5 Days to Landfall

by Robert Roy Britt

  Sharp objects pelted his back. One embedded itself in the shoulder above his good arm, and he winced, folded his arm inward and pulled the projectile out, cutting his fingers. Glass. It’s raining glass.

  “Jesus fuck,” he said aloud.

  ***

  Once the hole in the bricks was wide enough for Jonathan to squirm into, Sleepy sent him through with a flashlight to check out the abandoned construction tunnel. There had to be a way out, or the whole plan would be destroyed, their lives in jeopardy. Hammer would come at six, give or take. The boy had piled several pails full of dirt onto a chunk of plywood next to the escape hole. Another mound was on the floor next to the plywood. PJ had scrounged a pulley that looked as though it might hold up. Sleepy had hung it from the ceiling and strung a length of rope from the plywood up to the pulley and down into the hole.

  Sleepy himself was in the hole again, working the crowbar with what remained of his energy.

  Sleepy felt the brick he was working on come loose; he gave the crowbar a mighty swing and the brick flew free. He tested the hole and was able to squeeze his shoulders through.

  Sleepy hollered up to PJ, who handed down the first of the pails full of dirt from the second pile. Sleepy poured it through the hole and it fell six feet to the floor of the old construction tunnel. He passed the pail back up and PJ filled it again. They continued until the dirt was gone.

  Sleepy threw the tools through the hole. He grabbed the rope that dangled from the pulley, strung it through the hole and said the first silent prayer of his life. The work was done.

  He sent PJ up the ladder with instructions to do what he did best: hide. Then, when Hammer descended into the Block House, simply replace the metal plate, throw some nearby concrete blocks onto it so Hammer and his men could not get back out the way they came in.

  His mind freed up, he began to worry about Jonathan. He stuck his head through the hole and hollered, heard nothing but his own echo. When Sleepy crawled up into the Block House PJ was coming down the ladder.

  “Water,” PJ said.

  It took Sleepy a moment to jog his thoughts away from Hammer and comprehend what he’d heard. “What?”

  “Water comin’ in. Risin’ fast. Old tracks are full, almost up to the platform. It comes in the street vent.”

  The street vent in the abandoned tunnel was a hundred yards to the north. The plan was unraveling. They had to go one way or the other, regardless of Hammer. He calculated how quickly they could make it up the ladder and out through the abandoned tunnel, into the main tunnel and out the exit from the Canal Street station. It would take nearly ten minutes, even though they knew the route well. There was no way to know if they had ten minutes. The Canal Street station might already be flooded. And then there was Jonathan. They couldn’t leave without the boy anyway. Maybe they should go into the escape hole and look for him, he considered, but they still didn’t know if there was a way out.

  “Shit,” Sleepy said. Then he heard Jonathan’s voice, faintly. He jumped into the hole, crawled the two feet horizontally and stuck his head through the hole in the bricks.

  “Jonathan?” he shouted.

  “Father! I found the way out.”

  “Stay put,” Sleepy said, and he hustled back up into the room. “Let’s go,” he cried. “Through the hole. Jonathan’s found a way out.”

  The plan was ruined. They wouldn’t get Hammer. Now they just had to try and get out alive. He sent PJ through first. It was a tight fit for his round body, and he groaned a little from the uncomfortable position, but finally Sleepy shoved him through.

  He checked the rope where it was tied to the holes in two corners of the plywood, then he tugged on it to check the pulley. He suddenly heard the metal plate scrape against the concrete at the top of the ladder. A red, pockmarked face emerged below the ceiling, upside down from Sleepy’s view. The flat nose, crowded by mean eyes, was breathing heavily.

  It was Hammer. The sight frightened him. There would be other people with Hammer, and it would take them only a moment to get into the room. Hammer glared at Sleepy. His voice was evil, coarse with hatred, and familiar: “You’re mine.”

  Sleepy could barely breathe with all the fear bundled in his chest. They would escape. Hammer would chase him relentlessly. That had been part of the plan. But now, for it to work, he needed…

  Then Sleepy saw a slow trickle of water began to drip into the Block House from behind Hammer’s head.

