by Greg Enslen
“What was that?” Berger asked, looking at her.
The young woman stammered. “I was just looking at the flight path of the St. Louis plane. If they were going to Chicago, it would have turned. But there’s a nuclear power station in Byron, about two hundred miles west of Chicago.”
Gore turned and looked at the plane—the fighters were still following it. He swallowed, hard.
“Anderson,” the president said.
Anderson looked up, and the two men made eye contact via view screen, even though the president was safely sequestered under the White House and Anderson was in a similar bunker, buried deep under the innermost ring of the Pentagon.
“Yes, sir?”
“Shoot down that plane. On my orders—I’m signing the order now,” Gore said, and grabbed the hastily-prepared memo on the table in front of him, signing it and holding it up for the camera.
“Yes, sir.”
Over the next thirty seconds, all eyes were on the black and white screen as the F-16s backed off, lining up directly behind the large tail fin of the passenger jet. On a signal that no one in the Situation Room could hear, both fighters fired sidewinder missiles.
They both struck.
The back third of the plane erupted in a cloud of fire and metal and smoke. The plane immediately tilted upward, as it had lost most of the weight behind the wings, and then tipped over, slowly, lazily spinning through the sky until it impacted a cornfield some two hundred miles south of its intended target.
3.31
On the Road
“To confirm, a nuclear power plant south of Los Angeles has been struck by a hijacked passenger plane,” the announcer said on the radio.
Stevens was on his cell phone, trying to contact the younger Dr. Ellis or Terry or any of the other people working at the new warehouse. It was located about a mile and a half north of the power plant at Indian Point. After hearing the terrorists seemed to be targeting nuclear plants, Stevens had started dialing.
The elder Ellis was speeding up, changing lanes to get in front of the big white box van he’d been following. He honked and motioned for the driver to pull over, and the man turned and worked his way across the three lanes of Interstate 87. Ellis pulled his car off the road as well and got out to go speak to the driver.
“What’s going on?” the driver asked.
“You been listening to the radio?” Ellis asked.
“Nope.”
“More terrorist attacks, one in Los Angeles.” Ellis said.
“Oh, Christ,” the driver said.
“We don’t need to have all of us out on the streets—you take my car and head home, okay? I’ll drive the van.”
The driver nodded, and they exchanged keys as Stevens walked up.
“I called Terry, but he wasn’t at the warehouse,” Stevens said. “He went out to get lunch. He’s on his way back to clear the place out.”
Ellis nodded. “OK, I’ll keep calling Ellis until he picks up. But we don’t all need to go to Buchanan. You guys head home. Stevens, I’ll call you when I get there. You can come up when this is all over.”
“You sure?” Stevens asked.
Ellis nodded and climbed up into the van. With a wave, he pulled the van out onto the highway and continued north. Within minutes, he’d exited I-87 and was heading north on the Saw Mill River Road, toward Buchanan. He kept trying the younger Dr. Ellis’ number, but he wasn’t picking up.
3.32
Buchanan, New York
Just north of the expansive Indian Point Nuclear Station in Buchanan was a small group of buildings next to the river. One of these was the new warehouse, and inside, the younger Ellis was racing against time. He cursed and answered his phone, which had been ringing off the hook.
“Yup?”
It was his voice on the other end. Deeper and a little gruffer, but his voice, nonetheless. He never got used to that.
“You need to get out of there now,” the elder Ellis said.
“I know,” the younger Ellis answered. “We heard on the radio; terrorists hit a nuclear power station near Los Angeles. I’m just putting the last of the sensitive materials in the Faraday.” He had been locking up precious components in the new metal cage. As he talked on the phone, he pulled the door closed and spun the large wheel lock to make sure it was secure.
“Yup,” the elder Ellis answered. “I just heard that they shot down another plane—that one was headed for a nuclear station outside of Chicago. That just leaves the East Coast.”
“You think they could hit Indian Point?”
“Not sure,” the elder voice said. “But get out of there, anyway. It’s the closest one to New York City.”
“OK, will do,” Ellis said.
“Be safe,” the older version of him said and hung up.
The younger Ellis ran through the offices, making sure everyone else had gotten out. He glanced over his shoulder and out the office window—this space had formerly been used by Interstate Battery System as a loading station. It wasn’t as big as the Red Hook warehouse, but it would do. And it was located within a mile of Indian Point which, up until a few minutes ago, had seemed like a great idea. Out of the office window, he could see Lent’s Cove and two other large warehouses that sat along the waterfront. Indian Point was a mile south, along the Hudson.
He ran through a system of hallways and out onto the main floor, where the machine sat, almost finished. The elder Ellis had the remaining pieces in his truck—it was just bad timing that they hadn’t already finished reassembling the machine. There was a loading dock around back, on the side that faced the river, and Terry and several other men were still unloading supplies and extra components from the last truck.
“Almost done?” Ellis asked as he ran up.
Terry nodded. “That’s it. The truck is leaving—go ahead and close the gate,” he said to another man, who slapped at a control on the wall. A heavy metal shutter-like gate began lowering from the ceiling, and Ellis saw the truck disappear.
