David Golemon - Ancients

"Bring the Wave up to full power. Directional beacon is locked and confirmed."

Engvall ran to another panel and watched as the Wave buildup became a steady stream of blue and red on the computer's monitor.

"We have solid tone," one of the techs called out.

Once the stream turned pure red, the audio wave was pulsed to the amplifiers on the seafloor. Once the trigger had penetrated the depths of the sea, the audio signal would be activated and then the three-pronged decibel enhancers set inside the large steel enclosures would chime like a tuning fork, creating the desired tone that the Ancients had calculated thousands of years before for the science of breaking solid stone.

The amplifiers were laid along the Koryak-Kamchatka orogenic belt, which sat above one of the most active continental plates in the world. The wave from the amplifiers would sink to crust depth and hammer at its edges in an assault of sound that would crumble any natural strata in all of known geology.

The duration of the three-second pulse would be short, due to the instability of the Wave of the Ancients. That and the fact that the fault line above the plate ran all the way to Sumatra.

"Initiate trigger, now!"

Located at the bottom of the huge aircraft, a set of doors swung open and the small laser cannon deployed. It was not a cannon in the normal sense of the word; it was a laser-guided sound pulse. A three-second burst at full power shot downward into the sea, where it would actually pick up speed as it was not diminished by one single decibel due to the salinity of the water. Twenty-one miles below the surface of the sea, the wave penetrated the waters of the cold Pacific at the speed of sound. It struck the first amplifier, then relayed down the line of six. More than six hundred miles of fault line and its supporting plate were under attack. The strike would generate enough explosive energy as fifty twenty-megaton nuclear detonations going off in the earth's crust.

As it struck, the audio wave radiated in the only direction it could: straight down through sand and rock.

The Boulder Institute of Seismology in Colorado recorded the eruption underneath the crust as it traveled as far south as Australia and as far east as the United States. The epicenter of the quake originated two hundred miles north of the undersea Siberian Seamount. As the seafloor split, ten trillion gallons of seawater flooded into the void. The smaller seamounts nearest the eruption cascaded into the gap that had instantly gone from a mere fracture to the size of the island of Hawaii. The quake hit the Siberian coast and shook houses to their foundations. The first shocks hit Japan and China only twenty-three seconds later.

As he monitored the reports coming in from prepositioned seismic stations in the Pacific, Engvall knew that they had unleashed a strike accurate to the mile. As he listened to the euphoria in the voices of his technicians, the realization had struck him that he just might have destroyed a great deal of Russia's eastern coast.

As a listening post at the northern end of the Sea of Japan, the Joint Communications and Seismic Station did not garner much respect from the U.S. Navy. The antiquated equipment failed to measure seismic activity accurately. Japan and the United States had succeeded in doing that in the late 1950s. The communications network was in an even worse state.

As the bored men fought to stay awake, the needle on the antiquated Richter monitor moved once and held steady. The operator failed to see the quick jump of the needle. Instead, the ancient radio monitor told them something was amiss.

The two young Korean and Russian officers listening in on the Japanese and American chatter were using a radio and direction finder that was surplus back in 1959. The constant replacement of its tubes and the limited-frequency channels made finding anyone, anywhere, talking openly as rare as good food on the anchored station. However, the one thing it was good at was picking up low-range high-decibel-burst releases, only because the equipment lacked the necessary filters of modern sets to block it out.

Both radiomen suddenly shouted out and threw the headphones from their ears. The Russian doubled over in pain and the Korean actually felt the trickle of blood flow from his right ear.

"What are you two fools doing?" asked the Korean duty officer.

"It must have been some sort of burst transmission," the soldier said as he grabbed his Russian counterpart for support. "An aircraft directly overhead, that's the only thing it could have been, maybe--"

That was as far as he got as the anchored platform was rocked on its stiltlike legs.

"My God, look at this!"

The officer gained his balance and turned to the Richter scale. The long needle was swishing back and forth on the graph paper, almost creating a solid wall of red as it moved.

The technician shouted out, "6.5 ... 7.1 ... 7.9 ... 8.0," as he counted the numbers the needle struck. As he did so, the platform--an old oil derrick of Russian design--lifted and then swayed. He continued: "8.7 ...9.6..."

"My God, the sea is erupting around us!"

"Track that aircraft!" the officer screamed as he lost his footing.

The men of the battle cruiser Admiral Nakhimov were making ready to get under way when the harbor waters started to recede. At the same time, warning sirens sounded throughout the naval base. The above-deck crew ran to the railing and watched in amazement as the sea rolled out from under them and her sister vessel, Petr Velikiy, as both giant vessels strained at their many mooring ropes. As the two great warships groaned and creaked, their heavy bulk settled into the dark mud of the harbor. Smaller warships of the fleet were torn from their moorings, kidnaped by the retreating waters of the Pacific.

Onshore the quake hit with devastating power. Buildings constructed to withstand direct bomb hits were knocked flat with no warning. Streets buckled and fell into voids created by ancient riverbeds collapsing underground. Thousands of people were crushed to death as cranes and material in the dry dock area broke and fell. Giant cruisers rolled over and crushed the lives of seamen as they tried in vain to make it over ships railings.

Men aboard the Admiral Nakhimov were knocked from their feet as thick, viscous mud erupted like lava from the harbor floor. The giant ship rippled as the mud below waved up like a maddened sea. At that moment, the men heard the most horrible of sounds. It rumbled even above the noise of the quake. It was the return of the sea.

"Abandon ship, all hands abandon ship!" the loud speakers on both vessels bellowed.

The horrible roar grew from the east and the sea beyond. The sun was blotted out as the giant wave built as the ocean rushed back in to fill the land vacated in its backlash. As the sea started to crest, just one mile south of the port of Vladivostok another quake, of greater magnitude, struck. The air itself became a living thing as scared people became disoriented and fell to the undulating ground. Then the water was returning just as if hell itself had opened its gates.

The crew of the Nakhimov knew they were about to die as the wall of water was seen taking out the city before them. Entire buildings were knocked free of their foundations, their debris joining the onrush of destruction. The wall of water hit the two great ships. They were smashed and then lifted and flipped over like toys in a tub as they cascaded into the eastern end of the port city.

The Petr Velikiy disintegrated like it had been made of wood. The thick steel plates made to withstand a standard torpedo strike caved in and fell apart as easily as if made of the finest crystal. The Nakhimov was flipped end over end three times before it struck the roiling waters below, breaking the ship into three pieces. Still the waters rushed inland.