Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  “The United States government,” Nico begins, and I clap one hand over my mouth, “if it wanted to, could detonate one or more near-surface nuclear explosions in the space surrounding the approaching asteroid.”

  I tighten my grip over my mouth, clamp it closed, forcing myself not to speak.

  “The effect would be to superheat the surface of the object, initiating what’s called a back reaction and altering its velocity sufficiently to keep it from impacting the planet.”

  I shut my eyes now, too, and tilt my head forward in a position that hopefully looks like deep concentration, but is in fact a desperate attempt to keep myself from leaping to my feet and away from this monologue. Nico goes on.

  “But certain officials, high in the government, have decided to suppress this information. Make it sound like it’s too late, or impossible.”

  I can’t take it any longer, I remove my hand from my mouth. “Nico.” Just that, quietly. She doesn’t hear, or chooses not too. Houdini smacks his lips in the corner.

  “Those with the knowledge to perform the operation have been jailed or made to disappear.”

  This is talking points. I can smell it. I try again. “Nic?”

  “Or, in one case, murdered.”

  “Murdered?” I’m done. I stand up, lean forward across the table. “Nico, this is crazy.”

  She leans back from me and says, “What?”

  “This is the big secret? A nuclear explosion? Blast it from the sky? You can’t do that. It turns the one big asteroid into a million smaller ones. You haven’t heard that? There was a National Geographic special about it, for God’s sake. It was on the cover of the last issue of Time magazine.”

  I’m speaking loudly. Houdini looks up for a moment, startled, then returns to his kibble.

  “That’s not what I said.” Nico speaks softly, crossing her arms patiently like a kindergarden teacher, like I’m the child, I’m the fool. “You’re not listening.

  “We went to war to prevent Pakistan from shooting a nuke at the thing. Thousands of people died.” I can still see the pictures; it was all in the Monitor before the paper went out of business: drones, air strikes, firebombs, the rapid annihilation of nuclear capability and concomitant destruction of civilian areas. There was quite a spread on Pakistan, too, in that same issue of Time, their farewell double issue. Cover headline: “And Now We Wait.”

  “I didn’t say blast it from the sky.” Nico rises from the table and leans against the buffet line, digs another cigarette from her pocket. “What I said was a nuclear explosion or explosions, near but not on the asteroid. This is called a standoff burst, as distinct from a kinetic impactor, which would be a ship or other object smashing into the surface. A standoff burst has the advantage of creating the desired velocity change while minimizing surface disruption and the resulting ejecta.”

  More talking points. I feel like she’s going to hand me a pamphlet. I get up. I pace.

  “A standoff burst. And you guys think no one has thought of that?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t listen,” she says with sadness, shaking her head, tapping ash onto the floor. “I knew I couldn’t count on you.”

  I stop pacing. Of course she knows exactly what to say; she has had a lifetime of making me feel bad for castigating her in the face of her outrages. I take a breath. I lower my voice. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Please. Tell me more.”

  “As I said, it’s not that the government—I should say the military, it’s really the military, not the civilian government. They have thought of it. They even commissioned people to figure out how to do it, years ago, when this kind of danger was purely hypothetical. There has to be a nuclear package in a new shape, with a new kind of fuse, to deliver the payload in space.”

  “Right. But they never built those.”

  “Well.” She smiles, winks. “That’s what they want us to think.”

  “Jesus, Nico. This is crazy.”

  “You said that already.” Her expression suddenly transforms from wry and knowing into kind of serene intensity—this is the part she’s been waiting for. This is the kernel of the lunacy. “Certain conservative elements in the international military-industrial complex welcome the asteroid, Henry. They’re psyched. The opportunity to rule over a decimated, miserable population? To consolidate the remains of the world’s resources? They can’t fucking wait.”

  I start laughing. I lean my head back and bark laughter at the ceiling, and now Houdini really jumps, skitters away from his dish. The absurdity of this, the whole thing, sitting here talking as if we two tiny people in this bombed-out Indian restaurant in New Hampshire happen to have privileged information about the fate of the universe.

