The story is set in the very near future: a Republican president detested
by the left and reviled in the media is in the White House, the Republican
nomination for his successor is a toss-up, and a ruthless woman is the
Democratic front-runner. In fact, unless this is an alternative
universe with a different
calendar, we can identify the year as 2008,
since that's the only presidential election year on which June 13th
falls on a Friday until 2036, by which date it's unlikely Bill O'Reilly
will still be on the air.
The book starts out with a bang and proceeds as a tautly-plotted,
edge of the seat thriller which I found more compelling than
any of Clancy's recent doorstop specials. Then, halfway
through chapter 11, things go
all weird. It's like the author
was holding his breath and chanting the mantra “no
science fiction—no science fiction” and then
just couldn't take it any more, explosively exhaled, drew a
deep breath, and furiously started pounding the keys. (This is not, in
fact, what happened, but we don't find that out until the end
material, which I'll describe below.) Anyway, everything is
developing as a near-future thriller combined with a “who
do you trust” story of intrigue, and then suddenly,
on p. 157, our heroes run into two-legged robotic
Star Wars-like
imperial walkers
on the streets
of Manhattan and, before long, storm troopers in space helmets
and body armour, death rays that shoot down fighter jets, and later,
“hovercycles”—
yikes.
We eventually end up at a Bond villain redoubt in Washington State
built by a mad collectivist billionaire clearly patterned on George
Soros, for a final battle in which a small band of former Special Ops
heroes take on all of the villains and their futuristic weaponry by
grit and guile. If you like this kind of stuff, you'll probably like
this. The author lost me with the imperial walkers, and it has
nothing to do with my last name, or my
anarchist proclivities.
May we do a little physics here? Let's take a closer look at the
lair of the evil genius, hidden under a reservoir formed by a
boondoggle hydroelectric dam
“
near
Highway 12 between Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier” (p. 350).
We're told (p. 282) that the entry to the facility is hidden beneath the surface
of the lake formed in a canyon behind a dam, and access to it is provided by
pumping water from the lake to another, smaller lake in an adjacent canyon.
The smaller lake is said to be two miles long, and exposing the entrance to
the rebels' headquarters causes the water to rise fifteen feet in that lake.
The width of the smaller lake is never given, but most of the natural lakes
in that region seem to be long and skinny, so let's guess it's only a
tenth as wide as it is long, or about 300 yards wide. The smaller lake
is said to be above the lake which conceals the entrance, so to
expose the door would require pumping a chunk of water we can roughly estimate
(assuming the canyon is rectangular) at 2 miles by 300 yards by fifteen
feet. Transforming all of these imperial (there's that word again!) measures
into something comprehensible, we can compute the volume of water as
about 4 million cubic metres or, as the boots on the ground would
probably put it, about a billion gallons. This is a lot of water.
A cubic metre of water weighs 1000 kg, or a metric ton, so in order to
expose the door, the villains would have to pump 4 billion kilograms
of water uphill at least 15 feet (because the smaller lake is sufficiently above
the facility to allow it to be flooded [p. 308] it would almost
certainly be much more, but let's be conservative)—call it 5 metres.
Now the energy required to raise this quantity of water 5 metres
against the Earth's gravitation is just the product of
the mass (4 billion kilograms), the distance (5 metres), and
gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/sē, which works out to
about 200 billion joules, or 54 megawatt-hours. If the height difference
were double our estimate, double these numbers. Now to pump all of
that water uphill in, say, half an hour (which seems longer than the
interval in which it happens on pp. 288–308) will require
about 100 megawatts of power, and that's assuming the pumps are
100% efficient and there are no frictional losses in the pipes.
Where does the power come from? It can't come from the
hydroelectric dam, since in order to generate the power to pump the
water, you'd need to run a comparable amount of water through the
dam's turbines (less because the drop would be greater, but then
you have to figure in the efficiency of the turbines and generators,
which is about 80%), and we've already been told that dumping the
water over the dam would flood communities in the valley floor.
If they could store the energy from letting the water back into the
lower lake, then they could re-use it (less losses) to pump it back
uphill again, but there's no way to store anything like that
kind of energy—in fact, pumping water uphill and releasing it
through turbines is the only practical way to store large quantities
of electricity, and once the water is in the lower lake, there's no
place to put the power. We've already established that there are
no heavy duty power lines running to the area, as that would be
immediately suspicious (of course, it's also suspicious that there
aren't high tension lines running
from what's supposed to
be a hydroelectric dam, but that's another matter). And if the
evil genius
had invented a way to efficiently store and
release power on that scale, he wouldn't need to start a civil
war—he could just about
buy the government with the
proceeds from such an invention.
