The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  “Now. First things first,” he said, typing on the keyboard in front of him. “You asked me to look at four geo-physical events and determine if any of them could, hypothetically, have been man-made.”

  “Yes.” She waited, as if she were in his classroom.

  “My answer would be no.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.” He nodded gravely, swiveling the chair to face her, his lips pursed. It was not the answer she had expected. Then the messages were hoaxes? The events coincidences?

  “So,” she said, “even hypothetically speaking. It’s not, in your judgment, feasible that—”

  He held up his right hand to stop her. “I’m responding to the question as phrased,” he said. “The term you used was ‘man-made.’ ”

  Blaine saw a twinkle in his dark eyes. Although he didn’t show it much anymore, Dr. Sanchez had a winning smile that seemed to transform him into a child. “And to that question, the answer is no. If you had used a different term, I might have responded with a different answer.”

  He was waiting for her to ask him. “What term?”

  “Man-induced, let’s say. Or man-manipulated.”

  “And then what would your answer be?”

  “Then I would have said yes.”

  “To which event?”

  “All four.” He clicked open a slide show on the large monitor and stood. She recognized the first image as an aerial view of eastern India and Bangladesh, with the wedge of the Bay of Bengal between them.

  “Take the first example. A tsunami in the Bay of Bengal. Next,” he said, as if instructing someone to change the image, although he was holding the remote control himself. He zoomed in on the horseshoe-shaped upper bay.

  “As you know, the Bay of Bengal is one of the most vulnerable spots on the planet. You won’t get a lot of disagreement about that. The reasons are well-documented: it’s low-lying and heavily populated, prone to deadly floods. Okay? Each year, thousands of people lose their lives during the monsoon season.” He changed the image—this one an aerial of floodwaters encroaching on the land. The borders seemed to have drawn in, the water redefining the shape of the coast. “Projections show the country may lose seventeen percent of its total land mass over the next thirty years. Which, needless to say, will have severe consequences, considering the population density. Next.”

  He clicked to another slide, a diagram showing layers of the earth’s crust. It reminded her of something from a college geology class. “The vulnerability that you don’t hear about so much has to do with the plates in the earth beneath the Bay of Bengal,” he said. “An earthquake, in fact, has been overdue there for decades. An undersea earthquake, in turn, could trigger a tsunami, which is what we now know happened on September twenty-fifth.”

  She watched him as he enlarged the image, pacing in front of the big screen like a teacher. “As you know, of course, earthquakes occur when the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust suddenly shift.”

  Blaine nodded.

  “Now, we aren’t, as of yet, able to determine just when earthquakes will occur, in the sense that we can predict thunderstorms or hurricanes or low-pressure systems. But we are able to predict where, on long-term models, earthquakes are likely to occur. We know, from magnetic geophysical surveys, for instance, where fault lines lie.”

  “Okay.”

  “But what triggers the shifting of these plates, and causes these vulnerabilities to actually become disasters? Let’s separate it into two general categories: the triggers that are natural and those that are not natural.”

  “We’re still talking hypothetically here.”

  He stopped pacing. “No,” he said, “not hypothetically. We can say with a degree of certainty that some earthquakes clearly have man-made triggers. It’s what’s called induced seismicity.”

  “For example …?”

  “Yes. Next,” he said, changing the image to an aerial view of an earthquake’s aftermath.

  “May 12, 2008,” he said. “At two twenty-eight in the afternoon, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck the Great Sichuan region in Western China. Okay? More than seventy thousand people died as a result. Five million were left homeless. Many prominent scientists consider this an induced seismic event. Possibly the worst man-induced disaster in history.”

  Blaine watched as he clicked through two more images: rescuers wearing masks, standing on the rubble of a fallen city. Limbs of dead bodies jutting from concrete slabs of collapsed buildings.

  “But I don’t understand. What man-induced trigger would have caused an earthquake that killed seventy thousand people?”

  He changed the image to a bright clear aerial of a mammoth reservoir and hydroelectric dam. “In this case, the Zipingpu Reservoir, which was built four years earlier, near a major fault line.” He zoomed in on the water pen. “This reservoir held three hundred and twenty tons of water, which placed enormous pressures on the fault line. The scientists who believe this was induced seismicity believe the pressure of the reservoir caused the plates on the fault line to shift and rupture.”

  Blaine absorbed that for a moment. “Do you believe it?”

  “I think it’s well within the realm of possibility, yes.”

  “There are other examples?”

  “Many, yes. Next: a 6.3-magnitude earthquake occurred in Maharashtra, India in 1967, for instance. The epicenter and aftershocks were all located near or under the Konya Dam reservoir. One hundred and eighty people died and fifteen hundred were injured. Closer to home, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in California in the mid 1970s was attributed to a massive earth-fill dam and reservoir there.”

  “And, presumably, there can be other causes besides dams?”

  “Any number, yes. Mining explosions. Nuclear tests. Extraction of fossil fuel and groundwater. Well-drilling. In Colorado in 1961, the United States Army drilled a twelve-thousand-foot disposal well at its Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where waste fluids were dumped. It caused two hundred earthquakes in one year.”

