The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  The shelf between Scotland and Norway, with its oil wells, pipelines and platforms, showed signs of cracking.

  Someone shouted through the storm at Alban. He spun round and saw the chief scientist waving at him frantically. He could barely hear the man’s words. ‘The slope,’ was all he could make out. ‘The slope.’

  After the lull the sea had whipped up into a frenzy. Black waves battered the Thorvaldson. Alban looked despairingly at the boom from which the Deep Rover had been lowered into the water. The water was foaming. The stench of methane was overpowering. He started to run amidships where the scientist grabbed his arm.

  ‘This way, Alban! Oh, God - there’s something you should see.’

  The ship shook. Alban heard a low rumble. It was coming from beneath the water. They staggered up the narrow swaying stairway to the bridge.

  ‘Look!’

  Alban stared at the control panel. The sonar was scanning the depths. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The seabed was gone. It was as though he was looking at a maelstrom. ‘The slope’s collapsing,’ he whispered.

  At that moment he knew there was nothing he could do for Eddie or Stone. His foreboding had become a dreadful certainty. ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘At once.’

  ‘But which direction?’ the helmsman asked.

  Alban tried to think. He knew what was happening down there and what lay in store. Heading for port was out of the question. The Thorvaldson’s only chance was to sail out to sea as fast as she could. ‘Put out a radio message,’ he said. ‘Norway, Scotland, Iceland and all the other North Sea states. They need to evacuate their coasts. Do it now. Get through to everyone you can.’

  ‘But what about Stone and—’ the scientist began.

  ‘They’re dead.’

  He didn’t dare think about how powerful the slide might have been. The images on the monitor had sent shivers down his spine. And they weren’t out of danger yet. A few kilometres closer to the shore and the ship would capsize. Further out to sea there was a chance they’d escape, despite the fury of the storm.

  Alban tried to remember how the slope was shaped. Towards the north-west the seabed descended downwards in a series of large terraces. If they were lucky, the avalanche would come to rest before it reached the bottom. But there was no stopping a Storegga Slide. The whole slope, hundreds of kilometres of it, would slip into the depths, descending 3500 metres. The slide would penetrate as far as the abyssal plains east of Iceland, sending apocalyptic tremors through the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea.

  Alban looked up from the console. ‘Head for Iceland,’ he ordered.

  When the first branch of the avalanche reached the Faroe-Shetland Channel, the submarine terraces between Scotland and the Norwegian Trench had already disappeared, transformed into a slurry of debris that gathered pace as it crashed into the depths, pulling with it everything in path. Nothing of shape or structure survived in its wake. One part of the avalanche split off to the west of the Faroe Islands and came to a halt in the underwater banks surrounding the Icelandic Basin. Another part headed along the mountain range between Iceland and the Faroes.

  But the bulk thundered down the Faroe-Shetland Channel as though it were a chute. The same basin that had absorbed the Storegga Slide thousands of years earlier was filled by an even bigger avalanche, pushing forwards relentlessly.

  Then the edge of the shelf broke away.

  Over a stretch of fifty kilometres the shelf snapped off. And that was just the start.

  Sveggesundet, Norway

  Once the helicopter had taken off, Tina Lund had loaded her luggage into Johanson’s jeep and driven away fast through the rain. God knows what Johanson would have said, but Lund believed in pushing a car to its maximum.

  A weight lifted from her mind with every passing kilometre. It had all clicked into place. Once she’d cleared up that business with Stone, she’d called Kare and volunteered to spend a few days with him on the coast. Kare had seemed pleased, if a little bewildered. Something in his voice made her suspect that Johanson had been right and that she’d settled on the right course just in time.

  As the jeep rolled down Sveggesundet’s high street towards the seafront, her pulse quickened. She left the vehicle in a car park just along from the Fiskehuset. A track and a path led down towards the sea. It didn’t look like a typical beach: the boulders and slabs of stone were covered with moss and ferns. Although the area around Sveggesundet was flat, it was wild and romantic, and the view from the Fiskehuset, with its dining terrace on the front, was impressive - even on a misty, rainy morning like today.

