“I really hate to bother you, but I’m afraid—well, we’ve found something extraordinary. Extraordinary and disturbing. You recall what you said in New Delhi about how polar melting might disrupt the North Atlantic Current?”
What in the world? Why did this rate a five a.m. phone call? Jack wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Yes,” he said guardedly.
“I don’t know quite how to say this, but I think it’s happening.”
The room swayed. “What do you mean?” Lightning flickered against the drawn drapes. Jack quelled an urge to rush to the window.
“One of our Nomad buoys registered a thirteen-degree drop in temperature the other day.”
That was no big deal. What the hell was this about?
Rapson continued, “At first we thought it was a malfunction. But four more across the North Atlantic are showing the same thing. I’ve sent you an email.”
The Nomad buoys were part of a complex system that the Brits were deploying. Unlike the current bone-head U.S. administration, they took the North Atlantic Current damned seriously. It was the lifeblood of their country. Kill it, you killed the UK.
Jack called up the email. “Jesus. I can’t believe this.”
“You predicted it would happen.”
“Yes, but not in our lifetime! This is so fast.” But he’d feared it, he had. It had been worrying him for months. It was why he’d started collecting weather anomalies. He needed a drink. No, he didn’t. He needed coffee. Quad expresso, damn hot. Now.
“There are no forecast models remotely capable of plotting this scenario,” Rapson said. “Except yours.”
His? Jack’s was nothing but a rough model of climate as it might have been ten thousand years ago. “My model constructs a prehistoric climate shift. It’s not a forecast model.” A forecast model would have millions of data points and run on a supercomputer. His had a couple of hundred thousand and ran on a damn laptop. This laptop.
“It’s the closest thing we have. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Jack pulled up his model, began keying in water temperatures as they must be at present across the North Atlantic. “Or at least not for ten thousand years,” he said slowly. He did not like the way this looked. No, he surely did not, not one little bit.
L.A. had recorded over six hundred accidents in the fogbound madhouse of the past twenty-four hours. Eleven fools had been pounded to bits by their own surfboards, and the cliffs in front of Santa Monica were being eaten by surf that wasn’t even starting to get tired when it slammed into them.
Tommy was on the story, clutching his mike in the wind, staring into the Minicam. This was what it was all about, a story like this. Behind him, he knew, surfers were still working the waves, madmen all.
“These waves are even bigger than I imagined them,” he gushed. “Just take a look. Wow, look at that wipeout.” He kept hoping that the guy would reappear. He did not. “That’s gotta hurt.”
Were these people out of their minds? Yes, damn right. That guy had probably just drowned, for the love of mike, and there were still guys floating boards. It made him kind of sick to think that his story might be drawing more of them down here to this death trap.
“I spoke with several people earlier who say this is the best surfing they’ve ever seen in Southern California.”
“We’re not on,” his cameraman said.
“We’re not on?” Not even Bernie would pull this. Nobody would pull this. But they had damn well pulled it.
The National Weather Service’s Los Angeles Weather Center was a comfortable station for a meteorologist, but not one that was going to get you real far. Weather was not an issue, here. Smog was an issue. But the weather was cookie-cutter perfect except when an El Nino sent some storms up this way. Then there could be landslide dangers, for sure. But weather, as in “Seek shelter immediately”—no.
Which was why Bob Waters was making out on the couch with Tina, the administrator from Ojai. They were down to their underwear, too. Bob was pleased. Things were moving right along.
Then Tina broke away. “I don’t know about this,” she said around her fantastically smeared lipstick, “aren’t you supposed to be monitoring something?”
Oh, dear. Dear, good girl. “This is Los Angeles, California. It has no weather.”
He got back down to business. She needed to have her temperature increase, pronto. He slipped her bra off and reignited her lips with the best kiss he knew how to administer, slow and full of eager, persistent tongue.
She talked around the kiss the way she would have around a cigarette. “What’s that noise?”
He pulled back. “What noise?”
But he heard it, too. What was that? He got up from the couch, tucked in his shirt and zipped his pants as best he could, then stuck his head out into the hallway. They really didn’t belong in the supervisor’s office, but it had by far the best couch. Still, he didn’t want the janitor who was waxing the hall floor to see him.
What was that? Not the floor waxer. He stepped out into the hall. “Excuse me,” he yelled. “Could you—”
The janitor turned off the machine. “Yeah?”
At first, Bob couldn’t believe it. Then he had to. Every phone in the building was ringing.
He ran into the command center, such as it was. The public was going crazy. He snatched up the first phone he reached. A voice started screaming. The guy was yelling something—“tornado.” It was the word tornado.
Oh, Christ. “Sir, you’re seeing a dust devil… . No, sir—okay, look, just stay calm.” He hung up and went quickly to the next phone. “We don’t get tornadoes in Los Angeles. But thank you for calling. Really.”
