by Steve Alten
“What would you like me to say? Enjoy your stay in prison? Meet any new friends? You betrayed your country, Gunnar. I’m here to give you a chance to—”
Gunnar restarts the engine, slams the tractor into gear, and floors it, the spinning tires shooting mud into the air.
She brushes mud from the front of her skirt, then curses as she wipes the olive brown cowshit from her fingers and back across the fabric.
Gunnar parks the tractor and storms into the farmhouse, his blood boiling. Entering the kitchen, he sees his father watching from the window.
“So? What she want?”
“Don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m taking a shower.”
Harlan watches his son storm off. The old man opens a cabinet, setting another place at the dinner table.
A violet dusk has enveloped the farm by the time Rocky stumbles out of the field. Removing her shoes, she enters through the kitchen door.
Harlan is at the stove, boiling a pot of green beans. “Supper’s in ten minutes. Go upstairs and clean yerself up, you smell like somethin’ the cat dragged in.”
Rocky starts to say something, then thinks better of it. She heads out into the living room and climbs the wooden stairs in her stocking feet, hearing the familiar pattern of creaks. Entering the guest bathroom, she slams the door, unable to pull it shut within its swollen doorframe.
Gunnar hears the noise. He finishes toweling off, then slips on a pair of jeans and a sweater. He runs a comb through his wet black hair, then pauses at the bedroom door. Fingers his two-day growth, checks his breath, curses himself, then walks to the bathroom door and pushes it open.
She is standing in her slip, washing the manure from her skirt. He stares at the taut muscles in her back and legs.
Rocky never looks up, She can feel him staring at her figure.
“Enjoying the view?”
“Why are you here?”
“Orders, from my father. If it was up to me, you’d still be in prison.” She slips her skirt back on and turns to face him. “We have a situation. The Navy’s giving you an opportunity to make up for some of the damage you caused. My orders are to bring you to Washington.”
“What for?”
“You’ll be debriefed in D.C. The chopper’s refueling.” She glances at her watch. “Should be back in half an hour. Get your gear.”
“Forget it.” He walks out.
“Forget it? Hold it, mister—” She follows him down the stairs, her stockinged feet nearly slipping out from under her on the polished wood floor. “What do you mean forget it? Goddamn you, Wolfe, you owe—”
He spins around at the foot of the stairs, his face close enough to smell her scent. “I owe? Who do I owe? I’ve stepped in more blood than a butcher and have more Purple Hearts than a cow has teats, and do you know what I have to show for it? A dishonorable discharge and five years in prison. The only thing I owe is some serious payback to the asshole who set me up.”
“If that’s true, then you may finally get your chance.”
He feels his chest tighten. “What are you talking about?”
She stares into his gray irises, noticing the stress lines around the eyes. “Someone built the Goliath.”
“Bullshit—”
“Bullshit? I was there, asshole, I was aboard the Ronald Reagan when she sank.”
Rocky’s words jolt him like a live wire. “A carrier? We lost a carrier?”
“Not just the carrier, the entire CVBG.”
“My God.” He rubs his forehead, struggling to digest the information. An American carrier fleet packs more military might than all but a handful of nations in the world.
Rocky adjusts her skirt and sits on the bottom step. “Information’s being kept on a need-to-know basis until the Navy completes its salvage operation. The Ronald Reagan was carrying a dozen nuclear warheads.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Gunnar leans against the rail. The house is silent, save for the ticking of Harlan’s grandfather clock. “Are you certain it was the Goliath?”
“I saw it, Gunnar. It looks exactly the way we designed it.”
“Who built it? When did the attack occur?”
“The attack took place about a week ago. The rest of your questions will be answered on the flight to Washington.”
A week ago? If Sorceress was activated, then … Gunnar closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I think it may already be too late.”
“Excuse me?”
“There may not be much we can do to stop it.”
