by Ray Hammond
Rows started breaking out between the community leaders as they gradually discovered the treasures contained in the vast ship’s 3,011 private apartments. Safe after safe was cut open to disgorge jewellery, gemstones, gold – and share certificates worth billions of dollars.
Numerous staterooms were filled with the obsessions of the super-rich, the collections of rare things that gave purpose to the lives of individuals who could buy almost anything: porcelain, objets d’art, fine antiques, early musical instruments – clavichords, spinets, virginals, violins, lutes and guitars. One apartment was filled with Renaissance bronzes, another with French armour of the sixteenth century, a third was graced by magnificent Rouen and Nevers faïence. One collector kept three cabinets of Classical era Greek and Roman coins, another only the rarest statuary from ancient Greece.
The apartment walls were covered with thousands of fine paintings – Rembrandts, Van Goghs, Picassos, Titians, El Grecos, Canalettos – many of them individually valuable enough to buy a vast country estate in one of the world’s richest nations. But none of these assets represented any value to a group of people unable to set foot in the developed world.
‘We should contact the insurers,’ John Gogotya urged his lieutenants as they met in one of the ship’s grand ballrooms. ‘They will pay us well – enough for everyone amongst us to buy a passport.’
‘Maybe an Eritrean passport,’ sneered Muhammad Sitta, Gogotya’s Number Two. ‘Or an Angolan one. I say we should trade this ship for the right to live in America – or Europe!’
‘He’s right,’ said one of the older men in the group. ‘This is the best asset we have to bargain with. I say we take it to America – to Los Angeles.’
‘To Los Angeles!’ enthused Muhammad Sitta.
‘To Los Angeles!’ shouted the others.
*
Eight weeks after the great Californian earthquake, Dr Emilia Knight lounged on her sunset deck, wondering whether she should ring Michael Fairfax. But she wasn’t sure of his current whereabouts. Although she had spoken to him by phone immediately after the catastrophe – even seen him on television announcing his massive legal case – he had not called her since or sent a message.
It was a warm Tuesday evening and Emilia decided that she would light the deck lamps and turn on the electric bug-zapper before making the call. Rising to her feet, she leaned on the deck rail, gazing down at the twinkling lights of other homes dotted around the dark inlet. Most of the properties in the Muir Beach area had withstood the massive quake. Cascading boulders and landslides had changed the curves of the small bay somewhat, but that was the only local evidence of the recent upheaval.
Emilia Knight’s rented home had also proved to be a credit to its builders. The stainless-steel bolts that secured its metal underframe to the cliff itself had stoutly withstood the vigorous buffeting and, after five days of almost non-stop duty at Geohazard HQ, Emilia had finally returned home to discover little damage other than a freezer full of spoiled food and a few minor breakages.
She had swept up the broken glass and china from the floor, still marvelling that she herself had escaped so lightly. After three days and nights working within the company’s emergency command bunker, the US Navy had taken Emilia, Steve Bardini and two Geohazard colleagues across the bay to see for themselves some of the damage downtown. They were scheduled to meet with government building engineers who had to decide which of the shattered buildings should be pulled down, and which were thought able to withstand further shocks.
Their visit had been like walking through a city that had just suffered a direct hit from a nuclear bomb. Only occasionally could Emilia pick out any familiar landmark – a view towards the bay that seemed still unaltered, or a single wall that remained standing, a tattered advertisement on its flank.
Almost alone among her work colleagues, Emilia herself had not lost any close friends or family in the disaster. She was from Boston originally and almost all of her West Coast friends lived fairly near her on the Marin coastline or in other locations well away from the quake’s epicentre.
But walking amongst the ruins of the once-great city had affected her profoundly. As an earth scientist, she was used to visiting earthquake sites and areas that had suffered volcanic eruptions. She had witnessed the urban devastation of Kyoto, Madras and Beijing – but she had never before seen destruction on quite this scale. Up until this point she had felt that her geological training and ten-year career in predictive seismology had provided her with a pretty accurate mental model of how fragile the Earth’s crust was, and just how easily the shrug of a tectonic plate could cause widespread havoc. But this forced her to rethink, to rescale her mental model of the forces pent up beneath the Earth’s surface.
