Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  At last he fell silent, and Bill Harper spoke quietly.

  “Are you through, Doug?”

  “No, man, I’m an angry Paul Revere with a fresh horse and a megaphone, and I’m just getting warmed up.”

  There was a long sigh from Olympia.

  “You know, if it wasn’t for your passion and sincerity, I’d be mightily offended to have just been lectured on a scenario I know so well. But the truth is, I’m in your corner, Doug. But you have simply got to understand that there are things at stake from a political perspective that are incomprehensible to a scientist. But people like me have to consider that aspect!” Harper’s voice was rising, too, though only slightly. “For instance, do you have any concept of how much monetary loss and potential liability the state will incur if we chase everyone away from the coastline and nothing happens? That’s the first question the governor is going to ask. And can you guarantee him it won’t be a false alarm?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Neither can I, and God doesn’t seem to be in on our hotline tonight.”

  Doug shook his head and rolled his eyes, grateful that videophones were not commonplace. They’d played these parts before, the subordinate bureaucrat officially resisting the worried scientist and requiring a level of certainty designed primarily to shift potential blame. He had no respect for such cover-your-ass political games, or for the weasels who played them.

  Not that Bill Harper was a weasel. He was a good man working for a clueless governor and an even more ignorant staff. Despite the state law against surreptitious taping, Doug imagined the director had a recorder going unannounced on the other end, just in case.

  “Bill, I’m sorry, but I’m strongly advising you to wake up the governor and recommend evacuation of the coast. We could lose thousands of people, and I mean any minute.”

  “You’re really and truly that spooked? This isn’t practice for the cameras?”

  “Yes, damnit! I mean, no and yes. This isn’t theater, it’s real.”

  “Officially, the price tag for a gubernatorial wake-up call is simply a prediction from the USGS. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just please tell me we’re going to shake badly and I’ll do my best to convince him. But I just cannot act unilaterally and hope to keep my professional head.”

  “And I can’t make a short-term, official prediction for the USGS, Bill. You know that!”

  “Then, sadly, we’re at an impasse—for the moment.”

  “I could call the State Patrol and have them wake the man up,” Doug replied.

  “You could, yes. And please be my guest. I need to remind you, though, of the level of skepticism you’ll be dealing with. And he knows you, Doug, and he thinks he knows this subject and he does not believe your theory. For him, it’s always black and white. No prediction, no eviction.”

  “God, not another bad poet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Look, could you at least alert your network of police and fire and rescue forces in those counties that we’re hovering on the edge of a prediction and they might want to lock and load?”

  “Yeah, that I can do.”

  Doug rubbed his forehead, unconsciously searching for the release mechanism to the steel band that seemed to be tightening around his cranium. Aside from the scientific realities he could see, there was rising alarm in his gut that those left on the coast the next day were very likely to die.

  “Bill, you understand the prime reason we can’t make a hard prediction is that we’ve never ever seen patterns of tremors like this before. We have no precedent, only guesswork. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And I’m guessing the balloon has really gone up. After all, have I ever given you a false alarm?”

  “Not before today, if then,” Harper replied. “I’m sitting here genuinely worried, too.” There was a weary sigh from Olympia. “Doug, when you’re scared enough to issue a formal warning, call me back and I’ll shove my opinions into the lion’s den. I am listening.”

  Not well enough. Doug thanked him and replaced the receiver, aware of a gentle hand on his shoulder and he turned with a start to find Jennifer standing behind him, her coat on and her hair back in place. There was a faraway, hunted look in her eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “Yes, but I have a 7:45 A.M. takeoff and I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m going to bed down in my office.” She leaned over to give him a quick kiss.

  Before he could protest she’d turned and dashed out the door, leaving a sudden void he had no time to deal with.

  “Our careers are on the line, aren’t they?” Sanjay had asked an hour earlier. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t predict a disaster. If we’re wrong, we’re the disaster.”

  More information was cascading in from the seismograph networks than even the computers could crunch, but they were far from having the justification for a USGS alert. It would take a smoking gun—either a big enough foreshock or some new bombshell information supporting his theories—before Menlo Park would take the risk.

  Sanjay was right, Doug thought. If they were the cause of a formal prediction of the big one and nothing happened, or worse, if they failed to convince their superiors in California in time to issue an alert and then lost the Pacific Northwest and tens of thousands of people, they would become an embarrassment to the seismological community and the USGS. No matter that the science wasn’t mature enough to provide a hard and fast prediction or a warning beyond enlightened guesswork. The career risk couldn’t be greater.

