Jessica gazed from the old Indian mound at the transformation of Poinsett Landing nuclear station. From the wreckage and desolation of just days ago, Poinsett Landing was on its way to becoming the busiest port on the Mississippi.
Operation Island was proceeding at a truly astounding rate. While power company and Energy Department teams concentrated on the problems presented by the leaking storage pond, the Army under the direction of Jessica’s engineers had been engaged in the work of turning Poinsett Landing into a river port. Portable quays had been moved into place, cabled to building ruins, to the auxiliary building or the control facility, or when necessary to the river bottom. Barges filled with supplies and necessary equipment had been warped alongside.
The clutter of plant workers’ vehicles that stood atop the Indian mound blocked any serious and sustained use of the mound by Jessica’s engineers. The world would have forgiven her if she’d pushed these vehicles into the drink in order to turn the mound into a giant helipad, but Jessica realized she was going to depend on these plant workers, and didn’t want to commence their working relationship by shoving valuable workers’ property into the Mississippi. Instead the vehicles were airlifted to Vicksburg by huge Super Stallion helicopters. On return flights, the big copters— which had been developed to carry the heavy equipment for entire Marine divisions— had carried enough supplies for a small camp atop the mound, and material to start building jetties and anchorages for the barges and boats that would bring emergency material to the landing.
For the moment, everyone in the area had been evacuated to the top of the Indian mound. Operation Island was about to enter a new phase.
“Good news, General,” said Larry Hallock, who had just returned from the auxiliary building in a boat. “And bad news.”
And how many times had she heard that in the last few days, Jessica wondered.
Well. By now, she figured, she was equal to just about anything. World ends the day after tomorrow? Fine, we’ll come up with a plan for disassembling the planet and recycling the materials in order to create the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. Just give us a few minutes.
“Good news and bad news, Mr. Hallock?” Jessica said.
She liked Larry Hallock. He was proving indefatigable at a time when indefatigability was at a premium. Within twenty-four hours of the big quake, he had put together the plan to entomb his reactor and salvage the spent fuel, a plan so solid in its fundamentals that no one had been able to improve on it in the time since. Larry worked twenty-hour days supervising the work at the plant, his detailed knowledge of the plant site was unsurpassed, and he was always able to modify his plans to account for the limited materials available. After a day or so on the job, he’d thrown away the sling that had supported his broken collarbone and spent his days scrambling over scaffolding, jumping between barges, and climbing ladders.
Larry was the kind of soldier that Jessica always wanted in her outfit.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Good news first, if you please.”
Larry nodded. “We’ve cleared away most of the wreckage in the auxiliary building,” he said. “We’ve cut away the roof that was damaged, and reinforced the parts of the roof that are still standing. We’ve rebuilt the catwalks, and repaired the two leaks we know about. There’s probably at least one more leak that we don’t know about, because water levels are still declining, but I expect we’ll find it before long.”
“Very good, Mr. Hallock. And the bad news?”
Larry hesitated. “The crane that we hope to use to extract the spent fuel suffered some serious damage. So the repairs will delay things. We’re probably going to have to cannibalize parts from other plants and fly them out here.”
Jessica nodded. “I understand.”
“And the reactor complex has increased its list. By another half a degree.”
Jessica bit her lip. The endless series of aftershocks continued to shake the soupy ground beneath the reactor’s massive concrete-and-steel foundation, eroding its support. While its current angle of list placed it in no danger of toppling, Jessica was still uneasy. What if another major earthquake occurred? The danger was by no means remote— in 1811-12, there had been no less than three major earthquakes on the New Madrid fault system, all Richter 8.0 or greater. If another big quake hit, Jessica worried that the foundation pad beneath the reactor might begin to break up. If it shattered, the Poinsett Landing reactor might well decide to start rolling down the Mississippi.
The best way to guard against this danger was to get on with Larry’s plan to turn Poinsett Landing into an island. But Operation Island, despite the name, had run into a critical shortage.
