8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

  “Where would you set it?”

  “As deep in the mine as I could go. I’d use a capacitor bank to produce the electrical charge that would start the firing sequence.”

  “What happens after you set the timer?”

  “You get the hell out of there as fast as you can,” Booker said. He didn’t smile. “The advantage of a timer is that it’s virtually foolproof. The disadvantage is that once it’s set and the bomb is armed, you can’t easily stop the process.”

  Their immediate job finished, Booker and Atkins took the elevator up from the lower cell to the bunker’s main level. Carson, the plant manager, was waiting for them.

  Atkins knew something was wrong as soon as he saw him. The man was holding several sheets of yellow paper with shaking hands. He looked like he’d just been given terrible news. He nervously pushed his reading glasses higher up on his nose.

  “The president’s national security chief just called,” he said, his voice faltering. “Fighting has broken out between units of the Kentucky National Guard and the regular Army.”

  “What!” Booker said.

  Atkins felt like sitting down. He was numb. To his knowledge nothing like that had happened since the Civil War, American troops fighting other American soldiers. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the horror of what that meant.

  Looking at his scribbled notes, Carson said, “The governor of Kentucky has ordered National Guard units to oppose any attempt to explode a nuclear device in his state. They’ve been instructed to use deadly force if necessary. There’s been shooting in western Kentucky between guardsmen and units of the 101st Airborne. The fighting is continuing sporadically.”

  “Any casualties?” Atkins asked.

  The plant manager nodded. “On both sides. I don’t have any numbers.”

  All this meant a drastic change in plans. Instead of waiting until morning to leave, Booker and Atkins had been ordered to depart immediately. Originally, they’d planned to fly. Now they were going to ride back with the bomb in a tractor trailer.

  “Why don’t we fly?” Atkins asked. “It’ll take another half day to drive back to Kentucky.”

  “They’re worried about a rocket attack when the plane lands,” Carson said. “There aren’t that many landing places and they’re probably under surveillance. Apparently some of the guard units in Kentucky are equipped with shoulder-fired SAM rockets. The fear is a plane would be too good a target. They’ll know what it’s carrying, and they’ll be watching for it.”

  “When do we leave?” Booker asked.

  “In fifteen minutes,” the plant manager said. “We’ve already sent out two decoy convoys. I’d suggest you get something to eat.”

  The gray eighteen-wheeler was already waiting for them outside the Gravel Gertie, its engine running. Guards in military fatigues were lined on both sides of the vehicle, weapons at the ready. The big rig looked as though it had logged a lot of miles. The fenders were coated with red, Texas dust.

  “The truck is armored,” Carson said. “Its communication system allows it to be tracked continuously by satellite.” The convoy would also include two vans. “These vehicles will be operated by DOE couriers who have authority to shoot to kill.”

  At exactly 1:30 in the afternoon, they rolled through a back gate at the Pantex plant. A cold wind knifed across the east Texas prairie, blowing rain against the windshield. Atkins and Booker sat behind the driver and a guard who had an automatic rifle nestled between his legs. The semi was flanked by two beige vans. They’d also have an air escort—Air Force helicopters and fixed wing aircraft that patrolled the highway along their route, all 780 miles of it.

  Within twenty minutes, the truck was on Interstate 40, skirting Amarillo. The Oklahoma border was a one-hour drive to the east.

  The bomb was in a padded container in the back of the trailer. It was strapped down, the container bolted to the floor and padlocked. Three armed guards rode with it.

  “It’s going to be a fast ride,” the driver said, glancing over his shoulder at his two passengers. “We want to be across the Missouri line in five hours. As soon as we get out of the Amarillo traffic, we’re gonna open it up. You might want to try to catch a few winks. It’s a long drive.”

  Atkins settled back into his seat. The compartment behind the driver was equipped with a bunk bed, a tiny bathroom, and a television console. He watched the rain and sleet beat on the windshield and listened to the wipers click back and forth. During the last twenty-four hours, he’d only managed a couple of catnaps. Normally the sound of the rain would have been enough to help him drift off. Not this time.

