Super Cell
They’ll pay him a fortune to find a violent tornado for their movie. He knows the risks all too well, but he never imagined just how complicated the perfect storm could be.
Chuck Rittenburg was one of the most successful storm chasers in history until a bad decision resulted in the death of a young couple who’d paid to ride along. A decade later, broke, divorced, and estranged from his college-age children, he’s got nothing left to lose. When a film producer offers Chuck one-million dollars to help find and photograph an extreme tornado in Oklahoma, Chuck sees a chance to earn his kids’ respect again—and maybe his own.
The situation quickly becomes about more than tracking a monster storm for Hollywood. FBI Agent Gabi Medeiros insists on joining his crew. A burglary ring is targeting tornado-ravaged neighborhoods, and their tactics now include murder.
With the stage set for a major heist, a deadly twister, and a confrontation between Man and Nature on an epic scale, Chuck and his crew will be lucky to escape in one piece.
Praise for Buzz Bernard’s Previous Novels
Plague
“A page-turning thriller rooted in today’s world of political unrest. This all too realistic fiction will suspend your belief in the safety of home and the assurance of government protection. PLAGUE will keep you up at night long after you’ve finished it.”
—John House, MD, author of So Shall You Reap
“If you love thrillers and haven’t read Buzz Bernard yet, I suggest you stop what you’re doing and rectify that right now. PLAGUE grabs you around the throat and squeezes, with believable characters, a realistic plot, and non-stop action. One of the best thrillers of 2012.”
—Al Leverone, author of The Lonely Mile
“An all-too-believable nightmare tale about the horrors of biological terrorism. Buzz Bernard will keep you up at night wondering What if?”
—Tom Young, author of The Mullah’s Storm, Silent Enemy, and The Renegades
“Fans of the late Michael Crichton should check out Buzz Bernard’s PLAGUE. This bioterrorism thriller is a real page-turner.”
—Cheryl Norman, author of Rebuild My World
“A delight for thriller readers. Intense, edgy, full of twists and scary plausibilities. A totally unexpected protagonist and a brilliant cast of characters. Fans of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and Stephen Coonts will want to pick up H.W. “Buzz” Bernard’s PLAGUE, but not before clearing all decks and fastening their seat belts.”
—Donnell Ann Bell, bestselling author, The Past Came Hunting
Eyewall
“Buzz Bernard bursts on the scene with EYEWALL, a compelling and suspenseful tale told with the insight and authenticity of one who has walked in the world of the famed Hurricane Hunters and endured the harsh realities of a major, devastating storm. Great characters combine with razor-sharp suspense and leave you breathless. A one-sitting, white-knuckle read.”
—Vicki Hinze, award-winning author of Deadly Ties
“A well-crafted tale you can’t put down; characters you care about; a spot-on insiders look at hurricane forecasting and flying.”
—Jack Williams, author and founding USA TODAY Weather Editor
“A dramatic and frenzied story of how an angry hurricane collides with the frailty and heroism of human nature. After reading the exciting and emotional EYEWALL, I admire even more those who work to protect us from the next category five.”
—Michael Buchanan, co-author and screenwriter, The Fat Boy Chronicles and Micah’s Child.
“Riveting . . . Intrigue, power struggles . . . Frightening reality from several perspectives . . . EYEWALL will keep you more than interested. Having been on location interviewing survivors of a Cat 4/5 hurricane that hit Charleston SC in 1989 (Hugo) and witnessing the destruction left in its wake I fully understand how a Cat 5 might impact a barrier island along the southeast coast of the United States. The author takes us there and describes in frightening detail the impact of this scary scenario.”
—Marshall Seese, retired anchorman and meteorologist, The Weather Channel
Other Novels by Buzz Bernard from Bell Bridge Books
EYEWALL
PLAGUE
SUPERCELL
Supercell
by
H.W. “Buzz” Bernard
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-354-2
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-339-9
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 by H.W. Bernard
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits:
Tornado photo (manipulated) © Solarseven | Dreamstime.com
:Esaz:01:
Supercell:
At once the most beautiful (visually) and violent of all thunderstorms, it also is the least common. A supercell is characterized by a deep, persistent, rotating updraft called a mesocyclone. In a favorable environment, a supercell can last for many hours, unleashing violent weather—tornadoes, damaging wind gusts and very large hail—all along its track.
The Enhanced Fujita (Ef) Scale of Tornado Intensity
NOTES:
Only 0.1 percent of tornadoes attain an EF-5 rating.
The vast majority (95 percent) are EF-0, EF-1, or EF-2.
Tornado ratings are determined by careful analyses of structural damage during post-storm surveys. The strength of a twister can’t be gauged accurately by its appearance, nor can its intensity be measured, since anemometers suffering direct hits are destroyed.
