One Second After (9 page)

“So, is the whole country like this right now?” Kate asked. “Or is it just us?”

He shook his head.

“Look, I'm kinda tired, sat up most of the night keeping watch on the house, so let me try to explain this in order if that's OK.”

“Sure, John, take your time,” Charlie intervened.

“Well, at the same time the potential energy release of EMP grew, and believe me, I don't understand the technical side of it at all, just that I know that it happens when a nuke goes off and we suspect there's ways of calibrating a small nuke to give off a high yield of energy. Our electronic equipment was getting more and more sensitive to it.”

“No one saw an explosion,” Charlie said, “and believe me, I've asked around, kind of suspecting the same thing.”

“That's just it, it's in the report,” and John motioned to the article on Kate's desk.

She looked at it, thumbed through it.

“Mind if we run off some copies? . . .” And she fell silent, blushing slightly at what sounded like a dumb comment.

“We're all conditioned,” John said with a reassuring smile. “I tried to make coffee in the machine this morning. It's OK, Kate.”

She smiled sheepishly and nodded. “Go on, John.”

“Well, to Charlie's question. EMP doesn't really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the ‘Compton effect,' and believe me, I've read about it, but don't have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. Just that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and bango, it fries everything with electronics in it.”

“Just one bomb?” Kate asked.

He nodded.

“Remember a TV back in the fifties, the early sixties, all those tubes, and hot as hell? That same thing now sits in the palm of my kid's hand when she's playing one of those damn games.”

He wondered for a second if maybe all the pocket-size computer toys were gone. . . . If so, no regrets there at least.

“So the stuff gets more and more delicate, and more and more prone to even the slightest electrical surge.”

“Someone could now fire off a nuke, calibrated to do a maximum load of EMP, and anything within line of sight from up in space gets fried, even from a thousand miles away. For that matter, anything hooked into our electrical web goes as well. Electrical lines are like giant antennas when it comes to EMP, and guide it straight into your house, through the sockets, and, wham, right into anything hooked up.”

“Surge protectors, though?” Kate said. “I spent a hundred bucks on one for my new television.”

He shook his head.

“Surge protectors don't work for this,” Charlie interjected, and John looked over at him.

“We had one, exactly one, briefing on this about two years ago,” Charlie said. “Hundreds on every other threat, just one on this, but I remember somebody asking that question. Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn't have time to trigger off and boom, the whole system is fried. That's why it's so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react.”

“You still haven't answered my question about your damn car,” Tom snapped. “Why is yours working and I've got six squad cars out there that are dead?”

“The electronics,” Charlie interrupted. “That's what got me thinking on it, too, but I didn't feel it was right to say anything about it.”

“Why not?” Tom asked.

“Panic. That's why. I saw an article on the Web about this a couple of months back, and it was a lot worse than what we were talking about just two years ago. Some people who don't like us have apparently been spending a lot of time and money to get a bigger bang for the buck.”

“So why didn't we just protect ourselves?” Kate asked. “Hell, what does it take to build a better surge protector?”

John sighed and shook his head. She was so damn right.

“Kate, it's some rather technical stuff, but it meant retrofitting a lot of stuff, hundreds of billions perhaps, to do all of it. And besides, a lot of people in high places, well, they just glazed over when the scientists started with the technical jargon, the reports would go into committees, and . . .”

“And now we got this,” Charlie said coldly.

John nodded, frustrated.

“Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn't. This, though, it didn't have the hype, no big stars or politicians running around shouting about it . . . and it just never registered on anyone's screen except for a few.”

“I don't get it with the cars, though,” Tom interjected. “Computers, yes, but a car?”

“Any car made after roughly 1980 or so has some solid-state electronics in it,” John said. “Remember carburetors, thing of the past with fuel injection and electronic ignition. That's why my mother-in-law's old Edsel is OK and Bartlett's VW out there. No computers in the engine, and vacuum tubes in the radio. The surge had nothing to fry off; therefore, it still runs. Now everything in a car is wired into some kind of computer. Better living through modern science.”

John fished in his pocket for a cigarette, pulled it out, then hesitated. Kate was glaring at him, as was Tom. The town had a no-smoking ordinance for all its buildings.

John hesitated, but damn, he wanted one now.

“Look, guys, if you want me to talk, I get a cigarette.”

“Mary would kick your ass if she knew you were still smoking,” Kate said.

“Don't lay the guilt on me,” John replied sharply. It was Mary's dying that had snagged him back into smoking after being clean for ten years. The army had started getting uptight on it, and amongst all the other aspects of grooming for the star, smoking was a checkmark against him with some of the bean counters and actuaries in the Pentagon who argued why invest the effort on a guy who might die early?

“Go on; light up.” She hesitated. “And give me one of those damn things, too.”

Now it was his turn to hesitate. He hated leading someone back into sin, but on this day . . . what the hell.

He lit her cigarette. She leaned back in her chair, inhaled deeply, let it out, and sighed.

“God damn, I've been wanting that for six years now. Damn, is it good.”

A couple of seconds later she actually smiled, the first time she had done so since he walked in.

“Head rush,” she muttered, then took another puff.

“Damn near everything has a computer in it now,” John continued. “Cash registers, phones, toys, cars, trucks, but, most vulnerable of all, the complex web of our electrical distribution system. All of it was waiting to get hit.”

Tom leaned against the wall and let a few choice words slip out.

“You think they'd have seen this coming. Done something about it.”

“Who is ‘they,' Tom?”