  He knew he wasn’t going to sleep.

  CHANDLER. Bristow. Sapulpa.

  The driver was as good as his word, blasting by the small Oklahoma towns that lined the highway at more than eighty miles an hour. He picked up Interstate 44 just east of Oklahoma City. Three hours later, they were approaching the Missouri line.

  The guard seated next to the driver occasionally spoke by radio to the helicopters and other aircraft shadowing the small convoy. They’d also picked up several more vehicles near Oklahoma City, four vans that had driven up from Fort Sill.

  “They’re carrying two teams of Special Forces troops,” the driver said. “They’re gonna hang with us until we get to the Mississippi.”

  Unable to relax or get his mind off Thompson’s cryptic message about Elizabeth, Atkins asked Booker about some of the nuclear test shots he’d witnessed. More than an attempt to make conversation, he was genuinely curious.

  “The first was Mike out on Elugelab Island in 1952,” Booker said, rousing himself from a catnap. “It had a couple of firsts. The first hydrogen bomb, the first yield over one megaton. It was way over. Mike yielded 10.4 megatons. Only one other shot since then has even come close. When we got the primary and secondary all set up, I swear the thing looked more like a small oil refinery than a bomb. It completely vaporized the island.”

  The fireball left a crater two hundred feet deep and a mile across, a blue hole punched into what had once been an atoll lagoon. Birds turned to cinders in midair. An island fourteen miles to the south was incinerated. Trees were stripped of bark. Animals of their skin.

  “It was an incredibly dirty bomb,” Booker said. “No one really knew how big it was going to be. No one could have imagined … The cloud reached 57,000 feet in two minutes. The stem was thirty miles high. The top eventually billowed out like a huge umbrella one hundred miles wide. Mike scared the bloody shit out of us.”

  “Where were you at zero hour?” Atkins asked.

  “On an old World War II minesweeper thirty miles away. I was up on deck and had dark glasses on. The heat felt like someone had opened an oven door in my face. The shock wave was spectacular, a long, loud clap of thunder. I waited a couple minutes until I thought it was safe and whipped off my glasses. I had no idea … You can’t imagine how big it was. The enormousness of the fireball. It blotted out the sun. The cloud looked like it was going to roll right over us.”

  Booker reclined in his seat. The soft glow of a reading light in the overhead console left his face in shadows. “I got my first dose of radioactivity on the Mike shot,” he said. “You think I would have learned my lesson, but I let it happen again ten years later. That time I really did it up good.”

  When Atkins asked what had happened, Booker folded his hands on his chest. He sat there a few moments before he began. “It was at the NTS in 1962. The Sedan shot. We set off a 104-kiloton device at a depth of 635 feet. We must have been out of our minds to do it so shallow. It was part of the Plowshare Program to show that nuclear explosions could be used for such peaceful purposes as digging canals and God knows what else. The bomb blew a 320-foot-deep crater a quarter-mile wide and sent columns of dirt, stone, and highly radioactive dust 12,000 feet into the air. Seven and a half million cubic yards of debris went up. All of it red hot. The ceiling was twice what we’d predicted.”

  Booker described how they’d
penned up thirty beagles in wire cages at distances between twelve and forty miles from ground zero. Their mouths were taped shut so they wouldn’t ingest the fallout.

  “All but two of those dogs died,” Booker said.

  The bomb team waited out the explosion in the red shack several miles away. “I went back to the blast site way too soon,” Booker said. “The place was a lot hotter than I’d been told.”

  Booker stared at Atkins, blinking in the dim light. Then he said, “They told me I’d gotten about two hundred roentgens. I found out a couple years later through back channels that I’d actually received a whole-body dose of nearly four hundred roentgens.”

  Atkins knew that a roentgen measured the amount of exposure to gamma rays. Four hundred roentgens was a lot of radiation.

  Guessing his thoughts, Booker said, “Six hundred is usually lethal.”