  Nico talks for a while, and I listen as best I can, but a lot of it just washes over me, a lot of it is just words. There’s a rogue scientist, of course: Hans-Michael Parry, an astrophysicist formerly associated with the United States Space Command, who knows exactly how to do it, knows where these specially constructed fuses are housed and how they are operated. Nico’s organization has found Parry in a military prison, and they’re going to get him over to England, where sympathetic elements are ready to try this deflection maneuver with British bombs.

  “Oh,” I say, during this exegesis, over and over, just: “Okay.” I pat my lap and Houdini clambers up. I scratch him behind the ears, mutter “that’s a boy” before he escapes to chase a stray bit of kibble across the room.

  There was a part of me, I realize as she’s speaking, that wanted to be surprised. I wanted her to say something that would make me say Holy moly! She’s right! But of course that was never really possible, was it? That, of all the people in the world, my sister is going to happen to be the one with a solution. No one has a solution. No one sitting in India Garden, no maverick astrophysicist rotting in the bowels of the U.S. Army prison system. It’s all nonsense, so plainly so that it would be hilarious if I didn’t know of at least one person who had already been sacrificed to my sister’s belief that it’s real.

  “So what?” I finally ask. “You and your friends are going to spring this scientist from the pokey?”

  “We did that already,” Nico says, ignoring the sarcasm in my question. “Not me, not the New England group. Another team, in the Midwest, they already found him and secured his release. And now Jordan and I and the other New Englanders, we’re just waiting to recon with the team.”

  I mouth the words disbelievingly. Recon with the team. All this B-movie dialogue. How many times, over the course of our lives, have I seen Nico’s beautiful quicksilver brilliance dimmed: by grief, by alcohol and marijuana, by association with foolish minds.

  “How can you believe any of this, Nico?”

  “Because it’s true,” she says. She reaches into the warm refrigerator and pops the top on a mango soda. Summer rain taps against the glass and on the pavement outside.

  “But how do you know that it’s true?

  “Because it is.”

  “That doesn’t work,” I say. “That formulation. You sound like Jesus Man.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  Jesus Man was the bright-eyed codger in the next bed over from Grandfather, in his last month or two, the final round of radiation before they gave up on Nathanael Palace and we took him home to die. Jesus Man had the light of the Lord, and there was no pain or discomfort that he couldn’t bear smilingly through God’s grace. He was practically celebrating it all, welcoming every new misery as a step on the road to paradise. Grandfather hated him—almost, he told me once, whispering loud enough for the other man to hear, as much as he hated the cancer itself. Once Jesus Man told Nico and me, while Grandfather slept, that he hoped we had accepted the Lord in our hearts. I didn’t say anything when he said that, just nodded politely and looked at the TV. Nico, age seventeen, smiled and said, “Thanks, mister. I’ll think it over.”

  Now she shrugs, stands up. “That’s the whole story, big brother. I can’t make you beli
eve if you don’t.”

  “Nope,” I say. “You can’t. When are you leaving? To recon with the team?”

  “Soon. Jordan says they’re on the way now. Tomorrow or the next day, a helicopter is going to land in Butler Field to scoop us up.”

  “Nico, I love you,” is what I say next, and I’m surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth; she looks pretty surprised, too. She crosses her arms, and I press on. “I do. And I made you a promise.”

  “I release you from that promise,” she says immediately.

  “You can’t.”

  “We were kids.”

  “You were a kid,” I say quietly. “I was fifteen. I knew what I was saying.”

  “I release you.”

  “No,” I say, suddenly regretting my tone, my skepticism, regretting everything about the conversation. Don’t go, I want to say, don’t do it, just stay, come with me to Maine, come with me to Concord, Nico, don’t go. Houdini is done eating and has found a place to lie down. In the silence, his snoring fills the room.

  “Good luck with your case,” says my sister.

