Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(118)
How long would it take him to die?
Not liking the result of his mental calculations, Dr. Donald Stephenson turned back to the secondary stasis field control station. For two and a half seconds, his finger hovered over the KILL POWER button. Then, as his finger descended, the protective stasis field winked out.
President Jackson and his national security staff stared at the televisions, all tuned to CNN. At first the reporter had seemed to experience a kind of meltdown, but had regained her calm.
“For those of you who may have just joined us, we continue to follow our top story, the international effort to prevent the November Anomaly from becoming a black hole that threatens to destroy our planet. As we have been reporting, within the last few minutes we’ve received reports of a nuclear detonation centered at the ATLAS cavern. We go now to our White House correspondent Rolf Larson.
“Rolf. This has been just another in a sequence of what can only be described as disastrous events. Has there been any official White House response?”
“Karen, we’ve been awaiting an official statement on what has transpired within the ATLAS facility, beginning with what appeared to be an attempted alien invasion through the Rho Gateway, followed by a series of explosions and the loss of all broadcast feeds from within the cavern itself, culminating in a nuclear explosion at the site.”
“Rolf, excuse me for interrupting, but we’ve just received confirmation that there has been a nuclear explosion at the ATLAS cavern. We are just getting the first video of the mushroom cloud as seen from Geneva. Oh my God. This is something we hoped never to see in our lifetimes.”
“Karen, we’re seeing it here on our monitors. This has to be heartbreaking for anyone with family members working at the site, for the military units that were positioned around the ATLAS site, and for the Swiss and French people. We here at CNN have also suffered the loss of Ted Cantrell and our entire crew reporting from the scene...”
From his position at the head of the table, the president muted the broadcast and turned toward Cory Mayfield, his director of national intelligence.
“Cory?”
“We’ve got General Smith holding on the line from Ramstein.”
President Jackson pushed a button on his control console.
“General Smith. This is President Jackson here in the Situation Room with my entire national security staff. Give me a rundown of what you know.”
“Mr. President, as you are aware, our attempts to remotely detonate the nuclear devices failed despite several attempts to correct the problem. Army Captain William Everett, our on-site nuclear weapons specialist, volunteered to manually detonate the nuclear warheads. From the fact that we’re all still alive, it is clear that, despite the naysayers in the scientific community, the nuclear option destroyed the November Anomaly and the gateway.”
“Casualties?”
“Only estimates so far, Mr. President. Each warhead had a twenty-kiloton yield. The blast occurred a hundred meters below ground. That’s both good and bad. The ground helped limit the range of the immediate blast effects as well as the initial gamma pulse, but we’ll see a lot of alpha and beta fallout due to the amount of dirt and debris sucked up into the mushroom cloud. Prevailing winds are westerly at ten knots. That’s bad for Switzerland, Austria, and parts of Bavaria and Italy, but good news for most of the major European population centers.
“Our worst case estimate shows up to ten thousand killed in the initial blast, maybe ten times that over the coming weeks and months. I’ll need data from our nuclear survey teams before I can be definitive.”
“Thank you, General. That’s all for now.”
President Jackson disconnected the call as the door opened to admit Carol Owens, his chief of staff. Seeing the look on her face, President Jackson almost dreaded to ask.
“OK, Carol. What’s happened now?”
“Mr. President, I just took a call from Dr. David Kronen at Los Alamos. The Rho Ship is gone.”
The information failed to register. “Gone?”
“Yes, sir. Dr. Kronen says that one moment it was there and the next it disappeared and took half the building with it. Fifteen people are missing and presumed dead. If it had occurred during the day, we would have lost hundreds.”
“What time did this happen?”
Carol swallowed. “Shortly after we lost the television feed from the ATLAS cavern.”
The president lowered his head, massaging his temples with his hands. When he raised his face again, he looked directly into Carol’s eyes.
“I want to keep this away from the public for three days. Tell Dr. Kronen he has that long to get me some answers. For now, we have to stay focused on the events in Switzerland.”
Turning his gaze to the others at the table, he continued.
“Well, folks, we’ve got a bunch of frightened and angry people out there, all of them wanting to know what the hell just happened and what comes next. We can’t deny being behind the nuclear detonation, nor do I intend to. So an hour from now I’m going to walk out into the White House Briefing Room and lay it all on the line. You’ve got until then to come up with the best way to spin it.”
A sudden, unseemly surge of joy spread through the president. Yes, he’d been responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people, but he’d saved the planet. All things considered, not a bad day’s work.