Blink of an Eye

by William S. Cohen

  The exercise was still going on when participants learned that real terrorists had struck in America. The coincidence of a terrorist exercise occurring during a terrorist attack merely added to the long list of improbabilities that people like Lanier had lived through in their responses to nuclear alarms.

  Lanier had had a physics professor at Stanford who turned discursive one day and said that every coincidence led to inevitability. “Coincidences,” he said, “were one of the many ways we try to understand fate. We live our lives between moments of fate and moments of chance. And at memorable junctions, we come upon events we call coincidences.”

  The professor’s remark was one of the thoughts that had spun through Lanier’s mind on that September day when, while Lanier was acting in an imaginary catastrophe in England, a real catastrophe had struck America. Jackal Cave ended abruptly, and Lanier was given a real mission.

  The White House had to know, without producing further panic, if a dirty bomb was part of the terrorist attack. Lanier and his NEST group were put on one of the few aircraft allowed to fly that day. When they landed in New York, Lanier was told to report to the officials directing rescue operations at the Twin Towers.

  NEST operatives were like volunteer firemen. They had other jobs at the NNSA, but when the alarm went off, they became part of the NEST response, a unit that could mobilize as many as sixty men and women. At the heart of NEST were the searchers. They had been trained to risk their lives as inconspicuously as possible, looking like ordinary people walking around streets or down the halls of buildings, carrying attaché cases that contained radiation detection devices and transmitters that would send telltale beeps to ear buds that led to what looked like iPods. The beeps would focus NEST on the possible bomb. And if it were real, next would come the disarming and the disposal, which brought in the other members of the team and the ultimate purpose for the team’s existence.

  And so Lanier and his team went to work at Ground Zero. As far as anyone working at the Twin Towers knew, they were some FEMA guys flown in from Washington to search for unseen fires smoldering under the rubble. When the NEST squad was done and made a classified report to the NNSA, their superiors knew that no nuclear material had been used in the attack.

  This time, Lanier thought, we go in knowing that something did happen … Something nuclear.

  39

  “WELCOME, RUBE,” said Major General Frank Wethersfield, commanding general of Fort Stewart, as Lanier led the other NEST members from the runway to the operations center at Hunter Army Airfield. A second van pulled up and two soldiers began unloading the hazmat suits and equipment.

  Wethersfield, who wore a sharply creased camouflage uniform and combat boots, shook Lanier’s hand. The broad-shouldered general towered over Lanier, a man so thin, short, and bent that he appeared to be frail. But his grip was surprisingly strong, and a closer look showed him to be wiry rather than frail. Behind his wire-rim glasses were bright, piercing blue eyes. He and his companions wore khaki slacks and blue windbreakers with LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY embroidered on the left front.

  Lanier introduced Wethersfield to the other members of the smallest Nuclear Emergency Support Team he had ever assembled: Russ Belcher, an authority on radiation poisoning; Fred Malcomson, a physicist specializing in nuclear-weapon design; and Liz Dalton, an expert on identifying the origin of nuclear radiation.

  They all entered the operations center while Lanier and Wethersfield lingered on the outside steps.

  “I guess you know we’re getting ready to go in ourselves,” Wethersfield told Lanier. “As soon as we hear from FEMA. We have two brigades—about six thousand men and women. We’re on full wartime alert. The whole goddamn fort’s in lockdown, waiting for what happens next.”

  “It’s pretty surrealistic, isn’t it?” Lanier said, with a trace of the accent he had when he entered the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. From there he had gone to MIT, then to Stanford—and, twenty-one years ago, to Los Alamos. “I’ve spent most of my work life doing drills. I’ve been like a fireman who has jumped on the fire truck a thousand times but has never seen a fire.”

  Wethersfield nodded. “The Army’s a lot different,” he said. “We don’t need exercises. We’ve got the real thing. Most of my men are Iraq or Afghanistan vets. They all know they can be shot at and maybe die. Now they’ve got a mission where they might get cancer. They didn’t go into the Army to get fucking cancer. I can’t send them in and sit on my ass back in Stewart. I’m going, too.”

