Fiction/Thriller
Date Published: December 13, 2022
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
Agnew, a small farming community in south-central Texas, has just been
obliterated in the nation’s worst rail accident in history. The
President of the United States enlists cybersecurity expert, Mike Paxton, to
lead the investigation and determine who is to blame.
As Mike seeks to uncover the truth behind the attack, more weapons of mass
destruction are unleashed across the country in what appears to be an
attempt to eradicate western society. Those who survive are forced into a
near-apocalyptic existence: transportation, manufacturing, agricultural, and
oil industries crumble, and economic collapse devastates America.
With time and resources running out, Mike must discover the cruel forces at
play. Are these violent attacks merely a ploy to preoccupy the American
government so a larger, global plan can be carried out without the threat of
intervention by America’s powerful military defense? Will Mike and his
team be able to stop them before it’s too late? Or will the United
States lose all hope of maintaining its status as the most powerful country
in the world?
EXCERPT
The sweltering humidity, unseasonable this time of year in the south-central Texas farming community of Agnew, made the scorched air feel close to a hundred degrees. For the overflow crowd in the aged gymnasium, it was stifling. The community-wide pep rally was a welcome respite between harvesting soybeans and pulling cotton bolls. Everyone hoped their undefeated, six-man football team could do what had not been done in two decades: win tomorrow’s game and play for the state championship.
Signs and hand-painted banners urging the team to victory hung on every surface in town, from storefronts to churches, the co-op grain elevator, even the fire station. Nine-year-old Emma Bergsten and her classmates sat atop the foldaway bleachers, screaming cheers and singing songs. Her older brothers were team stars, her sister the head cheerleader, and three cousins played in the band.
Hearing the whistle of the train on its way through town, Emma glanced out the gym’s gaping double doors just as the landscape of Agnew and the lives of everyone she knew changed forever.
The colossal explosion from its payload ammonium nitrate bomb obliterated a box truck near the railroad crossing. In an instant, the first of five engines pulling the hundred-car Union Pacific Eagle Ford Shale crude carrier plunged into chaos as the eruption thundered all around.
Screaming at supersonic speeds in every direction away from the explosion’s core, the shockwave freed its unbalanced energy in a microsecond. Driven by molecular nitrate collisions at the nanoscale, the invisible, vibrating force smashed tsunami-like through massive concrete cylinders at the grain elevator, destroying the cotton gin, sheriff’s office, and volunteer fire station in seconds. Intense wind followed, sweeping the debris into a destructive wake. The concussion shattered the cafeteria windows. It triggered such biological havoc in the bodies of the three cooks, they died before the glass hit the floor.
Jolting through the adjacent gymnasium, the devastation continued, windows shattered, and shards of concrete from the elevator scythed the roof. Survivors scrambled over tubas, trombones, ceiling fragments, and each other in their efforts to escape. Find Mommy, Emma thought as she fell from the top of the foldaway bleachers.
The old building shuddered and collapsed. As the explosion subsided and the smoke cleared, only a portion of the south wall remained.
Tank car after tank car buckled like an accordion stretching a half mile back through town, some upright, most on their sides. Oil gushed from fissures in car walls. Sparks emitted from the wreckage ignited the low flashpoint crude. Rapidly growing pools generated a huge fireball twice the height of the grain elevator. The first of five explosions registered 4.8 on seismographs in Austin, Houston, and Albuquerque, shaking every structure in town and alerting the residents in a twenty-mile radius to what many believed to have been an earthquake.
The initial concussion from the blast shattered businesses and most of the homes closest to the tracks, while others crumpled and ignited. Menacing flames destroyed everything in their wake. Those trapped in their homes died as their skin melted. The town burned in a sea of red, yellow, and orange.
938-word excerpt
Midafternoon, hot, bright, and blue, the Nordic Spirit, a Belize flagged, Norwegian-owned 310,000 ton Very Large Crude Carrier completed on-boarding a full load at the Shell refinery and initiated the uncoupling process. The Patty Bess tugboat nosed into the ship’s starboard bow and tied on. The Sidney Wayne latched to the stern behind 191 feet of line. The Alice, with Topper at the helm, amidships as the Nordic Spirit, continued to uncouple, men readying the release of the moorings from their cleats.
Eruptions! One hundred eight simultaneous eruptions, akin to the blast from an awakening volcano. Shock waves killed longshoremen, warehousemen, crane operators, children playing in nearby neighborhoods, even passing motorists. The enormous boom burst forth and was heard throughout the greater Houston metropolitan area and in communities a hundred miles away. The detonations rocked the entire Ship Channel as sirens from the Emergency Command Center screamed.
