8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

Another fifty yards, and they’d be out of the danger zone.

  BOOKER gripped the blaster firmly in both hands. In the last strong shock, the roof had collapsed at the far end of the tunnel.

  The detonator cord still ran free.

  He sat against the wall, trying to steady himself and think clearly.

  Neutron continued to hold up the weakened section of roof in the middle of the tunnel, but it was starting to sag and the cracks were spreading. It wouldn’t be long before it caved in on them.

  It was almost time, a matter of a few seconds.

  Booker put his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and took a breath. Images of his wife and daughters, of places they’d gone, tracked before him.

  His two daughters.

  He focused on them and remembered their faces as first and second-graders and how cute they looked in their blue-and-white tartan school uniforms. He’d kept those faded pictures in his wallet for thirty years.

  They were bright, good girls, far better than he’d deserved. He’d stayed close to them. One taught English literature at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The other was an architect in Kansas City. He hoped they’d understand the decision he’d made and why.

  He glanced at his watch and started counting down from ten… .

  Five …

  Four …

  Three …

  Two …

  One …

  He gave the blaster a sharp clockwise turn with his right hand.

  THE Humvee barreled over the top of the hill. Wheels spinning, it slid through a ragged clearing in the trees smashed open moments earlier by a heavy personnel carrier. Back in control, the driver started down the other side but immediately hit his brakes, skidding to a stop that spun them around in a sharp half-circle.

  Atkins had heard the order to halt come over the Humvee’s dashboard radio.

  He knew what it meant: it was almost time for the explosion.

  “Get out!” the driver shouted. Soldiers were jumping from the open backs of troop carriers. They were lugging rifles and packs and running hard down the side of the hill, some stumbling and rolling, then getting up and running again.

  Atkins and Elizabeth got out of the Humvee and started after them. There was no cover, no shelter. They were going to take whatever happened out on open ground. It was as good as any other place, Atkins thought. At least they’d be able to see each other in case someone needed help.

  A gorgeous valley spread open before them. The hills in this part of southwestern Kentucky were wooded. The fields lush with thick grass. Atkins couldn’t help but think, as he often had before, that it was fine horse country. Then he realized something that he’d overlooked for days. He hadn’t seen a single horse or cow or sheep. The fields in this part of the Bluegrass State had been abandoned by both man and beast.

  They saw the president at the bottom of the hill. He’d just stepped out of a half-track. Soldiers had already formed a protective shield around him. Others had moved up into the hills and taken defensive positions. Helicopters buzzed the ridgeline at dangerously low altitude.

  “Here it comes,” Elizabeth said. “Yes!”

  She felt herself lifted up. It was like an ocean swell washing against her legs in a strong surf, causing her to sway on her feet but not fall down. Two distinct ground waves rolled past them, rippling the trees and tall grass.

  They were ten yards from a stream that trickled along the base of the limestone hills. Clear as glass only moments earlier, the surface of the water suddenly shimmered.

  “It fired!” Atkins shouted.

  NEAR BENTON, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 20

  4:30 P.M.

  LAUREN MITCHELL HAD BEEN GIVEN A PERSONAL escort to drive her home—four Army paratroopers in two Humvees. In the two hours since they’d left the Golden Orient, they’d covered less than twenty miles on unmarked country roads. Following Lauren’s directions, they’d frequently plowed across sodden fields and pastures to save time.

  Lauren had wanted to be back with her grandson when the bomb exploded. She didn’t make it.

  Her driver, a nervous but alert corporal, pulled over on the shoulder of a muddy road a few seconds before zero hour.

  “Maybe we better get out of the vehicle,” he said.

  Unsure what to expect, they were well within the thirty-to forty-mile radius for the bomb’s maximum seismic effect.

  “It should hit any second now,” the soldier said, looking at his watch.

  They were on a steep hillcrest with a view of Kentucky Lake in the distance, the gray-blue water visible through a gap in the trees. Another five miles, and Lauren would have been home. She wondered how Bobby was doing and longed to be back with him.

