Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller) by Waite Thomas

Author:Waite, Thomas [Waite, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

THE SILENCE IN LANA’S NSA office belied the tragedies on several split-screen monitors she kept tuned to government and commercial news feeds. she’d muted the sound, needing to hear nothing more of drowning victims, environmental devastation, and the open panic of the world’s population. The massacre of all the scientists and support personnel in Antarctica was so shocking that she still had difficulty comprehending the loss, made personal when she learned that her college roommate, a renowned paleoclimatologist, had been among the murdered.

The Trident II had hit the continent just north of the Thwaites Glacier at an altitude of about two miles to exert maximum damage from the air. Not a direct strike but close enough to immediately calve glacial chunks the size of Rhode Island into the southern ocean—and incinerate billions of tons of ice now forming massive blizzards that were sweeping across the seas.

Scientists had long considered Thwaites crucial for holding so much of the region’s ice in place, but the blast had widened the glacier’s mouth. And it most certainly had compromised its grounding line, the border of the land that supported the ice and the body of water that would receive it. Glaciologists were certain the explosion would speed up the glacier’s path to the sea, which had been expected to take hundreds of years. The potential for a death toll in the billions from the missile strike would turn into a fast-forward reality if all the ice backed up behind Thwaites were shaken loose, as so many experts now feared.

None of the experts working for, or consulted by, the Defense Department were predicting anything but the most dire ramifications from the explosion.

“Expect sea level rise for a period of weeks, maybe months,” had been the bulletin from DOD. “Expect severe radiation poisoning as polar easterlies carry toxic plutonium from the continent. Expect disturbances both domestic and foreign among threatened populations.”

The parched language of panic.

Already, scientific consensus held that the world was heading for an absolute minimum rise of a meter—if the planet were exceedingly lucky and all of the WAIS didn’t crash into the ocean, a catastrophe that would lift sea levels the full eleven feet. But a meter still constituted a century’s worth of warming in the geological equivalent of a blink.

Trampling had become the leading cause of death in low-lying countries, such as Bangladesh, as populations crowded along coastlines raced away from rising waters. The number of victims already numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Nauru, and other nations throughout Oceania were losing territory—and lives—by the minute.

But the biggest numbers of victims might yet hail from the biggest names in cities: New Orleans, which looked as if Hurricane Katrina had returned on steroids; New York, where subway trains had been caught in flooded tunnels, killing more than one thousand passengers; Los Angeles, where famed beach communities had been obliterated; Tokyo, where trampling killed hundreds; and Amsterdam, where even centuries of living below sea level could scarcely prepare the populace for such a swift onslaught of the ocean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.