William Forstchen - One Second After

“Jesus Christ, what about fallout? We got to start moving on that right now.”

John shook his head.

“Give me a minute, Kate. This gets a little complex. When you got some time, read the article; that will explain it better.”

“John, have we been nuked? Is this a war?”

“Kate, I don’t know. I know as much as you do at the moment as to what is going on outside of right here, in Black Mountain, but that alone tells me a lot.”

“How so?”

John took a deep breath and looked at the Styrofoam cup on her table, the paper plate covered with crumbs.

“Look, guys, I hate to ask this. I’m starved and could use a little more caffeine.”

No one moved for a second. Kate made it a point to remain firmly in her chair, not budging an inch.

“We got a pot boiling out back,” Charlie said, and left the room and came back a minute later with a cup of coffee, black the way John always liked it, and, amazingly, some bacon and eggs.

“Picture an EMP as something like a lightning bolt striking your electrical line or phone line during a thunderstorm.” John said between quick sips of his coffee. “Boom, and everything electronic in your house is fried, especially delicate stuff with microcircuitry in it. That bolt is maybe packing thousands of amps the microchip in your computer runs on hundredths of an amp. It just cooks it off.”

Kate said nothing, giving him a moment to wolf down one of the eggs and a piece of bacon before continuing.

“Back in the 1940s, when we started firing off atomic bombs to test them, this pulse wave was first noticed. Not much back then with those primitive weapons, but it was there. And here’s the key thing: there were no solid-state electronics back in the 1940s, everything was still vacuum tubes, so it was rare for the small pulses set off by those first bombs to damage anything.

“We finally figured out that when you set off a nuke in space, that’s when the EMP effect really kicks in, as the energy burst hits the upper atmosphere. It becomes like a pebble triggering an avalanche, the electrical disturbances magnifying. It’s in the report. It’s called the “Compton Effect.”

“Now come forward. When we did those articles back in the nineties, we were getting word that the Chinese were doing a helluva lot of research on how to boost the EMP from a nuclear blast, making it a helluva lot more powerful.”

“So it’s the Chinese who hit us?” Tom asked. “Damn bastards.”

“I don’t know,” John said, a bit exasperated. “No one knows, at least not here, not yet. Maybe even the Pentagon doesn’t know yet.”

He hesitated after saying that, thinking of Bob Scales up there. Did the Pentagon exist? There was no news. One scenario that his group had kicked around was an initial EMP strike to take down communications, then selected ground bursts of nukes on key sites to finish the job… and of course D.C. would be the first hit.

It was maddening; John just did not know.

“How can nobody know anything around here?” Kate snapped.

“That’s the whole idea behind an EMP strike,” John replied. “Whether a full-scale strike from a traditional foe like Russia during the Cold War or a terrorist hit now. You pop off a nuke that sends out this strong electromagnetic wave, it fries off communications, and a lot of other things, then either sit back or continue. The frightful thing we realized was that some third-rate lunatic, either a terrorist cell member or the ruler of someplace like North Korea or Iran, with only one or two nukes in their possession, could level the playing field against us in spite of our thousands of weapons. That’s what is meant by ‘asymmetrical strike.’”

“So, is the whole country like this right now?” Kate asked. “Or is it just us?”

He shook his head.

“Look, I’m kinda tired, sat up most of the night keeping watch on the house, so let me try to explain this in order if that’s ok.”

“Sure, John, take your time,” Charlie intervened.

“Well, at the same time the potential energy release of EMP grew, and believe me, I don’t understand the technical side of it at all, just that I know that it happens when a nuke goes off and we suspect there’s ways of calibrating a small nuke to give off a high yield of energy. Our electronic equipment was getting more and more sensitive to it.”

“No one saw an explosion,” Charlie said, “and believe me, I’ve asked around, kind of suspecting the same thing.”

“That’s just it, it’s in the report,” and John motioned to the article on Kate’s desk.

She looked at it, thumbed through it.

“Mind if we run off some copies?…” And she fell silent, blushing slightly at what sounded like a dumb comment.

“We’re all conditioned,” John said with a reassuring smile. “I tried to make coffee in the machine this morning. It’s ok, Kate.”

She smiled sheepishly and nodded. “Go on, John.”

“Well, to Charlie’s question. EMP doesn’t really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the ‘Compton effect,’ and believe me, I’ve read about it, but don’t have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. Just that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and bango, it fries everything with electronics in it.”

“Just one bomb?” Kate asked.

He nodded.

“Remember a TV back in the fifties, the early sixties, all those tubes, and hot as hell? That same thing now sits in the palm of my kid’s hand when she’s playing one of those damn games.”

He wondered for a second if maybe all the pocket-size computer toys were gone…. If so, no regrets there at least.

“So the stuff gets more and more delicate, and more and more prone to even the slightest electrical surge.”

“Someone could now fire off a nuke, calibrated to do a maximum load of EMP, and anything within line of sight from up in space gets fried, even from a thousand miles away. For that matter, anything hooked into our electrical web goes as well. Electrical lines are like giant antennas when it comes to EMP, and guide it straight into your house, through the sockets, and, wham, right into anything hooked up.”

“Surge protectors, though?” Kate said. “I spent a hundred bucks on one for my new television.”

He shook his head.

“Surge protectors don’t work for this,” Charlie interjected, and John looked over at him.

“We had one, exactly one, briefing on this about two years ago,” Charlie said. “Hundreds on every other threat, just one on this, but I remember somebody asking that question. Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn’t have time to trigger off and boom, the whole system is fried. That’s why it’s so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react.”

“You still haven’t answered my question about your damn car,” Tom snapped. “Why is yours working and I’ve got six squad cars out there that are dead?”

“The electronics,” Charlie interrupted. “That’s what got me thinking on it, too, but I didn’t feel it was right to say anything about it.”

“Why not?” Tom asked.

“Panic. That’s why. I saw an article on the Web about this a couple of months back, and it was a lot worse than what we were talking about just two years ago. Some people who don’t like us have apparently been spending a lot of time and money to get a bigger bang for the buck.”