“I’ll sue your ass for slander you keep that up. You were careless. That’s all.”
Atkins lunged for Marshal again and had to be held back.
When Atkins had calmed down, the pilot took him aside. “I don’t much like that bastard any more than you do. I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Or who’s to blame. And I don’t much care. We’ve got to get back to Memphis. I don’t want to be flying in the dark and get my ass shot out of the sky by some hillbilly who’s pissed because he lost his cabin in the earthquake.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 15
1:00 P.M.
BOOKER REACHED THE UNIVERSITY EARLY IN THE afternoon. He’d come with a companion, a small gray monkey that had started following him soon after he’d landed in Overton Park. Booker knew the Memphis Zoo was located there and figured the animal must have escaped from its cage during the earthquake. The monkey was shivering in the cold and Booker had given him one of the apples he’d brought with him. From that moment, the monkey stayed about ten feet behind Booker at all times and had trailed him to the university.
It took him a while to locate the earthquake center. The campus was a mess. The damage was worse than anything he’d seen at Oak Ridge, which was bad enough. The front of the new library had fallen off. Buildings were down wherever he looked, and even though it was cool, he smelled the sickly sweet odor of bodies that hadn’t been pulled from the wreckage and were starting to decay. If they didn’t take care of that soon, he knew they were going to have an epidemic on their hands.
When Booker finally found the earthquake center, he was told Walt Jacobs was in the field running tests and wouldn’t be back until later that evening. An armed guard also told him all the other seismologists were too busy to talk to him and denied him entrance to the building.
Booker showed the guard his ID from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “I jumped out of a goddamned airplane to get here,” he said angrily. “You’ve got to let me in there to talk to someone.”
The Army corporal shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I can’t do that.”
One of the seismologists stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. In an instant, the monkey shot from behind Booker and scurried through the open door. Feeling the annex’s warm air, it was trying to get out of the cold.
“Dammit,” the guard said, turning to give chase.
Booker entered the building right on the soldier’s heels. He was still wearing his bright-red jumpsuit and boots. He carried a small backpack. A pair of goggles were suspended from his neck. He made quite an impression.
As it ran about the library annex, the monkey kept up a frantic ear-splitting screech.
Steve Draper, the president’s science adviser, stepped into the hallway to see what was the matter. He’d stayed behind to monitor the situation after the president left.
“I want to talk to someone about the aftershocks,” Booker said, walking right up to him. He didn’t recognize Draper and assumed he was one of the seismologists. “Promise me, you’ll just hear me out.” He quickly explained who he was and why he was there.
“I’ve brought some notes,” he said, rushing along with his description. “I’m fairly sure the best depth would be at a minimum of two thousand feet. The deeper the better. I did a little research before I left. I’ve been playing with a graph that plots the magnitude of an earthquake with energy released in ergs. The energy released by a magnitude 5.5 quake has an energy equivalent of about 10 ergs to the twentieth power. A nuclear bomb, a small one, say 2 or 3 kilotons, would release about the same amount of energy. The trick here will be to release enough energy along the fault so you get a modest earthquake. But not enough to set off a big one. I can make that happen. The geologists need to tell me how big a bomb is required to do the job and where to place it. That should be pretty straightforward number crunching. I’d do it myself, but I’m getting a little rusty.”
Draper stared at him. He didn’t say a word.
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 15
11:05 P.M.
EVERYONE IN THE EARTHQUAKE CENTER WAITED nervously for Guy Thompson to begin. He and his small team of computer imagers had worked hours analyzing the seismic wave data generated by the many aftershocks as well as by the vibration and explosion tests Walt Jacobs’ team had carried out.
Weston, as usual, sat with Marshal and Wren. They were armed with stacks of technical papers on the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
Atkins had taken a seat as far as possible from Marshal. He still didn’t know what to make of that screw-up with the explosives. It seemed impossible that Marshal could have accidentally fired the blasting machine. But he didn’t like thinking about the only other option. Until he had time to sort it out, he resolved to keep a close watch on Marshal.
Thompson, CD headphones draped around his neck, asked for the lights to be dimmed. He wore a pair of beautifully stitched blue and black cowboy boots and a green Western shirt with a white yoke. He’d let his raven hair hang down to his shoulders.
His first image was a two-dimensional view of what everyone was calling the Caruthersville Fault where it intersected with a previously known segment of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
The fault appeared on the screen as if suspended on the grid—beautiful computer graphics.
The rupture was thirty kilometers deep and extended on a northeasterly line into western Kentucky. It started roughly at Caruthersville, ran across the western edge of Tennessee and up into Kentucky. The fault line ended near Elizabethtown, about thirty miles from Louisville. Lexington was sixty miles away; Cincinnati, 105.
“The total length appears to be about 180 miles,” Thompson said.
Atkins glanced at Elizabeth. That was longer than the original estimate.
When combined with the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the combined fault system reached into six states.
“This is huge,” Thompson observed. “Nothing in North America compares. Not San Andreas. Nothing. The seismic data from other stations in the upper Mississippi Valley indicate aftershock activity on almost every segment of the New Madrid system. Most of it remains concentrated along the Caruthersville Fault.”
A pall of silence followed. The scientists in the room were tired, wrung out. They’d been working for days in a city devastated by the earthquake, where the damage was all around them. Where dead bodies still lay in the streets. They were emotionally drained. It was hard for them to summon up the energy to respond to Thompson’s chilling data.
Atkins thought it might be among the largest intraplate fault systems in the world. Several in Asia were longer. He never would have considered anything like this possible in the continental United States. And all those fault lines were quivering with seismic energy.
It got worse.
Thompson’s next image was another two-dimensional close-up of the Caruthersville Fault, the point where it intersected with one of the older New Madrid segments. Radiating from both lines were literally hundreds of smaller ones, so many they looked like veins connected to major arteries.
“Those are stress fractures,” Thompson said. “In some places, they extend twenty miles or more. I’ve never seen such clear delineations. The seismic waves produced by the explosions slowed dramatically every time they hit one of these fractures.”
Another image, one of the most dramatic of all, showed a series of sharp peaks that rose up like a mountain chain from the new fault zone. The peaks illustrated cumulative aftershock activity in that area. Each of the taller peaks represented a minimum of twenty aftershocks that had occurred in roughly the same twenty-square-mile area. The proportional ratio was less for the smaller peaks.
