Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Don’t bet on it, pendejo.

  Maria heard a car door slam outside and looked out to see Freeman walking towards the entrance. She ran down the stairs, praying that this time he wouldn’t take so much convincing that her theory was right.

  18:02: 16

  ‘Well, Sandra didn’t back up her grocery list, but she backed up everything else, including all her e-mail correspondence,’ Arazon said, leading him in from the back door to the lab where she had two computers running. One monitor displayed a page of text, the other a three-dimensional image above several columns of abbreviations and figures.

  ‘What’s this thing here?’ Larry asked, indicating the latter.

  Arazon arched her eyebrows. ‘Sergeant, when I tell you what I think we’ve got here, I don’t want you saying I’m loco, okay? You gotta hear me out.’

  ‘Dr Arazon, I helped fake a ritual human sacrifice before a worldwide live TV audience this morning. My concept of crazy is pretty forgiving at the moment. You talk, I’ll listen.’

  ‘Okay, on this screen is e-mail to Sandra Biscane from Luther St John - plus there’s more on-file. And on this screen is what he commissioned her to work on: it’s the prototype for a new kind of modelling software. Now, here’s why she wouldn’t tell anybody about it.’

  Arazon highlighted a section of text using the mouse. Larry leaned closer to the monitor.

  ‘. . . I have to insist on the utmost discretion regarding this project and my involvement in it. As I’m sure you can appreciate, many of those who I consider my political allies would be most displeased to learn where my sympathies lie with regard to this particular issue. Some people might call me a hypocrite or a coward for not standing up to be counted, but if I had shown my hand before, I would not have been privy to the information that may now assist this cause.’

  ‘So what the hell’s he talking about?’ Larry asked.

  ‘Nuclear testing. He claims to be very opposed to it, which would indeed come as a shock to a lot of his GOP buddies. He tells Sandra he’s learned from friends in high places that the US is planning to follow France’s lead and carry out underwater weapons tests. Says he’s concerned not just for the environment but about the possibility of deeper seismological consequences.’

  ‘Tidal waves.’

  ‘You got it. Says the government couldn’t give a shit about the first but the threat of the second might carry some weight, so he commissioned Sandra to adapt her modelling software - thus.’

  Arazon pointed him to the other monitor.

  ‘You feed in the details of a specific location - supposedly the test site - and then the program simulates what would happen if you caused an explosion right there. What’s on the screen just now is a default, Myora Atoll. These columns here are all the variables, and the program’s calculations get more accurate the more blanks you can fill in: weapon’s nominal yield, distance to nearest land mass, average water depth around test site, density of surrounding rock types, silt compaction density, sonar-tested silt stratification depths, et cetera et cetera et cetera. The idea isn’t simply to demonstrate that you could cause a seismic wave by setting off a nuke in the wrong place - this thing could tell you exactly what kind of place the wrong place is.’

  ‘However, the late professor was working on the assumption that causing a tidal wave was something you’d generally like to avoid,’ Larry observed. ‘So if, for instance, you had prophesied that LA was going to be flooded by an act of God, and you happened to be in possession of a nuclear weapon . . .’

  Arazon nodded solemnly. ‘This would tell you where to plant it for maximum effect. Of course, you’d then need someone to supply geological data about various sub-oceanic sites until you found one that suited your needs. Someone like the Californian Oceanographic Research Institute.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Are you really sure about this?’

  ‘Have I been wrong so far, Sergeant?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Only doubt I have is how Luther St John could procure an atomic bomb to play with.’

  ‘Well, he commissioned this software and then after that he made his prediction. Sounds to me like he was pretty confident of getting hold of one. No, wait a minute, he knows someone who could get hold of one for him. The Southland Militia — that’s who he’s in this with. They whacked Biscane and hit the Gazes Also

  ‘The FBI are worried these assholes might have stolen the sub to smuggle nukes into the US. Agent Steel told me the Militia’s Oberführer has been back and forth a lot from Frankfurt recently, possibly en route to somewhere in the former Soviet bloc. I thought Steel was getting carried away with himself, but . . .’

