08:50 (Hawaii Time)
Thursday, May 21, 1998 ‘C’
Flight Deck of the cruiser U.S.S. MONTANA
Off Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii
‘’Everybody is ready?’’
‘’Yes, General!’’
‘’Then, let’s start this show!’’ said Ingrid in a calm voice before starting the engines of the UH-5 medium helicopter she was going to pilot off the deck of the cruiser U.S.S. MONTANA, cruising off the island of Oahu. In reality, she was feeling a mix of strong emotions right now: dread at what she and the team of nuclear survey specialists accompanying her would find on Oahu; hope that things would prove to be better than she feared; sadness at what she was certainly going to see on Oahu. It had now been nearly 23 years since a three-megaton thermonuclear bomb hidden by North Korean leaders on a Soviet cargo ship had exploded at quayside in Honolulu Harbor, completely destroying the city and its suburbs and also rendering unlivable the whole of the Hawaii Archipelago. The disaster had also severely damaged or sunk the warships present in Pearl Harbor and had effectively destroyed the whole base complex and its surrounding civilian communities. Over 400,000 people had died that day in and around Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, with 300,000 other people being seriously wounded. Then, the survivors had started falling sick from the radiations created by the bomb, adding gradually to the casualty count over the weeks and months following the explosion. What had made things even worse for Hawaii was the fact that, when another bomb meant to destroy New York had been intercepted, discovered and disarmed in time, it had been found that the Chinese-made thermonuclear bomb sent by the North Koreans had been placed in a sea container that had then been packed with highly radioactive nuclear waste material, making it an extremely ‘dirty’ nuclear weapon. The intent of the North Korean leaders for doing this had been clear enough: to render the target area unlivable for many decades and poison as many Americans as possible. For that, those North Korean leaders had paid heavily once their scheme, meant to put the blame on China, had been unmasked. However, that had not changed the fact that the whole of Hawaii had to be urgently evacuated, with the surviving Hawaiians then forced to resettle along the American West Coast after losing everything they had.
Lifting her helicopter from the flight deck of the cruiser, Ingrid then sped at low altitude towards what had been Honolulu and its port. Even from many kilometers away, the damage the city had sustained 23 years ago was plainly evident to the naked eye. The bomb explosion, which had occurred right next to one of the quays of the port, had created a four-kilometer-wide and 460-meter-deep crater, half of it on land and the other half in the seabed. Thus, a huge mass of seawater and of sediments, rocks and other materials had been instantly vaporized by the bomb’s fireball and transformed into highly-radioactive fallouts. The tons of nuclear waste products which had been packed around the bomb inside its container had at the same time tremendously increased the radioactivity of this fallout material and also increased the average half-life of it in terms of radiation hazard. Some of those nuclear waste isotopes had in fact half-lives measuring in the millions of years. Thus, while hoping for the best, Ingrid was clearly expecting the worst. Captain Mary Dunham, the NBCW{32} survey specialist from the Space Corps who led the team traveling in Ingrid’s helicopter, was also pessimistic about what they would find on Oahu and grimly looked at what remained of Honolulu, which was little indeed. Without even considering the long-term effects of the lingering radiations, the ground-level explosion of a three-megaton bomb created a fireball with a radius of 1.95 kilometers, within which everything would be instantly vaporized. Within a radius of 3.14 kilometers, the blast wave would have destroyed concrete buildings, while most residential buildings made of wood or bricks would be destroyed or would collapse within a radius of 6.6 kilometers. Windows would also be broken within a radius of 17 kilometers, their chards causing hideous wounds to house occupants standing in front of them. Finally, the thermal radiation produced by the explosion would have instantly caused third degree burns within a radius of 17.1 kilometers and would also put on fire most wooden structures and vegetation. What Mary Dunham was looking at as the helicopter approached Honolulu from the direction of the sea was unfortunately looking as bad as she had expected. One detail that she could spot with her binoculars then made her frown even more.
‘’General, I can’t see a single sign of vegetation growth within at least two miles from Ground Zero{33}. In Japan and in the various Pacific atolls we used in the past to conduct nuclear tests, vegetation had started to appear again and grow after a few years. Here, there is nothing visible after nearly 23 years. This is not a good sign at all.’’
‘’Agreed, Captain! That is probably due to the heavy presence of long-life radioactive detritus in the ground and water. The waters around Oahu are probably still highly radioactive, like the ground matter around Honolulu. Once we will be over the center of the bomb crater, we will dip our radiation meter in the water and measure the radiation levels there.’’