“We need to leave, now,” Ellis said. “They shot down another plane—it was trying to hit another nuclear power plant, this one near Chicago.”
Terry looked up, his eyes wide. “Are they trying to hit Indian Point?”
Ellis shrugged. “No one knows, but let’s clear out.”
Terry nodded and gathered up the other men. Running, they all returned up the hallway and came out of the building next to the office. There was a circular drive in front of the building, a concrete planter filled with bushes and flowers. Most of the men ran down the drive and climbed into their cars, driving away. Ellis waited until Terry and Cassie came outside, then locked up behind them. They talked as they jogged to their car—they had driven up together.
“Is that everything?” he asked them.
Cassie nodded. “It’s all secure. The plans are all locked up.”
“I put the reactor on the lowest setting,” Terry said as they opened the car doors. “It won’t need any maintenance for at least a month, and then only to empty the baffles—”
Behind them, in the sky, Ellis heard something that sounded like a train. He turned and looked up.
A plane was coming in, streaking through the sky like a meteor.
Dr. Donald Ellis turned and saw Terry staring up at the plane as well. They only had a moment or two to recognize that the plane was a commercial jet and that it was coming straight down out of the sky. A moment later, the plane impacted into the horizon a mile south of their location, sending up a massive explosion. A wave of heat and radiation swept over the world, engulfing everything in flames.
3.33
Evacuation
On the evening of July 4, the governor of Connecticut appeared on CNN and ordered the population of his entire state to flee northward, over the border and into Massachusetts, as the radioactive cloud began to grow and spread slowly eastward. The 80,000 residents of Danbury, Connecticut, the closest large city east of Indian Point, immediately began exiting the city
as the radioactive cloud drifted across the New York/Connecticut border.
The exclusion zone began as a 400-square-mile area centered on the Indian Point reactor, but as the prevailing winds began to move the cloud, the plume of fallout affected a larger and larger area. Meteorologists examined the prevailing wind patterns and determined that the cloud, while spreading daily, would move almost due west, sparing the New York City metropolis area only 50 miles to the south. But Danbury and Norwalk and Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, were doomed.
The highways were jammed almost immediately. The governor of Connecticut called in his National Guard to assist in the evacuations, but the rule of law began to break down quickly. People without transportation stole vehicles to make their way north and out of the way of the cloud. A bank in Milford was robbed by opportunistic thieves. One man in Trumbull shot his family and then turned the gun on himself. In Fairfield and Westport, there were reports of unexplained explosions.
In Groton, civilians were transported away from the areas in immediate danger by boats as naval personnel prepared to evacuate the base—classified materials had to be moved or destroyed, and several research and development projects in partial stages of completion had to be destroyed. Some were hurriedly transferred to a large military barge, taken out into the middle of Groton Harbor and sunk.
As the radioactive cloud bloomed eastward, in coastal cities like Greenwich and Stratford, boats full of fleeing citizens raced across the Sound to the relative safety of Long Island. In some Connecticut harbors, every boat had left its home port, in many cases, not piloted by the rightful owner.
3.34
Meltdown
He sat alone in the Oval Office, at his desk, but the president’s thoughts were far away.
They were with the rescue teams, and the meteorologists, and the climatologists. His thoughts were with the gaggle of scientists trying to figure out exactly how much of the United States was no longer fit for human habitation. President Gore sat, thumbing through papers on his desk, and was unable to focus on any of them.
The desk he sat at was the famous Resolute Desk, built from the timbers of the 1850 British warship HMS Resolute. It was one of a matching pair of desks, the twin sitting in Buckingham Palace in London. The desk President Gore sat at had been a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880.
But Gore didn’t feel much like a president any more. He’d allowed a second attack on his homeland. This morning, the day after the July 4th attacks, he’d asked the Surgeon General for a casualty count. The shaken physician wasn’t even able to hazard a guess.
Most of the immediate deaths had been in the towns of Buchanan, New York, and San Clemente, California. The scientists said that the planes, impacting and destroying the containment structures at both plants, had sent vast amounts of radioactive materials into the air.
And these twin radioactive clouds, slowly growing and spreading, would determine the final tally. Gore was powerless to affect the weather, and they had lost San Juan Capistrano in California, along with Mission Viejo and Dana Point and Oceanside and Camp Pendleton. The so-called “Western Cloud” was now moving south over the border with Mexico, slowly irradiating San Diego and Tijuana. Anyone trapped on the highways and roads, leading out of the killing zones, would be dead soon.
In the east, it was worse.
The Indian Point Energy Center had been located on the Hudson about 40 miles north of New York City. Casualty estimates were 100 percent in the immediate area of the meltdown, which occurred only minutes after the plane destroyed all of the containment systems surrounding the radioactive core.
Immediately, evacuation procedures were started. New York State, east of the Hudson, was evacuated northward to Albany, but initial casualty estimates were already at 8,000 people just in the Buchanan–Peekskill–Yorktown Heights area. Anyone who was still able fled southward to White Plains and other locations closer to New York City.
