Still, the damage to the U.S. was catastrophic in both human and financial terms. Globally, the three nuclear strikes created an economic depression that wreaked inconceivable havoc, ultimately bankrupting many of the planet’s corporations, to say nothing of ordinary citizens. At times, it seemed as if the world would never recover.
The good news was that any and all naiveté over nuclear weapons and nuclear power had come to an end. The people of the world had always hated nuclear power and nuclear bombs, and the industry had survived only because a handful of politically rich plutocrats reaped fortunes off these taxpayer-financed enterprises and had bought off the politicians.
Those days would come to an end.
It took a few more nuclear terrorist strikes for antinuclear rage to reach a global tipping point, but eventually, over the years, it did come to pass. Now the hatred of things nuclear was visceral, ubiquitous, and unyielding. People took to the streets with an unprecedented rage. After the riots began, it took less than a year to ban nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Even nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel were universally outlawed. Any person caught violating the antinuclear law, including any corporate head or political leader responsible for the violation of those laws, was subject to life in prison without parole.
A heavily armed global force was given almost unlimited military and political power to enforce the new antinuclear laws.
An international tribunal was empowered to indict, convict, and sentence offenders.
Elena also discovered that Hasad had left a diary on his flash drive—a memoir of sorts. It did not make for pretty reading. His life had been a nightmare horror show. When, at age two, George H. W. Bush’s Baghdad bombing killed his parents, he was thrown into Iraq’s orphanage system. There, he learned to fight for survival—with no quarter given. Fearless, possessing an intuitive affinity for violence, he was, while still in his teens, recruited into Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, where he was soon dragooned into its Special Forces. He became especially adept at assassinations.
After the toppling of Saddam and Iraq, he fought for a variety of groups, including al Qaeda, ISIS, and Pakistan’s ISI. He was more interested in money than ideology, however, and he eventually began selling his services to the highest bidder.
His only reprieve from this life of unremitting violence was the nine months he spent in the U.S., hanging out with Jules and Elena. The ISI had sent him there to learn to “speak like an American” in anticipation of future undercover operations in the U.S. However, hanging out with the two women, he learned something else. He confessed they were the only two people he had ever loved.
Obsessed with his narrative, Jules wrote his biography, entitling it Gunman. A global megabestseller and international blockbuster movie, it made Jules millions.
It even changed many people’s opinion of Hasad. As catastrophic as his attacks were, he had achieved something all the antinuclear people and peace protesters had failed to accomplish in close to a century of effort.
Hasad ibn Ghazi had, Jules wrote, eradicated “all things nuclear.”
In her next book, she then set out to write the story of her and her best friend, Elena Moreno. It was the hardest, most painful thing she would ever do.
She wrote of their hardscrabble childhood in the West Texas border country desert, Elena’s gangster father, her own family’s struggles, college, and of Elena’s falling in love with a murderous undercover terrorist named Hasad ibn Ghazi. She wrote of her years as a journalist; the wars she’d covered, often with her sister, Sandy; Elena’s two decades as a CIA NOC, later as head of the Pakistan desk. Jules wrote of Elena’s mad passionate fling with Jamie, which he could never forget; and of Hasad returning to the States; the terrorist attacks; Elena’s race through D.C.’s fiery streets to kill Hasad; Jules’s chopper coverage of the flaming, smoking inferno that had been the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station. She wrote of then fleeing the country; of Jamie’s devoted, unswerving support of them both despite the U.S. government’s and the media’s persecution; the endless death threats; the loyalty of the Swedish prime minister and government, to the point that Sweden was expelled from the EU for refusing to extradite the four fugitives. Jules wrote of their never-ending fears of a CIA abduction and danger of them languishing forever in supermaxes or dying by lethal injection. At last, however, thanks to the posthumous intervention of a violent, mass-murdering, nuclear psychopath, Hasad ibn Ghazi, she and her friends were vindicated, redeemed, and lauded by the same media and the same governments that had previously screamed for their blood.