  He suddenly paused. Then he asked softly, “Who the fuck did this, Rube? Who the fuck did this?”

  Lanier looked up at the general and said, “I don’t know, Frank. All I know is I’m supposed to help find that out.”

  Wethersfield and Lanier entered the operations center together and walked into a room where members of the general’s staff had assembled. “Dr. Lanier, head of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team,” Wethersfield said by way of introduction to officers who had already been briefed about the arrival of NEST. He nodded to a colonel who stood before a wall map holding a pointer.

  “Good morning, Dr. Lanier. We are here,” the colonel said, aiming a laser beam at a gray area marked HUNTER ARMY AIRFIELD, east of a much larger gray area marked FORT STEWART RESERVATION. “We have sent out recon patrols as far as here.” The red dot moved eastward on the map to a line indicating the boundary between Hunter and the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station.

  “A Coast Guard station that far inland?” Lanier interrupted, a scowl reflecting his puzzlement.

  “Yes, Doctor. It’s only nineteen kilometers from the sea and is—was—a safe spot from coastal flooding,” the colonel replied. “Well, here we detected traces of radiation and pulled back the patrols. We believe there are casualties at the Coast Guard station.” He turned to Lanier.

  Lanier stepped up and looked at the map for a full minute. The Savannah River, flowing farther east, curved sharply, forming what looked like an outline of a cup. He imagined a wall of water rushing up the river to the top of the curve, then spilling out, as if from the cup. The curve would divert the flood, pouring the wall of water out of the cup and into the city.

  Turning away from the map, Lanier said to the colonel, “I’d like to see the recon reports and the report of the electricians who got your electric power back. It might give us some clues about the power of the EMP. And we’re going to lay out a preliminary radiation zone based on whatever information we can get. What the White House needs most right now are radiation readings. That’s what NEST is going to get.”

  *

  A few minutes later, Lanier and the other three NEST members in their yellow hazmat suits and black boots awkwardly stomped out of the building. They would not pull on their wide-visored hoods and respirator backpacks until they were about to enter a probable radiation area.

  Clipped to the right sleeve of each suit was a direct-reading dosimeter that showed accumulated exposure. The device, the size and shape of a fountain pen, contained a thermometer-like indicator set at zero. As X-rays or gamma rays struck the dosimeter, the display moved up in proportion to the radiation exposure. Lanier knew that the hazmat suits would shield him and the others from an injurious exposure. But he wanted everyone to be alerted to danger, and, in case of a suit failure, alerted to a possible overdose.

  Wethersfield accompanied the team outside. “We’ve got two Strykers and volunteer crews, ready to roll,” he said, pointing to a pair of eight-wheeled vehicles nearly nine feet high. “They’re stripped of weapons and we ramped up their communications to your specs.” Lanier had asked Wethersfield to set up a direct line from the Strykers, through Fort Stewart’s command center, to Falcone in the Situation Room.

  Each Stryker had a driver and a vehicle commander. The commander of the lead Stryker stepped forward, introduced himself to Lanier, and gave him and the others a quick tour. When the vehicle was sealed, the crew looked at the world through periscopes. The commander could leave h
is seat and stand on a platform that allowed him to open a hatch and stand half exposed. The two NEST passengers would ride in a rear compartment that could be opened so that they could enter and leave.

  A camera attached to the periscope in Lanier’s Stryker streamed images into his laptop, then to the Situation Room through the Fort Stewart communications center. The two vehicles were also linked by radio, as were the four NEST members. They had microphones and earplugs built into their hoods so that they could talk to each other. Lanier could also patch in to Stewart and thus to Falcone.

  The Stryker crewmen were wearing CBRN suits, camouflaged military versions of hazmats, designed to be quickly donned over uniforms in combat. Once called NBC suits for protection against nuclear, chemical, and biological threats, they got a fourth initial when dirty bombs became a new possible hazard. The soldiers had not yet put on their hoods and breathing masks.

