Michael Crichton - State Of Fear

They were almost a hundred feet away. The wave had come a good sixty feet up the slope.

"The next one will be bigger," Kenner said.

The sea was quiet for several minutes. Evans turned to Jennifer. "Listen," he said, "do you want me to"

She wasn't there. For a moment he thought she had fallen out of the jeep. Then he saw she had fallen on the floor, where she lay curled in pain. Her face and shoulder were soaked in blood.

"Jennifer?"

Kenner grabbed Evans's hand, pushed it back gently. He shook his head. "Those guys in the jeep," he said. "She was okay until then." Evans was stunned. He felt dizzy. He looked at her. "Jennifer?"

Her eyes were closed. She was hardly breathing.

"Turn away," Kenner said. "She'll make it or she won't."

The next wave was coming in.

There was nowhere they could go. They had reached the end of the track. They were surrounded by jungle. They just waited, and watched the water rush up in a hissing, terrifying wall toward them. The wave had already broken. This was just surge rushing up the hillside, but it was still a wall of water nine or ten feet high.

Sarah was sure it was going to take them all, but the wave lost energy just a few yards away, thinning and slowing, and then sliding back down to the ocean.

Kenner looked at his watch. "We have a few minutes," he said. "Let's do what we can."

"What do you mean?" Sarah said.

"I mean, climb as high as we can."

"There's another wave?"

"At least."

"Bigger?"

"Yes."

Five minutes passed. They scrambled up the hillside another twenty yards. Kenner was carrying Jennifer's bleeding body. By now she had lost consciousness. Evans and Sarah were helping Morton, who was moving with great difficulty. Finally, Evans picked Morton up and carried him piggyback style.

"Glad you lost some weight," Evans said.

Morton, not speaking, just patted him on the shoulder.

Evans staggered up the hill.

The next wave came in.

When it receded, their jeeps had vanished. The spot where they had been parked was littered with the trunks of uprooted trees. They stared, very tired. They argued: Was that the fourth wave or the fifth? No one could remember. They decided it must have been the fourth.

"What do we do?" Sarah said to Kenner.

"We climb."

Eight minutes later, the next wave came in. It was smaller than the one before. Evans was too tired to do anything but stare at it. Kenner was trying to stop Jennifer's bleeding, but her skin was an ugly pale gray and her lips were blue. Down at the beach, there was no sign of human activity at all. The tents were gone. The generators were gone. There was nothing but piled-up debris, tree branches, pieces of wood, seaweed, foam.

"What's that?" Sarah said.

"What?"

"Someone is shouting."

They looked across to the opposite side of the bay. Someone was waving to them.

"It's Sanjong," Kenner said. "Son of a bitch." He grinned. "I hope he's smart enough to stay where he is. It'll take him a couple of hours to get across the debris. Let's go see if our helicopter is still there or if the wave took it. Then we'll go pick him up."

Eight thousand miles to the east, it was the middle of the night in Golden, Colorado, when the computers of the National Earthquake Information Center registered an atypical seismic disturbance originating from the Pacific basin, just north of the Solomon Islands, and measuring 6.3 Richter. That was a strong quake, but not unusually strong. The peculiar characteristics of the disturbance led the computer to categorize it as an "anomalous event," a fairly common designation for seismic events in that part of the world, where three tectonic plates met in strange overlapping patterns.

The NEIC computers assessed the earthquake as lacking the relatively slow movement associated with tsunamis, and thus did not classify it as a "tsunami-generating event." However, in the South Pacific, this designation was being reexamined, following the devastating New Guinea earthquake of 1998the single most destructive tsunami of the centurywhich also did not have the classic slow tsunami profile. Thus, as a precaution, the computers flagged the earthquake to the sensors of the MORN, the Mid-Ocean Relay Network, operating out of Hilo, Hawaii.

Six hours later, mid-ocean buoys detected a nine-inch rise in the ocean level consistent with a tsunami wave train. Because of the great depth of the mid-ocean, tsunamis often raised the sea level only a few inches. On this particular evening, ships in the area felt nothing at all as the big wave front passed beneath them. Nevertheless, the buoys felt it, and triggered an alarm.

It was the middle of the night in Hawaii when the computers pinged and the screens came up. The network manager, Joe Ohiri, had been dozing. He got up, poured himself a cup of coffee and inspected the data. It was clearly a tsunami profile, though one that appeared to be losing force in its ocean passage. Hawaii was of course in its path, but this wave would strike the south shore of the islands, a relative rarity. Ohiri made a quick wave-force calculation, was unimpressed with the results, and so sent a routine notification to civil defense units on all the inhabited islands. It began "This is an information message amp;" and finished with the usual boilerplate about the alert being based on preliminary information. Ohiri knew that nobody would pay much attention to it. Ohiri also notified the West Coast and Alaska Warning Centers, because the wave train was due to strike the coast in early mid-morning of the following day.

Five hours later, the DART buoys off the coast of California and Alaska detected the passage of a tsunami train, now further weakened. Computers calculated the velocity and wave force and recommended no action. This meant that the message went out to the local stations as a tsunami information bulletin, not an alert:

BASED ON LOCATION AND MAGNITUDE THE EARTHQUAKE WAS NOT SUFFICIENT TO GENERATE A TSUNAMI DAMAGING TO CALIFORNIAOREGONWASHINGTONBRITISH COLUMBIA OR ALASKA. SOME AREAS OREGONWASHINGTONBRITISH COLUMBIA OR ALASKA. SOME AREAS MAY EXPERIENCE SMALL SEA LEVEL CHANGES.

Kenner, who was monitoring the messages on his computer, shook his head when he saw this. "Nick Drake is not going to be a happy man today." It was Kenner's hypothesis that they had needed the cavitation generators to extend the effect of the underwater detonations, and to create the relatively long-lasting landslide that would have produced a truly powerful ocean-crossing tsunami. That had been thwarted.

Ninety minutes later, the much-weakened tsunami train struck the beaches of California. It consisted of a set of five waves averaging six feet in height that excited surfers briefly, but passed unnoticed by everyone else.

Belatedly, Kenner was notified that the FBI had been attempting to reach him for the past twelve hours. It turned out that V. Allen Willy had vacated his beach house at two A.M. local time. This was less than an hour after the events in Resolution Bay had taken place, and more than ten hours prior to the tsunami notification.

Kenner suspected that Willy had gotten cold feet, and had been unwilling to wait. But it was an important and telling mistake. Kenner called the agent and started proceedings to subpoena Willy's phone records.

None of them was allowed to leave the island for the next three days. There were formalities, forms, interrogations. There were problems with emergency care for Morton's collapsed lung and Jennifer's massive blood loss. Morton wanted to be taken to Sydney for surgery, but he was not allowed to leave because he had been reported as a missing person in America. Although he complained bitterly about witch doctors, a very good surgeon trained in Melbourne took care of his lung in Gareda Town. But Jennifer had not been able to wait for that surgeon; she had needed three transfusions during five hours of surgery to remove the bullets in her upper body, and then she was on a respirator, near death for the next forty-eight hours. But at the end of the second day she opened her eyes, pulled off her oxygen mask, and said to Evans, sitting at her bedside, "Stop looking so gloomy. I'm here, for God's sake." Her voice was weak, but she was smiling.