Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The US President stood with the leaders and representatives from the EU, Asian, Australasian, African and South American governments, gazing up at one of the dozen panoramic screens.

  Costa Rica, the eastern half of Cuba, the Greater Antilles chain and Bermuda had all now been overrun by the mega-tsunami. There were no estimates yet of the death toll.

  Images broadcast from along the tsunami’s path showed the huge wall of water sweeping ashore, dwarfing all buildings as it raced inland on its relentless journey. Behind this first giant wave, the following ten surges forced the brutal incursion onwards, maintaining its height and murderous velocity.

  On the larger islands, millions who had found higher ground owed their lives to Geohazard’s advance warning. But this seemed of little comfort to those watching from the moon. They stood together in near silence as they witnessed the epic orgy of destruction taking place on their home planet.

  As it travelled westwards, the radial arc of the tsunami lengthened to over 1,600 miles and a devastating landfall on the USA’s East Coast was now predicted to occur all the way from the Florida Keys in the south to Cape Cod in the north. At either extremity of this sweep, the height and strength of the wave-train would be weaker than in the centre, but the midpoint fell between the 40th and 41st parallels – the latitude of New Jersey, Long Island, Manhattan and the State of New York.

  President James Underwood had used the BBC’s lunar broadcast facilities to make a short emergency address to the American people. He had urged them to remain calm, to show their patriotism by assisting their neighbours to safety, to refrain from looting, to cooperate with the military and all emergency authorities and to remain tuned in to their local TV and radio stations. He had also told them that he bitterly regretted being caught so far away from home at this time of national crisis. He had concluded, ‘May God’s blessing be upon you all.’

  But, as camera shots now revealed, many US citizens were ignoring their President’s appeal. In Manhattan, the wailing of multiple emergency vehicle sirens filled the air and running gangs could be seen looting shops, hotels and offices. While all the bridges and tunnels out of the mighty city were still blocked by traffic jams and pedestrian hordes trudging westwards, a significant number of New Yorkers appeared to see this emergency as a wonderful opportunity for self-enrichment.

  Nicholas Negromonte had immediately set about attempting to create an Atlantic hurricane that might slow down the mega-tsunami. But there were problems associated with this strategy.

  ‘Because so little of a tsunami sits up while it’s moving through open water, the wind has minimal effect on it,’ Emilia Knight had explained to the group of the world’s leaders.

  ‘But as soon as the tsunami starts to rise landwards, it would, wouldn’t it?’ the US President had countered.

  ‘But that would mean creating a hurricane right on the shoreline,’ she had objected. ‘You’d just be creating one potential disaster in an attempt to prevent another.’

  ‘But a hurricane’s preferable to a tsunami, isn’t it?’ Underwood had reasoned, grasping at straws.

  Though they’d had to concede that the President was right, Nick Negromonte had identified a further problem.

  ‘It normally takes weeks for us to build up the sort of atmospheric pressure capable of creating a storm cyclone. Climate engineering isn’t an instant process.’

  ‘But you’ve got all this up and running now,’ the President had objected, waving an arm vaguely in the direction of the moon’s vast solar farm.

  In response, Negromonte had ordered the moon’s new solar resources to be reprogrammed and switched up to full power to join the other ERGIA space stations and satellites in their ongoing efforts to create an anticyclone directly in the path of the mega-tsunami.

  Now, almost four hours later, Negromonte saw on the screens that he had indeed created an Atlantic storm in record time. Even without the private information pouring into his earpiece from his executive operations officer on board the ERGIA Space Station, he could see that the millions of computer-controlled applications of spot heat and cold were inverting the tides of the atmosphere, boosting upswings of warm air to funnel upwards in anabatic columns towards the upper atmosphere, and suddenly pushing cold air down to take its place. The atmospheric chaos that followed was already producing winds of over forty miles an hour and filling the skies off the American East Coast with violent thunder and lightning.

  Suddenly there was an involuntary gasp from everybody in the meeting hall: BBC World headquarters in London had decided to add a caption overlay to the picture.

