Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

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.

He drank his coffee and packed up. Had some Cheerios and a banana for breakfast. Checked out. Looked at his watch. Nine thirty.

Might as well go.

He started the Escalade and flicked the switch to engage the step-up module (a glorified Tesla coil) with the vehicle’s V-8 engine. This comprised the weapon’s power source.

He left the car running, and stepped outside. The Escalade’s short bed had a rigid cover. This he removed, and set down next to the truck. He dismantled the gimbal rig and moved aside the pieces of the foam cocoon, then connected his laptop to the device. The software that controlled the weapon elevated the barrel and then the focusing program kicked in, swiveling it into position. It was almost noiseless: a faint whir.

If anyone had asked, he would have told them that the weapon was a surveying device. But he was parked near the lot’s perimeter and there was no one in sight.

He touched the tattoo on his chest for luck, then flipped the toggle switch that fired the weapon. He could not detect the beam at all. He heard nothing and, like Tesla and Ceplak before him, he wondered if it had worked.

But unlike Tesla, Wilson did not have to wait weeks for news reports from Siberia. Even as he watched the barrel retract and fold in upon itself, a 727 heading for Dulles slid by directly overhead in complete silence.

Its momentum and glide had taken it beyond the target area. The engines were dead and it was already losing altitude. He wondered how far it would glide. He wondered if he’d hear the impact and explosion.

The plane represented another part of the Culpeper experiment. As the agent of death for innocent people, what would he feel? Would he be repulsed?

The plane yawed to the right.

He hadn’t been entirely sure about planes. In trim, with the ailerons and landing gear tucked in, they could glide for quite some distance. And some had backup hydraulic systems that might allow a very good pilot to bring a plane down safely.

But not this aircraft. It was entering a dive. Without the thrust of the engines, it was basically a flying rock.

Wilson lost sight of it for a moment. Then he heard a concussive thump, and black smoke billowed on the horizon.

He felt a strange mix of remorse and elation. He’d been on a lot of planes, and knew what really bad turbulence could do to people. He could imagine the terror of the crew in the cockpit and the passengers’ panic. It was probably a bit like Wounded Knee, with death in your face and nowhere to run.

In any case, Wilson thought, it was all in a good cause – and besides, it was fate.

Theirs and his.

The random nature of the destruction intrigued Wilson and he would have liked to stay in Culpeper to witness the cascade of events firsthand. But no.

The Comfort Inn was beyond the impact area and he’d been careful to map out an exit route, because it wouldn’t take long for the gridlock to ripple outwards. He didn’t want to get caught up in that. And besides, he had other business to attend to. He could listen to the news while he drove.

There was a bad moment when he turned the Escalade’s key and nothing happened. A rush of sensation in his chest. Maybe his own car hadn’t been out of the target area! Had he miscalculated?

But no, his watch was still working. So he tried the key again. This time the engine started with a roar.

As he approached an intersection almost thirty miles from the motel, he saw that the traffic signals weren’t working. Cars edged through, one at a time.

He wasn’t surprised. An EMP hitting Culpeper was certain to cause peripheral damage. He’d had no idea how extensive the damage to the power grid would prove to be, but he knew it could be considerable. The excess voltage from the pulse would fly along the conductive electrical lines, burning out everything for some distance. And as far as the grid was concerned, despite the big outage of 2003, little had been done to improve its stability.

And the truth was that electrical substations were not created equal. If the Culpeper substation was a node that carried a heavy voltage load, its failure would propagate for hundreds of miles. Those outages would be short-lived. The utilities would have things up again in a day or two.

But not in Culpeper. Culpeper was dark. Culpeper was fucked.

He listened to the radio.

The first reports were about events that took place outside Culpeper: the plane crash, the spectacular traffic jams. That made sense, of course, because there was nothing coming out of Culpeper itself. Getting TV trucks and communications gear into the little town would be impossible until the traffic jam could be untangled and tow trucks could begin to pick away at the permanently stalled cars.

By the time he reached Pennsylvania, he knew that the banking facilities in Culpeper had not proved capable of withstanding the pulse. The financial markets had closed early – due, it was said, to “technical problems.” Breathless reporters speculated about “computer viruses and Trojan horses,” while a White House spokesman dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” those who suggested that the plane crash was somehow related to the problems Wall Street was experiencing. “The next thing you know,” he said, “they’ll be dragging in the traffic jams we’re seeing outside the Beltway.”

No one said anything about Culpeper. Culpeper wasn’t a story yet.

“But this wasn’t just any hacker or virus,” one reporter insisted. “This was financial terrorism.”

Banks in time zones to the west closed early.

International correspondents from Asia to Europe reported that trading had ceased on their exchanges.

The Fed chairman came on the air to announce that there was a “glitch” in the system. He reassured the public that computerized banking networks were built with safeguards and “redundant systems,” and that things would soon be up and running again.

And what about the plane? Had it been attacked? Or was the crash just a coincidence?

The vice president urged calm from an undisclosed location.

It was almost dinnertime, and Wilson was nearing Pittsburgh when the first news emerged from Culpeper itself.

Hysterical residents sketched a picture of a town littered with dead vehicles, where nothing electrical or electronic worked.

Those who’d made their way out of Culpeper brought the scene alive. Fires were blazing out of control, most of them ignited by truck or car crashes. Fire trucks and ambulances found it impossible to get to the scene.

Wilson hadn’t even considered fire, but of course he should have. The great quake that struck San Francisco in 1906 had done some damage, yes, but it was fire that wrecked the city.

It was shortly after Wilson crossed the border into Ohio that a voice first mentioned the possibility of an “electromagnetic pulse.” On an NPR talk show, a roundtable of experts batted the subject around. One panelist, a retired nuclear physicist, did his best to explain the phenomenon. But when he started talking about “Compton recoil electrons,” the host interrupted him.

“But what would cause it? That’s the concern.”

“Well, it’s very strange that the effect is so localized,” the expert said drily. “I can’t begin to explain that. But generally we see an EMP as the side effect of a thermonuclear detonation.”

Panicked callers swamped the switchboard. The expert backpedaled. Yes, it could have been something else: a solar flare, perhaps, or some kind of “anomalous lightning storm.”

Within minutes radio stations were airing reassurances by government officials: No radiation had been detected in or around Culpeper.

Media helicopters surveyed the afflicted town, providing updates about the fires and traffic jams and immobilized vehicles. Medevac helicopters swept in and out of the town’s airspace, ferrying patients from the regional hospital to facilities in Washington.

Eventually, a handful of Culpeper residents found their way to the airwaves. And that’s when some of the wilder reports began to circulate. The sun had blinked out – just for a moment – and then the cars died.

Wilson was near the Indiana border when he first heard that a swarm of black helicopters had been seen just before the pulse hit. Another resident mentioned the sighting of a chupacabra. A third reported seeing “a saucer-shaped vehicle in Rick Marohn’s cornfield.”

On the outskirts of South Bend, he stopped for a six-pack and a Subway sandwich, then took a room at a Ramada. By then, it was all Culpeper, all the time.