PRESIDENT ROSS HAD CALLED THE EVENING meeting in the national security adviser’s conference room in the basement of the White House’s West Wing. He’d flown in a handful of scientists from the Memphis earthquake center and the USGS. They’d taken an Army helicopter to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where Air Force One picked them up for the one-hour flight to Dulles.
Ross had deliberately kept the group small. In addition to the seismologists, he’d limited attendance to Margaret Greenland, his national security adviser; the speaker of the House and Senate majority leader; and his science adviser, Steve Draper.
The president had already been warned that the news was bad, but he hadn’t realized its true gravity until Elizabeth Holleran began to speak. As she described the carbon-14 dating tests and their implications, he struggled to keep his composure.
In a concise, factual delivery, Holleran laid out the key point: the radiocarbon dating of fossil chips she’d scraped from the walls of the deep trench showed unmistakable evidence that massive earthquakes had ruptured the fault no less than six times during the last fifteen hundred years. The horizontal layers of clay, sand, silt, and gravel were riddled with the trace marks of those disturbances. The sequence was striking. The shortest period between quakes was roughly two hundred years. Most occurred at intervals of anywhere from five hundred to eight hundred years.
The zone had been incredibly active over the centuries. The vertical displacements varied from several inches to as much as forty feet.
“They’re textbook examples of severe faulting,” Holleran said. She showed a blowup of a photograph she’d taken about a hundred feet down into the fissure.
Even to the president’s untrained eye, the thick scarring and darkening of the soil stood out clearly.
Using a pointer, Holleran outlined the telltale signs of repeated faulting. The small room was stuffy and crowded, but no one moved or fidgeted. They were all listening intently, jotting down notes.
“The quake that left those footprints dates from just after the time of Columbus’ voyage of discovery,” she said.
The jagged crack in the exposed soil was striking. But the most distinctive aspect was the clear indication that the fault had repeatedly produced great earthquakes. The evidence appeared in each of the different strata, which were separated by bands of lighter-colored soil.
“I take it this wasn’t caused by just one earthquake,” Ross said.
Here it comes, Atkins thought.
“As best we can tell, there were at least four major earthquakes,” Holleran said, outlining their tracings. “They were probably concentrated over a very short span of time.”
“How short?” Ross asked.
“That’s difficult to say,” Holleran said.
“Give me a range.”
“At the longest end, months.”
“And at the shortest?”
Holleran’s reply was quietly stated: “Weeks.”
With a possible error of no more than thirty years, the carbon-14 tests had shown major earthquakes around A.D. 200 then again in 631, about the time of Mohammed. Mega quakes had also occurred when the ancestors of the American Indian were migrating to North America in the 1100s and, again, during the Black Death that depopulated much of Europe in the 1650s.
The sedimentary patterns Holleran had found in the deep fissure indicated that the big quakes often came in groups of three, but at least one sequence had four, possibly five major earthquakes. The best evidence of a huge earthquake was a sharp, twenty-five-foot offset that dated roughly to the mid-1600s.
Only an extraordinary quake could have done that. Atkins thought. The growing body of data increasingly indicated that the American heartland was prime earthquake country to a degree no one had ever imagined before. And much of the credit for nailing this definitively had to go to Holleran. He had no doubt, none, that she was right in her analysis. It was highly likely they were going to get rocked again.
“So we could be looking at maybe two or three more major quakes?” Ross asked. Casually dressed in jeans and a blue pullover, he was taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“It’s possible. Mister President,” Holleran said. “If the fault follows the usual pattern.”
“How possible?” Ross persisted.
Holleran said, “I can’t give a percentage. I’d say at least one more big quake in the magnitude 8 range is likely.”
Weston, who’d been biding his time, objected. He’d managed to find a clean suit and tie for the trip to the White House, even a set of cufflinks. He launched into an attack on the whole field of paleoseismology. He wasn’t alone in his argument. Several of the USGS scientists were also leery of basing seismic projections on the physical evidence of past quakes. There were simply too many exceptions, too many gaps in the chain, too many inconsistencies.
“At best it’s interesting data that needs more interpretation,” one of them said. “It would be a mistake to use it now to try to project for future earthquakes, especially under present circumstances.”