“Eight thousand sailors died, Gunnar. You think we’re just going to sit back and …” She wipes away tears, her face flushing in anger. “They killed my husband.”
“Your husband?” Gunnar looks up at her, at a loss for words. “When did you—”
“What difference does it make? All hell’s breaking loose. I haven’t seen this much panic in Washington since the nine-one-one attacks. Now get your gear, I have orders to deliver you to D.C.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I’ll contact the MPs, who will drag your sorry ass on board the chopper in shackles.”
“He ain’t goin’ nowhere, not ’til he eats.” Harlan Wolfe enters the hall from the kitchen, a carving knife in his hand. “Gunnar, go and get your stuff. And you”—the old man points the blade at Rocky—“you get in the kitchen and help me put supper on the table.”
The thunder of the helicopter’s rotors echoes in the distance.
“All through Nature, you will find the same law: First the need, then the means.”
—Robert Collier
“The atomic bomb will never go off, and I will speak as an expert in explosives.”
—Admiral William Leahy to President Truman, 1945
“Science will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, and make everybody healthy and happy … yeah, sure.”
—Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, who sent bombs through the mail, causing three deaths and numerous injuries
“We only killed our own.”
—Mickey Featherstone, Irish mobster, to future New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
CHAPTER 3
Convention Center
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The tall woman with the pale complexion and shoulder-length brown hair fidgets as she waits her turn at the dais. She scans the crowd, then glances at the television crews. One-third capacity, and none of the major news networks are even here. What the hell’s wrong with our species? Are we that infatuated by the stock market and pro football? Don’t we realize that our very lives are in danger?
“Our next speaker is Dr. Elizabeth Goode, the foremost authority on nanocomputers and the author of ‘The End of the World and Other Selffulfilling Prophecies.’ Dr. Goode?”
A smattering of applause from the late-morning crowd.
“Before I begin, I suppose I should thank you for even bothering to show up. Frankly, it seems more and more of our population is caring less and less about the world’s quest to annihilate itself using thermonuclear means. I don’t know … maybe we scientists are simply not explaining ourselves properly, or the public just doesn’t believe us. Hell, maybe this entire convention would have been better served if the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research had invited some Hollywood bimbo with big tits to speak to you about nuclear proliferation instead of an overworked, single mother with a 170 IQ and dark circles under her eyes.”
A rustling of chairs as the crowd reenergizes.
Give ’em hell, Goode. Remember, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
“You just heard Dr. Robert Schwager warn us about how the former Soviet Union’s stockpiles of weapons’ grade plutonium have turned into the equivalent of a third world yard sale, and yet most of you are probably daydreaming about your Philadelphia Eagles winning streak or thinking about what you’ll order for lunch. For God’s sake, people, wake up! Apathy is the world’s greatest killer, so you’d better snap out of it now and smell
the sarin, before we wipe ourselves off the face of this goddamn planet.”
Dr. Goode registers the local television cameraman’s lens zooming in from stage right.
“I’ve been invited here this morning to give you a brief overview of the latest doomsday technology, a little something we scientists refer to as ‘pure-fusion weapons.’ You’d think we humans would already be satisfied with our ability to annihilate the world’s population a healthy five thousand times … but no. Now scientists at the United States National Ignition Facility at Livermore, California, and our French counterparts at the Laser Megajoule Facility in Bordeaux are on the brink of testing a new weapon, a real doomsday bomb—one that our politicians in Washington may actually be persuaded to use.
“To understand the power of pure fusion you must first understand the difference between fission and fusion. In the fusion trigger of a conventional hydrogen bomb, uranium 235 absorbs a neutron. Fission occurs when the nucleus energetically breaks apart to produce two smaller nuclei and several neutrons, which go on to split more uranium nuclei. The resultant chain reaction proceeds rapidly, producing an explosion. This fission explosion is what produces the temperature and density necessary to trigger the fusion of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
“Fusion is considerably different than fission. Fusion is a reaction that occurs when two atoms of hydrogen combine or fuse together to form an atom of helium, and a ‘leftover’ neutron, a cousin of what powers the sun. Fusion releases much greater quantities of energy than fission, causing an even larger explosion.”