  TIME TO NEW YORK IMPACT: 30.00 MINUTES

  *

  At first, Dr Giorgio Zaoskoufis wondered if Geohazard’s international computer network was under attack from hackers. Then he thought that there might be a serious virus infecting the system. Only after speaking with the company’s global IT manager in Houston, Texas, did he finally begin to accept that his bizarre data displays were accurate.

  In the last hour, every one of his warning boards had lit up with alarms – not just alerts from his own region of the planet but from seismic sensors all over the world. It had started with the chain of eighty Javanese volcanoes – the so-called Indonesian ‘ring of fire’. At first Giorgio Zaoskoufis had abandoned monitoring the Atlantic tsunami just to help his Tokyo colleagues get warnings out to the many nations who would be affected by this chain reaction of eruptions in South-East Asia. But he was constantly interrupted by further alarms as sensors, strain gauges and satellite cameras detected additional abnormal seismic build-ups in his local region and elsewhere.

  Vesuvius seemed ready to erupt for the second time within three months, and Mount Etna – a seldom-quiescent sister volcano – also appeared to be building up for something quite spectacular.

  In Los Angeles, sensors along the southern branches of the San Andreas Fault clearly indicated that the abutment of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates was preparing for a major realignment in the Long Beach area. Even while Geohazard’s network was sampling alarming recordings of tremors cascading in from Southern California, yet another alarm sounded as strain gauges in Mexico City started to suggest that the Cocos Plate – the most active subduction thrust fault in the western hemisphere – was once again threatening to burrow further beneath its neighbour.

  At that moment, Yoyo Kanii ran over to ask her boss to interpret a new warning just arrived from Tokyo. The famous Mount Fuji, the volcano dominating the city’s skyline, was also producing vibrations from deep underground that suggested it too was getting ready to erupt for the first time since 1708.

  Zaoskoufis turned off all audible alarm systems and slowly stood up.

  ‘My family live in Tokyo,’ said Yoyo quietly.

  The senior seismologist glanced at her pale, frightened face, then up at the large world map on the central screen. Red lights were flickering on land masses everywhere – illuminating almost every volcanic chain and every earthquake fault line. He leaned across and touched the controls, adding a transparent overlay of a seismic bathymetry map of the world’s ocean floors.

  Underwater sensors laid a decade earlier along the World Ridge System, the 50,000 kilometre chain of underwater volcanoes that girdled the entire globe and fed the oceans with heat and minerals, were all – all 8,959 chimneys and fumaroles – simultaneously triggering alarms as magma-venting levels scaled up towards major eruptions.

  *

  Manhattan’s unique personality had been shaped largely by its architecture. The densely populated high-rise buildings created a formicating community, like scurrying ants – alive, vital, teeming: the fastest place on earth.

  But environmental risk had been poorly understood at the time when local topography and economic logic had dictated how Manhattan’s architecture would develop. Only after the first terrorist attacks of the early twenty-first century did social planners realize that the corollary of economic clus
tering was physical vulnerability.

  On the afternoon of 21 October 2055, the city was to learn that an island of high-rise architecture, laid out in a formal grid, was also particularly susceptible to natural disaster.

  ‘. . . Downtown Manhattan is now a ghost city waiting for the tsunami to arrive. This is Aurora Templeton for MSN in Central Park, New York.’ The famous anchorwoman signed off, her cameraman ceased transmitting and then switched off his floodlight.

  ‘Get us out of here,’ shouted their soundman into his walkie-talkie, craning his neck and beckoning the hovering news helicopter back down for a landing.

  The eight-seater Cougar Commander circled and touched down on the grass 200 yards away. But as Aurora and her MSN crew sprinted towards their aircraft, they saw figures emerging from the surrounding bushes, figures that were also starting to run towards the helicopter.

