OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
JANUARY 15
6:30 A.M.
FRED BOOKER BOARDED THE SMALL, SINGLE ENGINE plane early in the morning. He’d been told the air was calmer at that time of day. That was important because for the first time in his life he was going to jump out of an airplane. He didn’t want to fight a strong wind, which might blow him off course.
It was going to be difficult enough landing near the University of Memphis. News reports said many parts of the city were still burning. Booker didn’t want to get caught in the updraft from the fires—or drift down into them.
That’s why he’d paid strict attention when his good friend from the ORNL, a former Army paratrooper, had explained how to operate a parachute. The day before, the friend had outfitted Booker with a brand-new parafoil chute. “You want to go left, pull on the left cords,” the friend told him. “You want to go right, pull on the right side. You want to drop straight, let up on the cords and just hang on. When you land, loosen up; take the jolt in your legs, keep them bent. You’ll hit nice and easy. Just like jumping off a ten-foot wall. No problem.”
No problem for a forty- or even a fifty-year-old, Booker remembered thinking. He was nearly seventy with a bum left knee that needed cartilage surgery.
The pilot looked like the recently retired air force major he was—lean, tanned, and wearing dark green aviator sunglasses. When he found out why Booker wanted to go to Memphis, he’d agreed to take him for free.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.
Booker nodded. He wanted to talk to some of the geologists in Memphis and explain his idea for using a nuclear explosion to try to turn off the cycle of earthquakes. The aftershocks, which had shown no evidence of slackening, were killers. His friends, the two geophysicists from the Shock Wave Lab, thought he was crazy, but had written him letters of introduction addressed to Walter Jacobs.
The flight west to Memphis was short, less than two hours in a small plane. The pilot had to keep changing altitude because of all the emergency air traffic.
“The hell of it is they can’t land there,” he explained. “The airport’s closed. All the navigationals were knocked out. Radar, light beacons, everything. The whole damn control tower went down.”
“So where’s everybody going?” Booker said. They’d just dropped from ten thousand to eight thousand feet to make way for a C-140 military cargo plane. The huge gray jet seemed to move in slow motion yet rapidly pulled away from the Cessna.
“They’re using Interstate 55 just north of Memphis on the Arkansas side of the river. Highway over there’s in pretty good shape. They’re flying in relief supplies. Cargo planes are stacked up all across the country, waiting to get in. That stretch of highway is the only place within four hundred miles where they can land. The airport in St. Louis is out of commission; so are the ones in Little Rock and Louisville.”
The time to jump came with dramatic suddenness.
“There’s Memphis and look at her burn!” the pilot said. “I don’t believe it.”
Booker saw the smoke long before he saw the flames, so much smoke it was almost impossible to pick out any landmarks.
The pilot dropped lower. He found an opening in the clouds of smoke and thought they were over the eastern part of the city. “This is as good as it’s gonna get,” he shouted to Booker, who’d worked up the nerve to move to the open doorway. “You ready?”
Booker nodded. He was holding tightly to the doorframe, then he let go and leaned forward, closing his eyes as he fell into space. The wind slashed at his face and howled in his ears. It was incredibly loud and pulled at his trousers so hard he thought he was going to lose them.
Pull the ring, he told himself. Pull the ring.
Groping, eyes still closed, he clenched the metal ring and gave it a strong downward tug just as he’d been instructed.
He immediately shot upward, a bone-jarring ascent, and felt his bladder start to go. He was falling more slowly now, swaying in his harness. He opened his eyes and stared up at the parafoil, a brilliant yellow rectangular canopy. It was swept back slightly along its rear edge. The puffed-out rip-stop fabric, all that was holding him up, was much smaller than he would have thought.
Booker took a breath and looked down. The ground was coming up quickly. He pulled on the right cords and immediately moved right, away from a cloud of thick smoke. He was relieved to see how easily he could steer. He pulled on the left cords and veered in that direction.
Beautiful.
Now where the hell was he?
It looked like a residential district. Through the drifting smoke he could make out the damage; many of the buildings were down. He figured he was about a thousand feet up. He twisted slightly in the harness, trying to pick out the university. It was impossible.
The wind was screaming in his ears, and he was coming down a lot faster than he imagined.
He saw specks moving on the ground, clusters of people. He was too high to make out faces. He steered straight for them, figuring it would be a good idea to have someone around in case he botched the landing and got hurt. A lot of telephone and electrical lines were down there. He hadn’t thought about that.
He tugged on the right cords and heard a popping sound; it was distant, yet distinctive. He heard it again, more clearly this time, a series of sharp cracks. It sounded like firecrackers going off.
They were shooting at him!
He saw three or four men with raised guns; he could see the muzzle flashes.
Booker pulled hard on the left cords; his whole body tilted in that direction. About seven hundred feet in the air, he pulled away from the shooters, moving out of range. He eased up on his grip and straightened out his course again. The ground was very close.
He tried to remember what the instructor had told him about landing. Take the shock in the legs.
He glimpsed the river behind him; that meant he was facing east. Good. At least he was going in the right direction.
Power lines and trees were coming up. He was going to land in someone’s backyard. Or in a tree. Some people were running in his direction, pointing up at him, shouting. He wasn’t sure if they were the shooters. But he wasn’t going to stick around and find out.
Booker tugged hard on the cords with his right hand, moving away from a tall tree. He was drifting through the air sideways, his body almost horizontal to the ground. A sudden gust of wind blew him up about a hundred feet. He looked down again and found himself over a large park. He saw an opening in the trees and pulled left, steering for it. He tried to prepare for the impact and then he hit. His legs bucked and he pitched forward on his stomach. The chute, still open, dragged him along the grass before he remembered to tug the harness release.
He rolled over several times and lay on his back. He stared up at a blue sky streaked with dirty trails of smoke. He tested his arms and legs. Everything moved and seemed to work. He got his bearings and started walking east, toward the university.
NEAR DEXTER, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 15
11:25 A.M.
WITHIN THIRTY MINUTES OF THE PRESIDENT’S departure, an Army UH-60 helicopter from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, landed at the University of Memphis’ earthquake center. The president had personally ordered the aircraft diverted from rescue operations. The seismologists could use it as long as necessary.
The first order of business was to try to get a better “picture” of the new fault. Their initial data showed it started just north of Caruthersville, Missouri, crossed the Mississippi and a sliver of Tennessee, and extended about
