Mariner's Ark

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘I’m on the bridge. Robin, you’ve got to see this!’

  ‘As soon as I’m fit to be seen myself,’ she promised.

  TWO

  Richard Mariner had been up and about for the last two hours of the last good day. Though he, like Robin, had no idea how fast and how fully things would go downhill in the all too immediate future and how many lives, including their own, would be at risk. Full of beans since five a.m., probably because it was lunchtime in his head if not in his still well-lined stomach, he had carefully peeled himself away from the somnolent Robin, patted her right buttock gently but proprietorially, and done his best to slide some of the bedding over her pale pink curves. Then he’d tiptoed into the bathroom, showered and shaved before dressing and slipping out, like a student playing truant, to explore. He’d wandered through the grand vessel on a self-guided tour, from the aft engine rooms several decks down with their huge steam turbines, through the engine starting platforms, gazing at the massive turbine turning gears, through the emergency steering stations, onwards and upwards. His fey Scottish ancestry had failed to alert him to any of the ghosts that famously haunted the spaces that he visited – just as it failed to warn him how deeply into death and destruction he and those he loved would be swept within the next few days. Instead, the more he had discovered the more he had fallen in love with this grand old lady, as though she harboured nothing unsettling from the past or the future.

  At this precise moment, as he broke contact with Robin, Richard was in heaven. Or, he reckoned wryly, as close to heaven as he was ever likely to get. He was also in the past, though not as far back as Robin, who was fancying herself as Grace Kelly now rather than Dolores Hope, or the coincidentally named Robyn, the second Mrs Astaire – as she luxuriated in the shower, lazily lathering herself with the green tea and willow soap provided for the purpose, and wondered whether she should summon room service with a bracing cup of English Breakfast tea before she went aloft.

  Rather, Richard was back in his schooldays, when terms at the forbidding Gothic pile of his Edinburgh alma mater had been leavened with the occasional visit to the west coast, where his love of the sea had been born. For the old-fashioned brass controls all around him on Queen Mary’s command bridge took him to gleaming memories of the bridge, control and engine spaces of the venerable paddle-steamer Waverley, which plied up and down the River Clyde in the days of his youth and had sailed all around the coast of Britain to this date, the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world. With his parents on weekend exeats and during summer vacations, he had clambered from stem to stern, from truck to keel as Waverley pounded downriver from Greenock’s Custom House Quay to call at Gourock, and Largs, then on to Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae and back, past Clydebank where the John Brown shipyards used to stand in the long-gone days when Queen Mary herself, hull 534 until she was named, sat on the slipways.

  Richard’s eyes grew wide as he luxuriated in the brass-bound equipment, all of which would have been familiar to Joseph Conrad and, it seemed, at least one generation of Victorian seafarers before him. Brass so lovingly burnished that his lean face was reflected in it as though in a golden mirror. The gleaming surface gave a strange tinge to the reflection, though. His skin looked deeply tanned – even the white line of the scar along his cheekbone seemed sunburned. His jet-black hair had a tinge of red-bronze and the icy blue of his eyes seemed, unsettlingly, almost sea green, as though his angular, Celtic face had become that of a Mediterranean man. As though, somehow, Queen Mary had magically transformed him from the piratical Captain Kidd into the mythical adventurer Odysseus.

  There was a matched pair of helms, to Richard’s eyes the size of cartwheels, in gleaming brass like all the rest, with a third, dull-grey emergency control beside them. Above the huge helms, brass trumpets gaped like the bells of French horns, communicating with the identical system of controls down in the engine room and – when necessary – with the emergency control room far below. And the engine room telegraphs stood beside them, marked with every command from full ahead to full astern, stand by, stop and finished with engines.

  That last command brought a wry smile to Richard’s lips, for he entertained a more recent memory – of the liquefied natural gas transporter Sayonara that was controlled by computers and had been taken over by pirates who had reprogrammed her command systems so that finished with engines had in fact started her final, near-fatal run to a terrifyingly deadly impact with a floating nuclear power station off the coast of Japan.

