8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

  “But you think it might work?” the president asked.

  Holleran paused, carefully weighing her response. “It might, in theory,” she said.

  “But what about here and now?” Ross persisted.

  “I’m not sure,” Holleran said. “There are so many variables, so many unknowns. But even taking that into consideration, I can’t see that we have any choice. If we’re in a multiple quake pattern—and I think we are—there aren’t many alternatives.” At least she couldn’t think of any, and with all her heart, she wished she could. Booker was proposing a huge gamble, rolling the dice with the most powerful natural forces known to man. Still.

  “If we do nothing, we’re going to get hit again,” she said. “Possibly harder than any of us can imagine. We have to try something.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work?” Weston said, refusing to be cowed. “What if it sets off Armageddon?” There were immediate loud shouts of agreement. Most of the people in the room were shocked by what had been proposed, outraged that it was even being discussed.

  Ross said, “I totally agree with your choice of words, Doctor Weston. We could have an Armageddon. And in a matter of weeks, maybe days. The evidence Doctor Holleran found in that fissure in Kentucky reads like a damn road map. Even a nonexpert like me can understand what all those cracks mean.”

  “I’m not sure that a nuclear detonation wouldn’t violate the test ban treaty,” said Margaret Greenland.

  “This wouldn’t be a test,” Ross snapped. “This will be for real. An attempt to avert a national calamity. I’ll personally call the Russian ambassador. Talk it over with him. Tell him what we’re up against.”

  Ross wanted data run on where the shot should be made and its likely energy discharge. He wanted the answers—or best guesses—by tomorrow at the latest.

  “That could be a problem,” Thompson said. “My concern is the time it’ll take to run the computations. Our computers are maxed out right now.”

  “Tell me what you need,” Ross said.

  Thompson didn’t hesitate. “Two Sun Sparc 10s. And enough disk storage space to handle two or three G-bytes. The programming codes we use are real space-eaters. Just to run good P- and S-wave velocities, you’re talking roughly sixteen thousand lines of computer coding.”

  The president turned to Draper. “See that he gets whatever he needs. I want that equipment loaded on Air Force One within an hour.”

  Booker had been fiddling with a pocket calculator, working on some rough critical mass projections.

  “Where would you get the nuclear device you need?” Ross asked.

  “The Pantex plant, Mister President.”

  Ross was aware of the Department of Energy facility in east Texas. The huge complex where thousands of America’s nuclear weapons were kept in cold storage was just outside Amarillo.

  “You’d use one of our stockpiled warheads?”

  Booker nodded. “Depending on the requirements, I might customize one.” Fusion or fission. He wasn’t sure. As he worked out the pros and cons of each, he thought they might go either way. Fission had the advantage of being a cleaner bomb, but not as powerful as a thermonuclear fusion device. Depending on the design, however, a fission warhead could generate nearly as many kilotons as a thermo. He’d designed one himself back in the early 1960s, a fission bomb that produced a 500-kiloton yield without using the customary fusion boost of injecting heavy hydrogen into the core.

  “I want you to go to Pantex and get what you need,” Ross said. “Meg, make sure he gets the necessary clearances. The highest priority. I’ll make the calls myself if necessary.”

  “It might be a help to have a seismologist go with me,” Booker said. “I’ll need some advice.”

  Draper looked at Atkins. “‘John, are you up for a trip to Texas?” he asked.

  “Sure, I’ve always wanted to see Amarillo,” Atkins said. His smile belied his fear. He knew that he was in this up to his neck. Once they got started, there’d be no turning back. The clock was running. He instinctively realized he needed to commit himself totally. He glanced at Holleran and understood she felt exactly as he did. He could read it in her eyes. He experienced another strong twinge of excitement, a strange mingling of anxiety and elation. They were about to embark on something that had never been tried before. He wanted it to work, knew that it had to work.

  Walt Jacobs had been conspicuously silent. Atkins felt his friend’s eyes boring right through him.

