by Liz Grzyb
“Well, not in any detail. Apart from the weather, of course.”
“In 20 of those situations, the antecedent conditions involved active armed conflict. Months, if not years, of war, of death, of forced famine, of innocence destroyed, for nothing but greed. In the 18 you identified, the weather event effectively disarmed both sides, forcing them to respond to the natural crisis rather than killing each other and innocent bystanders. That’s when we arrive to help those innocent bystanders and effectively end the conflict through the conditional aid we bring.”
“But you wouldn’t have gone in without the weather event?”
“We’re not an army to go invading war-torn countries.”
“So, the weather event was what? A means to an end? A reason to go in where you weren’t previously needed? How is that not deceptive business practice? Fraud on a global scale?”
“I suppose it would be if it were done for financial gain.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Of course not.”
“But in all those rescue operations of which you so proudly speak, you were the one that caused the natural disaster. You created the conditions to—what was it—‘statistically favour’ the development of a natural disaster that resulted in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people.”
“As the military keep telling us, there is always collateral damage. The cost has been high and I truly regret the loss of those whom we could not save, but it is a necessary evil.”
“What would your brother Darren say to that?”
“I know that he would say that no one life is worth more or less than any other. Every life is worth saving. But I have not yet found a way to do that. The best that I can do is to stop as much of the bloodshed as I can.”
“Even if it is in clear contradiction of the United Nations environmental modification convention?
Roger Gorton appeared suddenly behind Terry Sharp and spoke quietly into Sharp’s left ear again. Jocelyn watched Sharp’s face, trying to read his enigmatic expression. He closed his eyes for a moment and then nodded. He turned to Gorton and whispered a few words that Jocelyn could not decipher. Gorton’s eyes widened slightly and Jocelyn noted an almost imperceptible shake of his head as though in disagreement. Then he straightened and backed away with a curt nod, returning to from wherever it was he came.
Sharp suddenly stood. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Jocelyn became wary. “Where do you want to take me?”
“Upstairs.”
“You mean the roof?”
“No.”
“But,” she indicated the view out the windows, “we’re on the top floor. Aren’t we?”
Sharp smiled as he led her to a door Jocelyn had not previously noticed. “What I’m about to show you is so secret it doesn’t appear on any plans of this building and can only be reached via these stairs.” He opened the door and gestured for Jocelyn to step through. He then led her up a flight of brightly lit stairs. “I built the real top floor after the building had been completed,” he said. Then, with a chuckle, “People thought I was being a douche, redecorating a penthouse that had only just been completed but I was, in fact, building this.”
He opened the door at the top of the stairs and revealed darkness within. “Come on in.”
Jocelyn stopped at the threshold, suddenly uncertain. “What’s in there?” She had sudden visions of a sordid den of disrepute and felt a little afraid of this man whom, despite all her research, she realised she did not know at all.
“This is the nerve centre of the Sierra operations,” he said and entered the darkness.
Jocelyn stood her ground for a moment but then felt a bit silly and hurried to catch up. Inside wasn’t as dark as she had imagined. While the lighting was low, the glow of row after row of computer monitors provided enough light to see by. Sitting at the banks of monitors were half a dozen people, all busy doing something she could not figure. Many of the monitors showed satellite imagery of the Earth. On some, the world was in night, others day. Others showed rapidly changing graphs of unknowable quantities. Still others showed column after column of data scrolling at high speed. Standing behind the last row of monitors where none of those seated could see him, was Roger Gorton, watching the proceedings like a quarterback calling plays. He glanced at her, his animosity clear in his expression.
“Well?” Sharp asked. “What do you think?”
“I’ve no idea what I’m looking at,” Jocelyn replied honestly. “But it does look impressive, whatever it is.”
Sharp waved an expansive hand. “This is where we whisper to the butterflies. The control centre.” He waved at two people at one end. “Over there we run the multiple global, synoptic and mesoscale meteorological models on the supercomputers in the basement. Next to them is where we run the dynamical models for determining the modifications necessary to achieve desired outcomes. Here we control the satellite orbital platforms. And over there we manage the energy transfer processes, mostly wide-spectrum, low power lasers but also microwave and ultrasonic. We monitor all weather satellite and automated weather station feeds for current state analysis, both for determining feasibility of modifications but also to monitor the results of modification attempts.”
“Wow,” Jocelyn said with no trace of artifice. “It’s a good thing the UN doesn’t know about this place. You would be Public Enemy Number One.”
“The UN’s the least of my worries, Jocelyn. If any world government, in particular any military branch, caught wind of this, the world would immediately become a much worse place to live.”
“So what gives you the right to pick and choose what you do with your technology, particularly on the international stage?”
Sharp shrugged. “I don’t have a good answer for that. Perhaps an over-developed sense of fairness and justice.”
“One could also say an over-developed ego, Mr Sharp. All upstanding democratic societies have separated their judicial processes from their law enforcement. What you’re doing here,” Jocelyn pointed her chin at the room in general, “is no better than what you’re afraid the world’s military will do with it.”
“Do you think so?”
