“Could we yank it off the bottom with a large tug? How well anchored is it?”
“The main section is impermeable. It’ll be there two hundred years from now. The wings… well, if you could break them free of the attach points, they could be dragged seaward, but you’d need an oceangoing tug. You’d have to drag them out, though, because they’re backed by solid concrete footings. So just detaching them wouldn’t be enough.”
“Thank you, Professor. I warn you, I might need to call back.”
“That’s… all right. I’m wide awake and considerably worried.”
Doug rang off, letting the information ricochet around his head. He was tempted to dial the man back and ask the weight of the so-called wings, but what was the difference if they couldn’t even detach them, let alone pull them out of position?
He called Terry back and ran through the conversation.
“Damnit! Can’t we try something?”
“You have any bright ideas?”
“Yeah, head for the hills. But if there’s a way to solve this and slow that mother down, we’ve got to try it.”
“Even if Mick Walker agrees to destroy his creation, how do we do it?” Doug wondered.
“You did consider the Navy, right?”
“There’s no way the Navy’s going to send something out here big enough to shell a shore installation with people on the island. Besides, I think that takes a battleship, and they don’t have any left.”
“Well, you mentioned an oceangoing tug. What if there’s one close by?”
“I was thinking that. We could try calling through the Coast Guard. Undoubtedly they know who to call.”
“Or, there’s always dynamite.”
“But where would we get that much in time? And besides, Terry… oh, brother…”
The floor had begun vibrating again.
“What?”
“Another tremor.”
“Uh, oh. Yeah, I feel it here. Hang on!”
The shaking lasted no more than ten seconds, then subsided.
Doug continued, his vocal register a little higher and more strained than before. “What I was saying is that we have no real reason to believe that we can actually slow it down now. The pin has obviously been pulled from the grenade.”
Terry’s voice conveyed a weary tone of defeat. “I guess I knew that. I know it’s just a matter of hours.”
Doug sighed. “You go ahead and get out of there, Terry. I’ll check with the Coast Guard and leave by helicopter as soon as possible.”
There was a long sigh. “God, I wish we could have done something, Doug.”
“I know. Take care, my friend. I’ll see you back in Seattle.”
“Right,” Terry replied, his tone carrying an undercurrent of doubt that Doug would ever make it off the island.
CASCADIA ISLAND HELIPORT
The big National Guard Chinook lifted off from the hotel parking lot with fifteen injured people aboard, including the governor, his wife, and daughter. They were headed directly for Madigan Army Hospital at Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma. But there were still eleven other injured guests to evacuate, and Jennifer was moving now between two ambulances to determine who had to go first. The rest of the Nightingale fleet was inbound, and the decision on whether to risk the Dauphin or wait for the heavier helicopters was weighing heavily on her when a hand landed gently on her shoulder, accompanied by a deep male voice she really did not want to hear.
“Jennifer? I need your help.”
The icy expression she turned on Doug was as much a defensive reaction as an expression of anger, but within ten minutes they were walking together toward the Dauphin as a startled Sven turned to appraise the situation. She inclined her head toward Doug.
“I need to fly him briefly over that artificial reef.”
“What?”
She had her hand up. “Don’t ask, Dad. Just take off the tiedowns.”
Doug climbed into the left seat of the Dauphin and shut the door, fumbling for his seat belt as Jennifer pulled on her headset and began the start sequence.
“Hang on,” she said. “We’re in for a very rough ride.”
The Dauphin was rocking in the thirty-knot winds even with the rotor up to speed.
She pulled on the collective and the Dauphin leapt from the pad, tilting dangerously to the left. A quick pulse of the cyclic to the right dampened the roll and within a few seconds they were moving forward and climbing through twenty feet, safely away.
The turbulence was nothing short of frightening, and Jennifer could see Doug was literally hanging on to the edge of the copilot’s seat, his knuckles white. She settled into the task of riding out each gust, but the controls were in constant motion.
“Okay, where do you want to go?” she said over the intercom, her voice all business.
He pointed straight ahead.
“See the concrete barrier out there?”
“The wave thing? The one that causes the waterspouts?”
He nodded energetically. “Yes. The waterspout thing occurs at the center of it. It’s kind of like a long, swept-back, curved wing. I need to look at the outer forty feet or so of each side.”
“How close?”
“As close as you can safely get.”
As if on cue, a towering explosion of water shot skyward less than a quarter mile away, and she altered course to the south side of the structure, avoiding the corrosive mist that remained in the air after the tons of salt water had crashed back down.
Rain had begun again, although it was light and sporadic, splattering the canopy of the Dauphin while the rotorwash tried to blow it off.
“Okay, right around that end,” he said. “Can you put the spotlight on it?”
The wind was blowing from the same direction they were flying, their speed through the air a comfortable seventy knots, but the Dauphin was actually moving over the surface of the water at forty knots. She slowed until they were barely moving over the surface, aiming for the right side of the concrete reef. Doug pressed his nose to the forward left side of the canopy, straining to see. She snapped on the Night Sun searchlight and toggled its small joystick on the top of the cyclic with the thumb of her right hand.
