She gave a light laugh and came into the room, seating herself in one of the chairs opposite his desk. “I’m about to turn in. Are you coming up soon?”
“Yes. Soon. How are you doing, honey?”
“I’m tired. It was a good day, though. A lovely day. I can hardly believe it’s been forty years,” she said softly.
“I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”
She smiled. “Yes, you would. You accomplish whatever you set out to do, Carter. You always have.”
He accepted her praise with a smile. She was a good woman. He’d known she was the right one from the first time he’d seen her. And he’d been right. She’d moved from rural Iowa, the only home she’d ever known, to Washington, D.C., with a few tears but no complaints. She’d borne every one of his setbacks with stout loyalty and inexhaustible inner strength, and every triumph with quiet dignity.
Shy at heart, Iris didn’t like being in the public eye, much preferring to stay home and take care of her family. But as the companies had grown and he’d asked her to make appearances with him and even on her own, she’d handled each situation with genuine grace and the patience of a saint. She was a very, very good woman and, from the start, had proven herself worthy of his trust and affection. “You did a great job, Iris. Thank you.”
“Meg said you were already up when she went running this morning.”
He nodded, turning his head as he caught, out of the corner of his eye, televised footage of a washed-out campsite in a desert canyon. “Breaking News” flashed across the screen below the FOX News logo. Reaching for a remote, Carter brought up the sound.
“—this morning’s tragedy in Death Valley. A Park Service helicopter pilot who was investigating reports of a freak rainstorm discovered the washed-out camp of a group of college students. According to the National Weather Service, the heavy rains occurred before dawn and lasted less than an hour, but dumped two inches on the parched desert floor. The eight nineteen-year-old students, who were trekking across Death Valley as part of an attempt to raise money for a friend who’d been stricken with cancer, were apparently sleeping when a flash flood caused by the storm roared through the canyon where they’d made camp. We go now to Carmella Noyes, who is on the scene in Death Valley. Carmella, just how unusual is it for a rainstorm to—” Carter hit the Mute button.
Two inches in less than an hour. In the desert.
The air temperature in their target zone at two thirty this morning had been 98°F with a relative humidity of 11 percent. And he’d produced from that hostile environment not only clouds but clouds that had produced two inches of rain in less than one hour. He folded his hands on his desk to hide their trembling and took a slow, deep breath to contain his elation before turning back to his wife, who had just emitted a soft sniffle.
She knows better than that. He felt his brows furrow.
“What a tragedy.” She met his eyes, tears pooling in her own, and shook her head slowly. “They were so young.”
Carter sighed. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Iris. It’s an unfortunate coincidence and it’s a damned shame. We’ll send a donation to their cause.”
“Carter,” Iris began, her voice close to a whisper, “please tell me you didn’t know they were there. That it was—”
“As it happens, I didn’t know they were there. But I wouldn’t have stopped the test if I had, Iris. It’s happened before. It will happen again. We avoid it when we can, but science has always required sacrifices. You know that.”
“But—”
She’s arguing with me? His frown deepened and anger began to stir inside him. “There are no ‘buts,’ Iris. The test was a success. A huge success. Raoul is already heading out of the country to refine the procedures, and then we can begin to do what we’ve always wanted to do. What we’ve talked about doing for thirty years.” He stood and walked around the desk to take her hand. She rose out of the chair and his arms went around her as she nestled against him. Her warm, comforting curves melted into him as they had for more than forty years.
“Carter, you know I’m proud of you. You’ve achieved so much. And you’re so kind to want to use it for good,” she whispered. “But, as a mother, I just can’t help thinking about—”
“No.” Tilting her chin up so she had to look at him, Carter made sure he had a gentle smile on his face even though his voice was firm. “No, Iris, you can’t focus on those kids. Focus on the results. As a mother, you should be thinking about all the other children who will be saved. All the children whose parents have never seen rain, who have never known anything but heat and dust. The generations who have never lived anywhere but refugee camps, who have never eaten anything that wasn’t thrown to them off the back of a truck. We’re going to save them, Iris. We’re going to save so very many of them.” He pressed a kiss to her soft forehead and gave her a tight hug, which she returned.
“Where is Raoul going?”
“The Caribbean.”
Her body stiffened against him and he knew she was holding her breath. Anger stirred again and, again, he suppressed it.
“But the last time—the tests you ran there before went so terribly wrong. Those storms were so dreadful and then—” He felt her chest rise against his as she took a deep breath. It didn’t keep her voice from cracking. “It’s not going to be like last time, is it, Carter? It’s not going to be like Mitch, is it?” she whispered against his chest. “Or Ivan? Those storms were so big. So many people were hurt.”
Carter clenched his teeth. How many times had he told her that mistakes were best forgotten once you learned the lessons they offered? And he had learned plenty from the mistakes he’d made nine years ago. His first field attempt at manipulating a hurricane had had disastrous results. He’d been too eager, too full of pride, to temper his enthusiasm. Instead of proceeding with moderation and restraint, he’d gone for big results. Nature, in the form of Hurricane Mitch, had punched back hard and fast.
