“Understood, Doctor. I’ll concentrate on incident reports from mainland Europe and forward anything I receive. Any suggestions you might have regarding countermeasures would be appreciated.”
“Understood, Brigadier. Juliet Bravo, listening out.”
***
“How’s it going, Doc? Need a hand?”
“I wish there was something I could farm out, Eddie, but this is all specialist stuff, weather data and the like.”
“Fair enough. I’m at a bit of a loose end. Everyone bar me seems to have some special skill they can offer, but all I seem to do is answer the phone and make coffee.”
“Making coffee’s as important as those other things, Ed, but you can certainly help me catalogue these reports. I need to input them into a spreadsheet so I can easily order them by time, location, speed and distance.”
By the time the stack of reports had been flipped through for what felt like the hundredth time, Joey’s hands were grey with printer ink. He rose and crossed the room to sluice the worst of it away and splashed his face to freshen up. Gazing blearily at the water spiralling down the drain, a sudden thought struck him, and he hurried back to his desk. He re-read the first few reports then went directly to the final three, the latest to be reported.
“These mention a weather system originating in the Arctic region, travelling south. Brenda, contact all our observers in Scotland, Norway, Iceland—the further north, the better. I’m looking for any suggestion of tremors, tidal surges, gale-force winds. We could be seeing a bounce-back effect. If the shock wave slaps against something solid, like an ice cliff, it’s going to come back on itself, but it’s likely to lose a lot of its energy and move more slowly, making it difficult to detect unless we’re actively looking for it.”
Brenda made a couple of short, businesslike calls. Joey launched into another round of theoretical calculations, and the rest of the team were kept busy fielding the calls now coming in from mainland Europe. These included serious landslides and flooding in southern Spain as well as the Netherlands, where the coastal defences were being overwhelmed.
By the time Groth’s direct line flashed, Joey had received four reports from northern outposts in Iceland, Norway and Scotland. Not a great deal, but it was a start, and it confirmed what he’d suspected and feared.
“Brigadier, I think we’re looking at a new development. The shock wave appears to be reversing back along its northern path.”
“Does this suggest any possible course of action, Doctor Hart?”
“The ripple as the wave recoils will be losing power and momentum as it returns, rather than grow as it did on the first outward surge. But there’s something else to consider.
“Until now, we’ve been recording the effects of an immense body of water—two-thirds of the whole planet—swirling around the deepest of our ocean beds.
“Now, there’s something called the Coriolis effect, which is why water down a drain tends to flow clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and anticlockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. There are other variables involved, of course, and it is my theory that a slight wobble to the smooth spinning of the planet may have resulted from the size of the detonation used to seal off the Mariana Trench. It wouldn’t take very much to cause a dramatic change to weather patterns worldwide, but I’m confident the effect is temporary rather than permanent. Our best option is to continue with the holding operations we’ve already set in motion, reacting to each incident with whatever we have and can mobilise.
“Every situation will have to be approached according to its own needs, but this is a worldwide weather problem and a logistics problem of global dimensions. It needs to be tackled in an appropriate fashion, with total commitment from all the world’s leaders. I don’t see any part of the planet being unaffected, and the solution has got to come from a unified effort from every country, without exception.”
Several seconds of silence followed. Joey had to assume that the brigadier was taking this new information on board.
“We’re going to need some unprecedented levels of cooperation between governments for this to work.”
Even listening to this brief sentence, Joey sensed the brigadier had already worked out a possible solution.
“One question, Doctor. If this rebound wave is going to die off in the manner you describe, how long do you think it will be before we know for sure one way or the other? I need as much time as I can beg, borrow or steal if I’m going to broker some sort of agreement about international cooperation on this scale. If there’s even a remote chance the problem could sort itself out, it would be to our advantage.”
“Brigadier, soon in geological terms could be as much as several lifetimes.” Joey sighed, took off his glasses and gave them a totally unnecessary polish. “Best guess? Expect the current extreme weather conditions to settle down and become more predictable within a week or so. Does that help?”
“I’ll take it. I don’t like the idea of seven days of storms and the damage they’ll cause, but it gives me an opportunity to contact as many people as possible, persuade them to work with us on finding a way to correct the wobble we seem to have created in the Earth’s spin—assuming it’s not going to settle down itself, and we can’t afford to wait and see. That’s not an option.”
“Seeing the effects of the storms might actually persuade folk to take us seriously, Brigadier. The most important thing is, we have to come up with a plan of action, a possible solution—and it has to be ready within the next week.”
“Any preliminary thoughts?”
“This might sound more than a little crazy, Sir…”
“Desperate times, Doctor. Let’s hear it.”
“I need any reliable figures you can glean from anywhere in the world—especially the Southern Hemisphere—and remote access to fast computers to process and interpret them.
“Remember the eddy effect I mentioned? If we can find a way of breaking up the directional flow by constructing an obstacle on the seabed upstream of the Mariana Trench site, diverting the stream north and south, it would kill the momentum of the water mass in the same way we use breakwaters and groynes on beaches to control surface tides and protect coastlines.”
