Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  “The lasers are extremely powerful, sir, with a midrange beam, and are designed to destroy materiél or other assets by superheating them. It exploded armored tanks in field trials.”

  Jake sensed Kate’s shudder.

  “How quickly?”

  “Under ten minutes.”

  Tom turned to Jake. “All you need is something to produce enough heat to evaporate vapor at the bottom of the storm, right?”

  “Well, not too much, because then we’ll just help build the storm.”

  “So sucking up hot, dry air will have the same effect as sucking up hot, wet air?” Tom asked, exasperated.

  “No, a hurricane needs moisture because that’s where the energy is,” Kate interjected.

  “So we send in a few drones to blast the shit out of the bottom of the storm, drying it up. Then what happens?” Tom demanded.

  “In theory, the storm cell will disintegrate and the storm will fragment. But it could rebuild itself,” she explained.

  Tom shrugged. “Then we just keep at it to make sure it doesn’t.”

  “If I could just make the point that if the beams are just directed into the atmosphere, instead of at a solid target—”

  Tom cut her off. “An atmosphere that dense has to attenuate the beam significantly. And in any event, there won’t be any vessels on the other side of this storm. Am I right, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kate seemed to shrink in her seat. Jake looked away.

  “Tell me how many Peregrines we have on the East Coast,” Tom demanded.

  “Thirty.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows. “Thirty? Where are they?”

  “Off the coast of New Jersey aboard the William J. Clinton.”

  Jake sat up straight at the name of the Navy’s newest “next generation” nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It was bigger than anything else afloat, and more technologically advanced.

  A new voice was heard. “The Clinton has been deployed to sea, sir, in advance of the storm.”

  Tom frowned. “When did that launch?”

  “It hasn’t been commissioned, sir. It’s been stationed there undergoing final-stage field trials and will be commissioned when those end. It’s scheduled to participate in the NATO war games in September.”

  Tom nodded, then swung his head, skewering Jake with a look. “How close would you have to be?”

  With a growing sense of dread, Jake shifted in his chair. “To what?”

  “The storm,” Tom replied with false patience.

  Jake tried to conceal the alarm that had sped up his heartbeat and was churning its way through his stomach lining. “If the drones have a range of one thousand miles, then I suppose that’s how far away—”

  “No,” the naval officer interrupted. “That storm is already three hundred miles wide with winds topping one hundred and sixty miles an hour. Given the conditions, the drones would have to be deployed closer to the action to make sure they reach the eye as quickly as possible. We’d need to be as close as we could get.”

  “How long would it take the Clinton to get to a position within range?” Tom asked.

  The commander swallowed hard. “Top speed is thirty-five knots. Between thirty and forty-eight hours depending on where the storm tracks and how fast it moves. But, sir, it’s not officially—”

  “Thank you all. Commander, see if you can’t get the Secretary of the Navy to carve out a few minutes to meet with the DNI later this afternoon.” Tom stood up then and turned to Jake. “Go pack your stuff. Both of you.” Without offering time for an argument, Tom turned to face the rest of the people around the table. “I need to make a phone call. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Tom was already heading toward the small room in the back of the house where the webcam was set up by the time his words had sunk in. Kate sprang to her feet and followed him at a trot, trying to keep the panic she was feeling off her face. Her heart rate was much too high and her breathing much too shallow. “Wait a minute.”

  He stopped and looked down at her, his annoyance undisguised. “Yes?”

  “Pack my stuff to go where, exactly?”

  “I want you out on that carrier. You came up with this idea. You should see it through.”

  She could feel her eyes going wide. On the carrier? “First of all, this is Jake’s idea, not mine,” she spluttered. “I’m a meteorologist. I don’t know anything about lasers. And I don’t—”

  “There are people aboard who know about lasers,” Tom said bluntly. “You know about storms. Specifically, you know how Thompson’s storms behave.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want to be in the middle of one. On a boat.” She glared at him. “I’m a civilian, in case you’ve forgotten. You can’t order me to do this.”

