8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

  Neutron advanced down a long, dimly lit corridor, turned, and kept going until it came to a fifty-yard row of wooden skids. The steel tanks of mercury were laid on their sides in sturdy wooden frames and looked like oxygen canisters.

  “We’re in position,” Burke said. “Here’s where it gets tricky.”

  Booker kept his eyes glued to the television monitor as the robot methodically began moving up and down the line of skids, covering them with a thick layer of white foam.

  “Now where?” Burke asked.

  “Send him down the corridor to your left,” Booker said. “There’s a fire door at the end and another security keypad. The plutonium beds are on the other side.”

  The ground shook. The building seemed to buckle inwardly.

  “Everyone back!” Tim Duncan shouted into a bullhorn. “Get away from there. Now!”

  The succession of heavy aftershocks had severely weakened the already damaged building. Afraid one of the walls would collapse on his men, Duncan ordered everyone back at least three hundred yards from D-4.

  “Forget the robot,” he shouted to Burke and Booker, who hadn’t moved from their advanced position near the front wall. They were about fifty yards from the door. “You’re too close.”

  Burke shook his head. “No can do. I’ll be out of communication range with the robot. That’s one of the glitches we haven’t quite worked out. Our range is limited to about two hundred yards.”

  The ground rocked again. Booker actually felt himself lifted up and down as the earth rolled under his feet.

  There was a shudder, then the sound of heavy chunks of concrete slamming to the ground. Part of D-4’s flat roof had caved in.

  Booker measured the distance to the building with his eye. If the front wall came down, they’d never get clear in time. He resisted an overwhelming urge to run.

  NEAR BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS

  JANUARY 13

  6:15 A.M.

  THE SUN WAS STARTING TO COME UP, REAVELING a chilly gray sky and a landscape that had been torn apart. The sights of cataclysmic liquefaction were everywhere.

  Atkins and Elizabeth drove in silence, lost in their thoughts as they surveyed the devastated countryside. They were on Route 61, which paralleled Interstate 55 a few miles to the east. They’d pulled off I-55 when they encountered their first collapsed overpass. They had to drive out into a muddy field to get around the wreckage and wouldn’t have made it without the Explorer’s four-wheel drive. Radio reports said every overpass had been knocked down in the quake zone. Until the debris could be cleared, the major north-south interstate was all but cut off.

  No more than ten miles from Blytheville, Arkansas, they were nearing the quake’s reported epicenter. Memphis was about eighty miles due south. Atkins tried to increase the speed, but it was impossible. There were too many obstructions.

  Trees were down. Sand blows, volcanic in shape, were still erupting, blasting geysers of mud, carbonized wood, and stone into the air, but not with their earlier force. And the sound they’d noticed most of the long night—the howling roar of the earth cracking open and venting—had all but ceased.

  Pushing hard to get to the epicenter, Atkins had to stop frequently to pull around cracks in the highway surface, some of them two and three feet wide. All the delays were maddening. They’d gone nearly four hours without getting a seismograph up and running at the epicenter. That was unforgivable. With each passing hour, they were losing precious data.

  In some places, the road looked as though a ditch-digger had cut a deep trench across it.

  Despite his increasing sense of urgency, Atkins stopped to inspect one particularly large sand blow. Measuring several hundred feet in diameter and perfectly cone shaped, the crusty sides were about four feet high and had already hardened. Steam was still drifting out of the opening.

  Elizabeth slowly approached the side and cautiously touched the steam vapors. She quickly withdrew her hand.

  “It’s almost boiling,” she said.

  “There’s got to be a strong thermal element at play here,” said Atkins. He was still wondering about the strange light that had made the depths of Kentucky Lake shimmer. It was possible they were caused by thermal disturbances in the crust.

  “I hope they’re setting up some good strain-rate databases in Memphis,” Elizabeth said. They needed to know how much energy had been released.

