“But in the meantime, everyone’s stuck on my island? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. Since we don’t have an approachable beach, I’m afraid the only way on or off is going to be the heliport.”
Mick Walker shook his head. “For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone. Not yet, at least.”
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY WESTERN HEADQUARTERS MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
The highly unusual emergency meeting in one of the somewhat Spartan conference rooms had been called in late afternoon, bringing a reluctant but alarmed group of scientists and administrators in from their homes on a Saturday. The mood was somber, the conference room connected by a conference call and speakerphone to the USGS monitoring station in Golden, Colorado, and their offices in Washington, D.C. Dr. Peter Nelson, the director of USGS seismology programs and a member of the National Academy of Sciences for his pioneering work on plate, block, and flake tectonics, was at the head of the table, his trademark understated style a magnet for respect and calm assessment.
But even Pete Nelson’s patience was fraying around the edges as the associate director for geology speaking from USGS headquarters in Reston, Virginia, asked the same set of questions for the third time, obviously more worried about the political implications of issuing an earthquake warning than the potential to save lives.
Nelson cut him off.
“Jake, excuse me for being intrusive, but I think all of us out here at Menlo, and our group at Caltech, and certainly our regional director in Seattle, are trying to tell you the very same thing: the penalty ethically, morally, and politically for failing to act if we’re right will grossly exceed the penalties for acting if we’re wrong.”
“Look, Pete, I’m just trying to get it right, okay?”
“Yes, sir, we all are, and I know the burden you have to carry with this pragmatic and somewhat anti-science White House. But the bottom line, as they love to say in business, is simply this: the Cascadia Subduction Zone has never given us a warning of an impending break before, and now it is. The warning is unclear as to the specifics of how big and when a great earthquake or quakes will maul us, but the intermediate warning it’s giving is crystal clear. With three hundred years of pent-up energy behind a crumbling dam, it’s time to sound the alarm. And that, our citizenry will say after the fact, is one of our jobs.”
There was an aggrieved sigh from Reston.
“All right, I’ll take it to the president’s science advisor within the hour.”
“With all due respect,” Nelson pressed, “I think we should consider issuing the warning first and merely informing the advisor of it.”
“Which is why I’m the political protector for geologic science back here in the Beltway, Pete. No. We get permission first.”
Another voice cut in, the sound quality identifying the speaker as also being somewhere else than Menlo Park. “It’s beginning to sound like we’re reading a NASA script, only the ostriches at NASA were trying to ignore the danger to just six or seven astronauts. We’re trying to ignore the mortal danger to thousands.”
“Who the hell said that?” Jake Berg asked from Reston, but Pete Nelson cut in.
“It doesn’t matter, Jake. We’re all of an equal mind out here. We think delay is a huge mistake, but we recognize your authority. Please hurry.”
“I don’t like insubordinate employees. You all got that?”
“They do, Jake. And we’re going to shut down the link out here first, okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”
There was an aggressive click from the Beltway.
Chapter 22
CASCADIA CASINO BALLROOM 7:19 P.M.
The decision to continue the dinner was simple, Mick thought. People had to eat and there was no way off the island now even if he’d wanted to evacuate.
The absence of over a hundred people, of course, was a problem he couldn’t ignore, especially since they were all headed back to the mainland in lifeboats and would miss the weekend festivities.
He swept into the ballroom after leaving his driver at the curb, his head still reeling from the news that a million dollars’ worth of dock facilities would have to be rebuilt. There had been no time to check insurance coverage, but he was pretty certain they were protected.
We’d better be, Mick thought. The liability for the injuries alone is going to be horrific.
There were still groups of guests standing and talking as he entered and he worked the room like a master politician, smiling and greeting everyone as if nothing untoward had happened.
Sherry, his secretary, had been in tight formation with him as she normally was in social or business situations. She had developed an uncanny ability he considered the next thing to ventriloquism, a way of smiling and not moving her lips at the same time she was throwing a name or other information right in his ear. Somehow others never caught on, and she made him look brilliant.
“Sherry, where’s O’Brien?” Mick asked as they were working their way toward the head table.
“We’re looking,” she said. “Penny was assigned to keep him under control.”
Mick stopped and looked at her. “Penny? Oh, Christ.”
“What?”
“Never send a pretty woman to deal with Frank O’Brien.”
She was chuckling. “Mick, you never hire the other kind.”
“Find them,” he said, eyebrows raised. “Quickly. For her sake as well as his.”
“Where?”
“Any private room nearby. You’ll find him there trying a fast seduction.”
Mick reached the head table and paused, noting the continued absence of the governor and Robert Nelms, and gathering his thoughts. Six people had been seriously injured and the chances any of them had relatives or friends in the audience was small, but unknown. To tell the whole story would ruin the evening. To make it sound like a mechanical problem would be far better, even though most would discover the truth later on. He could always say that he, too, hadn’t been informed of the full extent. In any event, the show must go on, and he was a great showman.
