Seven Unholy Days (29 page)
Authors: Jerry Hatchett
58
10:10 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)
YELLOW CREEK
A RADIAC technician named Bert hit the mother lode in Building C. The device looked like an oversized ammo can, drab olive green with a clunky utilitarian design the Russians are famous for. As Major Thompson had predicted, it was a long rectangular box about the size of a golf bag. Building C was as far you could get from Building F, home of the reactor housing and our only hope for salvation. We had it on a squeaky dolly and were wheeling with much haste.
The people who had manned the RADIAC’s were ordered to evacuate and move behind Sheriff Litman’s wide perimeter. No resistance was offered. The only people left in the whole co
mplex were Tark, Abdul, and me. Larry and the growing entourage of viewers at his end tried to get me to leave the premises, to no avail. I was determined to see this thing through for better or worse. Abdul stayed in the control room, hammering away on his keyboard, committed to busting that last layer of encryption. Tark had to be on hand for the big event, since he was the one who had been studying the operating procedures for the shaft-evac system. He was in place and had the system ready when we squeaked in. I pulled the countdown timer from my pocket and laid it on the floor beside the housing. We had just over eight minutes.
Tark had the top of the housing open. I leaned over the edge of the concrete structure and peered down into what looked like a bottomless hole. Despite Major Thompson’s assurances that impact could not detonate the bomb, I still had serious misgi
vings about dropping a nuclear bomb thousands of feet down a hole to a very hard landing. He had shown me diagrams of the construction, and what it took to effect a detonation. Theory is one thing. Being there with the nuke is another. Six and a half minutes. It would take the telescopic apparatus five minutes to extend itself down into the shaft and activate its dozens of containment valves.
I looked at Tark and grabbed one end of the bomb. He grabbed the other, and we eased it into position over the top of the shaft. “Three, then drop,” I said. “One ... two ... three ...
NOW
!” We nosed it over into the shaft and let go. The cavernous room sounded eerie echoes as the metal casing bounced off the shaft walls on the way down. We listened carefully and finally heard a faint thud, then nothing.
“Starting sequence,” Tark said as he turned a key-switch on the system control panel. The big rod slid down from the tall ceiling with a gentle hum and penetrated the shaft like a plun
ger in a gargantuan syringe. The fit of the outer sleeve of the telescopic rod to the shaft was perfect. 4:03 remained in real time.
I grabbed the timer and said, “The farther away we can get now, the better. Let’s roll.” The countdown whizzed through the 00:03:00 mark at triple speed. One minute to go. We were almost back to Building A, which housed the control room. I stepped inside and shouted for Abdul to get out.
“I must stay, Matt Decker. I am only seconds away from the bottom of the file!”
“You’ll never break it if you’re dead, Abdul. Have you made offsite backups of everything?”
“Yes. I sent everything to the CEPOCS cloud.”
“Great, then get out of there. We’re out of time!”
He typed a blur of keystrokes as he was getting up and said, “I’m in!”
“Let’s go, Abdul!”
He headed for the door but didn’t make it before the timer in my hand squealed. A fraction of a second later, a massive concussion shook the ground so hard it knocked both of us down. I looked over at Tark. He was still on his feet but swaying as the ground shook. I felt the ground under our feet drop several inches. Pavement cracked and the metal siding on the building creaked and groaned. Windows shattered as the whole building warped, showering us with shards of safety glass.
The rumbling continued, the noise deafening. Building F, the epicenter of our man-made earthquake, was collapsing. Glass broke and metal shrieked as the huge structure came down. Something caught fire and smoke started pouring out of the wreckage before it stopped falling. The vibration of the ground finally stopped.
“Tark, I guess we should’ve thought of this before, but do we have any kind of working fire control?”
“Yeah, plenty of hydrants and hoses.”
“Good deal. Are you fit to man a hose?”
“I’m fine, Matthew.”
I yanked a walkie-talkie out of my back pocket and keyed it up. “Sheriff, we need help in here, fast!”
“On my way,” he said.
