World Quake by Mark Hobson

Author:Mark Hobson [Hobson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

PINDAR: BRITISH GOVERNMENT NUCLEAR BUNKER COMPLEX.

BENEATH WHITEHALL.

LONDON

KENNY WAS KEPT SO BUSY in the twenty-four hours following his surprise introduction to Bethany’s husband, he didn’t have time to ponder on the state of her marriage. He saw her only twice. Once when she popped into the dormitory to bring him a laptop so that he could continue with his work, and again at a group meeting to discuss their recovery plans with representatives from the United Nations (communications with the outside world continued to be intermittent and after twenty minutes, they had lost the link).

At the meeting, Kenny had noticed the absence of the Prime Minister. His spot at the head of the table was taken by Matthew Waghorn, flanked by two Army Generals. Afterwards, as he had grabbed a drink from the coffee machine, Kenny had quickly collared another of the attendees and quietly asked him how the PM was coping following the disappearance of his daughter.

“Not good,” was the sober response.

“But he’s still running the show, right? He’s still in charge?”

“Oh yes. For now at least,” the man added, arching one of his eyebrows.

Kenny spent most of his time going over his theories and conjectures regarding the extent of the worldwide earthquakes. He’d set up a tiny workstation on a small desk that he’d dragged into the dormitory, on which he had the laptop, a wireless portable printer and a stack of flash drives. From there, he was able to work undisturbed late into that first night while those sharing the dormitory slept.

Back at the Tiede Observatory on Tenerife, working on the Thémis Project with the European Thémis Node Telescope and alongside his boss, Antonio de La Rosa, Kenny had quite early on reached the conclusion that the series of mega-quakes that would cause a global catastrophe would not simply be a one-off event. The moon’s close transit to Earth – a near-miss in astronomical terms – had put such a massive strain on the planet’s geology that the molten core was now in constant motion, churning at great speed and with awesome power. The crust and mantle were close to breaking up which, if that happened, would make yesterday’s earthquake look like a picnic in the park. Earth’s iron and nickel inner core, which normally spun faster than the planet’s surface, was now wobbling like a huge, out-of-control dynamo, throwing out a magnetic field so big that it was messing with the north and south pole. In space, the thousands of satellites flying around the planet in elliptical orbits or geostationary points above the equator, and which relied on the gravitational pull of our world to maintain their positions, were now scattered to the heavens, badly affecting all communications. The International Space Station had gone off-line – nobody even knew if the crew were dead or alive.

The whole world had gone belly-up and things would only get worse in the coming days. What Kenny was trying to do was predict the when and the how bad.

All the

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