Serpentine Fire

By Jon Binkowski and Stephen DeWoody

A devastating, globe-shaking earthquake hits California; but terrible as it is, it only sets the stage for the real disaster to come. Because at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a fissure opens and releases a life-form that has been locked away for countless millennia.

When the quake strikes: Marine biologist Charles Jacobs is lucky to survive as his beloved Monterey Aquarium collapses. In Oakland, NOAA scientist Felix Goodwin suddenly finds himself tapped by his Washington boss, millionaire industrialist Garrison Drummond, to head up Emergency Operations. And environmentalist Natalie DiBella, homeward bound on an airliner that narrowly avoids crashing, dreads that her family may not have been so lucky.

Months later, when Charles is brought to a top secret government facility to examine a huge, strange creature, it is like nothing the eminent scientist has ever seen before. As impossible as it seems, it is a sea serpentand it is not alone. Soon the oceans are swarming with them, in all shapes and sizes, but all with the same eerie jade eyes. Charles comes to realize that they are the ultimate invasive species; Natalie thinks they are a beautiful force of natureand the Machiavellian Drummond believes they have the potential for almost limitless power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491732724

Jon Binkowski

Jon Binkowski is a creative entrepreneur and an award-winning writer, producer, and director of live shows and indie feature films. He is co-owner of Renaissance Entertainment, a production company headquartered in Celebration, Florida, where he lives with his wife, Shona, and their daughters. Stephen DeWoody is an award-winning playwright and an accomplished writer and art director for indie films and the live entertainment industry. He has had a multi-faceted career as a performer, director, writer, and designer. Stephen resides in Orlando, Florida, with his wife, Sandy. They have two grown children. Both authors worked for over 15 years with the SeaWorld family of parks, producing shows, exhibits, and attractions—giving them unique insight to the fascinating world of exotic deep-sea underwater life. Serpentine Fire is their first novel together.

Book preview

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The Monterey Aquarium Team:

Charles Jacobs, PhD, lifelong aquarist

Kirsten Carstairs (KC), ichthyologist & water chemistry specialist

Lloyd Hansen, volunteer aquarist

Natalie DiBella, environmentalist

Smitty (Vernon Smith), First Mate of the Samuel S Berry

Wesley Howard, crewman on the Berry

Joel Van Dyne, crewman on the Berry

Malcolm McCabe, AKA blogger Miles Mucker

Julie and Yogi, Aquarium volunteers

Government Personnel:

Felix Goodwin, NOAA scientist, later USMC Brevet Colonel

President Spencer, in office on Q-Zero

Lieutenant Cassie Forrest, USN, later part of the Aquarium Team

Garrison Bulldog Drummond, VP of US, former CEO of SeaRes, Inc.

Captain Anthony Stewart, USN, attaché to Drummond

Major Watters, USMC, head of security at Monterey Fjord facility

Ensign Jackson, USN, young security officer

President Amanda Graham, elected after the crisis

Lisa Russell, Drummond’s press secretary

Project Bythos Team:

Delia Suarez, primary fuel and weapon scientist

Major John Kellogg, USMC, Delia’s second

Perry Gibbs, marine biologist in charge of breeding research

Kenny Johnson & Danny Johnston, civilian scientists

Seafarer Crew:

Gwen Goodwin, Captain, Drummond’s daughter, CEO of SeaRes, Inc.

Ted Nye, First Officer

Parker (Sparks), radioman

Scott Adams (Doc), EMT

Hicks, security

Ken Yakota, engineer

Others:

Kuboyama, First Mate, Hotaru-maru Japanese fishing trawler

Takahama, Captain, same

Jim & Jimmy Langley, father & son fishermen

George Thompson, amateur treasure hunter

Brian Becker, skipper of the Shady Lady / Beowulf, captured ‘PB-1’

