear: we’re either proactive about this or we’re dead.”

  The President looked at Kramer. “Herbert?”

  Kramer’s pale features positively vibrated with tension. “It’s your decision, Mr. President. It’s not something I would wish to be a party to.”

  The President’s jaw tightened. “No, Herbert,” he growled softly. “It’s not something I’d wish to be party to, either. Except I don’t have a choice.”

  He turned to Cabot. “Bob, you and I go back a long way. What do you think?”

  Cabot took a deep breath. His voice was as deep-chested and sonorous as ever. “Mr President, my feeling is we need to do something. We’ve already lost a lot of citizens in the big cities. People are getting really agitated. Did you see the banner headline in the Washington Post? – ‘WHO’S NEXT?’ If there’s an outbreak of violence it could spread very quickly. Our options are going to become more limited if we’re fighting rioters and looters on the streets.” He sighed and opened his hands. “What more can I say? It’s one hell of a decision but whichever way you go, I’ll back you.”

  The President nodded slowly. “Thanks, Bob. Does anyone have anything to add?”

  They shook their heads.

  “And we’ve had no viable suggestions for alternative action?”

  Again they shook their heads.

  The room went quiet. Seconds passed. The President studied each of them in turn, Kramer, Terry, Chris, Noel, and Bob. No one moved or spoke. He broke the silence.

  “I’m driven to the conclusion,” he said heavily, “that we need to buy more time. Are we agreed? Herbert?”

  Kramer set his lips tighter.

  “Chris? Noel? Bob?”

  Their expressions were grim. All nodded their heads.

  “Chuck?”

  The Vice-President nodded, too.

  The President sagged slightly, as if his body were too heavy to be supported any longer. “I have already discussed this contingency with the Air Force Chief of Staff. He assured me that the operation could be carried out in total secrecy. I did not imagine then that we would ever reach the point where those preparations would be needed.” He took a deep breath. “I will instruct him to commence the countdown as of midday today.”

  Terry closed his eyes. He was thinking of Maggie, but there was nothing more he could do or say.

  CHAPTER 56

  On the flight back to Florida, Terry gazed out of the window into the August sunshine, thinking about the latest encounter with Herbert Kramer. In Terry’s experience you didn’t have to like someone to respect them. He neither liked nor respected Kramer. Evidently Kramer felt the same way about him. He’d waited in the anteroom after the meeting in the Oval Office to buttonhole Terry.

  “Why wasn’t I informed about this, McKinley?”

  Terry ignored the rudeness. “It wasn’t a secret, Dr. Kramer. The figures are reported at the briefing every Friday morning at eleven o’clock.”

  The bloodless lips twitched. “I have commitments on a Friday.”

  “Well I’d have been happy to inform you at some other time if you’d made yourself available, but we haven’t seen you down there for weeks. My hands have been pretty full lately, and I’m afraid there hasn’t been time to seek you out.”

  “You found time to seek out Chris Walmesley this morning.”

  Any number of robust retorts flashed through Terry’s mind and it took all his self-control to bite them back.

  “Chris has data that’s complementary to ours. We put it together to get a more complete picture in preparation for this meeting.”

  “As the President’s adviser I need to know. Kindly keep me informed in future.”

  And he’d turned on his heel and walked out.

  Kramer evidently felt his authority was being undermined, especially by Chris Walmesley. Whatever battles those two had fought in the past, this was surely a time to set aside their differences. Not, it seemed, for Kramer. The evidence was overwhelming, but as long as it was coming from Walmesley the man would go out of his way to trash it.

  Unfortunately Kramer was the Director of their Institute and, formally at least, he and Maggie were answerable to him. All the signs were there before, and now it was clearer than ever: sooner or later they were going to clash head-on.

  Right now that was the least of his worries. The President was about to unleash the colossal energy of a supervolcano in the north-west United States. With that prospect in view nothing else mattered. He checked his watch. About twenty-one hours to go.

  How was he going to break the news to Maggie?

  Maggie came running out into the corridor as Terry unlocked his office door. He turned to greet her, briefcase tucked under one arm.

  “Terry, oh good, you’re back!”

  “Hi, Maggie.” Terry pushed the door open. “What’s up?”

  The words tumbled out of her. “It’s all hands on deck. Matt’s group is still busy sequencing the plasmid but Silvia’s managed to transfect the plasmid DNA into E. coli. She said it was easy. It’s like a miniature version of that production plant at Genon! We’ll be able to grow up oodles of plasmid and purify the protein switch it’s making. Then we’ll sequence the protein and get the structure, and – ”

  She frowned.

