“Roger that, Delta Echo.”
Cannon Beach
JONATHAN, ZURRY next to him issuing great sonorous snores, had watched the waters of the tsunami retreat and counterattack three times. None of the subsequent surges, however, exceeded the high-water marks of the initial flood. He, Zurry, Bill, and Olive remained safe on a gravelly road among a sheltering copse of evergreens and huckleberry bushes on the slopes of Haystack Hill.
Finally, the ocean seemed to tire of its assault and fell back from the beaches and harbors of the coast one last time. Jonathan stood and walked a little way up the road to check on Bill and Olive. Olive still rested against the mailbox post where he’d left her. Bill sat on the ground beside her holding her hand. He managed a weak smile as Jonathan approached.
“We survived,” he said, “thanks to you.”
Jonathan knelt in front of the couple. He could see they’d been crying.
“I’m sorry about your house.”
“We lost everything,” Bill said, and leaned his head against Olive’s. “Except each other.” He reached out and touched Jonathan’s arm. “Hey, I’m glad you found your friend.” He nodded at Zurry.
“Thank you. And thanks for trying to help me save my . . . stuff.” He let slide the fact they’d almost killed Zurry in the process.
Jonathan shivered slightly as a gust of wind swirled down the road, working its way through his soaked clothing. He stood and looked out at the ocean. Between him and a beach now littered with debris and wreckage, stood a wasteland of mud, rocks, sand, splintered homes, shattered trees, crushed vehicles, crumpled pavement, and drowned wildlife. Already a stench of death and decay had crept into the air.
He gazed, disconsolate, at what no longer could be called an ocean-side paradise of beach homes and cottages; at a place where residences had once nestled among salal and seagrass and wild blackberries, and found asylum from winter storms behind wind-flagged pines and spruce and fir. But no longer. The landscape had morphed into a post-apocalyptic movie set, an urban dump that likely extended for hundreds of miles north and south, a countryside with a salty sheen devoid of life and hope.
Yet he spotted life, people beginning to creep back into the no-man’s land from wherever they’d sheltered. And he knew where there was life, there was hope.
“Come on, Zurry, old buddy. Wake up. Let’s go take a look.”
Zurry snapped his huge head up, struggled to his feet, shook himself, water flying in all directions, and walked slowly to Jonathan, limping a little.
He stopped as the ground shook and trembled again, heaving and yawing. Olive uttered a tiny, pitiful scream. Bill said, “Oh, no.” Jonathan sank to his knees and reached for Zurry.
The shaking, sharp and violent, lasted less than thirty seconds, then relented. Jonathan scrambled up and squinted at the western horizon. Once again, the ocean seemed to be sliding away from the coast, perhaps gathering its forces for yet another charge toward the Pacific beaches.
“Well, maybe we got a few minutes, Zurry.” Jonathan chose a landmark, an empty refrigerator sans its door, that he thought defined the directional bearing he’d followed to rescue Zurry.
“Let’s look in that direction, boy. Maybe the bags were heavy enough they sank instead of being carried away by the tsunami.”
He waded, gloppy step by gloppy step, through viscous mud and sand toward where he thought he’d found Zurry. The aftershock appeared to have opened fresh cracks in the re-formed terrain, crevices that might have unearthed something previously buried.
Keeping one eye on the ocean, the other on the uneven ground, he moved slowly. And slowly lost hope. The black man’s lot.
He realized that exhaustion had overtaken him and that he’d be unable to continue his search, at least today. He turned to struggle back up the hill.
Zurry barked, his nose jammed against a muddy mound of sand.
Really? Jonathan kicked at it. The coating of mud and sand fell away. He knelt and tugged at something that looked like the edge of a piece of canvas. He tugged again. And smiled. He knew the mud-encrusted material held significance, but suddenly couldn’t remember why. He blinked. Perhaps a burial shroud for a fellow black from centuries ago? Or maybe for a brother Marine from mere decades past? He remained confused, but knew, given time, clarity would return. It always did, though he begrudged the increasing frequency with which such blank spells seemed to recur.