  Doug found himself wishing he knew a good, genuine psychic he could consult, but for a serious scientist that was also unthinkable.

  NIGHTINGALE AVIATION OPERATIONS, BOEING FIELD, SEATTLE

  Sleepy at last, Jennifer closed the door to her small office bedroom just before 4 A.M., stripped down to an oversized T-shirt, and dropped onto the bed, achieving REM sleep almost immediately. An interminable period seemed to drift by before she awakened, her eyes on the dispatcher who was leaning in the opened door spilling light into the windowless room.

  “Jennifer?”

  “Did I oversleep?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute. Why didn’t you wake me at 7?”

  “Jen, it’s 6:45,” Dan Zalinsky replied as he snapped on the overhead fixture. Jennifer squinted hard against the assault of light.

  She sat speechless for a few seconds before looking at her watch.

  “A.M.?”

  “Yes.”

  “I… could have sworn I’ve been sleeping all day.”

  “Are you rested?”

  She got up and slipped on a robe. “Yes. Strangely.”

  “I woke you early because we’ve got a situation. The whole area is getting rattled with small earthquakes and we’re going to need to make some plans if things get worse.”

  “We had a pretty good one just before 3 A.M. while I was at the lab with Doug.”

  “Well, they’re continuing. He’s been on TV this morning, too, and called several times to convince me that none of our ships should go to Cascadia today. Especially not you and Sven.”

  “Okay. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Coffee’s on your desk.”

  “Thanks, Dan.”

  He closed the door as she struggled to remember the last shards of a long, involved dream that had now evaporated. The room seemed to undulate for a second. Was that her sleepy state or another quake? Her gyros were still wobbling too much to be sure.

  The bathroom off the other side of her office had a small shower and all the toiletries she needed, and she rushed the process while downing the coffee and made herself reasonably presentable in fifteen minutes. Her hair was slightly uncooperative but not fatal to the professional appearance she was determined to maintain, and she decided not to let it bug her.

  On the way to the charter operations desk, an unquestionable tremor rattled the building with not enough force to move objects off desks, but enough to prompt Dan Za
linsky to point downward as she approached.

  “Like that one, for instance. I’m surprised you slept through them.”

  “I am, too. Fill me in.”

  Dan ran down the list of charter shuttle flights, the special mission to Cascadia carrying Mick Walker the night before, and the locations of the Nightingale Medevac fleet of EC-135 Eurocopters positioned across the Pacific Northwest.

  “Your dad’s inbound, too.”

  “Why? Never mind. I’ll find out.”

  She poured another cup of coffee, feeling the cobwebs slowly clear as she looked around the interior of the main reception area.

  Despite Sven Lindstrom’s lifelong frugality, the offices of Nightingale Aviation spoke of understated wealth and good taste. It was evidence of a surprising passion of the near-penurious founder, who thought that the way a company’s headquarters looked determined the level of trust of the clients. Most of Nightingale’s Medevac clients were unconscious people barely clinging to life on the way to some hospital helipad, but the sister company—Nightingale Air Services—had become successful in no small measure because Sven had maintained a customer-service point of view through the years of building the company.

  The philosophy had covered chairs and sofas in elegant leathers, spread expensive oak through the furniture selection, and turned the operations section into an impressive and comfortable combination of mission control and corporate boardroom. With such elegant offices, Sven’s driving to work every morning before retirement in a ratty 1974 Volvo had been an embarrassing contradiction.

  Jennifer caught a glimpse of Sven’s new gray Cadillac on one of the TV security monitors and began walking to the front. She pushed through the door to find him standing by the car and for just a second she felt her stomach tighten up as if she had been called to the principal’s office.

  Dad, what are you doing here? she thought.

  His eyes were on a faraway target, and he was apparently trying to gauge the base of the fog that lay like a cool, damp blanket over Seattle.

  “Dad, hi.”

  “Hey, Honey. Rotten morning. And these earthquakes! You awake?”

  She nodded and hugged him. “I’m tired but I got a few hours of sleep.”

  “Here? I know you weren’t home.”

  “Yes. Here,” she said. There was no point in going into details that would trigger a lesson on crew fatigue.

  “When a dad doesn’t know where his daughter is sleeping, it’s worrisome.”

  “This daughter is way too grown for you to worry about that.”

  In truth, she thought, the question didn’t bother her. She was used to his bursts of sudden curiosity, and his predictable irritation at being unable to instantly reach anyone he called. But despite his mania for instant contact, he had a thing about calling her cell phone. It was as if calling her at home at 3 A.M. was more humane somehow than risking a midnight cellular call. She had yet to figure out his logic.

