by Peter Hernon
Lauren leaned out the window with the bullhorn.
“Evacuate now! The dam’s gone at Kentucky Lake!”
She kept repeating the warning as the sheriff maneuvered through the wreckage. The damage was extensive. Just like Gilbertsville, Raitland was a wasteland of broken glass, shattered brick walls, and collapsed buildings.
Lauren realized it was useless. Those who even heard her warning were too disoriented or stunned to respond. And there wasn’t time. The flood would hit them within minutes. The town was going to be swept away.
An elderly woman ran into the street right in front of them, waving her arms. Hessel braked hard, barely missing her.
“Lou!” the woman screamed. “It’s Dave. You’ve got to help me.”
The sheriff climbed out of the car. “Is that you, Mary Beth?” It was the wife of his cousin, Dave.
Seeing her more closely, Elizabeth realized the woman wasn’t elderly at all. Early thirties. She looked older because her face and hair were powdered white from plaster dust. A red gash crossed her left cheek.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad, Mary Beth.”
The woman touched her cheek and stared almost absentmindedly at the blood on her fingers.
“Where’s Dave?” the sheriff asked.
“The ceiling fell on him. Please, Lou. He’s hurt bad.”
The house was across the street. The front porch and part of the roof had collapsed.
Hessel said softly, “All right, Mary Beth. I’m coming.” He turned to Lauren. “I’m going to stay here,” he said. “See what I can do to help. You get on up to Paducah and tell them what’s heading their way. Then you and the boy get the hell away from there.”
Hessel hurried over to his cousin’s smashed home. The woman had already disappeared through the front door. Wanting to help, Lauren followed the sheriff. She told Bobby to stay in the car.
The two-story frame house had shifted on its foundation. Hessel went inside. His cousin lay in the living room, pinned on his stomach with a joist beam across his spine. He was bleeding from both ears.
“I think my back’s broken,” he said between gritted teeth.
Seeing Lauren behind him, Hessel grabbed her by the shoulders, hard. “Dammit, Lauren. I’m staying with my people. You get out of here. Now!”
Lauren kissed Hessel on the cheek then ran back to the patrol car. Sliding behind the steering wheel, she made a tight U-turn and raced back toward the highway. The ground started shaking again as the car nosed up onto the two-lane.
“Grandma, there it is!” Bobby shouted from the back seat.
Lauren didn’t look behind. She didn’t have to. She knew the flood water was crashing toward them down the valley. She could hear it.
NEAR CARUTHERSVILLE, MISSOURI
JANUARY 13
2:16 A.M.
DICK MARSDEN POURED A CUP OF HOT COFFEE from his thermos and settled back comfortably in his captain’s chair. Only two cars were loaded onto the ferry that every other hour crossed from the Tennessee shore to the Missouri side of the Mississippi, then back again. It was the last run of the night. The gangplank had been pulled in and the metal gate secured across the ferry’s open bow.
They’d shove off in two or three minutes. Running ahead of schedule, Marsden had time for a quick cup of coffee.
The view from the pilothouse was impressive, even in the dark. The Mississippi was nearly two miles wide, nothing at all like it was at St. Louis. Marsden had worked on fleeting barges there for nearly twenty years. The river at St. Louis—narrow and fast flowing—was like a muddy canal.
Down here near the Missouri boot heel, it was a different story. Three miles upstream, a new four-lane suspension bridge crossed the river. Marsden could just make out the red aircraft warning lights on the top of the span’s superstructure. The bridge handled all the interstate traffic crossing from Dyersburg, Tennessee, to Caruthersville, Missouri, where motorists could pick up Interstate 55. To the south, it was 90 miles to Memphis. To the north, St. Louis was 160 miles away.
The ferry mainly served locals who worked in Tennessee and used it to shave commuting time from their homes in Missouri.
