Premier Luchenko suggested that only one enemy of Russia could marshal the immense resources such sabotage would require: that renegade Texan, Ripley Forte.
President Turnbull pointedly declined to disagree.
20. SLOW BURN
25 JULY 2009
“Still burning?” President Turnbull asked worriedly.
“Still burning, sir,” replied his National Security aide, Marine Major General Habib T. Noonie.
President Turnbull massaged his face, trying to rub the tension away. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy from fatigue, the lines that usually gave him the appearance of graceful maturity now were those of a tired old man. “Goddammit,” he protested, “those wheat fields can’t still be on fire. Our Department of Agriculture experts said they’d burn out in a matter of hours. But it’s been four days now, and they’re still burning. I don’t understand it.”
“You’re not alone, Mr. President. No one understands it.”
“What do the Russians say?”
“Merely that the great Russian people are valiantly battling the flames set by that arch-capitalist villain Rip-ley Forte.”
“Well, for once, they’re half right. But it still doesn’t account for the fires still burning.”
“According to Premier Luchenko, before they could get one fire extinguished it had spread to adjacent fields and is now burning out of control.”
Turnbull made a gesture of disbelief and emitted a ripe raspberry to go along with it. “They’ve mustered every able-bodied man and woman in the wheat-growing areas to fight those fires. They’ve hooked up harrows and discs to their tractors and gang-plowed firebreaks to cut off the spread of the conflagration. Our wheat-belt farmers would have done the job in a day; the most it could have taken the Russians is double that. But four days?”
Nevertheless, whatever the cause, the Russians weren’t faking the fire. American reconnaissance satellites reported that not only had the pall of smoke over the Soviet Union not dissipated, but it had actually thickened during the four days since the American lasers had been manipulated by Ripley Forte’s scientists into setting Russia’s wheatlands afire. Another anomaly: the Russians had registered a bitter but pro-forma protest and demanded the extradition of Ripley Forte to stand trial in Kiev for crimes against humanity. Considering the gravity of the situation, the Russian response to this nationwide catastrophe had been astonishingly mild. The least Turnbull expected was a Russian demand for some sort of symbolic retaliation, perhaps the nuking of an expendable American city, like Detroit,
Of course, that initial reaction might have been deliberately restrained in order to put the Americans off their guard, so that they would be unprepared for a sudden deluge of Russian nuclear warheads. But President Turn-bull had anticipated that ploy, and American nuclear and conventional forces remained on full alert. The reserves and national guard were in the first stages of mobilization, and citizens of both the United States and Texas were stocking up on food and water and hastily digging shelters. Supermarket shelves had been swept clean, and the price of shovels, plastic sheeting, premixed concrete, and handguns had quadrupled since the beginning of the crisis.
Still, the Soviet Union protested that it harbored no aggressive intent against the United States-and Intelligence reports from within Russia, backed by satellite reconnaissance, confirmed that the Russian armed forces had indeed been diverted from defense to firefighting duties and nowhere were preparing for a nuclear confrontation. The Americans were at a loss to explain the remarkable absence of Russian counteraction to an obvious Western provocation. It was totally out of character. Turnbull and his advisers waited with apprehension for the other shoe to drop.
On Day Six of what the news media were describing as the Great Russian Burn-Off, a hint that the crisis might be some kind of smokescreen came as General Noonie strode into President Turnbull’s office unannounced, clutching a handful of glossy photographs and trailing yards of the latest satellite photos and computer readouts. He spread the strips across the president’s desk. “Take a look at that, Mr. President,” he said, pointing at the shadowy area on the right side of the map.
President Turnbull regarded the image blankly. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Those black smudges.”
“When you’ve seen one black smudge, you’ve seen them all.”
“Except that you didn’t see them there in the earlier shots,” General Noonie said triumphantly. “The clouds of smoke were concentrated in European Russia-over the Ukraine and the so-called Virgin Lands opened up by Nikita Khrushchev when he was premier back in the fifties. Those were the primary wheat-growing areas fired by our lasers when Forte got cute with the satellite sensors. But these clouds of smoke are far to the west, over Siberia, in Asian Russia.”