  Without thinking, he pocketed his cell phone with its automatic text alerting him to the safe berthing of Sulu Queen, which had arrived unnoticed during the shenanigans at midnight last night. He’d only noticed the text when he’d called Robin. He strode forward towards the twin helms until he was brought up short by the equally effulgent brass rail designed to keep casual visitors away from the priceless equipment. He hesitated, overcome by a sudden boyish desire to climb over the barrier and explore the forbidden area further. After a moment, good sense prevailed and he stepped back, contenting himself with walking to the starboard extremity of the bridge, where he could look out over Queensway Bay past Grissom Island and over Long Beach into the dawn. But then something deep below his consciousness led him back across to the port side. And that was where Robin found him when she arrived at last, gazing narrow-eyed away westward, as though he could see over the grey bulks of Terminal Island, past Sulu Queen in her berth and distant San Pedro to the depths beyond the San Pedro submarine escarpment and away across the Pacific.

  ‘Wow!’ said Robin as she arrived. ‘No wonder you wanted to show me this! I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Shall we climb over the barrier and play with it a bit? Bags I try one of those wonderful wheels.’

  Then Robin stopped speaking for an instant. And not because she had noticed Richard’s preoccupied westward stare. Instead, she crossed to the opposite extremity of the bridge to the one he was occupying and looked eastward while he looked west. ‘Hey,’ she said a moment later. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Richard tore his frowning gaze away from the dark sky over the far Pacific and turned. ‘What?’

  Robin just gestured eastwards. And there, apparently static, a wall of fog stood where it had suddenly appeared, reaching right across Queensway Bay and Long Beach harbour as far as Seal Beach and Marina Vista Park less than five miles distant, a towering white cliff, sitting, waiting, like a rattlesnake about to strike.

  ‘That’s pretty impressive,’ she said. ‘Strange, too.’

  ‘And then some,’ he agreed, glancing over his shoulder at the distant, western sky. ‘There’s something up with the weather …’ Then he shook his head as though clearing it of its forebodings. ‘Let’s go down to breakfast,’ he suggested. ‘Nic’s chopper’s due to pick us up at ten.’

  THREE

  In fact, Nic’s chopper touched down at 10.15 a.m. It landed at the Island Express helipad, 1175 Queen’s Highway, just behind the huge white dome of the Carnival Cruise Lines building, above which the three black-topped red funnels atop Queen Mary stood tall. Nic was aboard himself, but Liberty was not. The six-seater passenger cabin of the little Bell executive 429 was empty apart from the man himself. ‘Look,’ he said as Richard and Robin climbed aboard, strapped in and put on the headphones that allowed them to communicate. ‘I’m sorry to be late but I’ve been forced to change plans with no notice. I’ve dropped Liberty down at Maxima where she’s getting ready to go aboard Katapult8, and I’ll take you to her as well if you insist, but I’m on my way to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce and I’m only just going to make it in time as it is. Something’s come up …’

  ‘Something bad,’ hazarded Robin, who had never seen her friend looking so concerned. She had to raise her voice over the gathering roar as the Pratt and Whitney motors throttled up and the helicopter swooped upwards.

  ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’ve called a meeting of the local great and good. And one or two han
gers-on, like me.’ He gave a self-deprecating grin that banished the worry from his lean, boyish face. But not, Robin noticed, from his eyes. ‘You heard of something called an ARkStorm?’

  ‘Not since that Russell Crowe movie Noah came out,’ said Richard lightly. ‘And there were one or two people in England back at the beginning of 2014 who were thinking of arks as well. Especially on the Somerset Levels and down along the Thames towards Windsor …’

  ‘Yeah. The floods. I remember.’ Nic nodded. ‘Well, as ever, anything you Limeys can do us Yanks can do bigger and better. Come along to the meeting and listen to this guy. He’s from the USGS.’

  ‘The United States Geological Survey?’ said Richard, more seriously. ‘Are they expecting an earthquake? Then yes, we’d better get going. The Chamber of Commerce, right?’

  ‘The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.’