Dr. Goode scans the crowd, its energy waning. Keep it simple, you’re losing them …
“The key difference in a conventional and a pure-fusion H-bomb is how the explosion is triggered. A pure-fusion bomb doesn’t need fission to engage the explosion. This means plutonium or enriched uranium is not required in the design. The good news, if you can call it that, is that no plutonium means little to no radioactive fallout. The bad news is that the nuclear threshold is greatly lowered, so that a 20-mm bullet could explode like many tons of TNT. The explosive power of many relatively small, pure-fusion devices would be much greater than the same weight of a single conventional hydrogen bomb, and far less expensive.”
A female reporter in the front row stands. “Can you tell us how much greater?”
Dr. Goode frowns. “I’ll give you an example. The atomic bomb our country dropped on Hiroshima generated an amount of energy equivalent to nineteen kilotons or nineteen thousand tons of TNT. Temperatures at the hypocenter, or ground zero, reached seven thousand degrees, with a wind velocity estimated at 980 miles per hour. That blast wave killed most of the people within a half mile radius instantly. That was a mere fifteen-kiloton explosion. The biggest version of the H-bomb generates twenty to fifty megatons, or 50 million tons of TNT, the equivalent of two to three thousand Hiroshima-size bombs. A pure-fusion bomb generates a far greater damage volume per unit weight. It would only take a cluster of half-kiloton pure-fusion bombs to equal the military impact of a thirty-megaton H-bomb. That’s a tenth of a ton of pure-fusion TNT to equal a megaton of the conventional nuke. Let me quantify that for you in another way. If you wanted to wipe out a whole continent’s population … say, that of Europe, the job could feasibly be accomplished using only six to twelve well-placed Trident II (D5) nuclear missiles whose warheads had been converted to a swarm of pure-fusion weapons.”
Gasps from the crowd.
A reporter from the Trenton Times raises his hand. “Dr. Goode, are you saying these pure-fusion bombs already exist?”
“We have the bomb, the key to the technology is in its triggering mechanism. Both the United States and France have been working illegally on the problem for decades. Los Alamos is rumored to be only months away from testing a magnetized target fusion driver. In magnetized target fusion, an initial plasma is created by electromagnetic means. Conventional high explosives then compress the plasma, creating the conditions necessary for pure-fusion ignition.”
Another hand is raised. “Exactly what do you mean by illegally?”
“Actually, I meant that subjectively. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 bans all nuclear explosions. Unfortunately, the CTBT never formally defined the term ‘explosion,’ since it assumed only fission triggers, and so testing goes on. It’s a loophole our government refuses to close.”
A heavyset man in the fourth row stands, pausing to allow the television cameras to focus. Dr. Goode recognizes the Republican lobbyist from her visits on Capitol Hill. “Come now, Ms. Goode, aren’t you overplaying the part of antinuke alarmist just a bit? No country has ever announced the goal of building these pure-fusion weapons. And even if they were conceived, no country would ever use them.”
Goode stares at the man with a look to kill. “First off, Mr. Johnston, no country would be stupid enough to announce pure fusion as a goal. Second and most importantly, what you’re failing to mention is the real danger of these weapons. When it comes to acquiring thermonuclear devices, the biggest obstacle to rogue nations and terrorists up to now has been their inability to obtain sufficient quantities of enriched uranium or plutonium. By contrast, deuterium is abundant in seawater and tritium is easily made in a college physics lab.”
“Come on, Ms. Goode—”
“It’s DOCTOR Goode, Mr. Johnston, now sit your Republican-leased fat ass down.”
