Phobos

by Steve Alten

  Americans living along the east coast shuddered at the images being broadcast over their communication screens. Fearful of things to come, many raced to grocery stores to stock up on food; others stood in long lines to purchase ammunition. All thanked their maker that they did not live out west—refusing to accept the fact that everyone was stuck on the same boat, even as the USS Planet Earth continued to take on water.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Andrew Morgan Hiles has been in the Oval Office less than forty-five days, having taken over after President Heather Stuart’s fatal stroke. The former vice president feels as if he is running on a river log, every global alert a precarious step threatening to toss civilization into the depths. He has asked the question “Is this the end of the world?” so many times of so many different ashen-faced aides that he has finally accepted humanity’s altered course, mentally moving into survival mode.

  Altered course? His press secretary had coined the phrase between tears. As if the caldera weren’t enough, as if the earthquakes and “normal volcanoes” hadn’t stolen enough lives, now to be told a 350-foot megatsunami was bearing down on the eastern seaboard, set to strike New York in less than an hour? The entire day, every scenario … it was insane. Hadn’t he seen this nightmare in movie theaters a dozen times?

  Playing out his role as president, he had listened to his advisors discuss the fate of 50 million Americans living along the Atlantic coast, debating whether they should risk further panicking the already panicked herd by announcing the megatsunami. Most of his advisors said no, but he had overruled them.

  Besides, as horrifically frightening as the wave was, it was the caldera that was his bigger worry, with scientists forecasting seven to ten years of nuclear winter. Truckloads of canned goods and supplies were en route to Mount Weather, an underground facility where he and his family and the rest of the politically affluent would ride out the holocaust. For now, he had to remain presidential, a team player assuring the human race that life would go on, that God was with them … even as he was being escorted into his helicopter for the twenty-minute flight to Virginia.

  His secretary of defense offers a quick salute. “Everything’s being readied, Mr. President. We’ll broadcast tonight’s speech from inside Mount Weather.”

  “What about my family?”

  “Already there. Everyone on the list is in the facility and accounted for, with the exception of Ken Mulder.”

  “Mulder’s missing?”

  “No, sir. The chief of staff had to rush back to Florida, apparently his wife took ill.”

  “His wife? I thought she lived in Illinois?”

  CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA

  Route 528, also known as scenic route A1A, runs east from Cocoa Beach, spanning the Indian River, Merritt Island, and the Banana River before reaching the oceanside complex of Cape Canaveral. Traffic along the six-lane highway is bumper to bumper in both directions, commuters in their westbound vehicles desperately attempting to flee the island community before it is submerged by a wave beyond their imagination, the people inching eastbound attempting to reach the H.O.P.E. Space Complex, where they will board a space shuttle and flee the planet before the same wave destroys the entire Mars Colony fleet.

  Having been in the army since he was a seventeen-year-old ROTC captain, Kyle Hall has been trained to handle chaos, but what H.O.P.E.’s director of operations is dealing with is beyond any military operation he has ever faced. In less than ninety minutes he must organize and board eight hundred passengers onto twelve Mars space shuttles and successfully launch these space vehicles using personnel and security guards who know full well they are operating in the kill zone of a megatsunami. Compounding the director’s problem is that his CEO, Lilith Mabus, has oversold their flight capacity by well over a thousand percent. Conveniently, neither Lilith nor her son is around to handle the blowback, forcing Kyle to deal with nine thousand of the most powerful, corrupt, egocentric, and dangerous human beings on the planet, all of whom have paid vast sums of money for themselves and their loved ones to live out their days on Mars.

  Faced with a life-and-death numbers game rivaling the lack of lifeboats on the sinking Titanic (absent the male chivalry that allowed that captain to save the women and children first), Kyle Hall has decided on a combination of bribery and shell-game tactics to deal with his situation. To the dozen indispensable members of his flight control crew he has promised their choice of passage aboard the last shuttle or $5 million in wired funds if they remain on duty until 5:00 p.m., the wave set to strike at 5:19. To the two hundred members of his heavily armed security detail he offered a hundred thousand dollars per soldier, plus safe passage off the space complex aboard Lilith’s 787 airbus, scheduled to depart at 5:05 p.m.