White Plains General received a massive influx of radiated patients with high levels of exposure to fallout, manifesting in extreme fevers, headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea. Mortality rates in patients with a dosage of more than 3,000 radians (rads) were 100 percent within two days of exposure. In comparison, natural radiation in the environment exposed a person to about .026 rads over the course of a year, depending on elevation. A dental x-ray exposure was .005 rads, and a whole-body CAT scan provided an exposure of about 1 rad.
The acute radiation poisoning that resulted from exposure killed in the same way a nuclear weapon would have. Thermal burns and beta and gamma burns accounted for the majority of casualties, along with fallout and long-term exposure to the radioactive elements in the environment.
Smaller doses of radioactivity could be treated with blood transfusions and antibiotics, though both were in disastrously short supply. But long-term exposure to radioactive elements, such as those that were coating every building and tree and surface in eastern New York State, would soon cause an unprecedented epidemic of low blood cell counts, neurological problems, and cancers.
3.35
Evacuate New York City
On the evening of July 5, President Gore ordered the immediate evacuation of New York City, along with Rhode Island, Long Island, and the northern half of New Jersey.
It was a laughable request, of course—a city the size of New York would take two or three weeks to empty—but it got people moving. The roads leading south out of the metropolitan area were immediately jammed but were kept moving by armed National Guardsmen in Humvees and on motorcycles. The collective citizenry of New York, carrying whatever they could stuff into their Toyotas and Volvos, flowed steadily southward into New Jersey and Philadelphia. Over the next three days, massive tent cities were constructed by FEMA in the parks inland from Atlantic City and Ocean City and Toms River, and the former residents of New York City settled into a new, and unfamiliar, routine.
As the “Eastern Cloud” moved eastward, it passed over Norwalk and Bridgeport and Milford and out over Long Island Sound, hugging the Connecticut coastline. Behind the cloud, military personnel and scientists in radiation suits, staged in Stony Point and West Haverstraw, New Jersey, moved across the Hudson into Indian Point, measuring the environmental radiation levels.
And over the next few days, as the cloud moved off the eastern seaboard and out into the Atlantic, the real scope of the devastation became clear: a fifty by one hundred and twenty mile zone, some 6,000 square miles, had been rendered uninhabitable for the next 100 years. This Exclusion Zone, which included most of Connecticut, the southern half of Rhode Island, and the eastern third of Long Island, would be cordoned off from the rest of the nation.
Bordering the Exclusion Zone on all sides was a large strip of land, an area of “heightened exposure” that could, potentially, be decontaminated over time for future use. This Border Zone, which included White Plains and Stamford to the south and Providence and most of Massachusetts south of Boston, including Martha’s Vineyard, were to be off limits for civilians until sections could be decontaminated enough for future use.
Once the immediate evacuations were completed and the affected zones were established, life slowly began to return to something approaching normal. Two months after moving to the massive tent cities of southern New Jersey, the government began to allow the population of New York to slowly migrate back into the city. Many people never returned—they feared the radiation levels from the small amount of fallout that reached the city. Others decided that living in such a visible location was no longer for them.
Some enjoyed their new lives in southern New Jersey and decided to purchase homes and stay for good.
President Gore appeared on the television as often as possible as the weeks passed into months, assuring Americans that they would recover from this horrible attack that had scarred the nation and rendered a slice of the country permanently uninhabitable. But commentators remarked on how drawn and tired the president looked and how much
he had appeared to age in the months since the Christmas attacks and the helicopter crash.
In public, Gore was a stoic, resolute figure. In private, he was anything but. He felt enormous guilt for not being able to prevent the 9/11-style attacks on Christmas, even when aided with reams of foreknowledge.
3.36
Piermont, New Jersey
He sat in the living room, unable to move. He had never felt more like giving up.
The other Dr. Ellis, the young one with the family that was a copy of his. And Terry. And Cassie, whom he’d talked into leaving her job at the Post. They were all dead now—dead because of him. And untold hundreds of thousands more, dead in southern California and Connecticut and Tijuana and Long Island. His old town of Jericho had been evacuated. And in the confusion, he’d been unable to find the Sarah and Tina from this timeline—they could be dead as well, or caught up in the panicked evacuation of New York City and Long Island.
Dr. Don Ellis sat in the rented house and flipped through the art books again. He’d been in a horrible place since the attacks seven weeks ago, but looking at the art books in this dingy home had cheered him up.
There were several Warhol paintings reproduced in the book that intrigued him—for a short time, they distracted his fevered mind from thinking about Terry and Cassie and the other Ellis at that warehouse in Buchanan. Had they seen it coming? Or had they been inside when it happened and not known what was happening?
Ellis shook his head and looked at the biography of the painter. He’d never been a fan of Warhol—all of the works he’d seen seemed to smack of crass commercialization. But there were several in this book that were interesting—the man certainly had a talent for creating interesting works. Ellis had seen the Marilyn Monroes and Campbell’s soup cans, just like everyone else, but these were new to him. They were a series of paintings from late in Warhol’s life, including some interesting abstracts such as Camouflage and Rorschach and an oversized take on the Last Supper. His favorite was a swirly, Jackson Pollack–style painting, made to look like multicolored yarn.