Ark Storm (46 page)

She let it roll her, felt its energy weakening, fought up, breathed again, heard the roar behind her. A big one, she tried to straighten her body, to fly with it. It slammed her down. She felt the shore beneath her. Searing pain as her shoulder slammed into it. The wave rolled over, she pushed up, felt the sand beneath her feet. She ran, pummeling her legs against the shore, racing to beat the next wave. It caught her, smashed her down again. She forced herself up, legs burning, just raw survival, the fumes of it driving her on, then she was out, free of the sea.

The rain and wind whipped her. She was shivering so much she could hardly move. On to the house, to the huge structure before her. Legs shuddering. She struggled to make each step. The commands from her head were only intermittently transmitting to her body. She forced herself on, closed on the house. The wind had done its job. A window was smashed. She stepped in. Cold, so cold. Her whole body was spasming. Phone. She saw a landline. Rang the number her mind gave her.

Her lips wouldn’t move. She grabbed them, rubbed them, tried again. “Dan,” she managed to say.

“Boudy! Thank God! Where are you? What’s happened?”

She tried to speak “… choppr … ree mi—ou t’sea … swam.…” The words came out slurred, half formed. She searched on the desk, found headed notepaper, read out the address, the zip code, struggled over the code, repeating it again and again till Dan understood, repeated it back right.

136

ARK STORM OPS ROOM

Dan slammed down the phone. San Luis Obipso! Christ, it would take him forever to get to her. In the ops room TV monitors showed the jams clogging the roads. The scrolling headlines declared that an estimated half a million residents of California were trying to run from the storm. The ARk Storm warning had gone out one and a quarter hours ago. The warnings were apocalyptic, stripped of bureaucratese—basically,
Get the hell out or get washed away
. Dan felt fear coursing through him. Gwen sounded like she was going down. She needed him
now
. And he needed a helicopter. He scrolled through his contacts.

Riley was hovering at his shoulder.

“Was that Boudy?”

“It was and she’s in a bad way. I’ve got to get to her.”

He hit
DIAL
.

“Mack, you bastard. You want a story?”

“Thought I fired you.”

“I quit, actually. Consider me a freelance. I’ll give you the story of your career if you give me a helicopter. Now.”

“What story?”

“The real story behind this ARk Storm. The story of how it is being made, even as we speak.”

“Being
made
?”

“No time. Just trust me. And get me the copter.”

“Why the
fuck
should I trust you?”

“Because,” said Dan through gritted teeth, “if you don’t I will come and break your knees tomorrow. Got it?”

The editor laughed. He thought Dan was joking. But he could smell a story, could hear one in the intensity of Jacobsen’s voice.

“The chopper’s in Monterey, overflying the coast.”

“Ring the pilot. Get it to Stanford.”

Dan turned to Riley. “Tell me you have a landing pad!”

“We do,” she replied, matching his urgency.

“There
is
a landing pad,” Dan confirmed, thinking of Afghanistan and what passed for landing pads there. “I’ll be waiting.”

137

SAN LUIS OBISPO, 2:48 P.M.

Warmth. Bath. Taps. Hands shaking violently, Gwen struggled with the taps. She got them on, ran the bath. The water that came out of the taps felt cold. Both the hot and the cold faucet felt cold. She knew enough to know she was too chilled to feel the water, might scald herself. Using only her right hand, her left shoulder she knew was dislocated, she turned them off, picked the shower, turned it on, scrolled it to a high heat setting. She stepped in, felt the water gush over her from all angles. One of those high-end showers with multiple heads. She propped herself against the wall. Fifteen minutes and she felt colder than ever. And her shoulder hurt like crazy. She thought she might pass out with the pain. She stepped out, grabbed towels, staggered into a bedroom, ransacked the drawers; a sports nut, a tall man. She pulled on his layers, base thermals, mid-layers, overlayers. She found a ski suit in a closet, mittens, hat. She pulled them all on, shoulder screaming. Food. Tea. Kitchen. One handed, she boiled the kettle, made tea, dumped in the sugar she managed to find, spotted a jar of energy bars, ripped off the wrappers, ate five. In the bathroom cabinet she found Advil. Popped four. Then she got into bed, pulled the duvet over her whole body and passed out.