He tilted his head toward the slate-gray sky and waited.
Airborne Over Portland
ROB THROTTLED back the Cessna as he approached the West Hills of Portland, a range of low hills, generally less than a thousand feet, separating the Willamette River from the western suburbs of the city. He continued his conversation with Nehalem Bay Fire and Rescue.
“We’re over Portland now. Have you heard anything from PDX or Legacy Emanuel since the second quake?”
“Negative, Delta Echo. We thought we had everything set up, then the comms went dark. Bad shit. Hold your position and I’ll try to find out what the situation is now.”
“I can’t believe this,” Shack said over the interphone.
Rob glanced at him. His face registered both anger and resignation.
“We’ll do something,” Rob said. I just don’t know what yet. “Don’t worry.”
He looked down at the West Hills and realized the area had taken a horrific hit, probably exacerbated by the presence of the Portland Hills Fault. Numerous landslides scarred the slopes of the range. The crumpled skeletons of dozens of homes littered the paths of the slides, as though razed from their foundations by giant bulldozers. The main highway over the hills, U. S. 26, had been severed in several spots by slides and cave-ins. The tunnel at the base of the hills, where the highway intersects the Interstate system, had collapsed.
Downtown Portland sat battered and smoking. The newer skyscrapers seemed to have survived, but now lacked much in the way of glass in their windows. The glass, like fields of diamonds, sparkled in millions of tiny shards on the debris-laden ground. Many older buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble. Fires and shattered water mains shot a strange mixture of smoke and water into the air.
“Jesus,” Shack said, “it looks like Sarajevo in ’95—the Bosnian War.”
“Thankfully it’s Sunday,” Rob noted, “so at least most offices and stores were probably empty.”
He banked the Cessna to fly north along the Willamette, the river bisecting Portland. The main span of the Marquam Bridge, I-5, rested on the bottom of the river. He pointed out the wreckage to Shack. “There’s what was supposed to be the safest bridge in Portland.”
He continued north. The new Tilikum Crossing, opened in 2015, seemed to have withstood the dual earthquake assault. But the bridge had been designed only for light rail, busses, bicycles, and pedestrians, not private vehicles.
The Hawthorne Bridge appeared heavily damaged. Impassable. The Morrison and Burnside Bridges appeared intact, but closer inspections at some point in the future might well uncover significant structural deficiencies.
The old Steel Bridge, a multimodal passage—autos, light rail, and Amtrak—now sat like a bony dinosaur on the river bottom
The approaches to the Fremont Bridge, I-405, had crashed onto the banks of the Willamette, pulverizing whatever had existed beneath them.
At the northern end of the stretch of a dozen bridges spanning the Willamette, Rob reached the BNSF rail bridge and the St. Johns Bridge, both of which had ceased to exist as viable river crossings.
He spoke to Shack on the interphone. “Well, it looks like Portland’s going to be a divided city for weeks, probably months, to come.”
Shack seemed less interested in that than their more immediate problem. “Call the fire and rescue guys again. See if they’ve heard anything yet. We gotta get Alex down.”
Rob made the call. The response came quickly. “Still working on it, Delta Echo. We’re in touch with the trauma center, but they don’t think they’ll be able to get a vehicle to the airport. Not after the second quake. The streets and roads are shot to hell. We also heard the runways at PDX are too badly damaged to be used, even by light aircraft. The place is closed. There’s another problem, too.”
How many frigging more can there be? “What’s that?”
“Bonneville Dam. Apparently it’s sustained some significant cracks. They don’t think it will fail, but just in case, well, that’s another reason the airport is shut down. It’s right on the river, and if the dam lets go . . .” The EMT didn’t finish the sentence.
“Where’s Bonneville Dam?” Shack asked over the interphone.
