pyramid, the tapered sides were covered with thin sheets of metal that shone brilliantly in the sunlight. The top floors had collapsed neatly, telescoping together like the sections of a segmented drinking cup. The broad base, which covered a full city block, remained intact.
They flew over the city’s famous Mud Island, which angled out from the riverfront. The monorail that carried passengers to the island’s shops, restaurants, and museums had been smashed; three wrecked cars still dangled high in the air.
Drifting, dense smoke obscured the broad view of the city as it stretched far to the east. Then the wind changed and the curtain parted.
“I don’t believe this,” Elizabeth said, staring down at the cityscape. The larger fires seemed concentrated along the riverfront, where most of the high-rise buildings and renovated cotton warehouses were located. Many of the tall buildings along Main Street looked damaged; a few had collapsed entirely, spilling against other buildings, knocking down entire walls. Some had lost only their upper floors.
There were fire trucks and ambulances down there, their red and blue lights flashing up through the swirling smoke.
“How are emergency vehicles getting around in all that?” Elizabeth asked.
“They’re not,” the pilot said. “Most of the streets are blocked.” He pointed off to the port side. “You see that big yellow building over there to the left? That’s a children’s hospital. It looks like the walls are standing, but most of the floors have caved in. We flew over it on the way to pick you up.”
Elizabeth glanced at Atkins and shuddered. America’s luck had finally run out. She realized that the death toll from this earthquake was going to be huge. With the exception of the 1906 quake in San Francisco, the ones that struck in southern California had largely been glancing blows along the edges of major population centers. The real disasters, the ones that leveled entire cities, had struck elsewhere—Chile, or Italy, or Japan, or Armenia, or Mexico.
This time it was different.
“I’m going to put you down fast,” the pilot said. They were nearing the landing zone he’d picked. “I’m sorry about that, but some of those buildings are still falling down in the aftershocks. It’s gonna be real tight down there.”
He explained that the travel building had a keypad locking system. He tore a piece of paper off the clipboard strapped to his leg and handed it to Atkins. It had the numbers.
The pilot slowly began to descend through the patchy smoke. “I’m going to try to set you down on that parking lot.” They’d have to drop down between the building and another, taller one that had lost its upper stories. Curtains flapped in the smashed windows.
The crew chief patted Atkins on the shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up. “Get ready!”
As the helicopter descended between two buildings, its rotors were dangerously close to the walls. There was no margin for error. The pilot, a veteran of the Gulf War, was superb. They descended slowly, steadily.
Atkins looped the straps of the seismograph and laptop around his shoulder. The crew chief gave Elizabeth a small backpack. “K-rations, flashlights, and a couple bottles of water. It’s the best we can do.”
They were about four feet off the ground when Atkins saw the men. Maybe ten of them. They’d come out of nowhere and were running for the helicopter, arms raised, screaming for help.
“Jump, now!” the crew chief shouted.
Crouching at the cargo door, Atkins and Elizabeth leaped for the ground. The men frantically rushed past them. Two of them grabbed on to the bottom edge of the open door and were lifted up as the copter started to climb. Legs kicking, they fell from about fifty feet. Both hit the ground hard and didn’t move.
Atkins grabbed Elizabeth’s hand. They ran for the travel building.
“What do you have in the backpack?” someone yelled at Elizabeth. “You got any food? Hey, asshole, listen to me.” A man moved toward them. He wore dark slacks and a torn overcoat; he was big and heavy, well over six feet tall.
Atkins ignored the man, who was with three others. Their faces were streaked with dirt. They were moving toward Atkins, who fumbled with the security keypad at one of the building’s side doors.
“Just give us the backpack,” the tall man said.
Atkins tried to remember the keypad numbers the pilot had given him. He fumbled in his pocket for the sheet of paper. Finding it, he punched in a sequence of five digits and pulled on the handle. Nothing.
He handed Elizabeth the paper and faced the men. They kept coming. Atkins picked up a piece of broken pipe lying in the rubble.
Atkins noticed the butcher knife the big man was holding tight to his side. He’d give him another few yards then go for his head with the pipe; he wanted to take him out fast.
Gunfire exploded above them, the bullets kicking up rocks near the feet of the men who were approaching Atkins and Elizabeth. The group broke up and ran for cover.
Atkins looked up and saw the helicopter hovering over the roof of the building. Leaning out the cargo door with a rifle, the crew chief was covering them.
Atkins waved to him.
Elizabeth had the door open. He jumped in behind her and slammed it shut.
OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
JANUARY 14
9:25 A.M.
THE FIRES HAD BEEN BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL OR extinguished at the ORNL’s Y-12 plant. Engineering teams were out inspecting the damage, trying to determine which buildings had to be demolished. It was dangerous work because of the frequent, strong aftershocks. A bad one killed two engineers when a steel I-beam fell as they tried to check out the “Mouse House.” The eight-story building contained the biology division and got its name from the 125,000 mice kept there as laboratory animals.
Fred Booker scoped out the damage through a pair of powerful Zeiss binoculars. He stood on the deck of his home in the hills that overlooked the plant. Except for losing electricity and having a couple of large windows broken, his tightly constructed, well-anchored A-frame had come through the quake virtually unscathed. Booker got his water from a well operated by a gas-powered pump: he also had an ample stock of canned foods. And Jack Daniel’s. He was in fairly good shape to sit things out.
Booker planned to go back to Y-12 later in the day and offer whatever help he could.
Meanwhile, he had two houseguests—Len Miller and Ed Graves, the young geophysicists he’d been working with in the Shock Wave Laboratory before the quake. They lived in Knoxville, forty miles to the east; Booker had put them up when they were unable to get home.
Both were worried about the flurry of aftershocks.
“There’s still a hell of a lot of strain energy in the ground,” Miller said.
“It’s hard to figure,” said Graves. He’d borrowed one of Booker’s jackets and was standing on the deck in the bright winter sunlight. “Mid-plate quakes like these are damned near impossible to understand. I keep asking myself if something in the lower crust is putting stress on the faults.”
“My guess is it’s a hotspot,” Miller said. Hotspots were well known to geophysicists. Born deep in the earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and core, they were thermal plumes, gigantic bubbles of molten rock that rose from two thousand miles underground. As much as a thousand miles across and often shaped like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast, hotspots played a vital role in keeping the planet from turning into a chunk of space ice.
Graves and Miller likened the earth to a boiling pot of oatmeal. Percolating in a circular convection, it kept pulling heat and hot rock from great depths to the surface, then back down again.
It was their work in this area that prompted their heat studies at the Shock Wave Lab. These slowly rising hotspots helped create volcanoes. And Miller had long believed they could also cause enough deformity in the crust to trigger earthquakes at depths of well over four hundred miles.
