At the New York Mercantile Exchange, a few futures traders were looking at what would obviously be a substantial profit that day. Who was the idiot who had sold short these contracts? At so high a margin? The same observation was being made at the Chicago Commodities Exchange, the London Metal Exchange, and in other of the world’s buy and sell arenas. Someone out there was clearly a few bricks short.
It was 9:04PM in Pakistan. Marak was sitting in his living room in Islamabad, watching a bank of TV’s. It was also 9:04PM in the mountains of the Sefid Koh. The Emir, looking to be in a black mood, and getting blacker by the moment, was watching his Internet connection, delivered by the servants of Satan themselves.
Sam and Hank had been waiting on the Glen Canyon Bridge with rapidly growing concern. A squadron of F-15’s had flown overhead, and appeared to be circling. Two Navy planes had dropped bombs of some sort into the reservoir. The helicopters were stationary, hovering directly behind the dam. The police had noticed their presence, and their apparently disabled truck, and were headed their way. The television camera was trained on the Glen Canyon Dam, and their uplink system was transmitting. It was now four minutes past the appointed time of detonation. Still nothing. But their orders, from Yousseff himself, had been very clear. Stay with the truck. Keep transmitting the images. They were soldiers in a much broader war, and they were not to abandon their post.
It was 11:04AM in New York City, where concerned engineers, working at the Rockefeller Center, were clustered around one of the hundreds of monitors in the central NBC newsroom.
“Johnny,” said Floyd, the associate producer, to the chief engineer on the floor that morning. “Are you saying that we don’t know who is transmitting that particular image to us? Seriously?”
“Yes, Floyd. Mind like a steel trap. You’ve got it. Someone has hogged one of our frequencies and is sending this to us,” answered John, gesturing to the screens in front of them. “How, I don’t know. The ’why’ is for you news guys to figure out.”
“We’ve got an uplink on location at the Hoover Dam right now. What we’re seeing on the screen, Johnny, is a dam. Is there some way that the uplink at the Hoover is sending this?”
“Floyd, you’re not an engineer, I know,” said an exasperated John. “But if you look at those couple of dozen monitors over there,” he said, chucking a thumb behind him, “you will notice that the images are profoundly different. It’s not the same dam.”
The alliteration that had had Turbee stumbling a short time earlier was starting to spread across the nation. First at TTIC, then through the Intelligence Community, then the military, and now at the nation’s news desks.
“It’s a different damn dam,” breathed Floyd. “What on earth for? Who’s transmitting this?”
“We don’t know who’s doing it,” repeated John. “We don’t know why. I’m pretty sure I already told you that. But there could be a huge story here. I’m going to get some more engineers in on this to try and sort it out. But you guys need to be recording every second of this, and your news guys shouldn’t stray too far.”
At 9:04AM, Javeed pushed the Ark to the very center of the Glen Canyon Dam. The darkness and silence around them were unworldly. Perhaps they had failed and were already dead, he thought. This was Hell. Cold, deathly silent, dark, and full of fear. He searched his heart, but couldn’t find any regret at the thought of failing in the mission.
Massoud checked the dials and the now only partially functional HUD. “We’re there, Javeed. It is time,” he said.
Javeed nodded and reached for the large button just below the HUD. He had started to doubt the mission, and his part in it, and was anxious to finish things before he thought any further. He pressed the button. Nothing. Pressed it again. Still nothing. He pounded it with his fist, desperate to have this done. Nothing.
Massoud gently pushed Javeed’s hand away. “You must push it gently. Like this.”
It was 9:06. Massoud reached for the button, and gently pressed it. Everything disappeared in a radiance of light.
56
The moment of truth came at 9:06AM, Mountain Standard Time, when Massoud pressed the red button on the console before him. This sent an electric impulse to an extremely accurate digital distributor, which sent simultaneous signals to five equidistant capacitors. Those, in turn, sent more powerful pulses to five detonators, set along an elliptical path within the Ark. Kumar had made sure that all of these electronic components functioned perfectly.
The five detonators each simultaneously developed small pressure waves. As these pressure waves traveled through the Semtex, the material was compressed and heated, causing complex nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon bonds to rupture, creating enormous amounts of energy. This created even greater pressure waves as the chain reaction ripped upward through the Semtex, moving at a high rate of speed. Almost instantaneously, the detonation wave hit the first of the many elements precisely crafted into the lining of the Ark. Once it reached the cone liner, the detonation wave created a planar plasma jet, moving at over six miles per second. Because of the complex internal geometries of the Ark, the jet was flat, and almost laser straight. As the other elements of the Ark were caught up in the blast, they too were converted to plasma and ejected upward, but at a slower rate. This resulted in a jet of energy that stretched up for hundreds of feet. The jet was followed by steel, molybdenum, and gold, all traveling in its path at slightly slower speeds. When the leading end of the jet struck the soft concrete of the dam, pressures of tens of thousands of atmospheres were produced. Pressures of this magnitude far exceeded the yield strength of the concrete, which flowed like water out of the jet’s path. This process, called hydrodynamic penetration, lay at the center of the destructive power of the Ark. The factors governing the process were linked together by the complex equations that had been developed by Tiani and Melvin. If the two scientists had been correct, the destructive power of the Ark would be enough to slice through the dam like a knife through butter.
At that moment, Sam and Hank were on the verge of being arrested. The cavalry was coming, all right, and it was coming for them. Three police cruisers, sirens blazing and lights flashing, had just raced onto the bridge. For a brief second, Sam thought of throwing himself off the edge. But he’d never been trained in the craft of the suicide bomber. In fact, he’d never meant to be a suicide bomber. Why had he become involved with the Emir in the first place? he suddenly wondered. What misguided boyhood mistake had led him on this path? This ugly introspection was cut short by a blinding flash of light, followed almost immediately by the ear-splitting roar of an enormous explosion. The percussive wave was so powerful that it knocked both men backward. Sam saw what appeared to be a gigantic pillar of fire rising from the dam’s crest to the heavens. The two helicopters closest to the blast were knocked violently backward, and fell into the waters of Lake Powell.
“Allah be praised,” breathed Hank.
“Holy shit,” said Sam, who had become better versed in the American tongue than his friend.
“They did it,” said Hank, overjoyed that two of their countrymen, whom they had sat with just five hours earlier, were now dead. “They are heroes. They did it.”
“Yeah, and now they’re dead. But the dam, Hank, the dam is still standing. Look at it,” Sam said, pointing.
Sure enough, the Glen Canyon Dam still stood. There was a tendril of smoke curling irregularly from the center of the dam crest, but that was all.