“That’s…easy to understand, Doctor. But will it work? We’re not dealing with the erosion of the North West English foreshore here. To start with, this obstacle would have to be constructed in the deepest recorded part of any of the world’s oceans.”
“Brigadier, we managed to place a considerable number of extremely dangerous missiles exactly where we needed them, at exactly the same depth. We then detonated them, and there were no mishaps or casualties. Think of that as a test run if you like. I believe we can do this.”
“And the materials needed for this…breakwater, whatever you decide to call it. Even if we ignore for the moment the sheer volume and the shipping needed to transport and dump it—we’re talking telephone numbers of tonnes of ballast, presumably—just manoeuvring the cargo vessels is going to be a logistics nightmare.”
“The fact that it’s an isolated location, far from any major landmasses could actually be an advantage, Brigadier. But it will mean every country which has any cargo vessels available has to be involved. It’s going to make the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk look like a walk in the park, I realise that. But as you said, it’s desperate times, and it calls for drastic measures.”
“And the ballast itself?”
“Red Adair once said, ‘Fill the hole with whatever junk you’ve got to hand and cap that son of a bitch.’ He was the best oilwell troubleshooter ever known. I think we should take him at his word.
“The whole of the industrialised world has a problem with waste disposal. Scrap metal mountains, building rubble—just about any inorganic rubbish which is solid enough to sink instead of floating. We could use this as an opportunity to clean up the environment, worldwide.”
“There are very strict laws about the dumping of waste materials, Doctor, but I unde
rstand what you’re saying. This is a unique situation, outside anyone’s experience. A week is nowhere near enough time to get a general agreement, but you’ve given me breathing space, time to talk to others. I’ll continue to get you as much data as I can from around the world. Keep me informed of any change in the weather patterns, and especially if the wobble in the Earth’s spin looks like getting worse.”
True to form, Groth ended the transmission without further ado.
Chapter Thirty
“Naval Command, Australia. All shore leave has been revoked; all available crews instructed to report to their vessels within twenty-four hours. Merchant shipping has been ordered to offload any cargo on board and stand by. All tourist routes are being held at their current docks and harbours. Those at sea will make landfall at the nearest available port.”
“Situation report, Japan. All naval vessels have been deployed at sea, leaving harbours clear of military vessels. Commercial vessels have all been contacted, many of them in the southernmost regions of the Arctic following established seasonal fishing routes.”
“Thank you, Japan. Your fishing vessels are to remain as far south as practical. We can’t use their cargo facilities without asking them to dump their cargoes, which would be a waste of food resources, but they must not enter the operations zone until we can give an all-clear. Confirm.”
“Understood. The message has been relayed and acknowledged.”
“Royal Navy, on behalf of the Joint Command, European Flotilla. Every available NATO vessel is fully crewed and on standby. Reservists have been contacted and given notice to report to regional centres. Smaller vessels will continue commercial fishing in the North Atlantic and the North Sea, as they will not interfere with planned operations further south.”
“This is the US Coast Guard, Washington DC. Torrential rain and winds up to one hundred twenty mph have caused major structural damage in Haiti, the Bahamas and Cuba. There has also been severe damage along the east coast affecting all areas as far north as New York. The hurricane season has arrived earlier than anticipated. We’re trying to mobilise all our larger vessels away from ports and harbours, into deep waters where they will be safer and available for deployment as required.”
“Except this isn’t just an ‘early hurricane season’,” Pete Whelan muttered, mostly to himself, and stretched. Cooped up in a disused army base in Tauranga, he’d all but forgotten what a bed—any bed but especially his own—looked like.
“We could have used some of that rain here these past few days.” his PA said.
“True enough, Marc.” The bay, usually lush and green with an abundance of rainfall, since the detonation in the Pacific had been drier than midsummer in Wairarapa. “But if we’d called in a fire control team, we’d have been obliged to give ’em a map ref.”
“And someone would know this place actually exists. Jaysus, is the security still that tight? We’re going to have to go public sooner or later.”
“So let’s make it later—the later, the better. Faced with a choice of bead-wearing hippies singing bad folk songs or skinhead thugs tossing bricks at anything that even hints at being vaguely military, I’d have ’em all lined up against a wall and shot at dawn.”
“Come off it, Pete. I know you better than that. Deep down, you’re just a big soft pussycat.”
“Who’s tanked up on Super Lava Java and hasn’t slept for about a week. I know these reports are all crucial bits and pieces of the jigsaw, but there’s just too much to process.”
“Which is why the brigadier requisitioned all these state-of-the-art computers and top operatives to run them. Nobody expects you to run every programme yourself or know the details of every scrap of intel that comes our way. Fer Chrissakes, Pete, go and lie down before you fall down. You’re no use to anyone like this.”
