Ground Zero (The X-Files) by Kevin Anderson & Chris Carter (Creator)

Author:Kevin Anderson & Chris Carter (Creator) [Anderson, Kevin J.]
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780061056208
Publisher: Harpercollins (Mm)
Published: 2010-03-07T19:30:00+00:00

THE X-FILES

He didn’t think Bear Dooley was even aware of the previous H-bomb test that had taken place in this same area. Dooley didn’t seem the type of man who wasted time studying history or worrying where things came from. For the rest of his life, though, Robert Ives would be haunted by the knowledge that they had made a horrendous, tragic mistake here at Enika Atoll.

By now Ives had seen the Bikini Islanders repatriated, after the government had stripped the topsoil from their blasted island and replaced it with fresh dirt, replanted the jungles, restocked the lagoons.

The mysterious islanders on Enika, though, had not enjoyed such solicitous treatment. Sawtooth had been one of the first H-bomb tests, kept quiet at the time, just in case the device failed. During those Cold War years the U.S. couldn’t afford to let anyone see that its thermonuclear devices didn’t function well enough to keep the Commies awake at night.

But Sawtooth had worked—spectacularly well. It was in the days before spy satellites, and the perimeter of the atoll had been ringed with gunboats, calmly confident that they wouldn’t be seen. These waters were infrequently traveled, and the captains of the cutters had instructions to chase off any fishing boats or sightseers. Even so, the anticipated flash of the Sawtooth device was visible for hundreds of miles across the open water, rising like the brief glow of sunrise in the wrong part of the sky at the wrong time of day.

Everyone had been so naive then. They had assumed that the small, barely charted atoll was uninhabited, and so the scientists and sailors had not looked too hard to find any indigenous islanders.

178

GROUND ZERO

The Navy expected to find no one on Enika, and so no one had ever really searched.

During preparations for the Sawtooth explosion, the engineers and sailors had not bothered to report signs of encampments, tools, nets found washed up on the rough reefs. They dismissed the junk as old artifacts and looked no farther, because they didn’t particularly want to find anything else. Such information might cause problems. The perimeter boats had all pulled back and the main destroyer, the USS Yorktown, had moved out to a safe distance beyond the reef line. Those lucky few observers who had been assigned welding glasses stood on deck to see, while the others promised not to open their eyes at the critical point. Still, when the Sawtooth detonation went off, several dozen crewmen suffered from brief flash blindness. Ives remembered. Some things were impossible to forget. The roar sounded like the world cracking open, and the mushroom cloud rose like Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone—only about a million times as big—sucking up vaporized coral and sand along with an immense volume of seawater. The incandescent plume towered like an awesome thunderhead heralding Armageddon. The shockwaves slamming through the water caused the Yorktown to rock like a toy boat in a bathtub….

Several hours later, after it was all over and the sea had grown

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