Captain Bagayan, of the BRP Rajah Tupas of the Philippine Navy

Paul Jankiewicz, searching for the R/V Albert Bigelow

Kevin Nguyen (Nemo), treasure hunter in Salinas Fjord

Sean Nguyen, Nemo’s sidekick

Bob & Rosemary Jacobs, Charles’s parents, on board the Monarch of the Sea

Mario Morales, survivor of the Monarch disaster

Frank Petillo, entrepreneur fish farmer at Bora Bora resort

Tyler Hollister (Fabio), amateur filmmaker at Bora Bora

Davis Marsh, owner of the Beowulf

Cliff Campbell, Captain of the crab boat Constance Kate

Greg Geissman (Ice Man), helicopter pilot

PROLOGUE: Q-ZERO

No warning. No mercy. In spite of the most advanced seismology in history, there is no warning. And in spite of the desperate, heartrending prayers of millions, there will be no mercy.

Millions of birds take to the air at once, from Shasta Lake at the top of the Sacramento Valley to Bakersfield at the bottom of the San Juaquin, hundreds of miles away. With the sudden, terrible, deafening roar of living rock tearing asunder, inland fault lines that had been considered stable for decades suddenly slam into motion. Dams don’t just fail; they disintegrate. Valleys flood with a nightmare sound that survivors will claim was to thunder as ocean is to pond, as the mother of all quakes continues running, breaking, tearing the earth apart with savage speed.

The tectonic shift continues to exert itself, pushing against the continental shelf. On a farm in the high country above Monterey, a newborn foal watches its mother fall to her knees, ride a rolling carpet of pasture, and finally regain her balance over five hundred feet away. In a small lake a few miles north, two old men, fishing from their battered old john-boat, working their spot as they have for decades, ride the boat down to the muck as the lake goes suddenly dry—all around them fish flop helplessly in the mud. In the scenic hills, a young couple hikes a well-worn mountain trail; as the rolling thunder rises, they are nearly overrun by wildlife bolting down the mountainside across their path; they look up in time to see the massive avalanche of raw earth as it comes down on their heads. Canyon sides that had sheltered sprawling bedroom communities near San Jose in the shadow of the Diablo Range crash together, burying thousands of acres in an instant, then yawn open to reveal one last glimpse of mangled architecture before slamming back together, never to open again.

Across hundreds of miles, the normal mid-morning bustle of a dozen big cities all up and down California is abruptly pre-empted. It is as if the earth suddenly stopped turning for just an instant: inertia causing everyone and everything to hurl forward, and then sling back, as full speed immediately resumed. Entire cityscapes perform macabre, surrealistic dances of death. Buildings of steel and glass metamorphose into cartoon creatures made of rubber; bending, bowing and twisting to the beat of a billion bass drums.

A few miles off the San Francisco coast, the R/V Samuel S Berry rides an enormous swell like a cork in a bathtub; only a few miles further east, however, a charter fishing boat named Norma Jean finds itself riding an inbound wave; it will eventually be found lodged in the second story of a shattered building in Half Moon Bay, nearly half a mile from the shore. No survivors are ever found.

And not only California; this is a worldwide event. Tourists at Yellowstone stand waiting for Old Faithful—the geyser blows ahead of schedule, a thousand times more violently than ever before, and the tourists go with it, as a mile-wide crater explodes beneath them. North of Memphis, Tennessee, the mighty Mississippi River flows backwards, colliding with the Missouri, and immediately forming a vast new lake. Over a hundred sites along the western Pacific Rim shift and rumble, drowning some low-lying islands while creating some new ones. On the north shore of Greenland, the Petermann Glacier fractures into a dozen huge icebergs, exposing ice that has been buried for a hundred thousand years.

No one will ever convince survivors that this initial titanic seismic impact lasts only forty seconds, as glass shards fall, gas lines explode, bridges and highway overpasses collapse, and tens of thousands die between one heartbeat and the next. Native Californians who have been through dozens of earthquakes realize that nothing has come even close to preparing them for this. For those endless forty seconds, it seems as if reality itself is toppling: thirty-story buildings do not tango with each other; sewers do not swallow automobiles whole; pedestrians are not catapulted by sidewalks hundreds of feet into the air. And, like a stunning slap to the face, there follows a deathly stillness before the hot tingle of pain slowly blossoms… Then, the aftermath. Some pass out, sparing them the immediate agony; others are stunned into a state of shock—but for most, hysteria.