Dedication
For my brother Rick,
who’s not a storm chaser,
but who’s weathered
more than his share
of storms in life
Chapter One
SATURDAY, APRIL 13
CHUCK RITTENBURG, slump-shouldered, unshaven, stood on the concrete walkway in front of his dingy row-apartment in Norman, Oklahoma, sipping a Coors Light. It hadn’t always been like this, a beer for breakfast. But now . . . what the hell.
Pulses of warm, humid wind from the Gulf of Mexico via the Piney Woods of east Texas whipped over him, bearing away the odors of cleaning solvent and insecticide that leaked from his cheap efficiency like aerosols of despair. Something else rode the wind, too; something at once ominous and exhilarating. He’d sensed it before, many times: the threat of monstrous thunderstorms, the kind that give birth to the Grim Reapers of the Great Plains—tornadoes.
The day that had heralded the unraveling of his life had begun like this . . . a decade ago. The image of what happened that day was seared into his memory like a psychic scar, one that would never heal, never stop hurting, never allow him to
raise an emotional white flag and say I surrender, let this be the end of it. Instead, it clung to him like psychological leg irons, reminding him constantly of all he once had but had no more.
HE’D BEEN DRIVING the lead van of two belonging to Thunder Road Tours, his eminently successful tornado chasing operation. The vans had stopped on a shelf of high ground in Oklahoma’s Glass Mountains, a rugged, semiarid landscape of mesas and buttes in the western part of the state. A line of thunderstorms, like slow-motion, alabaster napalm explosions, billowed along a dryline advancing out of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles.
A dozen chasers, tourists really, each having shelled out over two grand for the privilege of getting intimate with a tornado, piled out of the vans to watch the closest cell a few miles to their west. A visibly imposing, low-hanging bulwark of blackness, the wall cloud, rotated counterclockwise beneath the towering storm.
“Looks like it’s about to drop a funnel,” Chuck’s partner, Mac Beauchamp yelled, his gaze on the right rear flank of the thunderstorm. A wind-borne rumble of thunder almost blotted out his words.
A bolt of lightning lanced out of the storm onto a nearby mesa, immolating a scrubby pine and simultaneously launching an artillery-like explosion of sound.
“Back in the vans,” Chuck screamed. “Now!”
The chasers scrambled back into the vehicles. All except for two: a young man and his girlfriend. The man, from the West Coast and perhaps unfamiliar with the dangers of lightning, didn’t heed Chuck’s command. Instead, he pointed a digital camera at the cauldron of clouds and snapped a series of photographs. His lady friend stood beside him, her head dipped into the wind, her blond hair whipping around her face.
Chuck waited a moment, then stepped from the driver’s seat of the van onto its running board and yelled at the two stragglers. But he was a heartbeat too slow.
The man turned and looked at Chuck. It was that image that Chuck knew he would carry with him the rest of his days: the man’s electrically-charged hair standing on end, his eyes pleading, his mouth wide with unspoken thoughts—secrets only a man who knows he has a millisecond to live can harbor. The brilliant stroke hit him square, knocking him out of his shoes and throwing him yards away as if he were no more than a stuffed toy.
His girlfriend passed to the next realm with him. She didn’t even have time to look up. She jerked spasmodically as the dart of lightning struck, then crumpled into a heap, dead before she hit the ground.
In tandem with the fatal harpoon of electricity, thunder erupted in an ear-splitting barrage and rolled across the barren landscape for several seconds, like tympani for a dirge.
Between the two bodies, a shallow, smoking crevasse lay in zig-zag repose across the gravelly surface, a final, eternal link between the young man and his lady friend.
CHUCK TOOK A SWIG of his Coors and stared across the parking lot in front of his apartment. The lot remained filled with cars—Saturday morning. Not too many people going to work, transporting their kids to school, or setting out for classes at the nearby University of Oklahoma.
He didn’t realize at the time, on that day ten years ago, but the deadly lightning bolt claimed not only the lives of the young man and his lady, but his as well. Not in a physical sense, of course, but in all aspects of his life that mattered. Even though his company was covered by liability insurance and waiver forms, slick, predatory personal injury lawyers and the spiraling cost of mounting a defense forced Thunder Road Tours into bankruptcy. Chuck lost not just his company but, in quick succession, his savings, home, and wife.
Suzanne, his wife, had been unable to adapt to their new status as “have nots,” and after a brief affair with a former boyfriend, she and Chuck divorced.
His nineteen-year-old son, Ty, with whom he’d always had an arm’s-length and contentious relationship—undoubtedly a contributing factor to the animus in his marriage—had stormed out of his life accusing Chuck of “blowing my college money chasing clouds.”
His daughter, Arlene, seventeen, had moved with her mother back to her mother’s native Virginia. There was no doubt in Chuck’s mind he would have been helpless attempting to raise a teenage daughter with his life in shambles. He’d kept in close touch with her, however, talking on the phone with her at least once a week during her high school and college years. Until she was 21, he’d dutifully delivered what little child support he could muster by working as head custodian at a local middle school and at various odd jobs, all of them menial. Even now he and Arlene remained in touch, though less frequently, as she busied her life carving out a career in public relations and attempting to find “the right guy.”
