by Fritz Galt
Buildings lurched. Signs bent. Cracks crawled abruptly across the face of the protective compound wall.
She clutched Michelle for support. But, as they kept each other upright, the strong arm of nature seemed to tug Michelle out of her grasp.
Natalie watched buildings twist off their foundations. Some swayed unnervingly. Others caved in or completely collapsed. She could witness only some of the horror through the toppled compound wall.
Meanwhile, antennas struck the pavement and blew down the alley like broken twigs. The institute’s satellite dish was dislodged by the earthquake and sent aloft in a whipping gust. It spun off the roof, flew over the wall and smashed through the windshield of a car that had just bounced to a crooked halt.
She heard glass pop and shatter behind her. An entire line of windows sprayed glass in all directions. Shielding her eyes, she saw foreign service officers, secretaries and top brass scramble out of the darkened building. Many were cut and bleeding. Others limped out and massaged bruised bones.
Michelle Pan had long since dissolved into inconsolable sobs.
Natalie held onto her distraught secretary as if the thin, once-dignified woman were the last scrap of humanity she could rescue from the unfolding disaster.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Natalie kept saying.
A live electrical wire writhed on the alley pavement and sparked as it skittered through a puddle. Bus and car brakes screeched on the crowded street. Every several seconds, she heard one vehicle crash into another like a bad movie.
She watched an overturned ghost money incinerator roll about a sidewalk and into the open door of a roadside restaurant. A propane gas tank that fueled the cook’s burners tipped over.
Live embers drifted over the gas.
“Oh, no,” she shouted.
The explosion sent flames as high as the ceiling. As aftershocks gained in strength, they jarred the building and opened the structure like a wind tunnel. The fire followed the propane droplets upward and instantly enveloped the apartments above like a match thrown into a pool of petrol.
Struggling for oxygen, people reached out through broken windows and rattled their unyielding security bars.
There was nothing Natalie could do. She knelt in the drenched lawn and covered her face.
Back in the office of the defense attaché, Steve Novak was just concluding his conversation with Eli Shaw in Beijing when a fire alarm stopped him short.
“What’s that noise?” Eli Shaw asked over the phone.
Steve looked around his office. “AIT’s fire alarm.”
“I thought there was a typhoon,” Eli said.
“Now I hear the city’s air raid warning,” Steve reported.
“Air raid?” Eli sounded cool on the mainland side of the strait. “No sign here that China’s launching an attack. Still, I’ll let you go.”
“Go where? Run into a storm or stay inside and burn up?”
Steve felt paralyzed until his heavy wooden desk flew forward without notice. The telephone ripped out of his hand as he shot on his chair past the desk. He landed with a thud against a metal filing cabinet on the far side of the room. He had to crawl back across a roomful of paper to retrieve the phone. “Eli?”
“What the hell was that?”
“Major earthquake. It’s still underway. Got to close the office.”
“Leave the building.”
“Too much classified lying around.”
“Don’t risk it. Just leave.”
Suddenly, the desk started back at him. Steve stood up and jumped on top of it as it slammed against the wall.
“My desk just attacked me, for god sake.”
“Listen,” Eli said. “I’ll handle Mick’s concerns here and in Hong Kong. Don’t worry about that. Just take care of yourself.”
The phone line went dead. Steve dropped the receiver and dodged several chunks of plaster falling toward him. He looked up and saw open sky through a yawning hole in the ceiling. Eli was right. The building was going to collapse.
Aides and secretaries streamed out the department’s sole exit into the hallway. The power was out and the hall was dark, until wind sucked up segments of the roof and ceiling panels. Then rain washed onto the fleeing staff.
Stumbling toward the main entrance, he passed several offices. Through the battered doorway of one, he saw Bill Fellows bend over to yank his zipper up and an exasperated Juliet Marsh grappling to reattach her skirt.
He heard pounding behind the door to the front office. Director Nichols was trapped inside. Since the institute wasn’t an official embassy, they had no marine guards to rescue the director and guide him to safety.
Steve punched in the combination to the cipher lock. Nothing clicked. Lines to the emergency generator that powered the locks must have been severed. The door was bolted shut.
He stood back and sized up the door. Daylight streamed through the top corner of the doorframe.
“Stand back,” he yelled.
Then the earth heaved once more. As daylight poured in through the ceiling, he rammed against the door. With the full weight of his lunge, he separated the door from its frame.
He also separated something in his shoulder.
Clutching his arm, he fell into what was a shattered office, but a big round of applause. The director’s entire staff had been trapped.
Bronson picked him up and the staff quickly filed out.
“Easy on the shoulder,” Steve said.
“We owe you one.” Bronson gestured to the doorknob someone had yanked out of the door. “We couldn’t get the damned thing open.”
Steve knew the closest exit. “This way, sir.”
Against the flow of people, he steered Bronson down a small hallway and into the Economic section. There, an emergency exit door flapped in the wind.