Mick took the microphone and cleared his throat.
CASCADIA ISLAND HOTEL
“I don’t care who you have to call into work.”
Robert Nelms shifted the receiver to his other ear and tried to get control of his breathing before continuing. “And I don’t care that it’s a Saturday night. We’ve got a very serious problem out here and I need to know if we missed something. Anyone who doesn’t want to come in and crunch the data is fired. Period.”
He replaced the phone and sat back in the large chair in his suite, feeling exhausted, the crack in the marble floor and walls of the convention center vivid in his apocalyptic thinking. Cracks like that didn’t occur because of bad materials, they occurred because of bad foundations, and providing good foundations had been their job. What on earth could have gone wrong?
The possibility that the repeated earthquakes were responsible had more than once crossed his mind, but without a flawed substratum—without some major fault or soil incongruity underneath the building that they should have found—no such cracking could have occurred just because the ground shook. Besides, Walker had paid them millions for extra seismic studies. It wasn’t a seismic problem. Somehow they had missed a soil problem, and it could mean having to rebuild the entire structure.
At the same moment, Doug Lam closed the door of his room behind him and sat on the bed as he prepared to punch a number into his cell phone.
It rang instead, with Terry Griswold on the other end, his voice urgent and excited.
“What’s up, Terry?”
“No, it’s what’s down, Doug. I’ve just completed a laser reading over here about four miles northeast of where you are on the island.”
“And?”
“It has dropped! Doug, I don’t know if there’s any chance the main pressure release could end up being slow and nondamaging, but the coast and that island ha
ve dropped at least twelve inches from my last measurement last Monday a week.”
“A foot?”
“Yes! No question. I repeated the ranging six times and it came out the same every time within instrument tolerances.”
“How about the tremors? I haven’t felt anything for the last half hour or so.”
“I checked with Sanjay not ten minutes ago. Same pattern, same locations, still continuing.”
The impact of a large P wave shuddered through the room, chattering the contents of a decorative shelf and knocking over a lamp.
“Hold it! We’ve got a quake coming in… and it’s still going. Whoa!”
“Yeah, I just started feeling it… Wow, this one is big!”
“Here come the S waves! Jeez, Terry! Hang on!”
“My seismograph is going nuts… wait, wait…” There was the sound of crashing glass in the background and in the bathroom of the suite as the room began to sway sickeningly, the motion ramping up as Doug checked his watch, figuring ten seconds had already elapsed. In the corner, a big-screen television apparently not tied to the wall was threatening to fall over, and the bed was shaking itself into a new position as the building boomed and screeched.
Less than a tenth of a mile away at the Cascadia Convention Center, the same three employees who’d been standing watch several hours before had stepped outside. Some sort of aurora on the horizon had attracted their attention simultaneously, but as soon as they looked, it was gone. The concept of “earthquake lights” was unknown to all of them, but the light that had struck their retinas had been very real, and generated by yet another sudden movement of rock miles below.
The deep shudder of the first P wave got their immediate attention and all three instinctively moved out farther onto the circular drive and away from the large, stressed-concrete overhang. The S waves began to shake the building then, the oscillations becoming greater and greater until an earsplitting bang assaulted them. In what seemed like a slow-motion sequence, the expensive new building in front of them split in two, the divided components shuddering in place for an instant before the walls began to cascade down in a boiling cloud of concrete dust and rubble.
When the shaking stopped, nothing of the convention center was standing.
One of the three Cascadia employees reached with a shaking hand for his radio. It took four tries before his finger could find the transmit button.
As the S waves died out, Doug relaxed his grip on the bed frame. The illusion that the room was still shaking was strong, and he concluded he was shaking internally.
He raised the cell phone back to his ear.
“Terry? You still there?”
“Yeah. God, that was big!”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Probably a 7. But either it was a deep one, or the epicenter’s farther away. It had to be at least a 6.8. I’ll have the initial analysis on screen in a minute.”
“Any damage there?”
“Naw. Just my nerves. I’m… in this log cabin on the beach. It’s indestructible until the tsunami comes.”
“That was too small for a tsunami.”
“I was kidding, Doug. Hold on… yeah. 7.1.”
“And the location?”
He heard a low whistle. “Oh, God. We’d better get on the phone.”
“Why?”
“This was a surficial quake, very shallow. Big and shallow and dangerous, and it looks to me like it just mauled Olympia.”
In the Casino Ballroom, Governor Frank O’Brien had reluctantly abandoned his private pursuit of Mick’s female employee to join his wife at the head table. When the first waves arrived, he glanced in confusion at his host, and when the S waves began in earnest, the governor dove under the table, leaving the first lady to follow.
“Stay calm, everyone. We’ve been having a few quakes lately,” Mick said into the podium microphone, feeling somewhat smug for having the courage to make a calm announcement even though the shaking was scaring him profoundly. “If you’d like, just get under the tables.”
