And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  But as they fled the plant and its toxic soot-heavy smoke, the reactors were also generating incalculable quantities of hydrogen gas inside their containment domes. The burning of the fuel rods’ zirconium cladding was filling the two concrete-and-steel hemispheres with intensely flammable H2, as if inflating a pair of Hindenburg dirigibles. The gas was so light it instantly shot up to the top and stayed there. As the amount increased, however, and the gas expanded, the hydrogen levels inside the domes dropped lower and lower, closer and closer to the fires below, finally reaching the now nakedly exposed, incendiary fuel rods below. When the gas finally touched the flames, the explosion was almost beyond comprehension.

  At first, Jules thought Elias had set off a pair of nukes. The twin fireballs blasted the concrete dome casing several miles in all directions. Even though the chopper was now two miles away, several shards hammered its rear cabin. The other pieces rocketed past like artillery rounds, thankfully circumventing their helicopter.

  Jules glance one last time at HRNPS and saw two gargantuan globes of scintillating fire rising above a pair of disintegrated domes, ascending high over the obliterated nuclear plant and riding the thermal down-river drafts toward New York City.

  With excruciating lassitude, the debris began falling to earth, barely missing the rotor and the blades but pummeling everything else. Looking back through her Vortex Viper HD 12×50 binoculars, Jules could see that most of the HRNPS was gone, and the guard tower, where Elias had stationed himself, was a shattered wreck.

  She wondered if he had made it.

  But then all at once, Sandy was yelling at her:

  “You won’t believe it, Jules, but Rashid and Adara are on the radio. They’ve got some big oceangoing boat and are twenty minutes from here on the Connecticut coast. They’re in a cove with a big empty beach. We’re setting down there, then boarding the craft.”

  “What about Elena and Jamie?” Jules asked.

  “We’re meeting them along the Jersey shore in the morning.”

  “And then?” Jules asked.

  “We’re all Belize-bound.”

  “Lord knows what happens then,” Jules said.

  “Whatever it is,” Sandy said, “it’s got to be better than what’s happening here.”

  “Copy that.”

  By some perverse miracle, the final refrain of “Mission Apocalpyse” was suddenly thundering out of the rubble of the gun tower, Elias’s audio system eerily and inexplicably intact.

  Who do we turn to when it’s time to die?

  How do we stop the children’s cries?

  Where do we hide when the End is nigh?

  Oh, what do we do when the bill comes due?

  Where do we flee when humanity’s through?

  Where do we run when it all comes down?

  How do we die when the End rolls ’round?

  When the mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  When the mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  When the mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  The mission’s apocalypse

  Sandy banked east and headed for the Connecticut coast.

  EPILOGUE

  When the dust has settled,

  When the thermonuclear

  Dust comes down,

  When the fallout drifts slowly,

  Slowly to the ground.

  Will anyone be around?

  Will anyone be around?

  —Sister Cassandra, “When the Dust Has Settled”

  1

  We kept the faith.

  —Jules Meredith

  The three nuclear attacks had been so singularly horrific that many leaders in the U.S. and abroad sought a war against Islam, some even arguing for nuclear strikes. Fortunately, the American vice president, James C. Hoffman, who had been undergoing minor surgery at the Bethesda Naval Hospital at the time of the State of the Union attack, survived. After taking office, he resisted these demands for nuclear retribution on the grounds that no one at that time knew who the real state sponsors of the attack were. He refused to nuke entire populations out of a lust for revenge.

  So the apocalyptic land war in the Mideast—which, according to General Jari’s Islamist texts would commence in Dabiq and in al-Amaq in northern Syria and would end in the West’s final obliteration—did not materialize. Furthermore, had Jari claimed credit for the attacks, it had become clear that he would have only elicited the thermonuclear destruction of his homeland as well as much of the Mideast. He would not provoke the land-fought Armageddon, from which he had mistakenly believed his people would emerge victorious. Even the most fanatical extremists saw no percentage in provoking the vaporization of entire Islamic states. Consequently, no one in the jihadist movement claimed credit for the attacks. Staring into the nuclear abyss, General Jari and the terrorists … blinked.

