by Peter Hernon
“Don’t press it,” he said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “I flunked rappelling when I was a Girl Scout.”
Elizabeth’s helmet was fitted with a headset microphone so she could talk with the team on the surface. She rechecked all the knots and buckles in her seat harness and signaled to the men to lower her over the side.
“Take me down ten feet,” she said. Her back to the trench, she pushed away from the wall with her feet, letting the rope glide through her fingers. She’d already picked out several places to check that were close to the surface.
In a few minutes, she shouted: “Bull’s-eye! There’s multiple scarring here. Sand boils, a big lateral offset. This might have been made by the 1811-1812 quakes.” Using a trowel, she gently scraped away at the side of the cliff. “There’s plenty of peat down here.” She put the samples into cellophane packs that she carried in a waist pouch.
Atkins hoped that would be enough, but he knew better. He heard Elizabeth say, “Let’s try another fifteen feet down.”
A helicopter crewman carefully played out more rope.
“I see some evidence of scorching,” Elizabeth said. “They may have been caused by lightning strikes that burned away some of the hillside.” She deposited a few more fragments of charcoal into her sample bag and asked to be lowered ten feet.
It was a gray, gloomy morning with a sharp wind. Not much light filtered down into the crevasse. Atkins and the others had safety ropes tied around their waists so they wouldn’t fall in if the ground suddenly gave way. From what he could see from above, the exposed wall of layered sediment would probably be measured in the thousands of years, not tens of thousands.
That was fine, he thought. They were more interested in the recent record of big quakes—those that had happened one or two thousand years before the cataclysms of the last century. That would be long enough to show a pattern—if one existed.
“It’s like a layer cake down here,” Elizabeth said. “Let out another fifteen feet.”
Playing her light on the uneven walls of the trench, Elizabeth zeroed in on another big scar, which appeared to have been made by an explosion crater.
“This sand blow… is… a… monster!” she cried out. She was down about eighty feet. The vertical offsets were even more impressive—and equally troubling. She examined two of these zigzag tears, scraping samples from each. One of them appeared to have severed an ancient streambed. The slightly coarser, darker sand might have been easy to overlook, but not for Elizabeth’s practiced eyes.
“It took a pretty good-sized quake to break through this streambed,” she said. “I’m going to do a little measuring.”
She used a steel tape measure to get the exact dimensions of the offsets, requesting several times to be raised or lowered a few feet. She also took photographs with the camera, which had an automatic flash.
“How long’s she been down?” the crew chief asked.
Atkins glanced at his watch. “Nearly forty minutes.”
“The soldier shook his head. “We’re pushing our luck.”
Atkins wanted to bring her up. Then he heard Elizabeth’s excited voice over his headset.
“Here’s another slam dunk! That offset was bigger than I thought. At least twelve meters.” Caused by the fracturing waves of an earthquake, an offset was a clear break or crack in a layer of sediment or rock.
The news startled Atkins. An offset of that size could only have been made by an exceptionally strong earthquake. It was evidence the fault had already produced several large quakes long before the triple play in 1811-1812. The deep tear in the earth’s crust had remained dangerous for a long time.
“Liz, did you find any carbon on the offset?” he asked.
“You bet,” she said. “Some good pieces.”
A strong northerly wind stung their faces and made it feel much colder. Atkins had just put his hands in his pockets to warm them when the earth moved. A minor tremor.
“Hey, look over there!” one of the geologists shouted. About thirty yards away, a twenty-foot-long strip of earth had peeled away from the edge and fallen into the fissure.
“Elizabeth, are you all right?” Atkins said into his radio. Dust clouds were rolling out of the crevasse.
He heard her say, “Bring me up!”
The lift began, but the rope hit a snag and wouldn’t budge. The hoist started to smoke from the friction.
“Shut it down!” the crew chief shouted to the operator.
After pulling Elizabeth up about ten feet, the rope had stuck on something.
“I’m hung up,” Elizabeth said.
A shower of dirt and clay had fallen on her. Her shoulder throbbed where one of the larger pieces had struck her. She tried to see in the choking dust, covering her mouth and nose with a handkerchief. It was like groping in fog. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face.
The ground lurched again, rocking her harness. A block of sediment broke away from the wall of the fissure somewhere below her and smashed into the bottom, throwing up more thick dust. From the sound it made, it was a big, heavy chunk of earth.
Elizabeth figured she was down about 150 feet. Keeping one hand on the harness, she reached up with the other and felt something overhead. The rope was twisted around it.
The next jolt was even stronger. The upper walls of the crevice seemed to move closer together. But maybe that was just her imagination.
Elizabeth smelled something coming up from the depths. Sulfur.
As the dirt settled, she saw what had fouled her rope—the root system of a tree. Long buried and completely carbonized, part of the trunk had broken through the wall during the last tremor. The rope was caught between several gnarled roots, each as thick as a man’s arm.
“I’ve got a problem here,” she said. “Give me a little slack.” Pulling herself up in her seat, she was able to clear the tangle, using her feet for leverage, pushing out against the wall.