  “Doesn’t it affect bone marrow?” Atkins said.

  There was a strange look on Booker’s face. “It can cause leukemia,” he said, turning off the overhead light. Atkins could hear his deep, regular breaths in the darkness.

  “I’ve been in remission for two years, but it’s starting to come back,” Booker said. “My white blood cells are a mess. Most of the time, like right now, I feel fine, but I can tell I’m slipping, losing energy in bits and pieces. The doctors say I could live another three to five years. Or maybe a lot less.”

  “Why are you doing all this?” Atkins asked. He didn’t know what else to say.

  Booker leaned closer and spoke in a whisper so the two men in the front of the cab couldn’t overhear him.

  “They lied to me,” he said. “The government, my superiors. They all lied, and I’m going to die because of it. They’ve lied to the American public for years about the effects of the radiation clouds that blew across the country in the fifties and sixties. They lied about the high rates of leukemia and sterility and cancer in Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Lied about what caused it. I made my peace with myself over that a long time ago. Had to or I would have gone crazy. But I swear to God, whatever happens in the next few days, I’m not going to let anybody lie about it.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  JANUARY 19

  4:25 P.M.

  THE PRESIDENT STARED IN GRIM SILENCE AT THE aerial photographs arrayed on his desk. One showed the wreckage of an Army Huey burning in a field in western Kentucky. Others were tight close-ups of Kentucky National Guard tanks dug into position at key intersections in that part of the state.

  “How many units have declared loyalty to Governor Parker?” he asked.

  “We think no more than five,” said Meg Greenland, his national security adviser. “About seven hundred men in all. They control twenty-five heavy tanks and two helicopter squadrons. They’ve also attracted some paramilitary types.” She looked hard at the president, who was studying the enlarged photographs taken a few hours earlier by air reconnaissance. “Injuries are estimated at just over one hundred.”

  “How many killed?” Ross asked.

  “At least thirty,” Greenland said. “That includes about sixteen men from the l0lst Airborne and other units based at Fort Campbell. Most have been killed in fire fights in the far western part of the state. We expect those numbers to increase.”

  President Ross had gathered his key advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the rapidly worsening military picture in Kentucky. The governor, interviewed in hiding by a cable television crew, had explained his reasons for armed resistance. Ross had watched the tape five times. He had to admit that Governor Parker had eloquently stated his opposition to a plan to detonate a nuclear device in his state. He’d called it madness and questioned the president’s sanity, pledging to the people of Kentucky that he’d do whatever was in his power to stop the blast, even if it meant armed opposition. He told them that federal troops had attacked elements of the Kentucky National Guard, who were defending themselves.

  That last part wasn’t true, but Ross was going to make no mention of it when he addressed the American people within the next hour.

  All in all, Parker had been impressive. Just the right mixture of somber gravity and determination.

  The president’s science adviser, Steve Draper, had been on a special satellite hookup almost constantly with the seismologists in Memphis. He’d given Ross a list of arguments for detonating a one-megaton bomb deep in a coalmine near the town of Benton in southwestern Kentucky.

  It was anything but a unanimous decision. In fact, a narrow majority of the scientists opposed the idea as too risky. Those in favor of the plan thought it had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of success.

  “Are there any other options?” Ross asked. He kept coming back to that

  Draper shook his head. “They’ve offered none.”

  “Do they still think we’re going to get hit with another big quake?”

  “They do,” Draper said. “Opinions on when vary from a couple days to months.”

  “Then we go ahead as planned,” Ross said. The scientists were going to let him make the call. So be it. He’d known that all along. The decision—and the blame—would be his. That was as it should be. He didn’t mind. As he saw it, he had no choice. It was either gamble and try to defuse the quake with a nuclear explosion, or do nothing and face unspeakable devastation.

  He asked about evacuations. Soldiers were trying to remove everyone within a thirty-mile radius of the Golden Orient mine. It was a huge undertaking and there wasn’t much time. The difficulties were aggravated by the lack of communications and the earthquake-damaged highways.