Jocelyn nodded, suddenly uncertain, both of the law and of herself.
“I think the major difference between what we do here and what others may do is that our focus is on the good of humanity, not on some collection of nationalistic ideals intended to push arbitrary lines around on a map and increase our sense of worth at the cost of others. It’s a matter of the decisions that are made and how it affects the world as a whole.”
Sharp suddenly turned away and moved to Gorton. Jocelyn watched the two speaking in hushed tones. Again, Gorton appeared aggrieved by Sharp’s words. Once Gorton looked over to her and the withering glance was enough for her to put Gorton down indelibly on her list of most hated. After a moment, Sharp returned to her side.
He indicated one of the large monitors on the far wall. “Watch this.”
The scene on the monitor was clearly a satellite image of the south-eastern mainland US. It was not until the scene changed, swinging to the north-west and zooming in, that Jocelyn realised that the image was live. The scene continued to zoom in, somewhere west of the Kentucky. She thought she recognised the squiggle of the Ohio River slide past but it was too quick to be sure.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“The state of Missouri. The 18th most populous in the Union, the 21st largest by area, home of one of the many cities in the country called Springfield, as well as of Harry S. Truman, the only President to ever come from the Show Me State.”
“Why?”
Sharp nodded at the screen, which had zoomed in even further to the Missouri River and a large urban area on its southern bank. “Jefferson City. The—”
“Capital of Missouri, yes I know. What’s so interesting about it?”
“You’ll see.” He left her and went to one of the silent desk
jockeys sitting in front of them and spoke quietly with the woman.
“My God,” Jocelyn breathed. “What the hell has happened there? It looks like there’s been a war.”
“The Homeland Defence Guard decided the capitol building was too difficult to defend,” Roger Gorton said calmly. “They kidnapped the Lieutenant Governor and his staff and, with more than three times the force of the National Guard who had attempted to lay siege to the building, essentially wiped them out on their way to their stronghold at Hartsburg not far from Jefferson City. Over five hundred dead or wounded.”
“Could nobody stop them?”
Sharp snorted. “Would you shoot at someone carrying an armed nuclear Mk 27 warhead?”
“Jesus. They’ve armed it?”
Gorton nodded. “That seems to be the case.”
“What can they do?”
Sharp looked at her. “They? They, whoever you mean, can do nothing until the terrorists either detonate the warhead or decide to stand down. After killing the Governor and probably three-quarters of the State’s National Guard reserve, the terrorists have very little to gain by standing down. No one, certainly not the President, can acquiesce to their ludicrous demands, so there seems to be only one possible outcome.”
“Jesus,” Jocelyn repeated. She suddenly needed a seat. Gorton seemed to read her mind and had one behind her knees before they crumpled.
“Thank you,” she mumbled. She looked at Sharp. “But surely . . . ” She realised she had nothing. Her head was reeling from the shock of the sudden escalation of the situation. Only two weeks ago no one had heard of the Homeland Defence Guard, and now they were likely to put a great smoking hole in the centre of the continent. “What’s going to happen?”
Sharp smiled. “A tornado!”
Jocelyn blinked. “A what? But it’s not storm season!” Even as she said it, she knew what was coming. “Oh, you’ve got to be joking, Terry. You can’t create a tornado out of thin air.”
Sharp wobbled his head from side to side. “No, that’s true,” he conceded. “But if there’s one place in the world where the air is not thin, it’s at the conjunction of the warm air coming up out of the Gulf of Mexico and the cold air streaming down off the Rockies. Check out this screen.”
On another of the big monitors an infrared satellite image of the greater continental US appeared, showing surface, mid and upper level clouds in different shades of grey. There were a lot of bright shades to the north and over the Rockies, indicating very cold air, and darker shades, indicating warmer air, over the Plains and further south. The screen suddenly switched to an animated colour image.
“This is the output of a large number of runs of the dynamical model exploring the phase space of possible modifications to create the conditions suitable for the formation of a tornado.”
“That was quick. Must be some supercomputer.”
“Yes it is, but to let you in on a little secret, we’ve been running them since you arrived in my office.”
“So you knew this would happen?”
“No, of course not. But it was something that we knew was possible. It’s what we do—consider all possible outcomes of a situation. We have a saying here on the top floor: Computing is cheap, lives are not.”
“Nice. So, is a tornado feasible?”
With a laser pointer that he pulled from nowhere, Sharp highlighted a region of green swirl over Kansas. “This is the transition zone where the interaction of the air streams is most likely to spawn thunderstorms that can produce tornados. At this time of year, the magnitude of the differences is relatively slight meaning that the vorticity of the atmosphere is low.” He highlighted a region of orange to the south of the green. “However, by introducing some thermal forcing over this region, we can increase the relative difference between the two streams and—” he pointed to yet another screen which showed a similar scene, “begin to generate vorticity in the upper air streams, here coloured in orange.”
Jocelyn nodded at the new screen. “Is that model output too?”
Sharp shook his head. “In fact it’s not. That’s a live image Doppler radar.”
“You mean it’s working?”
“So far. All the ingredients are present, we just have to wait for the atmospheric dynamics to do their job.”