Most horrifying is the noise. The ultimate thunder of the Quake gives way to a few seconds of total silence as this part of the world gathers its collective breath to unleash a torrent of shrill primal screams. Terror is a hopelessly inadequate word for the sounds that rush in now to fill the void: the screams and cries of countless victims; the blare of car horns and the piercing squeals of senseless alarms; the discordant whining of rescue vehicles as heroic first-responders begin weaving through random eruptions of fire and gas; all rise together to form one calamitous, cacophonous tone: the Devil’s Choir.

And even as the sirens wail, those survivors with even a little of their wits about them realize with shivers of dread anticipation that the seismic clock is still ticking, and that aftershocks are on their way.

Never mind the first forty seconds—forty days later, deadly temblors still rumble across the planet.

—from Reflections on the End of the World As We Know It:

Anecdotes, Essays and Musings

by Virginia Stein

CHAPTER 1

C HARLES JACOBS HAD JUST STEPPED out onto the boardwalk outside the Monterey Aquarium and Oceanic Studies Institute to stretch his long, lanky legs. He’d been sitting at his desk for three hours straight, and his lower back was howling; Charles understood the necessary evil that was corporate paperwork, but he was far happier out in a boat—or under one, scuba diving. But his second-in-command, KC Carstairs, was away on a vacation Charles had insisted she take—her first in five years or more—and now he was obliged to take up the slack. He ran his hand through his sandy, sun-bleached hair, telling himself for the thousandth time that he needed a haircut. He squinted in the late morning sun, wondering where he’d left his latest pair of sunglasses. Oh, well; they’d turn up as soon as he bought a new pair.

Charles was forty-something years old; he honestly couldn’t have said exactly without doing the math on the date vs. his birthday. He held doctorates in Marine Biology and Applied Ocean Sciences, and routinely turned down academic offers for faculty positions at universities all over the world. He considered the Monterey Aquarium his, and nothing was likely to lure him away. Standing at the boardwalk rail, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Fresh air, salt water, but also notes of seagull guano, decaying kelp, rotting fish, a trace of boat fuel. To a stranger fresh off the plane from farm country, say, the combination of smells would probably be overwhelming, and likely unpleasant. To Charles, it smelled like life.

One of his earliest memories was sitting on his mother’s lap as she was on duty atop a lifeguard tower at the public beach in Seaside. Charles really could swim before he could walk. By the time he was six he was a veteran surfer as well. For the first half of his first grade year, he ditched school for the beach so many times that the principal was already threatening to hold him back and make him repeat the grade. Then something unexpected happened: little Charlie got hooked on fishes. His teacher, Miss McKenzie, set up an aquarium and through some instinct or sixth sense put Charles in charge of it. When the class took a field trip to the Monterey Aquarium, Charles’s fate was sealed.

In middle school, encouraged by his mother, Charles had joined the swim team, but the highly chlorinated water of the municipal pools gave him a rash, at least figuratively. Instead, he joined the Sea Scouts. That lasted all of one summer, but Charles ultimately chafed at the militaristic lifestyle the program imposed. When an internship at the Aquarium opened up, he jumped at it.

Charles had just opened his eyes, abandoning his brief reverie, when every seagull in sight suddenly took wing. He glanced at his watch; it was just past 10:30, and the tide should have been coming in; instead it seemed to be dropping lower than ever. And that could only mean… As he heard the first rising rumble of that distant seismic freight train, he turned and ran toward the big tanks. By the time he got to the nearest doorway, the first colossal jolt hit and Charles just barely managed to catch his balance on the frame. Across the lobby, the floor heaved and the massive main aquarium literally came apart at the seams—thousands of gallons of water shot out in the instant before the glass shattered, flooding the room with devastating ferocity. The floor rocked beneath him, pulled him away from the doorjamb and knocked him off his feet. In the brief, disorienting instant that he fell, he was overwhelmed by the rising noise—screams and exploding glass and shattering beams and the terrible thunder of the Quake itself; then his head slammed against the concrete floor.