  “I thought I’d come in and give you some moral support with these earthquakes. Your boyfriend’s been on TV making some worrisome noises.”

  They pushed through the doors together and into the reception room.

  “I just heard he’d been on. Was he saying anything about Cascadia?”

  “The subduction zone, not the island. Yeah. Saying we might need to evacuate the coast. For a scientist the boy’s pretty brave.” Sven moved to the counter and picked up a clipboard. “So what’s the charter plan, with or without earthquake problems?”

  Jennifer glanced outside at the gray morning. The bottom of the fog layer was barely a hundred feet above the runway and the entire shroud only two hundred feet thick. It was effectively hiding the distant Olympic Mountains, the top half of the airport’s control tower—and a clear path to keeping Nightingale on schedule.

  “Let’s go take a look, Dad. Even if that’s the last of the earthquake tremors it’s going to be a banner day—provided the fog doesn’t shut us down.”

  “Not that bad,” he said, dismissing the possibility with an air of authority that invited no uncertainty. If Sven said it was going to be good enough to fly, it would be. The weather wouldn’t dare challenge him.

  The distant sound of an arriving airliner caught Jennifer’s ears, triggering memories of the first time she’d witnessed the Space Needle sitting all alone on a cloud. Seattle’s foggy mornings were surreal to arriving passengers, the top twenty floors of the city’s tallest buildings along with the iconic Space Needle appearing as disembodied alien structures floating on an endless field of aerial cotton, a vision more attuned to science fiction than real life. The mysterious image of the city in the sky would float magically past the windows as the airliner extended flaps and landing gear and slowed for a southbound touchdown at Sea-Tac Airport, daring the witness to believe it existed. Within minutes, the gritty task of surviving a modern air terminal would enfold the traveler’s mind, yet the image of a suspended city would continue to float in memory—a very personal experience of momentary transcendence.

  Her own plentiful memories of such moments brought a smile. From the ground—especially in the eye of an aviator surveying what was little more than a low-hanging cloud—fog carried a different dynamic beauty, a disorienting dichotomy ranging from soft, misty diffusion best viewed in a bathrobe with coffee and a lover, to the professional challenge of dealing with low visibility in a fast-moving air machine.

  She glanced at her father as he stood at the operations counter and read the schedule. At his side she had learned to evaluate the seductive visual confection that difficult weather could present, and how to appreciate it even as she worked to defeat the challenges it could throw at an airman. Sven Lindstrom, it had turned out, may have been properly described as difficult, but her old man had the heart of a poet who secretly saw the world as beautiful and could seldom openly admit it.

  “So, what do you think, Dad?” she asked.

  “I think I need an IV of Starbucks’ goopiest espresso,” Sven answered. “And since you’re a nurse, you can hook it up for me.”

  It was the first time he’d referred to her other profession since the night of his collapse, and Jennifer felt a small flag go up in her mind. Why now?

  “Are you getting enough sleep yourself, Dad?” she asked.

  “Well… the older your mother gets, the louder her snoring.”

  “As if you didn’t snore like a buzz saw yourself.”

  “Scandalous rumor,” he smiled. “Jen, Doug Lam looked completely spooked a while ago.”

  “Really?” The mention of Doug’s name triggered a surge of desire to confide in her father the frustrations she was having with their relationship and her attempts to talk to Doug about it. She knew better, but the urge was there, first as a warmth and then the hollow realization that he was incapable of giving his daughter sympathetic advice on such matters.

  “Doug thinks we should cancel this whole Cascadia thing and stay away from the island,” she said, suppressing the other thoughts.

  Sven snorted. “Yeah, give up nearly a quarter million dollars in revenue, not to mention a really fun evening in a plush hotel.”

  “It does sound like fun, provided we don’t get washed out to sea.”

  “Is Mr. Wizard going, too?”

  Finally, she thought, his real feelings about Doug had returned.

  “I’m going alone, Dad. Lucky me.”

  “Well,” he snorted, “it’s hardly a surprise that he isn’t taking you to the hated opening of the hated resort.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘hated.’ ”

  “I would. I’m well aware that Dr. Lam wants to keep the island safe for gull droppings, but he’s going to have to get over it, especially if he’s thinking of marrying my daughter.”

  Jennifer decided to ignore the marital reference.

  “Actually, Dad, today he’s got a legitimate point. We’re in real danger of a major quake, and I’m going to have to brief everyone to keep the rotor rpm’s up and lift of
f instantly if anything out there starts rocking and rolling.”