  “Because of the drilling?”

  He briefly showed his fetching smile. “No, because of the fluids. What was happening was that they were lubricating the rock layers and making them prone to slip, causing a series of very small earthquakes.”

  “So you’re saying it would be possible to exploit existing vulnerabilities to create a ‘natural’ disaster such as an earthquake.”

  He nodded.

  “And what about these other disasters? The examples I gave you?”

  He reached down for a sip of tea, as if composing himself for the next presentation.

  “It’s interesting.” He set his tea cup down. “On the face of it, each of these four events seems unprecedented. In terms of severity, certainly, each one is. But the events themselves are actually not unprecedented at all. In fact, each region, it turns out, is particularly vulnerable to a man-induced event of exactly this nature. I’ll show you why.”

  “Please.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  CATHERINE BLAINE WATCHED THE large monitor as Dr. Sanchez called up a new image. A scene of coastal devastation: collapsed condominium buildings, windows blasted out, twisted steel and shattered glass, house roofs torn off and deposited in the road, cars overturned, signs blown apart, gashes in a highway where the pavement had buckled.

  “Let me take you quickly through your other three questions,” he said. “Beginning with the hurricane off the coast of Uruguay. September twenty-eighth. ‘Unprecedented’ is, again, the word the media kept using.”

  “Yes.”

  He frowned and his right hand wavered. “Technically, that may be true. Okay? There had never before been a recorded hurricane strike on the coast of Uruguay. The common wisdom is that sea temperatures in the South Atlantic are too low and wind shear too great for these kinds of storms to form.

  “But, in fact, severe storms have been occurring with increasing regularity in the South Atlantic. In 2004, for the first time that we know of, a hurricane hit the coast of
Brazil, five hundred miles south of Rio. Which, I might add, is only about two hundred miles north of Uruguay.”

  “So it’s not as unusual as it seems.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. How about the tornados in France yesterday? As far as I can tell, there’s never been a disaster like that before.”

  He pursed his lips. “Actually,” he said, “events ‘like that’ happen all the time over there. France has more tornadoes than any country in Europe. And this particular region—Picardy, near the border with Belgium—has more than anywhere else. So, in fact, we’re again dealing with an existing vulnerability. The same is true of the series of earthquakes in the Pacific.”

  Blaine considered that. “All right. Next question, then: could these have been man-manipulated? In other words, are there existing technologies that could create or enhance a tornado, for example?”

  “Well.” He typed in a new prompt on his computer keyboard, waited a moment, and typed in a number sequence. “Let me just show you something.” He called up a video file on the large monitor. An animated black-and-white image that she began to recognize as a tornado funnel. But as the camera pulled back, she saw that the tornado was swirling inside a giant enclosed space. “This is, in fact, a man-made tornado,” he said. “It was created by what’s called an atmospheric vortex engine. Invented by a Canadian petroleum engineer more than ten years ago.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Energy. Scientists have investigated man-made tornadoes as a source of electricity for many years. This, as you can see, was done in an enclosed environment.” He ran the image again, this time in slow motion. “Air carrying waste heat is blown in from vents on the sides of these walls, spinning into a vortex that mimics the formation of a naturally occurring tornado. Once started, the vortex draws in more hot air from vents in the wall, spinning it through turbines and generating electricity. This tornado measures about fifty meters in diameter.”

  He clicked the remote to produce a new image, a printed document with the famous Mercedes-Benz logo on the top. “This is a press release issued in 2009,” Dr. Sanchez said, “from the Mercedes-Benz company in Germany, claiming it had created the largest man-made tornado. It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records now, in fact. I have it on good authority, though, that it really isn’t. Larger ones have been created more discreetly by researchers in both China and in Canada.”

  Blaine skimmed through the press release, then looked up at Dr. Sanchez.

  “How about hurricanes?” she said. “How could they be manipulated?”

  “That’s slightly more problematic, because of their size, but the objective would be similar. The power generated by a Category 2 hurricane, if we were able to convert it to electricity, would satisfy the United States’ energy needs for three years, Cate. So, again, there are scientists studying this. Models of artificial hurricanes were, in fact, created in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, part of an attempt to learn more about how to prevent building failures.”

  “And, staying hypothetical: What about the earthquakes in the South Pacific Sea? How would they have been man-induced? There’s no dam there.”

  “No.” His eyes twinkled and he sat back in his wooden chair. “But essentially, all you need to do is apply a force that would cause the plates of the Earth’s crust to rub against one another. Okay? There are any number of ways that might happen. An underwater explosion could do it. There are other processes that have been researched and eventually, I believe, will be viable. Ground radio tomography, for one.”

  “Ground radio—?”

  “You bounce a wave of energy into the ionosphere and it comes back to earth. On a small scale, this has been used to look for oil reserves in Alaska. It’s the same principle as a CT scan or an X-ray.”

  Blaine thought of something, then brought forward a question she had wanted to ask in the meeting at the White House: “If, hypothetically, a disturbance could be created in the atmosphere, would there be any visible sign of that disturbance? That might even determine the source of it?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Take yes,” she said, watching him intently. “Would there be any way of tracing it?”