“You may want to open the door,” she said. “For a better look.”
Doug shot her a worried glance and she chuckled in spite of herself.
“Don’t worry. I won’t boot you out.”
“Thanks!”
“Not that it isn’t a tempting idea.”
Doug reached down and cinched up his seat belt even tighter before working the handle and cracking open the door against the hurricane of cold wind. The thermal onslaught instantly sucked at his body heat, dragging it through his pores and his coat, the wind blasting his eyes and face as he struggled to make out what he was looking at below.
“Can you get any lower?” he asked.
“Yes, but not without getting more salt spray in the engines. How low do you need?”
“As close as you dare, Jen. I see the end splices… at least I think I do.”
“And why are they important, again?”
“You see that break… that line in the structure? Just below us?”
She used the rudder pedals to yaw the Dauphin to the left slightly, following his gesture.
“I think so.”
“If there’s a way to detach the outer portion at that joint on both sides, I’m thinking we could get a big tug to yank them out to sea, or at least get them pulled far enough…” His voice trailed off.
“What?”
There was a sigh transmitted over the intercom and she thought she saw his shoulders droop. “No. This is impossible,” he said.
“Is it? Why?”
“Look at the way the pieces interlock, and how massive that thing is. I don’t know how they barged it in to begin with.”
Jennifer slowed the Dauphin, matching her forward airspeed against the windspeed and achieving a surprisingly steady hover. She studied the str
ucture in the Dauphin’s searchlight, moving the focal point of the light back and forth along the dark crevice of the splice.
“Has Mick Walker agreed to disassemble it?”
“The whole island is toast, Jennifer. He’s acquiesced.”
“Really? Are you sure of that? Somehow I can’t picture Walker agreeing with your theory even now.”
“Point is,” Doug continued, “what’s the difference if it goes or stays? The island is now useless for a resort, the entire project is a disaster, and if there’s one iota of a chance that breaking up this wave barrier will delay a gigantic earthquake, he won’t stand in the way.”
They studied the barrier in silence for nearly a minute as she kept them fifty feet above it.
“You really think this would make a difference? To get rid of it, I mean?”
He nodded, his lips tight in concentration.
“Well, how about dynamite? Is there any on the island?”
Doug was shaking his head and searching for the interphone button.
“I asked. They don’t have any they’ll admit to. Anyway, it would take a huge amount and looking at it in person, I don’t know how the hell you’d attach it, or detonate it, you know?”
“It could be done.”
He turned to her, his expression startled. “How?”
“Either radio control or a long detonator line… pack the charge in two separate bags connected by a heavy rope, drop one in front, the other behind, with the rope over the top, then move away and trigger it.”
“You make it sound easy,” Doug said.
“No. Not easy. Just possible. But you’d need enough explosive power to do the job. Just chipping the concrete a little wouldn’t be enough. You said forty feet either side?”
He nodded, then brightened. “Wait. What we need is to ruin the compound curves of the thing so the waves won’t reinforce themselves. Any large hole in it might work.”
She turned right and flew to the northwest end of the structure and dropped the Dauphin down to less than ten feet above it, pointing to the spliced area.
“Doug, you said they brought those end pieces in on a barge. I don’t see how they could have floated them in if they’re solid. I think they’re hollow, like those on the Seattle floating-bridge sections.”
“And if they are?”
“Well, you blow a hole in the front part of a hollow structure, it’s going to fill with water. Won’t that do the trick?”
Doug shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You said any disruption to the waveform, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’d say it’s worth a try. If each wave is a carefully formed critical thing, then hitting a huge hole will screw it up.”
“Maybe. But where we could get explosives at the last minute I have no idea.”
“Doug, are those steel hooks on top?”
“Where?”
“There. Along the entire length of those end pieces.”
His head was against the Plexiglas trying to see the barrier.
“I think so. You’re thinking of lifting them with a helicopter?”
Jennifer laughed. “Not even a Skycrane could lift those. But you mentioned tugs, and at least they’d have something to latch on to.”
“I’m ready,” he said.
“For what?”
“To go back.”
She nodded and turned the Dauphin away from the wind for a rapid flight back to the helipad. The mission accomplished, they fell silent for a few moments, the noise of the helicopter’s engine and rotor partially muffled by the noise-cancelling headsets into a dull roar.
“Jennifer?”
She turned slightly.
“Yes?”
“Are you ready to tell me what you are so angry about?”
“You haven’t figured it out?”
“No.”
“After hiding in your hotel room with a bathrobed bimbo while I made a fool of myself banging on the door, you still don’t know?”
He was silent for a few seconds while the images coalesced.
“Oh, jeez, Jennifer! You’re the one who sent that blank piece of paper and saw us at the door and thought the worst, didn’t you?”
“I think the colloquial term is busted.”