  Hoffman’s peacemaking efforts cost him a second term as president, but he did prevent a Middle Eastern Götterdämmerung.

  As the months wore on and it became clear no one could prove that a foreign power had sponsored the attacks, people wanted scapegoats. The news media was quick to blame Elena Moreno and Jules Meredith. Many of the country’s talking heads even claimed to have “absolute proof” that the two women had engineered the nuclear assaults. Moreover, before President Caldwell, William Conrad, and Ambassador Shaiq were killed, they and General Jari had fabricated incriminating e-mails and text messages from the women to Hasad ibn Ghazi—a known global terrorist—in which Elena and Jules allegedly helped him plan the three strikes. The evidence seemed irrefutable.

  There were also the five incontestable communications between Elena and Hasad, confirming at the very least that Elena had somehow been his friend—a fact she’d illegally concealed from the Agency. And, of course, witnesses eventually came forward, testifying that the two had dated in college.

  The women’s subsequent actions also made them appear guilty. Among other things, they’d fled. Their reasoning was simple. They refused to submit to a star-chamber tribunal packed with hanging judges who would have tried them on trumped-up charges, then convicted and sentenced them under the Patriot Act’s antiterrorist statutes. They would have undoubtedly faced life without parole in a Guantanamo-type hellhole or lethal injection in some federal pen. Free, they could still work to prove their innocence.

  Jules’s sister, Sandy—under indictment for aiding and abetting her mass-murdering sister—also joined them abroad.

  First, Jamie took the three women to Belize, which, long ago, he had effectively bought and now owned. Then he flew to Sweden—where he personally convinced the Swedish prime minister that the women could not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that they were innocent. Once they were granted asylum by the Swedish government, they settled down in Stockholm.

  Jamie and his three friends eventually moved to an old castle-fortress perched on a mountaintop, previously owned by Sweden’s prime minister. He hired a small army of private contractors to fortify and defend it. The world press was rife with rumors and news reports that a CIA/Navy SEAL abduction attempt was likely, and Elena, in particular, saw to it they were militarily prepared for such a contingency.

  They had been in the castle a little more than a year when Hasad’s Swiss banker called them. Hasad had $23 million in a Swiss bank in gold bullion in a numbered account, the banker said. In the event of his death, he had told the banker to notify Elena Moreno and explain that she was his sole beneficiary. The bankers had spent a full year confirming that Hasad was dead.

  “Oh yes,” the bankers told her on the phone, “there is one other item—a small padded envelope, which is only to be opened in private by Elena Moreno.”

  Jamie arranged to have the money deposited in an account under Elena’s name and have armed, certified couriers deliver the envelope in person to her at the
castle.

  The package contained a flash drive. Being one of the world’s top computer experts, Jamie made multiple copies of it. He and the two women then examined its contents on a desktop computer with a forty-inch monitor.

  The USB stick held detailed evidence proving that Shaiq and Jari had conspired to inflict three nuclear strikes on the U.S. Shaiq had also planned to blackmail President George Caldwell by threatening to expose his illegal financial dealings. Hasad had evidence on the flash drive that Caldwell had accepted Saudi bribes and hidden them in offshore tax havens. Hasad had the locations and account numbers of those clandestine accounts on the thumb drive. Hasad also had evidence that Shaiq—in order to eventually blackmail Caldwell and Conrad—had counterfeited e-mails allegedly proving that Caldwell had knowledge of the impending attacks and failed to notify the FBI, the CIA, or the National Security Council. Shaiq had intended to use those manufactured e-mails to terrify Caldwell into secretly handing over to Shaiq the reins of American power. He would then force Caldwell to use the nukings to frighten the U.S. Congress into tearing up the Constitution and giving Caldwell martial power. After Caldwell declared martial law, Shaiq would become the power behind the throne—the absolute dictator of the United States.