“Let’s grab some hoses and try to set up a perimeter around F,” I said. “We don’t want to put the water right on the wreckage unless we have to. We don’t know what kind of radioactive fallout is in there and the last thing we want to do is start spreading it around with water.”
“Understood,” Tark said. The big man was in a dead run. I saw a fire hydrant ahead, around fifty yards from the heap of mangled metal that used to be Building F and sprinted toward it. I passed him and seconds later Abdul sped by me. He was fast. Really fast. He beat me to the hydrant and broke the glass out of the housing next to it that contained the four-inch diam
eter hose and hydrant valve wrench. He threw the wrench on the ground, grabbed the nozzle, and started unspooling the hose.
“Just a perimeter around it, Abdul. We just want to keep it from spreading to the other buildings,” I said as I slipped the wrench onto the valve and cranked it open.
“Got it, I’ll work on wetting down the other buildings,” he said. Something about the way he said it spooked me and I froze, trying to decipher the goose bumps that rippled down the back of my neck there in the searing heat of the flames now engulfing Building F. Then it clicked. For five days I had listened to his thickly flavored, broken English that sounded like something out of a comedy flick. Now he had just rattled off a perfect sentence without the slightest trace of an accent.
59
6:51 AM SUNDAY EASTERN EUROPE SUMMER TIME
(LOCAL)
10:51 PM SATURDAY CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
ANCIENT CITY OF PETRA, JORDAN
Hart watched as the sun climbed high enough in the eastern sky to start erasing the shadows in the old city. Other than still being featured in a movie from time to time or explored on occasion by adventurous tourists, mysterious Petra lay untouched and unseen. Sitting at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, the buildings of Petra had been carved right out of the pink sandstone walls of the canyon. This unique architecture, along with a narrow alley-like entrance, made for a superb defensive position in times of old, strong enough for its original inhabitants to ward off would-be conquerors for hundreds of years.
The defense finally came to an end in 106 A.D., when the Romans under Trajan took the city. Many surviving inhabitants fled and the busy Petra became a forlorn and eventually deser
ted place. Westerners wouldn’t even learn of Petra’s existence until 1812, when local Bedouins shared its story with a Swiss explorer named J.L. Burckhardt.
Hart intimately knew all the history of Petra that there was to know, but as he watched the sunlight spread across the stri
king stone facade of the treasury, his mind was on the future, not the past. This time, Petra’s defense would endure. No Roman invaders would capture her. Where the Nabataeans had failed, his people would succeed. His adversaries would be led here like a moth to a flame, while he kept a date with destiny.
During the 90s and 00s, Petra turned into a popular tourist stop, complete with five-star hotels on a mountain overlooking the picturesque canyon scene. A series of terrorist suicide bombs while the area was full of American college students on an archaeology study trip ended that era. Without tourism and without a climate and environment suited for any other ente
rprise, Petra died again. Property owners gladly parted with parcel after parcel when a shell corporation backed by Hardier Enterprises started buying. Money changed hands and no questions were asked. It was the way things worked in that corner of the world.
For two years, Jordanian laborers and imported construction workers—who were paid well and understood to keep their mouths shut or die—worked to turn Petra into a modern fo
rtress. Reinforced concrete lined the sandstone walls inside rooms that had been hollowed out of the canyon walls thousands of years before. New tunnels were bored deep into the ground, leading to a self-contained power plant with enough diesel to power the complex for years, as well as freshwater and air conditioning systems that belied the harsh desert surroundings outside. To anyone who happened along, Petra would appear as she had for almost two thousand years. And they would not be allowed to look beyond the facade.
A small army of several dozen mercenaries guarded the a
rea, vigilant for signs of intruders from the desert. Dressed in local garb and mounted on camels, the perimeter guards patrolled a 500-meter circle around Petra. Inside the canyon walls, another line of defense was made up of more heavily armed soldiers in desert camouflage gear with a cadre of advanced weaponry at their disposal, including shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and a variety of ground-to-ground armaments. The inner sanctum could be sealed with steel doors on a moment’s notice but there was no need. All was quiet in Petra.