“Jesus, John, you know. The president, Homeland Security. Hell, I was getting e-mails damn near every day on terrorist alerts, training on what to do if they hijacked a truck loaded with nuclear waste, even a drill with the hospital last year if they unleashed some sort of plague. I got twenty bio and hazmat suits in a storage closet. Never even heard about this thing being talked about.”

John sighed.

“Yeah, I know. It was off most people's screens. Seemed too sci-fi to some of them. But that doesn't matter now.”

“I'm still worried about radiation, though,” Kate said, “fallout.”

“Don't.”

“You sound rather assured of yourself.”

“You don't have a single radio working here, nothing at all?” John asked.

Tom shook his head.

“I do.”

“Where?”

“In the Edsel. It's an old tube radio. I checked it last night. Static from one end to the other. If this thing was local, if they had popped a bomb over Atlanta, Charlotte, we'd still be picking up radio stations from the Midwest and Northeast.”

“Why?”

“It's a horizon event. Line of sight, like I said. I'll guess it was one to three nukes, lit off a couple of hundred miles up above the atmosphere, covered most, maybe all, of the United States. Fallout is a by-product of rubble blown up into the atmosphere from a bomb going off. Pop an EMP above the atmosphere . . . and, well, at least you don't have any fallout worries.”

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie sighed.

That caught John slightly off guard. Charlie was strict Southern Baptist, and for him to say that . . . well, it was a major sin, though a Catholic wouldn't think twice about it.

“Who do you think did it?”

“Does it matter?” John replied.

“Yeah, maybe it does to me?” Tom said. “I got a boy over in Iraq right now. You know that one of my nephews is with the navy out in the Pacific. I sure as hell would like to know who they're fighting. If it was the Chinks, my nephew will be in it. The rag heads and it's my son.”

“Doubt if it's China,” John said quietly.

“Why? You said they were the ones doing the research.”

“Doing the research, but using it in a first strike? Doubt it. They are just as vulnerable to EMP as we are. Do it to us and we'd flatten them and they know it.”

“We have it, too?”

“Sure we do. What the hell do you think the threat was to Saddam back in 1991? Charlie, you were over there then, same as me; you remember.”

“Yeah, if they hit us with any weapon of mass destruction the word was we'd pop a nuke off about twenty miles above Baghdad.”

“When a nuke goes off above the atmosphere or even in the high upper atmosphere, it sets off that electrical chain reaction I talked about. Again, just like a solar flare, usually the upper atmosphere absorbs the magnetic disturbance of a solar flare and up north we see that as the northern lights. But if it's big enough, the disturbance hits the ground and starts shorting things out. So we threatened Saddam with an EMP if he unleashed anything on us,” John said. “It would have shut down the entire power grid of central Iraq and shut down their entire command and control system as well. They didn't, so we didn't.”

“Wouldn't that have fried our stuff, too?” Kate asked.

“No. Remember, it's line of sight. Twenty miles up, our forces in Saudi Arabia would have been below the horizon. Besides, all our equipment was hardened against EMP to varying degrees. They spent a lot of money on that back during the Reagan years.”

“So our military is still OK here in the states then?” Kate asked.

“Doubt it. That's the gist of the report I just gave you. Every administration since Reagan's has placed hardening of our electronics on the back shelf. Meanwhile the equipment kept getting more delicate and thus susceptible and the potential power of the burst kept getting one helluva lot stronger. Remember how we were all wowed by the high-tech stuff back in 1991. That equipment is now as primitive as a steam engine compared
to what we got now. And in constantly making computers and electronics faster and better we made them smaller, more compact, and more and more vulnerable to an EMP strike.”

He dropped the butt of his cigarette into his nearly empty coffee cup, offered a second to Kate, who took it, and lit another for himself.

“Who then?”

“For my money . . . maybe North Korea, maybe Middle East terrorists with some equipment supplied by Iran, Korea, or both. As for the warhead, we all know there's enough of those left over from the old Soviet Union that sooner or later someone would get their hands on, if for nothing else than the goodies inside that go bang. Iran and Korea were hell-bent on making nukes as well. But they'd be crazy to throw three or four at us when we could make the rubble glow for a hundred years with a thousand fired back in reply. But turn them into EMP weapons . . . and they win, at least in terms of hitting us harder than we could ever have dreamed of.

“Maybe launched from a sub, hell, even from a freighter that got up a couple of hundred miles from the coast. Get that close and even an old Scud could just about get the package high enough. One like I said, maybe two or three, and you've just castrated the entire country.”

“We'll flatten the bastards for this,” Tom snapped.

“Most likely already have, but do they give a shit? Hell no. The leaders will survive; they're most likely down in bunkers a thousand feet deep laughing their asses off right now. Hell, if we flatten them, they'll tell their own people that survive that we struck first and then they got millions more followers.”

“I can't yet believe this,” Kate sighed.

“Sun Tzu,” Charlie said.

John looked at him and smiled.

“The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest. . . . He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will.”

All three looked at him in surprise.

“Hey, I remember a few things from college.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“What happened out there,” John said softly, “doesn't matter to us now. It's what happens here in Black Mountain that does.”

“How long before the power comes back on?” Kate asked. “Or we get some word from Washington on what to do? Or even from Raleigh or Asheville?”

Strangely, an old Civil War song flashed into his mind, a line from “Lorena”: “It may be for years, and it may be forever.”

“Weeks, months, maybe years,” John said, and he found he could not look into Kate's eyes as he said it.

Yesterday, her biggest concern was the hot argument in the town about who would be grand marshal this year for the Fourth of July parade, that and the continuing wrangle with Asheville about water rates.