Even as Emilia laid her plans for recalibrating the Geohazard Simulation Theater so as to allow much larger quakes to be replicated, she knew that she was merely operating on autopilot. It was the sheer stillness of the dead San Francisco that had shocked her most. There was almost no noise within the city, just an occasional crash as one of the wreckage-clearing parties managed to free a beam, or the barking of a stray dog scavenging among the debris.
At the end of a two-hour tour through what had been the Marina District and Haight Ashbury, she had been forced to turn her back on her male colleagues to hide her tears. But when Steve Bardini’s arm crept round her shoulders and she had recovered sufficiently to turn back to face her companions, she saw that they too were fighting back powerful emotions.
On her return to Geohazard Labs from the city’s devastated downtown area, Emilia found an unoccupied office, closed the door, and dialled the satellite-phone number that Michael Fairfax had given her.
He answered on the second ring. The details of the personal loss he then recounted caused her tears to well again, this time uncontrollably. She had never before had to face such a degree of personal involvement in the disasters that she attempted to predict and ameliorate.
For several minutes Michael spoke as if to console her. Then, as he described his own family’s burial at sea only the day before, she realized that his seeming ice-cold strength was one of denial, a symptom of deep shock.
Then the lawyer abruptly announced that he was about to fly to Europe – to try to lodge his hulk-people case with the International Court of Civil Justice in The Hague.
‘Robert Fivetrees has now agreed to give evidence in Holland about his data analysis,’ he went on. ‘He considers that the earthquake we’ve just suffered is the final proof. He seems desperately concerned for the safety of cities worldwide if the energy companies keep on interfering with the planet’s magnetic force fields.’
‘He might well be right . . .’ Emilia was still mentally groping for words to deal with this bereft man. In the aftermath of the earthquake she hadn’t had a chance to even look at the professor’s data.
‘Would you now consider telling the Hague court what you found in Samoa?’ the lawyer urged. ‘The judges could offer you some degree of protection, but you might still be open to prosecution from our own government here.’
She thought about the devastation she had just walked through. If there was the remotest chance that Professor Fivetrees was right in his theories, it had to be safer to shut down weather-management services until the effects could be studied further.
‘But I’m not sure if there is any link,’ Emilia told the lawyer. ‘We have no real idea why uranium and plutonium were propelled to the surface. Just that it’s never happened before, as far as we know.’
‘But would you at least be prepared to testify to what you found there?’ Michael pressed her.
She thought about it for less than ten seconds – everything had changed now. ‘Yes, of course, if you think it will help.’
The next time Emilia saw the attorney he had been appearing on the national news, referring to her find and announcing the start of what might become the world’s largest-ever legal case.
Emilia pushed herself away from the
deck rail to light the lamps. She finally switched on the electric bug-zapper, then lifted her phone and summoned Michael’s number.
Just as she was about to place the call, her front doorbell chimed. She sighed and snapped her communicator shut. Perhaps it was a neighbour dropping by – everybody locally seemed so much more friendly and helpful since the earthquake.
Emilia hoped above all that it wouldn’t be Steve Bardini again. After the emotional shock of the earthquake he had redoubled his attempts to restart their affair, until she had been forced to tell him in the clearest possible terms to keep his distance. But despite this, she knew that he was still hanging around her home in the evenings, often walking along the beach down below just in the hope of bumping into her. It was like having a stalker.
‘Good evening, Dr Knight, how are you feeling now?’
The visitor was her doctor from the San Diego Naval Hospital. Behind him stood two paramedics in full biohazard safety suits. ‘May we come in?’
Wholly bemused, she stepped aside to let them enter.