  Aurora reached the open side-door of the Cougar and felt a powerful hand from behind thrust her up into the cabin. She turned back to help her crew aboard, but saw that a score of desperate men and women had now reached the helicopter. They were clinging on to the aircraft’s bodywork and skids, determined to hitch a ride out of the endangered city.

  The pilot abruptly increased engine power and yanked upwards on his collective control. The helicopter’s engine bellowed, and the whole aircraft shuddered and rose a few feet off the ground. But more desperate people had appeared from the dense undergrowth around the park’s open area and they were now clinging on to the legs of those who had found a handhold on the aircraft itself.

  Panicked, the pilot increased engine power and rotor angle to the maximum, but the hovering helicopter was being dragged inexorably downwards.

  Aurora felt one hand grasp at her jeans-clad leg, then another. Although she had managed to fasten a belt around her waist, she could feel herself being pulled out of her seat.

  Suddenly, a group of four men who were clinging on to the right-hand side of the helicopter lost their collective grip and fell from the skid to the ground below. Unbalanced on one side, the aircraft tipped violently to the left and its rotor blades churned up the grass of Central Park until they broke off and scythed through the bodies of eleven would-be evacuees still clinging to the now-capsizing Cougar.

  Then, as a piece of splintered rotor blade slashed through a fuel supply line above the engine, the helicopter exploded in a ball of flame.

  *

  Efforts to weaken the force of the mega-tsunami by generating hurricane-force winds close to the shoreline had failed. Overhead, dark storm clouds swirled, lightning flashed and gales swept the coast. But the storm had not yet had enough time to build up to cyclone levels. To add to the problem, the first of the giant tsunamis only began rearing up above normal sea level when it was within less than ten miles of the shore. The strong winds that had been artificially generated in such a hurry had only seventy seconds in which to combat the speed and fury of the oncoming wall of water. They slowed it down by only twenty-seven miles per hour.

  The mega-tsunami made its first landfall on American soil in southern Florida. Waves over twenty metres high came ashore at a speed of 409 miles per hour, instantly wrecking all shipping and coastal buildings. Thrust forward by the following surges, the water raced inland across a largely flat terrain, to link up with the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee, completely destroying the coastal cities of Miami, Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. The entire southern tip of Florida, extending over 1,000 square miles, was completely submerged within the first twenty minutes.

  Further north, the waters reared over the city of Daytona Beach, then engulfed Cape Canaveral, the former Kennedy Space Centre and the new Moon Ferry Terminus built on Merritt Island. As the distinguished visitors to the moon stood watching the broadcast images, they groaned as one when the wall of water hurled itself across the runways and hangars, destroying everything in its path. Most of them had started their journeys in Florida but now they realized that they would have to return to Earth via the alternative Moon Ferry terminals in Russia or China.

  Six minutes later the mega-tsunami hit the southern coast of Long Island at a speed of 481.8 miles per hour and almost simultaneously surged into Lower New York Bay and the Hudson River. At that speed, the water hit with an impact as hard as concrete.

  The Statue of Liberty was knocked off its perch and disappeared into a cloud of white foam, as quickly as if it had been caught in the path of a thermonuclear blast. The old buildings clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan seemed to disintegrate like children’s sandcastles as a fifty-foot-high embankment of water shot onto the land with the velocity of a subsonic jet plane.

  The long, straight streets of the city funnelled the water skywards, forcing it to climb to over 600 feet as it was propelled onwards by ten pursuing surges.

  The waters of the Hudson and East Rivers themselves reared backwards, as if in alarm, when bores as high as forty-storey buildings rushed upstream, sweeping out westwards, drowning Staten Island and New Jersey. The USS Intrepid was wrenched from the security of her thirty enormous mooring chains, flipped over onto her belly and smashed into six pieces, which were then rolled seven miles north before finally being deposited across Westchester County.

  In Manhattan itself the streets became high-sided canyons through which super-scale rapids plunged and swirled around any smaller buildings, as if around rocks in a mountain cataract.

  Over forty circling helicopters kept transmitting pictures that suggested some of the newer major high-rise buildings might withstand the enormous pressure as billions of tons of Atlantic sea water were jet-hosed through the city streets.