  Lund strolled to the restaurant and went in. Kare was out, and they hadn’t started serving. A kitchen assistant walked past with a crate of vegetables, and told her that the boss had business in town. He didn’t know when he’d be back.

  It’s your own fault, Lund told herself.

  They’d agreed to meet there, but - probably because she’d driven like a mad thing - she was an hour early. She’d just have to sit and wait.

  She stepped out onto the terrace. Rain pelted her face. Some people would have fled indoors, but Lund barely noticed it. She’d spent her childhood in the country. Sunny days were wonderful, but she enjoyed rain and gales too. Suddenly it occurred to her that the gusts that had rocked the jeep for the final half-hour of the journey had turned into a severe storm. The mist had thinned, but the clouds had sunk and were scudding low across the sky. White spray billowed from the furrowed sea.

  Something wasn’t right about it.

  She’d been here often enough to know the place quite well, but now the beach looked longer than usual. The pebbles and rocks seemed to extend for ever, despite the crashing waves. Like an impromptu ebb tide, she thought.

  On impulse she pulled out her mobile and called Kare. She might as well tell him she had arrived - rather than risk taking him by surprise. She didn’t want anything to go wrong.

  His mobile rang four times, then switched to voicemail.

  Fate had ruled otherwise. In that case, she’d just wait.

  She wiped the dripping hair from her eyes and went inside, hoping that, if nothing else, the coffee machine was ready for action.

  Tsunami

  The sea was full of monsters. Since the beginning of human history it had been a place for symbols, myths and primal fears. The six-headed Scylla had preyed on Odysseus’s companions. Angered by Cassiopeia’s boastfulness, Poseidon had created Cetus, a sea monster, and cast sea snakes at Laocoön when he foretold the fall of Troy. Sirens were lethal to sailors unless they stopped their ears with wax. Mermaids, aquatic dinosaurs and giant squid haunted the imagination. Vampyroteutis infernalis was the antithesis of every human value. Even the horned creature of the Bible had risen from the sea. And then, to top it all, science, whose first allegiance was to scepticism, had taken to preaching the message of truth that lay at the heart of the legends. The coelacanth was alive. The giant squid existed. For thousands of years people had feared the creatures of the deep, but now they followed them excitedly. Nothing was sacred to the modern scientific mind, not even fear. Deepsea monsters had become man’s favourite playthings, the soft toys of science.

  Except one.

  It struck fear into the most rational mind. Rising up from the sea to sweep over the land, it brought with it death and destruction. It owed its name to the Japanese fishermen who had been spared its horrors out at sea, but had returned to their villages to find their homes devastated, their families dead. The word they used to describe it meant ‘wave in the harbour’. Tsu for harbour; nami for wave.

  Tsunami.

  Alban’s decision to plot a course for deep water showed that he knew the monster and its habits. Seeking the supposed protection of the harbour would be fatal.

  While the Thorvaldson was battling its way through the choppy seas, the continental shelf and slope slid further into the depths. The downward pull lowered the sea level over a vast area. The water around the plummeting
mass rose up, surging outwards in a wave that radiated across the ocean. Near the site of the slide, covering an area of several thousand square kilometres, the wave was so flat that its presence went undetected amid the raging storm. Its height above water reached scarcely a metre.

  Then it hit the shallow water of the shelf.

  Over the years Alban had learned what distinguished a tsunami from a normal surface wave. Ocean swells were usually the result of movement in the air: solar radiation warmed the atmosphere, but the warmth wasn’t distributed equally across the surface of the planet so the heat was transferred by winds, which swept over the ocean, ruffling the water and creating waves. The water rose barely fifteen metres, even in a hurricane. Giant waves were the only exception. Normal surface waves reached a maximum speed of ninety miles an hour, and the effect of the wind stayed on the surface. Just two hundred metres lower, the water would be calm.