  “Listen!” one of the soldiers shouted.

  The sound of muffled thunder rolled along the ridges. The bomb had gone off.

  “It’s gonna wash right over us,” the corporal said, looking back toward a narrow valley they’d just driven through. The hills were swaying. The ground was moving toward them in waves.

  “Get away from the vehicles!” the corporal yelled. The Humvees had begun to rock up and down on their axles. They ran, half fell, down a grassy hill that sloped away from the road. The first wave staggered them, then the second wave knocked them off their feet. They fell hard.

  “Jesus,” the corporal said, trying to stand and falling on his back as the ground kept shaking.

  Lauren sat up and dug her hands into the wet grass, trying to hold on to something, afraid she’d be thrown into the air. She stared out toward the lake. The water momentarily seemed to pull back from shore. She watched big waves whip up as the shaking intensified. Monster waves.

  After a few minutes, the ground quieted again.

  Lauren picked herself up, got her balance, and hiked back to the road.

  The corporal followed her. “I think we can drive now, ma’am,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

  Lauren shook her head and said, “Thanks, but I’ll walk the rest of the way.” She could be home in an hour if she put her mind to it. She didn’t want to be caught in one of those Humvees if the road turned liquid or a trench opened up beneath them. Two of the paratroopers followed her on foot. The others drove.

  The Mississippi Valley might keep shaking for days, Lauren thought. Sooner or later it would stop for good and when it did, they’d start rebuilding their marina. That was her unwavering plan. This was her country and her grandson’s. They were going to survive this.

  NEAR KALER, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 20

  4:31 P.M.

  JUST AS BOOKER HAD PLANNED, THE PLASTIC explosives detonated deep in the Golden Orient, caving in all four major shafts on Level 8. Roofs and tunnels collapsed on themselves as the mine was sealed.

  Seconds later and right on schedule, the MK/B-61 exploded. The capacitors flashed their charge. The electrical circuit closed, setting off the network of detonators. The blocks of high explosives that Booker had painstakingly shaped at the Pantex plant in Texas all fired, crushing the plutonium core in the bomb’s primary. At the moment of maximum compression, a small fireball of fission—boosted by the infusion of tritium and deuterium gas—flooded the bomb’s secondary component, the part containing lithium deuteride uranium. In the barrage of radiation from the fireball, the secondary imploded, setting off the thermonuclear explosion.

  Deep in the mine, the bomb’s supercharged energy was released, blasting the temperature to about ten million degrees. The pressure spiked at a thousand times that of the earth’s atmosphere. The same kind of white-hot, incandescent gas that forms the core of a star blasted outward, carving a dome-shaped cavity the size of a tenstory building. During the last few preshocks, the deep fissure at the bottom of the mine had already begun to close. The explosion hastened the process, sealing the fissure as great sheets of molten rock collapsed into it.

  Shock waves radiating from the core fractured the surrounding rock and liquefied it. The expl
osion created a nuclear earthquake that unleashed swarms of seismic waves rippling through the earth’s crust. The P waves traveled through the rock as sound waves, a series of rapid compressions and dilations. These were followed by the much slower-moving S waves. There was an abundance of Love waves, converted S waves trapped within the earth’s surface layers.

  As the bomb exploded, the ground directly above the blast site billowed up like a sail suddenly filled with a strong gust of wind. Then the ground settled again, forming a concave shaped subsidence crater on the surface one thousand feet in diameter. More settling would follow as the hot cavity continued to cool.

  The mine’s tall skip shaft and man shaft towers collapsed, shaken apart, their heavy timbers crashing through the metal building that housed the main entrance.

  No cloud of radioactive dust escaped.

  ATKINS was soon on the radio with Guy Thompson and the team of seismologists manning the red shack control center two miles farther to the west. They were monitoring the array of strong-motion seismographs and other instruments positioned near ground zero. The equipment had been geared up to make a quick determination of the bomb’s yield by measuring the amplitudes of the P waves and the S waves.

