48 Hours, page 25
The sun was well above the tree line to the east, and in that morning sky, one could look at it for several seconds before turning away. The answer to his prayer was in his heart as he gazed at the sun and Sauron’s Eye, which appeared to be looking straight at him and his world with a malevolent gaze.
He followed behind Harrison. Few in this town knew him, and he thanked God for that as he shouldered his way through the crowd, because what could he say if they turned to him with pleas and appeals as a friend to look out for their child or if there a way they could all go in together as a family? He looked over at Jerry Green’s table.
Jerry had been forced to increase the detail around his table, a human wall now, mostly parents; from the looks of them, they must have been one hell of a football squad in their day, helping to keep the crowd back and in some semblance of order, letting a few through at a time after showing their identification before Jerry stamped the backs of both hands.
“Damn it, Darren. Now!”
Harrison was by the Humvee with General Perry by his side, motioning for him to come over. As Darren approached, Perry sat back down inside the Humvee, putting on a headset.
“What’s up?” Darren asked.
“It’s about to hit the fan, that’s what’s up,” Harrison replied, nodding toward Perry sitting in the front passenger seat. Leaning into the vehicle, Darren could hear what he was saying.
“Bravo Xray Seven. This is General Perry. I am ordering you to disregard George One. Repeat, disregard George One.”
Perry turned a switch on the comm unit built into the front dash of the Humvee, and now Darren could hear the conversation both ways.
“General, sir, you are telling me to disregard a direct order from the governor?”
“Affirmative.”
“Sir, I cannot do that. And sir, George One has informed me that you have been removed from command.”
Amid the chaos surrounding him between crying children, more than a few crying parents, and others shouting for instructions, all of it a sea of anguish and confusion, he now heard something else—the thumping of a helicopter, growing louder by the second.
“Xray Seven, abort! Abort! You are following an illegal and immoral order. Abort!”
“Sir, I cannot; I have my orders.”
A National Guard helicopter came in low and hot, just clearing the trees to the south, and behind it was an Apache gunship a hundred or so feet higher.
“Don’t do this!” Perry shouted, but there was no response as the Black Hawk passed straight over them, the sound near-deafening, dust and debris kicked up, parents crouching and pulling their children in protectively. The pilot then pulled up sharply into a banking turn, bleeding off speed as he circled, while the Apache swung about and went into a slowly turning hover a couple of hundred feet higher. The sight and sound of it was intimidating, as it was surely meant to be. So much dust was now swirling up that Darren had to squint, turning his back to the down blast, a sharp memory now triggered of Iraq, all the damn dust and sand kicked up by helicopters.
“Your attention, please! Your attention, please!” The Black Hawk had a loudspeaker rigged up, the voice sounding sharp, threatening, echoing above the roar of the engines and rotors. “You are ordered to disperse immediately, by order of the governor. Clear a way so that emergency vehicles can enter this facility. Once that operation is completed, room will still be available for any who wish to enter.”
The message was repeated three times.
Darren, looking for a vantage point, finally climbed up on the hood of the Humvee. Some people, those at the edge of the crowd of several thousand, began pulling back, but most still remained in place, crouching.
“You have five minutes to disperse. Disregard those wearing National Guard uniforms who are in open rebellion and attempting to hold an official government facility. They are troops in rebellion and shall be dealt with according to martial law. If you do not disperse, extreme measures will be taken.”
As the message was repeated for the third time, the Apache arced up into a high-angle turn, dropped its nose, and thundered down, aiming straight at the crowd.
Collective cries of panic rose, the crowd surging back from the fence. Others lying flat pulled their children in tight to cover them. More than a few shots rang out, parents on the ground taking aim and firing at the Apache but with no effect against its well-armored hull.
“This is General Perry!” Darren saw Perry up by his side standing on the roof of the Humvee, shouting into the microphone linking him to the helicopters. “Don’t do it. For Christ’s sake, there are children down here!”
The Apache swept over the crowd barely twenty feet above the ground, like a hawk swooping in for the kill. At the very last second, it pulled up into a high-arcing turn, while whoever was on the Black Hawk kept repeating the same message.
“Stand your ground!” shouted Darla, having been disturbed from her nap. Holding up a battery-powered bullhorn, she had climbed partway up onto the Abrams M1, shouting the same message several times. “They are fellow Americans; they will not shoot at their own children down here. Stand your ground!”
The crowd was disintegrating into chaos, but her cries rallied enough to turn back and stay in place.
Perry jumped from the hood of the Humvee and back into the front seat. “Bravo Xray Seven, In the name of God, are you going to shoot at the children down here?”
“Sir, I have my orders direct from the governor—”
“Fuck the orders, man! Are you going to shoot the children down here?”
The loudspeaker on the Black Hawk went silent, the chopper rising slowly while the Apache went into a menacing holding pattern a couple of hundred feet up.
“Sir, I don’t want to.” Darren heard something of a plaintive note to his voice. “The governor is listening in on another channel, and he has just ordered me to disperse this crowd by any means possible—not to shoot to kill, if possible, but shoot to at least frighten.”