  Ross asked for his opinion. Jacobs shifted in his seat and glanced at some notes he’d scribbled. He spoke with a force that startled Atkins. “Mister President, I think we’d make a tragic mistake if we detonated a nuclear bomb anywhere near the fault. Right now, we have a chance, a slight one, but a chance that the New Madrid system won’t fire, won’t produce another series of earthquakes. I admit that Doctor Holleran’s data scares me stiff. But if we try to set off a controlled quake on that fault system, we might get something that can’t even be described. The Reelfoot Rift, which contains much of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, is at the middle of the North American plate. It’s a weak spot deep in the earth, a giant scar in the rock at the precise place where 400 million years ago the continent tried to split apart. I worry that we’d be driving a wedge deep into a place of critical weakness.”

  “Kind of like using a peg to split a log,” the president said.

  Jacobs nodded. “Exactly, Mister President. What if we split the plate? Make it crack wide open. The deep fissures are already there. If a bomb somehow unlocked them, how do we know it wouldn’t restart a geological process that ground to a halt millions of years ago?”

  “What could happen?” the president asked.

  Jacobs didn’t answer. It was as if he was afraid to say more.

  Atkins said, “It would mean you might have the Gulf of Mexico in Memphis.”

  FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 18

  3:00 A.M.

  A KENTUCKY STATE TROOPER KNOCKED ON Governor Tad Parker’s bedroom door, waited a respectful ten count, then knocked again. There was a deep cough, then the sound of footsteps. Parker opened the door.

  The governor, hair tousled and wearing a baggy terry-cloth robe, rubbed his eyes. He’d just gone to sleep, thanks to two large glasses of red wine. He hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep a night since the earthquake five days earlier.

  “We’ve got a satellite transmission from Washington, sir,” the trooper said. “It’s Doctor Weston. He said it’s urgent.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Parker said.

  It was a short walk, just up a flight of steps, to the state disaster operations office.

  The governor’s mansion, an early twentieth-century Beaux Arts building with a granite facade and beautiful English gardens, had been heavily damaged during the quake. Parker and his wife had moved across Capital Drive into the Executive Office Building, where they’d taken up makeshift quarters in the basement.

  They were doing better than most residents of the Bluegrass State. At least they had portable toilets and bottled water. Critical shortages of drinking water were widespread. Telephone service was nonexistent. With virtually all of the relay towers knocked down or badly damaged, the cell phone system had also collapsed. For long distance communications, disaster officials continued to rely on shortwave, packet radio, and infrequent satellite transmissions.

  Frankfort was roughly halfway between Louisville and Lexington, and all three cities were in bad shape. For that matter, so was virtually every other city, town, and village in Kentucky. Bowling Green was probably the hardest hit. Two hospitals had been destroyed. There’d been a bloody riot over food. Shooting had broken out along the Old Morgantown Road as people tried to force their way into a grocery store that had managed to reopen. The day before, a relief convoy was attacked on the Green River Parkway just outside the city limits. Four National Guard soldiers had been shot dead, the trucks looted by a large group of armed civilians.

&
nbsp; Parker’s people still hadn’t been able to get him a detailed damage estimate. With the exception of limited shortwave transmissions, most towns were cut off from the outside. The earthquakes had shattered the interstates and local highways; bridges were down, over two hundred at last count. The rural folks were in the best shape; most of them had horses to ride and food to eat. They also had well water.

  From the front door of the Executive Office Building, Parker could look south, toward shattered Interstate 64. Just beyond it, on a granite bluff, stood the tomb where Daniel Boone was buried. Parker appreciated the grim irony that Kentucky was just about as cut off and inaccessible as it had been when Boone made the first of his long hunts through the state more than 200 years earlier. The Indian name for the area was more haunting than ever—Dark and Bloody Ground.

  When the governor arrived at the emergency communications office ten minutes later, they’d lost the satellite link with Washington. It took over an hour to reestablish one. Like everything else, the satellite system was overloaded. The Intelsat network was struggling just with priority traffic.