“Okay,” Pete agreed reluctantly. “Can you do me a favour and get in touch with my brother Dave? Give him everything we’ve got—and I mean, everything, no matter how obscure or insignificant it might seem. He’s got Doctor Joey Hart at his shoulder, and there’s nobody in the world who knows more about climate conditions and seismology. Our Dave has a way of spotting things others sometimes miss. He’s not a scientist. He isn’t going to bother proving something or finding a logical explanation, but who knows? His instincts and Doctor Hart’s expertise between them just might give us an angle we haven’t explored yet. I’ll go and crash for a few hours, though I daresay I’m too tense to sleep.”
Pete’s body had other plans, however, and shut down immediately his head touched the pillow.
After calling Dave and looking in to make sure Pete was comfortable, Marc collated all the available data and made one final check for anything which might have arrived within the last few minutes before forwarding the file to Doctor Hart.
***
“Who on earth is peewee?” Joey mused aloud, frowning at the monitor, which displayed his email inbox. His finger was almost on the delete key when Dave shouted.
“Joey, wait! It’ll be from my brother, although why he sent it from his personal account, I don’t know.”
“Peewee?”
“Pe-te Whe-lan.” Dave looked over Joey’s shoulder as he opened the message and clicked on the attachment. Columns of figures interspersed with graphs and weather maps scrolled across the monitor screen. “Anything there we didn’t already know?”
“Hmm. Not sure. I need a few minutes to crunch them, put them in context. Some of these were only logged within the past hour, so they’re up to the minute—certainly more recent than the figures we’ve been using.”
Brenda came to the console. “I’ve finished translating the reports from Météo-France and given them to Tom to add to the spreadsheet, Joey. And I’ve replenished the coffee.”
“Thanks, Brenda. I don’t know what we’d have done without you this past week.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, full stop,” Dave said, smiling at her over his shoulder. Returning the smile bashfully, she leaned against his back and put her arms around his waist. It seemed an eternity since they’d had an opportunity for a moment of affection, and she wasn’t inclined to pass up this chance.
“Those lines on the weather maps that look like the loops and whorls of a fingerprint. I know they’re something to do with areas of high and low pressure, but I can’t remember the proper word for them.”
“Isobars,” Joey said. “They show what direction the next weather pattern is coming from and the region it’s likely to affect.”
“So where they’re closer together, that shows high pressure? It’s a bit like reading a knitting pattern. More stitches per inch, more tension in the wool.”
“That’s a valid comparison, although weather systems aren’t constant.”
“But could you use that information to predict where and when the pattern—if there is one—is likely to repeat itself? That’s what I’d be doing if I was knitting with more than one colour or, say, using a cable stitch.”
“We can give it a try. We’ve tried everything else.” Joey sat up a bit straighter in his chair, grateful for a suggestion of something different, a new challenge. He ran some calculations, factoring in the relevant variables—latitude, elevation, landmass and so on—and transferred the results to the weather map. A fresh set of isobars superimposed themselves over the ones already on-screen. Joey highlighted them and changed the colour from black to red. The overall shape was similar, but they were more tightly packed and further apart.
“Interesting. If this is accurate, we can expect the areas of high pressure to be more intense but with longer periods between them—put another way, heavier rain but for shorter periods and less frequently.”
Dave stepped around Joey to take a closer look at the map. “Does that mean we’ll see the weather improve for a few days, then get battered with another storm more damaging than the last one? And then again, only worse?”
“That could happen, but we’re in uncharted territory h
ere. I can’t be certain each storm’s going to be stronger than the one before, but I expect it to get worse before it gets better. At the same time, I can’t predict how much worse it’s going to get before we see things easing off. The period of calmer weather in between the storms, though—that’s much easier to predict.”
“How long was the last calm between storms?”
“Three days.”
“And that blew itself to a standstill during the night. So, counting today as the first day, the next big storm can be expected in, what? Four days from now? Five? Longer?”
“Say four, then we’re on the safe side.”
“Best get on the horn to Groth. I told him he had a week, and he baulked at that. If we’ve a maximum of four days to prepare for a blow bigger than the last one, he’s going to have to mobilise a shitload of bodies and equipment and get anything essential out of the way or permanently tied down.”
***
“Is this our own little ‘calm between the storms’, I wonder?” Brenda arrived with a fresh set of full coffee mugs.
Joey pushed himself gratefully away from the console and stretched slowly for the nearest one. He winced.
“I must remember to stand up and move about once in a while. I’m starting to feel like Quasimodo here—I’ve even got ringing in my ears.” He stood and took a long drink. “That’s better. Thanks, Brenda, and you’re right. We’ve done all we can for now—brought Groth up to date with the latest from the Southern Hem, made an educated guess at the timeline—so we’re back to maintaining the ‘eyes and ears’ remit we were originally given. Watch the screens, stay alert, try not to miss a trick.”
“Joey, this might sound…well, not very scientific. Probably because I’m not a scientist.” A frown furrowed Brenda’s brow for a moment before she continued with a small smile of embarrassment. “We know where the shock wave originated. Can you work out how long it will take for it to travel right around the globe, back to where it started?”
Taking the Heat Page 22