  “That ‘boat’ is over twelve hundred feet long, has a displacement of ninety-nine thousand tons, and is the most technologically advanced warship ever built, Ms. Sherman.”

  “I don’t care how big it is. It will be like a cork in a bathtub in front of that storm.”

  “That’s where you come in, Ms. Sherman. You heard me say that we don’t know yet if there are other aircraft in Thompson’s arsenal. If that storm escalates, the whole eastern seaboard is going to be neck-deep in serious shit. You might possibly be able to help us avoid that outcome. If I can’t appeal to your professionalism, perhaps I can appeal to your patriotism. If I’m not mistaken, you watched the twin towers come down, didn’t you? People you know have been affected by that attack? Family members?”

  She stared into his hard, dead eyes, as breathless as if she’d been physically sucker-punched instead of just emotionally, and nodded slowly. A ball of helpless rage formed at the back of her throat, precluding speech even if she’d been able to find the words.

  “Make no mistake, Kate,” he continued, his voice low and flat. “What your boss has done is no less an act of terrorism than what those fuckers did six years ago. With that last laser burst, Carter Thompson let every one of America’s enemies know that weather has become a strategic weapon. And he let all of them know that he chose his own country as his target. None of those points are in dispute. All we can do now is try to thwart his plans, an option we didn’t have six years ago. And the bottom line is that if you don’t help us now, you won’t have a home or parents to go to.” He paused and chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute, then looked at her again.

  “You know better than I do that if this storm escalates any more before it hits the continental shelf, the destruction will be like September 11th and Hurricane Katrina combined. Long Island and an awful lot of Brooklyn and Queens are already underwater, as are much of Lower Manhattan and Staten Island. How far inland do you want the damage to go, Kate?” He paused again. “Are you aware that the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which is thirty-five miles outside of Manhattan, was built to withstand maximum sustained winds of one hundred and seventy miles per hour? What happens if the winds get higher than that? Imagine one-hundred-seventy, one-hundred-eighty-mile-an-hour winds carrying highly radioactive particles. How far would they go? How many people would they kill right away? And how many would they keep killing, and for how long?”

  She stared at him, fighting the tears burning behind her eyelids.

  “Well, Kate? Should I send you home to sit it out with your parents? Or are you going to help me and the rest of the people in this room and on that ship stop this bastard of a storm?”

  “You son of a bitch,” she whispered.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  Jake stood in the doorway of their bedroom and watched Kate throw her things into her duffle with sharp, abrupt movements that were fueled by her fury at whatever Mr. Diplomacy had said to her. The longer she was silent, the more Jake assumed there would be an explosion. Spending the last twenty-four-plus hours with her had taught him that.

  “Well?” he asked as she zipped up the duffle and g
rabbed it by the handles.

  “Well what?” she snapped through a jaw clenched so tight each word had to hurt.

  “What did my favorite Martian say that made you change your mind?” He let her pass in front of him into the hallway.

  “Just some old-fashioned blackmail. I’m sure you’ve read the same file on me he did.”

  “I never saw any file on you. I only mentioned your name to him on Saturday. Why would the CIA have a file on you?”

  “Good question. But he seemed to know an awful lot about me, including how low to hit me.” She spared him a glance then, and he saw the tear tracks on her face.

  Damn. “Anything I can do?”

  She moved her head from side to side, then brought up a hand to wipe her face. “Not unless you can get me out of here and out of going on that boat.”

  “Ship,” he corrected automatically. “Kate, carriers are huge. From what I’ve heard, the Clinton has a crew of nearly eight thousand people. Trust me, it has to be a hell of storm before you even begin to feel it rock.”

  “Simone is a hell of a storm, Jake, in case you forgot.” She sniffed and began rooting in her bag. “Besides, how do you know anything about aircraft carriers?”