  Images flashed quickly through Sleepy’s mind: Jonathan’s mother on the cold steps of the old warehouse the night he found her, drugged, raped and left to die; the small old man in the tunnel, writhing in utter agony and screaming as his leg spurted blood at the ankle while his foot lay on the other side of the tracks.

  A grin came to Sleepy’s face, not out of any feeling of self-satisfaction but out of justice and, yes, even revenge for the others, out of victory. It would be a grim victory, but one that was necessary. Time froze for a moment as the two stared each other down. All week you’ve been threatening. All week I’ve been digging. I win.

  “Fuck you.” Sleepy mouthed the words, but he could see Hammer understood.

  The words would enrage him even further, and he would follow, and in effect Hammer would kill himself with his own rage. Sleepy ducked into the hole and spit himself through the other side as quickly as he could. He and PJ heaved on the rope until they lifted the plywood up and about a cubic yard of dirt fell into the hole. Then with the shovel Sleepy tossed the dirt they had put into the abandoned construction tunnel back into the escape hole. It would take Hammer and his men a half hour or more to clear the escape route, and Sleepy knew they would try.

  Sleepy, PJ and Jonathan headed quickly to the way out. They rushed to the vent, following Jonathan and his feeble flashlight, moving through the cluttered former construction tunnel faster than was safe.

  The vent was in the ceiling and led into the main subway tunnel north of the Canal Street Station. No water came through it. That was a good sign. It was a heavy metal grate. Sleepy was the only one tall enough to reach it. He pushed up. It was stuck. He pushed harder, but it wouldn’t budge. He found a two-by-four and banged the vent loose. Tried again. It opened.

  Sleepy got on his hands and knees so PJ could get on his back and climb through the vent. He lifted Jonathan. Then he climbed up himself.

  Now they were in the main subway tunnel, well lit. It was 200 yards to the breach in the wall that led to the parallel but abandoned tunnel—the crawl hole that was part of the route to the Block House. If Hammer and his men had retreated, that’s where they would come out.

  They ran down the narrow walkway along the edge and reached the crawl hole. Water spewed from the hole and onto their feet. That meant, to Sleepy’s delight, that the water that poured into their home had come from the street vent in the abandoned tunnel. If Hammer hadn’t already gotten out, he wouldn’t now. Sleepy was sure he had stayed and tried to dig his way through the escape route.

  They continued on to the subway platform, where a dozen or so other people milled about. Sleepy hollered at them to leave. Only about half of them followed him. They went through the turnstiles and toward the stairs. The water had just started flooding the stairs. It ran down in a gentle cascade. But Sleepy could hear the howl of the wind above now. They climbed the stairs against the flow of the water and stepped out into the first hurricane any of them had ever witnessed.

  CHAPTER 53

  McGuire AFB,

  New Jersey

  6:14 p.m.

  The wind pulled at Hugo’s wings, tried to pry the WC-130 from the ground. Hugo was tied down as well as was possible. All the available hangar space had already been occupied, and the remaining planes at McGuire Air Force Base in southern New Jersey were flown to safer air bases hundreds of miles away.

  Captain Glen Barnes and his crew were well aware that Hugo had little chance of surviving the storm. But there was no question of putting the crew at further risk by trying
to fly the plane anywhere on only three engines. It was hair-raising enough just getting to McGuire on three, fingers crossed that they didn’t lose another.

  The only hope was that Hugo would ride out the winds without too much damage and it could be repaired and flown home later. It was bad luck that Hugo had lost an engine in a hurricane again, just like back in 1989. A coincidence. But the coincidences were stacking up. Mission control had made a rare move, keeping them on the ground for an hour and then switching their mission from Irene to Harvey at the last minute. He had a reporter on board with whom he had argued before takeoff, possibly diverting his attention from some detail he might otherwise have picked up on. Then a Hurricane Hunter plane had been lost in Irene. There was still no word on them. The 53rd had never lost a plane. Nothing had been routine about this day or this mission, and routine was the key to avoiding mishaps. His superstitions got the best of him. He pulled a stick of Doublemint gum from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it and stuffed it glumly into his mouth.

