Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  The storms he’d been analyzing had taken place across several months and across a widely dispersed area roughly bounded by the equator, the north of France, the west coast of the U.S., and the eastern edge of Africa. If they were man-made storms, this wild disparity could only have been a deliberate attempt to disguise them. When the list was aligned by date, it reflected normal, random weather. But when he realigned the list according to the storms’ locations irrespective of their dates of occurrence, he noticed a pattern emerge. The timing clumped, and when translated to universal time, the clumping became even more apparent: Regardless of the month, year, or geographical location, each of the storms had commenced within the same two-hour time frame.

  From a meteorological perspective, it was a pretty damned weak correlation. Storms could spring up at any time based on local conditions, and while it might look like a pattern, it was completely random. But from an intelligence perspective, it looked like evidence that could help triangulate the location of the perpetrator. The timing corresponded to early evening in the Middle East, early afternoon in Africa, late morning in Britain. Pre-dawn in the continental U.S.

  He’d been told to assume the operations were based within the U.S. borders.

  He reached for his coffee cup, realized it had been hours since he’d filled it, and dropped his hand.

  Could be our pals are early risers.

  Could be they prefer light traffic on their communication channels.

  Or want to stay under the cover of Nature while they’re operating within our borders.

  If it hadn’t been for Wayne’s genius at unearthing barely noticeable discrepancies, most of these storms would have gone unnoticed by anyone other than a local weather expert, and no one without a reason to do so would have grouped them like he had. And, as a group, they were impressive in their similarities, which, if reviewed through the lens of being a coordinated effort, were chilling.

  Jake ran through the list of locations again, even though he had it committed to memory at this point. None of the locales were urban, and most were rural or uninhabited, making them perfect test beds. The storms that had taken place within the U.S. had begun before dawn, making their initiation invisible to the local inhabitants. Natural early-morning convection cycles had further helped to mask each storm’s abrupt escalation.

  Other than the recent Death Valley storm, the U.S.-based storms had caused no deaths and only moderate damage to infrastructure. That made them non-events in the minds of the media. And if the media don’t pay attention, neither does the rest of the world.

  Damn it. Whoever these terrorists were, they were no ivory tower academicians. They were playing to win.

  He went back to the satellite footage of the most recent U.S. storm, Death Valley. Running the radar and infrared feeds simultaneously on a split screen with near-surface measurements tracking on another monitor, he viewed the images slowly, almost frame-by-frame. He watched the cloud cover and the rain bands from the radar readings, comparing them with wind speed and direction, relative humidity, then core temperature and lightning strikes. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but just like Justice Potter Stewart had said about porn, Jake had a feeling he’d know what he was looking for when he saw it.

  An hour later, eyes burning from the glare of the screens, he saw it, zooming in and replaying it four times to be sure he wasn’t imagining it.

  He wasn’t. Adrenaline poured into his bloodstream and his brain switched to red alert. There, in the seconds before escalation, a blip appeared that was different from the rest of the lightning strikes. Under the highest resolution, the thin streak showed a higher heat than any strikes recorded during the storm, lasted for a full second less than the average strike, and appeared to blast the very center of the convection cell. And the heat’s vector was dead straight.

  Lightning was never perfectly straight.

  Leaving the image frozen on the screen, Jake swiveled to another monitor and typed in a rapid command to pull up lightning strike data collected on the ground. Scrolling through the hundreds of lines of data, he slowed as he reached the significant time and scanned the numbers closely, enlarging them on the screen to ensure he’d read them accurately.

  Nothing.

  He sat back in his chair for a moment, breathing as if he’d just sprinted up a flight of stairs.

  Only one piece of machinery could produce that sort of heat pulse with that sort of trajectory.

  The sons of bitches were using some sort of laser.

  He put his hands back on his keyboard and began reviewing the available data for each of the storms. An hour and a half later, he’d corroborated his findings on all of the domestic storms and as many as he could of the foreign storms. The signatures were close enough to the experiments in the seventies to possibly be the next generation.

  Mr. Taylor, we have an answer.

  CHAPTER 35

  Simone continued her deadly, destructive, northerly path, hugging the U.S. coastline and smashing homes, businesses, and lives without leave or apology. Shaking off her reticence, Simone turned suddenly when she reached the Southern jewel-box city of Charleston, South Carolina, and let her winds venture farther inland. The eye of the storm, that tranquil core, stopped short of making landfall, preferring to send its signature call sign, a towering storm surge, ahead of it. The city, well used to feeling the awesome effects of an angry sea and fortified against it, stood tall. Her residents, the few who had remained, cowered before the twin furies of wind and water.

  The small constellation of luxury-oriented barrier islands took the brunt of the storm’s new strength, their balconied, glass-fronted homes shattering on impact. Expensive debris was flung with abandon along stretches of rapidly eroding beaches and hurtled inland to litter the roadways and gardens now flooded with the wrath of a writhing, moonless sea. Trees that had withstood more than a century of storms snapped, their tops rushing through the air like tumbleweeds, their torsos crashing to the ground, buckling houses, pancaking cars, pulling down wires. Water rushed into homes immune for decades, trapping their terrified inhabitants, who fled up elegant twisting staircases better suited for graceful descents. Wrought ironwork lost its allure as bars and grates were wrenched free of their brick moorings and flung like missiles through walls and storm shutters, embedding themselves in whatever didn’t splinter on impact.

