“Very well.” She picked up the handset beside the helmsman. “Mr. Vargas, how does our air look?”
“The system comes and goes,” he said, “but the skies look clear, Captain.”
Good, she thought. The missing Black Hawk was a concern, and she certainly didn’t need it showing up and complicating her attack. “Air defense status?”
“System is in the green,” Vargas reported.
Liz nodded. The close-in weapon system would ruin that Black Hawk’s day if it showed up, just as it had with the Navy bird up in Richmond. The digital bridge clock ticked over to midnight, and the captain keyed her handheld radio.
“Boarding Two, Command. Launch. Launch.”
Lt. Riggs acknowledged, and Liz looked out the windows until she saw the motorized lifeboat pulling away from the cutter, leaving a wake of white chop behind it. “Mr. Vargas,” she said, calling the combat center. “Stand by to provide cover for the boarding party.” Then to her quartermaster she said, “Mr. Waite, bring us bow-on to target.”
As the cutter wheeled to port, turning until it faced the aircraft carrier, the remote-operated fifty-seven-millimeter Bofors deck gun whined into position. The barrel stopped moving once it was centered on the wounded flattop.
“Steady now,” Liz said, standing beside the young helmsman. She wasn’t sure if the words were intended for him or herself. As she watched the MLB race toward the prize, Elizabeth wondered about her brother and whether he was still alive. She pushed the thought roughly aside. No time for that. Right now there was only the deadly business of surface warfare.
• • •
L t. Riggs stood beside the helmsman who was running the launch fast at the sheer wall that was the carrier’s stern. Every deck surface around him, as well as the MLB’s belowdecks, was packed beyond capacity with bodies and equipment. Everyone had a rifle and a sidearm; each was laden with bags and bandoliers of magazines. All of them carried either coils of rope with hooks fashioned in the cutter’s machine shop, pry bars, or acetylene torches for locked hatches.
They were terribly overloaded, almost thirty people aboard, traveling on a choppy night sea at high speed. Completely unsafe. It was a short ride, Riggs told himself, and besides, this was combat. The normal rules didn’t apply. His heart was pumping fast at the prospect of battle, not with fear but with exhilaration. He and his crew were going to storm an aircraft carrier! How many men in history could claim to have done that?
Only minutes to go now.
As the mass of USS Nimitz loomed before them, Lt. Riggs stood a little taller and started to grin.
THIRTY-TWO
January 13—12:05 a.m.—San Francisco Bay Area
It was a long-feared nightmare and the subject of scientific speculation and Hollywood fantasy: a 10.0-plus magnitude earthquake along one of California’s many fault lines. A killer of epic proportions. Many wondered, but few could imagine the destructive power contained within a megaquake of this size.
In the seismology world, the notion was derided almost completely. Experts thought the energy release would be the equivalent of detonating one trillion tons of TNT, and the earth simply couldn’t produce that type of energy. While a few claimed that it was not only possible but inevitable, others stated with confidence that there were no known fault lines long enough to even be capable of producing a 10.0 magnitude event.
The Pacific and North American plates, grinding together deep beneath the earth’s crust, cared nothing for scientific speculation about what they could and could not do. They were, and had been for some time, hung up on one another under the Hayward Fault, able to expel small bits of energy, but unable to truly “clear their throat.”
The fault was longer than it appeared as it connected to a network of lesser faults in the Hayward group and merged with the Calaveras Fault in the south. These connections multiplied its destructive potential well beyond any existing predictive model. With the exception of the small tremors last fall and the foreshock only hours ago, the Hayward Fault had gone through a long “quiet period” of inactivity. This was especially ominous to seismologists, who had—correctly—interpreted this as a time of steadily building pressure.
They were right about the pressure.
They were wrong about how bad it would be.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, originated sixty miles south-southeast of the city. It lasted from eight to fifteen seconds and registered a maximum intensity of 7.1. It was a truly terrifying and destructive monster.