  The two Strykers rumbled off, Lanier’s in the lead. After looking at the map, he had decided to aim toward what he thought of as “the cup.” He laid out a route that took them to the Coast Guard Air Station at the northern end of Hunter, then right to the Truman Parkway, which ran along the southern end of Savannah’s historic district, ending at the river. From there the Strykers would explore the center of the city.

  At the air station, the NEST members got their first view of destruction. Lanier ordered the Strykers to stop and told everyone to put on their full hazmat suits. The Stryker commander climbed onto the platform and opened the hatch, then stepped aside to allow Lanier to stand in the hatchway. Lanier told the commander to turn on the Webcam that would stream video into Lanier’s laptop, which transmitted the video into the Stewart-Situation Room net.

  “Stewart. This is Lanier. Put me through to Summit,” he began.

  “Falcone here.”

  “We are looking at the Coast Guard Air Station to the east of Hunter. I am sending a Webcam video stream with a GPS locator to augment my observations. About one hundred meters ahead are the remains of a large building, apparently a hangar. About twenty meters to the left of the ruins are the scattered wrecks of six helicopters. They seem to have been along a heliport flight line. There are muddy high-water lines along the standing wall of the building. The high-water lines look to be five to ten meters above the ground.

  “I see five bodies, in what look like flight suits. They are lying facedown, several meters apart.

  “My dosimeter”—he looked down at his right sleeve—“shows a background radiation level that is about the dose limit for nuclear industry employees and uranium miners. You’ll get details and much more after the emergency response team. But for now I am not seeing any dangerous radiation here, at this point. I emphasize here.”

  “Can we say that publicly?” Falcone asked.

  “I suggest you hold off until we can get some solid data to back up this first very preliminary report. I’ve got a Globemaster full of experts and equipment coming into Hunter today.”

  “Okay. But I’ll tell the President, Admiral Mason, and Penny Walker, Homeland Security.”

  “What about my boss?”

  “Secretary Graham is on his way back to Washington. When he gets here I’ll brief him. But all—I stress all—of your reports and all that comes out of NNSA efforts down there must come to me. I’ll then dole it out to Admiral Mason, the incident commander, and to Secretary Walker. Homeland Security is the lead agency, not DOE.”

  “So you’re the big boss. Okay. And we’ve got a new bureaucracy setup. Okay. But please keep what I’m telling you tightly held.” Lanier paused. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sticking my neck out. Use your discretion about telling the President or your other advisees. What I am thinking right now … the picture I get right now … is a wall of water coming up the Savannah River to a big curve—you’ll see it on the map—and then flowing westward, smashing into the city and into the Coast Guard Station, but not as far west as Hunter Airfield, and then withdrawing, back to the river, across marshes, then back to the sea. That movement is the basis for the tsunami illusion. And it means we are probably looking at a water explosion rather than an air burst.”

  “I’m looking at the disaster map and seeing what you mean about the tsunami. And the idea of a water explosion,” Falcone said.

  “Okay. Now we’ll be leaving the Strykers. We’ll do a fast walk-around survey here at the station. And then we’ll head into the city. I’m signing off.”

  Lanier and Liz Dalton, their hazmat hoods up, their respirators pulsing, got out of the Stryker and walked to the first body. The dead man looked to be in the mid-forties, his close-cropped black hair touched with gray. Lanier and Dalton had worked side by side at the Twin Towers. Now they were among bodies again.

  They looked at one another through their visors for a moment. Then Lanier ran the wand of a radiation-particle detector along the flight suit that encased the body. “Count is far below lethal level,” he said into his lavalier microphone. Liz nodded. The detector’s transmitter sent Lanier’s words and the detector reading, along with the time, date, and GPS location, to Lanier’s laptop in the Stryker. The computer was programmed to begin the creation of a disaster-area radiation database.