Mary Dunham nodded at that, hiding her growing anxiety and fear. All of them aboard the helicopter, including General Dows, wore protective suits and masks, plus had extra anti-radiation plates inserted in pockets of their suits which covered the parts of their bodies most susceptible to radiations. Glancing at the onboard fixed radiation detector situated in front of her made her clench her teeth.
‘’We are still over a mile from Ground Zero and flying at an altitude of 200 meters and I am already reading a Gamma radiation level of 2,600 milirems/year. That is over 170 times the maximum dosage deemed acceptable for the people living around our nuclear waste depository site in Yuma.’’
That announcement made Ingrid cringe.
‘’That is a lot! If it continues like this, we may not be able to stay very long on Oahu if we want to avoid absorbing too much radiations.’’
The more the helicopter got closer from Ground Zero, the more Captain Dunham looked uncomfortable. As Ingrid was stopping her helicopter in a hover some fifteen meters above the center of the crater, Dunham spoke up, her eyes starring at her radiation meter.
‘’General, I am now getting a reading of 9.2 rems/year at our present altitude.’’
‘’Record all our readings carefully from now on, Captain. Lieutenant McAllister, start lowering our dunking radioactivity meter.’’
‘’Yes, General!’’
McAllister then opened the hatch in the center of the cabin’s floor and started lowering the meter hooked to the winch that had originally supported a dunking sonar head. As the detector head approached the surface of the water, Mary Dunham nervously watched the indications they were getting.
‘’The dunking detector head is about to touch the surface and is giving a reading of 13.4 rems/year… The detector head is now ten feet under the surface and the Gamma radiations level has risen to 15.1 rems/year… The detector head is now at a depth of fifty feet and shows 47 rems/year. Shall we continue, General?’’
‘’Yes! I want to know how bad it is at the bottom of this crater. Dunk our detector head to its maximum depth of 200 feet.’’
‘’Understood, General! McAllister, lower the head to the maximum depth.’’
‘’Yes, Captain!’’
Some forty seconds later, the young Space Corps lieutenant spoke again.
‘’Detector head now at a depth of 200 feet. It can’t go lower than that.’’
‘’What kind of readings are you getting now, Captain?’’ asked Ingrid. Dunham then looked at her with haunted eyes.
‘’I now read a Gamma dosage of 420 rems/year, and we are still over 500 feet above the bottom of the crater. It must be a true radioactive hell at the bottom.’’
‘’A radioactive hell which will undoubtedly continue to poison the waters around Oahu for the centuries and millenniums to come.’’ added Ingrid, her voice bitter. ‘’We have seen enough here. Lieutenant, reel in our dunking detector head: we will now go take measurements inland.’’
‘’Right away, General.’’
Once the detector head was back inside the helicopter, Ingrid stopped hovering and took some speed towards what had been the center of the city of Honolulu. What they found there was a field of blackened ruins, with no trace of vegetation to be seen. With her survey team taking both radiation measurements and pictures from the helicopter, she again stopped to a hover at an altitude of a few feet over what had been a park.
‘’Throw out our first detector-transmitter!’’
At her command, one member of the team opened the port side sliding door of the helicopter and, pushing a button on the side of a sort of small spherical object, then dropped that object down, where it rolled before stopping when its small cruciform legs stabilized it in a vertical position.
‘’The detector is now transmitting, General.’’ announced Lieutenant Steve McAllister. ‘’It shows a reading of 705 rems/year at the surface of the ground. That’s way too high, even for short visits.’’
‘’I concur! The whole of Metropolitan Honolulu will have to be declared as a permanent no-go zone. We will now fly westward, towards the airport and the naval base at Pearl Harbor.’’
While she flew westward, her team let drop at intervals a few detector-transmitter units, so that they could continue monitoring the local radiation levels in the months and years to come. As they approached the Honolulu Airport, which shared runways with the military airbase of Hickam Field, the team photographed the darkened, melted aircraft debris littering the airport and dropped another detector-transmitter unit. Ingrid threw a sad look at the destroyed aircraft around the main tarmac: hundred of men and women had been killed here when the bomb had exploded. However, what was possibly the saddest and hardest part to watch for her was still to come. After another minute of flying, the UH-5 arrived over the naval base of Pearl Harbor, or rather what was left of it. While the blast damage from the nuclear explosion had been fairly minimal, the thermal radiation had triggered large fires all around the base, with the Navy’s fuel tank depot in particular having been hard hit. Of the various ships at quay or at anchor that had not sunk, their radar antennas had been ripped away, while the paint on their hulls had burned, leaving the ships blackened and scorched. Once over the base, Ingrid flew directly towards the huge hulk of the nuclear aircraft carrier U.S.S. ENTERPRISE, anchored next to Ford Island, itself situated in the middle of the harbor. Captain Mary Dunham looked questioningly at Ingrid as it became evident that the latter wanted to land on the derelict carrier.