  All but three guards have agreed to stay.

  As for the shuttle passengers, Kyle has Lilith’s narrowed-down list of names composed mostly of scientists, medical personnel, agriculture specialists, and engineers—all of whom have been housed in campus dormitories for weeks. These 812 men and women, the life blood of Mars Colony, have already been transported by bus to their assigned shuttle hangar. As for the politicians and bankers, Wall Street warriors and blue bloods, they will be directed to one of nine smaller utility hangars where they will be suitably “handled.”

  Ken Mulder is trapped in the back of the limousine, his daughter yelling at him, his son yelling at his mistress, his driver blasting the horn, threatening to turn the vehicle around if the eastbound traffic does not move within the next five minutes.

  The president’s chief of staff pops another Valium, staring at his watch. Four twelve. Sixty-seven minutes until that goddamn wave hits. How the hell is Lilith going to load and launch twelve shuttles in sixty-seven minutes?

  His seventeen-year-old daughter grabs his arm, her angry eyes filled with tears. “How could you do this to Mom?”

  “Do what? Is it my fault the caldera erupted? Is it my fault her flight was canceled?”

  “So you brought your whore?”

  “Watch it, kid.” Twenty-nine-year-old Fiona Chatwin points a finger, the peroxide blonde revealing a Chinese tattoo over her right breast. “Your father arranged this trip, not me.”

  “Don’t talk to my sister like that.”

  “Shut the hell up, all of you!” Mulder rubs his left eye, the migraine throbbing. “Look around. People are dying, and a lot more will end up dead very soon. For me to arrange passage to Mars Colony is an unbelievable blessing, our four tickets and living quarters are easily worth $10 billion. Yes, I know you wish your mother was here, but she’s not. So here we are. Let’s just be thankful—”

  “I’m leaving.” Amanda Mulder opens her door, stepping out onto the highway.

  “Dammit.” Ken climbs out in time to see the teenager disappear amid an endless road of cars. He is about to chase after her when the traffic ahead of them suddenly moves. Cursing to himself, he climbs back inside as they accelerate over the causeway.

  His son stares at him, in shock. “That’s it? You’re just letting her go?”

  “Call her on her cell. Tell her to please come back before that wave hits. I’ll wait for her at the main gate.”

  The limo follows traffic inside a gated security area where teams of armed guards are quickly dispersing passengers to a line of transport buses.

  A guard taps on Mulder’s window. “I need names and identification.”

  “White House chief of staff Ken Mulder. I have confirmation for four, only my daughter—”

  The guard speaks into his headset. “Confirming Mulder, passage for four. You’ll be on Shuttle 2. Exit the vehicle and board the transport bus, it will take you to the hangar. No luggage. You’ll be provided with a flight suit when you board. Let’s move!”

  “Wait! My daughter’s on her way, we were separated.”

  “She’s on the list, she’ll be directed to your shuttle when she gets here. Now move it, you’re scheduled to leave in th
irty minutes.”

  They are hustled and prodded to the next shuttle bus in line. Climbing aboard, Mulder sees every seat is occupied by an Arab sheik. He holds on to a shoulder rail as the vehicle accelerates down the asphalt drive, his son on his left, staring at him coldly—

  —a Chihuahua snarling at him from a woman’s shoulder bag on his right. “We paid $275 million apiece for these tickets. Well, I told that guard that if I couldn’t bring my dog, then his boss better wire me a full refund. That changed his mind.”

  The bus driver skids to a stop before a three-story aluminum prefabricated building. “Shuttle 1. Move quickly and watch your step.”

  The sheiks push their way off the vehicle.

  The woman with the dog and the ten-karat diamond ring and matching necklace mumbles to her companion, “Somebody better tell the Saudis there’s no oil on Mars.”

  The bus rolls on, stopping a half mile down the road. “Shuttle 2. Watch your step.”