Charles was only unconscious for a few seconds, but in those few seconds his whole world changed. He struggled to regain his feet, looking up at the entrance of the Bottom Dwellers attraction. For three years this had been his baby. Shaking off the pain of his throbbing head, he heard the screams of victims over the still-shattering glass and rushing water. He threw himself inside.

Charles had often been accused of caring more about fish than people, and indeed now his first inclination was to tend to the exotic specimens flopping desperately among the shards of broken glass. But he quickly regained his sense of humanity and pushed past fallen mullions and scenic boulders, slipping on broken strands of slick, mucous sea kelp to reach the only victim visible, a young girl who had been violently thrown against the back wall of the exhibit by the tremendous force of a million gallons of water exploding out of the tank. Where was everyone else? There must have been a small crowd in here, but if so it was buried under the debris of the decimated exhibit.

Stepping around two gasping giant groupers, Charles made his way to the little girl, seven years old at the most, a mocha-colored child with curly golden hair. She wore an oversized blue T-shirt with SH-SH-SH-ARK! scrawled across her chest in jittery white letters, an Aquarium souvenir she probably bought only minutes before. She had on only one pink-and-white tennis shoe; on the other foot was a dainty pink sock edged in lace. She seemed barely wet; a hundred little droplets stained her shirt as if she had just dashed through a lawn sprinkler. At first Charles thought she was convulsing—her body was heaving forward, then back again—until he saw that she had landed atop a huge halibut, and the big flat fish was frantically lurching and bucking, trying desperately to escape, to swim away from its prison of gravity.

The fish was hard to make out, because it was covered in the child’s blood. She was suffering from a large wound to the back of her head and a grotesquely severed right arm. The fish lurched one last time, and the grisly stump flopped, spurting a weak pulse of bright red arterial blood against the wall. The sight was so bizarre, Charles almost burst out laughing; for as long as he could remember, Charles had had to quell these nearly involuntary, wildly inappropriate responses. In college, he used to claim he had Tourette’s just so he’d have an automatic excuse. He’d finally come to realize that almost everyone deals with the same thing at one time or another; one colleague called it the Chuckles the Clown Syndrome: the odd uncontrollable guffaw that occasionally leaps out during the most solemn of occasions. Now, Charles stifled one chortle with a half-swallowed snort as he knelt next to the girl.

He took off his belt, desperately determined to attempt a tourniquet above the horrible wound to this broken child’s arm. She showed no sign of life, but her eyes were wide open. Beautiful, emerald-green eyes; like those hypnotic eyes of the Afghani girl on that famous NatGeo cover. But as he watched, the vibrant green seemed to fade to a dull gray as her life ebbed away.

Charles gently lifted her slight, limp body off the fish. Carefully, he carried her out past a series of bizarre scenes: broken sections of concrete coral; huge hunks of glass with an escaping octopus slithering across the punctured shell of a dying sea turtle; an elderly lady, dripping wet, crying in pain, grasping at what appeared to be nothing worse than a twisted ankle; a pile of a thousand or more anchovies (part of the Schooling Around exhibit, an analytical part of his brain noted, desperate for mundane order), their silvery sides shimmering in the glow of the emergency lights as they instinctively attempted to maneuver in the puddle on the floor; a Canadian tour group crushed by a full-scale model of a blue whale that had been suspended over the entry plaza—the dead tour guide still clutched her little maple-leaf flag.

