“I let you sleep as long as possible while the members of the National Security Board were called. They’ve all arrived, and they’re waiting for you in the conference room.”
“What the hell’s going on?” demanded the president, sliding out of his bed and reaching for his dressing gown.
“Fire in SD-1, sir.”
It was more a postmortem than a conference. The National Security Board could do little more than listen to the report forwarded by President Tom Traynor of the catastrophe that had occurred in SD-1 two hours earlier.
According to President Traynor, each of the twenty-odd storerooms containing plans and other documents relating to the evacuation of the coastal regions and construction of dikes around the major cities had been burned out, suddenly, simultaneously, and completely. Nothing but ashes remained of the months of work by thousands of the nation’s top experts. Fortunately, there had been no human casualties.
“Sabotage?” asked President Turnbull of President Traynor, on the videophone.
“Without question,” the Texan said grimly. “I’ve personally questioned SD-l’s chief security officer, one Denton Fulda, and got the story firsthand. You’re not going to like this.”
“I’m sure I won’t. What happened?”
“Ripley Forte showed up a few days ago, and-”
“The hell you say! Why wasn’t I informed? He was supposed to lie low in South Africa until we got this Russian winter sorted out.”
“I didn’t know myself,” said Traynor. “He just appeared out of nowhere, and Fulda let him in-owner, patriotic American, and all that. I’d have done the same, of course.”
“You’re not telling me that Forte had a hand in this?”
“Up to the armpit. He engineered the whole scheme. He persuaded Fulda that security for the storerooms was slack and volunteered a ‘sensor’ he had seen demonstrated in South Africa to tighten it up. Two days later a whole box of so-called sensors arrived by air, along with the ‘console’ that monitored them. Fulda and Forte personally planted sensors in all four walls of each storeroom, plus a couple right in among the boxes of documents themselves.”
“The sensors were sabotaged.”
“Hell, no! There were no sensors. What Forte led Fulda to believe were sensors were actually nothing but simple thermite pencil incendiary bombs, set to go off at midnight.”
“Jesus! But those document storage places were protected by sprinkler systems. Surely-”
“Forte knew all about them, of course. Sometime before midnight he turned off the valves regulating the water flow to the sprinklers, then stripped the threads so they couldn’t be turned on again. By the time we got water flowing half an hour later, nothing was left but gray ash.”
It was bad, very bad, but it could have been worse. The Russians, Turnbull felt sure, had never known about the existence of the standby plans the Americans would put into force should they continue to make smoke. Therefore, the fire wouldn’t affect their actions one way or the other.
The timing of the fire in SD-1 seemed suggestive, but of what, no one could say. Six days before, American surveillance satellites had observed a slackening of smoke from Siberia’s lignite mines; two days later all fires had apparently been extinguished. Besides the filth, acid rain, widespread respiratory ailments, erosion of buildings and monuments, general depression of the populace as a result of the eternal night, and the prospect of a massive and expensive clean-up, no irreparable harm had been done. Indeed, some defense savings had been effected by demobilizing units and mothballing ships and planes. As for the sea level, it had risen scarcely four feet, and in the absence of the Siberian fires would now stabilize at about six feet higher than normal before natural weather patterns removed the excess in the form of snow, once again building up Antarctic ice. Many coastal homes had been flooded, and even parts of some cities were underwater. Still, the damage was nothing like what it could have been.
“What about Forte?” asked President Turnbull. “What in the hell inspired him to do such a crazy thing?”
“Your guess is as good as anybody’s.”
“Have you tried asking him?”
Tom Traynor’s lips were pulled down in a scowl. “Can’t. He’s disappeared. We got belated word that a fisherman saw him on a speedboat roaring out of the Houston Ship Channel into the Gulf of Mexico. Air traffic control reports that no helicopter or tiltprop plane that could have snatched him from the sea was operating in the area at that time. No larger vessels, either. That leaves a submarine. We believe that he left the way he came, in one of those new titanium-hulled South African pig boats. If so, by now it’s submerged so deep we’ll never be able to locate it threading through the thermoclines.”