  “Fucking Jack Corbin,” Barnes said to his copilot as they peered out a window of the hangar, keeping an eye on their airplane a hundred yards away.

  “What about him,” Duggan said.

  “It’s his fucking fault.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Cap’n. He’s just some hot-headed newsie.”

  “Who disrupted our routine. Bastard got me riled up before takeoff. That’s not good. Maybe I missed something, who knows. Maybe we should have done the preflight over again after control held us on the ground.”

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” Duggan said. “Hugo’s just old and tired.”

  Just then the winds increased and one of the cables holding Hugo to the tarmac snapped and the left wing lifted into the air. The other cables let go and Hugo quickly flipped onto its back and skidded across the asphalt, then was lifted again and did a series of cartwheels before crashing into another hangar.

  Barnes watched the scene with no visible emotion. Inside, he wanted to cry for the wonderful machine he’d flown for more than a decade.

  “Fuckin’ a,” Duggan said. “Looks like we walk home.”

  Barnes thought again of the other crew, the one that had presumably gone down in Hurricane Irene over the Gulf of Mexico. “Maybe we’re the lucky ones,” he said.

  CHAPTER 54

  Coney Island

  6:19 p.m.

  Edward Cole listened to the sick whistle of the wind as it found every crack in the Seaside Nursing Home and forced its way in. He lay face down on the floor of his room, where he’d retreated after the lobby flooded. The wind blew mostly over him.

  His mind found a clarity it hadn’t experienced in a long while as he listened to every new sound. The shattering of windows. The slosh of waves outside, below.

  The wind was blowing out of the south, directly into the ocean-facing window and out the door, into the hallway.

  He had never seen wind like this. It picked a lamp up from his nightstand, hurled it into the hallway. Two oil paintings had been torn from the wall. Rainwater coursed through the room as though a showerhead were on.

  He understood that it was a hurricane. Amanda had told him so. He’d gotten to a higher floor, like she’d said. He was safe.

  In his mind, he tried to imagine what was going on out there. If the water was in the building, there must be no beach left. No boardwalk. The amusement park would be under water. He smiled.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, crawled infantry style to the east-facing window, put his hands on the ledge and pulled himself up. The first thing he noticed was the ocean, just four or five feet below the window, waves rolling by.

  Half of south Brooklyn must be under water.

  He looked out over the waves, over what had been boardwalk and streets, toward the Wonder Wheel. It was partially submerged and seemed to quiver in the mighty wind.

  He grinned.

  Next to it, the Cyclone’s roller-coaster peaks rose above the waves, its valleys submerged.

  He looked out to sea. A towering dark mass was rolling in, breaking from east to west. It crashed through the Cyclone, shredding it, then struck the Wonder Wheel, which keeled over in slow motion, a gentle acquiescence amid the fury of the storm.

  Then Ed Cole had his most lucid thought of the afternoon: The wave was coming his way. It didn’t frighten him the way he thought it would.

  But his next thought terrified him: Betty Dinsmore. I asked her to stay. Did she? No, please don’t be here, Betty. I couldn’t bear it.

  Her room was on the third floor. He crawled out his door, into the hallway. He heard the wave strike the building. The whole building shook. Water gushed out his door into the hallway and engulfed him. He rode the rushing water to the door of the stairs, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. Other peoples’ doors up and down the hallway blew out, and the hallway filled with water.

  The building groaned. He forced the door open, made it into the stairwell. Water rushed in from behind him, and the stairwell was filling from below, too. He groped in the gray for the stairs, his mind a confused jumble.

  Third floor. Got to find…

  Got to find — Sarah?

  “Sarah! Grandpa is coming.”

  He made it to the stairs, climbed one, then another. The water chased him, rose to his chest. He hollered again for Sarah. He heard a feeble reply from above, couldn’t make the words out. The voice sounded too old to be Sarah’s.

