The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  With a deafening crash the facade of the house smashed down on a tree that was straining in the water. Olsen was catapulted head-first through the window. He clutched at the air and grasped leaves. A stream of mud raged beneath him. He dangled from the branch, as it swung madly up and down, then tried to pull himself up. Fragments of wood and plaster rained down on him from above, narrowly missing his head. The jet of water ripped chunks out of the timber wall. The front of his house warped, splintered and tore apart He tried to move closer to the trunk. Lower down, and a little to one side, there was a thicker branch that he could reach. Maybe he could rest his feet on it. The huge tree groaned, and he made his way forward, hand over hand, gasping for breath.

  The remains of the wall crashed into the water, tearing branches and foliage as it fell. Olsen's branch jerked up. His fingers uncurled. Suddenly he was hanging from one arm. If he fell, his fate would be sealed. He turned his head awkwardly for a glimpse of his house – or whatever remained of it. Please, he thought, don't let them be dead.

  The house was still standing.

  And then he saw his wife.

  She'd crawled to the edge and was on her hands and knees, staring out at him. There was a look of determination on her face, as if she was about to dive into the water to help him. She couldn't, of course, but she was there, and she was calling to him. Her voice sounded firm, almost angry, as though he should stop messing around because everyone was waiting.

  For a moment Olsen just looked at her.

  Then he tensed his muscles. His free hand stretched up and grabbed the branch. He dug his fingers into the wood and began to move forward until his feet were directly above the sturdy branch. Slowly he let himself down. Now he could balance properly. He stood up. His shoulders quivered. He wrapped his arms round the trunk, pushing his face against the bark and staring at his wife.

  It took forever. The tree stayed put, and so did the house.

  When the water had finally dragged its booty into the sea, he was able to climb down shakily into the wasteland of debris and mud. He helped his wife and children to leave the house. They took only what they needed: money, credit cards, passports, and a few bits and pieces of sentimental value, hastily crammed into a couple of rucksacks. Olsen's car had disappeared. They'd have to walk, but anything was better than staying put.

  Silently they left the ruins of their home and walked along the other side of the river, away from Trondheim.

  Cataclysm

  The wave kept spreading outwards. It flooded the east coast of the UK and the west coast of Denmark. Between Edinburgh and Copenhagen the shelf was unusually shallow. Dogger Bank loomed up from the seabed, a relic of the time when the North Sea was still partly dry land. It had once been an island, its shores home to numerous animals that crowded together as the tides kept rising, until eventually they drowned. Now it lay thirteen metres below sea level, and it forced the surging wave to rear higher.

  South of Dogger Bank the shelf was crammed with the oil platforms that lined the south-east coast of Britain, the northern shores of Belgium and the Netherlands. The wave raged more ferociously than it had further north, but the uneven surface of the shelf, with its sand bars, ridges and chasms, acted as a brake. The Frisian Islands were inundated, but the wave lost some of its momentum so Holland, Belgium and northern Germany were spared its full force. By the time it reached The Hague and Amsterdam, its speed had dropped to a hundred kilometres per hour, which was still enough to destroy large sections of coastline. Hamburg and Bremen lay further inland, but the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser were as good as unprotected. The tsunami raced along the rivers, flooding the surrounding area before it reached the cities. In London the Thames rose sharply, breaking its banks and smashing ships into bridges.

  The surging water spilled into the Strait of Dover, shaking the coastline to Normandy and Brittany. Only the Baltic emerged unscathed. The water off the coast of Copenhagen, Kiel and the other Baltic cities was choppier than usual, but the tsunami didn't reach them, shuttling between the Skagerrak and Kattegat until it collapsed. Further north the devastation continued unabated as the tsunami slammed into the shores of Iceland, Greenland and Spitsbergen.

  After the disaster, the Olsens had headed straight for higher ground. Later on, when Knut Olsen thought about it, he couldn't say why. He was the one who'd suggested it. Maybe he dimly recalled a film he'd seen about tsunamis or an article he'd read, or maybe it had been intuition. Either way, the decision to flee had saved their lives.

  Most people who survived the coming and going of a tsunami were killed all the same. When the first wave was over, they returned to their villages and houses to see what remained. But a tsunami was made up of a succession of waves. The large intervals between peaks meant that the second wave hit when people thought they were safe.

  It was no different now.

  Barely a quarter of an hour later, the second wave struck as forcefully as the first, and completed the devastation. The third, which hit the coastline twenty minutes later, was only half as high, then came a fourth, and after that, nothing.

  In Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, the evacuation measures hadn't come to much, despite the extra warning time they'd been given. Nearly everyone owned a car, though – and they'd all had the bright idea of using it. Within ten minutes of the news flash, the roads were jammed. Then the wave came along and the traffic was cleared.