Jules, of course, had to find a title for the book. One thing that had always haunted her was the idiocy of Caldwell and the gang of nuclear power zealots with whom he had surrounded himself. He was always raving about how nuclear power was the hope of the future and how nuclear power would turn our nuclear weapons into nuclear plowshares, saving humanity from the Damocles sword of nuclear war. Once, when Jules and Elena had been watching the president speak on TV, they heard him proclaim in one of his loonier moments:
“Thanks to nuclear power, we can finally jump out of the nuclear frying pan!”
“Yeah,” Elena had muttered to Jules, “and into the fire.”
Jules titled her book:
And Into the Fire.
And so their odyssey came to an end. The four friends found their Ithaca. Sweden was now their home. None of them wanted to return to the United States. There was too much blood under the bridge.
Yes, writing that story was the hardest, most painful thing Jules Meredith would ever do. But finally the ordeal was over, the story told. At the book’s conclusion, Jules tried to sum up what it had all meant, what their journey had come down to, what any life comes down to in the end. It all was an almost impossible task, but still she tried. Leaning on St. Paul’s last letter, she wrote:
In the end we did all any of us can do: We ran our race. We finished the course. We kept the faith.
Yes, we kept the faith.
And with those final words, Jules Meredith ended her book.
AFTERWORD
Once when I was a young New York book editor, I commissioned an alien invasion novel. It was to be very violent. In fact, at one point, in order to subdue humankind, the aliens were to push an asteroid into our orbit and slam our planet into it. The consequences of the asteroid strike were earth-shattering in the extreme. I was twenty-nine at the time and had never heard of anything so horrendous. Almost no one had back then. The magnitude of the destruction so consumed me that I asked the authors to also do a synopsis for a second novel about an asteroid colliding with our planet.
Eventually the authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, turned the premise into two books. The collision novel was Lucifer’s Hammer, a number two New York Times bestseller, and the alien invasion novel became Footfall, a number one New York Times bestselling novel.
However, when the authors sat down to write Lucifer’s Hammer, they made one important change. They substituted a comet for the incoming asteroid, which made the impact even more disastrous. Among other things, comets can hit harder than asteroids. Their velocities are often two to three times higher, and they’re frequently much larger—up to sixty miles across. Their hard rocky nuclei are bound together by ice, and their orbits are often erratic, making their strikes harder to predict. Since they possess dazzlingly luminous comas and tails, they are scintillatingly radiant.
In the novel, our comet swung a little too close to the sun, which melted the binding ice. The nucleus broke up into two Mount Everests of rock, which then rocketed toward the earth at something like forty miles per second. One mountain hit the Atlantic Ocean, one the Pacific. Each of the masses passed through the earth’s atmosphere and the two oceans in mere seconds, hitting the oceans’ floors largely undegraded, almost without slowing down. Their momentum—mass times velocity—was beyond comprehension, generating mile-high tsunamis, which inundated most of America’s East and West Coasts. Each of the strikes
cracked the earth’s mantle, liberating zillions of tons of magma—the molten iron from the earth’s core—which, in turn, vaporized zillions of tons of seawater, which came down in the temperate regions as saltwater rain, thereby destroying the topsoil for thousands of years to come, and in the polar regions as ice and snow, thus inaugurating a new Ice Age.
The comet destroyed civilization pretty much … forever.
Lucifer’s Hammer was and remains the most overpowering novel I’ve ever read. It haunted me while I edited it, and it still haunts me to this day.
About five years later, I began writing professionally, and in the back of my mind I always wanted to tackle an end-of-the-world novel. In fact, while my first novel was on submission and I had a few months to kill, I attempted a nuclear Armageddon novel. The year was 1982, it was during the Cold War, so I had the U.S. and Russia hit each other with all the nukes at their disposal.
I even composed a two-hundred-page treatment. I did not take the next step, however—the writing of the novel—because I could never make the scenario work. The problem with an all-out Russian–U.S. nuclear exchange scenario was that it was a mutual suicide pact. I could find no plausible motive for either side to willfully self-destruct.