  She also hoped they’d gotten the GPS and Radar Interferometry Systems operating again. The satellite data would help them measure with minute precision how much the earth had shifted or risen. And, more important, whether it was still rising, a telltale sign that seismic strain energy continued to build in the ground.

  There was so much they needed to know. The greatest need was for seismic information that would help them gather precise data about aftershocks. Where they were hitting. And how often.

  The strong-motion seismograph they wanted to install near the epicenter would help them pinpoint the magnitude of the fault that had ruptured. With any luck, it might also show whether any previously undiscovered faults had been activated.

  A single seismograph was, at best, of limited usefulness. They needed to set up a whole array of instruments, but that would take time. The seismograph in the back of the Explorer was the best they could do.

  Elizabeth was eager to do some trenching along the fault line. If there was ever a time for serious paleoseismology this was it. They might be able to find some clues about what had happened deep in the earth in the ancient past. She wanted to know how often big quakes had occurred—and at what intervals. The data could help them calculate whether or not the massive quake they’d just experienced was likely to be followed by another killer.

  Elizabeth didn’t like to consider that possibility, but the history of the New Madrid Seismic Zone showed that it had happened before.

  More traffic was out—mainly cars and pickups and, unbelievably, a few eighteen-wheeler rigs trying to avoid I-55. Atkins figured it wouldn’t be long before the authorities closed all highways in the area to everything but emergency vehicles.

  Ever since they’d crossed the Mississippi, the change in topography had been striking. The rolling, forested terrain of western Kentucky and Tennessee had given way to country as flat as any desert. They were passing through the Missouri boot heel, a sliver of the state that dipped into Arkansas.

  It was part of the Mississippi Embayment, which started roughly where the Ohio River merged with the Mississippi and broadened out in an inverted U to the Gulf of Mexico. The embayment contained the famous Reelfoot Rift, a weak zone in the middle of the North American plate where the earth had tried to pull apart 600 million years earlier. The New Madrid faults were part of the residual scar tissue.

  Atkins knew that the northwestern edge of the embayment, the section they were driving through, was the most interesting geologically. The land, an ancient flood plain, was used mainly for agriculture—soybeans and some cotton. The main characteristics were drainage ditches, grain elevators, irrigation pipes, and vast fields crisscrossed with rows of poplar trees.

  They crossed the Missouri state line into Arkansas. Blytheville was four miles south, right on Route 61. The epicenter was another five or six miles due south. Atkins took a bypass to get around Blytheville. For the last few miles, they’d noticed dark smoke hanging low on the horizon. The black smudge looked frozen on the gray winter sky.

  It was Blytheville burning.

  “How many people live there?” Atkins asked.

  Elizabeth checked the map. “About thirty thousand,” she said.

  It was a much larger town than he’d imagined. He doubted a single building had escaped serious damage and thought, again, about casualties. They were going to be horrific.

  Five miles later, the smoke was still visible. Atkins turned west on an unmarked country road. He drove another mile, passing a pair of dark-blue grain silos that had been upended by the earthquake. Corn had poured like gold from the gaping crac
ks. There wasn’t a house in sight, just cotton fields that had been picked nearly two months earlier and were still white with cotton the machines had missed. It was bleak country.

  “What about here?” Atkins asked, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

  They’d reached the approximate location of the epicenter.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Look up ahead,” she said.

  About a hundred yards down the road, the blacktop had been split wide open. Large pieces of broken pavement were stacked up against each other in overlapping layers. The fissure had gouged the road at a right angle.

  Atkins and Elizabeth got out of the Explorer.

  “Do you smell that?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Ever since we hit the Arkansas line,” Atkins said. The strong odor of sulfur was heavy in the cold air. It was the same smell he’d noticed the night before.

  The offset was large. Nothing like what they’d seen on the Mississippi, but still striking. The ground on the far side of the highway, the hanging wall, was at least four feet higher than on their side.

  The fissure—it was six feet deep—ran as far as the eye could see in either direction, west to east.