By comparison, the Alameda earthquake that struck on January 13 at five minutes past midnight was a 10.6 magnitude event that lasted four full minutes. Its epicenter was beneath the former naval air station at Alameda, right in the middle of the Bay Area.
The trigger was much like a finger snap and when enough stress was applied, there was a sudden movement, a release of energy, and a snap. As the stress finally built to intolerable levels under Alameda, the Pacific and North American plates experienced their own finger snap, letting off a burst of energy the planet hadn’t experienced in millions of years.
Seismic waves traveled outward from the point of origin in expanding, concentric rings, creating S-waves that caused repeating, oscillating ripples in the earth similar to snapping a bedsheet over and over. In this case, the bedsheet would be made of glass, rigid and fragile—like the thin surface of the earth. What came next was the stuff of bad dreams.
• • •
Several places around the Bay Area were built upon soft mud fill and silt beds, including the island of Alameda, the industrial and petrochemical areas of Richmond, and Treasure Island, a former Navy base turned trendy community and the location of the Bay Bridge’s central support. The intensity and duration of the shaking liquefied the mud and silt beds within a minute. Much of waterfront Richmond and all of Alameda immediately sank, the bay rushing in at once to cover structures and communities. Ten thousand of the walking dead on Alameda were consumed in a broiling cauldron of mud, seawater, and masonry.
Treasure Island sank as well, dropping the Bay Bridge’s central support. The span was already bucking and hurling sections of roadway into the bay, and now the plunging central support pulled both the east and west stretches down with it amid an endless screech of twisting steel. Abandoned automobiles and thousands of walking corpses tumbled into the churning water with it. After the initial fall, all that remained was the land-side approaches at the San Francisco and Oakland ends, frayed ends of metal and asphalt poking out over the water.
They wouldn’t be there for long.
As the earth’s surface rippled and jumped, the massive cables of the Golden Gate Bridge snapped and the framework went next, twisting and falling away, deforming the towering red supports at each end. The southern tower crashed into the Pacific. At the north, only the Sausalito support would survive, with its approach roadway leading to it and then abruptly dropping away to nothing.
• • •
Under the bay, the oscillation of S-waves caused the buried BART tubes to burst through the earth, wriggling like wet pasta. In moments they fractured, flooded, and disintegrated. Corpses that once stalked these dark tubes, shambling past stranded trains that last summer echoed with the screams of trapped commuters, now whirled through the deep waters of the bay by the thousands. Had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like vast clouds of underwater gnats.
• • •
In every community, any masonry structure not built of steel-reinforced concrete was instantly destroyed; homes, apartment complexes, warehouses, and historical landmarks were reduced to rubble in seconds, dust rising into the night in vast clouds. Buildings designed to resist earthquakes had never been intended to survive violence of this magnitude and followed soon after. Skyscrapers leaned and toppled, or dropped straight down into billowing clouds.
The city of Oakland, so close to the epicenter at Alameda, was shaken flat, leaving only skeletons of soot-covered I
-beams among the rubble. Even that would soon be gone.
• • •
Even as the city above toppled, the bedrock that made up San Francisco’s peninsula rolled and vibrated until it shattered like a china plate. From Daly City north, the peninsula gave a great heave upward, then crashed back down below sea level in fragments.
The Pacific reacted at once to fill the void, rolling in as a frothing beast, the city’s remains beneath its surging waves. Only the Transamerica Pyramid survived, a white spear jutting a mere fifty feet above the ocean’s surface, waves crashing against its sides. It lingered through several more S-waves, then sank.
Not far away, the buildings of Alcatraz were shaken into gravel. Like San Francisco, the bedrock here shattered as well, and the island vanished.
• • •
Act Two began ninety seconds into the quake.
• • •
At not quite seven minutes past midnight, the earth started cracking, a fast-moving and violent event, creating a fissure running the entire length of the Hayward Fault. In thirty seconds, every city in the fissure’s path shattered, from Richmond down to San Jose.