“Damn it. You know as well as I do it will go out of control and kids will get killed.”
“Sir, I don’t want to, but—”
“Make a decision as a man!” Perry shouted back. “All of us might be facing God before this day is out. What will you tell Him about what you did here today?”
There was a pause of only a dozen or so seconds, but for Darren, it seemed like an eternity. He jumped down from the Humvee and unslung his AR-15. It was useless against an armored Apache, but it might sting the Black Hawk a bit.
The Black Hawk’s rotors picked up velocity, nose pitching up, and it climbed out, the Apache turning and doing the same.
“God bless you, and thank you,” Perry said.
“General Perry, the governor orders you to report to him immediately.”
Perry laughed. “You know what to tell that self-centered son of a bitch what he can go kiss.”
There was a bit of a chuckle in reply. “Sir, nearly all of us are with you, but there are some who are not. I’m sorry, sir, but it isn’t over yet. Bravo Xray Seven signing off.”
Perry got out of the Humvee, while in the background, Darla repeatedly announced that everything was okay, for parents to continue to bring their children in, and for adult personnel to report to Jerry Green.
“He’s right,” Perry said. “It isn’t over. It is going to turn bad, real bad.”
The sun, climbing well above the horizon, once a source of comfort, now filled Darren with an icy chill down his spine.
PART X
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
18
THE WHITE HOUSE · 9:40 A.M. EST
HE was almost getting used to the ear-popping ride on the elevator taking them several hundred feet beneath the White House. But this time, as the door opened, he found himself facing four black-clad security personnel openly armed with M4s strapped across their chests.
Allison showed no reaction other than producing her ID, holding it up, and telling Richard to do the same. They were checked against a list and then told to proceed.
“What’s this?” Richard whispered. “It wasn’t this way yesterday.”
“You can tell things are getting a little dicey upstairs; several people tried to slip their way down here,” she replied.
This time, she led him down a different corridor; it was narrower and sloped down to a lower level. At the end of that descent, they turned left. A heavy steel-reinforced door, halfway open, was in front of them. Passing through the entryway, Richard noticed that the open door was more than a foot thick, resembling a safe door at a bank, complete with the Mosler logo. Farther in were double doors, glass walled, one behind the other. Allison opened the outer of the two, gesturing from him to go in. She closed the outer door, which sealed tight, and with the inner door opening, his ears popped.
It was the same as the ultraclean rooms at Goddard, except rather than to ensure dust-free environments for rooms with sensitive equipment and computers, it was to guard against radioactive dust. Finally, there was a standard body scanner.
Once past that obstacle, there were two more security personnel, this time Secret Service. Another showing of IDs, which were cross-checked to a sign-in sheet, which both he and Allison had to initial. One of the agents opened the door into the conference room, an agent inside gesturing to where Richard was supposed to sit while Allison stayed outside. A briefing was already going on as he slipped into his chair; he was a bit nervous and did not want to be noticed. The room was smaller than where he had met with the president and advisors only the day before. About twenty or so were crammed into its narrow confines.
He was noticed immediately by the president, who interrupted a presentation by Secretary Van Buren, who was speculating on long-term environmental effects from a full-scale flare of longer than one day. Richard glanced at the monitor displaying species die-off estimates. It looked grim.
“Dr. Van Buren,” the president said, interrupting the presentation, “if we could hold your briefing for a few minutes, Dr. Carrington has just entered the room, and we all want the latest update from him on what is happening with the sun.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Richard said softly, voice a bit shaky. This wasn’t going to be easy.
He stepped behind the podium, the room so small that he had to squeeze in behind it. He scanned the data and openly sighed, regretting that since it was obvious everyone in the room was hanging on his reaction and what he was about to say.
“Whenever you are ready, Dr. Carrington,” the president urged him, making clear there was no more stall time.
Richard cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and finally waded in. “The luminosity of the sun has increased over the last seventy-five minutes.”
“What does that mean?” the president asked.
“Sir, the sun’s output of visible light has increased just over 2 percent, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The point of origin of this increased luminosity is Sauron’s Eye. Up until seventy-five minutes ago, Sauron’s Eye appeared, relative to the plasma surface of the sun, to be a dark spot more than fifty thousand miles across, while the outer rim of it was a swirling mass of high-intensity energy boiling up from deep within the sun, thus giving it the appearance of a malevolent humanlike eye, pupil in the center surrounded by a light-colored sclera. That is shifting rapidly as predicted. The most recent close-ups from Helio II…”
He paused and turned to look at the monitor. Several seconds passed, and a still image appeared on the screen. He looked at the time stamp; it had arrived a little over ten minutes ago, which meant the image was about twenty minutes old. He glanced at a row of clocks that displayed the time in D.C., London, Moscow, and China.