  An hour after the underwater avalanche, the offshore oil industry in northern Europe had ceased to exist Almost all of the coastal towns in the surrounding area had been ravaged or destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their lives. Only Iceland and Spitsbergen, two sparsely populated areas, had escaped without fatalities.

  During their joint expedition, the Thorvaldson and the Sonne had established that the worms were destabilising the hydrates along the length of the slope, as far north as Tromso. The landslide had happened in the south. Because of the effects of the tsunami no one had time to consider whether the northern slope was in danger of collapsing too. Gerhard Bohrmann might have been able to provide an answer – but he had no means of identifying the location of the slide. Not even Jean-Jacques Alban, who had succeeded in getting the Thorvaldson far enough out to sea to escape the tsunami, had any idea of what had taken place.

  THE SOUND OF EXPLOSIONS echoed across the sea, bouncing off the ruins of the towns. Roaring helicopters, wailing sirens and loudspeaker announcements mixed with the screams of survivors. It was a cacophony of misery, and at its heart was the leaden silence of death.

  Three hours went by, and the last wave rolled back into the sea.

  Then the northern slope collapsed.

  PART TWO

  CHATEAU DISASTER

  From the annual reports of international environmental organizations

  In spite of the 1994 ban, the dumping of radioactive waste in the world's oceans is ongoing. Greenpeace divers examining the seabed at the mouth of the discharge pipe of the French reprocessing plant in La Hague found levels of radioactivity seventeen million times higher than those in uncontaminated waters. Crabs and kelp off the Norwegian coast have been found to be contaminated with the radioactive isotope tech-netium-99. Radiation protection experts in Norway identified the source of the pollution as the ageing reactors of the British nuclear reprocessing factory in Sellafield. However, American geologists stick by their proposals for highly radioactive waste to be buried under the ocean. The scheme involves dropping nuclear containers kilometres into the seabed through pipes, then covering them with sediment.

  From 1959 onwards, the former Soviet Union dumped large quantities of radioactive waste, including disused nuclear reactors, in the Arctic Ocean. Now over a million tonnes of chemical weapons are rusting away on the ocean seabed at depths of between 500 and 4500 metres. Particular concern has been raised over metal containers of Russian nerve gas that were sunk in 1947 and have been corroding ever since. 100,000 barrels of radioactive waste of medical, technolo
gical or industrial origin are known to be lying on the seabed off the coast of Spain. Plutonium from nuclear testing in the South Seas has been detected in the mid-Atlantic at depths of over 4000 metres. The UK Hydrographic Office lists 57,435 wrecks on the ocean bed, including the remains of numerous American and Russian nuclear subs.

  The environmental toxin DDT poses a particular danger to marine organisms. The pollutant is carried by currents and spread across the globe, where it accumulates in the ocean food chain. PBDE, a chemical used as a flame retardant in televisions and computers, has been found in the blubber of sperm whales. Ninety per cent of swordfish are contaminated with unsafe levels of mercury, while twenty-five per cent are also polluted with PCBs. Female dog whelks in the North Sea are developing male genitalia. The culprit is thought to be tribu-tyltin, a chemical contained in anti-fouling paint.

  Oil wells have been shown to contaminate a surrounding area of over twenty square metres, of which one third is entirely barren of life.

  Magnetic fields produced by deep sea cables interfere with the homing instincts of salmon and eels. The electromagnetic smog is also harmful to larvae.

  Fish stocks are in decline, while algal blooms flourish. Meanwhile, Israel has persisted in its refusal to ratify the convention banning the disposal of industrial waste in maritime waters. Haifa Chemicals dumped 60,000 tonnes of toxic sludge in 1999 alone. The pollutants, including lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and chlorine, are swept away by the current, contaminating the coasts of Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, the fertiliser industry in the Gulf of Gabes continues to pump 12,800 tonnes of phosphogypsum into the sea every day.

  Seventy of the world's two hundred most commonly exploited fish species are endangered, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the FAO, and yet the fishing industry continues to expand. In 1970, thirteen million people earned their livelihood from fishing. By 1997 the number had reached thirty million. Bottom-trawl nets, commonly used to catch cod, sand eels and Alaskan salmon, have a devastating impact on marine life, quite literally sweeping away ecosystems. Mammals, seabirds and other marine predators are robbed of their prey.

  Bunker C, the most commonly used ship fuel, contains ash, heavy metals and sediment that are separated off before use. The by-product is a thick sludge that many skippers prefer to dump illicitly rather than dispose of responsibly.

  The effects of the planned commercial extraction of manganese nodules were simulated by German scientists 4000 metres below sea level off the coast of Peru. The research vessel dragged a harrow over the seabed, ploughing an area of eleven square kilometres. Numerous organisms died as a result. Years after the study, the region has failed to recover.