  On the flash drive, Hasad also provided them with both written and voice-recorded testimony exonerating the women of any wrongdoing. Hasad apologized to the world for ever having “gotten involved with such an appalling gang of psychopaths.”

  He concluded with a bizarre coda that would become world famous:

  I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I’ve never believed humanity, as a whole, was bad. Except when it comes to things nuclear. I’ve watched the Bomb summon forth the wickedest hubris in the human soul. Like the serpent in Eden, its dark power told us that we could become as gods. We, too, could grasp the Luciferian flame, wage war on the planet, and lay waste to the stars.

  As you know, Elena, back in college I was fascinated by the Greeks—Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides. Remember that speech I used to recite to you from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon? I used to tell you it summarized everything we would ever need to know about humankind.

  We learn nothing save through suffering.

  The pain of memory falls drop by drop

  Upon the heart in sleep.

  Against our will comes wisdom.

  The grace of the gods is forced on us.

  Maybe in the end, that’s why I did what I did. Your country created nuclear weapons and peddled their technology worldwide to anyone and everyone who wanted it, no matter how dangerous the purchasers. If your people saw and felt firsthand, on their bones and blood, the horror and agony atom bombs and nuclear meltdowns visit on living, breathing flesh, if they realized the consequences of their nuclear trafficking and how easily feasible such strikes were, maybe, just maybe, they’d awaken from their blind avarice, their fatalistic denial … and see that the light at the tunnel’s end need not be the fireball’s blaze.

  It took Europe, Japan, and Russia two world wars to purge them of their war-lust. Maybe the U.S. needed these nuclear attacks before they were cured of their nuclear insanity.

  At least, that’s how I eventually came to justify what I did. On the other hand, maybe you knew me better. That night after I’d laid out those three football players who had assaulted you and Jules, with those socks filled with batteries, you had kidded me about it, calling me your “Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Maybe you were right. Maybe that was always my destiny: the Fourth Horseman, “whose name was Death and hell followed with him.”

  One thing’s for sure—I certainly brought hell to your homeland.

  Still, I hope some good comes out of it.

  He’d certainly shown Americans the consequences of their nuclear profligacy—“on their bones and blood.” A uniquely severe El Niño had exacerbated those prevailing westerly winds, and they were blowing especially hard the night of the HRNPS attack as well as during the weeks that followed. Lifting the plant’s nuclear dust and debris high into the air, the winds carried and deposited endless tons of it onto the heavily populated Tri-State area, but they mostly carried the fallout out to sea.

  Still, the Tri-State area had been caught unprepared. For decades, critics had derided the nuclear plant’s “evacuation plan” as “a fantasy document.” The meltdown’s true “zone of lethality” was everything within a radius of a hundred miles, and in reality no one knew how to evacuate and provide for the zone’s twenty million inhabitants. So FEMA’s first serious plan was to supply those affected with duct tape, iodine tablets, water, food, flashlights, portable radios, batteries, and medicine. When FEMA proved incapable of quick, timely house-to-house deliveries, the supplies were simply deposited in central storage sites, and the citizens were invited to brave the endless deluge of radioactive fallout and pick them up.

  FEMA advised everyone within a hundred miles of HRNPS to duct tape the edges of their windows and doors, then to stay indoors. Almost no one was sufficiently provisioned to do that for long. Many ultimately fled their homes, took to the highway in their cars. Some even left on bicycles or on foot. Too often, they found their journeys fraught with violence, robbery, hunger, toxic fallout, disease, and death.

  On the other hand, staying home was no panacea. Looting, injuries, illness, and death were pandemic. Millions eventually contracted radiation sickness.