  Thompson had lost his scientific detachment, the ability to consider disturbing facts analytically without losing his composure.

  He was terrified.

  The ground had gone into spasm. The bomb, following predictions, had released strain energy comparable to an earthquake in the magnitude 6.5 range and exactly in the bull’seye. The nuclear shock waves were directed right at the western end of the newly discovered Caruthersville Fault, its wide point of intersection with the fault from the 7.1 quake and the northernmost arm of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the place where the greatest stress was likely to be concentrated. The maximum band of seismic energy had radiated about forty miles, a little more than they’d anticipated.

  “We’re showing lots of Love waves,” Thompson reported. That was exactly what they’d wanted. Love waves were a good indicator that tectonic strain energy in the ground was being released as the deep rock fissured and cracked. The number of Love waves moving across the surface of the ground was considered a measure of the amount of energy released.

  What they hadn’t anticipated was the flurry of powerful aftershocks that inexplicably broke out along the entire length of the Caruthersville Fault. They were also firing with unprecedented rapidity along other segments of the NMSZ.

  The first aftershock—nearly as large as the main event—followed within thirty seconds, a quake that measured a magnitude 6.

  By then, the ground had been shaking intermittently for more than three minutes.

  “This may be getting away from us,” Thompson said, not hiding his fear. “The seismographs are swinging all over the place. I don’t like the way these aftershocks keep hammering us.”

  “How many have we had?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Five big ones within the last two minutes. Three over a mag 5. And maybe twenty smaller ones in the mag 4 or less range. They’re popping everywhere. We just had a mag 5.4 seventy miles northwest of Memphis.”

  President Ross and Steve Draper stood behind Atkins and Elizabeth. The president listened to what Thompson was reporting, not saying a word, hands thrust in the pockets of his jacket. If he was frightened, he didn’t show it. He was holding on to the edge of a portable table that had been set up to hold the radio equipment. It was difficult to stand during some of the stronger tremors. They were coming almost back-to-back.

  The profound uncertainty of what they were doing had tormented them all along. Atkins couldn’t help but wonder if their questions were being answered once and for all with each of these powerful seismic convulsions.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Ross said.

  “Nothing,” Atkins said. The ground rocked upward again, the hard vibrations rippling up through his legs and spine. The aftershocks weren’t nearly as powerful as the 8.4 monster, but they were very strong. Atkins and the others, everyone in the field, continued to hear what one soldier called “ground thunder,” the rumbling, otherworldly sound that seemed to rise from deep in the earth. Over the last few days Atkins had come to hate it.

  What fools they’d been to think they could stop an earthquake, he thought. What arrogance to assume they could meddle with one of nature’s most destructive forces.

  He feared that’s how they’d be judged. As arrogant, dangerous fools.

  The Caruthersville Fault was going to touch off another killer earthquake. You had no options, he reminded himself bitterly, slapping his gloved hands together in the cold. You had to do something. You had to try to stop it.

  He wasn’t going to make any excuses. He wouldn’t permit it. He’d never do that no matter what he had to face.

  Later, he’d have difficulty trying to pin down how much time elapsed between this crushing feeling of depression and self-doubt and the moment Elizabeth gently touched him on the arm. He realized it could have been only twenty to thirty minutes at most. It seemed much longer, a black hole chiseled into his memory as he shivered with fear in that cold, bleak field.

  Elizabeth said, “They might be slowing down.”

  The last few tremors were noticeably milder. And they were coming farther apart.

  Atkins felt it, too.

  The aftershocks appeared to be diminishing, winding down like a great engine coming to a halt.

  For the next hour as the black sky seemed to press down upon their heads, so oppressively low they felt they could touch it, Atkins and Elizabeth timed the aftershocks. Joined by the president, their eyes were glued to their watches.

