Wave (7 page)

“Hey, what’s up?”

“There’s something going on here.”

The person on the other end—whom he had never met but, judging by the voice, couldn’t have been much older than himself—listened patiently, then asked a series of questions. Sometimes Malone felt like he was betraying his employer; Dawson in particular, who wasn’t a bad guy and sometimes treated him like a son. He rationalized all this by reminding himself that the media needed to know what was going on in the world, had a First-Amendment right. The fact that he was feeding information to CNN, of all places, was also too cool to ignore. And, of course, he was being well-paid for his troubles. He received cash on a per-call basis, and every penny helped when you no longer lived with your parents and had a growing collection of CDs.

“I’ll give you a call back when I know more. Shouldn’t be long. Just wanted to give you a heads-up now.”

“Much appreciated. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

“Right.”

He replaced the phone in his pocket, opened the door, and hit the switch for the light and fan off. For the sake of authenticity, he flushed the toilet.

Some days, Dave Dolan needed a few extra cups of coffee. Oceanographic field work wasn’t exactly a night out on the town, but he still loved it. It wouldn’t lead to riches or fame but he could honestly say he was doing something he enjoyed.

He sat in a long, brightly lit room in the Rutgers Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, New Jersey, a bank of computers and monitors running along one wall. Every item worth more than ten bucks had a sticker featuring a bar code and the legend “Property of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.” Some of it was cutting-edge and worth a small fortune, and the WHOI expected it to be properly maintained. He had no problem with that; he was grateful for the opportunity to use it in the first place, and equally grateful that Rutgers had joined up with Woods Hole on a few joint projects—general studies on climate, pollution, and underwater sea life. All part of the state-funding game—you couldn’t conduct just one study, you had to be economical and do them
en masse
. The fishing industry wanted to know where the fish were. The DEP and EPA wanted to know where the pollution was. And the National Weather Service wanted to know what was brewing out there. Woods Hole had instrument arrays in shallow waters, intermediate waters, and in the deep, hundreds of miles out, some sitting at this very moment on the ocean floor, thousands of feet below the surface, in darkness and stillness that would drive a human mind beyond its limits.

A good portion of Dolan’s duties involved simple data collection and logging. Not terribly interesting, but the professional experience—especially with all this cutting-edge equipment—was priceless. Real-time feeds via the Iridium satellite system. It was beyond incredible, a true luxury in a field where study methods were archaic just five years earlier. Dolan didn’t consider himself “driven,” and that didn’t bother him. His immediate plan was to finish his master’s, then go for his doctorate. Once that was in the bag he’d secure a comfy teaching post at some respectable coastal university, and eventually he’d retire to an obscure spot in the Pacific where he could spend his twilight years watching the sea life with a mask and a snorkel.

Curled up in an ancient desk chair that tilted back way too far, Dolan reviewed the readings from the previous day. The Doppler was an autonomous and self-registering instrument that measured the speed and directions of sea currents. A second instrument, known in the vernacular as a tide gauge, reported the distance from the sea floor to the water’s surface. These instruments, along with a few others, were clustered together in sets. Each set was spaced roughly fifty miles apart, and the string of clusters ran about seven hundred miles out, well beyond the continental shelf.

He yawned and rubbed his eyes. The coffee was helping, but not enough. He glanced at his watch and decided it was still too early for a Coke. Maybe he’d head over to the Dynasty Diner and get something to eat.

He also decided he wasn’t going to spend the bulk of his morning sitting here listening to the equipment beep, gurgle, and belch. He took an oversized textbook from his knapsack and set it on his lap. The glossy cover featured a photo of a huge wave curl. Along the top was the title
Oceanographic Geology, Volume 4
.

Dolan had just removed the playing-card bookmark and begun to read when one of the alarms went off. It was unfamiliar to him—he’d heard others in the four months that he’d been here, but not this one. He looked up and found an unusual tide-gauge reading—a swift and sudden ocean rise of about four feet.

“That can’t be right.” He leaned forward to get a closer look.

“What was that?” a voice asked. Dr. Sarah Collins came into the room. She was thirty-two, single, neither attractive nor unattractive, and the leader of this two-person project. Her affiliation with Rutgers began two years earlier, but her ultimate goal was to secure a full-time position with the Woods Hole organization. Most of her colleagues believed—some of them grudgingly—that she had the necessary skills to reach such an exalted position.

“The tide gauge,” Dolan said. He tapped the LED glass lightly. “It says the water just rose four feet, but that can’t be right. I mean, it’s not impossible, but…”

“That’s from unit seven, isn’t it?”

“Umm…yeah. Number seven.”

“That one’s due for a checkup.” She shook her head, annoyed. “It’ll take a full day just for the team to get out there, and who knows what’s wrong with it?”

“What should I do about the reading? Should I record it?”

“No, don’t bother. Just note in the log that it needs maintenance right away. And run a diagnostic when you get a chance, just so we have the information.”

“Okay.”

She lingered for another moment, giving a cursory inspection to the rest of the equipment. All other readings appeared normal.
Four feet in open sea. Yeah, right.
…

She returned to her office—a tiny antechamber with an aging desk that had been given so many coats of glaze the wood was mummified—and sat back down. There was a cube fridge in one corner and, on top of it, a small television set. The TV was on, tuned into CNN with the sound turned down. She sifted through some paperwork, occasionally glancing at the screen. Somewhere in the back of her mind she noted that Bill Hemmer was talking above the BREAKING NEWS banner, but she dismissed it because rarely a day had gone by since September 11, 2001 that CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News didn’t use this visual gimmick. It seemed like
everything
was “breaking news” now. What struck her as particularly ironic was the fact that something considered breaking news one day could be forgotten the next. If the press continued to cry wolf like this, she thought, eventually nothing would be able to grab the public’s attention.