Chuck turned as the man who lived in the apartment next to him stuck his head out the door, stooped to retrieve the morning newspaper, and said, “Buenos días, amigo.”
Chuck nodded. He didn’t know the guy’s name, nor those of his wife and three kids. Probably illegals. He seated himself on the steps leading to his apartment and placed the beer beside him. Empty paper cups and styrofoam hamburger containers tumbled across the parking lot, driven by the fitful wind. A small whirl of dust chased a mangy-looking dog toward the main street.
A black SUV, a Lincoln Navigator, turned into the lot and eased along the row of apartments where Chuck lived. Looking for a specific unit, he guessed. The Lincoln coasted to a stop behind the vehicles jammed into the narrow parking slots directly in front of where Chuck sat. He watched as the front driver-side window of the SUV opened. A well-groomed man with a broad face and full black beard, wearing a white Greek fisherman’s cap, leaned his head out.
“Looking for apartment 3A,” he said.
“Guess you found it,” Chuck answered. He remained seated.
“Charles Rittenburg?” the man asked.
Shit, not another fucking lawyer. “Who wants to know?”
The man scratched his nose, perhaps buying time to formulate a response, then laughed softly. “I come in peace, Mr. Rittenburg. With an offer of employment.”
“I’ve got a job.”
The man looked down at something on the passenger seat, then moved his gaze back to Chuck.
“Pushing a broom at Kiowa Trails Middle School?” he said.
Chuck didn’t answer.
“Oh. Almost forgot. You’ve got a summer gig ushering at RedHawks Field. Big-time stuff. The team must draw what, four, five thousand per game? You gotta be raking in the dough from that.”
Chuck fingered his beer. “Who are you?”
“Jerry Metcalf,” the man said. “How about I buy you breakfast?”
Chuck held up the Coors Light. “Got it,” he said.
The man shut off the Navigator’s engine. “Not exactly the Breakfast of Champions.”
“Then I guess it fits.”
“I passed a Waffle House when I got off the Interstate. How about it?”
The dog shooed away by the dust devil earlier returned and crept toward Chuck, stalking the beer can but probably hoping there were some accompaniments nearby—pretzels or chips or popcorn.
Chuck stood and, carrying the Coors, turned to go into his apartment. “Not interested,” he said.
The Lincoln’s door opened, then slammed shut.
“Hear me out,” Metcalf said. “I’m from Global-American Cinema. I’d like to hire you as a consultant for a film.”
Chuck pivoted to face Metcalf, a large man, overweight, with an odd sense of style: In addition to the fisherman’s cap, he wore a white dress shirt with epaulets, cargo shorts and Timberland hiking boots.
“Don’t know anything about movies,” Chuck said.
Metcalf stood on the short walkway leading to Chuck’s apartment. “Yes,” he countered, “but you know about tornadoes.”
“Not anymore.”
“Bullshit, if you’ll pardon my French, sir. You were the best ch
aser in the business. Charles Rittenburg: The Great White Hunter of Tornadoes. That’s what you were called, wasn’t it? You were a guest on ‘The Today Show,’ ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘60 Minutes,’ and The Weather Channel. You were featured in USA Today and People magazine. Don’t blow smoke up my ass. Chasing storms isn’t a skill you lose overnight or even in the depths of a beer can. Hell, I know you’ve kept up with stuff because I saw you as a talking head on CNN and Fox after the Joplin disaster, in the wake of the Dixie tornado swarm in 2011, and then Moore in 2013. Jesus, that was close to home wasn’t it?” He paused, seemingly thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Ya know, Charlie, I don’t understand why anybody would want to live in a place like this.”
“A place like this,” Chuck responded, a hard frost on his words, “is where a lot of people choose to live. It’s good country with good people. As far as keeping my hand in the business, I did that as a hobby until my laptop went tits-up last year. I haven’t been able to afford a new one. Look, I can’t help you, Mr. Metcalf. And something else, just for the record. I like to kick off my day with a Coors, you know, smooth the rough edges. It’s my first and last of the day. I’m not a boozer. By the way, it’s Chuck, not Charlie.”
“Sorry,” Metcalf said. “Look, I know some heavy-duty shit came down on you. Life’s unfair and all that crap. But I’m offering you a chance to even the score.”
Chuck opened the door to his apartment. “Life only works out like that in the movies,” he said.
“Exactly.” Metcalf paused. “Did I mention I represent a film company?” He smiled broadly. Chuck could have sworn the man’s teeth sparkled in the low-angled morning sunlight.
The mangy dog, some sort of terrier-Lab mix, settled onto its stomach and watched the exchange between the two men.
Chuck glanced at the mutt, then at Metcalf. “Like I said, I can’t help you.”
Supercell Page 1