Cold War - Jerome Preisler [49]
Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard—the woman Ed . . .”
“Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.
Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.
Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark—but the truck would have crossed over it.
So that’s what Mackay had found.
Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.
NINE
93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002
MARKED AGAINST THE SUN’S 4.5 BILLION YEARS OF existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.
A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers—and 85 percent of its radius—turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.
The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:
Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places . . . assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.
As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks—wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.
These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.
Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun—an area ten times larger than