In the normal course of events, when something on this scale was to be created, enormous works of engineering would be constructed to shift the river into another channel. While Poinsett Landing was dry, solid objects— such as quarried stone— would be moved from a nearby source of supply to the construction site and laid in place to form the island.
This was purely impossible. Even when the nation’s infrastructure hadn’t been shattered by an earthquake, the technology to shift a river as mighty as the Mississippi from its mucky bed would have taken years to get into place. Whatever work was to be done would have to be done with the river right where it was.
Not only that, but there was little to build an island with. There was no solid ground in the Mississippi Delta, and no source of solid material needed to implement the “island” part of Operation Island. No quarries, no hills to dismantle, no sources of stone at all. When the Corps of Engineers constructed its dikes and levees on the lower Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s, the stone used had been imported by rail all the way from Tennessee.
This was more difficult in the present day, when many quarries throughout the country had been closed as uneconomical, and when rail transport to the area had been severely compromised by earthquake damage.
It was then that Jessica realized that a lot of the necessary materials were already at hand. It didn’t have to be a pretty island, it just had to be reasonably solid— solid enough to keep the river from undermining the reactor. The earthquake had shattered tall buildings, highway bridges, and masonry structures of all descriptions. The broken bits were going to have to be swept up anyway. So why not put them on transports and ship them to Poinsett Landing?
Poinsett Island would be constructed of the debris caused by the earthquake that had made the island necessary in the first place. That, plus some other necessary material to string it all together.
There was a pleasant irony in that, an irony that Jessica intended to appreciate to the full.
A roar began to sound from over the treeline to the east. Jessica glanced at her watch.
“Right on time,” Jessica said to Larry. “Watch this.”
A CH-53 Super Jolly helicopter appeared over the treeline, moving with deliberate speed toward Poinsett Landing. Slung beneath it in a steel mesh cargo net was ten tons of island material. Half of it was pipe casing intended either for oil or water wells. Much of the rest was broken power and telephone poles, plus the wires that held them together.
“Operation Island,” Jessica said blissfully. Her words were drowned by the deafening sound of rotor blades.
The Super Jolly plodded out over the river, the downblast from its rotors turning the waters white. It hovered for a moment upstream of the reactor, over buoys that had been set as aiming points, then the net was tripped and, with a grating roar, ten tons of material spilled into the Mississippi. Pipes and power poles flung themselves like spears into the riverbed. As the weight was released the copter bounded upward as if yanked into the sky by an elastic band. White water leaped as the debris struck the surface of the river. The roar sounded like Niagara. Tall, confused waves leaped from the site.
All that was left, as the helicopter roared away, were the tops of pipe and poles, and some of the tangle of wire that surrounded them. The inchoate structure lay about half a kilometer upstream from the power plant.
Jessica did not want to start at the nuclear plant and built upstream. In such a structure there was the possibility that the weight of the structure would actually increase the water pressure on the buildings. Rather, in building something this unprecedented, Jessica had chosen to emulate the technique of the North American beaver. The upstream part of a beaver dam was built first, and the rest filled in afterward.
Jessica would build a solid breakwater upstream from the plant, a huge tangle of pipes, timber, wire, and earthquake debris. As with a beaver dam, the pressure of the river would eventually wedge everything into a solid position. Once this was constructed, she would backfill toward the power plant, eventually engulfing its structures.
No sooner had the Super Jolly cleared the area, moving much faster without its cargo, than another copter appeared, this one a Super Stallion. Jessica had arranged a regular relay of big heavy-lift helicopters rolling in from the nearest railhead in Jackson, where tons of earthquake debris were being moved by rail. Each Super Jolly could carry ten tons, but the big Super Stallions hauled sixteen tons each.
In a matter of days, a fair-sized island would have grown up around Poinsett Landing.
Jessica felt a broad smile spreading across her face. “Isn’t it great!” she asked.