And, most surrealistic of all, as he picked his way through the rubble of the collapsed shark exhibit, he saw the bizarre tableaux of shark and human body parts jutting out willy-nilly from chunks of gunnite, re-bar and glass. The big blue-and-white SH-SH-SH-ARK! sign still hung in place; Charles involuntarily glanced down at the same logo draped over the child in his arms, and realized he had tears in his eyes.

In shock, he numbly carried the girl, fixed on sunlight emanating from above the debris, and calmly noted with that data-gathering part of his brain that his blow to the head was finally catching up with him; his vision was collapsing, going gently dark around the edges as he stumbled on in the first steps of a timeless fugue. The unbearable din of the chaos around him receded as well, until all he heard was the gentle thump-whoosh of his own pulse.

A powerful hand grabbed his arm. Come on, Doc. We need to get outside.

With a sharp and sudden effort of will, Charles focused on that voice and pushed the blackout back, reclaimed his objective vision, and snapped back to awareness, just in time to avoid stepping on a five-hundred-pound stingray with a ten-inch barb on its tail. He looked over at the man keeping him on his feet. He was a big, red-faced Nordic-looking fellow wearing an Aquarium staff blazer; Charles recognized him, a guy from Marketing, maybe, but couldn’t recall his name. Together they staggered outside.

They found a relatively serene spot where Charles could lay the little girl’s broken body down. He took distant note that his khaki pants were now almost black with the poor child’s blood. The Marketing guy took off his blazer and handed it to Charles, who laid it gently over the child’s upper body, covering her head and those haunting green eyes.

He turned to the man, who offered him a hand up from his knees. Thanks, Charles mumbled. Um… What the hell was his name? Lance?

Lloyd Hansen, the man said, apparently reading Charles’s mind. He was leading him to a big flat rock at the edge of the main path. You need to sit down, okay? Charles was in no condition to argue. Lloyd smiled, or at least made an effort in that direction. Hang in there, Doc, he said. I’m going back in. I’ll check on you later. And he trotted off.

Charles’s sense of hearing was still a bit addled. Everything sounded like listening at a keyhole that had been stuffed with cotton. Even so, he was slowly becoming aware of a new sound rising above the clamor nearby: the rolling rumble of the surf. Dear God, he thought, not a tsunami too.

Then the Quake’s first aftershock hit.

CHAPTER 2

F ELIX GOODWIN SAT AT A borrowed desk at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA—Coastal Services Center in Oakland, playing solitaire on his laptop. He had half an hour to kill before a conference call scheduled for 11 o’clock. As it happened, except for the receptionist at the front desk and a couple of bored grad school interns, he had the place to himself; everyone else assigned to this office was off in the field somewhere, on vacation, or already out to lunch. Felix hated California and was completely immune to the charms of historic downtown Oakland. He was completely out of his element here on the so-called Left Coast—and was self-conscious about everything from his wardrobe to his soft southern accent. Back at the NOAA National Weather Service home office in Charleston, he didn’t have an accent. To top it all off, every time he’d been to California in the past (okay, he’d only been here twice before), there’d been an earthquake, however minor. Felix would rather face a Cat-Four hurricane any day of the week. Weather he understood; plate tectonics, not so much.

Anyone else would have considered this assignment a pleasant junket, but Felix was anxious to be finished and be gone. He’d come out to meet his counterpart in meteorology at the new facility in La Jolla, and had been asked to look in on several other West Coast offices before heading back to Charleston by way of Salt Lake City. His flight out was later this afternoon, and as soon as his eleven o’clock call was over, he planned to head out to the airport and try to get on an earlier flight. Maybe he could beat his own private little earthquake curse.

