William Forstchen - One Second After

“So why didn’t we just protect ourselves?” Kate asked. “Hell, what does it take to build a better surge protector?”

John sighed and shook his head. She was so damn right.

“Kate, it’s some rather technical stuff, but it meant retrofitting a lot of stuff, hundreds of billions perhaps, to do all of it. And besides, a lot of people in high places, well, they just glazed over when the scientists started with the technical jargon, the reports would go into committees, and…”

“And now we got this,” Charlie said coldly. John nodded, frustrated.

“Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn’t. This, though, it didn’t have the hype, no big stars or politicians running around shouting about it… and it just never registered on anyone’s screen except for a few.”

“I don’t get it with the cars, though,” Tom interjected. “Computers, yes, but a car?”

“Any car made after roughly 1980 or so has some solid-state electronics in it,” John said. “Remember carburetors, thing of the past with fuel injection and electronic ignition. That’s why my mother-in-law’s old Edsel is ok and Bartlett’s VW out there. No computers in the engine, and vacuum tubes in the radio. The surge had nothing to fry off; therefore, it still runs. Now everything in a car is wired into some kind of computer. Better living through modern science.”

John fished in his pocket for a cigarette, pulled it out, then hesitated. Kate was glaring at him, as was Tom. The town had a no-smoking ordinance for all its buildings.

John hesitated, but damn, he wanted one now.

“Look, guys, if you want me to talk, I get a cigarette.”

“Mary would kick your ass if she knew you were still smoking,” Kate said.

“Don’t lay the guilt on me,” John replied sharply. It was Mary’s dying that had snagged him back into smoking after being clean for ten years. The army had started getting uptight on it, and amongst all the other aspects of grooming for the star, smoking was a checkmark against him with some of the bean counters and actuaries in the Pentagon who argued why invest the effort on a guy who might die early?

“Go on; light up.” She hesitated. “And give me one of those damn things, too.”

Now it was his turn to hesitate. He hated leading someone back into sin, but on this day… what the hell.

He lit her cigarette. She leaned back in her chair, inhaled deeply, let it out, and sighed.

“God damn, I’ve been wanting that for six years now. Damn, is it good.” A couple of seconds later she actually smiled, the first time she had done so since he walked in.

“Head rush,” she muttered, then took another puff.

“Damn near everything has a computer in it now,” John continued. “Cash registers, phones, toys, cars, trucks, but, most vulnerable of all, the complex web of our electrical distribution system. All of it was waiting to get hit.”

Tom leaned against the wall and let a few choice words slip out.

“You think they’d of seen this coming. Done something about it.”

“Who is ‘they,’ Tom?”

“Jesus, John, you know. The president, Homeland Security. Hell, I was getting e-mails damn near every day on terrorist alerts, training on what to do if they hijacked a truck loaded with nuclear waste, even a drill with the hospital last year if they unleashed some sort of plague. I got twenty bio and hazmat suits in a storage closet. Never even heard about this thing being talked about.”

John sighed.

“Yeah, I know. It was off most people’s screens. Seemed too sci-fi to some of them. But that doesn’t matter now.”

“I’m still worried about radiation, though,” Kate said, “fallout.”

“Don’t.”

“You sound rather assured of yourself.”

“You don’t have a single radio working here, nothing at all?” John asked.

Tom shook his head. “I do.”

“Where?”

“In the Edsel. It’s an old tube radio. I checked it last night. Static from one end to the other. If this thing was local, if they had popped a bomb over Atlanta, Charlotte, we’d still be picking up radio stations from the Midwest and Northeast,”

“Why?”

“It’s a horizon event. Line of sight, like I said. I’ll guess it was one to three nukes, lit off a couple of hundred miles up above the atmosphere, covered most, maybe all, of the United States. Fallout is a by-product of rubble blown up into the atmosphere from a bomb going off. Pop an EMP above the atmosphere… and, well, at least you don’t have any fallout worries.”

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie sighed.

That caught John slightly off guard. Charlie was strict Southern Baptist, and for him to say that… well, it was a major sin, though a Catholic wouldn’t think twice about it.

“Who do you think did it?”

“Does it matter?” John replied.

“Yeah, maybe it does to me?” Tom said. “I got a boy over in Iraq right now. You know that one of my nephews is with the navy out in the Pacific. I sure as hell would like to know who they’re fighting. If it was the Chinks, my nephew will be in it. The rag heads and it’s my son.”

“Doubt if it’s China,” John said quietly.

“Why? You said they were the ones doing the research.”

“Doing the research, but using it in a first strike? Doubt it. They are just as vulnerable to EMP as we are. Do it to us and we’d flatten them and they know it.”

“We have it, too?”

“Sure we do. What the hell do you think the threat was to Saddam back in 1991? Charlie, you were over there then, same as me; you remember.”

“Yeah, if they hit us with any weapon of mass destruction the word was we’d pop a nuke off about twenty miles above Baghdad.”

“When a nuke goes off above the atmosphere or even in the high upper atmosphere, it sets off that electrical chain reaction I talked about. Again, just like a solar flare, usually the upper atmosphere absorbs the magnetic disturbance of a solar flare and up north we see that as the northern lights. But if it’s big enough, the disturbance hits the ground and starts shorting things out. So we threatened Saddam with an EMP if he unleashed anything on us,” John said. “It would have shut down the entire power grid of central Iraq and shut down their entire command and control system as well. They didn’t, so we didn’t.”

“Wouldn’t that have fried our stuff, too?” Kate asked.

“No. Remember, it’s line of sight. Twenty miles up, our forces in Saudi Arabia would have been below the horizon. Besides, all our equipment was hardened against EMP to varying degrees. They spent a lot of money on that back during the Reagan years.”

“So our military is still ok here in the states then?” Kate asked.

“Doubt it. That’s the gist of the report I just gave you. Every administration since Reagan’s has placed hardening of our electronics on the back shelf. Meanwhile the equipment kept getting more delicate and thus susceptible and the potential power of the burst kept getting one helluva lot stronger. Remember how we were all wowed by the high-tech stuff back in 1991. That equipment is now as primitive as a steam engine compared to what we got now. And in constantly making computers and electronics faster and better we made them smaller, more compact, and more and more vulnerable to an EMP strike.”

He dropped the butt of his cigarette into his nearly empty coffee cup, offered a second to Kate, who took it, and lit another for himself.

“Who then?”

“For my money… maybe North Korea, maybe Middle East terrorists with some equipment supplied by Iran, Korea, or both. As for the warhead, we all know there’s enough of those left over from the old Soviet Union that sooner or later someone would get their hands on, if for nothing else than the goodies inside that go bang. Iran and Korea were hellbent on making nukes as well. But they’d be crazy to throw three or four at us when we could make the rubble glow for a hundred years with a thousand fired back in reply. But turn them into EMP weapons… and they win, at least in terms of hitting us harder than we could ever have dreamed of.