  The main briefing room at the LA Chamber of Commerce building, 350, Bixel Street, was packed. Nic was right, thought Richard. They had made it just in time, and it looked like there was standing room only. Robin took what appeared to be the last seat on the end of the back row. Richard and Nic, both tall men, were happy to stand behind her, leaning against the rear wall, looking over the top of the assembled audience. The young USGS representative looked chipper and confident. But in spite of what Nic has said, the scientist was not a man. The ID tag on her lapel said Dr Dan Jones, though, which explained Nic’s confusion.

  Summoning PowerPoint frames up from her laptop on to the overhead system, and speaking into a Bluetooth ear and throat piece that linked remotely to the PA system, the scientist began her briefing at once. ‘I’ll start now, ladies and gentlemen,’ she said as Robin sat down, her quiet tones booming around the room, amplified by the speakers. The audience of local businessmen and women settled to a tense hush.

  The USGS logo flashed on to the screen. It was replaced almost immediately by another, more sinister emblem. Within a grey circle sat the stylized outline of an ark with a jagged bolt of black lightning splitting it down the middle. Beneath the circle were the words ARkStorm. ‘My name is Danielle Jones,’ began the scientist. ‘I won’t bore you with my qualifications. You can check me out online if you feel the urge. I work for the USGS National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration division – NOAA for short. I am also consultant to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Emergency Management Agency. My specialism is in floods: their prediction and their management. During the last five years and more my team, my associates and I have been planning for, preparing to face, and watching out for early warning signs of what has become known as an ARkStorm. I can see one or two smirks – NOAA has an ARk, of course – but in fact this is no laughing matter.

  ‘Put at its most simple, an ARkStorm is one continuous wet weather event that is likely to last, non-stop, for in excess of forty days and nights. Just like Noah’s flood in the Bible, in fact. And it could, really and truly, bring our world close to the edge of total destruction. Our particular piece of it here in California. An ARkStorm is not a series of individual severe weather events like the Pineapple Express storms that can come at us in California up from Hawaii, as they did in LA in 2012 and in San Francisco in 2014, or like the series of six consecutive depressions that hit the west and south of Great Britain between December 2013 and February 2014. No. I’m talking about something more akin to the monsoon that hits various areas of the Indian subcontinent. But something much more powerful and sustained than the average monsoon. Uninterrupted rainfall on a state-wide basis in which more than three metres – ten feet – of precipitation will fall everywhere from the coast to the Sierra Nevada during six weeks of unremitting torrential downpour. Imagine the San Joaquin Valley becoming an inland lake; everywhere from Chico to Caleinte under several feet – maybe metres – of water. Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield … And that’s just part of it. You guys at the coast will suddenly find not only storm surges and spring tides rolling upslope, swamping the docks and coastal city blocks, but there’ll also be a couple of million tons of water upstate and inland with nowhere to go but downslope and over the top of you as it all washes back out to sea.’

  Dr Jones reached for a glass of water beside her laptop and took a long, thoughtful sip as she watched her words begin to sink in and the amusement die out of the faces in front of her. Nic put his hand up as though he were back at a lecture hall in Harvard. ‘This has happened, right? You’re not just theorizing, Dr Jones. This has happened before. Here.’

  Dr Jones nodded. ‘One hundred and fifty-some years ago. December of 1861 to January 1862,’ she confirmed. Suddenly the ARkStorm logo was replaced by the first in a series of old sepia-coloured photographs. ‘This is Sacramento at that time,’ she said. ‘What it looked like by the end of January 1862.’ The buildings astride the main street of Sacramento stood tall. But between them, instead of a road there was a deep lake and men in boats were rowing across it. Suddenly everyone in the room was paying very close attention to Dr Jones indeed.

  She looked around, seeming to meet every pair of eyes there. ‘Beginning in early December 1861 and continuing forty-five days into January 1862, an extreme storm struck California. Between ten and twelve feet of water fell. That’s three to four metres; twice the depth of the deep end of your swimming pools. And on every square metre of land. This caused severe flooding, turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, requiring Leland Stanford to take a rowboat to his inauguration as Governor of California, and ultimately causing the state capitol to be moved out of Sacramento altogether because it was totally underwater, as these contemporary photographs show.’