  “When I was in the Marines, I was stationed on one briefly, doing research.”

  She blew her nose, then looked at him, obviously unimpressed. “How are we getting there?”

  “By helicopter.”

  “I don’t fly,” she said as she started down the stairs.

  He followed her. “They’ll have Dramamine on board.”

  “I didn’t say I got sick when I fly. I said I don’t fly,” she snapped.

  “Well, we can’t drive there. Why don’t you fly?”

  She blew her nose again before answering. “The exact time I stopped flying was shortly before nine in the morning on September 11, 2001. It had something to do with seeing planes fly into towers,” she said over her shoulder as she reached the bottom of the staircase.

  “Christ.”

  “My brother-in-law worked in the North Tower. He had taken my niece—her name was Samantha and she was six—to work with him that day because it was what she wanted for her birthday. My office faced the towers. In fact, my office faced his,” she said, her voice rough and tight. “Do I need to go on, or is the picture clear enough?”

  “Christ, Kate. I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

  “Well, Tom Taylor knows,” she snapped. “He knows where my parents are, too. What else does he know, Jake?”

  “I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “But he wants us out there, Kate.”

  “There are plenty of other people who can babysit Simone for him. Why does it have to be us? Or me, anyway? I don’t work for him.”

  “You and I are the only two who have studied the storms.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Jake. This one is different. It’s over water for one thing. And it’s a hundred times bigger than anything else Carter messed with.”

  “If it escalates again—”

  “If it escalates again, we’ll all be dead.”

  Jake paused, took a deep breath, and decided to break the law. He grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her around so they were eye to eye. “Look, Kate, you know what Tom told you about Richard and Carter. They did this thirty years ago. But there’s more to it. What I’m about to tell you is highly classified. Highly classified, okay? I went back and checked some of the bigger or atypical hurricanes of the last fifteen years. I’m pretty damned sure that Carter had something to with Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and Ivan in 2004. Possibly Katrina and Wilma in 2005. The man is a lunatic.” Her reddened eyes and tear-streaked face revealed her shock. “And I suspect Taylor thinks you know more than you do about the storms and about Carter. So he wants us out there for the storm and he wants you within reach.”

  “You mean he wants me in custody,” she said, her voice breaking. “Why can’t any of you get it into your heads that I don’t know anything more than what I already told you?”

  CHAPTER 44

  The wind spun like it was alive. Tight and slender, it undulated above the water, enclosing and protecting the storm’s core, which was brilliantly lit from above. It was a sight seen only by those few brave enough to make the trip, those few tough enough to endure hours of terrifying, bone-rattling turbulence as they penetrated again and again the hundreds of miles of dark, dirty, churning clouds and rain that comprised the outer walls, and withstood the thunderous crashes and spectacular bursts of lightning that rolled and sheeted along wings and fuselage. They alone knew that, in contrast to those ominous, protective walls, the heart of Simone was pure.

  Early-afternoon sunshine spilled through the open tower, giving the light a clarity that hadn’t existed outside of a storm in centuries. The eye held no pollution, no man-made trouble, only Nature at her most fearsome, her most magnificent. Sunlight sparkled off the water vapor in the rising air, lending the air a calming shimmer associated more frequently with stories of redemption than destruction.

  The storm held firm to the warmth of the sea, drinking deeply, gathering strength, replenishing itself as it shifted hundreds of thousands of pounds of water and sent it toward what remained of the unprotected beaches and buttressed edifices alike. The walls of water, more solid than fluid, roared up Manhattan’s riverine boundaries and exploded into shoreline neighborhoods with a terrifying roar, breaking hearts and minds and bones. Heavy, wet winds smashed into the cocky, fortified city, filling the massive pit on its southern tip.