The planet seemed to growl as, with a terrestrial thunder, the fissure became a crevasse, the earth’s crust yawning open along the fault’s length. The waters of the San Francisco Bay poured into this opening, the charging Pacific following.
USNS Comfort, the former supertanker turned hospital ship, and the vessel that had lured Calvin’s Family and Evan to the Bay Area, was no longer tethered to a pier. Oakland Middle Harbor was beneath the waves now. The long white ship, still teeming with hundreds of the undead, executed three-quarters of a rotation before tipping over the edge of the crevasse and disappearing.
On the bay, where swells were now climbing to thirty feet and more, the Pacific was being sucked east into the crevasse, moving fast and with unthinkable force. A black Coast Guard cutter went to flank speed and took the waves with its razored bow, pointing west and fighting to keep from being pulled back into a void that was swallowing sea and land alike. A listing aircraft carrier, without propulsion or a way to steer itself, helplessly rode the wild sea as it was drawn inexorably toward the plunge.
A forty-seven-foot motorized lifeboat, loaded beyond safe capacity, was caught by a thirty-five-foot-high wall of water and flung end over end through the night. Bodies spun away into the sea, and those belowdecks were battered against steel bulkheads. Most of the boarding party trapped below were already dead when the tiny craft was sucked over the falls and plunged into the abyss.
Nimitz turned broadside to the angry Pacific and was instantly punished for it, the surging water tipping it on a forty-five-degree angle and pushing it closer to the edge of the crevasse. By now, the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay had taken on the look of the white waters approaching the drop-off at Niagara Falls, except this waterfall was more than fifty miles long. The aircraft carrier righted itself for a moment as the sea surged beneath its keel. The next wave would push it into oblivion.
• • •
The nightmare’s third act occurred at three minutes and thirty seconds into the event. In a terrifying demonstration of the planet’s power and brutality, the earth’s crust west of the crevasse heaved upward for an instant, then crashed back down, sinking an additional fifty feet lower than the previous sea bottom, creating a vast, momentary water pocket. Simultaneously, the land east of the crevasse was thrust up in a hundred-foot-high, gray-black wall of rock running the length of the fault.
This geological drop and thrust pinched the new crevasse shut, and the sudden offset in the ocean floor created a massive displacement in the water. The roaring Pacific filling the water pocket now hurled itself against this new cliff face and was thrown back toward the open sea in waves climbing as high as fifty feet.
A sleek black warship attempted to come about as the deadly tide reversed itself and was lost behind a towering wave.
A wounded aircraft carrier, listing dangerously forward and to port, spun in the churning sea, white water crashing across its flight deck and sweeping away the few drifters remaining there. The vessel climbed a wave that came at its stern, hovered at the crest for a moment like an enormous teeter-totter board, then slid down the steep back side and out of sight.
The megaquake subsided at nine minutes past midnight. In its wake it left a landscape so raw and broken that it could have been a scene from the planet’s violent birth.
The cauldron of the new bay surged with the debris of mankind: fragments of buildings, railroad boxcars, bits of aircraft and capsized ships, tractor-trailers and roofs of houses. And with every surge of the Pacific current, thousands of bodies were forced to the surface.
They reached.
They groaned.
And they were pulled beneath the waves once more.
THIRTY-THREE
January 13—Richmond
On the uppermost stairway landing of the concrete house, Evan was getting tired, just as he’d predicted. The charred fragments of twenty corpses littered the steps below him, victims of his survival knife, and more climbed slowly toward him, crunching their fellows underfoot as raspy groans filled the house. Evan had long since switched on his flashlight and stood it upright on the concrete banister so he could see what he was fighting. Stealth no longer mattered; they knew he was here.
His good arm ached from swinging and stabbing, and his broken wrist cried out from all the exertion. Some broke apart as he kicked them down the steps; others merely tumbled down to the switchback. More took their place. Evan lost track of time.