  Mulder takes Fiona by the arm and leads her quickly off the bus, the late afternoon Florida sun beating down on them. Armed guards motion them down a path that leads inside the building.

  It is dark within the barracks—a gym housing weight-training machines and a full-court basketball arena. A crowd of well over a hundred mills about while a looping instructional video broadcasts overhead, detailing the proper way to secure the shuttle seat harnesses.

  Mulder checks the time: 4:27 p.m. Racked with guilt, he turns to his son. “I’m going back for your sister. Stay with Fiona.” Before his mistress can protest he heads for the door—the exit locked from the outside.

  MERIDA AIRPORT, YUCATAN PENINSULA

  The Aerion supersonic business jet soars into the overcast sky and out over the Gulf of Mexico, quickly accelerating to Mach 1.8. Shaped like a white stiletto with small wings and a tail, the $89 million, twelve-passenger plane can cross the Atlantic Ocean in two hours, has a range of 5,600 miles, and can land on most airfields.

  Lilith had ordered the jet to Merida’s Manuel Crescencio Rejón International Airport from the H.O.P.E. space center in Houston, Texas, while she and Manny were en route on their five-hour taxi ride from Palenque. It was not until their arrival that they had learned of the caldera’s eruption and the megatsunami bearing down on the eastern seaboard of North and South America.

  Manny reads the latest news report on his leather i-chair’s monitor, then swivels around to gaze at the ebony-haired beauty seated next to him in the narrow aisle. Both Hunahpu are sweaty after the long trip, their perspiration—laced with pheromones—acting as a powerful aphrodisiac.

  “The latest reports have the wave striking North Florida in twenty-seven minutes. We’ll never make it.”

  “We’ll make it.” Unbuckling her harness, she climbs onto his lap. “I spoke with my director of operations. They’ll hold the last shuttle for us.” She kisses him, burying her tongue in his mouth as her fingers unbuckle his pants.

  Blind with animal lust, he lifts her skirt. Palming the smooth skin of her derriere, he abruptly tears away her thong and enters her.

  She grinds her pelvis into his, moaning in his ears, their minds consumed with the feast of the flesh when Lilith abruptly stops, fear in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s watching us.”

  “Devlin?” Manny looks around the cabin. “How?”

  “Through my eyes.”

  ATLANTIC OCEAN

  It had rolled upon Britain’s southwestern peninsula with the force of a four-story freight train, bashing through docks and homes, storefronts and buildings, submerging the villages and townships of Cornwall beneath a relentless wall of water that finally eased a mile from the battered shoreline.

  Despite the devastation, it was merely an appetizer of things to come.

  Birthed off the West African coast, the megatsunami was an expanding 270-degree wall of rushing water, thirty-three stories high, packing the energy equivalent of ten thousand twenty-five-megaton bombs, moving at the speed of a commercial airliner.

  Curving around the Canary Islands, it pummeled West Africa and turned the outlying western Sahara Desert to mud.

  Entering the Mediterranean, it hammered Gibraltar and sank every pleasure craft in its path.

  Crossing the Atlantic, it swallowed oil tankers and cruise ships with the brutal efficiency of an eighteen-wheel truck running over a bicyclist. It chased an entire American battle carrier group into Havana’s harbor, where it picked up the 150-year-old remains of the Battleship Maine and used its rotting steel carcass as a battering ram, sinking a naval destroyer, the USS George W. Bush.

  Two hundred twenty miles off the northeastern coastline of the United States, the monster’s forward speed was abruptly cut in half as its underlying power train met the continental shelf. Climbing the slope, the wave crested into a 470-foot-high curl, its sheer weight causing the crust of the North American plate to rumble as it thundered toward shore.

  The coastal beach resorts are ghost towns. Traffic lights on the main drags still change like falling dominoes and the gulls still cull into the late afternoon, but as the sun dips gold and the hour approaches five, a pall hangs in the air.