  Weston finally got an uplink.

  “This isn’t a secure line,” an aide warned the governor.

  “Let’s go with it,” Parker said.

  Weston appeared on screen. He looked haggard, upset. He told the governor about the discussion in the White House. Swallowing hard, he said the president was considering exploding a nuclear device in Kentucky.

  Parker gasped. He held on to the table to keep from staggering. He was aware that people were staring at him, all of them trying to hide their emotions. His head was throbbing.

  “He can’t do that,” Parker said hoarsely. Then more strongly. “The sonofabitch can’t do that! I won’t let him do that! Not in my state. Not in Kentucky!”

  MEMPHIS

  JANUARY 18

  11:45 P.M.

  “I DON’T LIKE THE WAY THOSE FIRES ARE moving,” the paratrooper said. He stood next to Elizabeth Holleran. A member of the l0lst Airborne, he was one of a detail of ten soldiers the president had assigned to guard the earthquake center at the University of Memphis. The troops were spread out around the compound in full battle gear—helmets, camouflage, and automatic weapons.

  Elizabeth watched the glowing red haze to the southeast. A strong wind was blowing the flames in their direction.

  “If that wind keeps pushing those fires, we’re gonna have some trouble,” said the soldier, a corporal.

  The threat of fire overrunning them had been a constant worry. The multiple fires that had broken out after the earthquakes were proving incredibly resilient. Without water to fight them, there was nothing to do but let them burn out.

  For Elizabeth, the number of fires and their intensity was a big surprise. Fire had always been considered one of the major hazards following a quake, but nothing like what was happening in Memphis had been anticipated, especially in a city with so many brick and masonry buildings.

  It was nearly midnight. An hour earlier, Atkins and Fred Booker had left for Texas aboard an Army helicopter that ferried them across the Mississippi to a makeshift runway on Interstate 55 twenty miles north of Memphis. A military jet was waiting there to fly them to Amarillo.

  Missing Atkins and exhausted after a day that had started nearly twenty-four hours earlier in Washington, Elizabeth decided to turn in. She walked back to the library annex and was heading for the equipment room when the lights blinked once and went out. The building was instantly plunged into darkness.

  “Goddammit!” someone shouted from the computer room. “The generator stopped.”

  It sounded like Guy Thompson. All of his people were still at work. There were groans, shouts of rage. A power failure could mean a loss of crucial data as they continued to monitor seismic activity along the new faults.

  Elizabeth saw flashlights come on, the shafts of light crisscrossing in the darkness. Thompson and another geologist hurried past her as they headed outside to check the emergency generators that supplied the annex and its elaborate bank of computers with electricity. It was imperative that they get back on-line as quickly as possible.

  Elizabeth started to follow them, then decided against it. She didn’t know anything about power generators and was afraid she’d only get in the way.

  Slowly groping her way down the pitch-dark corridors, she found the equipment room and opened the door. She was upset with herself for not remembering to carry her pocket flashlight. She’d left it in her sleeping bag.

  Moving carefully, one step at a time, between the rows of tall shelves, she found the bag, which lay unzipped on an insulated sleeping pad. Kneeling down, she started to feel around for her flashlight.

  She heard something, a footstep or maybe a sleeve brushing against a shelf or wall. She wasn’t sure.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  Someone was in the room. She got to her feet and stood perfectly still, trying to listen.

  “I know you’re in here,” she said, straining to see.

  She heard the sound again at the far end of the room, near the door. Definitely footsteps.

  “Who is it?” she shouted.

  In the darkness, she glimpsed a shape moving against the back wall. She saw a glint of pale green light. A faint blur of color. Then the door opened and quickly closed. Whoever it was had left.

  Elizabeth hurried for the door, banging into a chair and bruising a knee. She looked into the dark hallway, but saw no one. Whoever it was had disappeared around a corner. A gasoline engine sputtered outside and the lights came back on. They’d gotten the generator running again. Elizabeth guessed they’d been without power for no more than seven or eight minutes.