  But tsunamis didn’t form on the surface: they originated in the depths. They weren’t the result of high winds: they were created by a seismic shock - and seismic shock waves travelled at entirely different speeds. Worst of all, the energy of the tsunami was transmitted throughout the water column all the way to the seabed. No matter how deep the ocean was, the wave was always in contact with the seabed. The entire mass of water was in motion.

  The best demonstration that Alban had ever seen of a tsunami wasn’t a computer simulation but something much more basic. Someone had filled a pail with water and rapped the bottom. Concentric rings had rippled through the water. To picture a tsunami, he had merely to imagine it several million times bigger.

  Merely.

  Triggered by the landslide, the tsunami propagated outwards at a speed of 700 kilometres per hour. The crest of the wave was long and flat. It carried a million tonnes of water and was laden with energy. Within a few minutes, it had reached the spot where the shelf had snapped. The water became shallower, acting as a brake. The wave front slowed, but lost little energy. The mass of water pushed onwards, but because it was slowing, it began to stack up. The shallower the water became, the higher the tsunami towered, while its length shrank dramatically. Normal surface waves joined in, riding on its crest. By the time it reached the platforms on the North Sea shelf it had decelerated to 400 kilometres per hour, but it was already fifteen metres high.

  Fifteen metres was nothing to an oil platform - providing the wave was just normal surface swell.

  A seismic wave that stretched from the seabed to the surface, carrying a fifteen-metre mound of water and travelling at four hundred kilometres per hour, had the momentum of a speeding jumbo jet.

  Gullfaks C. Norwegian Shelf

  For a second Lars Jörensen thought he was too old to endure the final months on Gullfaks. He was trembling so much that the platform seemed to be vibrating with him. In all other respects he wasn’t feeling too bad. A little depressed, maybe, but not ill.

  Then it dawned on him that the platform was shaking, not him.

  He stared at the derrick, then back out to sea. The sea was raging, but he’d seen worse and it had never affected the platform. Jörensen had heard of platforms shaking: it happened when a drilling operation triggered a blow-out, causing oil or gas to shoot up at high pressure. The whole platform could shudder back and forth. But that was impossible on Gullfaks, where the reserves were half empty, and the oil was pumped into sub-surface tanks. Besides, extraction took place at a distance, not under the platform.

  The offshore industry had its own top ten of greatest risks. Struts within the steel framework that supported the platforms might collapse. Freak waves, massive surges of water caused by a combination of current and wind, were the industry’s equivalent of a maximum credible accident. Pontoons that broke free or tankers with engine failure were dangerous too. But near the top of the hit parade of horror was the gas leak. Escaping gas was almost impossible to detect. In most cases it was only noticed when it was too late and fire had broken out. In incidents like that the platform exploded: more than 160 people had died on the British Piper Alpha, the biggest disaster in the history of the industry.

  But a seaquake was the ultimate nightmare.

  And this, Jörensen realised, was a quake.

  Anything could happen now. When the ground shook, events spun out of control. Metal warped and snapped. Leaks sprang up and fires broke out. If the tremor was enough to rattle the platform, they could only hope that things wouldn’t get worse, that the seabed wouldn’t cave in or slump, and that the rig’s foundations would withstand the shock. But in addition to all that, another problem was associated with quakes, which no one could do anything about.

  And it was about to hit the platform.

  Jörensen saw it coming and knew that his chances were nil. He turned and made for the steel steps, trying to escape his lofty perch.

  It happened quickly.

  He lost his footing and fell. Instinctively his fingers clutched the metal grating beneath him. An infernal noise broke out, a roaring and cracking as though the platform were breaking apart. There was screaming, a deafening bang, and Jörensen was tossed against the railings. Pain seized him. As he hung there in the metalwork, the sea reared up out of nowhere. He could hear the shriek of tearing metal and realised that the whole platform was tilting. His mind shut down. Now he was just a panic-stricken body, making futile attempts to crawl away from the approaching water. He dragged himself up the slope that, seconds before, had been a floor, but the incline was getting steeper.