  Glass panes caved in as the deluge rushed amongst the skyscrapers, leaving them open skeletons right up to their fortieth floors.

  Despite the black storm raging overhead, thousands were gathered on the flat roofs of high-rise offices and residential buildings, hoping that the higher up they were the safer they would be.

  Many newer buildings did successfully withstand the initial impact. But as successive surges followed the initial crest, it became clear that the tsunami was carrying so much metal and stone debris in its broiling wake that serious structural damage was being caused below the churning white surface of this metropolitan maelstrom. One by one, buildings started to collapse.

  All subways, tunnels and basements had been instantly flooded. By the time the advance surge reached 44th Street, the close-packed urban topography had slowed its progress down to 243 m.p.h. By the time it reached 118th Street, it was crawling at 147.

  In the 92nd Street Y, thirty-one weighted-down scuba divers sat on the bottom of the swimming pool, repeatedly popping their eardrums as the water pressure surrounding them continued to rise abruptly. Then corpses started to drift down to join them in their pool.

  After an initial collective gasp, the moon visitors had stood watching Manhattan’s destruction in a deepening and dreadful silence. Forty minutes later, the tide had lowered sufficiently for all of them to see that almost no building had survived right up to a point just north of Central Park. Here and there steel armatures poked up out of the still-raging seas, but they were totally impossible to identify.

  Only minutes before the Atlantic had struck, huge masses of people had been seen fleeing through the city streets or tramping across bridges. Now there were no bridges left – all traces of them had been washed away. It was impossible to tell what was Manhattan, Long Island or New Jersey, or precisely where they lay under so much water.

  At the back of the hall Nicholas Negromonte stood in grim-faced silence. ‘Shut down all of our climate-management systems,’ he finally ordered.

  *

  Giorgio Zaoskoufis thanked all of the admin and support staff who had returned to work in the Athens monitoring centre. He set them to work fielding the vast number of requests for guidance streaming in.

  ‘Don’t waste time talking to journalists,’ he shouted above the din of the crowded room. ‘Just concentrate
on getting the latest updates out to the emergency services.’

  In the last eighteen hours over 400 major seismic incidents had begun or were threatening in the European-African sector alone. Zaoskoufis also knew that similar scenes were being repeated in Geohazard’s Oakland and Tokyo facilities as catastrophic disturbances within the Earth’s crust had started to appear around all of the planet’s fault lines, volcanic chains, underwater rifts and tectonic-plate intersections.

  As predicted, both Etna and Vesuvius were currently engaged in full-scale eruptions, while Stromboli and forty-one lesser volcanoes around the Mediterranean were in the early stages of magma venting.

  Sixteen earthquake warnings had already been issued for regions spanning Turkey, Albania, Montenegro, Italy, Egypt and the Aegean Islands – two quakes above Magnitude 7 had already occurred, one of them devastating eastern Istanbul. On the continent of Africa, three volcanic peaks in the Cameroon and the Congo Republic were already in major eruption but, most worryingly, space-based laser measuring tools now suggested that a 2,000-mile section of the great East African Rift was about to tear open again – after being at rest for over two million years.

  Yet, compared to the other two Geohazard monitoring centres, the staff in Athens were having a peaceful time. The regions of the Earth monitored by Oakland and Tokyo were each at least ten times hotter in seismic terms than the area that Zaoskoufis’s staff had to deal with.

  California was struggling to provide data on both the Long Beach and Mexico City earthquakes while at the same time monitoring eleven volcanic eruptions throughout the Caribbean and Central America.

  Geohazard Japan was totally failing to monitor the havoc currently being wreaked across Indonesia as the world’s most densely packed chain of volcanoes erupted simultaneously. The monitoring centre was hampered by the fact that nearby Mount Fuji had started a major eruption, now spewing rocks and lava globules over most of downtown Tokyo. Geohazard’s cameras revealed that the city was ablaze.