The Rackham Files (21 page)

I removed the hand I'd put on her shoulder, intending to convey something—hope, camaraderie, understanding; hell, I don't know what—but obviously I
didn't
understand her. "Right," I mumbled, and sloped outside to get a shovel. Swinging up in a long arc from Travis AFB was one of our new heavies under rocket boost. I heard several more while digging, and while I didn't stop to watch them, I wondered what they were up to. I don't wonder anymore.

Working up a fast sweat, I shoveled a ramp of turf against my office window until it almost matched the slope of the earthen ramp that surrounded the house about to the level of the first floor. I tried not to tally the minutes by which Shar and Ern and the kids were overdue. The tally came unbidden, since it was nearly five pee-em, two hours past Shar's estimate. Muted thunks and sloshes reached me as Kate filled my kitchenware with water. I was ruminating along the lines of,
Even if this false alarm costs a thousand lives, it may eventually save fifty million,
when a vast white light filled the sky, more pitiless than any summer noon, and did not fade for many seconds.

In my hurry, I hadn't followed my own drill; hadn't kept two radios tuned to different stations; and so I didn't hear the President's brief, self-serving spiel that called for crisis relocation and, by implication, admitted that we could expect a "limited" nuclear response to the tactical weapons we were unleashing on the wave of Soviet tanks that had lashed across the border into West Germany. "Crisis relocation" was an old weasel phrase for "evacuation"; our Office of Technology Assessment and thinktanks like the Hudson Institute had solemnly agreed that Americans would have between twenty-four and seventy-two hours of warning before any crisis developed into a nuclear exchange.

Actually, from the moment our Navy engaged Russkis in the Aegean until the first wave of nuke-tipped MIRVs streaked up from Soviet hard sites, we'd had about fifteen hours. It might've been halfway adequate if we'd planned for it as Soviet-bloc countries had done—or even as one solitary local government had done in Lane County, Oregon.

Everybody joked about the jog-crazy, mist-maddened tokers around the University of Oregon in Eugene, so the media had its fun upon learning that city and county officials there were serious about evac—I mean, crisis relocation. Some poly sci professor, in a lecture about legal diversion of funds, pointed out that most federal funding for crisis relocation was turned over to emergency-services groups in sheriffs' departments. And that those funds—all over the country, not just in Oregon—were being diverted by perfectly legal means to other uses. The overall plan for a quarter-million people in the Eugene area was orderly movement to the touristy strip along the coast.

Then an undergrad checked out the routes and nervously reported that the wildest optimist wouldn't believe that many people could drive out of firestorm range in two days' time through a bottleneck consisting of a solitary two-lane highway and a pair of unimproved hold-your-breath gravel roads. County maps showed several more old roads. They hadn't existed for thirty years.

Firestorm in Eugene bloody
Orygun
? A strong possibility, since the Southern Pacific's main switching yards in the coastal Northwest sprawled out along the little city's outskirts. No prime target, certainly, but all too likely as a secondary or tertiary strike victim. In a county commission meeting, some citizen asked, Why worry? We'll just get on the capacious Interstate 5 freeway and drive south.

The hell you will, replied a state patrol official. We have orders to keep that corridor clear for special traffic running south from Portland and the state capital. There'll be riot guns at the barricades; sorry 'bout that, but Eugeneans were scheduled to the coast and if they didn't like that, they could stay home and watch the firestorm from inside it, har har.

When local politicos realized how many feisty folks in the Eugene-Springfield area were clamoring for a solution, one of them hit on a rationale that couldn't be faulted. Eugene could be a target because the railroad had such tremendous load-carrying capacity, right?

Right. And SP's rolling stock, flatcars for milled lumber and boxcars slated for Portland and Seattle, often sat waiting on sidings all over the place, right?

Right. And the SP had a branch railway straight to the coast and a small yard for turnarounds only two hours away by slow freight. A hastily assembled train could haul fifty thousand people and all the survival gear each could lift from Eugene in a single trip, then return for more.

And that was right, too. With public subscriptions helping to fund their studies, SP troubleshooters found that they could make up such a train in about twelve hours. They even tried it once, billed as an outing for subscribers who'd paid SP to do the groundwork, and though two drunks were injured falling off a flatcar, it made a lighthearted tag end to the eleven o'clock news across the nation. That had been two years ago.