  Guy Thompson called back. He sounded excited. “It looks like they’ve stopped,” he shouted. “We haven’t recorded a significant tremor in ninety minutes.”

  His amplified words carried far in the cold, damp air. Some of the soldiers who’d started a bonfire broke into loud cheers.

  Elizabeth slipped her arm around Atkins’ waist. They spoke to Thompson together. He told them the accelerations had fallen to almost zero.

  IT was still too early to celebrate. They knew they’d be on edge for the next few days. They’d have to wait until they could get a definitive reading from the GPS system. The satellite data would tell them if the ground was deforming anywhere along the extensive seismic zone. A crucial test, it was the only way to assess how much elastic strain energy remained trapped in the ground.

  Atkins doubted they’d released all of it. A one-megaton bomb simply wasn’t powerful enough to do that, but they didn’t have to. Their strategy all along was to discharge just enough tectonic stress or “critical asperity” to break the cycle of earthquakes without pushing the fault into a major upheaval.

  The ultimate outcome still wasn’t known, but for the time being, they couldn’t deny there’d been a pronounced drop-off in seismic activity. Atkins wanted to believe it was happening, wanted to let down his guard, his scientific skepticism, and hope for the best.

  “Excuse me, sir, but do you know you’ve been shot?” one of the soldiers said, a medic.

  Atkins took his first good look at his right forearm. Wren’s bullet had opened a shallow furrow that ran just across the wrist. The bullet had nicked the bone, but hadn’t done any serious damage.

  The medic quickly got a bandage on it and examined Atkins’ nose.

  “Good clean break,” he said. “Looks like the second time, right?”

  Atkins nodded. He winced when the soldier gently touched the bridge.

  “I like it,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “I think it helps.”

  She kept remembering how she felt when she’d climbed out of the mine. It had hurt to be out of his sight, not knowing what was happening to him as the shaking intensified. Leaving him below in the darkness was the most difficult thing she’d ever done.

  When Atkins took her in his arms, something burst open inside him, an aching release unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Tr
apped in the depths of the mine, he hadn’t allowed himself to think about this moment—hadn’t dared. She’d taken off her hard hat. Her dark blond hair hung to the shoulders of her jumpsuit, which was caked with coal dust and white powder. He’d thought about her hair often during the last few hours, wondering whether he’d ever see it again. He wanted to run his fingers through it.

  Just after 11:00 P.M., Army patrols reported the route was secure. They got back into their Humvees and other vehicles and drove two miles to the red shack, where they spent the rest of the night, drinking strong coffee as Thompson’s team continued to monitor the encouraging seismic readings.

  In the morning, as the sun began to rise in a clear blue-gray sky, Atkins and Elizabeth took a walk. They hiked along the ridge to an opening in the trees where they could look out over a wide valley.

  Elizabeth noticed them first, the distant shapes almost obscured in the long shadows that had spread across the floor of the valley as the sun climbed higher over the hills.

  Atkins had borrowed a pair of binoculars. He adjusted the eyepiece. The image snapped into sharp view—a line of brown-and-white cows that had come out of the woods single file and were grazing in the pasture. Farther off, he saw two horses with their heads down, a mare and a gray colt, feeding in the tall grass.

  They were the first animals they’d seen in days.

  Atkins finally let himself dare to believe it. Finally let himself go.

  It was over.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the following:

  Gutenberg-Richter Publications, for the illustrations previously published in The Earthquake That Never Went Away, by David Stewart and Ray Knox.

  The St. Louis University Earthquake Center, website http://www.eas.sluedu/Earthquake-Center for the illustration.

  Thomas Borgman, for the illustrations.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A number of seismologists, disaster planners, structural and mining engineers, nuclear weapons experts, and others provided invaluable help in researching this book. I here thank several who took extra pains. I tried to hew to scientific fact as much as possible, and I take full responsibility for reworking facts for the sake of fiction; the good people I acknowledge bear no responsibility for how I used the material they so graciously provided.