Residents of Pasadena, La Porte, Galena Park, North Shore, Bayport, Seabrook, Baytown, Houston, Galveston, and Texas City, people whose lives have been intertwined with the petrochemical industry for generations knew this time, it was different. This time it was not a plant, this time, the whole earth moved. Homes and businesses within a half mile either side of the Ship Channel were shaken off their foundations, windows blown out, ceilings collapsed, metal outbuilding crumpled like tin foil.
Windows in downtown Houston and as far as Conroe forty miles to the north shattered. People in Louisiana, 250 miles away, experienced the shockwaves. For the second time in twelve hours, the seismograph in Albuquerque registered a disturbance to the southeast. Massive amounts of fire for fifty miles.
Ships docked in port broke their moorings and sustained substantial damage when they rammed each other or slammed back into the dock. Fire raced up the lines of the Nordic Spirit, and into her tanks before exploding. The middle of the ship, wholly gutted, sank in twelve minutes. Taking the three tugboats with her, she marooned all ships between herself and the turning basin at the upper end.
At once, more than 1.6 million barrels of oil, unleashed and on fire! Oil laden water, the width of the channel, half a mile long and expanding, ablaze, burned unabated into the upper San Jacinto Bay. The spill, seven times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident on Bligh Reef in Alaska, and a third the size of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, complicated the immediacy of the attack and increased its environmental impact many-fold.
Petrochemical complexes, several the size of the downtown of a city of fifty thousand people, collapsed upon themselves, ablaze. Doors, windows, and roofs of businesses and homes in communities on both sides of the channel were blown away. An inferno! The heat and odor were overwhelming.
Immense pillars of heavy, black smoke rose into the sky, covering the sun for twenty miles. Fire! Fire exploding three and four stories high, half-mile on a side, drank from twenty, forty and forty-eight-inch pipes of flammable petrochemicals. Melted and twisted metal, heat, and residual smoke rendered the entire site a war zone. Air fouled with ethyl benzene, sulfur, acrylonitrile, olefins, ethylene, and nitric oxide choked and burned the eyes of the first responders as, in vain, they tried to establish order.
At Barbours Cut, the container in the hold of the Martina Southampton exploded, ripping an immense gash in the ship. Shrapnel penetrated the hull of the Rio Chartrus as both vessels sank. The six tractor-trailer containers on the loading dock detonated, incapacitating all eight of the massive high-capacity loading cranes. Shipping containers strewn in every direction across eighty acres rendered the container complex inoperable.
Everything along the Ship Channel was aflame. The list, a who’s who in oil and gas. A huge mushroom shaped cloud from the ExxonMobil plant billowed 1,500 feet into the air, the shockwave knocking the local ABC affiliate’s helicopter flying overhead out of the sky. At the massive Shell complex, the sheer power of the first explosion triggered a domino effect throughout the plant as cracking plants and cooling towers erupted with such force, pipes and tanks of flammable liquids ripped open.
The scene of fire, explosion, destruction, and devastation repeated, again and again, as waves crashed ashore at the height of a level three hurricane. ExxonMobil, Phillips Petroleum, Lyondell-Citgo Refining, Occidental, Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, all in ruins. The list continued, Monsanto, Marathon Oil, service companies, blending companies, terminals and storage, cooling tower support people.
The explosions were so massive and intense, the safety and firefighting equipment on hand within the refineries and plants disintegrated. The air tasted of refinery chemicals, smoke, and fire. Houston Fire Department and their Hazardous Materials Unit, and Pasadena and Deer Park Fire Departments responded, trying to determine how best to defeat this monster they now faced. Even with the fire boats, it was clear in the immediacy of the moment, the fire outstripped the capacity of the entire region as the situation could only be likened to the Kuwaiti oilfield fires started by Iraq following Desert Storm.
At DuPont’s La Porte processing plant, the hydrofluoric acid storage drum ruptured, and 50,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride gas escaped, killing thousands, and putting the 650,000 people within a ten-mile radius of the complex at risk. Conditions worsened further when explosions from containers in tractor-trailer configurations positioned alongside the Kinder Morgan Terminal in Galena Park caused several chlorine storage tank walls to collapse, releasing a dense, yellowish gas cloud, killing hundreds. Thousands more suffered from pulmonary edema, violent coughing and sneezing, nausea and vomiting, eyes tearing and nose and throat irritation, and other complications as the cloud rose.
About the Author
Chuck Edmonds is a scientific writer whose military experience includes the
evaluation of weapons of mass destruction. Most recently, his work has
focused on mechanical circulatory support systems (partial and total
artificial hearts), his field of specialization at one of the nation’s
leading cardiac centers. His research has appeared in national medical and
surgical journals. He draws from his background of deep scientific knowledge
to create his fictional works, which often incorporate apocalyptic and war
themes. Chuck and his wife live in Houston, Texas, where they enjoy spending
as much time as possible with their kids and grandkids.
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