“It spans the Columbia about forty miles upstream from Portland,” Rob answered. “It was built back in the 1930s, long before we worried about big quakes. If it gives way, then—”
“Then you’ve got a tsunami coming down the Columbia.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“What about the real one, the one that wrecked the coast?”
“Probably wasn’t a big deal here. Maybe a little water rise, but not a huge one.”
Shack leaned back in his seat. “And I thought this place was supposed to be a Shangri-La.”
“So did a lot of people,” Rob said.
He went back to the emergency channel. “Nehalem Bay, Delta Echo here. I understand all the issues. I know they’re not your fault, and not even your problem. I get it. But we’ve got a dying patient onboard here. We need a solution.”
“Roger that, Delta Echo. The trauma center guy says they have an idea. I don’t know what it is, but they said they’d get back to me in five minutes after they make some coordination calls. Hang tight.”
“Nothing else to do,” Rob said.
Shack rolled his eyes, turned his body gingerly while clutching his ribs, and checked on Alex. He reached back, grunting in pain, and stroked her forehead.
Rob continued north over the river, noticing it began looking more and more like an open sewer with huge gasoline and oil spills eddying in brown and green swirls on its surface. Tugs and barges that had torn from their moorings drifted in the fouled water as did a flotilla of houseboats, several on the verge of sinking. People trapped on them waved frantically as Rob flew over.
Rob looked on helplessly. Can’t help you.
“Where’d all that greasy shit come from?” Shack asked.
Rob pointed to his left. “There. It’s called a critical energy infrastructure hub.” A stark industrial complex of tank farms, pipelines, marine terminals, and high-voltage electrical substations stretched for several miles along the west bank of the Willamette, just short of its confluence with the Columbia.
“What all is in there?” Shack asked.
Rob banked the Cessna slightly so they both could look down.
“Pipelines, storage facilities, electrical transmission lines, marine tanker terminals; basically, Oregon’s lifeblood.”
“Looks like the state may bleed to death,” Shack said, a touch of bitterness in his words.
The complex had been reduced to crumpled wreckage, including bent and toppled transmission towers. Oil and gasoline flowed unabated from damaged and destroyed tanks and pipelines, streaming into the Willamette, fouling the waters in a soupy blackness that would soon reach the Columbia and head downstream toward Astoria.
In one location, an area thick with storage tanks, dense, tarry smoke billowed from flames leaping unchallenged toward the sky.
“Pretty soon, the damn river will be on fire,” Shack said.
Rob brought the airplane back to level flight. “Another thing, that hub supplies virtually all of the fuel to the airport. PDX is going to be crippled for a long time.”
Shack didn’t say anything, just shook his head in what seemed sad resignation.
Rob continued to stare, almost blankly, at the scene below. He hadn’t yet been able to come to grips, either intellectually or emotionally, with the enormity of what had happened, with what he’d witnessed over the past two or three hours. Perhaps it didn’t qualify as the death of a region, but it came damn close.
The Pacific Northwest, particularly areas west of the Cascades, had been dealt a devastating blow. Not one of Katrina or Sandy proportions, no. Not even close. Something much, much larger. A mega-disaster. New Orleans after Katrina, and the New Jersey and Long Island shores in the wake of Sandy, had presented overwhelming recovery and rehab challenges, but this, what had happened here, could prove insurmountable.
No, don’t think like that.
The region would recover. Like Boston Strong: Northwest Resilience. It might take years, or even decades, but the Pacific Northwest would return, more vibrant and beautiful than ever.
A radio call interrupted Rob’s reverie.
“Delta Echo, this is Nehalem Bay Fire and Rescue. Do you read?”
“Loud and clear,” Rob answered. He turned the plane back toward the city center.
“Delta Echo, we’ve coordinated a plan with Legacy Emanuel . . . if you’re game.”
If I’m game? Why wouldn’t I be game? “This isn’t going to involve landing on a highway again, is it?”