  “Good luck,” I say, the start of a sentence, but I can’t think of anything to finish it. That’s all I’ve got. “Good luck.”

  * * *

  Another scene from childhood. A few years after that spring, a few years before Jesus Man. Nico was nine years old and already she was sliding in and out of situations: insulting teachers, shoplifting small items. Stickers, cans of soda. A girl gave her beer, an older girl, probably as a joke, but Nico drank it all and was drunk—ten years old and drunk, and in her still-forming brain the alcohol was acting not as a goad to more bad behavior but as a truth serum, and she was muttering and sputtering, processing all kinds of anger toward me, toward Grandfather, toward everyone. “You will, though,” she said, when I tried to hug her, lift her, carry her home. “You will go away like they did. You’ll die. You’ll disappear.”

  “I won’t,” I said to her. I said, “Nico, I will not do that.”

  The rain has exhausted itself, for now, and the sky is clear and untroubled, the stars twinkling in their familiar places. I try to sleep but can’t; I can barely keep my eyes closed, lying restless on the floor of the India Garden, sprawled out uncomfortably with my backpack for a pillow. At dawn I will get back on the bike, get Houdini situated among my emergency supplies and water bottles, and leave for southern Maine.

  Willfully I focus my thinking, put Nico and her friends and their tactics on a shelf in the back somewhere, pull a blanket down over Grandfather, who for some reason has been traveling with me all day today, emaciated and furious in his hospital bed with death crouching at his shoulders. I turn my head from everything and zero in on my case, my trip, my tomorrow.

  So why are you doing it? Julia asked, as Nico had asked, as McGully had demanded of me. There are undoubtedly other ways I could be spending my time, performing actions of more tangible value to myself or others. But an investigation like this has its own force—it pulls you forward, and at a certain point it’s no longer profitable to question your reasons for being pulled. I stay up for a long time, blinking into the darkness of India Garden, thinking about Brett Cavatone.

  He’ll ask me, too, if I find him, out there in the woods with his rifles. What are you doing here? Why have you come? And I don’t know what I’ll say, I really don’t.

  PART FOUR

  He’s Dead, He’s Dead, He’s Really Dead

  1.

  Route 4 meanders eastward from Durham and then north-northeast along the line of the Piscataqua River, offering me a wide rolling view of Portsmouth Harbor: rusting lobster traps bobbing unattended; boats listing in their abandonment, paint peeling, hulls jutting out of the shallows.

  It’s just me this time, bright and early and out on my mission. Detective Palace, retired, on his ten-speed with the dog hitched to the back in the little red wagon.

  Cutts Neck—Raynes Neck—the long span of Memorial Bridge reaching high over the harbor. Then the series of roundabouts that spit you out onto 103 East. I know this route by pure sense memory from our handful of summers at York Beach, before the bottom fell out of my childhood. I roll past the big blue donut that had marked Louie’s Roadside Diner, now torn from its mooring by weather or vandals and lolling across the parking lot like a giant’s abandoned toy.

  The sun is almost all the way up now, it’s close to nine, and I’m leaning into the curve of the third roundabout, navigating around the pits and gashes in the asphalt, speeding past the gates of Portsmouth Naval Station on the seaward side. I’m coming. The woods huddle in close against the road as 103 crosses the border and cuts into southeastern Maine, gives up its last pretense of being a highway and settles down into a crooked little two-lane road with a faded yellow line down the middle.

  Here I come.

  * * *

  Fort Riley, when I find it, sits on the northern lip of Portsmouth Harbor, a castle keep built on a cliff wall, staring out at the sea. For a couple hundred years it was an active United States Army fort, minding the coast during the Revolution, the War of 1812, all the way up to World War II, when civil reserves in green helmets would sit in seaside redoubts like this one, up and down the coast, peering out at the northern Atlantic for U-boats. For half a century Riley was a state park and historical site; now it’s where Brett Cavatone, my missing man, has come to make camp. I turn off the highway into the parking lot, a long narrow spit of gravel with dense woods to the left and, to the right, the high tumbling stone wall of the old fort itself.