“I’m free. Get me out.”
The hoist started pulling her toward the surface again. Grit and clay kept pouring down on her from the sides of the crevasse. A couple of pieces grazed her helmet. In minutes she was back at the surface.
Someone estimated that the fissure had closed about a foot. There was no telling how long it would remain open.
“How are you doing?” Atkins asked Elizabeth after he helped pull her out of the trench. Her face and hands were covered with mud.
Elizabeth managed a smile. “I’ve got a whole sackful of samples,” she said. “The fissure is like a road map. There’ve been a lot of quakes here. They’ve left marks everywhere. I counted at least fourteen of them.” She looked at Atkins. “They’re big, and they come in clusters.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 16
6:45 P.M.
WHEN THEY RETURNED TO MEMPHIS, ATKINS AND Elizabeth were exhausted. Nursing a headache, Elizabeth took some aspirin and went to lie down. Meanwhile, the earthquake command center was rolling in high gear. Another round of GPS data was due by satellite transmission within an hour. And Guy Thompson’s people were running computer simulations of the latest aftershock activity along the greatly expanded seismic zone. Each pass helped them scope out in sharper, ever clearer detail the length and breadth of the new fault.
Using Elizabeth’s samples from the fissure, a team of scientists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana were already working on the radiocarbon analysis. The results weren’t expected for another five hours.
Elizabeth unrolled a sleeping bag in one of the equipment rooms in the library annex. A long worktable was piled with spare parts for seismographs—starters, timing circuits, pendulums. The room was poorly heated but had the luxury of privacy. The men slept between the stacks on the floor of the library, grabbing a few hours whenever they could. Elizabeth rated her own space.
She’d just slipped into her sleeping bag when someone rapped lightly on the door. It was John Atkins. He’d
scrounged a cup of milk, which he’d heated on a butane stove.
“This might help you sleep,” he said. “It works with me—especially when I mix in a good shot of bourbon. Unfortunately, we’re fresh out of bourbon.” He grinned. “You’d think something like that would be illegal in Tennessee.”
Elizabeth took a few sips, holding the warm cup with both hands. “That’s nice,” she said, smiling. “Sit with me for a few minutes. I’d like the company.”
Atkins sat next to her, his back against the wall. She curled into the crook of his arm. She felt sleep coming.
“Thank you for today,” she said, looking up at him.
He kissed her, gently. Then she put her hand against the side of his face, and they embraced.
“Hold me,” she said.
“Go to sleep,” he said softly. All the old emotions were rushing back, the wonderful sensation of just being close to a woman. And he did care for Elizabeth Holleran. He’d known that since their wild trip across the Mississippi. She was cool under pressure, caring, and incredibly bright. She’d shown nothing but courage and conviction since she’d arrived in Memphis.
There was something else, too. He loved to look at her. She was a beautiful woman.
Snuggling closer to him, she said, “I’ll be awake the next time. Promise you’ll be there when I wake up.”
He kissed her on the lips. Then she was quiet. He felt her go to sleep in his arms and must have dozed off himself, sliding down next to her on the warm sleeping bag.
He hadn’t planned on that. It happened so quickly he was asleep before he knew it. Awakened, he had no idea how long he’d been out. Elizabeth was sitting next to him. She was slowly, gently unbuttoning his shirt.
He touched her and felt her breasts against his chest. She’d already opened her shirt and slipped off her bra. He glimpsed the long, wonderful legs as she straddled him. He twisted slightly so that he could unbuckle his trousers. Elizabeth pulled the sleeping bag over them and lay on top of him, touching him ever lower with her hands as they embraced.
He started to say something, to tell her that he loved her. There was so much to say, and he was still groggy with sleep. He hadn’t said enough the last time he loved someone. This was a second chance. A gift. He wanted Elizabeth to know how much he cared for her.
“I love you,” he said.
She touched his lips. “Keep saying that. I won’t ever get tired of hearing it.”
He kissed her deeply, clasping his hands around her waist, afraid even then of losing her. He’d take her as far as she wanted. As far as she’d let him.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JANUARY 17
7:00 P.M.
PRESIDENT ROSS HAD CALLED THE EVENING meeting in the national security adviser’s conference room in the basement of the White House’s West Wing. He’d flown in a handful of scientists from the Memphis earthquake center and the USGS. They’d taken an Army helicopter to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where Air Force One picked them up for the one-hour flight to Dulles.
Ross had deliberately kept the group small. In addition to the seismologists, he’d limited attendance to Margaret Greenland, his national security adviser; the speaker of the House and Senate majority leader; and his science adviser, Steve Draper.
The president had already been warned that the news was bad, but he hadn’t realized its true gravity until Elizabeth Holleran began to speak. As she described the carbon-14 dating tests and their implications, he struggled to keep his composure.
In a concise, factual delivery, Holleran laid out the key point: the radiocarbon dating of fossil chips she’d scraped from the walls of the deep trench showed unmistakable evidence that massive earthquakes had ruptured the fault no less than six times during the last fifteen hundred years. The horizontal layers of clay, sand, silt, and gravel were riddled with the trace marks of those disturbances. The sequence was striking. The shortest period between quakes was roughly two hundred years. Most occurred at intervals of anywhere from five hundred to eight hundred years.