  Fortunately, the area wasn’t densely populated. Still, an estimated 200,000 people lived in the danger zone.

  “Where’s the convoy from Texas?”

  Draper glanced at his watch. “They should be in Missouri about now, Mister President. Estimated arrival time is 10:00 P.M. So far, the trip’s been uneventful.”

  “We’ve sent two companies of paratroopers to meet them on the Missouri side of the river,” said General Frank Simmons, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I’m worried about the crossing. It’s a damn big river down there with a lot of places to launch an attack on that pontoon bridge.”

  They were going to cross the Mississippi in extreme southeastern Missouri a few miles downstream from its confluence with the Ohio. The crossing was about 150 miles north of Memphis. With the flooding rivers far out of their banks, the pontoon span that stretched to the Kentucky shore was nearly three miles long.

  “Do whatever needs to be done to secure the area,” the president told the general. “If there’s fighting, we won’t be the ones who start it. But I want that bomb delivered.”

  BULLETINS had already flashed on radios and television screens, announcing that the president was going to address the nation at 7:00 P.M. EST “on a topic of greatest urgency.”

  The cameras were set up in the Oval Office. When the hour came, Ross wore a blue suit and tie. It was the first time he’d shaved in several days. He knew it would be the most important speech of his life.

  “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he said, echoing the words John F. Kennedy had used when he announced his arms embargo on Cuba in 1962.

  Ross began by explaining the scope of the damage from the earthquake that had struck only five days earlier. The tremors had been felt as far northeast as Montreal, as far west as Albuquerque, New Mexico, and as far south as Biloxi, Mississippi.

  “It’s the worst natural disaster ever to befall our country,” Ross said. “I don’t have to tell you that. The odds are you felt the main earthquake and continue to feel some of the aftershocks. Nearly sixty percent of the population live in areas that have experienced shaking. If you live on the East Coast, you’re facing shortages of food and heating oil. If you live in middle America, the heartland, my part of the country, you’re coping every day with a horror that’s hard to imagine.

  “In my own state of Illinois, more than two thousand people have been killed. Most of them in
the southern part of the state near the quake zone. In Memphis”—he paused, looking down at some notes—“the death count is estimated at twelve thousand men, women, and children.”

  There were gasps among the assembled reporters listening to the speech in the press room in the East Wing. These were the first official death counts. And they were staggering.

  “Some towns have been destroyed. Paducah, Kentucky, no longer exists. Neither does Caruthersville, Missouri. Memphis has been devastated. Little Rock, St. Louis, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati have been hard hit. Chicago has been damaged.

  “My fellow Americans, I want you to see the names of some of the cities and towns that have suffered fatalities. The list I’m going to show you is only partial.”

  The president spent the next ten minutes reading the casualty list. As he spoke, the state-by-state list was shown on television screens.

  The death toll had edged over 130,000.

  As he finished reading the appalling list. Ross looked up at the cameras. He said that one, possibly two more quakes in the magnitude 8 range or greater were extremely likely.

  There were more audible gasps from the news corps and from some of his own staff members who hadn’t been privy to these details.

  Ross announced what they were going to do. Explode a nuclear bomb underground.

  And why.

  Some reporters dashed out of the press room and began calling their news desks. Ross went on to describe the evacuations.

  “Even as I discuss these grave issues with you, efforts are under way in the state of Kentucky. I know the thought of a nuclear explosion can be frightening. The scientists say it’s the only way we can hope to defuse another earthquake, turn it off in the ground by releasing some of its energy.

  “There is disagreement among the experts about whether this will work. I’d be lying to you if I said most of them supported this approach. The truth is otherwise. Most are opposed. I’ve decided to side with the minority who have argued—persuasively, in my opinion—that we have no other choice. There is sufficient evidence from ground surveys made by satellite that energy continues to build at a frightening rate in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, especially along a newly discovered fault, which slices through the heart of west-central Kentucky.”