What finally made her take the remote in hand and turn the sound up wasn’t the file photo of a 747 or of the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, but the long, running shot of the open ocean. Anything related to the ocean grabbed her; it had been this way since she was a child.

At first she thought it was a commercial and was about to dismiss it. Then CNN switched back to Hemmer and his BREAKING NEWS banner, and this time she read it—Commercial Airliner Goes Down in Atlantic Ocean. Possible Act of Terrorism.

“…shortly before eight-thirty this morning. The plane was a Boeing 747 with one hundred and eighteen passengers and a crew of eleven. It left the Netherlands bound for Washington DC and is believed to have gone down roughly eight hundred miles off the northeastern coast of the United States. We have been told that a message was sent by one of the pilots saying a passenger—a man who appeared to be of Middle-Eastern descent—claimed there was a bomb on board and was threatening to detonate it.”

A map of the Atlantic came up with a highlighted area and a caption box that read “Possible Crash Site.” Collins scrambled out of her chair and went back to the monitors. “David, where did you say that reading came from? It was unit seven, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Papers flew as she dug through a sheaf of maps.

Dolan replaced his bookmark. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Go look on the TV in my office.”

She reached the bottom of the pile—or what was left of it since most of the papers were on the floor now—and said angrily, “Where are the damn geo maps? David?”

Dolan’s reply was dull, lifeless. “In the…the file cabinet.” Then, much quieter, “Holy shit.”

Collins yanked the drawer back. When she finally found the map she wanted, she unfolded it quickly and spread it across the top of the cabinet. David came alongside her.

“This is where they said the plane went down,” she said, tapping the spot with a stubby, unvarnished fingernail. “And look at this.” She slid her finger to a tiny icon, and underneath was the legend, “Unit 7.”

“My God. Do you think…?”

She stared into his eyes; her own had become glassy with fear. “No, I doubt even the most powerful bomb in the world could elevate the open ocean that high. But what a bomb
could
do, just maybe, is this….”

She went into the next drawer down and finger-walked through the hanging folders. This second search was less frantic, as the contents were better organized and rarely referenced.

The second map portrayed the same general region. It boasted a variety of primary colors and bore the legend, “Geological Instability Survey #774.”

Pointing again, she said, “That’s what I thought.”

Dolan may have been nearly a year short of his master’s, but he knew enough to get what she was talking about. “It’s prime landslide area,” he said.

“That’s right. This is one of the regions the Garrett Group was concerned about in ’99, remember? That’s where this map came from.”

“But…it’s more than five hundred feet down. Wouldn’t a bomb have to—”

“If it exploded on impact, nothing would happen. But if it exploded well below the surface the shock waves could trigger a landslide.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t even have to be a particularly powerful bomb.”

They looked at each other, awash in the faint hope that this was nothing more than wild speculation; an academic exercise.

“I’m gonna check the readings one more time.”

“Okay. You didn’t run the diag, did you?”

“No, not yet. Let me do it right now.”

He turned the unit back on. Green LED characters came to life, at first in meaningless formations while the receiver waited impatiently for a signal from a satellite that floated thousands of miles above them in frigid space. He ran the diagnostic, which took no more than a minute. As they both feared, the unit appeared to be working just fine.

And then the tide gauge reading arrived—confirming the wave’s four-foot spike.

Dolan’s face paled as if all the blood had been drained out of it. “Christ, that’s just about right, isn’t it?” When he received no response, he said, “Sarah?”

She was back in her office already; he heard the sound of a wooden drawer being opened.

He found her at her desk with a tiny pocket calculator. She mumbled to herself as she tapped the keys and worked out the numbers. Then she stopped.

“My God,” she said, her voice merely a whisper, “the waves will begin striking in about two and a half hours.”

Sarah
Collins had always prided herself on her ability to remain calm in tight situations. As a youngster, she awoke one summer morning to the screams of her mother when the tall stockade fence that surrounded their backyard had somehow caught fire. She called the fire department and held the blaze at bay with a garden hose until they got there. When she was just thirteen, she successfully applied the Heimlich to an elderly man at a restaurant. And at twenty she not only saved a small boy from drowning off the beach in Point Pleasant, but also the inexperienced lifeguard who had gone out to rescue him.

But those incidents were meaningless compared to the crisis that lay before her now, and she knew it. For the first time in her life, she had to expend a conscious effort to locate the required calm within herself. She thought of her late father, who had the ability to turn stone-cold when necessary. He had told her, “If you find yourself in the heart of the storm, you must be the one to lead.” She focused on that—on the notion that it was her duty to take control. And her objective was obvious—tell as many people as you can.

She took her cell phone from her purse.

“What’s that for?”

“I’ll tell you in a min—Danny? It’s Sarah.”

Dr. Daniel Kennard had been Collins’s professor when she was pursuing her doctorate. Like so many students before her, she eventually fell in love with him, platonically. He had white hair, a kind and grandfatherly manner, and a seemingly endless supply of patience. He gave generously of himself and treated his students as equals. Collins cried the day she left him to return to the East Coast, but they never lost touch.

His voice was groggy and confused. “Sarah? Sarah Collins?”

“Yes, Danny. It’s me.”

“What the hell time is it?”