Now the red phone rang. Okay, great. He picked it up. “It’s Tommy,” the voice said. “I’m at the beach.”
“Look, Tommy, I’m kind of in the middle of something. What do you need?”
Tommy was huddled under a lifeguard stand, frantically using his cell phone. “There’s hail the size of golf balls coming down here!” As he spoke, Manny Wolff handed him a bigger one, then another that was bigger yet. “Make that tennis balls and oranges. What’s going on, Bob?”
Bob was staring at the Doppler radar, staring in disbelief. He was looking at a monster of a kind he had only learned about in college, and it was right over the Los Angeles Basin. As he watched, a red area appeared shaped like a long hook. “Oh, my God,” he said vaguely as he hung up the phone, “I’ve gotta go.”
His next step was to call his supervisor, Jeff Baffin, at his house in the Hollywood Hills.
Jeff responded immediately to the ringing phone. He hadn’t really been asleep, not with all this thunder. He was a meteorologist for a reason: weather fascinated him. It was the world’s last out-of-control wild thing, proof that nature was bigger than man. He’d been hearing thunder before the phone rang, and telling himself that he ought to get up and open the curtains and take a look at what sounded like a really neat storm.
“It’s Bob. Turn on the Weather Channel. Right away.”
The Weather Channel? Bob had access to far more information than the Weather Channel. But Jeff found his remote and did as he was asked.
“I think we’ve got to issue a tornado warning.”
What the hell? This was Southern California. “What are you talking about?”
Then he saw, on the TV, the same Doppler that Bob was probably looking at. Jeff had done a stint at the National Severe Storms Lab in Oklahoma, and he knew instantly what he was seeing. Instinct caused him to jump to his feet. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“I didn’t realize—”
Thunder bellowed. Jeff went to his French doors, pulled the drapes aside, and opened them onto his deck. Wind poured in, wet and dank, the kind of wind that flails and leaps around at the base of a big storm, the wind that worries between the gusts that crush.
Before him there unfolded the most magnificent and terrible thing he had ever seen in his life. The monster was slidi
ng across the Hollywood Hills, its cloud bottoms bulging down at him like the teats of some sort of demoness of the sky. As he watched, circulation formed in one of them, then probed downward toward Hollywood Boulevard. It snaked left and right—then swept this way, moving across a couple of miles of air in seconds.
Instinct made Jeff crouch. The scared animal that lives in the back of every human mind cried, “Hide, don’t let it see you!”
He heard it hissing, a steady sound that rose to a kind of thunder.
Then he came to his senses. He took his cordless phone to his ear. “Bob,” he cried, “issue the goddamn warning!”
And then he got the hell out of there.
SIX
P
resident Richard Blake said, “You’re sure a five iron will get me there? I was thinking maybe a four.” “Five’s your club,” Tim Cooper said. The president took the club, addressed the ball, and knew that the swing was exceptional as soon as he felt contact. He watched the ball sail perfectly down the center of the fairway. When it bounced on the green, his Secret Service guys applauded. “I should never question you, Cooper,” the president said.
He thought to himself, I can get in another nine if I’m fast. Orders were strict: the president took his golf seriously. He was not to be disturbed on the course. The truth was that he used the time to think. Since he’d taken on this killer of a job, he had lost all privacy, all personal space, and it wore on him.
Of course, three helicopters were overhead and probably fifty minders of various kinds were making themselves invisible all around him, but that was okay, that was tolerable. As long as all he saw was Cooper and his following guards, the game was doing its job. Then he heard a loud humming. He looked around and realized that golf was done. “Maybe we can finish the back nine later,” he muttered miserably to Cooper as six carts loaded down with everybody from Secretary of State Angela Linn to the—was that guy the head of NOAA?—anyway, loaded with major players—came bearing down on him.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Cooper said.
What in God’s name had happened this time?
Tommy was reporting and driving the news van. “I’m currently moving east on the 10,” he yelled over the thunder, the horns, and the roar of the storm. “What you are seeing behind me are two actual tornadoes striking Los Angeles International Airport—no, wait, they joined and formed one large tornado.”
It seemed to stand dead center of the runways, like a gigantic black column stretched between earth and sky. Tommy wondered if the debris he could see in the air around it consisted of pieces of airplanes … or maybe of people.
Then he saw, not half a mile ahead, another tornado, this one blowing across the freeway. His chest fluttered, he felt air being sucked out of his nose, and the distant noise of the LAX twister was replaced by a cataract of sound so loud it was like a living thing.
A compact car appeared in midair, the driver clutching the wheel. Tommy could see his teeth, his twisted-shut eyes. He swerved, causing cries of terror from the equipment bay in the back, and the Focus hit beside him and went skidding away on its roof. I just saw a guy die, Tommy thought. And then the tornado was off the road, and thank God.
An aged Honda started honking behind him, its panicked driver trying to literally crawl up the van’s tailpipe.