  Mesh garbage bins, emptied of weight and with their plastic liners serving as spinnakers, rolled along the streets, flipping above cars and other impediments and occasionally becoming airborne, smashing into windows six and ten stories up. Voracious, sucking winds pulled cowering occupants out through shard-rimmed, gaping holes. Driverless cars slid along the congested streets, abrading the boulevards, puncturing structures, and nurturing gridlock more ambitious than city dwellers could conceive. Light poles were hurled like spears, like harpoons into the sea of air, shattering on impact and impaling whatever they encountered.

  Dropping pressure defeated the best-laid plans of the world’s engineers as expansive sheets of reflective, impactresistant glass burst out of their bonds and sailed, or dropped, through the canyons of high-rises. Depending on their aerodynamics, they sliced into buildings or bounced off the steel and stone. Cartwheeling through streets and sky, the window-walls stopped only when they sheared off the heads of gargoyles or statues or terrified pedestrians fleeing damaged places that no longer offered shelter.

  Oblivious to everything but the warmth and the water that gave her life, Simone spun ever faster, a creation of heartbreaking, indescribable beauty, of poetry, a whirling, ethereal goddess meant to inspire awe and respect. Her unearthly roar silenced everything else. Her touch destroyed.

  And yet, as the spiritual knew, her aftermath was new life.

  CHAPTER 45

  Monday, July 23, 5:08 P.M., Atlantic Ocean,

  200 miles southeast of New York City

  Her teeth clenched so hard her jaw was aching, Kate unbuckled herself from the seat in the large, loud, mostly empty helicopter, which was now settled on the helipad of the William J. Clinton. The ship was moving at a steady clip away from the U.S. mainland.

  “Which way did you say I should turn when I get off this thing?” she asked Jake under her breath.

  “To the right. That’s where the bow is. That’s the pointy end.”

  “I know what the bow of a boat is,” she hissed.

  “Ship. You look that way because that’s where the flag is flying. So look at it and remember why you’re here,” he snapped, “then follow my lead. You’re going to ask for permission to come aboard.”

  “What’s gotten into you?” she demanded. “And, by the way, I am aboard.”

  “Would you just do what I tell you, for Christ’s sake?”

  The pilot turned around with a poorly hidden gri
n. “It will just be another minute and then you can debark. You two honeymooners? ‘Cause this ain’t the Caribbean Princess,” he drawled.

  Kate let Jake handle the conversation and instead looked out the window at all the people scurrying around the helicopter and on the ship in general. The deck was huge. Huge. And there was nothing but dark, churning sea and pelting rain in all directions. There was no land on the horizon, which in itself was hazy and difficult to discern.

  Being here under these circumstances—during a heightened state of a terror alert, heading for what had already become the most powerful hurricane ever recorded—was surreal, or maybe just too real. Too reminiscent of when the towers fell. She and everyone else in the building had been effectively quarantined for nearly twenty-four hours. They’d had no lights, no air-conditioning. No power of any kind. Just panic and grief, the sound of sirens, and roiling plumes of thick, choking, grit-filled smoke that billowed past the windows, obscuring some of the horror beyond them. She didn’t want to be here. Not surrounded by people pumped up on adrenaline, excited about heading directly into harm’s way to execute an operation that was foolhardy at best.

  She wanted to be anywhere but here. She wanted to be home.

  “Kate?”

  She looked at Jake.

  “We can get out.”

  “Great. Thanks.” She accepted his hand as she crab-walked to the now-open door and stepped onto the surface of the deck. He was right. She couldn’t feel the motion of the waves or the boat. Ship.

  He let go of her hand and pointed, saying something she couldn’t hear. She looked to the right, past what looked like a several-story-tall glass-fronted building, to the bow of the ship, where the flag was whipping in the stiff wind. From the corner of her eye, she saw Jake throw his shoulders back and salute. The sight of the flag, of the man, closed her throat and blurred her vision.

  Jake turned and faced an officer about their age who stood a few feet away. Kate followed his lead, saying what he’d told her to say and shaking the proffered hand. Then she followed them both through a doorway and into the gunmetal gray labyrinth of the ship.