A smattering of applause as she grabs the microphone and turns to face the cameras. “If you listen to nothing else I say, listen to this. The most frightening thing about pure-fusion weapons is what attracted the military to them in the first place—and that is their much smaller yields and relative lack of radioactive fallout. By eliminating the harmful aftereffects of the bomb, you reduce the political unacceptability of using the weapon while increasing its relative lethality.
“In other words, humanity is on the brink of eliminating its own nuclear stalemate.”
Dr. Goode inches her way through the crowded lobby to a waiting elevator. The doors shut, sealing off the mob. She presses the button for Parking Level Three.
Three-thirty. With any luck, I’ll miss rush-hour traffic and be back in Wilmington before Duncan and Ian get home from school.
The elevator doors open. She hurries to her car, a two-year-old Lincoln Town Car she has converted to fuel cells. Using her key chain, she deactivates the security device—
—as the two FBI agents approach from behind, flashing their badges.
“Sometime in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on Earth.”
—James McAlear
“This conflict was begun on the timing of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”
—President George W. Bush, after the terrorism of 9-11-01
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”
—Samuel Johnson
CHAPTER 4
White House
Washington, D.C.
Gunnar follows Rocky and the two MPs down a short corridor in the West Wing of the White House. His pulse quickens as the large, light-skinned African American steps out from behind a set of double doors to the president’s Situation Room.
The Bear returns his daughter’s salute. “Wait for us inside.”
Rocky shoots her father a look, then enters the private chamber, leaving the two MPs unsure of what to do next.
“Return to your posts.”
“But sir—”
“Dismissed.”
The MPs pivot and head back down the hall.
General Jackson stares at his former commando. “Glad you’re here.” “Didn’t have much of a choice:”
“The president’s inside waiting. We’ll talk later. For now, keep your ears open and your mouth shut, and don’t allow anyone to provoke you.”
“Maybe you ought to mention that to your daughter.”
Ignoring the comment, Jackson opens the door, motioning Gunnar
inside. The newly appointed commander in chief of the United States Special Operations Command feels as if he is leading a lamb to slaughter.
Rocky is standing off to one side. Her father signals her over as a gangly civilian with tight wavy hair steps forward to greet them.
“Commander Jackson, meet Gray Ayers, Secretary of the Navy. Mr. Secretary, this is my daughter, Commander Rochelle Jackson-Hatcher.”
Thomas Gray Ayers, Jr. extends his hand. “We’re all sorry for your loss, Commander, and I’m sure there are places you’d rather be, but this briefing singularly requires your presence. When answering the president, keep your responses short and to the point. Nothing too technical, but don’t hold back either. Edwards has been around the block a few times and doesn’t like to be bullshitted.” Ayers turns to face Gunnar, a grimace pulling on his long face. “Mr. Wolfe, I’m not quite sure what to say to you. The general feels you can shed some light on what’s happened, and I respect his opinion, but frankly, I’d just as soon see you shot for treason.”
Ayers nods curtly to General Jackson, then walks away, taking his place at the conference table.
Gunnar grits his teeth. “Nice to meet you, too … asshole.”
Jackson grips Gunnar’s elbow, leading him and his daughter toward three vacant chairs.
Two more men enter. The Bear leans over to Gunnar, informing him that the man with the black hair and piercing blue eyes is Austin Tapscott, the new Secretary of Defense. The former Army Airborne sniper offers a curt nod. The general with the receding hairline is Marc Ben-Meir, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He offers his condolences to Rocky, pointedly refusing to so much as glance at Gunnar.
A short man enters the Situation Room, pushing his way past the general.
President Edwards’s newly appointed Secretary of State takes a seat at the conference table and ceremoniously begins reviewing his notes. Nick Nunziata, Jr. is a former senator from Georgia who lacks the jovial personality of his late father, Democratic congressman Nicholas Nunziata, Sr. At five-foot-seven, Nunziata’s short stature belies a fierce reputation. A straightforward, no-nonsense guy bearing a bit of a Napoleon complex, the man is not one to be trifled with.
