TSUNAMI
CRAWFORD KILLIAN
© Crawford Killian 1998
Crawford Killian has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First Published in 1998 by toExcel
This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 1
“Three hundred and three metres,” Don Kennard said into the microphone. “I’m about two metres above the bottom. Visibility is fair.”
“Copy.” The radio operator’s voice came fuzzily through the loudspeaker of the submersible’s radio.
“I’ll retrieve the first core here, and then follow the current across Butler Canyon before the next core.”
“Very good.”
Don shifted on the narrow couch, grateful that a tall man had designed it. Lying flat on his belly, he was still fairly comfortable; after a few more hours he would be stiff and clumsy. The cabin of the submersible, though designed to hold two men, was barely wider than a double bed. Its curving ceiling was only a metre above the couches. The bulkheads, painted black to reduce reflection on the portholes, were beaded with moisture: humidity inside the cabin was close to one hundred per cent, and the temperature was a cold 12° Celsius.
As usual, Don was dressed for the dive in jeans and a black wool turtleneck sweater, with a watch cap pulled down over his thick brown hair. He was rawboned, not very heavy for his height, but with powerful shoulders and arms. His face was long and a little heavy-jawed; like all the men in his family, he had a slightly protruding lower lip. He was clean-shaven and, like most people these days, sunburned, except for a pale stripe around the eyes. His complexion, reddened and coarsened, made him look older than his actual age of thirty-six.
Don looked through one of the portholes at the grey sediment illuminated by the submersible’s floodlights and gripped the handle of the external manipulator.
The mechanical arm reached out and down, and poised for a moment above the mud. The submersible tilted a little; it was too buoyant to be really stable, which had earned it the ironic name of Plummet. Instability, though, had its advantages: as he drove the core tube into the mud, Don lunged forward on his couch. Plummet tipped, forcing in the tube a little deeper. A cloud of fine particles puffed up, mixing with the yellowish mist of dead phytoplankton in the water. The marine biologists were really interested in only the top millimetre of sediment, but a long core would give them a better data base.
He pulled the core tube free and manoeuvred it into the lazy-susan rack mounted outside the forward porthole, just below the wet compass.
“First core secured. Moving on. Can you give me a bearing?”
“Bearing one-six-seven at one knot.”
“One-six-seven. Copy.”
He looked sourly at the useless wet compass. Three weeks ago, the earth’s magnetic field had abruptly disappeared after fading for several months. Its loss made navigation underwater a difficult job.
That, of course, was the least of the problems. Since the previous summer, solar flares had been erupting with unusual violence and frequency on the surface of the sun.
Each flare had bombarded the earth’s ozone layer, forming nitrogen oxides that quickly broke up the triple-oxygen molecules of the ozone layer. Loss of the magnetic field had accelerated the process. With the ozone reduced by at least fifty per cent, ultraviolet radiation was penetrating the atmosphere.
The sun’s normal output of UV, sharply increased by the UV in the flares, was reaching the surface of the earth. It burned into the cells of plants and animals; crops were withering, and livestock was going blind. Humans could scarcely venture outside in daylight without eye protection, and whites needed sunblock cream on exposed skin, or they would start to burn in less than a minute.
The effects on the upper layers of the sea were, perhaps, even more threatening: phytoplankton, the microscopic marine plants that formed the basis of the oceans’ food web, were dying off under the UV onslaught. The core Don had just taken would help to determine the rate at which different species of plankton were affected.
The flares had also smashed the ionosphere, blacking out long-range radio, and had burned out most communications satellites. Electromagnetic pulses, like those associated with high-altitude nuclear explosions, induced voltage surges in power networks; whole continents blacked out. Electronic devices behaved with an eerie unreliability, sometimes working beautifully and sometimes burning out. The earth’s electric field became highly charged, and caused violent thunderstorms. The ozone had trapped some of the heat reflected from the earth’s surface; that heat now escaped into space, so the stratosphere cooled and weather patterns changed.
That, of course, was outside his scientific domain. His wife Kirstie knew far more than he about the impact of the flares on the weather. But she and her fellow climatologists at Berkeley were going crazy trying to make sense out of events. For example, Ultramarine, the research vessel that was Plummet’s mother ship, was being battered in the latest of a series of storms which should have stayed in the Gulf of Alaska. Instead, a branch of the circumpolar jet stream had moved far south, dragging the storms onto the California coast. The winter had been one of heavy rainfall on the coast and snowfall in the Sierras. Flooding and mudslides had thrown whole cities into chaos. Don, a physical oceanographer, preferred the peace and quiet of the continental shelf to the endless harassments of life on the surface.
