Peter Hernon - 8.4

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!”

“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.

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 puncture 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.