‘What is it, Doctor Bowman?’ she began. ‘Is something wrong?’
Then she noticed that the paramedics had also donned safety helmets. With Geiger counters in their hands, they advanced across her living room as if checking for radiation.
‘Your bone-marrow decay tests . . .’ began the doctor, putting down his black bag. ‘Well, I’m afraid the rate is far too high. You didn’t keep any small samples of those rocks for yourself, did you?’
‘I’m not mad,’ Emilia snapped angrily. The paramedics had now invaded her bedroom. ‘You don’t really think I’d bring radioactive samples home with me, do you?’
‘And you haven’t suffered any blackouts, or fainting spells?’ continued the doctor, as if she hadn’t spoken. He suddenly reached out for her wrist and checked her pulse between his middle finger and thumb while gazing at his watch.
Emilia glanced round to see what the paramedics were now doing. One of them was in the kitchen, running his Geiger counter over her counter top.
‘Would you mind sitting down?’ asked Bowman, leading her to an armchair. He then snapped open his bag and extracted a stethoscope, a miniature Geiger counter, and small air-jet hypodermic.
Emilia suddenly felt alarmed. ‘Look, what is this?’ she demanded. ‘Why have you suddenly turned up here uninvited? Why didn’t you just ask me to come in to the hospital?’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ said the doctor, with a kindly smile on his face as he held his Geiger counter to her abdomen. ‘I did try to call you, but you know how bad communications in this area have been recently.’
He glanced at the meter’s read-out, then pocketed it without comment. Since the earthquake, Emilia’s own mild exposure to radioactivity had seemed of little consequence and she had since given up regularly measuring the levels in her body.
‘I just need to take a little blood now,’ Dr Bowman said, tearing open an antiseptic sachet. He swabbed a patch of skin inside her elbow, then pressed the hypodermic against it.
Within seconds Emilia seemed to enter a dark tunnel. Then, as she turned her head to ask the doctor what he was doing, her eyes closed abruptly and her chin slumped to her chest.
Bowman took her pulse again, lifted one of her eyelids to check her response to light, then stood upright. He called out to the two men still searching elsewhere in the house.
Ten minutes later, Steve Bardini finished the long climb up from the beach, just in time to see a stretcher being loaded into the rear of a white US Navy ambulance. Catching a glimpse of the patient’s face, he realized it was Emilia.
His instinct was to step out of the trees and confront these paramedics, to demand to know what had happened to his boss and former girlfriend. But he knew she would be furious if he interfered in her personal business, if he made any public claim on her.
Remaining within the shadow of the pine trees, Steve watched as the three men finished loading their patient into the vehicle. There was nothing urgent or alarmed about their movements, he noticed.
Then he heard a communicator chirrup, and one of their party answered it.
‘Yes, all done,’ the man in a dark suit informed the caller, his words drifting clearly through the warm night air. ‘We’ll have her back in San Diego by two a.m latest.’
*
Highway 1, California’s oldest and most scenic coastal road, had become blocked at seventeen different locations during the earthquake.
Even in times of seismic passivity, this narrow, winding two-lane highway was frequently closed because of landslides and rockfalls, so most busy Californians who needed to get anywhere in a hurry chose to use the newer dual-carriageway Highway 101 that ran further inland.
But the old winding highway was much loved by tourists for its magnificent ocean views, and by motoring enthusiasts who delighted in the hairpin bends, adverse cambers, sheer-drop ravines and alpine passes that characterized its 400-mile run between Fort Bragg in the north and San Simeon to the south.
Shortly after 6.30 a.m. on the first Sunday morning since the California Highway Authority had announced that all stretches of Highway 1 had now been cleared and reopened, Professor Robert Fivetrees gunned his beloved petrol-driven, manual-shift, racing green Jaguar XKS V-8 – a car constructed in England in the year of his birth – around a tight, rising bend that led southwards out of the surfers’ resort known as Stinson Beach.