  He shrugged. “That would depend on the process. You could say that the energy bouncing back from the ionosphere should be detectable, yes. The radio field devices that the government is using experimentally in Alaska right now often light up the sky.” His head twitched as he thought about it. “Yes, I see what you’re getting at, Cate. It’s most interesting. Let me look into that a little and I’ll get back to you.”

  Blaine nodded. “But you believe this is feasible.”

  “Feasible? Of course. I don’t know that the technology currently exists on the scale you’re talking about. But it’s being studied. There’s one firm in particular that has been aggressively purchasing companies and research labs to advance this technology. I think it will eventually either go bankrupt or become a leader in an emerging industry. And that, I must say, worries me.” He sat back, looking sad all of a sudden.

  “Why?”

  “Do you know what natural disasters are, Cate? They’re adjustments. They’re not isolated occurrences that come out of nowhere. The weather is a big interrelated process, with no national borders. Hurricanes transport heat out of the tropics, helping to balance the planet’s heat budget. If you strengthen or weaken them, you’re going to affect weather elsewhere. If you artificially create monsoons in one part of the world, you may create drought in another. I’m just afraid if this happens, there’ll be serious side effects.

  “And the fact that natural disasters are becoming more prevalent worries me a great deal.” He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a wrinkled sheet of paper and scooted toward her, leaving the drawer open. “This crossed my desk the other day,” he said, planting his feet widely apart and handing her the paper. She glanced at the headline. “It’s from the World Health Organization. From 2000 to 2009, it says there was an increase in natural disasters of two hundred and thirty-three percent as compared to 1980 to 1989.”

  “So—you’re saying we might be solving one problem and creating another.”

  “Or many others. And it’s entirely possible that these new problems will be infinitely worse than what we had before.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  11:37 A.M.

  VICE PRESIDENT BILL STANTON bounded up the steps of the Queen Anne-style turreted mansion that he reluctantly called home, anxious to get in the kitchen and make his favorite sandwich: bologna, mustard, and Swiss cheese on wheat toast with lettuce, tomato, and crumbles of Ruffles potato chips.

  As a congressman, Stanton had been known as a “man of the people.” He’d frequently taken the Amtrak train from his home in Pennsylvania to Washington and prided himself on being accessible. But the Secret Service detail made it difficult for him to be a man of the people in Washington anymore, as did living in this Victorian mansion.

  Number One Observatory Circle, the official vice presidential residence, sat on fifteen acres of land at the US Naval Observatory along Embassy Row. Stanton described it to friends and family members as “something else.” Known as Admiral’s House, the Victorian-style home was built in 1893 for the superintendent of the US Naval Observatory. It became the official vice presidential residence in the mid-1970s.

  For Stanton, who had lived much of his adult life in a two-bedroom Philadelphia-area house he’d purchased in 1978, calling this place “home” felt silly—thirty-three rooms, ten thousand square feet of floor space. The place looked like a museum, with rare artworks, polished wood floors, couches and chairs upholstered in gold, windows draped floor-to-ceiling with silk taffeta.

  He ate his sandwich slowly in the shade of the back porch, sitting on the steps and watching the squirrels. He gazed at the grounds of the National Cathedral, and, to his left, across Canal Road, the north bank of the Potomac River and the Georgetown University campus. Sometimes Stanton would sit on these
steps and tell himself, “Hey, Billy, you know something, you’re the Vice President of the United States now, so you better start acting like it,” and then he would laugh.

  He enjoyed the chill in the air and the falling russet oak leaves, and tried not to think much about his afternoon meetings. Particularly the one with Thom Rorbach and Dean Stiles on the Janus Task Force. This Janus thing was “something else,” too, Stanton thought. A different kind of something else.

  As he took another bite of sandwich, Stanton felt his phone vibrate in a pocket of his pants. He didn’t check it right away, though. He slowly finished his lunch instead, enjoying the crunch of the Ruffles chips. Finally he set down the plate, pulled out his SME-PED mobile device and looked.

  “What the—?”

  A message from the POTUS. President of the United States.

  Golf tomorrow?

  For a moment, Stanton smiled. This was the same message Aaron Hall used to send Bill Stanton during the early weeks of the campaign, when the two former presidential rivals were just getting to know one another socially.

  But then he realized what was wrong with it: President Hall had quit golfing months ago.

  CATHERINE BLAINE WAS back in her office on K Street, typing out notes, sifting through what Dr. Sanchez had told her. Induced seismicity. Man-made tornadoes. Harnessing the energy of hurricanes. Atmospheric disturbances. Balancing the planet’s heat budget. Concepts she hadn’t thought much about before. The meeting had reinforced her suspicion that they were accepting the threats too easily. Sanchez, for all his quirks, had given her ideas, and raised questions that hadn’t been raised in the White House. She wondered, for instance, if the group’s scientific panel had fully considered the atmospheric changes that occurred during and immediately after each event. One summary had called them “untraceable.”

  The vibration of her mobile device pulled Blaine out of her reverie. It was Gabriel Herring. The President’s chief of staff was calling an emergency meeting. His message was the acronym they had all been given for meetings of those in the circle: YARI.