  Distant cracking noises. The building lurched. Everything seemed to drop out from under him, and his body floated free for a moment, then settled onto the stairs again. He reached up for the next stair. More cracking noises. Plaster fell into the water.

  Edward Cole put his hands over his head in the stairwell between the second and third floors of the Seaside Nursing Home. He was surprised at how calm he was. He really had only one worry on his mind: whether or not Sarah was safe.

  The stairs dropped out from under him and he sank into the cool, black water. Something of immeasurable weight slowly crushed him from above. He could not hear it, but through his body he felt the vibrations of cracking bones and then he felt nothing.

  ~ ~ ~

  EXCERPTED FROM HURRICANE HARVEY: CHRONICLE OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, BY NICHOLAS K. GRAY (2000)

  A thick black wall stretched across the horizon of lower New York Harbor and moved upriver. The left side of the wall engulfed the protruding lip of Governor’s Island before washing over all but the highest patch. The right side of the wall slammed into the Statue of Liberty, washed the feet of the still-defiant lady.

  The storm surge moved inexorably toward lower Manhattan, split at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers, and continued as two parts. It moved onto the island and up the rivers, followed by even higher surges.

  It picked up a sixty-foot yacht and a half-dozen small sailboats—all that were left at the Manhattan Yacht Club in a small marina notched into the concrete abutment—and tossed them into the glass front of a towering atrium that served as an entrance to the World Financial Center. The water pushed up a wide marble staircase, plowed through a bank of revolving doors, and surged across the North Bridge, an enclosed walkway over the West Side Highway. Soon, fed from side streets, the highway itself was a river. Water was running in every direction, through buildings, under overpasses, and even over streets.

  CHAPTER 55

  Manhattan

  6:23 p.m.

  The Slow Times usually rocked gently, its ropes making the sound of someone snoring or the gentle sawing of wood. The creak of the ropes struggling against the pull of the trawler had lulled Walter Beasley to sleep many times this summer. He tuned into the melodious sounds, let them drift into his head late at night after he’d taken his glasses off and laid down.

  The gentle, rhythmic scrape and buckle of the dock provided the beat.

  Now the ropes complained, moaning monstrously against the strain of the heaving trawler. The dock’s ker-chunk, ka-clink was harsh, frantic.

  Be
asley’s stomach was in his throat. It wasn’t seasickness. It was fear. There was no one else at the marina. He could not see two feet in front of him. He called the Coast Guard on his marine radio and they requested he leave the frequency free for real emergencies. The Slow Times was in port. Get off the boat, he was told.

  Walter wasn’t sure if it was fear or desire that confined him to the rocking trawler.

  He was afraid to negotiate the dock without his glasses. But he probably could have made it if he’d taken it slowly, carefully. He could have crawled.

  Where to? Where would I go? Back to the newsroom? Continue the charade? The boat is everything now. It’s my life. We’ll ride it out together.

  A firecracker. Here? How? He slid the cabin door open and the wind blew him back. He stumbled and fell, recovered, and crawled out of the cabin onto the rear deck. His mind had figured it out, but his emotions were hoping he was wrong. He felt along the port rail, found the cleat, reached out and felt the taut stern line. He ran his hand along the rail and found the other cleat, its knot still attached. The line was slack. The storm was beginning to tear the Slow Times from its mooring.

  A wave crashed over the transom and rolled through the cabin door. The Hudson River had become part of the ocean.

  Walter Beasley was on his hands and knees on the rear deck of his first love, nearly blind, soaking wet, while the greatest storm he’d ever seen threatened to sink him, and he’d exhausted all of his nautical knowledge. He had posed as a seafarer, much like he had posed as a newspaperman, and the gig was about up. Beasley had never felt much more than adequate in his whole life—successfully shrewd, maybe—nor had he ever felt defeated.

  It felt like the Slow Times was rising. He held to the side rail and stood halfway up. He squinted into his unfocused circle of view. The dark shape of a piling was getting shorter. The whole dock was surging upward. Desperation turned to panic. Beasley crouched down out of the biting wind and crawled back into the cabin.