138

The Boeing CH-47 Chinook flew its precious cargo along the coast to the prearranged site. The evacuation order had cleared the coastal community, making life simpler. The collateral dangers of the weapon meant that no one could be near it when it was fired, but, added to that, the weapon was highly classified. Civilian witnesses were not an option.

The Chinook landed. The three technicians, assisted by three more army engineers, rolled out a trailer, struggling in the wind and rain. They needed line of sight, and by their calculations they should get that in twelve minutes—time enough for them to secure the kit and get the hell out.

They maneuvered the trailer into place, and carefully they unwrapped its cargo: a large object that looked like a TV-shaped lens at the front. It was about two meters long by one meter wide. It was mounted on the front of a similarly shaped box about three meters long. This was in turn mounted on a remote-controlled pan. The engineers worked quickly in the torrential rain, securing the equipment with steel halyards they drilled into the tarmac of the empty road. The technicians consulted their mobile radar screens and identified the yacht
Zephyr,
approaching from the north. They programed in its coordinates, and the unit tilted like a giant camera.

“Time to go!” called out the commander.

Quickly they all ran back to the Chinook, jumped in, slammed the door, and strapped in. The helicopter lifted off, crabbed up sideways into the throbbing air. In three minutes they were out of harm’s way.

One hundred and fifty miles away, in the weapons control center of the warship USS
Comstock
, moored off San Diego, the commands were input and the directional energy weapon was fired. It zeroed in the beam of energy on the yacht
Zephyr
. It blasted it for thirty seconds. Then the beam was switched off and the Chinook flew back to retrieve the delivery system.

139

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 3:10 P.M.

Twenty-two minutes after he had put in the call, Dan watched the helicopter approach the landing pad. The winds were vicious. The pilot seemed to know what he was doing. He circled once, then came in fast, slamming the copter down. Dan hunched, sprinted toward him, wrenched open the door, and pulled on the safety strap in seconds. The pilot was as keen as he was to get off the ground where gusts could slam them over.
She,
Dan noted, nodded at him, pulled on the joystick, and they soared upward. The wind hit them like a punch and the copter veered sideways. The pilot handled it coolly, adjusting, gaining altitude, face taut but unflinching as if she were dealing with nothing more irksome than Sunday drivers. Dan pulled on his earphones.

“Amelia Holdstone,” announced the pilot in an educated British accent. “Must be one hell of a story! Where we off?”

Dan smiled. “San Luis Obispo.” He reeled off the zip code, watched Holdstone input it into her GPS.

“Seventy-nine minutes.”

Dan nodded, said a silent prayer.

Holdstone flicked him a glance. “You going to tell me the story? Seeing as I’m risking my life flying to the coast.” Her voice was droll. The woman was a card.

“You ex-military?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“And? What’d you do?”

“Would you understand it?”

“Try me. Navy SEAL.”

Holdstone’s eyes widened.

“Flew Apaches for the British Army Air Corps.”

Dan’s eyes widened in turn. “The best of the best.”

The pilot smiled.

“Top Gun?” asked Dan, seeing the pride behind the smile.

“As it happens.”

Dan felt a surge of relief. They had as good a chance as any of getting to San Luis Obispo, landing and taking off intact. It was marginal, though, and they both knew it.

“I’m going to rescue my girlfriend,” said Dan. “I don’t know the details. All I could just about glean is that she fell or was pushed from a helicopter at sea, swam three miles, negotiated the waves, and got into a house. If I’m real lucky, she won’t have died of hypothermia in the next seventy-nine minutes.”

Holdstone raised her eyebrows. “Wow! Miracle she’s still alive. Waves are thirty foot, breaking on the shore.” She flicked another glance at Dan.

“And the story?”

Dan gave a grim smile.

Holdstone suddenly flinched. “Holy shiiit!”

“What’s up?” asked Dan. Holdstone was staring at her radar monitor. Dan saw what she was looking at. Twelve dots, approaching from behind at high speed. Twenty seconds later, splitting the air, came a series of sonic booms. Dan looked up through the glass roof of the chopper, saw the jets, a half-squadron of F-22 Raptors, scream past. And he smiled: the look of a reaper.