  Florida Keys: in the course of a construction project, soil was flushed into the sea and settled on the reef, stifling a high percentage of the coral.

  According to oceanographers, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels are adversely affecting the growth of coral reefs. When C02 dissolves, it lowers the pH of the water. Nonetheless, leading energy corporations intend to go ahead with their plans to pump large quantities of C02 into the ocean in an effort to prevent the gas entering the atmosphere.

  10 May

  Chateau Whistler, Canada

  The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second.

  The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess's laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires.

  The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology. The globe was wrapped in a web of light-transporting wires, through which the bits and bytes of virtual society travelled in real time – telephone calls, video images, music, emails. The global village was made of cable, not of satellites.

  Erwin Suess's email left Scandinavia and sped towards Britain on its way north. As it rounded the tip of Scotland, TAT 14 curved to the left. Once it passed the Hehridean shelf, the cable snaked its way over the seabed, resting on the ocean floor.

  At least, it would have done, if the shelf and the seabed hadn't been destroyed.

  Barely eight milliseconds after the message had left Kiel, it crossed the ocean south of the Faroes, where the cable ended abruptly in gigatonnes of mud and rock. Its durable casing with its reinforced wire and flexible plastic jacket had been severed in two, shattering the glass fibres, so the message of light waves was sent to the mud. The avalanche had hit the cable with such force that the torn ends lay hundreds of kilometres apart. TAT 14 only resumed its course in the Icelandic Basin, crossing back on to the shelf south of Newfoundland and running parallel to the coast until it reached Boston, where the useless length of high-tech cable connected to the overland line. Winding over the Rocky Mountains, the data highway travelled north past Vancouver along the west coast of Canada, where the optical cable was hooked up to a conventional copper cable in the substation of the prestigious luxury hotel, Chateau Whistler, at the foot of Blackcomb Mountain. A photodiode then reversed the original process, converting the optical pulses back into digital data.

  Under normal circumstances the message from Kiel would have passed through the photodiode and appeared as an email on Gerhard Bohrmann's laptop. But the situation wasn't normal, and Bohrmann, along with millions of others, had lost his connection. One week after the disaster in northern Europe, transatlantic Internet traffic was at a standstill, and phone calls could only be made via satellite, if at all.

  Bohrmann was sitting in the hotel lobby, staring at the screen. He knew Suess had been planning to email him a file. It contained growth curves for the worm colonies and estimates of what would happen in the event of similar invasions in other parts of the world. After the initial shock, the scientists in Kiel had jumped into action, and were working flat-out on the data.

  He swore. The small world was large again, full of unbridgeable space. They'd been told that morning that a satellite connection for email would be up and running by the end of the day, but there was still no sign of it working. For the time being, they were tied to the severed cable. Bohrmann knew that crisis teams around the world were feverishly trying to build autonomous networks, but the Internet kept collapsing. The real problem, he suspected, wasn't one of know-how but capacity. The military satellites were working fine, but even the Americans had never considered the possibility that the transatlantic fibreoptic bridge might one day need rerouting via space.

  He reached for the mobile that had been supplied to him by the emergency committee, and dialled a satellite connection through to Kiel. He waited. After a few attempts he was connected with the Geomar Centre and put through to Suess. 'No luck,' he said.

  'Well, it was worth a shot.' Suess's voice
was perfectly clear, but there was a lag in response time that Bohrmann found offputting. He couldn't get used to satellite calls. The signal had to travel 36,000 kilometres from the caller to the satellite, then the same distance back to the receiver. Conversations were full of pauses and overlaps. 'Nothing's working here either,' said Suess. 'In fact, it's getting worse. We can't get through to Norway, we haven't heard a peep out of Scotland, and Denmark is just a place on the map. You can forget about emergency measures – nothing's been done.'

  'We're on the phone now, aren't we?' said Bohrmann.

  'Only because the Americans want us to be. You're enjoying the military privileges of a superpower. It's hopeless in Europe. There isn't a single person who doesn't want to make a call. Everyone's terrified because they don't know what's happened to their family and friends. We've got a data jam. The few available networks have been snapped up by government teams and crisis squads.'

  'So what do we do?' Bohrmann asked helplessly.

  'No idea. Maybe the QE2's still sailing. You could always send a rider on horseback to wait for the boat. You'd have the information in – now, let me see – six weeks or so?'

  Bohrmann gave a pained laugh. 'Seriously,' he said.

  'In that case, we've got no choice. Get ready to write.'

  'Fire away,' sighed Bohrmann.

  While he noted what Suess dictated to him, a group of men in uniform crossed the lobby behind him and headed for the elevators. At their head was a tall man with Ethiopian features. According to his insignia, he was a general in the US military. He wore a name-badge – PEAK.

  THE MEN FILED into an elevator. Most were travelling to the second and third floors. The others went up another level.