Those harassments, he reflected, weren’t limited just to the weather. On the surface he had to contend with people who did not interest him, whose problems and desires did not stir his sympathy. Solitude suited him; even Kirstie, involved in her own career, left him comfortably alone. In ten years of marriage they had spent much of their time apart: he on diving expeditions, she on research projects, in five countries on three continents. Their last six months in Berkeley was one of the longest times they had lived in one place, and together; Don was even getting to know some of his colleagues at the Pacific Institute of Oceanography. But people and organizations were too transient to care about — or too dangerous to care about, he admitted to himself. Once you invested your feelings in them, they tried to take you over, to tyrannize you. His grandfather Geordie had done it to Don’s father, and then to Don and his brother Steve. His father had escaped only by dying of a heart attack; the grandsons had escaped into science and distance. For Steve, what was important was seismology in the Antarctic; for Don, it was cruising like this, alone through the cold darkness three hundred metres down.
The floodlights abruptly shone on foggy emptiness.
“I’m over Butler Canyon,” he said. “The current in the canyon may push me a little west of south until I get across.”
“Copy.”
Don knew the canyon fairly well. The continental shelf off California was a network of such canyons; many of them were drowned rivers, relics of the last ice age when sea level had been much lower. This canyon was small, less than a kilometre wide and about fifty long. After ten thousand years of sedimentation, mud and silt lay almost a kilometre thick above its bedrock, so that it was only one to two hundred metres below the average level of the continental shelf.
“What the hell was that?” he shouted.
“What was what?” the operator asked. “ — Hey, Don, are you descending?”
“I sure seem to be. Just got a real jolt, up and down again. I’m down to three-twenty metres.”
“Are all your systems functioning?”
“Yes.”
Earthquake? Sandfall? Whatever it had been, Plummet’s descent had stopped now. Visibility was nearly zero. The mist swirled in the lights, thickening and darkening from yellow to brown. Plummet was still vibrating and yawing.
“I’m going back up to three hundred metres. I can’t see a thing. If visibility doesn’t improve, I’ll come all the way up. What’s it like at the surface?”
“Getting worse. The wind’s out of the west at forty knots. We have a hell of a sea running.”
“Any weather reports?”
“You’re about as far as our radios can reach right now. We’re two hundred kilometres off San Francisco and can’t raise anything.”
He started the motor, feeling relieved when its three horsepower kicked in, and reached for the switch that would force compressed air into the ballast tanks.
Without warning. Plummet turned over and nosed down.
Don fell full-length against the low, curved ceiling and slid headfirst into the black-painted forward bulkhead. Something — Plummet or something outside — was rumbling softly. Impossibly, the hull clanged as if struck.
Very slowly, too slowly, the submersible righted itself, and Don fell back onto the couch. What the hell could keep Plummet upside down for that long? Its centre of gravity was too low —
It turned over again. He could feel it start to roll and was braced for it: this time only his feet hit the ceiling, and he kept his grip on the wheel. Loose equipment bounced and clattered around him. Gauges twitched. The interior lights burned serenely on.
“Wait a minute,” Don muttered. The rumble grew louder, so loud he couldn’t hear himself talk. What must have been a fist-sized stone clanged against the hull.
Plummet swayed and righted itself, but began to spin rapidly on its vertical axis. The portholes showed a grey-brown murk. The million-candlepower external floodlights were either torn away or unable to penetrate the mud.
The spin slowed. The rumble was changing, rising in pitch to a rattling hiss. Plummet yawed and pitched. Don groped for the emergency weight-release, but his sight was blurred; his lids felt sticky when he blinked. He wiped his eyes, and his fingers came away smeared with blood. The top of his head hurt; he must have gashed his scalp on one of the gauges.
Before he could reach again for the weight-release, Plummet’s starboard side scraped violently against what must be the canyon wall. The submersible spun completely around and struck the wall again, stopping dead with an impact that flung Don hard into the thin cushion of the couch.
Plummet was lying nose-up at a steep angle. He must have struck a slope on the canyon wall, and now something was holding the craft down. The depth gauge read 450 metres. Stones rattled and banged against the superstructure; the strange, surf-like roar went on. Don caught his breath.
A turbidity current.
It had to be. A quake must have dislodged unstable sediments farther up the canyon. In a frictionless mix with water, millions of tonnes of mud and sand and rock had started to move. Like an avalanche, the current had fed on what it scoured from the canyon floor, increasing in force and speed. He was the first person ever to witness one, but their effects were well known: they could snap undersea cables like threads and carried enormous masses of sediment far out onto the ocean floor. If he hadn’t struck the canyon wall, the current might have swept him onto the abyssal plain, into depths far greater than Plummet could endure.
“Lucky,” he muttered. He would be buried alive instead of being crushed. Rocks were beginning to pile up the superstructure and along the sides of the craft; he could see a couple through one of the portholes.
Yanking the weight-release did nothing. Either the switch was broken, or the eighty-kilogram steel plate had released without any effect at all. Plummet no longer shook as violently under the barrage of stones: they were piling up fast.