  More old photographs appeared. It was just possible to make out a sign saying ‘Coffee Warehouse’ above the water in one of them. Dr Jones continued gently, ‘So was San Francisco, which suffered an enormous amount more damage than it was to do forty-four years later in the famous earthquake of 1906 and the fire that succeeded it. In which, I might add, all the photographic records of the catastrophic San Francisco floods were burned. So what we have is mostly from Sacramento newspapers and state archives.’

  Pictures followed at an increasing rate – photographs and daguerreotypes from the newspapers of the time, local and national. ‘Inundation of the State Capital: K Street from the Levee’; ‘The City Of Sacramento From the Pavillion’ … In each picture, city blocks stood like fleets of ships becalmed above an inland sea large enough to be generating waves. In the distance, churches stood on tiny islands that had once been hillocks. Rowboats bobbed like cockleshells. Desperate men looked out across the devastation as though contemplating the end of the world.

  Dr Jones cleared her throat. ‘Lakes formed in the Los Angeles Basin, Orange County and the Mojave Desert. Something if, if it happened now, would surely peeve the guys at the solar electric generating system they brought online in 2013 covering three and a half thousand acres out there. It’s not fitted for hydro-electric back-up! That alone would mean two and a half billion dollars down the Suwannee and nearly twenty per cent of the state’s electricity with it. Well, back in 1862, that’s what happened: the Mojave Desert became a lake more than ten feet deep. The mouth of the Santa Ana River moved six miles and the largest community between Los Angeles and New Mexico, Agua Mansa – which means smooth water, ironically enough – was completely wiped off the map. Forever. Nobody knows how many people died.

  ‘The storm destroyed one-third of the taxable land of California and bankrupted the state. And this, remember, was at a time when there were 379,994 residents, according to the Census of 1860. Now there are more like forty million. In Sacramento there were 13,785 citizens in 1860. Now there are three quarters of a million. You see where I’m heading with this? According to our latest calculations, independently of business premises, state and federal institutions, warehouses, schools, hospitals and so forth that would be inundated, we’re talking nine million flooded homes. Nine million …’

  ‘OK,’ came a voice from the
front. ‘So that’s the worst-case scenario. But just what is an ARkStorm and why are we talking about it instead of keeping the businesses you mentioned afloat? That’s afloat in the other sense of the word.’

  ‘I guess if you think back to your fourth-grade geography or science lessons, you’ll all remember learning about the water cycle,’ answered Dr Jones. ‘I’ll have to rely on your memories. I didn’t bring any PowerPoints with me—’

  ‘Check online,’ suggested Robin loudly.

  ‘Sure,’ acquiesced Dr Jones good-naturedly, and in less than a minute a big diagram from the USGS was up on the overhead, reminding the audience of what they may or may not have learned at school.

  ‘We can skip all the detail about volcanic steam, sublimation, desublimation and fog drip,’ Dr Jones informed them bracingly. ‘But it’s clear to see that what we have here is an ever-renewing system. Rain falls. It ends up in rivers and lakes, groundwater run-off and all the rest until eventually it reaches the oceans from where it evaporates, filling the air with water vapour. The water vapour becomes rainfall which goes into rivers, lakes and what have you, and the cycle starts all over.

  ‘But I guess when you guys were fourth-graders, your teachers probably told you that the water vapour was spread pretty evenly through the atmosphere. Well, nowadays we know it’s more complicated than that. The air up above our heads is actually full of streams. We can be absolutely certain of this now we have information from the Global Precipitation Measurement, or GPM, core observatory satellite that was launched back in 2014. The GPM mission was designed to build on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. That’s TRIMM to anyone into acronyms. TRIMM is also a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It was launched in 1997 but only measures precipitation in the tropics. The GPM core observatory satellite has extended coverage from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle. And what both satellite systems are showing us at the moment is a stream – what we call an atmospheric river – of humid air forming over the Pacific Ocean with the potential to come right for us. You’ve all heard of the jet stream, I’m sure. There’s one up above us at the moment, about ten miles above us, in fact, right at the top of the troposphere. It’s three miles in diameter, give or take, and three thousand or so miles long. It’s a river of air that flows round and round the globe. It moves like a bat out of hell and anyone thinking of flying to Europe will probably get to ride along with it.