knocked the wind out of him.
Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, was about 230 miles northeast of Memphis and roughly midway between Louisville and Lexington. All three cities had felt the earthquake that had struck Memphis three days earlier. There had been a lot of property damage, mainly cracked foundations and fallen chimneys, but no one had been killed.
But Parker knew this one was deadly.
He crawled to the door, got to his knees, and tried the light switch. The electricity was out.
Parker cursed himself for drinking too much wine at dinner. He’d met with his campaign advisers and had allowed himself to be overserved, something he rarely did. He usually stuck with one small glass of burgundy. This time he’d had four or five and had only recently gone to bed.
As the ground shook, glass shattered in the pair of French doors that opened onto the bedroom balcony.
The chandelier in the dining room jingled like a wind chime as it swung back and forth. Then it fell with a splintering crash of broken glass.
Large gilt-framed pictures were knocked from their mountings. A china cabinet pitched over, spilling nineteenth-century Wedgwood and French crystal onto the floor.
Crawling on all fours, Parker cut his hand on a fragment of glass.
“Tad, we’ve got to get out!” his wife screamed. She tried to hold on to the bed’s headboard, but the heaving ground action sent the massive four-poster sliding across the floor, knocking her legs out from under her.
Parker was as frightened as he’d ever been in his life.
When the earth finally stopped moving, he sat with his back against a wall, too stunned to get up. He stayed there with his wife next to him for five minutes before he finally managed to get dressed in the dark, slipping on a pair of trousers and a pullover.
He got a flashlight from the bathroom. The mansion was a shambles. Wide cracks had opened in the walls.
The ground started shaking again.
Parker realized those must be aftershocks. They had to get outside.
With his wife following in her bathrobe, a coat thrown over her shoulders, Parker hurried down the grand staircase to the first floor. He went out the front door just as a car from the Kentucky State Police pulled into the driveway.
A young officer got out. He delivered the terrible news with crisp professionalism.
“The dam at Kentucky Lake is gone, sir.”
Parker felt as if he’d been kicked in the teeth. He slumped against the open door.
That can’t be true.
As he tried to comprehend the immensity of what he’d just been told, Parker struggled to follow what the trooper was saying. He’d already moved on to another subject—the Department of Energy’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant at Paducah.
Parker knew it well. He’d lobbied hard to keep the plant in operation amid rumors that the DOE wanted to phase it out.
He squeezed his hands to his temples and tried to think clearly. It was so difficult, but he had to focus.
“The plant manager called, sir,” the trooper continued. “He wants Paducah evacuated.”
“What are you talking about?” Parker stammered.
“They have a leak of some kind. He said something about poison gas.”
Parker had just toured the uranium-enrichment plant with a delegation of Japanese visitors. He knew how they shot uranium in the form of uranium hexofluoride gas through a series of ceramic and steel separators, which filtered out impurities. The pipes ran for miles it seemed and were forty inches in diameter.
He remembered what one of the plant engineers had told him: The biggest danger was the accidental release of gas. When mixed with oxygen, it was lethal. The separators were sealed under pressure. If they ruptured, they’d go off like Roman candles, spewing clouds of poison gas.
“Will you authorize it?” the trooper asked.
Authorize what? Dammit, man. Just let me think, Parker thought.
The trooper was staring at him, waiting for an answer.
“The evacuation,” he said. “They want to do it right now.”
The ground shook, just enough to make Parker clutch the mansion’s porch railing. He sat down on the front steps. He was suddenly aware of how bright the stars were. The sky was filled with stars.
He’d never seen them so bright. Then he realized why: all the lights were out in Frankfort. The city was in total darkness.
NEAR CARUTHERSVILLE, MISSOURI
JANUARY 13
5:30 A.M.
MARSDEN GAVE THE FERRY AS MUCH POWER AS the engines offered. At such driving rpms, he worried about burning them up. The barge was a hundred yards off their port bow. Marsden tugged on the steering wheel. The ferry slowly responded, nosing away from the hulking shape that was riding low in the water and rapidly bearing down on them.
“We might just make this,” Marsden said.
Picking up speed slowly, the ferry was making plodding headway against the current.
Atkins turned to take another look at the approaching barge and saw a sudden burst of flames. Almost simultaneously, there was a strong explosion. Slammed to the deck, Atkins struggled to his feet. The ferry, engines open wide, was making a rapid turn as the current shoved it upstream. Large pieces of the barge, hurled far into the water, burned with a white intensity.
Elizabeth was on her knees, bent over Marsden.
“He’s unconscious,” she said. “He must have hit his head on the radio console.” Marsden had a deep gash just above his left eyebrow. Elizabeth pressed a handkerchief on the wound.
Atkins grabbed the steering wheel and tried to get the ferry back on course, headed downstream. It was no use. They’d swung around too far in the current and were facing upstream, toward the waterfall. The engines weren’t powerful enough to get them turned around again.
In a matter of minutes they were swept past the island and the ferry landing they’d left thirty minutes earlier. They were being pushed quickly upriver.
In the dim, gray light, Atkins could just start to make out the rough outline and dimensions of the waterfall. What he saw left him speechless.
The rim or edge curved toward the Missouri side of the river and appeared to be five or six hundred yards long. The water below was boiling. He saw clouds of foam rising up over the falls.
Atkins realized in amazement that he was gazing at the scarp of a fault that had pushed up from the depths and breached the Mississippi. That thought riveted his attention as much as the sight of the waterfall. He could also hear it now, a pounding roar. He thought again of a thrust fault and what it did beneath the earth, how the hanging wall moved sharply upward while the footwall dipped. Thrust faults were common in mountain chains, but exceedingly rare in this part of the country.
Elizabeth had managed to stop Marsden’s flow of blood. “I don’t believe I’m really seeing this,” she said, looking out the pilothouse window at the river. She was as moved as Atkins. The force of the cataclysm, seen up close, was beyond anything in her experience.
She pointed out how the height of the waterfall—they were still too far away to see it clearly—appeared to drop off sharply at both ends. On the side closest to the Missouri shore, the drop looked considerably lower. And the water below it was less turbulent.
Their only chance, Atkins thought, was to try to get close enough to the Missouri side so they could go over the falls at its lowest point. There was no way to avoid going over. But if they could maneuver to where the drop-off was minimal, they might be able to slide over without too much risk. At least such was his hastily formed plan.