  ‘The Ukraine,’ Arazon said suddenly, eyes wide.

  ‘What?’

  ‘St John was in the Ukraine, Jesus, only about a month ago. CalORI couldn’t get hold of him because he was in Kiev. He was buying statues or something, religious relics.’

  ‘Aw, Jesus Christ, tell me this ain’t happening.’ Larry reached for his mobile and the card bearing Steel’s number. ‘Tell me I fell asleep and I’m gonna wake up in time for Oprah. I’ll even watch the piece of crap.’

  He punched the number. Steel answered after two rings.

  ‘Hey Peter, Larry Freeman. Please tell me you heard back from German Immigration and Liskey wasn’t in the Ukraine.’

  ‘He was in Kiev four times, plus Odessa last month. How the fuck d’you know that?’

  ‘Shit. Peter, you better get down here to the Californian Oceanographic Research Institute, and it’d be a good idea if you didn’t stop at any red lights on the way. I’ll give you the address . . .’

  16:31:26

  Steel was talking quietly but frantically into his telephone, his back to Larry, while Arazon tapped at the keyboard, sifting through the data accumulated by the Gazes Also and refrigerated for safe-keeping. The thought was rolling round and round his mind to call Sophie and tell her to get the hell out of town, but Sophie wasn’t the kind of woman who did anything without knowing precisely why; and if he told her, how could he ask her not to warn everyone else in the city?

  No. That way worse things than madness lay.

  Stay focused.

  Steel snapped his mobile shut and turned around.

  ‘Okay, I’m afraid this doesn’t get any better,’ he said. ‘I made some calls. St John’s private yacht, the Light of the World, was indeed dispatched to the Ukraine to transport religious artefacts back to the US. The artefacts in question were statues, and the bad news, if things can get any fucking worse, is that there were supposed to be three of them.’

  ‘Where’s the ship now?’

  ‘Don’t have a fix on it,’ the Fed admitted. ‘But even if we did, what could we do? Board it? I mean, we all think we know what we’ve got here, but they might not see it that way further up the chain. Getting authorisation to raid the private yacht of a politically connected billionaire takes more than software and speculation. It also takes time, which we may not have. If St John did transport nuclear weapons from Odessa, they could already be off-loaded, and a pantload of good it would do us to raid an empty ship.

  ‘Basically, if these bombs exist, we have to deduce their final destination, and we have to consider the possibility that they’ve already reached it. So if Dr Arazon can work out where the nukes are likely to be planted, then we seek, locate and defuse. If we’re real lucky we might be early and run into the Militia when they turn up in their stolen sub. But I wouldn’t count on it.’

  16:11:44

  ‘Shit, I’m wasting my time with this,’ Arazon muttered angrily.

  ‘Now just keep it together, stay calm,’ Larry urged, pulling his chair closer.

  ‘No, I mean I am wasting my time. What was I thinking about? Can you hand me that CD there?’

  Larry passed the glinting disc into her hand. She popped it on to the awaiting tray and it slid inside the computer.

  ‘I’ve been trying to feed data from the Gazes Also into Biscan
e’s prototype - from scratch. I was forgetting: Mitch constructed 3D models of each location to present to St John - the models must be compatible for both programs because they were both developed by Sandra. That’s how St John would have worked it: use Mitch’s model as a base, then key in the extra data that the new system requires. Yeah, look, here we go.’

  The screen carne to life, displaying a rotatable frame diagram of a section of ocean floor.

  ‘See? The model by itself is running fine. Just missing some stats on stuff the old program didn’t need to know — mostly to do with how the environment would or wouldn’t withstand an explosion.’ She pointed to the columns under the diagram, where several bars were flashing on and off, denoting undefined variables. ‘For instance, SCD - that’s Silt Compaction Density. You gotta use the mouse to outline the area that the density figure you’re keying in applies to. Same with the stratification depths. Let me call that stuff up on the other machine here.’