Instead, I wrote a sequel to my unwritten end-of-the-world novel, titling it Wrath of God. It did well, both critically and commercially, despite the outrageousness of its plot. Rosie O’Donnell, the redoubtable stand-up comic and talk show host, once asked me to describe that plot. I said in a single breath, as rapidly as I could, like an insane tobacco auctioneer desperate for bids:
“George-S.-Patton-‘Stonewall’-Jackson-Amelia-Earhart-and-a-dinosaur-fight-Tamerlane-and-the-Great-Islamic-Horde-in-the-late-twenty-first-century-in-the-southwestern-desert-after-a-nuclear-apocalypse.”
“Smoke a lot of crack, don’t you, Bob?” Rosie responded.
While Wrath of God was a lot of fun, I still wanted to write a big end-of-the-world novel in which I dramatized in great detail the obliteration of humankind. After all, every one of our religions and mythologies has had a Genesis myth and an End Time myth, and the End Time myths are invariably the more interesting. It’s in our blood. We want to know what humanity’s grand finale will be like. But I still didn’t have a plausible plot—not for a nuclear apocalypse.
Then the world changed. In 1991, we witnessed the breakup of the old USSR. Overnight, their centralized security system collapsed, and security at their nuclear bomb-fuel storage sites evaporated. The guards simply walked off the job. Fissile nuclear bomb fuel was there for the taking. Russell Seitz called Russia during this period, “The yard sale at the end of history.”
For some time, I’d studied the technology of nuclear weapons. I’d learned that once in possession of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), the fabrication of a crude but powerful Hiroshima-style terrorist nuke was surprisingly simple. I learned, for instance, that if a terrorist placed a grapefruit-sized chunk of bomb-grade HEU on the ground and then dropped an identical chunk onto it from a height of six feet, the impact could achieve half the Hiroshima yield. If he put two smaller chunks into a piece of cannon barrel—an old Civil War cannon barrel would do—tamped off the ends, and blasted one into the other with extra-high explosive, a terrorist could conceivably achieve the Hiroshima yield. As Luis Avarez, who designed the Hiroshima bomb’s triggering mechanism said, a couple of high school kids could do it.
I’d then read a book by Herman Kahn called Thinking About the Unthinkable. Kahn created a lot of nuclear scenarios in which various countries suffered different kinds of nuclear attacks; he then analyzed what the nation’s response options were. One of his scenarios was called Catalytic Nuclear War, in which “a small vengeful power” nuked other nations but created the illusion that one or more of the great powers was guilty of the attacks. Example? Pakistan could surreptitiously nuke China but would deceive the Chinese into believing India did it. China would then retaliate against India with nukes, and India would nuke China in response.
Some experts have said that catalytic nuclear war is our most frighteningly plausible scenario for a global nuclear Götterdämmerung. I used Kahn’s concept as the basis for my novel End of Days.
Still, I needed an antagonist with a plausible motive for launching these attacks and fomenting a nuclear End Time.
Once again, reality intervened. During the 1990s, Sunni Islamist terrorists launched a series of bombing attacks on Americans—on the World Trade Center in 1993; on the U.S. Air Force living quarters in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in 1996; on two U.S. African embassies in 1998; on the USS Cole in 2000; and again on 9/11/01 when they flattened both of the World Trade Centers and wiped out part of the Pentagon in a series of kamikaze-style airliner crashes. Al Qaeda—which executed the last three attacks—was a cult, bent on launching nuclear attacks against the United States. A dozen years after 9/11, its spin-off organization, ISIS, would announce that they sought a Middle Eastern Armageddon.
Now I had my villains.
My research, however, was time and labor intensive. While many people, including every American president in my lifetime, talked publicly about how frightened they were of nuclear terrorism, when I combed the major newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, I found almost nothing of substance on the subject. Nor was anyone writing books about how such attacks would be planned, equipped, and executed. Studying an almost nonexistent subject was a long, arduous, tortuous challenge.