140

THE SUPER-YACHT,
ZEPHYR
, 3:15 P.M.

Unseen from the ground, hundreds of meters up in the sky, the army of drones flew on. “They followed their programmed flight paths, circles at first and then figures of eight, starting each time at a different point of the initial circle so that they could cover all the area inside it, sucking out more rain from the clouds, harvesting the storm. Many had been smashed from the air, but many flew on. They had fuel for another ten hours. They were grouped in teams of five, and in an example of serendipity, or diabolical luck, they roughly spanned the area that the atmospheric river was due to hit.

Peter Weiss, Hassan, monitored their progress, phlegmatic when another of their number was smashed from orbit by the weather. Suddenly all his screens went blank.

“Fuck it!” He fiddled with the controls, finally turning them on and off, trying to reboot. Nothing. The drones had stopped transmitting their positions.

Sheikh Ali frowned at the dark screens.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Coms’re down,” replied Hassan. “Satellites obviously are not affected by the weather, but maybe the relay station on the ground’s been hit.”

“What does it mean for Zeus?” asked the Sheikh.

“Nothing. The coordinates are programed into the drones. They should keep on flying in their preordained orbits. All it means is we can’t monitor them.”

The Sheikh shrugged. “We can see their harvest, can we not, on the television screens?” He nodded to the scenes of mayhem unfolding before them. The screens had flickered, gone blank for a minute, but were now flickering back to life.

“We can.”

The Sheikh smiled. “They declared an ARk Storm 1000 nearly two hours ago. It worked! Zeus worked.” He placed his hand on Hassan’s shoulder, kept it there. The weight of it was a blessing, a benediction. Vindication.

Hassan smiled, warmed to his core, magnanimous in victory. “Maybe the storm would have come anyway, made it to ARk Storm without us?”

“You are too modest. We shall never know. It was in God’s hands, at the end of the day. But we have our wish, Hassan. We have delivered California the ARk Storm of their nightmares. Or Allah has.” He smiled. “And like Noah, we shall escape it.”

The Sheikh stopped smiling. He raised his fingers to his temples, frowning. He shook his head as if to clear it of some kind of fugue.

Hassan watched him, puzzled, then he suddenly felt a pain in his head, a kind of searing headache. Worse than any he had felt before, and he had suffered some blinders. He winced, sucked in a breath, wondered insanely if it was his old Nazarene God smiting him for desertion and dereliction, avenging the atrocity that was unfolding, arguably at his hands.

*   *   *

Two minutes later, Captain Shaffer burst in. His façade of control seemed to be slipping. His tie was askew and his face was red.

“A bunch of my systems has been punched out!” he announced, running his fingers under his loosened collar. “No GPS, no radar, no ship to shore. TV’s recovered, everything else is dead as Elvis. Engine’s working, thank God.”

“Something weird happened here too,” said Hassan, forcing his words out through the miasma of pain. He tried his iPad, shook his head.

He used the pads of his fingers to massage his temples. It didn’t help. The pain just radiated from his skull. He thought he might be sick.

“So captain, are you telling me we are now lost at sea?” asked the Sheikh, pain chiseling his voice.

The captain seemed to swallow back a curse. “No. We are not lost at sea,” he replied in a staccato voice, face reddening further. “Fortunately I do not rely exclusively on the electronic tools. I always plot the course on the map. I have our most recent GPS position, as of two minutes ago, plotted. Now we shall sail by dead reckoning.”

“Dead reckoning?” queried the Sheikh, his mouth curling down.

“Yes. It’s the old school way of doing things; compass, speed, tidal drift, landmarks on the coast. If the skies were clear and it was night I could use celestial navigation. As they are not, I shall have to motor in closer to the coast so I can see landmarks. Visibility’s appalling, so I’ll need to go in fairly close.”

The Sheikh gave way to a full blown juhayman frown. “We need to get out of this as fast as possible, get to Tijuana.”

“I am as keen as you are, Sheikh Ali, to escape this storm. But if we wish to arrive at Tijuana, as opposed to getting lost in the middle of the sea or floundering on rocks, we need to move closer to shore and we need to slow down.” Shaffer delivered his monologue with his eyes fixed on the Sheikh as if daring his boss to challenge him.