  Stephen Stocker notices something seems awry as he exits his one-story rental in Margate, New Jersey. The twenty-two-year-old quantum physics major at Atlantic City University is paying his way through college by working late shifts as a blackjack dealer at the Goldman-Sachs Riverboat Casino. Exhausted from finals week, Stephen has slept undisturbed through the incessant alarms and broadcasts that have bombarded the island residents of Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate, and Long Port, the music coming from his sensory headpiece shielding him from the chaos.

  Stephen crosses Atlantic Avenue to the beach block, feeling fortunate to miss the usual traffic. He hustles up the wood incline to the boardwalk, scares off a flock of pigeons feasting upon a turned-over trash can, then descends five steps to the beach, mentally debating whether he should run his mandatory three miles or work on his wind sprints. He has five hours of free time before he must get ready for a 12-to-8 a.m. shift. Having lost his cell phone, he has no way of knowing all businesses are closed and that the hotel casino where he works will never see the midnight hour.

  The beach is gusting with wind, the sand stinging his flesh. He attributes the lack of bathers to the harsh conditions and opts to cancel his run for a swim. Tossing his towel over his backpack where dry sand meets wet, he dashes into the surf.

  Stephen ducks beneath a five-foot swell, then begins swimming parallel to shore. He manages twenty strokes before the undertow spins him vertical again.

  The water becomes a raging river, sweeping him out to sea. An experienced beachgoer, the college senior never panics, recognizing that he is caught in a riptide and that his best chance to escape is not to fight the fierce current but to swim parallel to shore. Launching himself into a powerful crawl stroke, he lowers his head and swims, the conveyor of eastbound shifting ocean emptying beneath him until his knee strikes sand and he’s lying in an acre of mud.

  “What the hell?”

  The Atlantic has receded a quarter of a mile, his towel and backpack a football field away. Baffled, he stands and turns as the muck between his toes reverberates and the air grumbles a baritone roar. What he sees rolling toward him causes the hair on the back of his neck to rise and his bladder to tighten.

  The wave is impossibly massive—a majestically curling monstrosity towering higher than the tallest resort hotel. It continues to climb—a looming mountain of water rapidly diminishing the blue sky. The sea floor quivers beneath its approaching girth, its stench blasting his face with an exhalation of sea life and algae and oil, its roar so frightening it paralyzes him in absolute terror.

  Stephen’s mind is gone, but it doesn’t matter: any rational thought of escape is futile. In a last desperate grasp at self-preservation, the physics major drops to his chest and shoves both arms elbow-deep in the mud. Then he turns his head away and
closes his eyes, tears flowing down his cheeks as the atheist prays to a maker he has long been convinced couldn’t possibly exist.

  The megatsunami plucks Stephen Stocker off the sea floor and tosses him into its raging belly, the sheer force of the dark water ripping his arms from his torso. Ocean meets concrete and steel a second later, leveling downtown Atlantic City while blasting every island residence off its foundation. The curl plunges into the bay, birthing a secondary wave, which is quickly consumed by the first.

  The Atlantic never stops, it simply continues pushing inland, bashing through toll booths and car dealerships, malls and neighborhoods, before settling into a twenty-foot tide that eventually dies thirty miles west of what had once been Atlantic City’s famous boardwalk.

  CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA

  5:07 P.M.

  Kyle Hall is standing on a grass-covered divide separating two immense reinforced concrete runways as an alternating procession of Mars shuttles accelerates past him in a low angled ascent—a choreographed ballet of flying metal elephants. Each airborne member of the thinning herd gradually rises to ten thousand feet before engaging its rocket boosters into a steep climb, accompanied by a sonic boom.

  The control tower crackles in his earpiece. “Shuttle 7, you are a go on Runway Alpha. Shuttle 8, stand by on Runway Beta.”

  “Control, this is Director Hall. This is taking way too long. Screw the go–no-go bullshit and get the rest of these whales airborne in the next ninety seconds.”

  “Director Hall, this is Shuttle 12. We’re loaded.”

  “Is my family on board?”

  “Yes, sir.”