8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

  “If you’d rather not,” Holleran said.

  “No, please. Sit down,” he said, gathering up the newspaper he’d been trying to read in the dim light. He cleared a space for her. “It’s just been kind of a rough day.” He didn’t want to get into an analytical debate with this woman over sunspots, tidal forces, and earthquake predictions. He was way too skeptical. Way too tired.

  “One of the USGS people told me where I might find you,” she said, sitting down.

  Atkins pushed back in his seat, waiting for her to begin, wanting to get this over with.

  “Would you mind if I ordered something to drink?” Holleran asked. She’d already had quite enough of the attitude in his voice. She felt like telling him to shut up and just listen. But this was too important. She had to be more diplomatic.

  “Sure, why not?” Atkins said. He stopped his waiter and asked for another beer. The man quickly returned and banged a frosty mug down on the scarred wooden table without saying a word.

  “That’s a waiter with personality,” Atkins said sarcastically. “They give the place its Southern charm.” He was already thinking how to get out of this as quickly and politely as possible.

  “Jim Dietz told me to say hello,” Holleran said. She’d just spoken to him on the telephone. “We’re working together on the Point Arguello project.”

  Atkins had taken a couple advanced seismology courses from Dietz at Cal Tech. They’d stayed in touch. Atkins liked and respected his intellect.

  “Did Jim know what you were going to do down here?” he asked.

  Holleran nodded. “He said I was out of my mind.” She took a sip of beer, a big one.

  Atkins smiled in spite of himself. She reminded him of an eager graduate student. Maybe a little older, but not much. Late twenties or early thirties. Not bad-looking. Better up close than in that conference room, which was good enough. In fact, she was damned fine-looking, sitting there on the edge of the chair in a green jacket and black corduroy slacks. No makeup at all. Didn’t need it.

  Atkins complimented her on her papers describing the dig at Point Arguello. He’d read both of them. It was solid research by someone who’d spent months in the field and wrote with authority. He noticed Elizabeth’s smooth, deep tan. This was a woman who wasn’t afraid of hard work or getting out in the sun. But he wasn’t about to waste any more time than absolutely necessary listening to her talk about Prable and sunspots.

  Elizabeth put down her beer mug. She wanted to get started while she still had the nerve. “I need someone to look at this data,” she said. “I was hoping that maybe you could—”

  Atkins put up his hands. He’d been expecting it. “Now hold on,” he said. “I heard what you said this afternoon. I don’t want to get involved in that.”

  “Otto Prable was a superb scientist. We need to look at his data. I know it’s probably a waste of time. But if you’d just—”

  “Why me?” Atkins said. “Why not that guy who introduced you this afternoon? Go to him. I can’t help you. I don’t want to help you. I think Prable just got lucky.”

  There was a moment when Elizabeth started to unravel, felt the panic slip out. She was putting her reputation on the line with a complete stranger who was acting like an asshole. She forced herself to calm down.

  Atkins helped. His brusque question snapped her out of it. “You think Prable predicted the magnitude 7.1 we just had? Or was that only a precursor? I can’t keep it straight. And what was that date for maximum exposure? January twentieth?”

  Elizabeth didn’t like his condescending tone. This was becoming far more difficult than she’d hoped. “Prable said there was a high probability of a severe earthquake,” she said, regulating her voice. “We’ve had one moderately severe quake already and several strong aftershocks. I think we ought to see what the man was talking about.”

  “But he wasn’t even a seismologist,” Atkins said.

  Elizabeth looked at him, focusing her thoughts. “No,” she said, not fighting the anger this time. “He wasn’t a seismologist. He wasn’t even a geologist. And I say, thank God! I’ve never met such a group of backbiting hypocrites. Have you ever stopped to think that our vaunted profession has never made an accurate earthquake prediction? Not a single one in all these years. Here’s someone who isn’t a seismologist, and we’re quick to knock down his data sight unseen because he didn’t have the right pedigree. Dammit!” She pounded her fist on the table. People glanced at them. Even the glassy-eyed waiters looked momentarily interested.