To his right, and far below, stretched the vast Pacific, a deep green-blue in the clear early-morning light. Ahead lay only winding open road. The professor had the roof down, his long hair was tied back, and a driving hard-rock track was blaring from the car’s stereo. It was a great way to start the day.
He changed down into second gear for a hard left-hander and then floored the accelerator again for the long straight run up towards the cliff-top ahead, above which he could just see the sun’s rays appearing.
Fivetrees had spent the night with Anne Rossiter, his current girlfriend and a former student, at her home in Stinson Beach and, as he often did on a Sunday, he had risen early with the intention of enjoying the thrills that the deserted early-morning clifftop road could offer a passionate driver. Later, he would creep back into the house before she was even awake and begin the task of preparing Canadian bacon, waffles and scrambled eggs for their breakfast on the beachside deck. Then they could spend the rest of the day surfing.
He was doing almost seventy when he had to brake hard again to take the hairpin bend known locally as Jute’s Dive. Then he was out of the chicane he knew so well and climbing towards the lip of the cliff.
‘I have him in visual,’ radioed the helicopter pilot who was flying 300 feet above and 600 feet behind him. ‘He’s entering the zone . . . now.’
Fivetrees changed up into third and crested the cliffside ridge at eighty. Now he could see for miles out to sea, a sheer fall immediately to his right, the red cliff face flashing by on his left. It was a truly beautiful morning.
‘Five, four, three . . .’ the helicopter pilot counted down into his radio, as the Jaguar approached a sharp left-hand bend.
The big truck shot rear-first out of a concealed cliff-side lay-by.
Robert Fivetrees slammed on his brakes, but he was doing almost sixty miles an hour and the slab-sided farm truck was sideways on, blocking the entire road, and was now only twenty feet away. To his left was a sheer wall of rock, to his right a vertical drop.
At the last moment before impact, Fivetrees flicked his walnut-rimmed steering wheel to the right and sailed out into space, the aerodynamic shape of the car holding it steady in the air for the first few moments before the weight of its engine caused it to plummet nose-first towards the rocks and the foaming surf below.
The chopper pilot watched the car fall, and lowered his stick to follow it down. The old Jaguar hit a group of black, foam-washed rocks, and a moment later there was an enormous explosion which made the pilot instinctively veer away, back out to sea.
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He circled round, increasing his altitude to 600 feet. Then he visually swept the highway for half a mile to the south, then to the north. There was no other early-morning traffic on the road, no potential witnesses. A thick column of black smoke was now rising from where the Jaguar’s wreckage burned amongst the rocks.
‘X-Ray One to Zulu,’ he reported over the radio. ‘It’s a home run.’
Chapter Fourteen
Ben Fairfax’s blue eyes widened as he stared down at the selection of hot toast and freshly sliced fruit that the flight attendant had placed on his tray table.
He lifted his wondering gaze from the food and the elegant place-setting, grinned at his father and slowly opened and closed his small fingers as if they were already sticky. Then he dipped his hand into the bread basket.
‘Oh man!’ he said with a huge grin. ‘Ciwomen toast!’
For some reason the whole family was flying first-class.
‘Don’t go too far inside the volcano, boys,’ said Lucy cheerily. She and Matthew were seated on the other side of the aisle.
‘Sir? Sir?’ A flight attendant was shaking him by the shoulder. Michael Fairfax struggled back to wakefulness, and with a wave of inner anguish realized that he had been dreaming yet again about his lost family.
‘We’ll be landing in Sacramento in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Could you please straighten your seat?’
Michael was returning home to California, intending first to visit his elderly parents in Lake Tahoe for a few days. They were also grieving and he knew it would make them feel happier if they could fuss over him for even a short while. He now felt strong enough to be strong for them.
Then he planned to summon up his courage and drive back to the Bay Area, to take stock of local conditions and to test his own feelings about the stricken region. It had been his home for all his life, but now he wasn’t sure how he would react. Still, at least there would be practical chores to occupy him.