Then he felt a thump, as if someone down the hall had slammed an impossibly huge door. Next, his chair began to shimmy underneath him. Damn, he said out loud. The picture of someone else’s family on the desk in front him danced a few inches, then fell loudly to the floor. He could hear rattling and crashing all around him as he pushed his chair away and crawled under the heavy desk. He reached up and retrieved his laptop just as the lights went out. The rattling sound was replaced by a low rumble, like an approaching freight train. The desk began to shift, bumping hard against his back. He thought he heard the receptionist scream, but he couldn’t be sure, because now that freight train rumble was drowning out everything else. He braced himself against the desk panels as he felt the entire building sway. Felix was a thoroughly lapsed Catholic, but now he began to pray: Our Father…

Soon the freight train passed. The swaying stopped. Emergency lights came on and Felix crawled out from under the desk. Later he would learn that while the entire San Francisco Bay area was still experiencing the worst earthquake ever recorded, in that inscrutable way of seismological events, downtown Oakland had been largely spared. He felt a little unsteady as he stood up, but he was pretty sure that was his sensitive inner ear, not any actual unsteadiness beneath his feet. Over the next few hours would come one aftershock after another, but for the moment, all was still.

The two interns, one a tall Asian-American fellow, the other a stout little Australian girl, were at a window in the conference room. Felix stopped in the doorway; the young woman turned to look his way. Come look at this, sir. I’ve never seen the like!

No, thanks. And if I were you I’d step away.

The young man spoke up: Why?

Because I don’t think this thing is over yet, and a window eleven stories up is the last place you want to be. Up to you, though. He turned and continued on his way. Behind him, he heard the guy saying, He’s got a point, I guess, as both of them moved away.

The receptionist, Karen, was still under her desk, but she was perfectly calm about it. She was a sweet-faced, tiny round woman in a pink pantsuit who always wore a pair of half-glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was a native Californian who’d been through dozens of quakes—she offered Felix a knowing smile, a brief roll of the eyes, and a reassuring thumbs-up.

Felix went back to his borrowed desk and picked up the handset that had fallen from the phone there and put it to his ear, tapping the hook for a connection. Of course there wasn’t any. Nor did his cell phone show any bars. Never one for making decisions, Felix grabbed a cushion from a guest chair and crawled back under the desk. Felix was a compact fellow—he claimed to be five-nine, but he was just a tick over five-seven—so the space here was roomy enough; he remembered that Seinfeld episode when George had built a complete retreat under his desk—maybe he’d just settle down here for a while.

He’d actually nodded off when Karen came gently knocking at the top of his desk. Felix glanced at his watch: almost one o’clock. Wow. Over two hours had gone by. Sir? Karen was saying. Mr. Goodwin? Felix felt a little sheepish as he crawled out, not to mention a bit stiff.

Sorry. Just give me a second. He stood up in stages, using the desk as a support. Sorry, he said again. (It was a bad habit; Felix said sorry the way some people said um.) Felix realized that Karen was looking at his head—he reached up with both hands and tried to get his thick headful of black hair under control. It was a lost cause. What can I do for you?

Mr. Drummond is on the emergency satellite link. Asking for you.

Sorry, what?

Just come with me, sir.

Felix shook his head and unconsciously straightened his tie as he followed the receptionist back to the front desk area.

Garrison Bulldog Drummond was the new administrator of NOAA; he had been a controversial choice (at least among those who’d ever even heard of NOAA), coming from the corporate world instead of the scientific or academic. He had stepped down as CEO of SeaRes, Inc. to take the position, but his political enemies claimed it was a ruse, and that the administration had put the fox in charge of the henhouse.

SeaRes was infamous in conservation circles. There was a common joke at Greenpeace, for instance, that the Res in SeaRes stood for Resell. In reality, it was generally thought to be Resources, but the company slyly encouraged the public to think Research and Rescue as well. In fact, it was none of those things; the company’s original name, long since legally changed to simply SeaRes, was the awkward if frank mouthful Scientific & Environmental Assets, Resources & Exploratory Services, founded in the post-World War II days of unabashed military-industrial development by Drummond’s father and father-in-law. Somewhere along the way, tired of their acronym being pronounced Sears, the Board of Directors capitalized the R, dropped the old name altogether, and created a long-term PR program positioning the company as stewards of sea resources with vague profiles of their supposed efforts at oceanographic environmentalism. They added leaping dolphins to their logo, funded a few legitimate research teams, and boldly used money and political influence to deflect all critics. Mostly, they stayed off the fickle public’s radar. The current company was far larger than most people realized, encompassing a dizzying range of subsidiaries—mostly acquired in hostile takeovers throughout the ’80s and ’90s—including everything from smaller oil companies to major weapons manufacturers.

