Dance of Death

by John Case

  The Russians had similar experiences: power lines blown out of commission, communications systems destroyed, villages darkened.

  There were fears that a single high-altitude blast detonated over Kansas would generate an EMP that would destroy all electronics in the lower forty-eight.

  Scientists were already so worried about EMP damage in the sixties – when computers were few and digital technology was in its infancy – that nuclear testing went underground after the Johnston Island blast.

  Now, computers were ubiquitous and digital technology was behind everything from missile guidance systems to espresso machines.

  As a result, the effects of a high-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse would be so profound as to be irreversible. Wilson believed that the pulse he intended to launch from the Nevada fire lookout tower would destroy the entire infrastructure of the continental United States. In one second, the world’s only remaining superpower would be a third-world country on par with … Angola.

  But first, the test. First, Culpeper.

  Thirty-seven

  Dublin | June 6, 2005

  BURKE RETRIEVED MIRANDA Renfro’s address from the town of Fallon’s website, which listed the property owners and the amounts of their assessments.

  Miranda Renfro owned lot 7B, Echo Village, 3 Fred Brigham Road. With data from the same site, he tried calling her immediate neighbors to see if he could persuade one of them to bring her to the phone.

  But no. Two of them thought he was a scam artist, the third didn’t speak English.

  That night, he drank beer and sat in front of the box. He watched Man United play to a draw at Man City. Then the news, then a program about the Crusades.

  He was still drinking too much and it worried him. But it didn’t stop him from grabbing another beer. He paced around the room, thinking about it, and finally, he made a decision. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad would go to it. He sat down in front of the computer, and turned it back on. He typed “Travelocity” into the search bar.

  As it turned out, making travel arrangements was easy. Explaining to Tommy wasn’t.

  Burke was telling him about the trip when he realized how obsessive his quest for Wilson must seem. Belgrade was one thing, a little side trip to Slovenia, okay, maybe, but following a slender lead thousands of miles to Nevada? This was going too far – geographically, and in every other way.

  He could read this in Tommy’s eyes, both skeptical and worried. “What you think you’re going t’find there?”

  “Jack Wilson, if I’m lucky.”

  “Nooooo,” Tommy said. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Maybe this Mandy woman will tell me where I can find him. And I can tell Kovalenko.”

  “You think so, lad? If someone like you comes here looking, I’m going to tell them – oh, yeh, Michael’s over in Dublin, let me gi’ you his address?”

  “Well –”

  “And if you do find him, what you gonna do, hey? ‘Jack Wilson, come wi’ me to the FBI?’” The old man frowned. “And you think he’ll toddle along? This man is a criminal. No, it’s madness, Michael. If you’re doing this for the business, forget it. We wait, we take our chances wi’ the courts, I canna have you racing around the globe.”

  Burke said he’d think about it. And he did. In fact, he slept on it.

  And in the morning, he took a cab to the airport.

  Thirty-eight

  Culpeper | June 8, 2005

  IT OCCURRED TO Wilson that if he waited until night, he could see the town wink out. Which would be interesting, but he wanted to strike during banking hours.

  He drank his coffee and packed up. Had some Cheerios and a banana for breakfast. Checked out. Looked at his watch. Nine thirty.

  Might as well go.

  He started the Escalade and flicked the switch to engage the step-up module (a glorified Tesla coil) with the vehicle’s V-8 engine. This comprised the weapon’s power source.

  He left the car running, and stepped outside. The Escalade’s short bed had a rigid cover. This he removed, and set down next to the truck. He dismantled the gimbal rig and moved aside the pieces of the foam cocoon, then connected his laptop to the device. The software that controlled the weapon elevated the barrel and then the focusing program kicked in, swiveling it into position. It was almost noiseless: a faint whir.

  If anyone had asked, he would have told them that the weapon was a surveying device. But he was parked near the lot’s perimeter and there was no one in sight.

  He touched the tattoo on his chest for luck, then flipped the toggle switch that fired the weapon. He could not detect the beam at all. He heard nothing and, like Tesla and Ceplak before him, he wondered if it had worked.

  But unlike Tesla, Wilson did not have to wait weeks for news reports from Siberia. Even as he watched the barrel retract and fold in upon itself, a 727 heading for Dulles slid by directly overhead in complete silence.

  Its momentum and glide had taken it beyond the target area. The engines were dead and it was already losing altitude. He wondered how far it would glide. He wondered if he’d hear the impact and explosion.

  The plane represented another part of the Culpeper experiment. As the agent of death for innocent people, what would he feel? Would he be repulsed?

  The plane yawed to the right.

  He hadn’t been entirely sure about planes. In trim, with the ailerons and landing gear tucked in, they could glide for quite some distance. And some had backup hydraulic systems that might allow a very good pilot to bring a plane down safely.

  But not this aircraft. It was entering a dive. Without the thrust of the engines, it was basically a flying rock.

  Wilson lost sight of it for a moment. Then he heard a concussive thump, and black smoke billowed on the horizon.

  He felt a strange mix of remorse and elation. He’d been on a lot of planes, and knew what really bad turbulence could do to people. He could imagine the terror of the crew in the cockpit and the passengers’ panic. It was probably a bit like Wounded Knee, with death in your face and nowhere to run.