Eugene's solitary preparations flashed through my head as, groveling flat on my belly, shouting into the eerie silence and seemingly endless flashbulb glare, I protected my eyes and called to Kate to do the same. I'd always thought an enemy would choose, as ground zero, the Alameda naval facility to my west. Ern had said STC, the satellite control nexus south of me in Sunnyvale, would be the spot. Occasional news pieces had suggested Travis AFB, a reactivated base twenty-five miles north of me; or Hamilton AFB, thirty-five miles northeast.

And we were all absolutely correct. The ghastly efficiency of a MIRV lay in each big missile's handful of warheads, and each warhead could be aimed at a different target. Travis disappeared in a ground burst, perhaps to take out our bombers and deep-stored nukes there. That was the deadly flower that blossomed first in hellish silence over the hills north of my place. The others were only moments behind.

When the light through my eyelids dwindled to something like normal afternoon brightness, I heaved myself up and pounded back into the house. On my way downstairs I saw my dining room wallpaper reflect another actinic dazzle from the windows, coming from the low airburst over Hamilton to our west. The fluorescents in my office below seemed pale for a moment. "Come on," I called, unable to find Kate. "Our best protection is in the tunnel!"

She rolled from beneath my desk; yelped, "Don't
do
that," as Spot darted ahead of her while
she
was darting ahead of
me.
I shut the big door, slapping the light plate to keep the tunnel lit, and sat down on the tough yielding linolamat.

"Spot, come," I said as his languid trot carried him toward the root cellar entrance. Another burst of energy lit the root cellar from the distant entrance, making Spot wheel back quickly.

"That's three," I said. But I was wrong, having missed the light show of Alameda's airburst. We were seeing cloud reflections of the ground-pounder that took out Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and much of San Jose.

In a very small voice Kate said, "The air is bad in here," and slumped against the wall. Spot nuzzled her ear as I got down on one knee and propped her into a sitting position.

Her breath was quick and shallow, pulse racing but strong, and Spot wasn't sneezing or showing any of the discomfort he shows in foul air. She wasn't shocky cold either, and suddenly I realized she'd been hyperventilating—not the deliberate deep whiffs of a free diver but the slow oxygen starvation you could experience when quiet panic and rigid self-control made a battleground of your hindbrain. "Head between your knees, Kate," I murmured to her trembles. "Try breathing slowly; all the way out, then all the way in."

At that moment a sharp rumble whacked the house and my ears, not very hard. But a softer rumble continued for what seemed a full minute; the Travis shock wave and its retinue of thunders. Spot's white-tipped tail flicked, his ears at half-mast. He showed his teeth in a hiss at the doorjamb, which was buzzing in sympathy with a vibration that shook the earth remorselessly.

When the second shock came it hit sharply, with a clatter of my fine Bavarian china as obbligato upstairs.

The third jolt hit five seconds later, the one from Alameda. A freak shock front raced through Concord, making lethal Frisbees of every glass pane and marble false-front in town. My western windows blew in and, with a pistol's report, one of my sturdy old roof beams ended nearly a century of usefulness. My ears popped with a faint pressure change; popped again. I could hear bricks falling from my chimney onto the roof, sliding off, but couldn't at first identify the snap-crack that came more and more rapidly until it became a guttural rising groan. It had to be my handsome old water tower, though, because that was what toppled near my kitchen, splintering porch stairs as it struck.

My electric pump was probably whining furiously to refill it, but I couldn't shut it off right then, thanks. The tank, strap-bound like a wine cask, had held several hundred gallons of water twenty feet in the air for gravity flow—probably the only overloaded structure on my place.

Well, it was overloaded no longer. One of Ern's old NASA bromides was that highly stressed structures have a way of unstressing themselves for you—but wouldn't you really rather do it yourself?

The last shock wave, from Sunnyvale near San Jose, was almost negligible for us in the lee of Mount Diablo. I tried to recall the crucial time sequences: the initial long flash that distributed heat and hard radiation at the speed of light and could have temporarily flash-blinded me if I'd had a line-of-sight view of the initial moment; the shock waves, one through the ground and a slower one through air that pulverized concrete near ground zero; a momentary underpressure a moment later near the blast that could suck lungs or houses apart: another machwave that could flatten a forest or a skyscraper. Fires and cave-ins were my most likely failure modes during those first long moments. If we came through all that alive,
then
it was time to worry about the fallout that could destroy live tissue through a brick wall.