Marsden had just set his coffee mug on the instrument console when the first shock wave hit, throwing him out of his chair so hard his forehead struck the steering wheel. The blow stunned him. The ferry had risen sharply in the water, pulling at its moorings as if a giant hand were trying to pick it up. Then it fell, the hull slamming down again.
Trying to stand on unsteady feet, Marsden gripped his seat so he wouldn’t be knocked over again. He watched in disbelief as waves appeared suddenly on the river, six-foot swells rolling from shore to shore. Grabbing a pair of binoculars, he looked upstream toward the bridge. He saw the glint of headlights midway across the deck. Probably a long-distance trucker.
Then, unbelievably, the bridge’s long center span snapped in two. Marsden saw the truck, its long trailer outlined in yellow lights, plunge into the river. The deck and part of the superstructure fell right on top of it, throwing up a wall of spray.
The shaking hadn’t let up. Every time Marsden tried to stagger out of the pilothouse, he was knocked against the bulkhead.
The cars parked down on the deck were bouncing around like toys, sliding back and forth as the ferry pitched and rolled.
Only minutes earlier, a big three-decker towboat lit up like a Christmas tree and pushing a long string of coal barges had glided by, heading downstream toward Memphis. Marsden watched as the same towboat went by him again, this time heading upriver. It took a moment for his dazed mind to comprehend what he was seeing.
The current was pushing the barges and tow backward.
Across the river, on the Missouri side, large sections of the bank were falling into the water. So much of the shoreline was caving in over there that it looked like a landslide.
His deckhand staggered through the doorway. His face was pale. “The river’s full of whirlpools,” he said.
Marsden barely heard him. He had his binoculars on the towboat and barges rapidly heading upstream toward the sunken bridge. Then, as he watched, the tow disappeared.
There was no other way to describe what happened. The tow went first, dropping out of sight. Then the string of barges, the last one lifting up, red running lights still ablaze as it nosed up and vanished from view.
When the shaking finally stopped, Marsden went out on the narrow bridge next to the pilothouse. The river was still wild. The deckhand was right about the whirlpools. A big one had opened up, swirling like a huge inverted funnel just downstream from the ferry. Marsden focused his binoculars on where the barges and towboat had disappeared. It was over two miles upstream out toward the middle of the river.
Marsden saw a line of boiling white water and realized what he was looking at. It was the foaming edge of a sharp drop-off.
There was a waterfall out there.
OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
2:16 A.M.
WEARING A WHITE LABORATORY SUIT AND CLOTH boots designed to prevent potentially lethal sparks, Fred Booker mentally ran through the final checklist before climbing into the firing bunker. He was in the Shock Wave Laboratory in one of the cavernous brick buildings at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s top-secret Y-12 plant. Booker was getting ready to fire the cannon, which was technically called a two-stage, light-gas gun.
Protected by twenty-foot-high fences topped with razor wire and guard towers manned by marksmen with automatic weapons, the Y-12 plant was one of the most secure research centers in the United States. Formerly built to produce uranium for the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s, it had evolved into a cutting-edge engineering laboratory equally capable of redesigning on an emergency basis the propellers for a nuclear attack submarine, building a better beer bottle, or making major breakthroughs in robotics. The facility spanned two and a half miles and contained some 250 buildings.
Booker, a young-looking sixt
y-seven-year-old physicist, had worked for the laboratory since the late 1970s. Oak Ridge was in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee, twenty miles south of Knoxville. He’d fallen in love with the country. It was where he’d started a new career. Where his wife, Mary, had divorced him. He didn’t blame her. She’d never been able to count on him. He was always in the laboratory working, while she had to raise their two ruggedly independent daughters. Mary lived in Knoxville, and they’d remained friends.
A tall, slightly stooped man with close-cropped gray hair and intense gray eyes, Booker kept fit by taking rambling hikes in the mountains. He also liked to paddle his battered Old Town canoe on the nearby Clinch River.
His colleagues considered him a workaholic, irascible, but brilliant.