  She started to get up, snatching the straps of her briefcase. To hell with this, she thought. Dietz had been all wrong about Atkins. He was a total jerk. She’d try someone else. Maybe Jacobs.

  “No, please,” Atkins said, motioning for her to sit down. “Don’t go.”

  Elizabeth Holleran took a breath. She sat back down again. Her eyes were flashing.

  “The key issue, it seems to me, is to run a probability analysis of Doctor Prable’s data,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I doubt it’s accurate, but after what’s happened down here, I’d sure want to examine it. He’s talking about a period of maximum stress in another nine days. All my training and instincts tell me he’s way off base, that his work is seriously flawed. But I keep asking myself, what if in some crazy way he’s right? It doesn’t leave much time.”

  “And you think he might be right?”

  There was that irritating smile again, she thought.

  “As a seismologist, I think that’s highly unlikely. But you had to know him, his intellect and integrity. I don’t see how we can afford not to check his theory out.”

  She was still angry and a little dismayed with herself for wanting to continue talking to this man. She’d read about Atkins. She guessed he was in his mid-forties. He had a creased, ruddy face and big shoulders and hands. The nose was all wrong, pushed slightly off center and flattened at the bridge.

  She took out two computer disks and laid them on the table.

  “It’s all right there,” she said. “I would have asked Jim Dietz to take a look at them, but there wasn’t time. After that 7.1, I wanted to get right down here.”

  Atkins noticed it first, how their beer glasses started shaking. It was almost imperceptible, then the movement became more pronounced. The glasses were rattling, jiggling on the table. The beer splashed out of them. The ground lurched, a sharp sideways motion. Not much, but strong enough to knock a plate-glass mirror down from the wall. It shattered on the floor.

  Atkins figured a magnitude 3. Nothing major, but the restaurant erupted in screams. After the last few days, everyone was on edge. Even a minor aftershock was enough to start a stampede. People knocked over tables as they pushed and shoved their way to the front door.

  “They’re going to run right over us,” Atkins said, sliding the table back against the wall. They were near the door, right in the path.

  He slipped Elizabeth’s computer disks into his jacket pocket. There was another moderate shake, stronger than the first. A row of liquor bottles fell off the shelves behind the bar. Broken window glass rained down onto the street from the building’s upper stories.

  “Don’t … go … out … there!” Atkins shouted. He heard the glass exploding on the pavement outside. “Stay off the street! You’re safer in here.”

  It didn’t do any good. A heavyset man, who’d left his wife behind in his rush to get out, elbowed his way toward the door. An elderly woman fell, and Atkins had to push back two people who started to step on her. Elizabeth grabbed the woman by the shoulders and pulled her out of the way.

  There was a pileup at the front door. Blows were being thrown as a couple dozen people frantically tried to push and shove their way outside. Atkins had seen it all before in Mexico City. The dead stacked up five and six feet deep around the doors of the high-rises. Trampled. The faces battered beyond recognition.

  A solid-looking man in his mid-fifties, white hair and black blazer, collided with Elizabeth. In his ha
ste to flee, he’d looped his arm through the strap in her briefcase. He was pulling her down.

  Atkins slammed the man against the wall, freeing Elizabeth’s arm. Eyes bulging with fear, the man swung savagely at Atkins’ face. Ducking under the blow, Atkins hit him in the jaw and stomach, hard punches thrown from the shoulder. The man sat down, his back sliding against the wall.

  Many of the patrons cowered under tables. The light fixtures over the tables were swaying. Atkins saw it, felt it in the restaurant. The quake had been nothing at all. But it was making people snap.

  ABOARD HK-101,

  KENTUCKY NATIONAL

  GUARD BLACK HAWK

  JANUARY 12

  6:12 A.M.

  SEEN FROM THE BELLY OF THE HELICOPTER, THE plowed muddy fields looked dotted with sand-piles. It was shortly after dawn, and they were clipping along the cotton fields of the Missouri boot heel at two thousand feet. In the shadowy light, it was easy for Atkins’ eyes to play tricks on him.

