There is surely much to fear from global warming. The polar icecaps are melting, coral reefs are dying, droughts, fires, and hurricanes occur more often and are more severe. As Robert Frost put it the world may well end in fire.
But not in this novel. In this novel the world will end in ice. The sun has gone out—or to be more precise, as Whitis’s Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and director of NASA Dr. Amil Bassar postulates: our sun has converted four million tons of hydrogen into helium every second for the past five billion years, releasing energy.
What if the sun changed its ways and created a new hybrid isotope that burned at a much lower temperature? Well, heat from the sun would cease and our planet would become a cold snowball spinning through space.
Also, as if we weren’t in enough trouble, there is a massive solar flare causing a huge EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which fries satellites and space stations, causes computers to fail, except those that happen to be deep in tunnels. All aircraft drop out of the sky. The President was on Marine One—she’s gone.
Dr. Bassar, knowing what will happen, shoots himself, and assistant director Alex Tate takes charge. He and his family are whisked away to Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, the deep underground bunker for the U.S. government in case of massive catastrophe. The few people in the bunker can survive for a while, but just sitting around eating canned goods is not a story.
Alex Tate devises a theory. If they can shoot an ICBM loaded with plutonium and hit the sun perhaps this will restart the sun burning hydrogen in the time-approved manner and save the planet. Tate, another brainy astrophysicist and two really tough Seal and Ranger types go into action.
First they take the secret 40-mile tunnel from Raven Rock to the White House to get needed equipment, then, in a specially equipped super Humvee, set out to a base in Minot, North Dakota, to fire a nuclear missile at the sun. The flight will take about 6 weeks.
Whitis takes the reader to a few sites to see how folks are doing. Mostly, not well. Darwin reigns. Violence is nearly universal. Food runs out. Everyone is freezing. Gangs take over. In a nice piece of comic relief two men in Lake Village, Arkansas find themselves with a warehouse with tons of frozen catfish, and propane to cook it. They will be fine, as will some survivors in Yellowstone eating bear meat.
On their journey to Minot, Tate’s crew fight a biker gang and a group of jihadists, and encounter any number of desperate people, but they cannot be deterred. The action is relentless and this novel has pace and, pun intended, high energy. Tate’s mission is, by the way, successful. A happy ending. About 8 billion people die. One million survive.