  “That looks like classic strike-slip horizontal tearing,” Elizabeth said, walking to the edge of the fissure. “The right lateral movement must have been incredible.”

  Shielding his eyes against the wind, Atkins had no doubt that the faulting had generated some monstrous seismic waves.

  “I’d suggest we set up around here,” he said.

  Somewhere below them, at the hypocenter of the quake, probably at a depth of over five or six miles, one of the major faults in the New Madrid Seismic Zone had ruptured with a tremendous explosion of energy.

  This was ground zero.

  NEAR PADUCAH, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 13

  4:10 A.M.

  “THE ROAD’S CLOSED. YOU’VE GOT TO TURN around.”

  The speaker wore a white environmental-hazard suit and a hooded facemask. He was with three other men, similarly dressed.

  “I’ve got to get to Heath,” Lauren said. “My parents live there.”

  “There’s been an accident at the uranium plant,” the man said. “Some gas leaked out. We’re trying to get people evacuated to the west.”

  “What kind of gas?” Lauren asked. She knew the Department of Energy operated a huge plant near Heath but had only a vague knowledge of what was done there.

  Another man approached. He held a radio in his right hand. Lauren noticed that they were all wearing sidearms.

  “Just turn around and get the hell out of here,” he said angrily.

  Lauren looked up the road that led toward town. It was wide open.

  She nodded to the man.

  “Bobby, get down,” she whispered to her grandson. Then she punched the accelerator and swerved around the barricade. The big 327-cubic-inch V-8 roared as she cut back onto the highway. She glanced in the rearview mirror. No one was chasing them. Good.

  She drove another half mile and made a turn. She planned to enter Heath from the back in case the main road was blocked. It was a small community. Only a couple hundred people. Her parents’ home was on the eastern end, a split-level ranch. Happy to be off the farm near Mayfield, her mother had fallen in love with the place.

  Lauren was puzzled by the evacuation. She didn’t see any cars on the road. Maybe everyone had already left, she thought.

  There was a sudden bright flash in the early morning sky. It was off to the right, a couple miles east. “What was that?” said Bobby, who’d also noticed the burst of light. It looked like a Fourth of July rocket, a long tail of white smoke, then a brilliant red flash.

  Later, she would learn there’d been an explosion at the uranium enrichment plant. The massive pipes that carried uranium hexofluoride gas under pressure had cracked open during the earthquake. Pieces of an electrical generator had ignited and gone off like rockets.

  “Listen to that,” Lauren said. She heard a rapid series of distant explosions.

  Bobby pointed toward the east. A helicopter was bearing down low over the treetops headed in their direction. It slowed and hovered directly over their car. It was about twenty feet above them. Painted in white letters across the drab olive fuselage were the words DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.

  A spotlight blinked on beneath the chopper, blinding them.

  “You’re in extreme danger,” an amplified voice boomed out. “Poison gas is drifting in this direction. Turn around at once.”

  The message was quickly repeated, then the helicopter moved off, climbing rapidly. It was headed due east, toward the uranium processing plant.

  “There it is!” Bobby yelled. They were on a slight rise. A chalky cloud, so faint as to be almost indistinguishable in the predawn gray, was drifting toward them. Still several miles away, it seemed to spread out as it rose higher in the sky.

  Lauren already had the Chevrolet turned around. At the first fork in the road, she headed south. The two-lane blacktop was torn to hell and the car’s chassis and springs took a beating, but she kept the speed at fifty miles an hour.

  She glanced at the fuel gauge, the first time she’d remembered to do so.

  The red needle was nudging toward empty.

  She knew there was a small town up ahead. Hammonds. It had a gas station.

  When she arrived, ten or twelve cars and trucks were pulled in close to the station’s single tank. The owner was operating a cash and carry business. His brick filling station was in shambles, but the lone pump was still working. He carried a rifle in the crook of his arm.