  “What is it, Terry? I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am pleased. It’s just… I just wish all this could have come sooner, that’s all.”

  She looked at him, eyes narrowed. “What went on in Washington?”

  “Come and sit down, Maggie.” She shot him a searching glance, then went in, pulled out a chair and sat stiff-backed. He shut the door, came over, and leaned against his desk.

  He met her eyes. “The countdown’s started.”

  It was as if a chill hand had clutched inside her chest. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Then: “How long have we got?”

  “As of now?” He consulted his watch. “About nineteen hours.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You can’t allow this to happen, you just can’t. You’ve got to stop it.”

  “Sorry, Maggie, only the President can stop it now.”

  “Then tell him – ”

  “It’s not for me to tell him what to do. He couldn’t take advice from a non-US citizen, especially on something as sensitive as this.”

  His apparently calm acceptance of the situation infuriated her still more.

  “This was your bright idea – you have a responsibility!” He recoiled a little, and she could see the hurt in his eyes. “At the
very least you could tell him we’re close to finding a solution.”

  When his answer came it was slow and gritty. “I have, I told him you were only weeks away. But this can’t be held back on the mere expectation of success. Even if I’d gone to him with the solution in my hand it would take months to deploy it effectively.” He turned his head away from her, then back again. “For God’s sake, Maggie, why do I have to explain this to you? You know it as well as anyone!”

  She jumped up. “This is ridiculous! You’re taking a dreadful decision based on an arbitrary – a theoretical – condition – ” she waved her hands wildly “ – somewhere up there in the atmosphere.”

  He said nothing, just went behind his desk and booted up his computer. “Come round here, Maggie. Look for yourself.”

  She stood there, breathing hard. Then, lips set tightly, she went to stand behind him. He typed on the keyboard and brought up a display, a map of the world. Both Northern and Southern Hemispheres were studded with red dots.

  “Every one of those dots is a city that’s suffered a white smog. Some have had more than one. These are the current ones.” He tapped a key and a pattern of green dots appeared. He pointed at the screen, his finger stabbing at each dot in turn. “Detroit. Dublin. Glasgow. Rotterdam. Marseilles. Athens. Istanbul. Bangkok. Beijing. Manila. The ones in Detroit, Bangkok, and Beijing show no sign of leaving soon. When they linger like that the death toll rises day after day after day. These things have already killed tens of thousands of people.” He turned to her and lifted his hands, mimicking her gesture. “The problem isn’t ‘up there’ any more. It’s down here.”

  “Well yes, but those are major cities, with lots of industry and traffic fumes. You’d expect problems to arise there first.”

  “But it’s happening insidiously elsewhere. Look at how wildlife’s suffering.”

  Some of her indignation subsided and her tone became less strident. “You mean like the incidents with the birds and fish?”

  “Birds and fish, and mammals, too: bats, dolphins, whales – ”

  “The Baja peninsula.”

  “Not just there: we’ve had reports of cetacean strandings on the Malabar coast – that’s South West India. Humpback whales this time.”

  Human deaths, animal deaths – death everywhere they looked. She could see the strength of the evidence. But Terry had come to terms with what lay at the end of that countdown. She hadn’t; her very soul rebelled against it.

  “But we’re so close.”

  “Face it, Maggie: we’ve run out of time.”

  They regarded each other in silence. She shook her head. “He won’t do it. No Western head of state is going to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people! He’ll have second thoughts and stop the countdown.”

  Terry sighed. “Well all I can say is, if he does, he’ll be responsible for hundreds of millions instead.”

  Chris Walmesley’s desk, normally clear, was a mass of papers: lists, graphs, and tables of figures. Noel Harrison sat next to him, shuffling them around. Only their advice could change things now and the burden weighed heavily on them.

  In the adjacent office Trish, Walmesley’s PA, was blocking all incoming calls and keeping the private line to the Oval Office free.

  Noel looked at another graph, then set it down. “Dammit, Chris,” he said. “I never thought it would come to this. The biologists ought to have come up with a solution before now.”

  “Come on, that’s not fair and you know it. We gave them six months to get it done, and that was a pretty tall order. In the event they didn’t even have nearly that long.”

  Noel sighed. “Our predictions were reasonable. The levels were going up when we first looked at the data, but not as fast as this.” He gestured at the graph and shook his head. “It was those extreme weather systems; we couldn’t have foreseen that.”

  “Noel, we’re not in the blame game; we have to deal with things as they are now. And right now our chances of ever beating this thing get worse with every day that passes.”

  “But Yellowstone…”

  “No one’s come up with an alternative.”

