JANUARY 1612:15 A.M.
WALT JACOBS SAT BACK IN HIS CHAIR, EYES FIXED straight ahead and shook his head.
“I don’t want to hear any more of this,” he said. “It’s lunacy.”
Steve Draper had asked him to join Atkins and Elizabeth Holleran in an equipment room for a private conversation. It was hard enough for him to focus: he was still waiting for word on his wife and daughter. The two graduate students who’d volunteered to go to his home hadn’t returned, and he was very worried about them as well as about his family. He’d been sleeping less than four hours a day, and his jittery nerves were ready to snap. He had no patience for crazy ideas.
Jacobs rarely lost his temper, but he was as angry as Atkins had ever seen him.
They’d just listened to Fred Booker explain his theory about using a nuclear charge to defuse the earthquake sequence.
Booker was hardly aware of Jacobs’ increasing hostility. Deep in thought, he was standing at a blackboard, using a piece of broken chalk to sketch the fault zone Guy Thompson had displayed graphically. He was working rapidly, making quick, sharp strokes on the board. Chalk fragments were flying.
“If this is the most seismically active segment, I’d make it my target.” He circled the area then drew a horizontal line right through it. “That’s where I’d sink the shaft. We put the bomb down as deep as we can go. As deep as we have time for. The size and location, of course, would all have to be precisely calculated. I’d let you people—”
Jacobs had had enough. “We’re in the middle of a catastrophe, and you’re wasting our time with this,” he said, knocking over a chair as he stood up. “We are not going to set off a nuclear explosion. It’s not even worth discussing.”
Atkins said, “How would we know a nuclear charge wouldn’t actually precipitate another big quake? Push it over the edge.” That was the very thing they wanted to avoid and to his way of thinking was the most dangerous element of Booker’s startling proposal. They had absolutely no empirical evidence to fall back on. The thing had never been done. He couldn’t buy this at all.
Booker said, “I can’t answer that. There’s going to be a risk. And I don’t underestimate that. All I’m saying is that if you people can tell me how much energy needs to be released along the fault to reduce the strain energy, I can design and fire a charge that might do the job.” He looked at Jacobs. “Throwing chairs around isn’t going to solve our problem. It never did out at the Nevada Test Site.”
“To hell with you,” Jacobs said. “So you know how to blow big holes in the ground. Goddammit, what’s the point?”
Booker stood right in front of Jacobs and stared at him. “The point is we can do something,” he said in a loud, frustrated voice. “We can try to do something. We don’t have to sit here and look at our precious data and get clobbered again.” Booker took off his goggles and threw them across the room.
Draper ordered Jacobs and Booker to cool off.
There had long been speculation that a nuclear blast, properly located, might be able to defuse an earthquake. Atkins was aware of it, but that’s all it was. Speculation. No reputable geologist had ever seriously suggested such a thing beyond raising it as a hypothetical. It was a fringe issue—too far-out to be seriously debated, too far-fetched. On the other hand, no one doubted a nuclear bomb could trigger an earthquake. There’d been too many examples. Some of the quakes had been fairly substantial, in the magnitude 5 range, perhaps even a little larger.
Elizabeth said, “Wasn’t there discussion that a Soviet underground test may have set off a mag 7 quake in Iran back in the late seventies?”
“I’m familiar with that earthquake,” Atkins said. He’d visited Tabas, a city in remote western Iran, where at least 25,000 people had been killed. “The Soviets had set off a 10-megaton blast at Semipalitinsk about thirty-six hours before the quake. But no one has ever established a definitive cause-and-effect link between the two events. And that’s the problem with all the antibomb people who worry that underground tests have made the earth more vulnerable to major earthquakes. There’s no hard evidence. It’s an emotional argument without any scientific basis in fact.”
“There are maybe a couple million people living within a three-or four-hour drive of any place you’d put a bomb along that fault,” Jacobs said in a voice that had lost none of its anger. “What happens if something goes wrong and all that radioactivity is vented into the air or leaches into the ground?” He was furious and was making no effort to conceal how he felt.
Booker said, “I’m reasonably sure we can prevent any venting and that if we—”
“Reasonably?” Jacobs sneered, interrupting him.
“Exposing a lot of people to radioactivity is an issue,” Booker said angrily. “No doubt about it. But an equally important question you have to answer is what happens if you get another magnitude 8 quake? What if it triggers seismic activity on those other faults Doctor Thompson was talking about a few minutes ago?” He was as mad as he’d ever been in his life. He’d dealt with stubborn fools all his life. Stubborn fools with Ph.D.’s. He stormed over to where Jacobs was sitting and slammed his fist on the table. “If you think that’s a serious possibility, my question to you is this: Do you try to come up with a way to stop it, or do you just shrug and say, sorry, there’s nothing we can do. It’s an act of nature.”
Booker turned to Atkins, who stood with his back to him, staring holes in the blackboard. “What if you get another triple here? Isn’t that what’s got everyone worried? It’s sure as hell got me worried. I wouldn’t want to see another mag 8 earthquake rip through the valley. It couldn’t survive it, and I’m not sure the country could.”
“We still don’t know how much energy is locked down there,” Atkins said. “There aren’t any adequate ways to measure it.”
“Excuse me, excuse me,” Booker said, clenching his fists and lowering his head in frustration. “But didn’t I just hear a discussion of multiple fractures along that new fault. Isn’t that evidence of elastic strain energy?”
“Yes, but the problem’s always been trying to measure it,” Jacobs said, his hostility unabated. “All we can say for certain is that deformations, or uplift, or the number of aftershocks can indicate a serious buildup of tectonic stress. But we don’t know how much stress has actually loaded up there, or how much it would take to trigger an earthquake.”
Booker took a deep breath. He wondered if the man was even listening to him. “Let me put it as simply as I can,” he said. “Do you think there’s going to be another big earthquake? That’s the question, isn’t it? Is another big earthquake possible?”
For a long time, no one spoke. Then Jacobs said, “Yes, it’s possible.”
NEAR BENTON, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 16
8:00 A.M.
THE NEWS ABOUT THE DEEP FISSURE CAME FROM Lauren Mitchell, who’d managed to find a Red Cross unit near Mayfield with a shortwave radio. Shortly after first light, a team from the earthquake center in Memphis flew directly to the site aboard an Army UH-60 helicopter.
Elizabeth Holleran had never seen anything like it: a fissure running nearly a mile long at depths varying from two hundred to six hundred feet. The deep tear in the ground had been much larger at one point. Visible from the air, the scar that marked where it had already closed extended nearly two miles through the hilly, forested west Kentucky countryside.
It was just after eight in the morning. Powerful spotlights hooked to portable generators illuminated the depths of the crevasse. After spending an hour inspecting it and helping to set up the lights, Elizabeth was ready to make a descent.
Atkins took her aside. “You’re sure about this?” he asked. He didn’t like anything about the plan, but he realized there was no stopping her. The fissure provided an unprecedented opportunity to look for evidence of previous earthquakes. Elizabeth was determined to make the most of it.
“I couldn’t get a trench this good in California if I had a dozen backhoes working overtime for a decade,” she