The zone had been incredibly active over the centuries. The vertical displacements varied from several inches to as much as forty feet.
“They’re textbook examples of severe faulting,” Holleran said. She showed a blowup of a photograph she’d taken about a hundred feet down into the fissure.
Even to the president’s untrained eye, the thick scarring and darkening of the soil stood out clearly.
Using a pointer, Holleran outlined the telltale signs of repeated faulting. The small room was stuffy and crowded, but no one moved or fidgeted. They were all listening intently, jotting down notes.
“The quake that left those footprints dates from just after the time of Columbus’ voyage of discovery,” she said.
The jagged crack in the exposed soil was striking. But the most distinctive aspect was the clear indication that the fault had repeatedly produced great earthquakes. The evidence appeared in each of the different strata, which were separated by bands of lighter-colored soil.
“I take it this wasn’t caused by just one earthquake,” Ross said.
Here it comes, Atkins thought.
“As best we can tell, there were at least four major earthquakes,” Holleran said, outlining their tracings. “They were probably concentrated over a very short span of time.”
“How short?” Ross asked.
“That’s difficult to say,” Holleran said.
“Give me a range.”
“At the longest end, months.”
“And at the shortest?”
Holleran’s reply was quietly stated: “Weeks.”
With a possible error of no more than thirty years, the carbon-14 tests had shown major earthquakes around A.D. 200 then again in 631, about the time of Mohammed. Mega quakes had also occurred when the ancestors of the American Indian were migrating to North America in the 1100s and, again, during the Black Death that depopulated much of Europe in the 1650s.
The sedimentary patterns Holleran had found in the deep fissure indicated that the big quakes often came in groups of three, but at least one sequence had four, possibly five major earthquakes. The best evidence of a huge earthquake was a sharp, twenty-five-foot offset that dated roughly to the mid-1600s.
Only an extraordinary quake could have done that. Atkins thought. The growing body of data increasingly indicated that the American heartland was prime earthquake country to a degree no one had ever imagined before. And much of the credit for nailing this definitively had to go to Holleran. He had no doubt, none, that she was right in her analysis. It was highly likely they were going to get rocked again.
“So we could be looking at maybe two or three more major quakes?” Ross asked. Casually dressed in jeans and a blue pullover, he was taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“It’s possible. Mister President,” Holleran said. “If the fault follows the usual pattern.”
“How possible?” Ross persisted.
Holleran said, “I can’t give a percentage. I’d say at least one more big quake in the magnitude 8 range is likely.”
Weston, who’d been biding his time, objected. He’d managed to find a clean suit and tie for the trip to the White House, even a set of cufflinks. He launched into an attack on the whole field of paleoseismology. He wasn’t alone in his argument. Several of the USGS scientists were also leery of basing seismic projections on the physical evidence of past quakes. There were simply too many exceptions, too many gaps in the chain, too many inconsistencies.
“At best it’s interesting data that needs more interpretation,” one of them said. “It would be a mistake to use it now to try to project for future earthquakes, especially under present circumstances.”
Atkins had expected their objections, which echoed Weston’s. He had a serious problem with Weston over the cracks at Kentucky Dam, a problem they still needed to resolve. But he understood that Weston expressed what most of the seismologists working on the crisis were thinking. Weston had been an effective
spokesman for their viewpoints. Argumentative and opinionated, he had history on his side. Back-to-back earthquakes of magnitude 8 or greater were incredibly rare.
Holleran let the remark pass without comment. She knew she had the support of most of the seismologists in the room. But on another level, she no longer cared what others thought. Her job, as she understood it, was to examine the physical evidence and try to draw meaningful conclusions while keeping speculation to a minimum. She’d done just that. The evidence was rich. The clues, buried deep in the ground, told them a great deal about the area’s violent seismic history.
Walt Jacobs had information to report—if not as dramatic, equally as troubling.
The man looked awful, Atkins thought. The bags under his eyes were dark and puffy. He hadn’t shaved or changed clothes in days. Atkins noticed his old friend was still wearing the rumpled blue denim shirt he’d had on two days earlier. He resolved to talk to him, see if he could help him pull out of it.
“The latest GPS sweep shows continued deformation along a line running roughly northeast of the Caruthersville Fault about two hundred miles into Kentucky.”
The satellite data had just been harvested by the GPS Master Control Station near Colorado Springs. It had been analyzed and enhanced at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech before it was relayed by satellite to Memphis. The data was projected on a map.
“How much uplift are we getting?” Weston asked. Like the others, he was seeing the data for the first time. Thompson had only recently processed it.
“Twenty inches along most of the fault. A little more than that at the point of axis with the main New Madrid segment. It’s roughly thirty inches there.”
Even Ross knew enough geology by then to realize an uplift of that magnitude was serious, an unmistakable signal that tremendous amounts of seismic energy continued to build along the fault lines.