  The strange starburst markings on the ground were a yellowish, powdery-white color. When the light was better, he noticed that the impressions looked smooth and feathered at the edges. Some were huge. They peppered the floodplain that spread out for miles on either side of the Mississippi.

  His face glued to a porthole window, Atkins kept clapping his hands, trying to warm them in the biting cold. The team of six geologists on their way to southwestern Kentucky sat on bench seats in the helicopter’s unheated cargo bay. The big olive-green chopper belonged to the Kentucky National Guard.

  Atkins knew he was looking at sand blows, but he’d never seen any that compared with these. Each one of those white splotches was a scar, the remains of a miniature volcano that had blown up during the great quakes of 1811 and 1812. The ground beneath them had turned to quicksand.

  “Looks like the whole damn boot heel blew up,” Atkins said, shaking his head in disbelief as he tried to imagine what it must have been like.

  The sand blows, the result of massive liquefaction, were among the most dramatic evidence that remained of the earthquakes that had also formed fissures and deep craters. There’d also been widespread landslides. The area of severe liquefaction covered 48,000 square kilometers, making it one of the largest earthquake liquefaction zones in the world. The only rival was in the Ganges river plain of India, the result of Himalayan earthquakes.

  Liquefaction occurred when an earthquake shook wet soil that was loosely packed and fine-grained, usually a mix of clay and sand. It turned into a dense liquid that resembled quicksand. If the pressure was heavy enough, sand and water were pushed to the surface with such explosive force that they formed sand volcanoes or sand blows. Many were eight to twenty feet across. Some were well over a hundred feet. The hardened conical sides of the sand blows eventually disappeared, leaving all those white marks on the table-flat countryside.

  The process had always fascinated Atkins. Jacobs opened his laptop and punched a few keys. The screen displayed various examples of the bizarre sand features, which he showed to Atkins and one of the National Guardsmen who sat beside him.

  Jacobs gave directions to the pilot over a headset microphone. Atkins tried to wake up. He’d barely arrived at the airport on time.

  On the way, he’d stopped off at the earthquake center. He got there at 4:30 A.M. and left a detailed E-mail message for Guy Thompson. Against his better judgment, he asked his friend to try to do a probability analysis of Prable’s earthquake projections. He also asked him to check the data against Jacobs’ observations. He’d left the two computer disks Elizabeth Holleran had given him. Convinced it was a waste of time, he’d told Thompson to try it only if he had the time. That wouldn’t be easy. Thompson was already working eighteen-hour days.

  Atkins suddenly regretted what he’d done. Guy would have plenty of reasons to blow up, and he couldn’t blame him.

  He remembered again how he’d stood in the street with Elizabeth Holleran after they left the Blue Sax. She thanked him for pulling that man off her. But she was still completely focused. She asked him again if he could have someone do a computer analysis of Prable’s earthquake data. A tough, good-looking young lady. But he still wished he hadn’t given those disks to Thompson. As soon as he got a chance, he’d try to call him and tell him to forget it.

  Jacobs said, “We’re going to fly over the world’s largest sand blow then swing north about twenty miles to New Madrid.”

  Atkins saw the lightly shaded patch on the ground before anyone else. Shaped like a funnel, the tapered end curved toward the river.

  “Is that it?” he asked, stunned. The sand blow was immense.

  Jacobs nodded. “There’s so much sand down there they call it ‘the beach.’”

  A rural road stopped abruptly at the edge of the area and veered around it at a sharp right angle.

  “It’s a mile and a half long,” Jacobs said. “And about a half mile wide. The ground’s littered with debris from the quake—fragments of coal, lignite, charcoal. When that one blew, it must have sounded like someone had opened a pipe straight to hell.”

  Atkins didn’t doubt it and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when the ground started to erupt and boil. Something out of Inferno. Towering geysers of muck thrown up thirty, forty, and fifty feet from deep in the earth. The noise must have been deafening.

  “Hang on. We’re going to climb,” Jacobs announced to the geologists, whose eyes were riveted on the ground. The helicopter shot up like an elevator, leveling off again at about four thousand feet.