President Turnbull made a gesture of dismissal. “I thought you graduated from the Naval Academy in the sciences,” he scoffed.
“That I did, sir,” General Noonie said proudly.
“Then they must have taught you that the prevailing westerlies of the northern hemisphere would have blown that smoke from the Ukraine westward a couple of thousand miles to Siberia during the six days the wheatlands have been afire.”
“I see what you mean, sir. But you know the old saying, ”Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ That’s especially true here. A lot of the smoke is indeed from the wheat fields. But not all, by any means. In fact, the smoke that you see here photographed is mainly being produced in Siberia itself.”
“How do you know that?”
General Noonie pointed to red-circled entries on the computer readout. “These are infrared readings. The smoke, even over the Ukraine, where the wheat fields are completely burned out, is warm. As it drifts west, it should grow cooler. But that smoke over Siberia isn’t cool-it’s hot. And the earth beneath that cloud of smoke is hotter still.”
President Turnbull stroked his chin in puzzlement. “But how can that be? Unless my geography teacher was all wet, the lower latitudes of Siberia are grass rangeland or covered with sparse brush and trees.”
“Your teacher didn’t lie.”
“Then how did it catch fire? We’ve already reviewed the computer programs Forte used to trick our SDI lasers, and they show conclusively that he targeted only wheatlands-not the steppes of Central Asia. To my recollection, not a single fire was ignited east of the Urals.”
“Right.”
“Then why the hell are the steppes afire?”
“They’re not, Mr. President. The fire is not general, but confined to something like 870 specific and relatively tiny areas.” On the desk he spread a large photograph on which were marked the locations of the current heat sources.
The president looked at it. “What is this supposed to tell me?”
“Nothing, sir-not until you see this overlay.” He produced a piece of clear plastic that fit precisely over the map of Russia. On the overlay were dots that masked every one of the fire symbols,
“What’s this?” said Turnbull.
“A map of reserves of lignite-sometimes called brown coal-billions of tons of the stuff, in Siberia. Many of these mines have been listed on natural resource maps since way back in czarist times, but they’ve never been exploited because they were uneconomical. Well, they’re being exploited now-with a vengeance.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As of this morning, when these satellite photographs were taken, they’re producing at full capacity.”
“Lignite?”
“No-smoke.”
During the next two weeks, smoke boiling up from the nearly one thousand Siberian lignite mines blackened the sky over Asian Russia. It ascended to more than forty thousand feet and oozed eastward, like a gigantic amoeba, along a two-thousand-mile front, borne by the prevailing westerlies toward the American continent. When it reached Alaska, it was seized by polar winds whistling down the vast Mackenzie Basin and spread like a pall from northern Canada southward as far as the Mason-Dixon line.
The United States that year was suffering one of its periodic heat waves. At first the advancing black mass, now gray from dilution with polar air, brought surcease from the blistering sun in a cloudless sky. But within days the heat rose slowly but steadily.
“And it’s only going to get worse,” Major General Noonie reported glumly.
“How do you figure that?” said the president. “That blanket of soot over the northern half of the United States won’t win any friends except maybe the dry cleaners and laundrymen, but at least it will keep off the sun’s rays.”
Noonie shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way, sir. Look-the sun’s rays are composed of visible light, with a wavelength of about one two-millionth of a meter, and IR-infrared radiation-ranging from one- to five-millionths of a meter. About half the total solar radiation that hits the earth is usually absorbed. That’s what keeps the earth’s surface warm. Come night, the earth radiates a lot of that heat back into the sky at wavelengths between five- and a hundred-millionths of a meter. That’s why nights are usually cooler.
“But if clouds are interposed between the earth and the sky, the situation changes. Clouds absorb solar radiation-and clouds black with carbon particles absorb it extremely well-and reradiate that energy in all directions. In effect, land covered by clouds radiates its daytime warmth to the clouds overhead, which reradiate a lot of it right back to the earth. The balance between nighttime heat loss and daytime heat gain is upset, and the earth progressively heats up. That’s the greenhouse effect scientists fear might trigger a new ice age. Now, an ice age occurs because-“