“Uh, no, Delta Echo.”
“Let’s hear it then. Short of airdropping our patient, which we can’t do, I gotta get her down somehow.”
“Understood. But this could be really dicey.”
An unease crept over Rob. The guy on the other end of the transmission seemed reluctant to plunge into the details of whatever had been planned.
“Okay, Nehalem Bay, but I thought I’d done ‘dicey’ already.”
“You have, but . . . uh . . .”
Rob’s unease intensified. Though he’d never faced cancer, he guessed he might be feeling something akin to a patient awaiting to find out if a malignant tumor is inoperable or not. He glanced at Shack who’d been listening to the exchange. Shack scowled, puzzled, concerned. He obviously didn’t like the hesitancy he was hearing, either.
“Come on, Nehalem Bay, lay it on me,” Rob snapped, not meaning to sound quite that harsh.
“Roger that, Delta Echo. You’re familiar with the location of Legacy Emanuel, right?”
“Vaguely. On the east side of town, a little north of the Coliseum?”
“Right. They’re about a half mile east of the river, near the I-5/I-405 interchange.”
“Got it. So what’s the deal?”
“The hospital has coordinated with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office to facilitate a pickup of the patient, but it won’t be routine.”
“Well, I kind of understand that. Nothing about today has been routine.”
“Maybe you’d better talk directly with Legacy Emanuel, Delta Echo.”
“Look, I appreciate the effort everyone has put into this, Nehalem Bay, but how about dropping the mushroom treatment and telling me what the hell the plan is. Is that an unreasonable request?”
“No, sir.” The speaker paused.
“Well?”
“Well, it involves the Sheriff’s River Patrol Unit.”
“Say again, Nehalem Bay.” Rob thought he’d misheard.
“It involves the River Patrol Unit.”
Rob allowed the words to sink in. River Patrol? It didn’t take him long to divine the “plan.” He felt as if his life were being squeezed out of him by a python. Of all the flying tasks he’d been called upon to carry out the past few hours, he knew with great certainty this would be the one he couldn’t. No way, no how. His aviation skills had been maxed out, depleted, exhausted, terminated.
“Oh, hell no,” he exclaimed, a bit too loudly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
&n
bsp; The River
Airborne Over Portland
Sunday, July 5
“WHAT WAS THAT, Delta Echo? Didn’t understand.”
“The plan is to have me land in the river, right?” Rob responded, not wanting to repeat his immediate gut reaction.
“I’m afraid there aren’t any other options, Delta Echo. Airports are closed. Roads impassable. The River Patrol Unit thinks they can fish you out of the water before the aircraft sinks.”
“Thinks?” he exclaimed.
“Well . . . uh, they haven’t done this before.”
“Haven’t done it before?!”
“I’m sorry, Delta Echo. It’s the best we could do.”
Rob yanked the plane none too gently into another turn, reversing his course, but continuing to orbit over the river. His anger at being called upon, again, to perform a seemingly impossible task had temporarily overridden his fear of considering how he might actually attempt it.
Shack laid a steadying hand on Rob’s arm.
“This is just unfuckingbelievable,” Rob snapped over the interphone, “just unfuckingbelievable.”
“I know, I know,” Shack said, his hand still resting on Rob’s arm, “but like the Nehalem Bay guy said, what other choices do we have?”
“I’m going to Hillsboro airport,” Rob said. “I know I can get us down there, even if the runway is shit.”
“Where’s Hillsboro?”
“A little over ten miles west.”
“Trauma center?”
“There are a couple of hospitals.”
“But no trauma centers?”
“None that I know of.”
Shack turned to look at Alex. “She’s on her second IV bag already. She’s not going to make it much longer without trauma care.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We do know it. That’s why the EMTs in Manzanita put her on the plane. Look, I hate to play this card, but what if that were your wife or daughter in the backseat? Would you be dicking around trying to find an alternative to a trauma center?”
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