by Peter Hernon
He was already moving toward the door when the Secret Service agent posted outside rapped on it sharply.
“It may be an earthquake, Mister President. We’re not sure yet.” The agent had his gun out, a black, short-barreled Uzi. Two other agents ran down the hallway of the presidential living quarters, weapons drawn. The doors to the building were being sealed off.
Ross headed for the stairway. He never waited for the elevator if he could avoid it. The thing took forever.
“We confirm an earthquake. A big one somewhere in the Midwest. We’re just starting to get some reports,” another Secret Service agent called out from the bottom of the long, curving staircase. He had a cell phone in his right hand, a weapon in the left.
“Have the NSA’s duty officer meet me in the Oval Office,” Ross said as the agent, a young man in a sharply creased gray suit, trotted along behind him.
Ross had never liked the stiff formality of the Oval Office, its Architectural Digest sterility and overwhelming sense of history. He hurried through the president’s study into the small office, which was dominated by the ornately carved mahogany desk owned by Teddy Roosevelt when he was police commissioner of New York City. It was a god-awful piece of furniture that Ross had never gotten around to getting rid of.
He buzzed the switchboard.
“Get me Steve Draper,” he said. Draper was his national science adviser. Ross anticipated he was going to need some technical help. He knew instinctively that if he could feel the shaking in Washington, the country had just been rocked by one hell of a strong earthquake. Much bigger than the one that had hit near Memphis. He needed the best scientific minds he could gather.
There was a knock on the open door.
“Mister President, we’ve got some information from the National Earthquake Center in Boulder.”
Ross motioned in Betty Lou Davis, a newly minted Harvard Ph.D. from DeKalb, Georgia, who was an aide to the national security adviser. She’d drawn the graveyard shift and was out of breath from hurrying over from her office in the West Wing’s basement with two assistants, who stood behind her, yellow legal pads at the ready.
“The earthquake registered a magnitude 8.4, Mister President. Its epicenter is somewhere in eastern Arkansas. Roughly the same area that experienced that magnitude 7 quake a few days ago. This one really hammered them. It’s been felt over a huge area. Upstate New York, the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario.” She hesitated a moment. “Your home state of Illinois has taken a pounding.”
“What about casualties?” Ross asked.
“We don’t know yet, sir,” Davis said. “We’re having trouble getting through to Memphis, Little Rock, and St. Louis. Communications are completely knocked out.”
“We intercepted a cockpit transmission from the pilot of a TWA 747 who was on his approach into St. Louis,” one of her assistants said. “He aborted the landing when he lost all contact with the ground. The runway lights went out. All of them.”
Ross sensed that Davis was worried.
“What else, Betty?” he prodded.
“The pilot stayed in radio contact with the people in the control tower,” she said. “We’ve got it on tape. Mister President. The tower was shaking. You can hear them screaming.”
KENTUCKY LAKE
JANUARY 13
4:50 P.M.
“IT’S GONE. THE WHOLE THING’S GONE,” BOBBY said in astonished disbelief as he stared at what was left of the Kentucky Dam.
Lauren thought her grandson was going to burst into tears. She almost did herself, but didn’t want him to see her sobbing. They’d arrived in Benton a few minutes earlier and had driven straight to the lake. The small town was in shambles, but the damage there was nothing compared with this.
The huge steel gates and the high wall of concrete and crushed rock that supported the elevated highway had been washed away. The lock and dam on the far shore were completely inundated. The powerhouse had disappeared. It was as if the dam had never existed. The water in the lake was flowing straight into the Tennessee River.
The water level had dropped about forty feet, but the lake surface was still turbulent. The swells were running two and three feet with whitecaps.
Lauren drove down the gravel road to their boat dock and marina. Anticipating the worst, she still wasn’t prepared for what she found.
The dock was gone, vanished.
She got out of the car and walked closer to the lake. She saw the blue roof of the restaurant about thirty yards out in the water. Attached by cables to the shore, it had been pulled into the lake when the water level plunged. The pier and boat slips had disappeared.
Bobby put his arm around her waist. They held each other, not speaking, staring dumbly at the sunken restaurant and dock. Everything they’d worked for, the sixteen-hour days, her savings. It was all underwater. Their insurance wouldn’t come near paying for the loss.
Staring at the wreckage a few minutes longer, Lauren took the boy by the hand and walked back to the car.
“We’re going home,” she said. Maybe she could think there, figure out what they’d have to do to survive and how she could find out about her parents, whether they were still alive. She was so tired. All she wanted to do was lie down and let sleep come.
Lauren finally felt the emotional release. Living through all this wasn’t easy. She whispered a quick prayer of thanksgiving to God for sparing Bobby. She’d lost her son, daughter-in-law, and husband, and didn’t want to lose her grandson. She couldn’t begin to think about how she’d survive if something happened to him. So far, they’d been incredibly lucky. If she found their home smashed to pieces, it wouldn’t matter.
On the way home, she stopped at Goode’s Convenience Store. It was just off Route 641 near the western side of the lake.
The front windows and the glass door were shattered.