‘’You want to visit the ENTERPRISE, General?’’
‘’Yes! I need to do a couple of things there. Its flight deck will most probably be radioactive, so I will understand if you choose to stay inside the helicopter while I enter the ship. However, if you choose to accompany me, then do it for the right reasons and not simply to follow me.’’
‘’Er, understood, General. I will leave my team aboard the helicopter.’’
Ingrid nodded her head at that, knowing that Dunham had not taken that decision out of cowardice: Ingrid was well known through the United States to possess healing abilities which allowed her to survive situations where other people would be at grave risk of death. Landing smoothly on the darkened, debris-littered flight deck of the aircraft carrier, Ingrid then grabbed a small haversack next to her pilot’s seat and jumped out of her helicopter, landing smoothly on both feet.
Cautiously making her way through the destroyed aircraft littering the flight deck of the carrier, she soon entered the island command structure, situated along the right side of the ship. Up to now, she had not seen a single human body on the deck but she could guess why. Her guess proved correct when she entered the big aircraft hangar of the carrier, situated under the flight deck and connected to it by four aircraft elevators. The hangar itself had been ravaged by fires but seemed to have been partially swept of debris some time after the disaster had struck. The reason for that became evident when Ingrid stumbled on a section of the hangar where over three thousand human shapes rested on the deck, each covered by a wool blanket and carefully lined up in rows after rows along the deck. With emotion nearly overcoming her, she approached one of the covered shapes and gently raised one corner of the blanket covering it. She cringed as she contemplated the skeletal remains of a man still wearing a rotting sailor’s uniform. Putting back down the blanket, Ingrid straightened up and came to rigid attention before militarily saluting the long rows of corpses, tears rolling on her cheeks.
‘’May you all rest in peace, men and women of the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE.’’
Then taking a few steps back, she took out of her haversack a digital still camera and took a few pictures of the rows of covered bodies and of the inside of the hangar before walking out of it and going to one of the decks situated below the hangar. Having studied the deck layouts of the ship before coming on this mission, she had little problems finding the suite that had belonged to the captain of the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE. She found the skeletal remains of the latter carefully tucked in his bed and covered with a blanket. Next to the body, on a night stand, she saw a sort of large notebook and, picking it up, opened it, careful not to damage the old pages inside it. It turned out to have been the captain’s personal diary and the last entry in it dated from six days after the explosion that had destroyed Honolulu. Passing a radiation detector on the diary, she found it to be only minimally radioactive, thus was safe for a short handling. She thus put the diary in her haversack, then saluted the dead captain before leaving his cabin and going up to the air control bridge, near the top of the command superstructure island of the carrier. Going out on one of the open bridge wings, Ingrid concentrated and started levitating off the gallery, flying up towards the mast which had supported the ship’s flag. Soon arriving at the level of the flag platform, she landed on it, then pulled down the burned out remains of the American flag still attached to the flag rope. Untying the burned flag and leaving it on the platform, as it proved to be highly radioactive, Ingrid took out of her haversack a brand new giant American flag and tied it to the flag rope before raising it to the top of the mast. She saluted the new flag as it floated in the wind, close to tears again.
‘’Goodbye, U.S.S. ENTERPRISE. Goodbye to all the valiant ships and crews lost here nearly 23 years ago. You will always be remembered.’’
09:35 (Washington Time)
Monday, May 25, 1998 ‘C’
The Oval Office, The White House
Washington, D.C.
Ross Perot was struck at once by the somber expressions on the face of Ingrid Dows, Secretary of Defense John McCain, Secretary of the Navy Charles Brubaker, Secretary of the Interior Joe Lieberman and General Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Perot understood at once that the news about Hawaii had to be bad. Inviting them all to go sit with him around the low coffee table sitting in a corner of the Oval Office, he waited for Ingrid to start speaking first: after all, she was the one who had personally led the teams sent to survey the Hawaii islands.