Atkins had expected their objections, which echoed Weston’s. He had a serious problem with Weston over the cracks at Kentucky Dam, a problem they still needed to resolve. But he understood that Weston expressed what most of the seismologists working on the crisis were thinking. Weston had been an effective spokesman for their viewpoints. Argumentative and opinionated, he had history on his side. Back-to-back earthquakes of magnitude 8 or greater were incredibly rare.
Holleran let the remark pass without comment. She knew she had the support of most of the seismologists in the room. But on another level, she no longer cared what others thought. Her job, as she understood it, was to examine the physical evidence and try to draw meaningful conclusions while keeping speculation to a minimum. She’d done just that. The evidence was rich. The clues, buried deep in the ground, told them a great deal about the area’s violent seismic history.
Walt Jacobs had information to report—if not as dramatic, equally as troubling.
The man looked awful, Atkins thought. The bags under his eyes were dark and puffy. He hadn’t shaved or changed clothes in days. Atkins noticed his old friend was still wearing the rumpled blue denim shirt he’d had on two days earlier. He resolved to talk to him, see if he could help him pull out of it.
“The latest GPS sweep shows continued deformation along a line running roughly northeast of the Caruthersville Fault about two hundred miles into Kentucky.”
The satellite data had just been harvested by the GPS Master Control Station near Colorado Springs. It had been analyzed and enhanced at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech before it was relayed by satellite to Memphis. The data was projected on a map.
“How much uplift are we getting?” Weston asked. Like the others, he was seeing the data for the first time. Thompson had only recently processed it.
“Twenty inches along most of the fault. A little more than that at the point of axis with the main New Madrid segment. It’s roughly thirty inches there.”
Even Ross knew enough geology by then to realize an uplift of that magnitude was serious, an unmistakable signal that tremendous amounts of seismic energy continued to build along the fault lines.
Jacobs had another satellite-generated detail to add to the analytical mix.
Earthquakes were known to produce strong energy currents or pressure waves in the earth’s upper atmosphere, the ionosphere. This connection had been first noticed after the Northridge quake of 1994.
Jacobs said, “We saw then that for two days before the earthquake, the GPS 10-3mn frequency band began to pick up a train of strong pressure waves. The waves were generated by a change in electrons. The greatest waves appeared within minutes after the first strong tremors.”
“What’s your point?” snapped the president, exasperated by the unrelenting complexity of the science.
“We’re starting to see some significant electronic disturbances in the atmosphere at distances of five hundred to six hundred kilometers above the fault line,” Jacobs said. “The waves are intensifying in strength.”
Guy Thompson hadn’t changed his Western look for the visit to the White House. He wore his usual attire—jeans, expensive cowboy boots, and a gaudy Western shirt. He’d braided his black hair in the back.
“I’d like to talk about the P velocity data.” Thompson explained that the velocities of the P waves had dropped by about 10 percent since that magnitude 8.4 event. “In the last twenty-four hours those velocities have started climbing again,” he said.
Ross asked him to explain.
“The theory was developed from observations in Russia,” Thompson said. “It holds that P velocities decrease after a precursor quake, then start to return to more normal levels just before a major event.”
“That’s only a theory,” Weston said, making no effort to conceal his anger. His view was shared by several others.
“I want to hear this,” Ross said, silencing Weston.
Thompson explained that his team had prepared a map of the entire seismic zone based on geomagnetic data gathered by satellite. Shifts in magnetic fields were recognized indicators of seismic activity. The recent readings showed a major change in the zone’s magnetic field.
On Thompson’s map, projected on the screen, areas of high magnetic intensity showed up as hills. Low intensity as valleys. The hills, which were colored red, dominated the image.
Atkins was interested in these geomagnetic readings. He continued to wonder whether magnetic fields were responsible for the strange, green glow that had shimmered deep in Kentucky Lake.
There was another possible source. All that fracturing of the rock deep in the ground generated heat. The role of heat in earthquakes was little understood. Some laboratory experiments had demonstrated that rocks would melt under the extreme pressures of a major earthquake. Other tests showed this didn’t always happen. Scientists were nowhere near an explanation of the heat dilemma.
Atkins wondered if New Madrid was showing a phenomenon never seen before in earthquake country—the visible discharge of tremendous amounts of heat up through the crust. An action that was almost volcanic in power.