“The CME will start to impact in approximately an hour and twenty minutes. The full impact will reach us in two hours. Regardless of the damage that this CME will do to us—and it will prove to be the most intense solar event to strike our planet since 1859—we are at least in some ways prepared for it. The event of three weeks ago was a wake-up call, but now we enter at least twenty-four of the most nerve-racking hours in the history of humanity once that CME has bent back our magnetosphere and left the surface of our planet exposed.”
Looking over to the technician sitting in the corner, hunched over her computer monitors, Richard asked, “Can we get an image of Sauron’s Eye from approximately three hours ago?”
It took about ten seconds for the image to appear.
“Put the two side by side, please.”
She did as requested. He took it in and shook his head, wondering if this was how seismologists felt when still trying to track down precise warning times for earthquakes.
“Notice the most current shot. Those long, curling streams of intense white light, which are actually advanced streamers of a proton event or flare, spiraling up around what we could call the pupil of Sauron’s Eye. The pupil is rapidly contracting as the high-energy storm from deep within the sun is exploding up through it. As the speed and intensity increase, the eye will start to look like it is winking at us as the pupil collapses in and then explodes.”
He stared at it for a moment, lost in silent awe and fear. He had spent a lifetime studying the sun, and at this instant, he felt as if he were indeed staring at something malevolent and deadly. That which he had given a lifetime to know seemed poised to destroy all that he knew. He wished the eye of doom would just collapse in upon itself and disappear into oblivion, but of course, like Tolkien’s story, that was fantasy, not the reality he was trying to explain.
The president urged him to continue.
“Each of those flares is tens of thousands of miles long, charged with an energy that would make the simultaneous detonation of every nuclear weapon on this planet pale to insignificance.”
He glanced at Admiral Brockenborough as if to say, The power you think you can wield is nothing compared to this.
“Three hours ago, the gravity of the sun was causing those vast coiling explosions to arc over and plunge back down at such velocity that they punched thousands of miles through the boiling plasma that can be loosely defined as the surface of the sun.
“Now to the most current image. Those coils of high-energy protons are escaping solar gravity and are now streaming outward at nearly the speed of light.”
“So it’s begun?” the president asked.
“Almost, but not quite yet, sir. What we are seeing there is a foreshadowing, a forward edge, like the outer bands of a hurricane that announce a storm is coming but is still some distance off. Yes, that means they are already hitting our magnetosphere, but it is just the opening move.”
“How soon before the full-out blow hits?” the head of national security asked.
“Ma’am, I cannot give you an exact estimate to the minute, but it is all but certain to blow within the next twelve hours.”
“If that damn thing blows before the CME fully impacts our magnetosphere…?” asked the president.
“Best case? The flare blows within the next hour and forty-five minutes. The head of it, moving at nearly the speed of light, cuts right through the CME, which is moving at only 1.7 million miles per hour. If so, there is a strong probability that it disrupts the CME significantly as it blows through; it then strikes our magnetosphere, and most if not nearly all the energy is absorbed and diverted.”
“In other words, we are saved?” someone whispered.
“Yes. Not just from the flare but perhaps even the effects of the worst CME since what is called the Carrington Event of 1859.”
“There will be one hell of a lot of explaining and cleaning up to do after what has happened in the last twenty-four hours,” the head of the NSA said, shaking her head.
“And some of us will look like total assholes,” replied Admiral Brockenborough. Richard knew the jab was directed at him and perhaps even the president as well.
“I would prefer to look like an asshole,” the president struck back angrily, “if that means we are spared this nightmare. I’ll take that moniker any day.”
“Sir, if such a possibility is indeed the case,” Admiral Brockenborough replied, unfazed by the rebuke, “that we still might be spared from this nightmare scenario presented by the good doctor up front, that changes the strategic situation profoundly.”
“Admiral, stop right there! I’ve made my decision regarding our nuclear weapons and have communicated thus to every leader of a nuclear-armed nation, including Iran and Korea. My order for a full stand-down is firm regardless of what happens today. Either obey that order without further debate, or I will accept your resignation here and now. Do I make myself clear, Admiral?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied with barely suppressed anger.
The president returned his attention to Richard. “Now give us worst-case scenario, at least from a solar event and not the insanity of our own collective suicide.”
Richard, shaken, pressed on. “I’ve already done so several times, sir, regarding worst case both with this group and you personally. It is still the same.”
“So that’s it, Dr. Carrington? We are facing the final hours?”
Richard nodded.
“We have about an hour and forty-five minutes left to prepare,” the president announced softly. “Let us all pray for the best but prepare for the worst. Let’s get to work as planned, and no one—I repeat, no one—is going to go off half-cocked.”
He swept the room with his gaze, and no one dared to reply as he stood up and left the conference room. Richard waited for most of the room to clear, no one bothering to approach him to talk, so he felt truly alone, again the Greek messenger. He followed the last of the group out the door, not sure what to do next or where to go. At this moment, he wished he could simply walk out of the building and find some way to still get back to Goddard, some familiar, comfortable surroundings to sit out the next few hours.
