“No need to repeat the order about staying out of the plume,” Lenny remarked, “if the pilots have half a brain.”
“We’ve got a specialty hazmat chopper from North Island on its way,” one of the controllers said, “and there’s a couple teams in trucks on their way as well. We’ve already started emergency evacuation of Engineer Springs—we were preparing that for the last twenty minutes, just in case. Not too much wind today, so they’ll have a half hour at least to clear people out of Engineer Springs, and they’re doing a reverse 911 to the few people that live out in the desert itself, and trying to backtrack everyone who’s used a cell phone in those areas in the last couple days in case of hikers or backpackers. We shouldn’t have too many people exposed to it.”
“But,” Cam said, “what the hell is it?”
A voice said, “Oh, no,” just as Heather looked back at the screen and saw a non-military plane pass right through the plume. It took her only a moment to realize that it had to be that traffic plane from the TV station; during that moment, the plane tumbled, then seemed to regain control. The little jet descended rapidly, lowering his landing flaps, as if trying to make an emergency landing—but there was nowhere good to land on a slope covered with desk-sized boulders and tangled brush. As it touched down, the plane flipped onto its back and burst into flames.
“Marshall, we need the last minute or so of that broadcast up,” Cam said.
“Got it.” The central screen flashed, scrambled, and re-congealed into a view of the burning remains of the 787 from much lower down. The audio feed came on with a feedback squeal—“try for a closer look at this amazing tragedy from—”
The camera angle began to wobble, and the voice screamed “Oh, god, oh, my eyes. My eyes!” Another voice screamed—the pilot, Heather thought. The screams became hideous, barking coughs, the camera wobbled wildly, the plane stabilized. He tried to land it, Heather realized, but he was blind and in horrible pain.
On the screen, a confusion of rocks, sand, and brush slammed up at the camera, the sky rolled through the screen, and the signal went out.
“Did that go out live?” Cam asked.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
Heather had known him for fifteen years, and today was the first day she’d ever heard Cam use profanity. I guess he was saving it for when it really applied.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CLAY SPUR. WYOMING. 7:08 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Jason and Zach hurried across the dark, cold gravel of the parking lot like a couple of criminals. At least they weren’t conspicuous; half the people in the restaurant were fleeing to their warm safe cars, down the highway, back to the family or the lover.
Zach started the car and, with more obsessive care than ground crew checking out an Orion for liftoff, ran over the lights and controls. “Is your laptop IBIS-capable?”
“Yeah. I was getting broadband Internet just fine till we turned off 90.”
“Then let’s go 90 to 25 all the way to Raton. I’m scared. I want to know my family’s okay, because the country’s under attack and I don’t know what’s going on.” Zach sighed. “Now is that dumb, or what? I mean, we’re attacking the United States, aren’t we?”
“Well, the United States and the whole Big System,” Jason said. “But I know what you mean. I feel it myself—damn foreigners have no right to attack America; only us Americans should attack America.”
“Yeah.” He put the car in gear and turned out of the parking lot. “That—uh, that whole thing with Air Force Two, that couldn’t be—there was no way—”
“That can’t be Daybreak,” Jason said. “We all spent, like, forever talking collectively about what was in bounds and what wasn’t, and I saw a bunch of ideas shot down for being too—you know, terroristic.”
“Yeah, except, why did it happen right on the exact day of Daybreak? Did all of Daybreak get conned?”
Jason balanced a hand. “Maybe. Or maybe somebody infiltrated us and piggybacked onto Daybreak. I can’t imagine how it could all be coincidence.”
“Makes me sick.”
“Me too. God I hope it has nothing to do with Daybreak.”
On I-90, Jason unfolded his laptop and made the free connection to IBIS, the chain of wireless stations that ran down the median. “Good news,” Jason said. “About every fifth or sixth wireless transceiver is down.”
Zach raised a fist in ironic salute, and said, “What’s the news?”
“I’ll have it up in a sec. The first thing we need after starting Daybreak is Internet access. Seems like a great prank of God.”
“Not God,” Zach said, quietly. “Someone who is often mistaken for Him, I think.”
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:15 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Something moved in Heather’s peripheral vision; a message from Browder had popped up:
smoke of plane crash poss=Na2O, consistent w/eye&lung injuries. check for radiation esp. beta & hard gamma & for U or Pt. maybe i was wrong? maybe nuke on board?
Na: the chemical abbreviation for sodium. And Browder thought the mystery plume looked like smoke from burning sodium. She forwarded to Cameron right away, and a moment later her headset was live. “Heather, I’m patching through to Browder, and I’ve got four DoE guys and two hazmat people from EPA kibitzing in.”
“Right here and ready,” Heather said.
“All right, for the record, we have Browder and O’Grainne from Department of the Future; Caspar, Pellegrino, Murchison, and Oe from Department of Energy; and Smith and Svejk from EPA, and my iScribe is taking all this down. Very quick briefing: We’ve got air samples from the plumes, both the gray-white caustic one coming from the hot spots, and the black smoke from the main body of the burning fuselage. The gray-white caustic plume is almost pure disodium oxide dust, and the spectroscopic analysis on the bright yellow-white fires shows very bright lines for sodium and oxygen, so there’s no question that it’s burning sodium.
“However the disodium oxide is not at all radioactive—it’s sodium-23 with a trace of other isotopes, not radioactive sodium-24. This is consistent with Dr. Browder’s speculation that sodium was being carried on board as a radiological enhancer for a nuclear weapon, especially a fusion weapon, since they produce enough neutron flux to transmute several tons of sodium instantaneously. Any problems with my understanding of the science so far?”
“Oe, DoE.” It was an older man’s voice with that flat, clipped Californiamall accent that all the stars used to have. “We’ve always worried about sodium-24 more than any other enhancer because of its chemical activity and extreme radioactivity, and because with the short half-life, the more eco-conscious terrorists might feel better about using it, since the radioactive component goes down from pure to less than a part per million in about ten days.”
“Caspar, DoE. Concur. The only reason to be carrying that stuff was if they had a nuke on board they were planning to use; metallic sodium is hard to handle and dangerous to work with and there are much more effective ways to enhance a fire—powdered aluminum or magnesium would be way easier to handle and make ten times the mess, and besides, they were crashing an airliner, which is going to start a big fire anyway. So the only possible reason to go to all that expense, danger, and complexity was if they intended to convert it all to sodium-24 with a nuclear bomb.”