  She rolled her chair a few feet to the next keyboard and stuck another disc into its CD-rom drive, quickly calling up some documents on to the screen.

  ‘How many locations did Kramer’s team study?’ Steel asked, fidgeting, unable to keep his eyes from the clock.

  ‘There were four expeditions, but we can discount the last one because they never got to report any findings for that. Hey, don’t worry, this isn’t gonna be a needle-in-a-haystack deal. I’ll admit I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but I will know it when I see it.’

  Arazon worked the keyboard feverishly, tapping at the cursors to zoom in and out from the model. To Larry, watching the shapes and features scroll past, it was like looking at a model of the surface of another planet.

  He noticed that parts of the land/seascape were shaded in different tones.

  ‘Dark grey is pre-charted topography,’ Arazon told him. ‘Old news, in other words. Features or details discovered and charted by the Gazes are in the lighter shade. They were working along this margin just south of the Murray fracture zone. Anything further north or south would be no good because the brunt of your wave would hit Frisco or San-Dee. St John’s targeting LA.

  ‘Okay,’ she announced, ‘let’s give this place a shot. Jasper Seamount. Sergeant, can you read out the stats from that screen as I ask for them?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Larry watched the model change colours as Arazon used the mouse to define areas of the digital reconstruction and carefully keyed in the corresponding figures. The flashing bars were stilled one by one until a single blank remained.

  ‘Okay, Agent Steel, this last one you’re gonna have to fill in,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How big is the bomb - in kilotons?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know.’

  ‘Just an educated guess is fine. Sandra’s notes admit there’s a big margin of error in the software’s estimate of blast impact. It won’t be pinpoint accurate in telling us how big a hole your nuke would make, so I only need a rough figure.’

  ‘Then what good is it?’

  ‘Because it will be pinpoint accurate in telling us what that hole would cause, whatever size the computer estimates it to be.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘Let’s see, if it was a MIRV6, say around thirty kilotons nominal payload - but there could be as many as three of them.’

  ‘So that’s ninety?’

  ‘Depends. If they’re tactically positioned, a cumulative simultaneous blast could . . . Ah, fuck it, call it a hundred. And if it’s three CHIBs, call it two hundred.’

  ‘We’re dealing in worst-case scenarios,’ Larry said. ‘Go for the biggest figure.’

  Arazon ran the simulation. The screen went blank, then the model reconstructed itself, with a large section of the seamount now missing. Arazon began pulling up sub-menus and banks of statistics. Larry was wondering whether the thing had worked; maybe he’d seen too many video games, but he’d been expecting a little more spectacle.

  ‘What gives?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much. Nuke a seamount like this and the rock itself is soaking up a lot of the blast. Debris tumbles two miles down into the abyssal plain. The computer estimates nothing worse than a good day for hanging ten.’

  ‘So you don’t know what we’re looking for?’ Steel asked, exasperated.

  ‘On the contrary, having seen this I think I do.’

  Arazon zoomed back out and began scrolling along the model at speed, then got up and crossed the lab to a cupboard from which she produced an outsized book. She laid it on the worktop beside her machine and opened it, revealing a map of what looked like the surface of the moon.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she said, her eyes flitting back and forth from the book to the monitor, ‘I’d like you to shut down the file you’ve got on screen and call up the data on Wegener’s Guyot.’

  15:40:53

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What?’ Steel demanded.

  ‘This has to be it.’

  ‘Why “oh dear"?’

  ‘Because I didn’t think worst-case scenarios got quite as bad as this.’ She pointed at the map. ‘This thing here, like an anthill, this is Wegener’s Guyot, seventy-five miles out. It’s comparatively small, not a real textbook guyot, not like these giant things out in the deep ocean basin. It’s right on the edge of Patten Escarpment, on the continental slope, and it’s where a prevailing undersea current runs out of steam, so it’s like a giant silt-dumping ground all around here. There’s deep, deep layers of stratified matter before you get to impervious crustal rock. Any kind of nuclear blast is going to leave a very big crater. Two hundred kilotons, even half that, less . . . Jesus.’