Don pressed his fingers against his ears, trying to muffle the noise. He was angry at himself for being frightened, for letting fear slow his thoughts. Blood trickled stickily over his hands from the cut on his scalp. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and opened them again. Maybe he could push the sub away from the canyon wall before the rocks built up and buried him for good.
He grasped the manipulator control and pushed the arm forward. It responded, grating against stone, and Plummet shifted a little. If the ballast tanks were still intact, and the emergency weight came free, Plummet might manage to ascend out of the current.
Cautiously, Don pressed the switch that fed compressed air into the ballast tanks. He was trembling uncontrollably, frightened and excited at once. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the manipulator arm hard against the wall and heard rock scrape against the nose. He pulled the arm back and pushed again. The stern lifted slightly, and rocks thumped down the length of the superstructure.
Don pulled back again, and threw himself forward as he pushed the arm against the wall.
He felt the unmistakable shudder of the emergency weight coming off. Plummet heaved towards the horizontal, banged its nose against the sloping canyon wall, and spun out into the current.
He watched the depth gauge: 410 metres. 408. He was rising slowly through the current. The brown swirl was as dense as ever, with only momentary thinning. Plummet’s rotation slowed.
At 320 metres, the water cleared a little. At 300 metres, the submersible began to ascend more steeply. The water was a chalky-coloured mist; the rumble of the current was still loud, but now came distinctly from below. At 280 metres, Plummet shuddered through the turbulence of the shear zone between the current and calmer water.
Don was still shivering, enough to make it hard to unscrew the cap on his canteen. Wetting a cloth, he wiped blood from his face and hands. His watch cap was stained red. The hair above his left temple was sticky and matted, but he seemed to have stopped bleeding. He rested his forehead on his crossed arms. He could think only in disjointed images: walking along a Vancouver street as a little boy, holding his father’s hand; struggling to the surface after falling into the deep end of a swimming pool; Kirstie’s blue eyes reflecting the Mediterranean sky. He felt sad, somehow, and unaccountably lonely.
Twenty minutes later, Plummet neared the surface. The storm was raising big waves, but fifteen metres below them the sea was calm. Don turned on the VHF and raised Ultramarine at once. Owen Ussery, the ship’s chief scientist, answered.
“You’re okay?”
“A little banged up, but yes, I’m okay.”
“You gave us one hell of a scare, Don. We clocked you at twenty-three knots before we lost you. Do you realize you must have been caught in a turbidity current?”
“Yes! It sure gave me a ride. I was almost too excited to be scared. There must have been an earthquake offshore.”
“No, it was a tsunami, Don. We finally raised San Francisco a few minutes ago. Apparently there was a hell of an earthquake or eruption or both, down in the Antarctic yesterday. Hilo issued a tsunami warning last night, but it’s taken hours to get the word out. The waves got here before the message did.”
“He was right! By God, he was right,” Don whispered.
“Say again?” asked Owen.
“My brother Steve is down there, at a research station on the Ross Ice Shelf. He’s been predicting a big quake in the Antarctic.”
“Well.” Owen paused. ‘I hope he’s all right. Listen, Don, We’ve got a fix on you and we’ll be picking you up in about two hours — maybe less if this damn storm lets up. We’re going straight home.”
“What for?”
“From what we heard on the radio, San Francisco’s been hit by several tsunamis. Really hit.”
Suddenly, Don felt trapped. Kirstie, he remembered, wasn’t in Berkeley today: she was at a climatology conference — in San Francisco.
Chapter 2
The morning session of the conference ended at last. Kirstie Kennard was eager to get out, away from San Francisco University and back to the relative sanity of Berkeley. For the past three-and-a-half hours, she had listened to grown men and women, with advanced degrees, debate whether losing fifty per cent of the ozone layer in six months should be described as “temporary” or “transient” or “short-term.”
Kirstie had kept very quiet except to deal with technical issues. The report which the conference was about to issue was more political than scientific, intended to calm the public yet alarm the government … Kirstie suspected the effects would be just the opposite.
She paused in the lobby of the auditorium to smear a little sunblock cream across her face, pull on her raincoat and gloves, and adjust her sunglasses. Even with the rain pelting down like this, enough UV got through the overcast to start a nasty burn in five or six minutes.
This afternoon’s meeting, she thought as she pushed out the door, would be depressing but funnier: helping Sam Steinberg plan strategy to fight the nonrenewal of his contract. More politics. He was in physics, she just a visiting professor of climatology. But she’d been shoved into helping him. The rest of his colleagues didn’t want to go near Sam, but Kirstie, with just a few more months left in her appointment at Berkeley, could risk contamination.
The poor bugger didn’t stand a chance, of course, not in the present political climate. Sam was a throwback to the 1960s, from his long hair to his romantic leftism. The fact that he was an absolutely brilliant scientist only demonstrated to others than no one was safe from what was called a “shakeout.”
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