Suddenly the situation struck her as ridiculous, like some sort of comedy skit on late night television. “But isn’t something like a tornado just going to piss them off even more? How is it going to stop them?”
Sharp chuckled. “What are they going to do? Blow up a tornado with their nuke? No, you overestimate the intelligence quotient of the militarily minded. To all intents and purposes, it’s an act of God. They will cower in fear until someone rescues them.”
“And that someone is you?”
Sharp nodded. “And also, in this instance, God. You ready?”
“For what?”
“Hartsburg.”
“We’re going out there? To where they have a nuclear warhead? That they’re threatening to detonate?” She didn’t get paid enough for this.
“You said it yourself, Jocelyn. If I’m going to make these decisions to modify the environment, then I have to accept the responsibility. Today I’m going to do that by being present. It’s the least I can do. This way.”
Why now? Jocelyn asked silently as she followed Sharp back to the stairwell. Instead of heading down, Sharp led her up once more. “Where are we going now?”
“The roof,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind flying in a helicopter.”
“No,” she said without conviction, feeling each step now as a weight around her neck as she climbed the stairs.
Twelve minutes later they were flying south-south-west at an air speed well in excess of 600 km/h. Sitting in the front next to Sharp, Jocelyn found herself staring at the instrument panel because looking out through the canopy frightened her unbelievably. “I thought you said this was a helicopter,” she said.
Sharp laughed around his headset. “It is, sort of. More precisely it’s described as a gyrodyne, a cross between an airplane and a helicopter. All the speed of the former with the ability to hover of the latter.”
The aircraft hit some turbulence and Jocelyn grabbed the overhead handhold even tighter, turning her “Why?” into a yelp.
“Basically because I wanted a helicopter faster than Hamed Mikulak’s.”
Jocelyn turned around to look at Roger Gorton, who sat equally uncomfortably in one of the rear seats of the gyrodyne. “Mr Hamed Mikulak is the CEO of Boomer Tech, with whom Mr Sharp has an infantile rivalry in regard to boys’ toys.”
“I like to give people the impression that Mikulak is my archrival,” Sharp said. “But the truth is I own him so bad. My aerospace division has promised me a prototype next year that will break the sound barrier.”
The thought of being in a flimsy aircraft going faster than the speed of sound made Jocelyn’s already tender stomach feel even worse but she had to stifle a laugh when Gorton rolled his eyes. She found herself warming to the gaunt spectre of a man.
“Look out to the right,” Sharp directed.
Jocelyn looked where he was indicating but saw nothing but a thick line of dark storm clouds stretching from behind them to a long way ahead of them. “What is it?”
“That’s our storm front. Somewhere in there, vorticity will be forming and hopefully the genesis of our tornado.”
Jocelyn nodded but couldn’t find anything to say.
The 530 kilometres from Chicago to Jefferson City literally flew by. Less than an hour after taking off from the roof of Sharp Tower, Jocelyn could see the shiny outline of the Missouri River and beside it, still many kilometres off, the surprisingly tight urban boundary of Jefferson City. Sharp put the aircraft into a shallow bank and began a wide turn north of the city.
“Looks like the Army has entered the fray,” Gorton said quietly. What Jocelyn had thought to be structures built along side a major interstate highway suddenly bec
ame heavy military vehicles moving slowly north from the city. The number and extent of vehicles was staggering. She looked to where they were heading and their intended destination was clearly delineated by the rings of vehicles—tanks, transports, armoured personnel carriers that Jocelyn could easily discern—parked around some rural idyl.
“My God,” she breathed. “There’s so many of them.”
Sharp grimaced. “And not one of them will be able to do anything but they’re making some politician in D.C. feel good about himself.”
Sharp pushed the aircraft away from the epicentre of attention and soon orbited a patch of cleared ground on a small hill about six kilometres away. He landed surprisingly gently and powered down before Jocelyn had figured out how to undo her harness. She opened her door and was immediately aware of the humidity in the air, like a hot stormy summer’s day, even though it was November. The distinct smell of ozone infused every breath and lightning flickered in the west. A storm was brewing.
“Vorticity readings are climbing steeply,” Gorton said, reading from his notepad. From somewhere he had put on a straw hat. He scrolled through a number of pages. “Nothing on the Doppler radar, yet. The National Weather Service has just issued a Tornado Watch for this and adjacent counties.”
“What’s the latest on our friends?” Sharp asked.
“The Army is attempting to negotiate. A number of them have been killed by sniper fire. A Marine UH-1Z light attack helicopter crashed on take off from MCAS New River, killing all on board. No one has managed to speak with anyone from the Homeland Defence Guard, although they have updated their Facebook page to indicate that detonation of the warhead will occur within twelve hours if the President does not accede to their demands.”
“So, situation as per usual. A whole bunch of hotheads willing and able to do lots of damage but no ability to actually achieve anything useful.”
“I think you’re understating the situation, Mr Sharp,” Jocelyn said. “These guys are more than just hotheads; they’re clearly fanatic terrorists of the most extreme kind.”