  “Someone switched it off,” Thompson said angrily, storming back into the annex. He hurried past her on his way to the computer room. “We’ve got to get everything booted up again. I don’t know how much data we lost. I don’t believe this. It was done deliberately. There’s no other explanation. Fucking sabotage.”

  Elizabeth went back into the equipment room. Her nerves on edge, she locked the door, something she hadn’t done before. She wasn’t sure if she should tell someone about the intruder, especially with everyone hustling to get the computers operational again.

  She found her flashlight rolled up in the foot of her sleeping bag and sat down, trying to think it through. It didn’t make sense until she glanced at the worktable near her sleeping bag.

  She suddenly realized why someone had come into the equipment room. She’d left her laptop on the table plugged into an outlet. It was missing.

  AMARILLO, TEXAS

  JANUARY 19

  5:40 A.M.

  THE BIG C-135B STRATOLIFTER SWUNG LOW OVER the Pantex plant on its approach to the Amarillo airport. It was just after dawn and overcast, but there was enough hazy light for Atkins to make out the looming storage bunkers that housed the plutonium “pits” of nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons. There were more than sixty such bunkers at the huge facility that spread over 16,000 windblown acres in the Texas panhandle.

  “They call them ‘igloos,’” Booker said. He pointed out a row of odd-looking, dome-shaped structures. “And those are the ‘Gravel Gerties.’” Some of the most powerful weapons in the nation’s nuclear arsenal had been assembled in them, he explained. But with the end of the Cold War, thousands of bombs had been dismantled there, the nuclear components put in cold storage. It remained a full-time job.

  The distinctive name came from the twenty-foot mound of compacted gravel heaped over the blast-resistant concrete roofs.

  “They’re designed that way so, in case of an accident, they’ll blow straight up and absorb the energy,” Booker said. He noticed Atkins’ subdued expression. Grinning, he said, “Don’t sweat it. There’s no danger of a nuclear explosion, but if you screw up with the high explosives that detonate the nuclear primary, you’re going to have trouble.”

  “What about radioactivity?” Atkins asked.

  “Only if you pu
ncture the shielding in one of the pits or accidentally release some of the tritium gas,” he said. Used in combination with plutonium, tritium was a booster that increased the bomb’s explosive yield.

  During the short flight to Texas, Booker had given Atkins a crash course in the fundamentals of nuclear fusion. Boosting was one of the keys to getting highly explosive yields from relatively small quantities of fissile material. It involved injecting a mixture of tritium and deuterium gas directly into the pit, the weapon’s explosive core.

  Booker, Atkins soon realized, was a gifted practitioner of the bombmaker’s art.

  Within an hour of their arrival—their plane was met on the runway—they’d already checked into Building 16-12 at the Pantex plant, where they received picture IDs, badges, name tags, and dosimeters to register any exposure to radiation. Armed guards went over their clothing and shoes with hand-held metal detectors.

  Security was formidable. Atkins noticed there was even a guard on the roof of the building, manning an M-60 machine gun. The roads that crisscrossed the complex were lined with fourteen-foot-high fences topped with barbed wire. As at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant, guard towers were plentiful.

  Booker and Atkins were ushered into a small office, where the plant manager—his name was Carson—met them. A somber-looking man in a blue suit, he kept dabbing at his chin with a bloody handkerchief. He’d cut himself shaving as he hurried to meet them at the plant.

  “You have presidential clearance to remove any weapon you need,” Carson said irritably. “I’ve got to tell you I don’t approve of this.”

  Booker asked whether they’d felt the quake here in Texas.

  The plant manager nodded. “We had some light damage. Nothing serious.”

  Booker said. “You’re nearly a thousand miles from the epicenter.” He shook his head in wonderment. The main seismic wave energy had traveled in the opposite direction and yet they’d still felt it out here in Texas. Amazing. “We’re looking at another quake, maybe even larger,” he said. “So make me feel good. Tell me I’m going to have your full cooperation and support.”