  The Edward Teller Nuclear Weapons Laboratory was outside San Francisco, and the City on the Bay suffered even worse than New York’s Tri-State area. Unbeknownst to the bombers, some six hundred yards south of the cannon bomb was a boxcar filled with long steel storage containers. They were packed with bomb-grade HEU in the form of flat-bottomed rings, vertically aligned. These rings essentially had the same size, shape, and upright positioning as the HEU rings in the first atom bomb and as those rings inside the Bear Flag cannon-barrel atom bomb. The rings’ steel storage boxes were twelve feet long and a foot across, and they functioned as a kind of Hiroshima gun barrel. Moreover, the long rectangular steel boxes were encased in a concrete container. When the A-bomb blew, its shockwave struck the ends of the HEU containers, slamming the rings one into the other with the power of the stars, telescoping them like colliding boxcars in a high-speed train wreck. Unfortunately, the storage rings’ steel and concrete containment system served to compress and exponentially increase the explosion’s power.

  The rings did not achieve supercriticality, but there were so many tons of bomb-grade HEU in those containers that the detonation’s yield was a thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

  The two combined blasts lifted billions of tons of radioactive debris into the air. Unfortunately, a hot, powerful wind, generated in part by a million-acre wildfire to the east, carried the poisonous debris through the mountain pass straight toward San Francisco. The state of California, which had long suffered a record-setting drought, was about to experience a record-setting rainstorm. Most Californians were grateful for the much-needed precipitation.

  Not the citizens of San Francisco.

  Not now.

  The monstrous cloud of radioactive fallout appeared over San Francisco just as the deluge commenced, turning the torrential downpour into a filthy, pitch-black rainstorm of radioactive death. Its toxicity was total. Such black rain constituted the most lethal form fallout could take.

  San Francisco was rendered an uninhabitable wasteland for decades to come. For over a year, evacuation of that city proved to be impossible, and the death toll soared.

  The San Francisco and New York disasters were expected to eventually cost millions of lives and over $100 trillion.

  Then there was Washington, D.C. True to his word, Hasad had removed some of the extra-high explosive from the bomb’s trigger. The bomb, however, was still more potent than he had expected. He had reduced its yield not to a single kiloton but closer to four kilotons, which was enough to set fire to most of the city. Obliterating many of D.C.’s most famous landmarks, it razed
the White House and flattened the Capitol Building. It toppled the Washington Monument and leveled the Lincoln Memorial. It also burned K Street—the lobbying capital of the world—down to the ground.

  The deaths ran over a million.

  Many nations had drunk the nuclear power Kool-Aid, and they had built such plants by the hundreds. Some nations, however, had grown increasingly skeptical of nuclear power’s unsustainable costs and myriad dangers. The U.S., for instance, had closed Indian Point, which had been a mere thirty miles from New York City. A terrorist strike against Indian Point would have contaminated New York for all time.

  Canada, too, had become increasingly aware of nuclear power’s hazards, particularly the threat of terrorist strikes. To avoid a panic, their leaders kept their operations secret, but they built several Chernobyl-style containment shells in prefabricated sections. They quickly transported the segmented shells to the devastated New York plant. There, outfitted in hazmat suits, crews of spectacularly brave Canadian technicians cobbled the pieces of the dome together. It covered the ravaged reactor like a sarcophagus.

  The first shell was a solid, impermeable, but temporary structure, capable of preventing the radiation’s spread for at least two years—long enough for a permanent concrete-and-steel shroud to be installed over the hastily built dome.

  Some nuclear pollution had reached New York City—enough that the EPA had to raise their previous toxicity standards in order to declare the city’s new increased toxicity levels as marginally acceptable. Pregnant women were temporarily evacuated, but most people remained in their homes, sheltering in place. That state of affairs did not last long, however. Soon people drifted out of their residences and returned to work. Within six weeks, most of the city’s citizens were back on the job, and the city was chugging along as it always had.

  Notoriously resilient, most New Yorkers refused to be cowed by the plant’s meltdown. Throughout the entire ordeal, the major networks had continued to broadcast out of New York, the newspapers had continued to publish, and it was said thereafter that nothing short of a direct nuclear hit could force New Yorkers to abandon the Big Apple.