“The goddamned madman had better stay there,” Turnbull said, “because the next time he turns up, I’m going to feed him to the fishes for sure.”
“Amen,” said President Tom Traynor.
The satellites in polar orbit that had confirmed the quenching of the Siberian lignite fires were the first to detect the new menace: hot water.
“What the hell do you mean-hot water?” grumbled the president, buttonholed by General Noonie as he was sitting down to lunch. He was in a pleasant mood for a change. During the two weeks that had elapsed since the Russians put out the fires, the skies had begun to clear. Not enough for the sun to shine through, but at least enough to give promise that one day soon they would see real daylight. And now his aide had come rushing up to him, burbling something about hot water.
“Calm down, Habib T.,” he said, “and say something coherent.”
“Hot water, sir. Billions of tons of it an hour. It’s pouring out of every nuclear generating plant in every single Benipic country.”
“Is that bad?”
“Bad? Well, sir, for one thing, the superheated water is killing all the fish in rivers and seas for dozens of miles around.”
“Never did like boiled fish,” commented President Turnbull, eyeing the platter of steak on the table.
He didn’t get to eat it. General Noonie dragged him off, protesting, to the conference room, where five of his National Security Board had already arrived.
“What’s the hassle?” he asked. “Why are you getting so stirred up over a little hot water?”
Dr. Sid Bussek, his scientific adviser, told him.
The hot water that was pouring out of more than a thousand reactors into the southern seas was sending immense clouds of roiling steam into the atmosphere. The clouds that formed as a result would act as an insulating blanket, just as the smoke had done in the northern hemisphere: the greenhouse effect all over again. The heated troposphere would cause the Antarctic ice cap to melt-but faster than before, since the heat and cloud cover were that much closer to the South Polar regions.
“Well,” said the exasperated president, “get the presidents of the Benipic countries on the line and tell them to shut down those reactors, pronto!”
“We’ve tried that. Everybody has the same story: that the operating staffs have barricaded themselves in the plants with enough food and water for six months.”
“Then call out the Strategic Air Command and bomb the bastards out!”
“I’m afraid that won’t do, sir,” demurred his scientific adviser. “If we attacked the nuclear stations, by air or by land, the nuclear reactions, now controlled, would go wild. We’d have meltdown, and the consequences of that… Well, you know the consequences as well as I do.”
“Then what the hell can we do?”
His staff looked back at him blankly. They had no answers. With new infusions of terrestrial heat, the oceans would continue to rise. Unless contained, they would obliterate both American coasts.
And the plans designed to protect the vulnerable cities and their populations, had been destroyed by Rip-ley Forte.
29. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
27 OCTOBER 2009
David D. Castle sighed with contentment. The sun was hot, but vagrant clouds conveniently interposed themselves just when the heat threatened to become unbearable. The breeze off Montego Bay was brisk, giving his skin a pleasant tingle when he emerged from periodic dips in the sea. His heart was serene, since the cares of office, never unbearable for a vice-president, weighed lightly on his capable shoulders.
He lay in the sun on a white beach towel the size of a squash court while pleasant thoughts gently nudged each other for pride of place. The current political crisis would wreck President Horatio Francis Turnbull’s political career no matter what the outcome: he had the unenviable choice of letting half the population’s homes and industries drown, or saving them at the cost of bankrupting the country by building dikes and making millions homeless. He, David D. Castle, would without question become the next president; no other worthy contender was even on the horizon. His Russian mentors were ecstatic at his unprecedented success as a mole: he expected promotion to lieutenant general in the KGB any month now, and when he became president, he didn’t see how the Kremlin could refuse him Marshal of the Soviet Union rank. The only worm in the golden apple from the tree of fortune-his irritating, irreverent, stumpy-legged, arrogant, cigarette-smoking, stable-scented control, Ilse Freemann-was safely several hundred miles distant, in Washington, D.C., where she could not possibly disturb his peace of mind.