Then the tornado seemed to stop. He looked at the wall of black wind, at the shadow of an eighteen-wheeler flashing past inside. Or was that a mobile home?
With sick terror, he realized that it could be coming back.
Jack Hall caught up with Dr. Gomez and Janet Tokada in a corridor. Excellent maneuver as far as Jack was concerned, much more efficient than doing the old interoffice two-step. His conferences with Gomez tended never to actually happen, and this had to happen—now.
“I need to talk to you,” Jack said, standing in Gomez’s path.
“Not now, Jack, I’m busy.”
At least Gomez didn’t pull his punches. In fact, he actually turned aside and attempted to bypass. Jack was having none of it. “Gotta be now, Tom.”
Gomez sighed, but he stopped trying to get away.
“We’re building a forecast model and we’re going to need—” Jack turned to Jason, who knew all the technical details. Jack knew what the end product meant, but kids like Jason understood what kind of digital massage the data would need before that end product could be created.
“We’ll need priority access to the supercomputer for two days, maybe three.”
Jack swallowed his own shock. That was a taller order than he’d expected.
Gomez’s eyes widened. “Oh, is that all? Anything else?”
“Yes. We need to start immediately.”
Tom looked up at Jack. “I’d say you’d lost your mind. But you’ve been this way for the past twenty years.”
That made Jack mad. He didn’t like being thought of as an overbearing eccentric, not one bit. He was trying hard to conceal it, but the truth was that he was frantic. “Tom, this is important,” he said smoothly.
Tom looked at him, and Jack looked right back. He did not smile, he did not banter. He wanted to communicate everything he could about the urgency of this project without appearing to browbeat his own boss.
The woman with Tom asked, “What is this model you’re building?”
Who in hell was she? Some congressperson over here to find a budget to slash, a few more scientists to send off to teach high school instead of doing the research for which they’d been trained?
“Janet Tokada,” Tom said, “Jack Hall. Janet is a hurricane specialist with NASA. Jack’s a paleoclimatologist and I have absolutely no idea what he’s up to.” He turned toward the double doors that led to the tracking lab. “Janet, let me show you—”
He opened the doors into total pandemonium, with technicians yelling at each other, people frantically keying information into computer stations, and knots of scientists clustered around monitors.
“What’s going on in here?” Gomez asked, amazed. Normally, this was a quiet sort of a place, an electronic laboratory, really.
Atmospheric specialist Glen Voorsteen yelled, “They’ve just issued a tornado warning in Los Angeles!”
Jack thought, Oh, God, I don’t even need a model. This is my model.
Jason stared with his mouth open, his face as pale as death, toward a news monitor. Jack followed his eyes to the words at the bottom of the screen, words in bright blood red: breaking news bulletin. A young woman was saying, “The first tornado was spotted twenty minutes ago. We have live coverage from our Fox Eleven chopper. Are you there, Bart?”
“Oh, Jesus, they have a chopper up,” somebody yelled.
The chopper was all but doing somersaults in the sky, but Bart was so excited that meant nothing to him. He stared out at the massive beast. What was this called, anyway, Category 4, Category 5? It just plain towered into the sky. “Lisa,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even as the helicopter took another leaping slide closer to the wall of the funnel. “Lisa, I’ve never seen anything like this. These tornadoes are forming so fast—” The pilot grabbed his arm, pointed. “What?” Bart snapped. They were on live television, here.
A tornado swept along the ridge of the Hollywood Hills. It had a strange, gliding motion, as if it were a leaf being blown along. They all moved like that, almost the way a snake moves, that same sort of sinister, questing motion.
This one quested right into a famous sign, and they got it, they got it all right out over the live feed, as the churning funnel ripped the Hollywood sign to pieces, sucking its letters up thousands of feet, then dropping the remains like confetti that blew away in the angry, random gusts of wind that surrounded the central funnel.
The engine of Jeff Baffin’s classic Porsche whined as he raced down toward Sunset. Ahead, he could see the single most amazing thing he had ever witnessed. Spread out before his eyes was a vast storm, its blackness spreading from horizon to horizon. All over Los Angeles, lights were gleaming as if
it were midnight, but the sun should be up, the streets flooded with morning light.
In the far distance, he saw the pale, iridescent streaks of a hailstorm. But closer—that was the incredible sight, the unbelievable, terrible, and awesome sight.
The funnel was not a funnel, but a thick, black piston of a thing that towered easily a thousand feet into the sky. It was surrounded by so much dust that the actual structure of the tornado was invisible. Surrounding it like satellites were tiny objects, twisting and whirling, bright against the darkness. Jeff saw a pickup truck, roofs, a police car with its light bar still flashing, and bodies, easily recognizable because of the flailing legs and arms, all sailing upward with majestic grace, then plummeting hundreds of feet down into the streets of the stricken city.
Day After Tomorrow Page 6