  I get off the bike and lift Houdini from the wagon and set him down in the gravel. My chest is thick with anticipation. The air smells like the sea. He’s here, I’m thinking. This is it. Hello, sir. My name is Henry Palace.

  I walk slowly down the length of the parking lot, hands out of my pockets and slightly raised, a picture of harmlessness, in case anyone is watching—anyone with a pair of sniper rifles and reason to be wary of visitors. There’s one car in the lot, a gray Buick LeSabre with Quebec plates and all four tires shot out. In the backseat, a teddy bear and an Uno deck. The entrance to the fort is all the way at the end of the parking lot, an arched doorway just where the stone wall bends away to the south and the gravel ends in grass and weeds. Farther on is the ocean.

  Put down your weapons, sir. Your wife would like you to come home.

  “Okay,” I say, to no one, or to the dog I guess, but then I see that he’s decided to stay back by the bicycle. I turn around and he’s way back up there where the parking lot begins, skittering back and forth between the chained-up ten-speed and our supply wagon. I gesture to my right, around the corner of the wall, into the fort proper.

  “You coming?”

  Houdini doesn’t answer. He growls uneasily, sniffs at the ground. “All right,” I tell him. “You stay there.”

  The buildings of the fort, half a dozen tottering stone piles and decomposing wooden ruins, are scattered over one big uneven hill—an acre or acre and a half of muddy grassland, sloping down toward a cliff over the water. The layout is as haphazard as might be expected of a centuries-old military campus, built piecemeal by different commanders at different times for different purposes. It’s all centered around one structure, though: the blockhouse, a wooden tower on a sturdy granite base, rising high above the center of the fortland like a birthday cake. The blockhouse could be somebody’s tidy colonial house, a charming white-sided vacation home overlooking scenic Portsmouth Harbor, except that it’s perfectly octagonal and slitted all around its eastern faces with narrow rifle ports, for spotting incoming ships and shooting at them.

  I shade my eyes and look up at the narrow windows. He might be up there. He might be in any of these buildings. Cautiously I pick my way through the mud and seagrass, over the foundation stones like flat gravestones, alert for the presence of Brett.

  The rifleman’s house is a square red-brick building, as small as a one-room schoolhouse. A cornerstone announces the structure’s pr
ovenance of 1834, but there is no roof; maybe it was never completed, or maybe the tiles were repurposed by the army when this fort was decommissioned, or maybe they were stripped last month by looters and carted away like Sergeant Thunder’s brick shed.

  I linger there in the roofless shelter. This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. In fifty years, everything will look this way, desolate and quiet and overgrown. Not even fifty years—next year—by the end of this one.

  I make my way carefully down the gentle slope to the granite wall that rings the fort’s easternmost edge. There’s a narrow trench dug into the mud just in front of the wall, except it’s not a trench at all, it’s an entrance, a stairhead carved out of the wet ground. A gash in the base of the wall, and then a short steep staircase into a dark chamber with a wet clay floor. The room is dank and close, as long and narrow as the barrel of a gun. A brass plate screwed into the granite wall identifies the room with an unfamiliar word: caponier. It smells like brine and fish and ancient mud. Light seeps in through nine high slit windows along the eastern face.

  I am too tall, in a room like this. It bears down on me, coffin-like, and I can hear my heart beating, experience an unexpected sharp awareness of my body’s functioning as a machine.

  I walk slowly across the room and lean into one of those slitted windows and squint. To the south there’s a lighthouse, to the north, uninterrupted miles of Maine coast. Way out on the horizon is the tiny black dot of an incoming ship and, twenty degrees to its left along the blue-green horizon, the tiny black dot of another. I stare for a minute, watching them come.

  They must come all day. Big ships, their holds packed with desperate cargo, famished and exhausted, people from all over the world, the Eastern Hemisphere emptying itself out.