  His strength was running out. The fingers of his right hand let go of the metal. There was a sickening jerk and he was hanging by one arm. The derrick was toppling and the gas flame on the boom was no longer shooting out across the water but rising vertically into the dark sky.

  Then everything exploded in a fiery, incandescent cloud, and Jörensen was cast into the sea. He didn’t feel the pain in his lower arm, where the blast had severed his hand, leaving it hanging in the metal. Before the spiral of flames could engulf him, the tsunami hit the sinking platform. Gullfaks C was blasted to pieces, the concrete pillars plunging into the sea.

  Granddad, tell us a story…

  Oslo, Norway

  The woman frowned as she listened to him. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘A kind of chain reaction, did you say?’

  She was on the Ministry of Environment’s Disaster Management Committee, and she was used to being confronted with the most outrageous theories. But she knew of the Geomar Centre, which didn’t usually make ludicrous claims. She focused on understanding what the German scientist on the telephone was trying to say.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Bohrmann. ‘It’s simultaneous. The damage is occurring all along the slope. It’s taking place everywhere at exactly the same time.’

  The woman swallowed. ‘And…which areas will be hit?’

  ‘That depends on the location of the break and how far it extends. Still, a large proportion of the coast, I’d say. Tsunamis stretch thousands of kilometres. We’re informing anyone in the vicinity - Iceland, the UK, Germany, everyone.’

  The woman stared out of her office window. She was thinking of the oil platforms, stranded in the sea. Hundreds of them, as far north as Trondheim.

  ‘What will happen to the coastal regions?’ she asked dully.

  ‘You should make plans to evacuate.’

  ‘And the offshore industry?’

  ‘As I said, it’s hard to predict. If we’re fortunate, there’ll be a series of small-scale landslides. In that case, the platforms might wobble, but basically they’ll be fine. On the other hand, if…’

  The door opened and a man rushed in. His face was white. He thrust a sheet of paper in front of her and signalled to her to end her conversation. She picked up the printout and scanned the short text. It was the transcript of a radio message from a ship. The Thorvaldson.

  As she read on, she felt as though the ground were slipping away from her.

  ‘The warning signs are already there,’ Bohrmann w
as saying. ‘In the event of it happening, anyone living on the coast should know what to expect. Tsunamis make their presence known before they strike. When the wave is approaching, the sea level rises and falls. It’s rapid, and it happens several times, so you’d notice if you knew what to look for. After ten to twenty minutes the water retreats from the shore. Reefs and rocks become visible. You start to see parts of the seabed that are usually covered. That’s the last warning. Then you must head for higher ground.’

  The woman didn’t speak. She’d almost stopped listening. A few minutes earlier she’d been trying to imagine what would happen if the man was telling the truth. Now she was picturing what was taking place that second.

  Sveggesundet, Norway

  Lund was dying of boredom. The kitchen assistant had switched on the espresso machine for her benefit and the coffee had been delicious. And despite the stormy weather and poor visibility, the view of the sea through the panoramic windows while she drank it had been amazing. But Lund found the wait unbearable.

  A blast of cold air hit the room.

  ‘Hello, Tina.’

  It was a friend of Kare’s, Åke. He ran a successful boat-hire business in Kristiansund that made a lot of money in the summer.

  They talked a bit about the weather. Then Åke asked, ‘So what are you doing here? Visiting Kare?’

  ‘That was the plan.’ She smiled wryly.

  Åke looked at her in surprise. ‘So where is he?’

  ‘It’s my fault. I’m early.’

  ‘Give him a call, then.’

  ‘I’ve tried. Voicemail.’

  ‘Of course.’ Åke slapped his forehead. ‘I’d forgotten. He won’t have any reception.’

  Lund sat up. ‘You know where he is?’