End of Days took me almost fifteen years to write—largely because the research was so difficult. True, I did other things in between. I was and still am a full-time book editor, and I also co-authored a series of five Aztec novels, started by the late Gary Jennings, the number-one New York Times bestselling author of Aztec and Aztec Autumn. But I put at least ten of those years into End of Days, and when it was finished, I’d done so much research I felt another book needed to be written. Most of the factual information I’d collected over that period did not exist in book form. I felt I needed to get it all down for those who were interested in the subject.
But were I to put all that information into a book, how would I organize it and what would I emphasize? One fact jumped out at me right away. I’d tracked down a couple of scientific reports—one from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the other from the Sandia National Laboratories. They both proved that terrorists would have a shockingly easy time building a fissile nuclear bomb-fuel reprocessor. With the equipment from an old dairy or an old winery, a half dozen nuclear technicians could build a fissile nuclear bomb-fuel reprocessor in just six months. In as little as a month—according to Oak Ridge—they could extract enough plutonium from the spent fuel rods to power the Nagasaki bomb.
In other words, a nuclear reactor—with the addition of a low-tech, easy-to-build fissile nuclear bomb-fuel reprocessor—was a fissile nuclear bomb-fuel factory.
But then, given the fact that these reactors were so potentially dangerous, why were we selling them worldwide to anyone with the money to pay for them? In fact, if the nation didn’t have the money, the U.S. would often give it to them in the form of a federally guaranteed loan.
President Eisenhower started this global nuclear proliferation movement. Back in 1953, he had established Atoms for Peace, in which he declared all nations had an inalienable right to nuclear power (assuming that the U.N.’s atomic energy agency did not catch them using their nuclear technology for military purposes). Under Atoms for Peace, the U.S. began purveying nuclear reactors globally, knowing full well that with the addition of a low-tech fissile bomb-fuel reprocessor, the spent fuel rods could be converted to bomb-grade plutonium. As a further gesture of good will, Eisenhower even released many of the most deeply classified scientific-engineering secrets to nuclear weapons production.
Eisenhower claimed that proliferating nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors to the nations of earth would make the world a safer place, saying, “Who can doubt, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amoun
ts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, that this capability would be rapidly transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage?”
Eisenhower said this even after the USSR had warned him that the global proliferation of nuclear power reactors would ultimately result in the global proliferation of fissile nuclear bomb-fuel factories. As I have pointed out, extracting bomb-grade plutonium from rods was a low-tech, straightforward operation. If the U.S. wanted to stop the proliferation of fissile nuclear bomb-fuel, the USSR told him, it had to block the proliferation not only of nuclear power reactors, but of all reactors. The facts were irrefutable, but Eisenhower ignored them. Instead, he made the U.S. the world’s number-one nuclear proliferator. He sold Pakistan its first nuclear reactor and established the protocols that allowed Iran to purchase their first one as well. In other words, the U.S. sold both these nuclear rogues their first reactors.
So what was Eisenhower’s motivation? I would argue that his reverence for free-trade, free-market capitalism trumped all national security concerns and made him almost criminally indifferent to the dangers of nuclear proliferation. It is certainly true that the USSR’s prediction was right, and Eisenhower’s utopian belief in the benefits of nuclear reactor proliferation was wrong. In the years following Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech at the U.N., nuclear power was the Trojan horse inside of which the nuclear rogues hid and developed their fissile nuclear bomb-fuel manufacturing programs.
But nuclear power was only part of the nuclear proliferaton/terrorism problem. Another energy industry was throwing money at the nuclear proliferators. When the nineteen hijackers flattened the Twin Towers, wiped out part of the Pentagon, and attempted to crash an airliner into the White House, the world quickly discovered that fifteen of the hijackers had been Saudis. Even worse, a number of important oil-rich Saudi royals had helped to bankroll some of the hijackers’ preparations. As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later say, wealthy Saudis were the premier financiers of Sunni-sponsored terror—that is, al Qaeda/ISIS-style terror—globally.
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