Now there was a coloured map of the USA, with cities marked in bold font. Circles were radiating out from a spot in the middle of Kansas, like ripples on a pond, as if the map were under water. The numbers were loping along in minutes now, rather than seconds, and Sacheverell was saying you expect Richter Nine up here on the Canadian border and down here in Chicago. The map disappeared and more old footage followed; this time the camera was panning over horribly flat rubble. A few dazed individuals in Arab dress stared at the camera. Others were crawling over a mound of debris, like ants over a hill. Sacheverell was saying of course these are stone houses and we can’t be sure this applies exactly to New York or Chicago but you would surely cause massive destruction coast to coast. He was aware that he was beginning to gabble but he couldn’t help himself. His voice was now a croak.
Then of course there’s the fire, he said, rising to the tension he sensed in his audience. About thirty per cent of the land area of the States is combustible in the summer and twenty per cent in the winter. You would expect thousands of fires over an area the size of France. They could merge into one giant conflagration so you would take out the whole of central USA with flames from the exposure to the rising fireball and this is Hamburg during a firestorm only with red hot ash thrown over the whole country you might set the whole country alight and then of course there’s the biomass the biomass yes especially as fat melts at forty-five Centigrade I mean Celsius but they’re the same really you expect living people to fry in their own fat over most of the States your skin will bubble and peel off in a few seconds and then your blood and water will boil and then your fat will combust and you will just carbonize while the blast is sweeping you along at the speed of a jet.
The audience sat riveted.
Now the movie was showing something that looked like one of the more lurid products of a Hollywood studio. An ocean was boiling. Now the boiling green lines formed into a pattern; they reared up into a wave, a tumbling, foaming breaker which washed over little cartoon skyscrapers like a wave over pebbles, and Sacheverell was saying we’re not sure about the stability of waves that big but we’re working on it with the Sandia teraflop but a splash like this off the Eastern seaboard would wash over the Eastern States but the Appalachians would stop it and you would be okay in Bozeman, Montana. Then there were more flashing symbols, the projector stopped whirring and the lights went up. Sacheverell swallowed nervously, blinking in the light.
His audience remained frozen.
“You got casualty estimates for this, son?” The President finally asked, quietly.
“Hard to judge, sir. Most of the USA is less than two thousand kilometres from Kansas. A million-megaton bang on Kansas I reckon would leave two hundred million casualties from the prompt effects.”
“You mean injured?”
“No sir, dead.”
“What about survivors?” the Vice-President asked.
“With this scenario one to ten per cent of North America would survive the initial impact. But they would have big problems. Mainly lack of food, medical care and sanitation. I reckon most of them would be taken out with starvation, typhus, cholera, bubonic plague, stuff like that.”
“Comment, anyone?” the President asked, turning round.
“What you’re saying,” said the Secretary of Defense, his features drawn tensely, “Is that the technology is available to create a weapon a million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb?”
Sacheverell nodded.
“You’re some sort of nut,” the Secretary of Defense said.
“It only takes a gentle push, sir. There are plenty of these asteroids around. The trick is to find one that passes close to the Earth. Then you soft land a small atom bomb on it. If you explode the bomb on the right place at the right time, you nudge the asteroid into an Earth-crossing orbit. It doesn’t need much. With a mid-course correction — a second explosion with a small atom bomb or even conventional explosives — you could target the asteroid to within a couple of hundred miles.”
Grant turned to Heilbron. “You say they’ve pulled it off already?”
“In my opinion it’s on the way in now.”
A slim, hawk-nosed man in his late fifties, wearing an expensive, dark three-piece suit, was standing at the back door of the theatre. He spoke angrily. “In the name of God, Rich, you’re telling us we’re at war.”
Grant raised his hand quickly. “Not here, Billy.” He turned to the DCI. “How many people know about this?”
“The seven of us in this room, two of my staff, and one of General Hooper’s aides. On the European side, about an equal number. About twenty people in all. And a team of eight trying to find the thing. They’re hidden away in a mountaintop observatory in Arizona.”
“Doctor Sacheverell, we know where to reach you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m one of the team, in Eagle Peak Observatory.”
“Don’t even discuss this with your dog. Gentlemen, that applies to us all. I want no apocalyptic statements, no veiled hints, no unusual moves. Nathan, Sam, the Green Room at 3 a.m.”
“With respect, sir…”
“Nathan, I’m about to entertain guests. Like I said, no unusual moves. What do you want me to do? Send him out for a pizza?”
DAY THREE
The Green Room, Wednesday, 03h00
Grant and his wife, accompanying King Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles and His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador, walked along the long Entrance Hall, the sound of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies coming from a dozen violins still entertaining a hundred guests in the State Dining Room. The President’s head was fuzzy from Chateau Latour and his cheeks ached from hours of enforced smiling. By protocol, he led them to the elevator taking them up to the residence for a private talk.
An hour later Charles and Camilla, looking exhausted, were being escorted by Secret Service men to Blair House, across the road from No. 1651. Grant gave it another hour and then came back down by the stairs to the Entrance Hall. He turned through the colonnade into the Cross Hall. Adam-style chandeliers and bronze standard lamps threw a warm glow on to the marble walls. Images of past presidents looked down at him. The violins were now silent. Somewhere three chimes of a clock cut into the stillness.
A door was ajar and he turned into the Green Room. Logs crackled in the fireplace, and a whiff of woodsmoke unexpectedly evoked a distant memory: a camp fire, sausages sizzling on a stick, smoke stinging his eyes, young men and women laughing. But before he could place the image in time, it had gone forever.
The Secretary of Defense, Nathan Bellarmine, was sprawled in a Federal-period chintz armchair at the fire. He had smooth, black hair, was slightly balding, and wore a dark three-piece suit. The dark waistcoat and Brylcreemed hair made him look slightly like a snooker player.
Occupying the chair at the other side of the fireplace was a small, hook-nosed, middle-aged man with white hair and eyes like dark pebbles: this was Arnold Cresak, the President’s National Security Adviser and a long-standing confidant.
The third man in the room was Hooper, sitting upright on a hard-backed chair, underneath Durrie’s nostalgic Farmyard in Winter. There were dark shadows under the soldier’s eyes. Grant waved them down as they began to rise, tossed his dinner jacket on to the carpeted floor and himself sank with a sigh into deep upholstery.
“Is the room clean?”