In Italy the coalition government fractured and the premier resigned. The French president addressed a crowd estimated at ten thousand people and was forced to stop speaking when a riot broke out on the edge of the crowd. Across the channel the British prime minister was questioned sharply in Parliament from both sides of the aisle about the dangers of Britain’s nuclear reactors. Here too a significant percentage of the lawmakers were immediately ready to shut down all the reactors.
By the time Americans began to wake up with their coffee, newspapers and morning television shows, the fat was in the fire. The television played scenes of rioting in Russia and the political crises in Europe while people read the front pages of their newspapers with a growing sense of horror. Jack Yocke’s story on the KGB’s involvement in the Soviet Square massacre — it was dubbed a massacre by an inspired headline writer and the name stuck — made the front page of the Washington Post, at the very bottom. The rest of the page was devoted to the Serdobsk meltdown.
Experts were stunned by the extent of the disaster. It was as if none of the redundant safety systems in the reactor had functioned. Initial estimates on the level of radioactivity at ground level where the reactor had stood were hastily developed from satellite infrared and other sensors. “It will be three hundred thousand years,” one physicist declared, “before an unprotected human can safely walk upon that site.”
In the Capitol in Washington congressmen elbowed one another vying to get in front of the cameras in the press briefing rooms. Every one of them swore he would support a critical review of the American nuclear power program. A significant minority was ready to shut down all the reactors right now. Among this minority were several of the legislators who had fought hardest on behalf of the utilities that operated reactors — the same people, incidentally, who had accepted the most PAC money from those utilities.
The antinuclear lobby was having a great day. Triumphant and exultant as the tide lifted their boat, they excoriated senators and congressmen who had consistently pooh-poohed safety concerns. They damned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an industry puppet, vilified every public official who ever said that nuclear power was safe, and demanded the immediate resignation of the secretary of the Department of Energy.
While the antinukes danced and pranced in television studios in New York and Washington, a huge crowd gathered outside the Capitol and were harangued by impromptu speakers. After an hour the crowd became unruly and police used tear gas to break it up.
When the sun rose in Japan the antinuclear, antitechnology forces arrayed in helmets and plastic body armor were ready to do battle with club-wielding riot police. The battle surged through downtown Tokyo, commuter trains were literally overturned, power lines were dragged down while still hot, and a mob broke through the fence at Narita airport. Outnumbered riot police turned and ran as the demonstrators charged for the Boeing 747s at the terminal gates. Most of the giant planes suffered minor damage, mostly to their tires, but two were set on fire.
The chaos brought the city to a choking halt while legislators in the Diet crafted a hasty plan to shut down Japan’s nuclear power plants. The power loss would stun the economy, but in a small nation that had never forgotten Hiroshima or Nagasaki, this was the only possible political choice. As uncomfortable, perspiring physicists sat before television cameras and tried to assess the Serdobsk meltdown damage based on fragmentary information, Japan got out of the nuclear power business.
At stock exchanges around the world the value of stocks in electrical utilities that owned nuclear power plants fell disastrously before trading was halted because of the huge disparity between buy and sell orders.
But Serdobsk was in Russia, and it was there that the situation got completely out of control as the evening shadows lengthened. The development “at any price” mentality of the post-World War II years was revealed for what it was — a grotesque miscalculation that had bankrupted the nation, left the people paupers on the brink of starvation, and now had made huge portions of the nation uninhabitable. Raging mobs roamed the core of Moscow and no foreigner was safe. Three hotels were now ablaze. The entrances to the Kremlin were blocked with barricades, and police hid behind them to fire into the enraged crowds. Several tanks appeared on the streets, only to be surrounded and disabled. The crews were dragged out and beaten to death as television camera crews broadcast the scenes from the safety of the rooftops.
A mob surrounded the American embassy complex and probably would have stormed it if the ambassador hadn’t ordered the marines to use live ammunition and shoot to kill. They did. By the time the summer sun had set, over a dozen bodies lay on the streets around the embassy. One of the bodies was of a young woman who had tried to get close enough to the wall to hurl a Molotov cocktail. When a corporal shot her, the bottle shattered beside her and her corpse was immolated. This vignette would have made great television, but unfortunately the CNN crew on the rooftop across the boulevard was having trouble with their satellite feed.
Jack Yocke saw the incident and used it to lead off a story for the Post. He knew he had something. The woman’s hair blowing in the wind as she lay dead in the street, the burning gasoline igniting the asphalt, her clothing, and finally that wispy brown hair — he could still see the scene in his mind’s eye as he tapped on the laptop and tried to capture the insanity of infuriated, berserk people charging marines behind a brick wall armed with M-16s. Blood and guts were what he did best, so he wrote quickly and confidently.
As he wrote he could still hear the occasional sharp crack of an M-16. Now and then through the open window he got a whiff of the acrid smoke of a burning car that the locals had torched this morning. It was a Ford with diplomatic plates — just which embassy employee it belonged to Yocke didn’t know. When he was finished he checked his work over for spelling and punctuation, then called the Post on Grafton’s telephone and sent the story via modem.
After Yocke had sent off his story, he locked the door of the apartment and went looking for Jake Grafton. He found him against the southwest corner of the compound wall busy with the TACSAT gear and encoder. The admiral merely glanced at him and continued to punch buttons, so Yocke sat down beside him.
Above them, standing on some empty furniture crates so he could see over the wall, was a marine with a rifle. He was scanning the windows of a Russian apartment house just across the alley. Fortunately no rioters had chosen to get up there and shoot down into the compound, probably because none of them had guns. The Communists had made damn sure that the civilian inhabitants of their workers’ paradise were unarmed and stayed that way.
“Hell of a day, huh?” Yocke said.
Grafton finished with the number sequence. He diddled a bit with the dish and high-gain antenna on top of the box and finally got the voice echo in sync with his voice. He pushed another button, then leaned back against the wall with the telephone-style handset cradled on his shoulder and glanced at the reporter. “Yeah,” he said.
After a moment he spoke into the mouthpiece. “General Land, please. Admiral Grafton calling.”
More waiting. Grafton nodded at Yocke’s trousers. “Toad loan you those?”