Admiral Warrens plashed across the inside hangar deck of the U.S.S.Constellation, surveying the damage. The ship hadn’t capsized after all, but the deck had taken on enough water to sink the Titanic twice. And yet the old girl was still afloat, limping along on emergency power.
Initial reports coming in from the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, and some earthquake- forecasting agency in Japan blamed the tidal wave on a major quake in East Antarctica-11.1 on the Richter scale. But Warren couldn’t confirm it with McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott. All communications with American bases on the continent had been cut off by a burst of EMP.
All of which seemed to validate reports coming out of Moscow and Beijing that the “seismic event” in Antarctica was really a secret U.S.-sponsored nuclear explosion-a flagrant violation of the international Antarctic Treaty.
The electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, had also blinded spy satellites overhead. Warren was told that if he couldn’t get a bird up in the air to fly reconn over the epicenter, it was going to take at least sixteen hours before any U.S. forces could reach the target to either prove the nuke accusations false or cover up Yeats’s dirty work.
“Goddamn you, Yeats,” Warren muttered as he stepped around the floating pieces of a broken wing. Looked like one of their F/A-18 Hornets. The rest was mangled with what used to be an S-3B Viking.
Warren shook his head. Twenty-six wounded, three in critical condition and nine missing. And that was just the Constellation. News reports said one-third of the island of Male, the Maldives’s capital, was underwater. Even a small rise in sea levels at this point could wipe out the island nation-all 1,180 islands. The entire population of 263,000 inhabitants was at risk.
The only positive news Warren could report back to Washington was that his crew had managed to rescue the Greenpeace protesters from their now-sunken ship. The meddlers were helping out with the wounded and serving up some of the best damned coffee Warren had ever tasted.
He was on his fourth cup when one of his radio officers splashed over. “EAM coming over Milstar, sir.”
Warren watched a sock float past him on the hangar deck. Milstar was the president’s communications link to senior military commanders. The $17 billion Military Commanders’ Voice Conference Network was designed to enable commanders to discuss whether a ballistic-missile launch threatened North America and, if so, to determine the appropriate response.
“Priority one, sir.”
“I’m coming.”
Warren took a final gulp as he eyed the rad-hardened Black Hawk chopper that several of his maintenance crew were working on in the corner-at his orders. He then crumpled the Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it on the hangar floor, where it floated away.
Inside the Constellation ’s war suite, the water was only ankle deep. Warren walked in to find his senior officer, McBride, seated at the conference table. Next to McBride, to Warren’s surprise and dismay, was the scruffy Greenpeace geek from the Arctic Sunrise whom CNN had featured. He was fiddling with some candy-colored laptop computer that looked like a toy.
Warren frowned. “What’s this civilian doing here, McBride?”
“This is Thornton Larson, a Ph.D. in geophysics from MIT,” McBride said. “He reviewed the Milstar downloads and has a presentation for you.”
“Couldn’t your officers figure it out, McBride?”
McBride said, “The data is so off the charts, sir, we felt we needed a second opinion. Dr. Larson has some valuable insights.”
Warren sat down and studied the disheveled Larson. The smart-ass hasn’t even discovered the razor blade, he thought to himself, and McBride was sharing national security secrets with him. “Enlighten me, Larson.”
“I was able to retrieve one final image from a satellite overhead before its innards were fried by that EMP,” Larson said excitedly. “I cleaned it up and here it is.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. A blue-tinted image of Antarctica, all too familiar to Warren these days, came into view. But in the middle of it, or rather just off center in East Antarctica, was a brown-yellow dot.
“Is that awesome, dude, or what?” Larson could only marvel at his work.
“God almighty, tell me that’s some storm and not ground zero,” Warren said.
Larson addressed the image on the wall screen. “Well, hello Mr. Ground Zero, are you ready for your close- up?”
The brown-yellow dot on-screen started to magnify, frame by frame, until Warren found himself looking at a crater in the ice, and at the bottom of it was a complex of pyramids, temples, and waterways. The kid was obviously playing them all for fools, Warren decided.
“You think you’re pretty funny, Larson, don’t you?” Warren said, starting to get up. “Let’s see how hilarious the brig can be.”
“Please, sir,” McBride said. “We checked it out and this guy hasn’t doctored anything.”
Warren slowly sat down, his thoughts immediately turning to Yeats. The SOB must have known all along. “So you’re telling me what I’m seeing on that screen is for real?”
“What you’re seeing is a localized event, like a garage band on the verge of stardom,” Larson said. “This is just the first single off an album I’ll call Mother Nature’s Cacophony in Doomsday Major.”
Warren gave McBride his “your ass is on the line here” stare, which his executive officer acknowledged.
Larson said, “Your attention, class.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. The image of an ancient city surrounded by ice was gone. In its place, spinning in the center, flickering with each power drain of the carrier’s electrical system, was what looked like a thermal image of the sun in space.
“Tell me what I’m looking at on the screen, Larson.”
“Earth’s core, baby,” Larson said. “The core! A new technique similar to a medical sonogram enables us to generate an image of the inner planet. I’ve used the latest version of PowerPoint on my G5 to generate-”
Warren waved his hand impatiently. “Get to the point.”
“Earth is an onion, man, made up of layers,” Larson said. “And it’s a rotating onion too, churning up hurricanes and storms in the atmosphere. But the core spins independently, and changes there can trigger significant consequences near and at the planet’s surface. I’m talking consequences.”
“You mean earthquakes and tidal waves?” Warren said.
“Big time,” Larson said. “Albert Einstein, Dr. Relativity himself, even theorized that the outer crust, the lithosphere, periodically shifts over the asthenosphere due to ice buildup in the polar regions.”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying, baby, is that we seem to be witnessing what is known as an earth-crust displacement. You dudes in the military-industrial complex prefer the perverse little acronym ECD.”
Warren didn’t know what this kid was smoking, but he had to know where this theory was going. “And what’s this ECD going to do?”
“Well, here’s where it gets really nasty,” Larson said. “Antarctica is going to get pushed toward the equator and North America into the Arctic Circle.”
Another computer image appeared on-screen, this one of Earth. Warren felt his own temperature rise as Antarctica moved up toward the center of the globe, ice free, and North America was pushed to the top of the globe.
Warren said, “So you’re saying we’re better off staying here and sunning on the beaches of Antarctica rather than freezing our asses off in the USA, which is going to get buried under two miles of ice.”
“Bingo!” Larson said. “Bingo! An ECD would cause extinctions to occur on different continents at different rates, based on varying changes in the world’s latitudes. I’ve mapped the projected lines of destruction. We’ll call them PLDs. Hey, I made up a new acronym! Well, these PLDs are pretty damn awesome, I’ve got to tell you.”
On-screen Larson drew a circle around the globe, through the North and South poles. “The line of greatest