  Dalton walked to the ruins of the hangar. She ran her detector along the standing wall, and then took a scraper and plastic bag from her tool belt, and scratched at the bits of mud that speckled the wall. “We’ve got higher counts here in the mud,” she said into her microphone.

  “Got enough for analysis?” Lanier asked.

  “Barely. If I can get higher—”

  Lanier spoke to the lead Stryker, asking its commander to bring it alongside the hangar wall. When it came close enough for Dalton to climb onto it, she stretched from the top of the vehicle so that she could run her scraper near the top of the high-water mark.

  “Little hotter here,” she said, transmitting her reading. She climbed down and joined Lanier, walking as fast as she could in her bulky suit.

  The other Stryker dropped off Belcher and Malcomson, who ran their radiation-detection wands over the other bodies. At Lanier’s order, they did not touch the bodies. He was determined to focus on making a rough map of the radiation left behind when the wall of water withdrew.

  The two Strykers continued to the eastern end of the Hunter reservation and then went off in separate directions, taking two of the highways that surrounded the center of Savannah. Slow-moving cars and pickup trucks, bumper-to-bumper, were moving north on Route 516 as Lanier’s Stryker entered the line of traffic, then made its way along the shoulder of the highway.

  Lanier spoke into his microphone. “Lanier to Falcone. There’s an exodus out of the city. Highways clogging. You’ll need to get troops here to handle the traffic and personnel to provide security for food, water, and distribution of potassium iodide tablets by DHS. We should try to keep people in the city until they are examined and given the tablets.”

  “Okay,” Falcone said from the Watch Center. “We’re relaying this to DHS and Admiral Mason, who is steaming toward the Savannah River. What is the radiation level?”

  “Looks to be averaging at about sixty millirems.”

  “Translation, please.”

  “About what you’d be getting walking around on the high plateau around Denver. We’re all going to learn a lot about ionizing radiation, Mr. Falcone.”

  “What can I tell the President? What can he say publicly?”

  “I’m in the middle of the answer to that. We’re following a procedure that will give you solid information. We need a few more hours.”

  “I need information now,” Falcone said.

  “Okay. You can say that a preliminary survey indicates a relatively light radiation dose but heavy destruction. NEST is preparing a detailed study of the impact area. That’s all for now,” Lanier said, signing off.

  For the next three hours, the Strykers passed along the edges of the devastated city center
, veering occasionally into side streets in a random pattern that Lanier was improvising. Every two hundred meters, one NEST member stepped out of the open back of the Stryker, wiped a piece of debris with a small, circular piece of cloth, and recited its serial number into a helmet microphone.

  The serial number, along with a GPS location and a time stamp, went to a laptop and then into a backup hard drive at Fort Stewart. The wipes were placed in a lead-shielded container. Data from this collection of wipes would lay the grid for the radiation survey.

  Lanier tried to focus on his prime mission. But he could not to ignore the dead and dying that he knew were beneath the ruins he was passing. His Stryker rolled toward a small mall: dry cleaner, Wendy’s, pet store, Chinese restaurant, pharmacy. It looked intact.

  But, as he got closer, he saw that the mall was a shell. Its roof had been torn off and the interiors had been blown through the windows and into the parking lot. The cars, smashed together and lying on their sides, were splattered with the flotsam of the mall. Lanier ordered the Stryker to stop.

  For a moment Lanier did not understand what he saw. And then he realized that he was looking at parts—of men, of women, of children, of dogs, of clothes, of bottles, of boxes, of chairs, of tables. Nothing was whole. Even the cars, torn and buried in horror, did not look like cars. The Stryker commander did not need an order to move on. Neither Lanier nor the others spoke.

  But, when his Stryker neared the river and he saw a small wooden church smashed open, its steeple gone, he switched on his microphone and said, “Falcone. We’ve got to get first-response teams in here right away. Volunteers for shifts no longer than five hours. They’ll need dosimeters and their shift must be followed by mandatory decontamination and ten hours off. I take responsibility. There are people here who are trapped. I don’t want them to die.”