  Larry and Steel looked at her, confused and impatient.

  ‘See, it’s all about the water’s equilibrium,’ she explained. ‘You disturb it and it doesn’t just compensate, it overreacts. The forces pulling billions of gallons of sea-water into a newly dug hole don’t stop when it’s full. The water at the back of the queue is still pushing to get in, you know? And then it all comes back out again, which is when you get a wave.

  ‘The wave’s only a few feet high on the open sea, but then it hits the continental shelf, and that’s where the trouble starts. It meets shoal-water and the friction slows it down, like fifty per cent every two miles, so as that wave-front slows and the depth gets shallower and shallower, you get millions of tons of water piling up behind it. And incidentally, the continental shelf is particularly wide west of the LA conurbation.’

  Arazon breathed out. Larry and Steel breathed in.

  ‘A wave hit Hilo, Hawaii, in nineteen sixty. It drove entire buildings through one another, and I’m not talking about straw huts, here. These were steel-reinforced concrete office blocks, and they were smashed like matchwood. The wave was approximately thirty-five feet high. According to the computer, two hundred kilotons at Wegener’s Guyot could give us a wave five times that size when it hits LA.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Steel gasped.

  ‘Even half or a quarter of that and the devastation would still be incredible. Not just on the coast, either. LA’s flat as a pool table - with such volume behind it, the sea would flood in for miles. The sewage system and water supplies would be crippled, so apart from the initial damage, you’d have drought and disease to contend with too . . . And if all that isn’t scary enough, seismic waves don’t travel alone. The water would pull back out, then forty minutes later surf’s up again. There were three waves at Krakatoa; the maximum recorded is nine.’

  14:02:02

  The Gazes Also pulled slowly away from the CalORI pier, Arazon at the helm, striking out for the ocean in defiance of those who’d ended its last voyage. Steel had said he wouldn’t blame her if she jumped in her Ford and headed literally for the hills, long as she kept her mouth shut, but she’d been adamant: it wasn’t a matter of sailing to the right co-ordinates, sticking your head under the water and spotting a bomb — the FBI divers needed someone to direct the se
arch from the surface. Not only could Arazon operate sonar to map out the submerged landscape, she was also the one best able to estimate where the nukes might be placed for maximum effect.

  Larry knew nobody could have kept her off the boat anyway. There was nothing worse than feeling everything is out of your hands at a time like this, a sensation he was about to be harshly reacquainted with.

  He stood beside Steel on the pier, the darkness lit by a three-quarter moon and a priol of floodlights. Arazon had been joined on the GA by another field agent, a young, bright-looking Oriental guy, and they were to rendezvous at the guyot with a team of divers travelling on a fast-picket Navy launch out of San Diego.

  ‘You should go home, catch some shut-eye,’ Steel said. ‘It’s gonna take them a few hours to get there, and a few more before we’ll know anything . . . either way.’

  It was Steel who looked like he could really use the sleep. Larry felt for him, in such a shitty Catch-22 position: he’d called the situation up to Brisko and beyond to get the nod for the assistance he needed, but at this stage it was still his show. If it was proved that there was indeed a nuclear threat to a US city, then heaven and earth would be mobilised in response. But when all you got is a computer program and a bunch of theories, then you can only do the good lawman’s job: pursue the line of enquiry to the best of your abilities and available resources. Steel confided that he was relieved even to get the dive-team and the Navy launch; despite what they said officially, the Feds were still reluctant to be seen going in like gangbusters since the Jewell fiasco in Atlanta in ‘96. And with undercover colleagues having been lost to the Southland Militia, questions had been asked of Steel about his judgement with regard to that organisation.

  Larry remembered how crazy he’d thought Steel sounded less than twelve hours ago; then he thought of his own increasing fatigue and wondered whether he wasn’t in the process of flipping out too.