One of the most powerful and destructive storms of the twentieth century, Mitch left meteorologists dumbfounded as they watched its power rise and fall and rise again. Its deadly, staccato path was unprecedented and virtually unpredictable, its destructive force almost incalculable. Eleven thousand people had died; thousands more were missing or had been displaced by the time the storm finally dissipated. Mitch had nearly destroyed a country; nine years later, Honduras was still recovering.
All Carter had been able to do in reparation was have Coriolis Engineering personnel on the ground there from the moment it was safe to deploy them.
And he had heeded Nature’s lesson. He’d waited, refining his calculations and his equipment, and three years ago he’d tried again. His intervention with Hurricane Ivan had been better. The storm had been clumsy and erratic, but it had been powerful, and that in itself was success. Reminders of early failures were completely unnecessary. And Iris knew that.
“I thought you had faith in me, honey,” he said calmly, but there was a challenge in his voice.
She clutched him tighter. “Oh, Carter, of course I do. You know I do, but—”
Mollified, he tightened his embrace slightly, then stepped away, placing her at an arm’s length and holding her there while he looked directly into her eyes. Her frightened, loving blue eyes. “No ‘buts,’ Iris,” he said again, softly. “People are the inconstant variable. They always will be. But I can control the other things now. You know I can, don’t you?” He gave her a small shake. “Don’t you?”
Still wide-eyed, still silent, she nodded.
Satisfied, he relaxed his grip on her shoulders. “It won’t be like Mitch. I promise you, honey. It will be nothing like Mitch.”
Even as the soothing words were coming out of his mouth, Carter knew his sweet, gentle wife had inspired him yet again.
There was truly no better means of focusing people’s attention on the fragility of life, on the power of Nature and the vulnerability of man-made structures, than the si
mple means afforded by Nature herself.
The world, and the president, needed to be taught a lesson.
And what Carter needed to teach them that lesson was a storm.
Thursday, July 12, 11:00 A.M., 500 miles east-northeast of Barbados
Raoul heard Carter’s rasp through his headphones and mostly ignored it, though part of his focus shifted.
He wasn’t getting too old for this shit; he was getting too bored with it.
The first few years, when they’d been doing the real research, had been interesting. Doing all the test runs while they were testing laser strengths and sensor life cycles had been a challenge, and plotting courses to find shitty weather and meddle with it had been a change from what pilots usually did, which was plotting courses to avoid it. But that had been more than a decade ago. For the past five years, every test run had been more or less the same as the one that preceded it. The scenery changed and occasionally the crew did, but procedures and results were essentially the same with small variations.
The last real excitement had been in the nineties when Carter had begun playing with hurricanes. Fucking madman. At first they’d deliberately stirred things up in East Africa to get some storms going. As far as Raoul was concerned, that was Carter’s first mistake. The flooding had gotten out of control too damned fast.
You just don’t fuck with the Nile.
Unless you’re Carter Thompson, who thought it was his right since his company would be the one called in to repair the damaged infrastructure.
By the time they’d finally manufactured a storm that had done what he wanted it to, which was blow out to the Atlantic, Carter had decided to use that storm to test his newest contraption, a laser that could superheat swaths of the ocean surface. It had been late in the hurricane season in 1998. Carter had been attempting to simply cause more rain by increasing the amount of water vapor in the air. What he got was Hurricane Mitch, which tore the hell out of the Caribbean and Central America. About as unnerved as Raoul had ever known him to be, Carter had immediately canceled the rest of the field tests—a bloody miracle, that—and hadn’t trotted out the updated version until 2004. That debacle spawned Ivan, which chewed up most of the southeastern U.S.
After that, Carter had gotten more cautious and more paranoid and had started spacing the tests further apart and in more disparate locations. One result was that during the last few years Raoul had had less to do and more time to think about what he was doing.
And what he was doing was despicable.
He could have dismissed it as a midlife attack of conscience, but the reality was that he could no longer fool himself into believing the foundation’s activities were as benign as they had once been. Raoul had become a millionaire at some point in the last few years, which was more than he’d ever thought he’d be, but the hunger for excitement that had once driven him was gone. He had no passion left in him. Carter knew it, and Raoul was certain that was part of the reason he was six thousand feet above the Central Atlantic right now. Carter had made it clear he wouldn’t let Raoul retire without a fight, and it seemed to Raoul as if they both knew the time for that fight was drawing near.
He adjusted the volume on his headset and acknowledged the second squawk.
“We’re on approach,” he said, bringing his full attention back to the bank of clouds ahead and below him. “We’ll drop the sensor on eight and initiate the laser on one. Over.”
“Proceed, Earth-Four.”
His co-pilot began the countdown and his flight director launched the sensor and initiated the laser on cue. The clouds boiled over and the plane bucked in the sudden turbulence. Raoul banked and increased altitude, watching the churn beneath him with dispassionate eyes.
It was another fucking storm, another fucking dollar. Maybe his last.
CHAPTER 10
After floating parched and light for so long over hot lands, the dust-laden wind had reached the sea and spread across the limitless sky. Impregnated with salt and heavy with water vapor, it drifted destinationless over the waves, spiraling lazily as it rose and fell in tropical eddies. Cooling currents aloft kept it from reaching the heavens. Warmth from the sunlit water kept it buoyant as it flowed, unhurried, to the west.