  The leading winds curled into the inland suburbs, wrapping them in a deadly embrace. Row upon row of newer homes were ripped from their foundations, exploded, and shattered like so many dollhouses smashed by an undisciplined child, their contents scattered obscenely for miles. The surging muddy water rose past bureaucrats’ worst-case predictions, forcing its stench and violence into the schools where thousands huddled, clinging to misguided assurances of security. Roofs were peeled back like foil wrap, letting in the torrents and airborne debris. Panicked parents clutched terrified children, and elders were abandoned to their fates as water swamped them from below andpummeled them from above. The filthy surge blocked their escape as it pushed against doors that needed to be pulled, turned wide hallways into flash-flooding rivers, and transformed broad, banistered staircases into raging, sucking cataracts.

  Churning in the overly warm continental shallows, Simone picked up speed and slammed into North Carolina’s Outer Banks with a fury beyond the scope of words before swerving back to the sea and resuming her parallel track. Coastal dwellers farther north in Norfolk and Richmond, making slow progress into the highlands, felt the merest shred of hope that they might be spared the full wrath of the storm.

  In the nation’s capital, the recommendation to evacuate had been rephrased as an order, and the roads north and west were waterlogged and filled with anxious residents and terrified visitors. Rain pounded the drenched city, flooding even the quaint, exclusive high ground, turning hilltop streets into cascading torrents of filthy water. Waves slapped at the upper steps of the Jefferson Memorial, having already obliterated the elegant Ellipse.
The Washington Monument stood proud, a pale, slender, unlit obelisk atop a small hillock of green that continued to shrink in the face of the unprecedented deluge.

  Boats rode high in the marinas dotting the shores of the Potomac. Tilted at precarious angles as their mooring lines pulled them down in a parody of security, they rocked into pilings, making contact several feet above the docks’ protective bumpers. National Airport had closed, its primary runways submerged with the brackish water and vast quantity of debris coughed up by the Potomac’s tidal churn.

  New York City, no stranger to devastation or threats and no weakling when faced with defending itself, recommended to its citizens that they consider seeking shelter away from the shorelines in the face of Simone’s expansive reach. And New Yorkers, life hardened and incapable of abandoning their city, ignored the warning.

  And then Simone, furious, fickle Simone, swept into the open ocean and that warm, nurturing river within it, the Gulf Stream. Twelve hours later, replenished and confident, the once sluggish storm had become a raging monarch and meteorologists reluctantly acknowledged she was now a Category 5.

  CHAPTER 36

  Sunday, July 22, 5:20 A.M., Midtown, New York City

  Carter sat in his Midtown apartment, staring through the large window at the choppy rows of skyscrapers and the neon signs that never stopped glowing. The early-morning sky was dark gray and overcast, with clouds layered thickly across its expanse. The first true rains from Simone were on their way and mandatory evacuation of the city was being discussed with increasing intensity on the news, the talking heads breathless with an almost orgasmic need to be the first to announce the impending order.

  He hadn’t slept for much of the night, too busy researching how his storms were being discussed on weather blogs and conspiracy sites, whether anything about Kate’s paper could point back to him. So far, nothing had. In fact, everything pointed to government experimentation.

  The unnaturally good weather the country had enjoyed earlier in the summer hadn’t gone unnoticed by the conspiracy theorists, deep-ecology groups, and weather renegades, and it had only fortified the arguments and charges they had been leveling at the government for more than a decade: that HAARP, the government’s huge array of antennae in remote Gerona, Alaska, was being used to alter the weather. The difference was that, now, even the real science community had gotten concerned over that prolonged and unnatural northerly flow of the jet stream. Its sudden and relatively recent return to normality had been followed closely by a dramatic rise in bad weather. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone; localized storms routinely formed in the Caribbean and the Gulf, spinning up out of warm waters and over land only to crash into cool fronts that swept down from the Rockies.

  But that hadn’t happened this summer. Gulf waters, which had reached record high temperatures, should have been releasing that heat through typical summer storms but hadn’t until recently. And now those late-forming storms were getting larger and were joining forces with the atmospheric chaos created by Simone. And the one thread that was running hot and heavy through every discussion was the cause of it all. The only explanation that recurred with much frequency was HAARP.

  For centuries, the jet stream, a consistent band of relatively stable air, had sped eastward across Canada and the U.S., undulating seasonally like damp sheets on a clothesline, arching and dipping according to the recombinations of millions of constantly changing variables. The one thing that had never varied to any large degree was its overall motion. Decades of monitoring had shown that, proven that. Never before in recorded history had it dipped so dramatically and remained virtually stationary for so long, keeping weather patterns benign for an entire continent.

  As the liberal talking heads and bloggers liked to point out, never before had any government had the means to make those things happen.