Then came a moment when the moaning abruptly ceased. The half-dozen burned drifters on the stairs stopped climbing and instead shuffled until they all faced in the same direction, then cocked their heads and stood silently. Evan had seen this behavior before, during his run through the charred petrochemical fields. He couldn’t tell how bad the quake would be so he stood his ground, chest heaving, blade still held ready. Several seconds later the shaking started, pitching his flashlight over the side of the banister. The house bucked beneath his feet, and he was thrown to the floor. There was a sound of concrete cracking, and he scrambled back down the hall just as the central stairs and the landing where he had just been standing collapsed into the house.
Worse. Much, much worse.
Back in the bedroom, Evan could see out beyond the balcony, scattered moonlight beginning to reveal the rooftops of the houses below. They seemed to ripple for an instant, then detonated in an explosion of brick, glass, and wood fragments. Within seconds, the residential blocks nearest the water dropped into the sea, and the bay surged forward, consuming the neighborhood.
Evan moved out onto the shaking balcony, thinking he would climb onto the iron railing and somehow pull himself up to the roof. Then the house came apart around him and he was falling, tensing for impact, expecting to be impaled on a twisted piece of rebar. Instead, the sea charged in and he was caught by the water, swept up and over the spot where the concrete house had been only seconds ago, thrown hard against the hillside behind it just as this ground too shook apart and fell beneath the foamy surface.
Like the float coats used by Nimitz deck crews, Evan’s survival vest featured a water-activated pellet that triggered an internal gas canister and inflated the vest with a sudden whoosh. A second pellet automatically activated the small white strobe at the vest’s collar, and Evan found himself floating in savage waves.
His body felt as if it were flung in every direction as the water rose and fell, his left arm slipping free of its sling, and the air was filled with a cracking sound so loud and so close that he thought it would make his heart stop. Evan washed up sharply against something hard and metallic, and he instinctively wrapped an arm and his legs around it, realizing it was the base of a shuddering radio tower. In the moonlight he could see the earth yawn open to his left with a massive rumble, a black maw stretching in two directions and widening by the second. Seawater and shattered houses r
oared over its far edge in a waterfall.
From somewhere beyond the crevasse came the long, metallic scream of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge coming apart, but there was little time to think about it. The radio tower was leaping and shuddering, trying to pull loose from the deep anchors holding it to the earth, threatening to shake him off and back into the swirling waters. Evan locked both elbows around the metal strut and tightened the hold with his legs. The tide that pushed him here had now poured back into the still-widening crevasse, and he found that he and the radio tower’s base were less than twenty feet from the chasm’s crumbling western edge.
The tower gave out a long groan and leaned toward the abyss. Evan screamed and hung on.
There was an abrupt vacuum then, an instant where sound and air vanished as the expanse of the bay beyond the crevasse suddenly dropped, and he thought of the surface of a not-quite-baked cake falling. The silence was broken as the roaring sea rushed into the sudden depression with a fury Evan knew he could not look upon and keep his sanity.
At that moment, the ground let out a roar of its own and heaved upward. A towering wall of rock shot skyward, spitting truck-sized boulders into the sea as if they were pebbles, rock slabs the size of buildings calving away like Arctic ice. The radio tower fell to the left, smashing onto the edge of the crevasse, its top snapping away and vanishing into the depths just before the rising angle of the newly risen cliff pinched the crevasse shut. Clinging to the tower’s remains with his arms and legs, looking like a sloth hanging upside down, Evan saw that the base was lodged in a vertical crack that split the face of the wall, trapped there, prevented from slipping into a sea that was now surging against what had become an ocean cliff.
The sea.
Evan’s radio tower, now a forty-foot, horizontal tangle of red-and-white steel, was hit by a wave that completely submerged him, the force nearly tearing him free. He held his breath, and when the water fell back he came up choking. The choppy surface was only a few feet beneath him when the wave went out, but he was submerged again when the next surge pushed against the cliff.
Omega Days (Book 4): Crossbones Page 28