Yet Shar's classroom work had taught us something vital, something most of the doomsday books ignored: if you were twenty miles or so from ground zero, you got several hours of "king's X" between blast and fallout. 

My tunnel lights were still on, and we hadn't felt any suction after the blast waves. That suggested the nearest detonation had been many miles distant. According to Shar's texts, the fallout of deadly radioactive ash and grit moved upward into the stem of the mushroom cloud to an altitude of several miles within ten minutes, then more slowly upward and laterally with the wind. Usually the wind speed was fifteen to forty miles an hour. While it was cooling, the stuff fell heavily from the mushroom cloud, which, at first, moved laterally at great speed. But if you were directly beneath that initial cloud you would've already taken enough thermal and shock damage so that only a miracle or a deep, hermetically sealed hideyhole would've made it of any interest to you.

I didn't know where the blasts had occurred. If they had been more than fifteen miles away, I'd probably have a few hours in which to assess damage, fight fires, or pray before the slowly descending ashfall dropped several miles downward to begin frying everything it fell on.

Kate seemed to be improving. "We made it through the first round," I told her, huffing to my feet: "Now we've gotta make sure the place isn't burning up or falling down. You up to it?"

Her olive skin was sallow but, "We'll know if I keel over," she said, and let me help her up.

I led her back to my office, touched my liquor cabinet where I'd hidden the detent, swung back the bottle-laden shelf. I fingered the detent for her to see. "Just a simple pressure latch. Always keep it shut when you're not using what's in here. And never pick up anything you don't know how to use."

"
Jesu bambino,
" she breathed, goggling at the tools of my trade: "I thought alcohol and firearms didn't mix. Is all that stuff legal?"

"Perfectly," I lied, and pointed out the few things she might need. "Malonitrile spray up here—better than Mace; the target pistol over here, the twenty-two longs for its magazine down there," I pointed among the ammo boxes. The extra sunglasses and thin leather gloves were self-explanatory. I'm always losing the damn things so I keep a dozen pairs of each on hand.

"What on earth is that thing in the middle, a cannon?"

"Near enough," I grunted, swinging the liquor shelf back. She'd seen my heavyweight, the sawed-off twelve-gauge auto shotgun with two pistol grips and a vertical magazine as thick as a two-by-four. That fat magazine held sixteen cartridges filled with double-ought buckshot, and the thoroughly illegal twelve-inch barrel fired a pattern that couldn't miss at ten yards. I could also hide it inside a coat front. Frankly, I didn't like the thing and had flashed it only once, at a man whose own emm-oh included concealable shotguns. He had just blinked and then had gone down on his face without a word. "That's one of the gadgets you
don't
want to pick up," I told her. "If you weigh under two hundred pounds it'll knock you on your can."

"I'll take your word for it." She put on her glasses and we went upstairs.

I first studied the kitchen ceiling and walls, which showed no cracks or wrinkles, and then bobbed my head up to window level for a fast glance outside, taking care with the splinters of glass on the floor. I saw nothing unusual, but the nearby hills impeded my view. "Sweep up this stuff before it dices us, will you?" I crunched my way into the spacious old dining room, mourning the shambles where window glass had speared into my glass-fronted china cabinet. The living room seemed undamaged and I saw no sign of danger through the intact multipaned north and east windows. The parlor windows had held, too. They revealed a sky innocent of intent to kill. I took the stairs two at a time to check on the second floor.

My first glance out the splinter-framed bathroom window upstairs made me duck by reflex action. Boiling into the stratosphere many miles north, an enormous dirty ball of cloud writhed on the skyline above my neighboring hilltops, showing streaks of red, like blood oozing out through crevices in burned fat. I risked another look; realized the target had been either the old mothball fleet anchored in Suisun Bay or Travis AFB, twice as far away. For all its agonized motion, the top of that cloud did not seem to be climbing very quickly, but from all reports it
had
to be. That meant it must be twenty miles or so away from us, and the prevailing winds were west to east. That hideous maelstrom of consumed rock and organic matter—including ash that had been trees, homes, human flesh—would scatter downwind for hundreds of miles but might miss us entirely. Given a direction and approximate distance, I knew the target had been Travis.