Elizabeth knew Vern Goode and his wife, Gloria. Vern also had a gun-and-ammo business and did a brisk trade during the hunting season. The metal, prefab building had two sections—one for the convenience store, the other for the gun shop.
Lauren told Bobby to stay put. She slipped Lou Hessel’s .357 magnum into a jacket pocket. She didn’t like the feel of the place.
“Vern,” she shouted, gripping the heavy pistol in her pocket. “You hear me, Vern?”
No one answered, so she stepped inside the convenience store. The exterior of the one-story building was in fairly good shape. The walls were bowed out slightly, but that was about all. It was different inside. Shelves were knocked down, and part of the ceiling had fallen. The light fixtures dangled from wires. Almost all of the merchandise was missing—canned food, soft drinks, bread, milk, liquor.
She walked next door to the gun shop. The door hung open on broken hinges.
“Vern, it’s Lauren Mitchell,” she called.
She slowly stepped inside. The gun cases were smashed. Everything in the shop had been removed—the rifles and shotguns that had stood in racks behind the front counter; the boxes of ammo; the pistols that had been displayed in glass cases. The cash register.
She took a couple of steps and stopped. She was standing in something sticky. It was dark in the narrow store. Lauren opened a window blind and in the thin light saw a dark stain that had spread out on the floor from behind one of the counters.
“Vern!” she shouted. “Gloria. Anybody here? Please come on out. It’s Lauren.”
She moved toward the counter, one cautious step at a time. The black stain looked like a puddle of motor oil.
Lauren peered around the counter. Vern Goode and his wife lay face-up on the floor. Both had been shot in the head.
Lauren leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Someone had killed them for the guns and ammunition. Lauren didn’t doubt it for a minute. A weapon was worth its weight in gold now.
She wondered how long they’d been dead. She wanted to bury them and look for the daughter, but there wasn’t time. It was getting late in the da
y, and she wanted to be back at her home before the sun went down.
If there was trouble, it would come in the dark.
NEAR BLYTHEVILLE,
ARKANSAS
JANUARY 14
6:05 A.M.
THE SUN WAS BARELY UP WHEN ATKINS AND Elizabeth got a shortwave transmission from Walt Jacobs in Memphis. He told them that Paul Weston had arrived at the earthquake center with two other members of the Seismic Safety Commission. They’d come in a National Guard helicopter provided by the governor of Kentucky. That same chopper was headed their way to pick them up.
Thirty minutes later, a UH-1 Huey with Kentucky National Guard markings landed near the creek bed. Carrying only their portable seismograph and laptop, Atkins and Elizabeth were happy to get off the ground. Some of the dogs had gotten bolder during the night and were moving back into the open.
As soon as they were airborne, the pilot motioned them forward to the cockpit. The crew chief, a young corporal with a blond mustache, gave them headsets so they could talk over the droning roar of the engine.
The pilot explained that Jacobs had a message for Atkins: he wanted him to enter a building on the Memphis riverfront and retrieve data from an array of seismic instruments set up in the basement and on the roof.
Atkins let that thought register. He’d forced himself to enter dozens of earthquake-damaged buildings since Mexico City. It had never been easy.
“It’s the headquarters for some travel agency,” the pilot said. “The Blake Building. It’s at Main and Vance Street, facing the river. Landing anywhere near it’s going to be a bitch. That part of the city is pretty torn up.”
Atkins remembered Jacobs talking about the building’s unique construction, how it had been specially designed to withstand earthquakes. Its “base isolation” technology relied on shock absorbers made from a rubber and lead composite that were shaped like an accordion and placed in the foundation and at key joints; they allowed the building to remain nearly stationary while the ground moved beneath it. Because of its potential survivability during a big quake, the building’s owners had agreed to let the university’s earthquake center equip it with an array of seismographs and other instruments. It even had a GPS satellite receiver anchored on the roof.
The helicopter wouldn’t be able to wait for them, the pilot explained apologetically. They were under strict orders to return immediately to Kentucky as soon as they put them on the ground. They were assigned to a medevac unit that had been working around the clock ever since the earthquake.
The flight to Memphis took forty minutes. They flew straight down the Mississippi, which had spread out three and four miles in places, swollen by the flood. Atkins knew it was going to get worse; as soon as the massive surge from Kentucky Lake hit the Mississippi at Cairo, it was going to blow out a lot of levee walls.
“Maybe I better prepare you for this,” the pilot said as they approached Memphis. “A lot of the city is pretty much gone.”
They saw the distant wall of black smoke long before they had Memphis in view.
“Those are mainly gas and oil fires,” the pilot said. “A lot of pipe lines cross the river around Memphis, ten or eleven of them. They all broke and some of them are still pumping out gas and oil. The river’s an inferno. It’s burning from Mud Island thirty miles downstream. Oil storage tanks blew up. They’re still going off like torches. You gotta be real careful flying down there.”
Sitting on a bench seat, Elizabeth looked out a porthole and recognized the familiar S bend in the river, the beginning of the sweeping curve the Mississippi made as it passed Memphis. She’d first seen it as her plane from Los Angeles made its landing approach. That seemed like months ago.