Ross interrupted Atkins’ train of thought. The president asked his national security adviser for a damage assessment.
Margaret Greenland stood and smoothed the hem of her rumpled skirt. She was a heavyset woman who didn’t care much about her appearance. She’d received her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her rise through the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency was the result of talent, grit, and hard work. Ross liked and respected her.
“This is based on our most recent damage assessments,” she said, switching off the room’s overhead lights. “We’ll start first with cities on the periphery of the damage zone.”
She began with footage of Chicago. The towering skyline was unmistakable.
“That’s Lake Shore Drive,” Greenland said with her slow, Southern drawl. “Most of the buildings along the Magnificent Mile sustained moderate damage. Every aftershock sends more glass falling down on the streets.” Some of the shards were found embedded like daggers in the walls of buildings.
“Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have also reported damage,” Greenland said. “Some underground pipes have snapped.”
A map on the wall showed the Mercalli damage zones rippling out from the epicenter like rings on a bull’s-eye. The Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale ranked earthquakes on the basis of observed physical destruction.
The film switched to Columbus, Ohio—the area around the State Fair Grounds and German Village. Both had been hard hit.
Greenland followed with photos of the collapsed Hoosier Dome and the devastated White River Park district in Indianapolis. Both cities were closer to the epicenter. The images were always the same. Buildings in various stages of collapse, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, crowds of people with dazed, shell-shocked expressions, weeping children.
“The total death toll in the country stands at 130,000 and climbing, but no one really knows,” Greenland said. “Disaster officials are sure of only one thing—that the numbers will go much higher. A big problem right now is finding the bodies.”
As he listened, Ross slowly massaged his temples, trying to alleviate a crushing headache. He knew there was no way to put human losses like that in perspective. They were unprecedented in the United States.
Continuing her grim assessment, Greenland said, “We’ve already talked about command and control in the damage zone. For all practical purposes, civil authority has collapsed. Army and National Guard units are providing what security exists under your previous declaration of martial law.”
Ross nodded. He’d recently boned up on President Lincoln’s decision to impose martial law during the Civil War and wondered if the man he considered the country’s greatest president had gone through as much agony before he sent federal troops into so many American cities. Ross had hated to do it, but felt he had no choice. Killing and looting had broken out on a mammoth scale. In a single neighborhood in Little Rock—Geyer Springs—federal troops had shot and killed nearly thirty people who’d been caught stealing items from smashed homes and stores. That’s what a shoot-to-kill order meant. And that awful body count was from just a single neighborhood.
Less than an hour earlier, Greenland had told Ross privately that the military, stretched dangerously thin, wouldn’t be able to respond to even a moderate international challenge.
Every available soldier on the East Coast and in the South had been pressed into earthquake duty. Unless the situation improved—and that appeared unlikely—they’d have to call in troops from the far West. They’d start with Fort Riley in Kansas. The 1st Infantry Division there had already been put on full alert. They could also bring in Marine units from Camp Pendleton.
“The basic necessities—food, water, medical care—are virtually nonexistent in the quake zones,” Greenland said.
The images from the cities that had sustained the heaviest damage all seemed to merge together into one overwhelming tableau of grief and destruction.
And you’re in charge, Ross kept telling himself. You’re supposed to know how to handle this. Tell people what to do. Suggest options. Keep their spirits up.
He knew he was failing badly on every front.
His national security adviser was talking about hospitals. In the heart of the earthquake zone, most of them had been destroyed. Ross looked at a close-up of Central Hospital in Little Rock and closed his eyes. It had the largest neonatal unit in the state. The building had split in two.
“Heating and fuel oil are already being rationed throughout the East Coast,” Greenland continued. “The situation there will be critical in three or four more days.”
Ross stopped her. “That’s enough, Margaret,” he said, gently touching her on the shoulder. She nodded and turned off the machine. She looked grateful to sit back down.
The president faced the gathered seismologists. “We’re going to have another quake, aren’t we?”
“Almost certainly,” Elizabeth Holleran said. The evidence she’d found in the fissure had removed any of her lingering doubts. “The only question is when and how big.”
“Anyone here agree with Doctor Holleran?”