  Not that the average person in the street or on the farm had complained until Simone arrived on the scene. Why should they, when the result for the nation had been nearly two months of perfect summer weather? Crops had surged toward early ripeness and high yields. The tourism trade had burgeoned. Employment figures rose and crime figures fell, and politicians had gotten used to basking in the glow of mostly happy constituencies.

  Conservative TV pundits were dismissing global warming as a scaremonger’s tactic while televangelists were trying to bolster profits by declaring it the calm before the apocalyptic storm. Meanwhile Europe shivered in one of the chilliest summers on record while Mexico withered under an unrelenting drought.

  Carter didn’t really care about any of that. He had bigger issues on his mind. Like the arrogance of the president, tampering with global weather to fuel his own popularity. Like how Simone was going to teach the man a lesson he’d never forget. If he survived.

  Undoubtedly the president would survive. The nation’s capital was already feeling the distant, undeniable fury of Simone’s presence, and the president and his family had already been moved to a secure location. As had the vice president, the cabinet, and most of the Congress. The very people who should suffer the most.

  Carter stared at the bleak skyline and sought to redirect his fury. He would prevail. Meteorologists were already fascinated with his mercurial creation. She had intensified much faster than Carter had anticipated, especially considering that Raoul had failed to execute the operation as ordered. However, as if in support of Carter’s plan, Simone had grown to a Category 5 on her own. The added boost of the laser, whenever it happened—and it would—would intensify beyond description whatever was under way naturally. New categories might need to be created. Perhaps Category 6 or even Category 7.

  The natural amplification Simone had already undergone would only serve to further camouflage his actions.

  He walked away from the window, his mind years and miles away. For years he had been telling anyone who would listen that all the world needed was one bad nuclear accident and life as the world had known it would be a memory, replaced by slow, horrifying, near-ubiquitous death. Few had listened to him. Winslow Benson had, and had taken his data and bastardized it, corrupted it beyond recognition, and had returned it to the public arena in an assault on Carter’s reputation that had burned with radioactive fervor. Like the subject matter, Winslow Benson’s twisted argument had a long, damaging half-life and had been trotted out as a “counterpoint” during discussions ever since. It remained corrosive even now. But not for long.

  Carter was going to be the triumphant one soon. In less than a week, everyone would get to see the results of what Winslow Benson stood for: Nuclear power. Environmental destruction so horrific there weren’t words to describe it. Deadly pollution with a radioactive half-life longer than mankind’s remaining presence on earth.

  Checking his watch, Carter headed for the shower. He would complete his business with Davis Lee and Kate, then head back to Iowa, where he would stay, surrounded by his family, until the holocaust was under way. If and when Richard Carlisle’s body was found, Carter would be long gone.

  Sunday, July 22, 6:00 A.M., DUMBO, Brooklyn

  Kate never had liked surprises, and hearing Jake Baxter’s voice on the other end of her cell phone at six o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t a good surprise. The fact that he was calling from his car on the street in front of her apartment was even less of one.

  She buzzed him in, using the few minutes it took him to get to the fourth floor to throw on clothes and brush her teeth. Her hair would have to wait.

  When she pulled open her front door, there he stood. He looked as bad as she did, only more tired.

  “Hi.”

  She knew her expression was less than welcoming, which was fine, considering that his was less than repentant. “I don’t suppose you have flowers in that backpack.”

  He frowned in mild confusion. “No. My laptop, a toothbrush, and clean underwear.”

  She stepped aside and gestured for him to enter her apartment. “I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some or hav
e you had enough?”

  “If you have the same kind—”

  “No turnpike coffee. I buy it from a little Ethiopian man on the Lower East Side. He roasts his own.”

  “Then I’ll have some,” he replied, setting his backpack on the floor and glancing around the living room. “Nice place.”

  “Thanks.” She closed the door and crossed the small space to her closet-sized kitchen. “How was the trip up?”

  “A lot longer than five hours. D.C. and the eastern shore of Maryland are under mandatory evacuation orders. Crappy drivers, heavy rain, and a generalized sense of panic make for a long ride north. I think every hotel from the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the George Washington Bridge is booked solid.”

  “Well, they’re all going to have to get out of Dodge. Have you heard the latest?”

  “No. I needed a break and listened to music for the last few hours.”

  “She didn’t make landfall as everyone predicted. She did an about-face off the North Carolina coast and headed straight for the Gulf Stream. She’s now a Category 5 and her forward speed is picking up.”

  Jake looked at Kate with a frown. “How do you know that? Were you up when I called?”

  She finished measuring the coffee into the machine and looked at him. “No. I got up a few hours ago for a little while. My sister lives in LA and works third shift. Sometimes she forgets that normal people sleep during those hours. Anyway, I checked the Web before I went back to sleep. So what is it that couldn’t wait until I’d finished sleeping?”

  “Yeah, uh, sorry about that.”

  “So you said,” she replied dryly. “So?”

  “I finished reading your paper and noticed that you thanked Richard Carlisle at the end of it.”