  Lauren figured she’d driven about thirty-live miles since the helicopter had warned them. Surely they were out of danger, but she kept nervously watching the sky for a yellow cloud.

  When it was her turn at the pump, the owner asked for cash in advance. Twenty dollars a gallon. Dressed in a soiled hunting jacket, he had a full black beard and was chewing a plug of tobacco.

  “Dammit, Tom. This ain’t right and you know it. You’re robbing folks.”

  The man who was waiting in line behind Lauren had gotten out of a battered red pickup. His voice was laced with anger.

  Lauren had fifteen dollars. She handed it to the man with the rifle.

  “Please,” she said. “Just let me have two gallons.” That would be enough to get home.

  “You heard the price. That’ll buy you three-quarters of a gallon.” He pumped it out to the nickel.

  “Tom, some people are going to die if they can’t drive,” the man behind her said. His words were cold, hard. He was bareheaded, maybe sixty years old, and had a leathery face.

  “Mind your own business, Harris,” the man said. “I’ll run my business how I see fit.”

  More angry words were exchanged. The bareheaded man took a few steps closer to the station owner, pulled a short-barreled pistol from the pocket of his jacket, and held it to the man’s head. The owner’s eyes bulged. He dropped his rifle.

  “Take five gallons, lady,” the man said. “Then you and the boy get the hell out of here.”

  OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

  JANUARY 13

  3:40 A.M.

  THE CLOUD OF DUST SHOWED CLEARLY ON BURKE’S television monitor as he followed Neutron’s progress through the massive building. A piece of the concrete roof had almost fallen on the robot.

  “That was close,” Booker said.

  Burke nodded, studiously working the controls. Neutron had opened the fire door and moved into another part of the D-4 building. The uranium and plutonium storage areas were divided into dozens of separate vaults.

  With Burke operating the control panel, Neutron began pouring a thick spray of foam over the storage bunker. There was just enough left in the canisters for one good soaking.

  The ground shook again. Another bad one, the movement was horizontal, a sharp back-and-forth motion. Booker saw the front wall of D-4 start to buckle.

&n
bsp; “Get out of there!” the fire captain shouted at them over a loudspeaker. “Pull back!”

  The huge building was teetering.

  “What about it, Jeff?” Booker asked his friend. If that front wall fell, they’d be crushed.

  “I’m not leaving the robot,” Burke said. “I’ve got seven years of work tied up in that machine.”

  They were experiencing a swarm of aftershocks, each stronger in intensity. Another part of the roof fell in. Booker heard it crash loudly to the ground.

  The walls were starting to sway.

  “Come on, Jeff!”

  Burke hadn’t moved. Booker doubted he’d even heard him as he hunched over his laptop monitor, manipulating the controls.

  Booker was getting ready to grab his friend and pull him to safety when he saw the robot emerge from the rubble. Rolling through a cloud of dust, the machine was using its powerful mechanical arms to clear a path through a pile of concrete and twisted steel that blocked D-4’s front door.

  “I was worried about the durability of the metal framing,” Burke said, still staring at his computer keyboard. “I don’t think—”

  “Jeff, let’s go!”

  Burke started after Booker. Moving quickly on its omnidirectional platform, the robot followed them.

  NEAR BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS

  JANUARY 13

  6:44 A.M.

  ATKINS GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. IT HAD BEEN WELL over four hours since the quake, and they still didn’t have a seismograph up and running at the epicenter. He clenched his hands on the wheel of the Explorer. It was incredible, from his perspective the geological equivalent to suffering a heart attack and waiting four hours before checking into the hospital for some tests. He could feel his chest tightening, the pressure building at his temples.

  Distant seismographs were recording the aftershocks, but there was no substitute for having an instrument right at the epicenter. They wouldn’t miss any of the smaller aftershocks that way, the swarms of magnitude 2 and 3 earthquakes that other seismographs might not pick up. Knowing about those small quakes was important in gauging how much seismic energy remained locked along the fault.