More than two miles beneath those eddies, along the long, jagged seam where the earth nudges the northern continents farther apart and inexorably widens the sea, life simmered around a meandering chain of steep hydrothermal vents.
The vents functioned according to the imperatives of Nature as they had for millennia. Without agenda, with no awareness of consequences or purpose, they had laid the foundations of civilization and trade, of art and greed and war, as their effluvia layered the ancient ocean floor with copper, gold, and other metals Man would eventually find and desire. The freestanding chimneys, many rising nearly two hundred feet above the seafloor and grouped intermittently along a line that roughly paralleled the spreading center, were the pathways for toxic clouds of superheated minerals the earth released from her deepest recesses.
Ceaselessly, the primitive, elemental spew emerged from the vertical chambers at temperatures reaching 750°F and combined with the dense, icy water to birth an impenetrable, poisonous black fog that billowed with hellish fury. Pushed skyward by unimaginable pressure from the chimney, the dark cloud alters in density, in chemical makeup, in salinity, until it has inevitably altered itself beyond distinction and become part of the sea. Its fearsome heat also dissipated on the journey.
On reaching the surface currents, the column of primeval heated water represents little more than the earth’s eternal contribution to the steady, timeless current that sweeps warm African waters to the temperate shores of Caribbean Islands and North America before turning to the east to bring its warmth to Europe.
This day, however, the earth’s crust shifted minutely, accelerating infinitesimally the movement of magma through her caverns. Its rhythm altered, a single white-hot wave moved through the sea of molten rock with a different intensity until, encountering the vented chamber and the sudden reduction in the pressure upon it, the wave released its excess energy and so returned to entropy.
Surging forward with greater force than usual, the superheated ejecta rose higher, hotter, and faster through the water column. Even so, when it pushed through the distant surface, its content mostly was dispersed, its fury mostly abated, retaining but a fraction of its birthright heat.
Still, that heat was greater than that of the surrounding water.
The ancient, geothermal vapors held enough discrete warmth to distend the surface wave it fractured on its release, and to extend minutely that wave’s errant slap at the wind. The barely warmer air rising from the surface collided with the well-traveled particles resting on a languorous breeze softly sweeping the midday sea.
Excited by the burst of wet warmth that had risen from the waves, the wandering eddy embraced it. As the eddy rose in a slowly accelerating swirl, its speed, heat, and moisture proved an irresistible attraction to other low-lying banks of torpid air. The gathering winds spiraled toward the picturesque scattered cirrostratus clouds overhead, like a novice dervish practicing its art.
Twenty minutes later an arrow of intense, man-made heat shot down from above, searing the heart of the spiraling winds. Photons scattered, evaporating molecules of water vapor and transforming their latent energy into the cell of an embryonic storm. Recovering only slightly from the instantaneous blast of excitation and fury, the superheated air spun upward, climbing hundreds of feet as its appetite for the dense, warm air beneath it became voracious, sucking it in, and devouring it.
Now part of the emerging vortex, the particles would next meet at a distant landfall.
CHAPTER 11
Thursday, July 12, 12:00 P.M., McLean, Virginia
Jake was poised to lock his computer when he heard the soft chime that announced new e-mails. He knew he could safely ignore them. He wasn’t expecting anything urgent, and besides, he was already on his feet, mor
e than ready to head to the large cafeteria to have lunch and a brief respite from the electronic glow of his computer screens. But, like everyone else in the place, he was addicted, so he clicked on the icon in his status bar. His e-mail application appeared on the screen displaying eleven new messages at the top, color-coded according to sender. Only one caught his attention.
He sat down again and clicked to open the broadcast message from the U.S. National Weather Service. Nearly an hour ago, a rapid and unanticipated escalation had turned an unnamed tropical depression in the Central Atlantic into Tropical Storm Simone.
Lunch was forgotten.
Thursday, July 12, 12:10 P.M., Financial District, New York City
“Did you not get my e-mail or are you trying to tell me something?”
Kate swiveled to see Lisa Baynes, the newest addition to the meteorology staff, standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. Only two years out of her undergraduate program, Lisa had already been head-hunted by most of the firms on the Street. Kate had made her the offer she couldn’t refuse—more money and an office with a door, plus a generous cab-fare allowance—and she’d happily left one of the big brokerage houses down the block to work for Coriolis.
Kate raised an eyebrow and gave her a mock frown. “Something like ‘you’re fired’ because you refused to help me when you saw me stranded in that tent talking to Ted Burse?”
Lisa put up her hands in surrender. “Hey, talk to the hand. I got stuck sitting next to him on the flight out there and I was ready to kill myself before the landing gear was up. Besides, at those kinds of parties, it’s every woman for herself.”
“Some team attitude.”
“Martyrdom is not in my job description.”
Kate laughed. “When did you send the e-mail?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“Then I didn’t get it. I have it set to update every twenty minutes.”
The younger woman’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? What if something comes up? Like, something important.”
Category 7 Page 9