John Atkins and Walt Jacobs raised their hands. Holleran had uncovered irrefutable evidence that couldn’t be denied. And Atkins was proud to go on record supporting her. They were taking a huge professional risk. He had few doubts they’d be proven right. But at what incredible cost?
It was an overpowering feeling of both intense excitement and fear. They were way out in front on this.
The five other seismologists in the room were hesitant to offer an opinion, much less a definite yes or no.
“What about you, Doctor Weston?” Ross asked.
“I’m sorry, Mister President,” Weston said, shaking his head. “I refuse to speculate.”
“After what you’ve just seen and heard, you’re not convinced?”
“No, sir. I’m not,” Weston said. “I’m still not sure the quakes we’re having aren’t part of a normal aftershock pattern.”
Ross was trying to be agreeable as he kept probing, pushing. “Then let me ask you this: what do you think will happen if we get another magnitude 8 quake on the New Madrid Fault?”
He read the look in Weston’s eyes and in the eyes of the others. He’d seen it often enough, the fear and uncertainty. He’d seen it in his wife’s eyes when the doctor met them in his office on that bright spring afternoon seven years ago and told them what they already knew. The tests were positive. She had breast cancer. He’d seen it in his own eyes earlier that morning when he looked at himself in the mirror.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ross said, giving way to the nightmare that had kept him awake every night for the last four. “Another quake would pretty much finish the Mississippi Valley. It would push us back to World War II productivity levels. Our economy would be in shambles. In many ways that’s already happened. Millions of Americans would be left totally on their own, without schools, medical care, even food or water. Without police protection.” He leaned over the broad conference table, supporting himself heavily with both hands.
Up close, Atkins was struck again by how tired the man looked. And yet his voice remained firm, decisive.
“This is a great country,” Ross said. “Our people have courage and resiliency. They’ll bounce back eventually. But we wouldn’t be the same United States.”
He looked at everyone in the room, locking in on their eyes, staring hard.
Atkins felt the power of the president’s gaze. He was exposing them to his deepest, most intimate fears.
Ross held them like that for a long time before he said, “Is there anything we can do to prevent that from happening?”
IT was late in the evening. Everyone was dragging. The president suggested they take a fifteen-minute break. He had a big urn of coffee and a platter of fruit and sweet rolls sent down from the White House kitchen.
Walt Jacobs took Atkins aside and whispered that he had something he wanted to tell him in private. They went into the hallway. Secret service agents and military aides watched them carefully as they walked down the long, brightly lit corridor and sat on an upholstered bench seat under a wall map of the Louisiana Purchase.
“My wife and daughter are dead,” Jacobs said. “They were trapped in our house. I found out yesterday.” He looked at Atkins and shook his head. “I’ve studied earthquakes since I was eighteen years old. I thought I understood them pretty well. I never thought one of them would kill my family.”
“Walt, my God, I’m so sorry,” Atkins said, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I had no idea. None of us did.” He couldn’t believe it. Jacobs had just kept on working as if nothing had happened. Atkins had suspected something was bothering him. His usually buoyant friend had seemed uncharacteristically moody, remote.
Jacobs suddenly got up and pounded his fists against the wall. The map print crashed to the floor, the glass dust cover shattering. He knocked over a lamp and staggered away sobbing.
Two Secret Service agents ran toward them. Atkins pushed one of them back as the agent reached out to grab Jacobs.
“No, let him go!” he shouted. He put an arm around his friend’s waist.
“I can’t do this anymore…. Can’t go on,” Jacobs said. “My wife’s dead, John. My daughter. I don’t give a fuck about another earthquake. I don’t care….”
He stood there with tears in his eyes. Atkins helped him sit down. Jacobs started to regain his composure.
“I had a feeling after that first good aftershock,” he said, staring at his folded hands. He was calming down and needed to talk, the words coming quickly. He mentioned the two grad students he’d asked to go out to his house to check on things. He glanced sideways at Atkins. “The kids got back yesterday. They had a hell of a trip. They had to go about ten miles out of their way because of fire and fallen buildings. When they finally got to my home, a neighbor who lives across the street told them what had happened. The guy had dug through the rubble and gotten to the back bedroom, or what was left of it. He found them just where I told them to go in a bad quake. They were in the bathroom right under the main floor joists. The strongest part of the house. The thing I never counted on was the entire brick wall caving in.”