John Paul Cater
Chain Reaction
This book is dedicated to those in uniform, serving our country,
military and civilian, working tirelessly, thanklessly for our safety. I salute you.
You are appreciated more than you will ever know. May God bless and protect you.
INTRODUCTION
“I have studied climate change seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.”
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.”
“Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.”
"Billions of dollars of grant money [over $50 billion] are flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story."
Indeed, follow the money and you will find a particularly disturbing trail leading to Dr. Simon Fogner, a once highly acclaimed Nobel Prize recipient and outspoken global warming proponent.
As with any public figure, the burden of societal recognition includes having a personal integrity beyond reproach. However, in the recent climate of global warming debates, this has not always been the case. Money buys deception and deception, when discovered, brings humiliation, ostracism and eventual personal devastation.
A gripping tale of greed, revenge, and intrigue, PI DAY DOOMSDAY takes you into the deranged world of madness and retribution of a scientist caught doctoring computer climate models, banished from science, living on the edge of insanity, intent on destroying humanity.
In this story, I do not attempt to prove or disprove global warming, but rather present a terrifying scenario set on an obscure holiday from the wrinkles of my mind. Not that I don’t love Pi Day, March 14th of any year (3.14), I tend to have a curious fascination with the public’s annual celebration of that number, simply the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. That ratio, taken from any size circle or sphere will yield the same number 3.14159265359… out to forever. Its digits are uncountable. An irrational and transcendental number, meaning the continuing digits never cycle or repeat into an infinity of digits, pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet: a physical constant throughout the universe.
Undoubtedly, pi a very strange and irrational entity, as is the villain in this story. Now sit back, relax, plug in your charger, and enjoy a very large slice of my Atomic Pie.
THE BOATHOUSE
The old boathouse groaned in distress, as wave after wave pounded through its barnacled timbers, awaiting the perfect moment to succumb to the advancing tide. The aging structure’s weatherworn siding and mottled tin roof sparkled with sea spray in the evening sunlight, creating a fleeting seascape that begged for an artist’s brush.
Inside, the time was now. With a measured twist of the calibrated dial, Simon Fogner, Ph.D., Nobel laureate, nuclear physicist and once-highly-acclaimed global warming scientist, set the apparatus on his unkempt workbench to awaken 528.88 milliseconds after 3:55:35 p.m. on March 14,2016. He smiled at the strange but meaningful combination of numbers that soothed his irrational mind, lessened his nausea, and pacified his throbbing headache for a moment. “My dear Adam, welcome to your world,” he said with a derisive chuckle, then looked aside to Eve. He could see her waiting, unknowing her fate.
Sidestepping, he shifted his short, frail middle-aged frame to Eve, the next tapered cylinder on the workbench. A spitting image of a thinner Anthony Hopkins, he bent over her, and repeated his movements with the same exacting precision. Within seconds, he had fused both units; there was no turning back. Both would detonate simultaneously, miles apart, forming a perfect mushroom-capped pi symbol in the sky; their internal fail-safe circuitry ensured the perfect synchronization.
He felt weak but he continued on, mustering all his might to stagger to the side of his sleek blue-on-white Sea Ray, extend the horizontal arm of the boat’s massive cargo crane and swing it over the workbench. Trembling, he reached up, caught, and attached the crane’s swinging drop claw to the first unit. The winch rope tightened, the boat tilted in its moorings, as he pulled it with shaking hand over hand, raising the nine-hundred pound warhead enough to clear the boat’s hull. Heaving with exertion, he swiveled it over the boat then lowered it onto the deck behind the captain’s seat.
As it inched downwards, his arms buckled in pain. He screamed, faltering, and released the rope early. Free of its restraint, Adam fell the last six inches with a resounding crash he feared would crack the fiberglass floor. It did not; instead, the heavy impact left a deep circular dent and rocked the boat violently with bangs and screeches rising from the slip’s styrofoam side bumpers. He covered his ears and grimaced as the chaotic noise echoed in the boathouse: the screams of a hundred fingernails scraping across a blackboard. Seconds later the boat settled, lower in the water, bringing him peace once again.
He bent over, hands on his knees, looking around trying to remember his plan. He knew his memory was going; years working with ionizing radiation assured that, so he had planned and rehearsed the day’s tasks in detail many times. He had to get it right.
Refocused on his mission, he lifted the mooring lines from the stern and bow cleats, climbed, struggling, into the boat and turned the ignition key. The two-hundred-sixty horsepower Mercruiser roared to life, bubbling noxious fumes from the submerged aft exhaust port, quickly filling the small boathouse with acrid smoke. The engine slowed to an idle as he coughed and sputtered, released the throttle, then yanked the protective lead-lined hood from his head and hefted it with both hands onto the passenger seat. How ironic to be killed by my safety gear. His protection was of no use to him if he suffocated while wearing it.
He looked at his watch, estimated two hours until sunset, then thrust his hand deep into his pants pocket, withdrawing a small marine map dotted with GPS coordinates. Switching on the boat’s GPS, he keyed in the target coordinates and watched the trip data flash on the screen.
His drop target lay eight miles out, quarter way to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, directly over a deep chasm in the Gulf of Santa Catalina canyon. He had strategically selected the point to devastate the L.A. basin area coupled with a backward punch to San Diego by way of the San Diego Trough feeding the La Jolla Fan. Undersea canyons, fans, and troughs intrigued him immensely with their hidden complexities. He had studied them in detail as he planned his mission.
Originating with movements of the lithosphere from plate tectonics theory, they described the undulations of the ocean floor only an oceanographer could understand, but to him these features became the avenues for mass destruction, leveraging shock waves into huge avenging tsunamis as they approached the shallow California shorelines. He suspected his apparatus might even tickle the San Andreas Fault into action, creating more damage and chaos than he could ever imagine.