Hart stooped to walk through the entrance of a small cave that opened into a larger cavern housing his private quarters. He sat in front of a computer—connected to the Internet via a satellite uplink/downlink concealed in a natural rock trough on top of the canyon rim—and opened his web-based Hotmail i
nbox. There waited the most recent email from the impertinent and irrelevant Decker, to which he typed a brief reply:
Subject: Spoils
Mr. Decker:
You proved to be an amusing and surprisingly resourceful adversary. With that in mind (although I find a reference to fair play laughable coming from a corrupt little weasel like yourself) I have elected to reward your meaningless victory by leaving be both your father and the Persian’s family.
GAME OVER.
After sending the email, Hart opened a file containing a document he had read many times. This would be the final reading, the one to cherish.
CONFIDENTIAL ANALYSIS OF JORDAN FAULT
BY: DR. CHAIM HILTON, Ph.D.
* * *
HISTORY: In the early twenty-first century, a pattern of unprecedented seismic activity was observed in the state of Israel. The activity comprised numerous minor tremors in the 1.5 – 3.0 range. Of more significance was the sudden commencement of activity where none had been previously observed. Subsequent measurement and analysis confirmed the existence of a paleo tectonic fault system, one that lay dormant for millennia and has now gone active. The system is exacerbated by the proximity of the vertical component of the fault to a known high pressure hydraulic vent. On the surface, the fault line extends from the northern Sinai region in Egypt, roughly north along the Israeli-Jordanian border to Lake Kinneret, at which point it extends diagonally across Lebanon in a north-northwesterly trajectory. The fault is listric in nature, extending vertically along the fault line to an unusually shallow depth, then extending westward at a downward angle. The land mass of Israel is in essence an angular slab resting precariously upon what could be viewed as a giant underground hillside. The fault system was given the name JORDAN FAULT.
POST-DISCOVERY ANALYSIS: A dense system of remote electronic monitoring devices was installed along the fault line and augmented by a series of space-based seismic surveillance units. To oversee and coordinate study of the fault system, the Negev Academic College of Engineering established a research program under my guidance. Activity in the Jordan Fault continued to accelerate in both frequency and magnitude.
FINDINGS: Due to the speed at which the fault activity was developing, we moved quickly to form a panel of leading scientists from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and other nations, in order to insure the highest confidence in our findings. Rarely has consensus among differing scientific camps been so thorough. Without significant dissent, it was agreed that the Jordan Fault is the most unstable seismic system on the planet.
STATUS: Stability continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate, but the seriousness of the situation remains largely masked by the low magnitude of continuing events. It is the vehement and unanimous opinion of this panel that adequate resources are not being allocated to this problem. And although this panel has complied with the confidentiality dictums imposed upon it by the state of Israel, we strenuously object to the continued concealment from the public of the facts contained herein.
OUTLOOK: It is possible that this system will eventually stabilize and return to dormancy. Such stabilization could take years, decades, or centuries. In the Jordan Fault’s current state of flux, however, the risk of a seismic event of cataclysmic proportion is high. The area immediately surrounding the primary fault line should be evacuated and protected. Any external stimulus could trigger the event. Possible stimuli include construction, military activity, or even normal motor vehicle traffic.
RAMIFICATIONS: A seismic event of magnitude 7.0 or greater is likely to start a chain reaction. The angular placement of the land mass, aided by the release of fluid from the nearby hydraulic vent, creates the potential for separation and lubricated gravitational slip. Bluntly stated, Israel could slide into the Mediterranean Sea. In addition to the near-total loss of human life and property on the land mass, this would in turn precipitate an oceanic event of severe proportions.
Hart smiled and closed the file, then left his quarters and went to the command center. “Status report,” he said to the man in charge of the local operation.
“All conditions nominal, sir.”
“And the corridor to the actual location?”
“Clear, sir.”
“Splendid. Come with me for a moment. I have a new slate of diversionary intelligence that needs to be distributed post-haste.”