‘’Mister President, while there are still many analyses of samples and radiation data to be completed, we are ready to present to you a preliminary assessment of the state of the Hawaii islands. Basically, it is not good. Here is my preliminary report of our findings. In short, while the radiation levels have dropped considerably on the islands of Niihau, Maui and Hawaii, the waters around them are still radioactive, making them unsafe for fishing, while the little vegetation that has grown there since 1975 contains traces of radioactive elements, thus making those islands economically non-viable and unsafe for long-term occupation. As for the islands of Molokai, Kahoolawi and Kauai, the radioactivity levels on them make then safe for only short-term stays of only a few weeks or months, while the waters around them are even more radioactive that the waters around Niihau, Maui and Hawaii. As for the island of Oahu, on which Honolulu was, it and the surrounding waters are still violently radioactive. Any person visiting Oahu now would accumulate a lethal radiation dose within a few weeks at the most, and that stands for the points of the island furthest from Honolulu. As for the region of Honolulu itself, it must be declared as a permanent no-go danger zone.’’
‘’And how, uh, permanent would this stay a no-go zone, General?’’ said Perot, nearly too afraid to ask. Ingrid’s expression was grim indeed when she answered him.
‘’Oahu will stay unsafe for any human occupation for at least the next few thousand years, Mister President, while the other islands of the archipelago may be reoccupied within a couple of hundred years. I am sorry to have to say so, Mister President, but we lost Hawaii for good. Even a very thorough cleanup will not be enough to save them. As for the fishing grounds around it, they will have to be closed off and tightly watched, in order to prevent any unscrupulous fishing company from catching and then selling radioactive fish from there.’’
‘’My God! I was hoping so much for better news than that. What am I going to say to the American people about this?’’
‘’The truth, Mister President.’’ replied at once and in a firm voice Ingrid. ‘’Nothing else will cut it.’’
18:09 (Washington Time)
Ingrid Dows’ residence, Aurora Hills
Arlington, Virginia
Ingrid, feeling deeply depressed, walked into her home with a nearly lethargic pace and suspended her uniform’s service cap, then served herself a stiff drink of scotch before going to sit down heavily on her favorite sofa in her living room. She then switched on her television set and started watching the news for a few minutes before switching it off: listening to the comments made about the President’s address concerning Hawaii only depressed her even more, as some in Washington were already making crass attempts to exploit the bad news to their profit. Sitting quietly in her silent living room, Ingrid reflected mentally on the 57 years of military services she had already consecrated to the defense of the United States and of its people. The horrible sights she had seen in Hawaii had reminded her that, despite all of her best efforts, things had gone wrong a number of times in the past for the United States and still could somehow go wrong. However, she was not going to be able to continue to serve forever, mostly because of political and administrative reasons which were out of her control. With both Russia and China now militarily defanged and no more able to present credible military threats to the United States, what other major military threat was left now? The short answer was: none. Basically, she had helped create a sort of ‘Pax Americana’ around the World, not by invading other countries or creating military coups but by eliminating the worse of the heads of states, tin pot dictators and fundamentalist leaders who had been the cause of so many of the wars and atrocities that had afflicted the World. Now, she had to decide if she was going to leave military service of her own volition or if she was going to wait until pushed out for political reasons. After all, she held her present position at the President’s pleasure. President Perot’s second term would end in about two years and she could not know the kind of man who would then replace him in the White House. During her decades of service, she had made plenty of political enemies, enemies who would be too happy to get rid of her if they could. While she had always been a fighter and didn’t let anyone push her around, she was truly tired of both war and political intrigue. Ingrid dearly wished that her children, particularly Nancy, could be here with her tonight in order to help her decide about her future, but they were presently studying in either New York or Boston. A gentle male voice then made her snap her head around towards an impossibly handsome young man who was now standing in the doorway of her kitchen, wearing a golden robe.
‘’I am here, Ingrid, if you want my advice concerning your future.’’
‘’Michael?’’ said Ingrid before jumping on her feet and running to the archangel, who received her in his opened arms. After a few seconds of embracing him, Ingrid looked up at him with expectation in her eyes.
‘’I really could use your advice about what I could now do of the rest of my life: while I still love flying and wish to be able to continue to fly, I am dead tired of seeing death and destruction around me, even if I haven’t caused those deaths myself.’’
‘’I perfectly understand your feelings about that, Ingrid: even the most dedicated warrior eventually needs to rest. Let’s go sit down on that nice sofa of yours, so that we could talk.’’