Soon after getting his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Booker had joined the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in southern California. He’d spent nearly a dozen years helping Livermore design nuclear bombs and had become a recognized master of the arcane art of “boosting” weapons—making them more powerful by layering thermonuclear fuels in the bomb’s “physics package,” greatly enhancing the weapon’s destructive impact.
When Booker ended his career at Livermore, he was in charge of the laboratory’s underground nuclear tests in the famous “Area 51” at the Nevada Test Site. He’d spent entire months on bomb “shots,” living in dusty trailers, traveling into Vegas on the weekends. None of it had helped his marriage, which had begun to unravel during his stint at the NTS.
Needing a change, he joined the nuclear engineering staff at ORNL.
Semiretired, he stayed on at Oak Ridge as a consultant and was helping with test shots in the Shock Wave Lab. The firing was done in a remote corner of one of the mammoth buildings once used to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium. Since the end of the war, these Alpha and Beta buildings had served other purposes. The Shock Wave Lab was in the old Alpha building. Painted a dull red like so many of the other buildings at Y-12, it was made of concrete reinforced with steel rods. Its dimensions were prodigious, 543 feet by 312 feet. The labyrinth of piping and equipment the uranium-enrichment process required accounted for these oversize buildings, many of which still lined First Street at the ORNL complex.
Booker had helped design a refitted naval cannon that had been lengthened and retooled to fire a pellet-sized piece of iron at twenty thousand miles an hour into a target—a vacuum impact tank. The 140-foot-long gun resembled a rifle barrel outfitted with a huge silencer. The barrel rested on a series of metal supports. The lab actually used two cannons, depending on the purpose of the shot. One fired at a slightly higher speed. They were lowered into place by an overhead crane. In nanoseconds the guns generated colossal temperatures that matched those at the center of the earth, thereby offering a glimpse of what pressures were like at the iron core of the planet, where the temperature was over twelve thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
A key ingredient in these firings was the explosive propellant. Booker had shaped the special compound himself, a mixture of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, which was also used to detonate nuclear weapons. The explosive charge drove a sixty-pound piston that squeezed hydrogen gas down the barrel.
The shots were done in the early morning when the building was deserted. The sound of the projectile moving at thousands of miles an hour and hitting the impact tank wasn’t much—the metallic clink of a coin pitched into a coffee can. But the shock wave that followed was a hummer. On previous firings, windows had been blown out of adjoining buildings. Doors had flown open, and floors had shaken.
The firing was done from a bunker of reinforced concrete located near the impact chamber. The bunker was a gray blockhouse about six feet high and eight feet long. Outfitted with an array of equipment, it had steel doors and a window slit covered with shatterproof glass.
“How’s the VISAR checking out?” Booker asked one of the two geophysicists he was working with, a young Ph.D. named Ed Graves. VISAR was the acronym for Velocity Interferometer System for Any Reflector. It was used to measure shock waves.
“All go.”
“What about the pyrometer?” The device measured high temperatures.
“Up and running,” said the other geophysicist, Len Miller. With the ORNL for twenty-five years, he was their leading “deep earth” specialist.
“What about the camera?” They used a rotating mirror streak camera with a xenon light source to measure shock velocity.
“Ready,” said Miller.
“Let’s do a shoot,” Booker said. He sat at the computer terminal that monitored the firing systems and various recording devices. He rapidly went down the checklist one more time. Miller sat next to him and would do the actual firing. He removed the cover from a red toggle switch.
“Here we go,” Booker said. He started the countdown from ten.
He’d reached six when a powerful ground tremor almost threw him out of his chair.
“Dammit, Len. It wasn’t time.”
He thought that Miller had accidentally fired the cannon. Then the floor shook again, even harder. Booker pressed a button that disarmed the gun.
“Boys, we’ve got ourselves an earthquake,” he said.
The first two shocks had been very strong, but the next one was even more violent, knocking all three men out of their seats.