  Atkins saw it first, but he’d been looking for it. Jacobs had tipped him off earlier. The famous Boot Heel Lineament. The largest visible surface feature left by the three quakes of the early 1800s. A faint line that ran like a reddish-brown ribbon about eighty miles across the Missouri boot heel. The name came from the shape of the small wedge of extreme southeast Missouri that dipped into Arkansas.

  “No one knew about it until 1988, when a grad student was studying some satellite photographs. Jumped right out at him. We still don’t know much about how it was formed. The best explanation is that it somehow reflects the actual fault deep below it.”

  “What’s the tower off to the left?” Atkins said, almost shouting to make himself heard over the droning chop of the rotors.

  “Power plant, one of the biggest in Missouri,” Jacobs said. The smokestack was belching puffs of white smoke across the pink horizon.

  Atkins started to say something. Jacobs grinned. “I know. The lineament runs right beneath it. I’d call that poor planning.”

  “Any nuclear plants around here?” Atkins asked.

  “Nothing in the immediate fault zone,” Jacobs said. “But if you move a couple hundred miles east, the TVA’s got two nuclear plants on-line. Sequoyah and Watts Bar. Both are over near Chattanooga.”

  Atkins didn’t even want to consider the problems a nuclear reactor would present in a powerful earthquake. So far, that had never happened anywhere in the world. But it was only a matter of time. Back in the 1970s, a magnitude 5.3 quake hit about twenty miles from a nuclear plant in Humboldt, California. The plant wasn’t damaged, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to close it anyway. The issue of what would happen to a nuclear power plant—especially the hot core—in a strong quake was one of many unanswered questions. They were nowhere close to solving it.

  The helicopter banked right and crossed the Mississippi a few miles south of the power plant. The shadowy line in the ground disappeared at the edge of the river, which twisted in a long S curve.

  “That’s one of the most powerful rivers in the world,” Jacobs said. “The last of the New Madrid quakes cut right through it. Pushed it around like a kid playing with wet sand. Every time I think about a natural force that strong, it kinda takes my breath away.”

  NEAR MAYFIELD,

  KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 12

  1:25 P.M.

  THE UH-60 BLACK HAWK PUT DOWN AT A SMALL National Guard airfield nor
th of Mayfield, where Seismic Commission officials had arranged to have three Ford Explorers waiting out by the runway. The geologists formed two-member teams and fanned out across the southwestern quadrant of Kentucky, the area that had continued to show intense seismic activity.

  Within thirty minutes of landing, Atkins and Walt Jacobs were on their way in a rented blue Explorer loaded with three portable seismographs. They had a long day ahead of them.

  The teams wanted to set up an array of twelve instruments on a 120-mile line running roughly from the Mississippi River east to Kentucky Lake. The plan was to have the network up and running within fourteen hours, which meant a grueling day. Each team had three or four stops to make, many of them in remote, rugged country.

  There was an unspoken sense of urgency. The recent tremor that had struck near Kentucky Lake was the strongest since the magnitude 7.1 event two days earlier. Sixty-eight small quakes had been logged in that area during the last ten hours, most of them a magnitude 2 or less, so weak they couldn’t be felt.

  The geologists wanted to harvest as many seismic waves as possible, then use them as earth probes to create computer-enhanced images of what was happening in the ground. It was an unprecedented opportunity to study the crustal rock.

  Everyone knew this chance would last only for a short time. They had to gather the data now, before the quakes ceased.

  After the discovery of the previously undetected fault that ran south beyond Memphis, Atkins wondered if the strong ground activity in western Kentucky indicated the same thing. Was it possible they’d find another branch or segment of the New Madrid Seismic Zone?

  He’d spent much of the day thinking about that and was still mulling over the possibilities as he and Jacobs sped due east on the Sam Purchase toll road. The hazy sky of the early morning had given way to beautiful afternoon sunshine. It was just over forty degrees. Fine weather. Jacobs was driving, pushing well over the sixty-mile-an-hour speed limit. He had a bluegrass CD blaring in the stereo. The sound went perfectly with the rugged countryside.