They stumbled against the rolling floor and through a tangle of hanging wires and light fixtures, and out the back of the building. Never had they met a howling gale with such relief. They shuffled outside and away from the structure.
Steve staggered onto the wet lawn that quivered like Jell-O and watched the building languish and groan. The cinder block construction had all the durability of a sandcastle. The foundation shifted, pillars fractured, entire sections collapsed.
Bronson clutched Steve by the good arm as the two tried to catch their breath and balance.
Steve’s left arm throbbed. His vision began to blur. His shoulder was either dislocated or broken.
The wobbly walls and running people made him dizzy. The stench of burning flesh overcame him.
He made a desperate bid for Bronson’s free hand and slid to the ground.
Eli Shaw was carefully setting his phone back in its cradle when he felt his desktop begin to vibrate. This was Beijing, for chrissake, nowhere near Taiwan. But glass rattled in the transom above his office door. He stood up and looked about the antiquated American embassy with growing concern.
Weather forecasters had predicted a near-perfect day all across northern China. In fact, bright midday sunlight flooded in through his secretary’s office window.
But something insidious, like a distant thunderclap, creaked the floorboards and trembled the delicate leaves of his office plants.
His year in noisy, congested Taipei had been a happy one. The food was good, the mountains beautiful and the folks friendly. His twin sons had even been born there.
An image flashed briefly though his mind, that of driving his wife and the newborns home from the hospital. Passing under palm trees in his blue Civic, he had pulled up to their white cottage on Yang Ming Mountain. The happy hours they had spent there were the very picture of domestic bliss.
Now Taiwan was in trouble.
He picked up the phone and buzzed his secretary. “Miss Fa, call the Central Weather Bureau and turn on your radio. Find out the location and magnitude of the earthquake.”
He jumped up and crossed to a large wall map of China.
Steve’s updat
e from Mick still sounded bizarre and impossible.
Alec Pierce was conducting scientific experiments off of Orchid Island. Like many others who had lived in Taiwan, Eli had only heard of the island and never been there. In fact, it took several long seconds to even locate it. A mere dot off Taiwan’s southeast coast, it was an island off an island, and labeled with its Chinese name, Lan Yu.
Then his telephone rang. With one finger still glued to the wall map, he reached for the phone.
It was Stephanie Williams in Shanghai.
“Boy, did you feel that one?” she said.
“Yup. It was a minor tremor up here. Any worse down there?”
“Like a bomb just went off. The whole consulate shook, rattled and rolled for several minutes. Cracked my wall. Might have broken a window or two. A lot of jolts followed by long, rolling waves.”
“I think it was centered in Taiwan,” Eli said. “I’m waiting for the coordinates. This is more than your average earthquake. And there’s a super typhoon hitting the island right now.”
“When it rains it pours.”
“Mick Pierce thinks all this may be connected to your stock market. Sounds far-fetched, I know. But hang tight. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. In the meantime, could you rouse Harvey Talbot in Hong Kong? Get him away from the racetrack and into the office. Something major is going down.”
Two minutes later, his phone rang again.
“I have the coordinates for you,” Miss Fa said. “Sixty kilometers off the southeast coast of Taiwan.”
He measured the distance on the map. He ended up pointing to open water just south of Orchid Island. That confirmed his suspicions. “How strong was the quake?”
“There was a series of quakes. The first registered 8.5 on the open-ended Richter scale and a second registered 8.2. There continue to be aftershocks.”
“Thanks. Please make a record of the data.”
He straightened up his children’s “For Dad” statues that had shimmied across his desk. So, Alec was onto something after all, and now he was riding out the rollercoaster ride of his life.
Not to mention a super typhoon and possible tsunami.
Chapter 22
A horrifying explosion catapulted Alec ten feet through his hotel room. His body hit the wall like a whip cracked against stone.
The chair to which he was bound shattered into pieces. He landed with a groan on glass and splintered wood.
He heard nothing. His ears were deadened from the blast.
He had to get out of the building. As he struggled to stand up, the floor seemed to drop out from under him.
He fell back clumsily on his hands that were still bound behind his back.
A low tremble emanated from a great distance deep within the earth.
The bomb had triggered an earthquake.
The second tremor hit even stronger than the first. It felt as if someone were shaking the life out of the hotel.
Chunks of crumbling white stucco prickled his face. Like broken bones, bare wooden braces splintered through the skin of the ceiling and walls. His television bounced past him. Through a gaping hole in the wall, he watched his balcony crack off the building and fall onto the balcony below.
Somehow, he had to free up his hands.
Regaining his balance briefly, he slipped his wrists under his feet and held his hands over his head for protection. He crouched low to ride out the shock waves.
He had to get out of the building. Between quakes, he hobbled to the door. He jerked it open and stood in the relative safety of the doorframe.
In the darkened hallway, people staggered out of their rooms. Tourists had already fled the island ahead of the storm, leaving those from his project. Among them, he only trusted the geologist, the engineer and May-lin. And he wasn’t so sure about her.