Garrison Drummond ran the company with an infamously brutal iron fist, and almost no one believed he had relinquished any real authority when he stepped down to take the reins at NOAA. Drummond was aware that he didn’t fit the image that the PR flacks wanted, and it suited him perfectly well to run things from the shadows.

Felix Goodwin knew Drummond all too well. After all, not only was the old Bulldog now his boss, he was also his former father-in-law.

That coincidence had gotten Felix thinking about his ex-wife a lot lately. He hadn’t seen Gwen in years. They’d met in college—Georgetown—and married the winter before they graduated. They were the very picture of struggling grad students until Gwen had passed the Bar and gone to work for her father, starting at the bottom at SeaRes, Inc. Felix tended to think of it in melodramatic terms: his blossoming Princess had fallen under the spell of the Evil Puppetmaster and gone over to the Dark Side. By the end of her first year at SeaRes, she had moved out; within a few months, a quiet divorce was arranged. Felix had moved back to Charleston, and hadn’t seen her since.

When Drummond had stormed through NOAA headquarters a few months ago, meeting the troops as he’d put it, he had shaken Felix’s hand without a hint of recognition. But he knew who he was all right. Unfortunately. Machiavellian was too puny a term for Bulldog Drummond. Under no circumstances could Felix even begin to trust him. In many ways, he was that Evil Puppetmaster, or at least one of the all-time, world-class Master Manipulators. Whatever it was he wanted with Felix now, although it would be presented as for the good of the country (or world, or humanity, or whatever Bulldog thought would inspire Felix the most), the only thing it would positively be good for was Drummond himself.

Karen handed Felix the phone; it was a government-issued satellite phone that looked like one of the big brick wireless rigs from the ’80s. He let out a louder-than-he-intended sigh and took the handset. Yes, sir? This is Goodwin. But it wasn’t Bulldog on the line.

A voice Felix didn’t know was saying, Stand by for Mr. Drummond, please. Are you kidding me? This was a real pet peeve with Felix; bad enough to be put on hold, but to receive the call, then be told to wait—it was too much.

He said sharply, Who is this, please? No response. Listen, we’re in the middle of an earthquake here, Felix added. To whom am I speaking?

It was clear by now that the man on the other end wanted to remain anonymous, but he finally answered, so quietly on the crappy connection that Felix could barely make it out: This is Captain Anthony Stewart. Mr. Drummond will be on shortly.

Ah. The head toady. Felix had heard of this guy. Scion of old Drummond family friends. Somehow Drummond had finagled the young officer’s posting to NOAA as some kind of US Navy attaché. In practice, though, he was apparently Bulldog’s monkey boy.

Finally, the old man himself came on the line. Reception was still lousy, but clear enough; Drummond wasn’t known for quiet conversation. He would have all-but shouted at his end of the connection anyway.

The bottom line was that since Felix was the ranking NOAA official that Drummond could find on the west coast, he was now going to be Drummond’s liaison for the duration. Paperwork would follow to make it official. Felix was to remain in California indefinitely, assessing new developments regarding oceanic resources and report all significant findings directly back to Drummond. And on and on. Drummond had served as a Marine decades ago, and still had a rock-hard military bearing. By the time Felix finally hung up, he’d said Yes, sir so many times he was starting to feel like a Marine himself.

He wondered grimly how long the duration would be. Giving in to his native pessimism, he imagined it would likely be weeks as opposed to days, maybe even a few months. Even he wasn’t pessimistic enough to imagine that it would actually be years.