“No, you’re grossly misinterpreting the whole thing. She’s an engineer named Diane Lacombe.”
“How nice for you. All I had was an MBA, and we know how limiting that can be in bed.”
“Jen, she’s the one who sent me the e-mail and brought the seismic data. We got caught in a downpour on the way back from the casino where she found me and she was just drying out. Nothing sexual was happening. This was purely technical.”
She chuckled ruefully. “So, you two were just screwing for scientific reasons? Maybe discussing the engineering theory of human coitus, and it wasn’t like an enjoyable boy-girl thing, right?”
“We were not, as you put it, ’screwing’!”
“Okay, I see… the bellman interrupted your foreplay! How anticlimactic of him, to coin a phrase.”
“Jen, be serious! I never even met the woman before tonight.”
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Doug, you’re shocked I don’t believe you as easily as I believed that your phone calls from Menlo Park last spring were really from Menlo Park. Maybe I’m wising up.”
“Menlo Park? I was in Menlo Park when I said I was.”
“Except when you took your estranged wife on a cruise, had your picture taken in Alaska, and decided to lie to me about it.”
“What?”
“I saw the picture.”
They fell silent for nearly a minute.
“Jennifer, I love you, but you are an exasperating woman. All action, control, and snap decisions, and no trust. You’re wrong about Diane Lacombe, and you’re wrong about Alaska.”
“We’ll talk later, as I said.”
Jennifer was silent as she overflew the helipad and swung the Dauphin back into the wind for the approach and landing.
“In other words,” he continued, “I love you, I have not betrayed or cheated on you, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re not through.”
“Wish that was true,” she said, half mumbling.
She sat the helicopter down harder than normal, quickly unloading the blades as Sven and two other men she had not seen before rushed up to tie it down.
“Okay, you’ve had your free flight,” she said as she ran through the shutdown checklist. “Now we’ve got to evacuate this island.”
“I may need you again.”
Her right hand flailed at the air in front of her. “What does that mean? Personally or professionally, you may need me?”
“The helicopter. If there’s any hope of blowing that thing up.”
“Oh.”
“Can you stand by for a few minutes while I call the guy that designed it?”
“Go ahead.”
“And, yes, I was worried about your seeing Alex Jamison again. You still melt when his name is mentioned.”
“I do not,” she said, her face visibly reddening even in the subdued light. Jamison was an obscenely wealthy cofounder of the world’s largest software company who’d wined, dined, and romanced her for a year before deciding that any female over twenty-five was too old for him. She had almost fallen in love with him, and the rejection had been confusing and impossible to understand, since there was nothing she could do about changing her age to fit his new criteria. Alex had been scheduled to be at the gala opening, but she hadn’t seen him. Yet the fact that his presence had worried Doug was somehow confusing her feelings about his conduct with ex-wives and female engineers.
Jennifer stole a glance at him, eager not to appear swayed, but he was hunched over the copilot’s cyclic pressing his cell phone to his ear, apologizing to someone for calling so late again. She interpreted the other side of the conversation from his reactions and w
ords as Sven flashed her a questioning glance from outside. Jennifer held up an index finger to wait, wondering why she was indulging him. The unsettling possibility that she could have misinterpreted everything was eroding her defenses, like an acid of self-doubt eating away at her decision to end the relationship.
“Okay, Professor,” he was saying. “So they are hollow, and any large hole would exponentially reduce the wave-formation effectiveness, right? Okay, wave concentration effectiveness.” He listened and nodded a few more times before speaking again. “Okay, you mean anything placed in front of it would do the job?”
He snapped the phone closed before turning to her.
“Jen, if you’re flying evacuation missions, does that mean all the way back to Seattle, or just across the channel?”
“Across the channel. We have the bigger birds inbound to do the medical evacs.”
“I’ve got to find explosives. If I can, I’ll need you to fly me back out there.”
She nodded, suppressing the need to ask him just how in hell he thought he could place them by himself.
Chapter 34
CASCADIA ISLAND HOTEL 12:12 A.M.
Diane Lacombe stood in the shadows under an emergency exit stairway too stunned to move. She’d put the file she’d taken from Walker’s office in her bag, which she’d retrieved from her room and left in the lobby earlier. Her deepening concern over who had watched her in the office had caused her to double back to the lobby-level stairwell during another small tremor. It might already be too late, she reasoned, but there was a chance whoever it was might not have had time to leave the upper floors and get lost in the crowd of evacuees. If so, maybe she could spot him.
Ten minutes and two more small tremors had passed before she heard a stairwell door on an upper floor open and close quietly. Footsteps moved progressively downward, their owner stopping at intervals, apparently listening for any indication that someone might be waiting or watching. She adjusted herself in the shadows to be all but invisible and still have a clear view of anyone coming off the stairs. Whoever was coming, she would have to memorize the face in order to pick it out later in the crowd of refugees.
The approaching footsteps reached the bottom, and her boss, Jerry Schultz, pushed through the exit door to the lobby, carrying a red folder in his hand.
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