“We’ve never had a quake in this part of the state,” said Graves.
“We’re sure… as hell… having one now,” said Miller, gritting his teeth as he spoke. “I’d put this… way up on the Richter.”
Booker was used to earthquakes. A few mild shakes out in the Nevada desert, just enough to rattle the windows. Nothing like this.
“I don’t know how much longer the building can take all this shaking,” said Miller. He was astounded by the length and intensity of the tremors.
“These walls are two feet thick and reinforced with steel,” Booker said. The Alpha building was a virtual fortress, designed under top secrecy to house an electromagnetic process for enriching uranium for the A-bomb. It had been built in segments, like a honeycomb with each segment consisting of four walls and a separate roof. The segments or “rooms” fit together like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle to form the building. The Shock Wave Lab was in one of these 100-by-200-foot rooms.
A chunk of concrete as big as a piano hit the bunker and shattered. It was part of the roof.
The ground was still shaking—a strong lateral motion.
More concrete rained down on them. Then, after several long minutes, the ground quieted. Booker carefully opened the bunker door just wide enough to glance up at the roof. He could see black sky through the gaping holes.
“Let’s get out, now,” said Miller.
“We can’t,” Booker said. Large pieces of the roof blocked the only doorway out of the building. They were trapped. And the ground was starting to shake again. One jarring tremor, followed quickly by another.
“The first aftershocks,” Miller said. “This is one mother of an earthquake.”
Scrambling out of the bunker, Booker put his back to the bulky steel impact tank located within a foot of the cannon barrel. He strained to move it.
“Give me a hand,” he said, gasping.
“What are you doing, Fred?” asked Graves. He started pushing the heavy tank, putting his back to it until they’d moved it off to the side, away from the barrel. The cannon now pointed directly at the wall.
“We’re going to try to shoot our way out of this damn place before the building collapses.” Booker said.
The three men hurried back into the firing bunker and strapped themselves into their seats.
“You ever done anything like this before?” asked Graves. His face was ashen.
“Can’t say I have,” Booker said. He scanned the instrumentation panel, making a few minor adjustments. The compressed gas levels were fine. They could fire the propellant.
“You ready, Len?”
“You want to run the co
untdown?”
“Just do it!” Booker shouted.
Miller threw the toggle switch. The cannon fired with that strangely muffled sound, but the concussive impact of the projectile blasting into the wall was crushing. The entire building shook. The shock wave lifted Booker a few inches out of his seat.
He opened the bunker’s steel door and cautiously peered out. The cannon had blasted a four-foot hole through the concrete wall.
“Let’s go for it!” Booker shouted. He followed the other two men through the hole, bending at the waist to squeeze through. It was pitch-dark outside. The lights that made the Y-12 compound glow like a city were off. The tremors continued in rapid succession. It was hard to walk.
They hurried away from the damaged building. It was cold and they didn’t have overcoats. Sirens wailed all around them. Three fire engines hurtled down the street.
Booker knew where they were headed. The containment park.
The mercury once used for lithium enrichment was stored there. Lithium, the lightest metal, had two naturally occurring isotopes, lithium-6 and lithium-7. Lithium-6 was used to make tritium, the gas that did such a nice job boosting the explosive power of nuclear weapons.
The Y-12 plant had required huge amounts of mercury—in the peak years between 1951 and 1963, over a third of the available world supply. Most of what remained was kept in jug-shaped steel flasks stored in concrete vaults in the containment park. Other volatile chemicals were also kept there in large quantity, methylene chloride and fluorine among them.
If any of that storage caught fire…
Booker couldn’t even try to comprehend what that would mean.
NEAR FULTON, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 13
4:25 A.M.
ATKINS HELD THE SPEED AT SEVENTY. IF HE went any faster, the Explorer had a tendency to slip out on the curves. The toll road that ran south from Mayfield to the Tennessee border was empty of traffic and in good shape.