CHAPTER 3

U NITED FLIGHT 5442 WAS SECONDS away from touching down in San Jose when the passengers felt a sudden strange lurch, pushing them hard into their seat cushions. The overhead fluorescents flickered, and several people screamed. On the left side of the cabin, many more gasped in shock as they saw a plane just taking off from a parallel runway slam back to the tarmac and erupt into a blossoming ball of flame. There was another stomach-churning jolt as the pilot aborted the landing and pulled the plane into an emergency c limb.

Natalie DiBella considered herself a well-seasoned, veteran air traveller; she had tens of thousands of miles logged in more than one frequent flier account. She’d been through turbulence that had the flight attendants barfing; had experienced sudden drops that sent meals flying through the cabin; she’d even been through an aborted landing before, when they’d been waved off because a private plane had taxied onto the runway. She took it all in stride. But this was orders of magnitude beyond anything she’d ever been through before—beyond anything she’d ever heard of before. From her window seat just forward of the right wing in the last first class row, she watched as the grassy field between runways rippled, like a giant picnic blanket being settled onto the ground. The heavier asphalt of the tarmac buckled under the same forces. Then the control tower keeled over, crushing the support building behind it.

The plane was banking hard to the right, swinging around as if designed to give Natalie a continuing view of the little airport’s utter demise: the plane that had crashed only seconds before was now completely consumed by dark orange flames, black smoke forming a small mushroom cloud; the control complex was still billowing dust—Natalie could see someone trying to run away onto the airfield but reeling like a drunken maniac as the earth continued to heave; smaller aircraft were sliding around, slamming into each other as the ground tilted first one way, then another; and then a gaping wound opened in the field between runways, belching out fire like some horror-film hellmouth.

She was vaguely aware that virtually every other soul on board—flight attendants included—was screaming, but Natalie was too stunned to scream. As the plane climbed, she could still see the doomed airfield; flames were spreading from the new chasm out across the airport with alarming speed, and Natalie found herself thinking of the map of the Ponderosa on Bonanza, consumed in a destructive ring of fire. Then the plane bucked in the sudden turbulence created by the violent displacement of enormous landmasses, and Natalie’s view of the chaos below shifted abruptly. Now she saw past the airport to the southeast as San Jose fell apart, and impossible ripples ran right along US 101 the length of the Santa Clara Valley as far as she could see.

Fortunately, passengers and crew had all buckled in for their final landing approach, so apart from a few bruises from some of the carry-ons popping out of their bins and onto the passengers below, no one was injured by this violent ride. A stranger’s overnight bag had fallen into the empty seat next to her; across the aisle the two-year-old in her mother’s arms continued sleeping through it all. A handful of passengers attempted to use their airsickness bags with various degrees of success, causing a chain reaction of nausea, but as if by an innate sense of propriety, it stopped short of first class.

Finally, the plane rose up into the clouds, and when they emerged above them the morning sun revealed an apparently serene world of cotton ball clouds beneath a dazzling blue sky. The incessant screaming of the passengers segued into sobbing and animated conversation as nearly everyone on board forgot the rules and started trying to make calls on their cellphones. Very few got any connections at all, and none back to the coast. Natalie didn’t even bother; she just closed her eyes and prayed, as sincerely as she knew how.

Her home was on the north side of Santa Cruz, thirty miles and a small mountain range away from the airport. She shared it with her husband Rick, whose mixed Italian and African-American ancestry had come together perfectly to make him the handsomest man she’d ever known, and their daughter Jessica, who had skin only a shade lighter than her father’s, and eyes the same emerald green as Natalie’s. Jessica was so beautiful, Natalie had briefly considered getting her a modeling agent, until she met some moms that put their seven-year-olds through that kind of pressure. Natalie had been in a pageant or two when she was in high school and college, but she had truly never been the type—she was a little too tall, a little too athletic, a little too casual about her wild, dirty-blond hair, and altogether too aware of how shallow it all was. Natalie was attractive; her husband and her daughter were both gorgeous, and