He took a quick accounting of the situation. His clothes were soaked from rainwater that washed across the tile floor. His shirt prickled with glass. His ears were beginning to ring. His bones felt intact, although his knees could no longer flex after he had slammed to the floor to place the phone call to Natalie.
His hands were still bound.
He yanked on the knot with his teeth. The rope fell off and he rubbed his wrists. They were raw, but the skin was unbroken.
His head still spun, but not from landing on the floor or being thrown against the wall. It was an older and duller pain, a product of his fistfight with the men in anti-contamination suits.
Slowly, a roar emerged like a distant flapping sail. He looked up. It was the wind howling through his window.
Then there came a lower pitch, a dying groan. He saw cracks shoot across the buckling floor. The building was giving way.
Down the hall, someone let out an ear-piercing scream.
He staggered toward the opening in his window. Three stories below lay the remains of his shattered balcony. Should he jump?
“Do not do it!” cried a female voice.
Alec spun around.
It was May-lin. Her willowy figure swayed in his open doorway.
“I have no choice,” he shouted.
She lunged toward him, and started to pull him back from the brink. “You have me.”
That was a nice sentiment. But, “how can we get out of this building?”
“There is another way.”
“Where?”
“Stairs. Follow me.”
Her composure was reassuring. Maybe her mind was clearer than his.
She seemed to notice his trouble walking.
“My knees,” he said. “I can’t bend them.”
She held him upright and patiently swayed with him into the hallway. Daylight seeped into the gloom at each open door.
At last they reached the emergency exit at the end of the hall.
“How do you know the stairs aren’t blocked?” he yelled. More often than not, landlords used stairwells for storage.
“I have checked. They are open.”
He stared at her in the sparks from broken hall lights. The long corridor swelled and dropped, often in conflicting directions as if caught in the crosshairs of an interference pattern.
“How long will this go on?” he shouted. “It’s been over two minutes.”
“You know your geology. This cannot last forever.”
He felt the firm pressure of her hand against the small of his back. She pushed the door open. They faced a dark, cement stairwell. She guided him forward and the door blew shut behind them.
The wind reduced to a low wail.
“It’s no safer in here.”
“We must be downstairs.”
With her warm body against his, they worked his stubborn legs step by step to the bottom. There they landed in two feet of water.
They waded through the flood and reached an exit. He heaved all his weight against the panic bar. In a minor waterfall, they tumbled out into the storm.
They had to get away from the falling building.
He grabbed May-lin and staggered headlong into the wind. It cut straight through his wet clothes. Broken palm branches crashed against their bare legs.
Along the seafront, dark gray rollers had devoured the beach. The waves skimmed across the swimming pool and smashed debris into the hotel lobby.
The pro shop by the tennis court lay in splinters. The only structure left standing on the grounds was the hotel itself, and it was in precarious condition.
Alec guided May-lin toward the relative safety of the tennis court, which was surrounded by a twisted chain link fence.
Concrete ruptured behind him.
He looked over his shoulder. The three lower floors of the hotel crumpled under the weight of the upper three stories.
But the disintegrating hotel was a mere backdrop to what grabbed his immediate attention.
The men in the bulky orange suits were back.
Mick watched a billiards table crash through an outer wall and fly to the bottom of a ravine.
He wasn’t going
to fall to his death. Nor was he going to be found dead cowering under a pillow.
Not waiting for the aftershocks to subside, he tossed the pillow away and gained his feet. People were shivering and whimpering under strewn pieces of furniture. He kicked fallen timber out of his way and waded through broken tiles to the breach in the wall.
On the edge of the valley, he heard more clearly what he couldn’t make out before. In a hollow whistling sound, an air raid siren drifted up from Taipei.
The city must have had prior warning, because he distinctly remembered hearing the siren a full minute before he felt the first quake. Someone had anticipated the earthquake before it hit.
The temple groaned in the ongoing tremors.
He had to get out of there before it collapsed.
In the gloom of the shattered room, he located a flight of stairs. He mounted them back up to the terrace where he had once stood. Prone bodies lay in the driving rain. One was moving. An old man was hunched over and crawling toward the spot where the covered walkway had stood.
It was Nan-an.
The old curmudgeon might hold the key to the disaster.
“Wait.” Mick streaked across the terrace, dodged falling debris and leaped across a wide crack. He dropped to the old man’s side. “Are you hurt?”
Nan-an scrutinized Mick closely. “You’re that American chap,” he said in flawless English.
“That’s right,” Mick said, surprised by the facility with language.
“Then you can take me back to my car.” The old man’s tone was firm.
“I’m afraid you’ll find the roads impassable.”
“I have a radiophone.”
“Who could possibly help you at this moment?”
“You idiot. I must advise General Li.”
Mick wouldn’t miss that conversation for the world. “All right. Get on my back.”
The old man grumbled, but managed to hold onto Mick with his long, untrimmed fingernails.
Mick looked ahead. The feather-like body was no trouble compared to the obstacles in his path. The walkway was gone. He would have to scale the slope on the verge of a mudslide.