Moments later, she got an up-close look at the city. The panorama of destruction was unlike anything she’d ever seen in the United States. All three bridges across the river, the Interstate 55, I-40, and the railroad bridge were down; some of the massive concrete pilings were still standing, but there were gaping holes where the decks had buckled and fallen into the water.
The Mississippi was on fire below the smashed I-55 bridge; that’s where the oil and gas storage terminals were clustered on the Memphis side of the river. The burning tanks were throwing shafts of black, billowing smoke a thousand feet into the sky.
Hugging the Memphis shoreline, the pilot pointed out a heavily damaged building. “That used to be the Pyramid,” he said.
Atkins had never seen the city’s distinctive convention center and sports arena complex. Shaped like a pyramid, the tapered sides were covered with thin sheets of metal that shone brilliantly in the sunlight. The top floors had collapsed neatly, telescoping together like the sections of a segmented drinking cup. The broad base, which covered a full city block, remained intact.
They flew over the city’s famous Mud Island, which angled out from the riverfront. The monorail that carried passengers to the island’s shops, restaurants, and museums had been smashed; three wrecked cars still dangled high in the air.
Drifting, dense smoke obscured the broad view of the city as it stretched far to the east. Then the wind changed and the curtain parted.
“I don’t believe this,” Elizabeth said, staring down at the cityscape. The larger fires seemed concentrated along the riverfront, where most of the high-rise buildings and renovated cotton warehouses were located. Many of the tall buildings along Main Street looked damaged; a few had collapsed entirely, spilling against other buildings, knocking down entire walls. Some had lost only their upper floors.
There were fire trucks and ambulances down there, their red and blue lights flashing up through the swirling smoke.
“How are emergency vehicles getting around in all that?” Elizabeth asked.
“They’re not,” the pilot said. “Most of the streets are blocked.” He pointed off to the port side. “You see that big yellow building over there to the left? That’s a children’s hospital. It looks like the walls are standing, but most of the floors have caved in. We flew over it on the way to pick you up.”
Elizabeth glanced at Atkins and shuddered. America’s luck had finally run out. She realized that the death toll from this earthquake was going to be huge. With the exception of the 1906 quake in San Francisco, the ones that struck in southern California had largely been glancing blows along the edges of major population centers. The real disasters, the ones that leveled entire cities, had struck elsewhere—Chile, or Italy, or Japan, or Armenia, or Mexico.
This time it was different.
“I’m going to put you down fast,” the pilot said. They were nearing the landing zone he’d picked. “I’m sorry about that, but some of those buildings are still falling down in the aftershocks. It’s gonna be real tight down there.”
He explained that the travel building had a keypad locking system. He tore a piece of paper off the clipboard strapped to his leg and handed it to Atkins. It had the numbers.
The pilot slowly began to descend through the patchy smoke. “I’m going to try to set you down on that parking lot.” They’d have to drop down between the building and another, taller one that had lost its upper stories. Curtains flapped in the smashed windows.
The crew chief patted Atkins on the shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up. “Get ready!”
As the helicopter descended between two buildings, its rotors were dangerously close to the walls. There was no margin for error. The pilot, a veteran of the Gulf War, was superb. They descended slowly, steadily.
Atkins looped the straps of the seismograph and laptop around his shoulder. The crew chief gave Elizabeth a small backpack. “K-rations, flashlights, and a couple bottles of water. It’s the best we can do.”
They were about four feet off the ground when Atkins saw the men. Maybe ten of them. They’d come out of nowhere and were running for the helicopter, arms raised, screaming for help.
“Jump, now!” the crew chief shouted.
Crouching at the cargo door, Atkins and Elizabeth leaped for the ground
. The men frantically rushed past them. Two of them grabbed on to the bottom edge of the open door and were lifted up as the copter started to climb. Legs kicking, they fell from about fifty feet. Both hit the ground hard and didn’t move.
Atkins grabbed Elizabeth’s hand. They ran for the travel building.
“What do you have in the backpack?” someone yelled at Elizabeth. “You got any food? Hey, asshole, listen to me.” A man moved toward them. He wore dark slacks and a torn overcoat; he was big and heavy, well over six feet tall.
Atkins ignored the man, who was with three others. Their faces were streaked with dirt. They were moving toward Atkins, who fumbled with the security keypad at one of the building’s side doors.
“Just give us the backpack,” the tall man said.
Atkins tried to remember the keypad numbers the pilot had given him. He fumbled in his pocket for the sheet of paper. Finding it, he punched in a sequence of five digits and pulled on the handle. Nothing.
He handed Elizabeth the paper and faced the men. They kept coming. Atkins picked up a piece of broken pipe lying in the rubble.
Atkins noticed the butcher knife the big man was holding tight to his side. He’d give him another few yards then go for his head with the pipe; he wanted to take him out fast.
Gunfire exploded above them, the bullets kicking up rocks near the feet of the men who were approaching Atkins and Elizabeth. The group broke up and ran for cover.
Atkins looked up and saw the helicopter hovering over the roof of the building. Leaning out the cargo door with a rifle, the crew chief was covering them.
Atkins waved to him.
Elizabeth had the door open. He jumped in behind her and slammed it shut.
OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE