“What’s that got to do with us?” Bill interrupted. “Bel, you were born in Newark, right? Shades of Barack Obama’s birthism, for chrisssakes! But really, if you were born in Newark, who cares where your parents came from… Bolivia… Chile… whatever?”
“The plane’s about to land,” said Isabel. “I can hardly hear now. Call me when you know something.”
23
FURIOUS FUMES OF grey and white smoke—explosions?—billowed up from the sixteen bridges scattered around the edges of Manhattan. Diana, one of six around the country watching this on computer screens, spun her volume control to low, just loud enough to make out the blasts.
The silver-tubed Metro-North train was reversing fast, racing back over what was left of a blue bridge that a moment earlier had connected Manhattan to the Bronx.
Another ring of explosions rocked the island. These flashes were brighter, the smoke thicker, and darker, and the noise fiercer, even on her low volume setting.
In the briefing, Isis had explained that each detonation was precisely calibrated for the target it destroyed—for the subway stations, its depth underground, its exact position along the network, and the force of blast needed to intensify the shockwave it was intended to build. Who, or rather, what determined the calculations and the pinpoint timing of each explosion was a sophisticated computer program called Shockwave.
Every few instants a new and tighter ring of blasts rang out, smoking higher and fiercer until, perhaps twenty seconds later, a vast ball of flames erupted into an inferno at the centre of the island, around 42nd Street. Almost simultaneously, it heaved back out to the island’s edge in a circular shockwave of such scale and intensity that it pounded everything in its path to the ground. Whole blocks fell into the vast fissures that cracked apart everywhere. Subways ripped open and fell in, crushing the rush hour commuters crowding the platforms.
Those above ground would be no luckier. If they weren’t sucked into a chasm as the ground split beneath them, flying debris would pound them. Skyscrapers collapsed in on themselves pulping everything and everyone in their way.
What Diana and the others were watching was horrific. Beyond imagination.
But it was also virtual, not real. Not yet.
Isis explained it was an elaborate computer graphics simulation created by the young Jax Mason, whose brilliant career had been cut regrettably short, as Diana and Lucky knew first hand, “though not short enough,” said Isis pointedly.
Silently, Diana squirmed.
Isis continued, explaining that in creating the program, Jax had conquered the complex theory of how shockwaves move through tunnels and up through the ground above them—the intricate technical interconnections between the mathematics, the fluid mechanics and the engineering.
Jax, Isis knew, had turned himself into a world expert on shockwave dynamics. On burst, airblast, yield scaling, overpressure prediction, dynamic pressure prediction, cratering, ejecta, airslap-induced ground shock, upstream-induced ground shock, shock spectrums, Brisance—shockwave energy—and Wef—effective energy. What Jax didn’t know about displacement asymptotes and acceleration asymptotes wasn’t worth knowing. One of Isis’s team had found Jax’s computer print-outs of calculations for “composite near-surface particle velocity wave forms” stowed under his bed, under his discarded dirty underwear and the research data on the Dresden fires in Nazi Germany he’d collected or, when he’d illegally tapped into the Smithsonian’s World War II archives, stolen.
But Jax’s work was not mere academic theory. This was his passion.
Jax had accessed and manipulated global geophysical data and research papers, and stress-tested his shockwave data on the actual geology of Manhattan. It was crucial to know, as Jax did, that from soft soil clay at the southern tip, the island’s subsurface shifted to a ledge of hard rock by 14th Street which extended north, for five blocks, to the unstable schist ridge of Murray Hill. That, in turn, extended underground for twenty blocks north, from 22nd through to 42nd streets. Jax had reviewed material on Manhattan’s geology all the way up to the 190s, near the Fort George portal where, according to the yellow Post-it-marked page of a book propping up a leg of his wobbly kitchen table, the rock was fragile, made porous by underground springs. The Fort George schist, like Murray Hill, could hide large pockets of decayed, shattered rock; important to know if you were going to send a shockwave through it.
With all that under his belt, Jax also researched the dynamics of explosives terrorists had used, or could easily get, and their specific blast characteristics.