  In any case, Wilson thought, it was all in a good cause – and besides, it was fate.

  Theirs and his.

  The random nature of the destruction intrigued Wilson and he would have liked to stay in Culpeper to witness the cascade of events firsthand. But no.

  The Comfort Inn was beyond the impact area and he’d been careful to map out an exit route, because it wouldn’t take long for the gridlock to ripple outwards. He didn’t want to get caught up in that. And besides, he had other business to attend to. He could listen to the news while he drove.

  There was a bad moment when he turned the Escalade’s key and nothing happened. A rush of sensation in his chest. Maybe his own car hadn’t been out of the target area! Had he miscalculated?

  But no, his watch was still working. So he tried the key again. This time the engine started with a roar.

  As he approached an intersection almost thirty miles from the motel, he saw that the traffic signals weren’t working. Cars edged through, one at a time.

  He wasn’t surprised. An EMP hitting Culpeper was certain to cause peripheral damage. He’d had no idea how extensive the damage to the power grid would prove to be, but he knew it could be considerable. The excess voltage from the pulse would fly along the conductive electrical lines, burning out everything for some distance. And as far as the grid was concerned, despite the big outage of 2003, little had been done to improve its stability.

  And the truth was that electrical substations were not created equal. If the Culpeper substation was a node that carried a heavy voltage load, its failure would propagate for hundreds of miles. Those outages would be short-lived. The utilities would have things up again in a day or two.

  But not in Culpeper. Culpeper was dark. Culpeper was fucked.

  He listened to the radio.

  The first reports were about events that took place outside Culpeper: the plane cras
h, the spectacular traffic jams. That made sense, of course, because there was nothing coming out of Culpeper itself. Getting TV trucks and communications gear into the little town would be impossible until the traffic jam could be untangled and tow trucks could begin to pick away at the permanently stalled cars.

  By the time he reached Pennsylvania, he knew that the banking facilities in Culpeper had not proved capable of withstanding the pulse. The financial markets had closed early – due, it was said, to “technical problems.” Breathless reporters speculated about “computer viruses and Trojan horses,” while a White House spokesman dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” those who suggested that the plane crash was somehow related to the problems Wall Street was experiencing. “The next thing you know,” he said, “theybe dragging in the traffic jams we’re seeing outside the Beltway.”

  No one said anything about Culpeper. Culpeper wasn’t a story yet.

  “But this wasn’t just any hacker or virus,” one reporter insisted. “This was financial terrorism.”

  Banks in time zones to the west closed early.

  International correspondents from Asia to Europe reported that trading had ceased on their exchanges.

  The Fed chairman came on the air to announce that there was a “glitch” in the system. He reassured the public that computerized banking networks were built with safeguards and “redundant systems,” and that things would soon be up and running again.

  And what about the plane? Had it been attacked? Or was the crash just a coincidence?

  The vice president urged calm from an undisclosed location.

  It was almost dinnertime, and Wilson was nearing Pittsburgh when the first news emerged from Culpeper itself.

  Hysterical residents sketched a picture of a town littered with dead vehicles, where nothing electrical or electronic worked.

  Those who’d made their way out of Culpeper brought the scene alive. Fires were blazing out of control, most of them ignited by truck or car crashes. Fire trucks and ambulances found it impossible to get to the scene.

  Wilson hadn’t even considered fire, but of course he should have. The great quake that struck San Francisco in 1906 had done some damage, yes, but it was fire that wrecked the city.

  It was shortly after Wilson crossed the border into Ohio that a voice first mentioned the possibility of an “electromagnetic pulse.” On an NPR talk show, a roundtable of experts batted the subject around. One panelist, a retired nuclear physicist, did his best to explain the phenomenon. But when he started talking about “Compton recoil electrons,” the host interrupted him.

  “But what would cause it? That’s the concern.”

  “Well, it’s very strange that the effect is so localized,” the expert said drily. “I can’t begin to explain that. But generally we see an EMP as the side effect of a thermonuclear detonation.”

  Panicked callers swamped the switchboard. The expert backpedaled. Yes, it could have been something else: a solar flare, perhaps, or some kind of “anomalous lightning storm.”

  Within minutes radio stations were airing reassurances by government officials: No radiation had been detected in or around Culpeper.

  Media helicopters surveyed the afflicted town, providing updates about the fires and traffic jams and immobilized vehicles. Medevac helicopters swept in and out of the town’s airspace, ferrying patients from the regional hospital to facilities in Washington.

  Eventually, a handful of Culpeper residents found their way to the airwaves. And that’s when some of the wilder reports began to circulate. The sun had blinked out – just for a moment – and then the cars died.

  Wilson was near the Indiana border when he first heard that a swarm of black helicopters had been seen just before the pulse hit. Another resident mentioned the sighting of a chupacabra. A third reported seeing “a saucer-shaped vehicle in Rick Marohn’s cornfield.”

  On the outskirts of South Bend, he stopped for a six-pack and a Subway sandwich, then took a room at a Ramada. By then, it was all Culpeper, all the time.

