There would be a number of immediate fatalities – and not just from car crashes. Aircraft unlucky enough to be traversing the affected area would drop from the sky. Pacemakers would go down. Hospitals would become… inhospitable. Their generators – backups that automatically cut in during power failures – were hooked up to the building’s electrical system, so they would be destroyed by the pulse. Intubated patients in the midst of surgery would die. Monitors and electronically controlled breathing apparatus and drug delivery systems would fail. Locked pharmacies would not open to electronic codes. Elevators would stall between floors.
The most prolonged effect would be caused by damage to the basic infrastructure, especially the roads. Before anyone could address the replacement of the power grid or the restoration of water and sewer, Culpeper’s streets would have to be cleared. And they would be choked with inoperable cars. Cars that would never work again.
As for the banking facilities themselves, Wilson was less sure of what would happen. Of course, they would be hardened against EMP. But they would not be able to withstand the pulse he’d be unleashing – a scalar pulse far more potent than the EMP from a nuclear detonation at high altitude. The only defense would be a Tesla shield – and no one had that.
And how would the world financial community react to an attack of this sort? He didn’t know. The big systems – Fedwire and CHIPS and SWIFT – were undoubtedly fail-safe. They had to be. The trillions of gigabytes flowing between banks represented real money, with electronic tracking the only records of the transactions.
But Culpeper was a big cog. Even if it was only down for a minute, it would rattle the world’s financial markets. Because, of course, if Culpeper could be hit, so could the backups.
Wilson would bet that the stock exchanges and central banks would have to close. Would people panic? He didn’t know. He’d be listening to the radio as he drove west.
Study of the effects of EMP dated back to the days of nuclear tests in the atmosphere. When the Los Alamos boys began to get too much flack for detonating devices close to the ground in Nevada, the tests were moved to isolated islands in the Pacific.
People still squawked. The thermal and blast damage might not be important in these out-of-the-way locales, but the radiation, and its persistence in the soil, was still a problem. The areas would be closed to humanity for decades. Maybe forever.
And there was another problem: Fishermen or nomads had a way of stumbling into harm’s way, then to become public relations nightmares, living (or dying) examples of the effects of radiation on the human body.
So the scientists took to the skies.
The way they figured it, tests at high altitude would inflict little blast or thermal damage, and the radioactive fallout would be dispersed over a large area. In this diluted state, the radiation would cause relatively little harm. What they hadn’t counted on was a side effect of high-altitude detonation: the electromagnetic pulse.
What happens during a nuclear detonation at altitude is that gamma rays released by the explosion crash into molecules in the atmosphere – oxygen and nitrogen – causing a discharge of high-energy electromagnetic radiation.
When such a pulse hits any conductive material – wires, power lines, antennas, cables, radio towers, railroad tracks, pipes, metal fencing – it is carried along. If the EMP hits an antenna leading to a radio, the radio is fried by the ensuing surge. If the antenna leads to the interior of a reconnaissance airplane, the EMP will destroy the aircraft’s instruments. If the railroad track leads to a switching mechanism – or a train – it will burn out the controls. If the pulse hits a building, all its electrical circuits will melt.
Los Alamos physicists found out about EMP’s destructive potential in 1962 when they detonated a 1.4 megaton device called Starfish Prime over Johnston Island in the Pacific. On Hawaii, more than seven hundred fifty miles away, electronic systems collapsed. Streetlights flickered out in Oahu, telephones went down in Kauai. Airplanes in the vicinity lost instrumentation. Radio communications were disrupted more than eighteen hundred miles from the blast.
The Russians had similar experiences: power lines blown out of commission, communications systems destroyed, villages darkened.
There were fears that a single high-altitude blast detonated over Kansas would generate an EMP that would destroy all electronics in the lower forty-eight.
Scientists were already so worried about EMP damage in the sixties – when computers were few and digital technology was in its infancy – that nuclear testing went underground after the Johnston Island blast.
Now, computers were ubiquitous and digital technology was behind everything from missile guidance systems to espresso machines.
As a result, the effects of a high-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse would be so profound as to be irreversible. Wilson believed that the pulse he intended to launch from the Nevada fire lookout tower would destroy the entire infrastructure of the continental United States. In one second, the world’s only remaining superpower would be a third-world country on par with… Angola.
But first, the test. First, Culpeper.
CHAPTER 37
Burke retrieved Miranda Renfro’s address from the town of Fallon’s website, which listed the property owners and the amounts of their assessments.
Miranda Renfro owned lot 7B, Echo Village, 3 Fred Brigham Road. With data from the same site, he tried calling her immediate neighbors to see if he could persuade one of them to bring her to the phone.
But no. Two of them thought he was a scam artist, the third didn’t speak English.
That night, he drank beer and sat in front of the box. He watched Man United play to a draw at Man City. Then the news, then a program about the Crusades.
He was still drinking too much and it worried him. But it didn’t stop him from grabbing another beer. He paced around the room, thinking about it, and finally, he made a decision. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad would go to it. He sat down in front of the computer, and turned it back on. He typed “Travelocity” into the search bar.
As it turned out, making travel arrangements was easy. Explaining to Tommy wasn’t.
Burke was telling him about the trip when he realized how obsessive his quest for Wilson must seem. Belgrade was one thing, a little side trip to Slovenia, okay, maybe, but following a slender lead thousands of miles to Nevada? This was going too far – geographically, and in every other way.
He could read this in Tommy’s eyes, both skeptical and worried. “What you think you’re going t’find there?”
“Jack Wilson, if I’m lucky.”
“Nooooo,” Tommy said. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Maybe this Mandy woman will tell me where I can find him. And I can tell Kovalenko.”
“You think so, lad? If someone like you comes here looking, I’m going to tell them – oh, yeh, Michael’s over in Dublin, let me gi’ you his address?”
“Well-”
“And if you do find him, what you gonna do, hey? ‘Jack Wilson, come wi’ me to the FBI?’” The old man frowned. “And you think he’ll toddle along? This man is a criminal. No, it’s madness, Michael. If you’re doing this for the business, forget it. We wait, we take our chances wi’ the courts, I canna have you racing around the globe.”
Burke said he’d think about it. And he did. In fact, he slept on it.
And in the morning, he took a cab to the airport.
CHAPTER 38
It occurred to Wilson that if he waited until night, he could see the town wink out. Which would be interesting, but he wanted to strike during banking hours.