Fat lot of good that will do, he thought as he watched the majority of his guests diving under the relatively lightweight banquet tables. The chandeliers overhead were wobbling and dancing.
“Okay, it’s stopping now,” Mick added, feeling the waves beginning to subside and wondering why the heavy rumbling noises had been punctuated with a much larger roar from outside that was there for a moment, then gone.
At last the room wasn’t moving.
“All right, folks, it’s all over. I could say that was just a planned demonstration of the fact that we’re in earthquake country, but… somehow I don’t think you’d believe me. At any rate, everyone can come out now.”
He could see someone racing in from a side door and glanced over. It was Sherry, a phone to her ear and a horrified expression on her face as she ran to his side and spoke directly in his ear.
“Mick, the convention center just collapsed!”
“What do you mean, ‘collapsed’?”
“The whole thing. It’s just gone. A pile of rubble.”
EASTERN END OF CASCADIA ISLAND
Sliding the blasting cap into the puttylike cake of C-4 was the easy part, Lester thought. Having the guts to connect the two wires with wire nuts to the waiting leads from the electronic timer was the real test. He checked his hands to see how badly they were shaking, pleased to find them steady. It was his stomach that was shaking—a reaction not only to the earthquake that had hit just as he was finishing the assembly of the bomb, but also to the actual ground movement. Bull had pulled Jimmy away as planned, but Lester could hear him yelp in surprise a hundred feet distant as the earthquake started.
Carefully, he connected the first wire, screwed the plastic wire nut in place, then touched the two wires together for the second lead. Satisfied he was still alive, he secured that one as well.
The tiny LED screen had an embedded light and he flipped it on, reading the circuit continuity indicator as 100 percent. He checked his electronic watch, verified the time, selected radio control and entered the eight-digit command password, double-checked the frequency, then killed the light and closed the case.
It was ready.
All that remained was to nestle the box in the small mound of grass he’d prepared to conceal it.
He reached Bull’s side a minute later and touched Jimmy’s elbow.
“What?”
“You’ve got to be more quiet, Jimmy.”
“I am quiet.”
“You’re a frigging Indian, son! We’re supposed to be able to pass silently through a forest. You? You sound like a locomotive.”
“A what?”
“A train.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Just be very quiet.”
“All right, what’s next?” Bull asked, watching Lester unfold the map.
“We go here, here, and here,” Lester said. “Then we can retreat and light ’em up.”
“I want to punch the button,” Jimmy said.
“The button?” Lester replied, momentarily confused.
“Yeah. When the time comes, I want to punch the button.”
The sophisticated radio-controlled, digitally encoded master detonator did not have a button. It had a keyboard, but with Jimmy it was just safer to say yes and leave it at that.
“Sure, Jim. You can punch the button.”
“Can I see it?”
Lester sighed and pulled out a key ring with a car remote on the end. “This is it.”
“But, doesn’t that unlock your car?” Jimmy said.
“Yes, but after what I just put together, it also blows up the explosive.”
“Oh. Man, be careful.”
“I will. But when the time comes, you can punch it.”
“Cool.”
Chapter 23
KOMO-TV, CHANNEL 4, SEATTLE 7:42 P.M.
The decision at KOMO-TV to preempt the early-evening programming had already been under discu
ssion before the state’s capital city of Olympia started shaking. Now, with reports of massive damage to the capitol building and several other government structures, fires raging out of control in six locations, and a reported collapsed bridge on the main highway to the Pacific Coast, it was time.
Dan Lewis and Kathy Goertzen slid into their seats behind the anchor desk, aware that the station’s helicopter was en route, but still fifteen minutes away from broadcasting live pictures. Reports of damage were pouring in from other parts of the South Sound as well, none of them as catastrophic as Olympia’s situation, but enough to rivet the attention of a population that one night before had been more interested in staged reality shows than the reality of a potential earthquake.
But now it was getting personal.
Dan Lewis took the floor director’s cue.
Good evening. We’re preempting regular programming this evening to bring you continuous Team 4 coverage of the growing earthquake activity in our area. First, a significant earthquake this evening centered under Olympia has severely damaged the state capitol building for the second time in a decade, this, following this morning’s extensive impact in Bellingham from a similar earthquake. And, at the hour, perhaps an even more important story is the growing possibility that the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which provides the largest earthquake threat to the Pacific Northwest, may be on the verge of causing what’s known in seismic terms as a great earthquake. KOMO has learned that the U.S. Geological Survey is very close to doing something they almost never do: issue a specific earthquake warning which would cover a three-state area. Kathy?
NIGHTINGALE ONE, AIRBORNE
The MV Quaalatch was not where Jennifer had left it, but that fact wasn’t half the irritant her father had become.
Twenty minutes before, she’d brought the helicopter down to a fifteen-foot hover over the pitching aft deck of the crippled ferry and had been proud of her prowess at holding the Dauphin Eurocopter reasonably steady. Gail rode the hook down and prepped and lifted two patients while Sven worked the winch.
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