  Thirty-nine

  Atlantic Crossing | June 8, 2005

  CRUISING ALONG AT thirty thousand feet, Burke had to agree with Tommy. It was a fool’s errand, no doubt about it. He was headed for a trailer park in Nevada to look up a woman who was very unlikely to help him.

  Still, above the clouds and power lines, it felt right. It was the next logical step, and he had to take it. He looked out the window, into the plain blue sky. He wouldn’t admit it to Tommy, because he knew it sounded crazy, but it seemed to him that his search for Jack Wilson was being driven by forces outside himself. That he and Jack Wilson were fated to come together, like blips on a radar screen. What would happen when they met, he didn’t know. He couldn’t worry about that yet.

  What he did worry about was getting through Immigration.

  The rules for dual citizens holding U.S. passports were clear: You must travel on your U.S. passport when entering or leaving the United States. He thought about taking a chance and using his Irish passport, but Kovalenko had probably put him on some kind of lookout list. Using his Irish papers would be breaking the law – and if they caught him, they might not let him in.

  Or worse.

  When it was his turn to step over the yellow line, the Latina at his entry station took one look at the VALID ONLY FOR TRAVEL TO THE UNITED STATES stamp, and immediately picked up the telephone. She seemed nervous, punching numbers into her computer. She slid his passport through a scanner, and then gave him a worried look. “We have to wait for my supervisor.”

  A big man in uniform came over to consult. There was a certain amount of keyboarding and then the big man shrugged.

  “He doesn’t need a passport to travel inside the country. Stamp it,” he said, and the Latina did. To Burke he said: “You can’t leave the country on that passport. You do understand that?”

  He did.

  During the plane’s long taxi toward the arrival gate, the captain had aired a vague announcement about “delays.” Aer Lingus personnel would be standing by to advise. Burke hadn’t really paid attention. Once he’d cleared Immigration and Customs, he had to get to a different terminal and catch a flight to Reno on America West.

  But it was evident inside the terminal that something had happened. The place was thronged. There were crowds around the few TV monitors. People were talking, and even without listening to what they were saying, he could sense the excitement and alarm in their voices, the whine of anxiety.

  “I think it’s terrorists,” pronounced a man in blue jeans and a Nuggets T-shirt.

  “They’re saying it’s one of them solar flares,” his wife insisted.

  Those who had been in the air when it happened, like Burke himself, had to play catch-up. All flights were grounded. Bunchy lines of impatient travelers waited to harry airline agents, seeking vouchers and information.

  Mostly there was no information. Everyone watched the news, glued to small screens featuring wall-to-wall coverage of a complex nightmare that had already been condensed into a single word: Culpeper.

  It took Burke a few minutes to grasp the parameters of the story and when he did, he realized what had happened – and who, and what, was behind it.

  He made his way to Terminal 7 and found a little square of territory on the floor. He sat on his suitcase and waited, his eyes on a television monitor.

  Helicopter footage showed the hundreds of stranded cars, some of them charred wrecks, and then a montage of burning buildings. The chopper flew low enough so that Burke could see people standing in the street, waving at the camera. Abruptly, the coverage shifted to the site of the airplane crash. Huge pieces of wreckage were being moved by machines. A different reporter interviewed family who’d been waiting for the plane at Dulles. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said that eighty-seven passengers and eight crew members were presumed dead. In Culpeper again, a handheld camera showed shaky footage of men with crowbars trying to pry open an elevator. Inside a hospital co
rridor, a weary doctor spoke, while the crawl noted that fourteen persons had died, four in mid-surgery and the remainder when life-sustaining equipment failed.

  *

  At three a.m. – late morning in Slovenia – Burke called Luka Ceplak.

  “Michael!” Ceplak roared. “I missss you. How are you?” A heavy sigh. “I know why you call,” he said, his voice somber now.

  “You do?”

  “Culpeper, yes? You want to know is our boy?”

  “I wondered …”

  “Is him. These facility – aircraft, too! – protected against ordinary EMP. But not scalar EMP. You can’t stop it.”

  “But I thought if Wilson used the weapon it would be … Tunguska.”

  “It’s different way. You think this town is back in business soon? No no. Years.”

  “So he struck out at the banks. You think that’s it?”

  “No,” Ceplak said. “I think, now he knows it works, he will go again. Bigger.”

  Forty

  Kuala Lumpur | June 9, 2005

  ANDREA CABOT WORKED her way through her morning yoga routine. Her instructor discouraged listening to the news, and in fact recommended “soothing music,” but Cabot was too busy not to multitask. CNN was on in the background.

  She had to agree that the broadcast was not conducive to concentration. It was hyperactive, scattershot coverage of the Culpeper incident: the plane, the inoperable cars, the power outage, the “down” banking centers, the fires.

  As Cabot executed the transition between Downward Dog and the Baby pose, the breathless reporter gave way to the first in a parade of experts.

  “Remember that old movie? The Day the Earth Stood Still? A man arrives from outer space, and as a display of power, he causes every motor and engine in the world to stop for half an hour. That’s what happened to Culpeper. The world just … stopped.”