  Noel extended his fingers and pushed the graph idly around. “Cabot’s suggestion was best, using aircraft to seed rainclouds. That would have washed some of the ammonia out. Maybe we should have pursued it further before we committed to this.”

  “It was unworkable! You couldn’t do it on the scale required.”

  Noel covered his eyes with one hand.

  “Neutron bombs?” he said.

  “Neutron bombs? Do we have any?”

  “I don’t know. Bob Cabot would know.”

  “All right, suppose we have them. What are you going to do with them?”

  “Explode them over the ocean. In all the hot spots, the Sargasso Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea – ”

  “The Great Lakes?”

  “Well, maybe not the Great Lakes…”

  “Noel, you’re fucking crazy. You think Russia and China and North Korea and India and Pakistan are going to sit still while we explode nuclear weapons all over the planet?”

  “We’d warn them. The radiation from a bomb like that would be lethal through metres of water. It’d kill the organism.”

  “Yeah, and it would kill everything else, too, bad organisms, good organisms, krill, fish, everything. In any case, the organism isn’t just in the oceans; it’s in rivers, lakes, the soil. You wouldn’t be doing anything to bring atmospheric ammonia down, and the levels would carry on rising.”

  “Maybe not as fast.”

  Chris gave him a patient look. “It won’t work, Noel.”

  Noel sat back. “All right, you think of something.”

  “I’m trying. Believe me, I’m trying.”

  Terry stirred, half sat up and looked at the clock. It was five-thirty a.m. He got out of bed and padded into the sitting area. Maggie was there. She was sitting in a chair, elbows on the table, holding her head in her hands.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “An hour, two hours, three – I don’t know.”

  “What is it? The countdown?”

  “Of course, what else?”

  “Maggie, it’s out of our hands.”

  “So you keep telling me.” She sank her head deeper, the fingers running through the curls at the back of her neck. “There’s got to be another way.”

  He fumbled around for something to say. “You should try to sleep. Can I get you anything?”

  He hadn’t meant to sound patronising but that’s the way it came out.

  She tossed her head irritably. “No, nothing. You go back to bed, Terry. I’m all right.”

  He grimaced and returned to the bedroom. He got into bed but lay awake.

  Barring some last-minute change the approaching day would be like no other. In little more than six hours something catastrophic was going to occur, something which he was responsible for, yet powerless to prevent. He thought back to his comments about the Manhattan Project. Is this the way Oppenheimer and all those talented scientists and engineers felt when the bombs they’d designed were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were they haunted for the rest of their lives by the hundreds of thousands of deaths – of those vaporized in the first instants of the blast, and those who died from burns or radiation poisoning over the ensuing weeks, months, and years? Is that the way he was going to feel about the people unfortunate enough to live too close to the supervolcano and those who might starve or freeze in the aftermath? Or would he think of them as martyrs whose unwitting sacrifice enabled the rest of the human race to survive? He squeezed his eyes shut. It seemed like a shameful indulgence even to think about his own feelings in the face of what could now happen.

  Dawn light filtered through the curtains. Time was nearly up.

  CHAPTER 57

  A thousand miles to the north-west, close to the town of Knob Noster, Missouri, the doors opened on a climate-controlled hangar at Whiteman Air Force Base, home
to the United States Air Force 509th Bomb Wing. At the same time six ground crew spilled out of one of the low buildings and hurried across to disappear into the shadowy depths of the hangar. Another man boarded a jeep and drove briskly away in the direction of the armoury.

  A tow tractor and a refuelling truck made their way over. A man dressed in coveralls hopped down from the refuelling truck. He pulled on thick gloves and shouldered the heavy hose from the reel at the rear of the truck. As he walked away a motor automatically turned the reel, feeding the hose out behind him. He lifted a metal trap in the apron, took off a glove to fiddle with a key, and removed the cover on the pipe leading to the underground fuel reservoir. Then he uncapped the end of the hose, locked the two brass fittings together and tugged to test the security of the connection. Finally he walked to the reel at the front of the truck, operated a lever to spool out a few metres of hose, and laid it on the ground in readiness.

  The jeep driver returned from the armoury. This time he was seated in a heavy articulated trolley and behind him was a twenty-foot-long, metallic pencil. He stopped and manoeuvred the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile backwards into the hangar.

  The door to the low building opened again. Two flight crew came out and crossed the apron.

  Thirty minutes went by. Then two of the ground crew brought the tow truck in and yoked it to the nose assembly of the aircraft that was towering somewhere above them. One returned to the truck’s cabin. The engine note of the vehicle rose. Slowly, from the entire width of the hangar, a giant B2 Spirit stealth bomber eased out onto the apron.