Without taking a breath or giving the president the chance to say no, Moore continued. “Stecker’s information was correct, but the numbers weren’t the perfect match he told you they were. They massaged the data to fit it into the graph, but for reasons that would take too long to explain, if you extrapolated the numbers in either direction, their graph diverges from reality.”
“Stecker?”
“It’s called rounding, Mr. President. Other than that I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
The president looked open to suggestion but he glanced at the clock nervously. “Be quick, Arnold.”
Moore took a breath. Light-headed and sweating, he looked around. Stecker rolled his eyes, Moore’s staff members looked at the ground, and Ahiga shook his head sadly and looked away. Not a friend in the room. He didn’t care.
“Mr. President, standard geology holds that earth’s core is a huge, spinning ball of liquid metal, mostly nickel and iron. Because those elements are conductive, the spinning motion creates the magnetic field that protects us.”
It was the quickest primer Moore had ever given.
“The problem is, no one knows this for sure; no one’s dug down that far to find out. And no one has been able to match this theory up with an explanation of why the earth’s field reverses at seemingly random intervals, a million years between one changeover, fifty thousand between the next.” Moore ran a hand through his hair, tamping down his wiry mane, trying to look like something less than a lunatic.
“The reason is,” he said, “it’s not a single magnetic field — I mean in the aggregate it is — but it’s being generated by three separate layers interacting with each other.”
“Oh, come on,” Stecker mumbled.
Moore ignored him. “A similar thing happens in the sun. Even though the sun is a million times more massive than the earth, and it creates a magnetic field millions of times more powerful, its magnetic field reverses every eleven years. And it doesn’t go easily. The sun’s equator rotates faster than the sections near the poles. As a result the magnetic lines of force get dragged across the face of the sun, much like spreading a sheet out over your bed and then pulling it only from the middle. The center moves, the edges stay. Instead of nice parallel lines everything gets skewed.
“In the sun, the lines get so tangled that they can snap like a rubber band stretched too tight. This is what causes solar flares and other events like the coronal mass ejections. Both events release incredible amounts of energy in a single instant.”
“How much energy are we talking about?” the president asked.
“Enough to fling a hundred billion tons of material into space at a single moment,” Moore said.
The president looked drawn. “How does this apply to us?”
“We keep acting as if the earth’s core is a single, uniformly rotating thing, and for the most part it is, but the inner layer is solid and the outer layer is liquid. In the simulation I’ve run we can line up the graphs of field strength and reversal timing, allowing that this outer layer is spinning at a different rate near its equator than it is at the poles. That’s the second field.”
“You said there were three.”
“Yes,” Moore said. “The third is created by the stones. It’s only been present for the last three thousand years. Sent here in an effort to stabilize that second field to stop it from doing what it’s about to do.”
“Which is?”
“Snap exactly like the loops on the sun.”
The president cleared his throat. “And what happens when this, um, rubber band snaps?”
Moore took a breath. “There won’t be any mushroom clouds, if that’s what you mean, but there may be some physical effects, possibly minor earthquakes or tremors, but mostly just a massive electromagnetic burst. I don’t have all the numbers, but you can expect something close to ten thousand times the energy of the burst we felt here.”
“Ten thousand times?” The president’s voice trailed off as if the concept were inconceivable to him.
“A tsunami wave of electromagnetic energy rampaging from the current pole across North America and downward, wiping out every electrical circuit in the Western Hemisphere. It will blind every satellite in near-earth orbit at the same moment, while a weaker shadow wave crosses Asia and central Russia and the northeastern corner of Europe. Unfortunately for us, the wave crossing Russia and China will be lighter, meaning they will be stung hard and blinded, but some of their hardened military equipment will survive, especially missiles in hardened silos. They will likely retain the capability to wage war, both on each other or on us, at a time in which we will be utterly defenseless against any foreign attack.”
“And the stones’ part in this?”
“Designed to counter it while they were hidden, to hold the wave back so the rubber band never stretches in the first place,” Moore said. “But something went wrong. When the Russian stone exploded that plan began to falter. But I think they have a fail-safe mode, and if we bring them up to a place where their signal is not blocked, they can find each other and they can vent this wave safely into space, channeling it like a lightning rod. But to have any chance we must surface all of them: the ones in Mexico and the one we have here.”
The president was quiet. The room was quiet. Finally, even Moore was quiet.
He did not know whether he had convinced the commander in chief, but he’d exhausted himself in the attempt.
“Clear the room,” the president said finally. “I will speak with the director of the NRI alone.”
Sitting next to Moore, Nathanial Ahiga grabbed his soda bottle. “You put on a good show,” he said somberly, sounding like he was talking to a valiant but defeated warrior.
As Ahiga stepped back into the lab section of the trailer and shut the door behind him, the other scientists picked up their notes and exited into the tunnel. Stecker followed them, a smirk on his face as he stepped out into the darkness.
CHAPTER 64
Pinned down by the circling drones, Hawker had cowered in the crown of boulders as three lumbering helicopters approached. In a flat area between the ridges, two of them touched down, disgorging a small army.
He saw twenty men fan out from the lead craft, while the second helicopter released what looked like a group of pack mules, moving in a precise and ominous fashion.
Through his binoculars he could see that these “pack mules” were some kind of mechanical walking machine, like four-legged donkeys with machine-gun turrets where their heads belonged.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mumbled.
The men hung back, allowing the strange walking machines to take the lead. He watched their hydraulic legs propel them forward, their turreted heads swiveling from side to side. He counted six of them, and all he could be certain of was that he didn’t want to see them up close.
Wedging the assault rifle into a gap between the rocks, he sighted the lead machine and opened fire. Shells from the rifle ripped into the lead beast. Sparks flew and it stumbled. But somehow it regained its balance and continued on its course, climbing the slope toward him. He fired at another with the same result and then let the rifle whale away on full automatic.
One machine crashed to the ground, its front legs damaged, the rear legs still trying to push forward. The others turned toward him and opened fire.
The rock wall in front of Hawker exploded from a convergence of shells. He dove to the ground, crawled fifteen feet, and tried to steal a glance out the other side. But the machines seemed to be waiting for it. The instant he poked his head out, another burst tore into the boulders around him. Whatever type of sensors the machines were using to find him — heat sensors, motion detectors, shape recognition software, whatever it was — they’d locked on to him now.