by Jack Du Brul
Panning the spyglass across the once-thriving water-front, Han found the gunboat and his hands began to tremble. He turned back to see the captain had been watching him looking at the town. Their eyes locked, assuring each other that they had seen the same thing.
At the end of a street Han didn’t recall from his previous visits sat the Berouw. What Han had thought was a street was in fact the path the thousand-ton ship had plowed as the sea heaved it inland. A dozen stone buildings had been flattened by the tumbling vessel. Countless more rattan and thatch huts were destroyed. The tidal waves’ equally fearsome withdrawal had scoured away the debris, including the dead.
Han plunged his hand into his pocket for his watch. From numerous readings of his journal he knew that the mountain would erupt again very soon. The original journal entries were written in an archaic language the watcher couldn’t decipher, but translations had been inked into the margins, detailing the exact location and time. Comparing his watch to the journal and factoring how long it would take the noise of the eruption to reach the bay, Han saw he had a few more minutes. He prayed that somehow the oracle would be wrong.
He steadied the book against the railing and retrieved a calligrapher’s inkpot and a quill from his bag. The scribes in Tibet had given the geographic location of the island: six degrees ten seconds south by one hundred and five degrees forty-two seconds east. What they couldn’t possibly have known when they wrote the tome so long ago was the local name of the mountain. He took a moment to write it in now.
Krakatoa.
The smaller eruption the day before had thrown nine cubic miles of ash into the air and undermined a subterranean dome. The dome finally collapsed at a little past seven on the morning of the twenty-seventh in a titanic avalanche of rock and sea. The thermal shock of billions of tons of water vaporizing against the magma below the dome split the air in a crack that could be heard in Australia, two thousand miles away. The sound was the loudest heard in human history. Six-hundred-ton boulders were thrown forty miles or more, burning missiles that caused forest fires that would rage for days. The catastrophic eruption threw a fresh column of ash and debris into the upper atmosphere that would eventually envelop the earth. Average temperatures in Europe and America would plunge five degrees for the next several years. The concussion wave would circle the globe seven times before finally dissipating.
Although the term would not be coined for several decades, the force of the eruption would measure in the thousands of megatons. The island of Krakatoa was split into three pieces and parts of it were obliterated altogether.
As furious as the eruption was, it wasn’t what would kill the thirty-six thousand victims of the disaster. What took them lurked moments behind the shock wave and traveled at half the speed of sound.
For a full minute after the blast, the watcher remained on the decking where he’d been thrown. It had been like standing in the largest bell ever built while giants assaulted it with sledgehammers. He could see crewmen frantically hoisting the anchor, but their voices were lost in the ringing that echoed in his head. The vibration of the Loudon’s engine blurred with the palsylike trembling in his limbs.
He knew that when the tsunami struck the ship, no place would be safe. Either all would die or all would survive, so he remained on deck to await the wave’s attack down Lampong Bay. The horizon had been sliced in two by the ash cloud, but soon another phenomenon began to blur the line between sea and sky.
The tsunami raced at the vessel at three hundred miles per hour and grew in height as it roared up the shallows. From a small hump far in the distance, the wave piled on itself, growing like a snake rearing its head, its crest frothing while still a mile away. The sound was a thousand cyclones confined in Han’s skull.
At the last moment, his courage failed him. He dashed into the superstructure as the Loudon was lifted thirty feet up the wave’s leading edge. It was as if the ship had been thrown vertical. And just as quickly the wave passed under the steamer and she dropped straight down, her keel flexing like a bow. She buried her prow in the trough and would have gone under had the captain not put on a burst of speed to meet the monster head-on.
Once again the watcher picked himself up from where he’d been tossed and staggered out to see the wave continuing its relentless journey.
The wall of water was thirty feet tall when it passed under the Loudon and had doubled by the time Han reached the rail. It doubled again in the last seconds before it struck land, forced ever higher by the sloping beach. From Han’s vantage it seemed the tsunami had already swallowed the land. In the seconds before it toppled, the wave completely hid the hills behind Telok Betong.
The surge was so powerful that it didn’t pause when it hit nor slow as it drove over the town, leveling everything in its path. It raged up the shore, snapping trees like matchsticks and ripping buildings from their foundations. The rubble was tossed a mile into the foothills. The wave destroyed two hundred years of careful colonial rule and hundreds of acres of cultivated land. It flattened some hills and built new ones with the rubble. It disinterred countless coffins from the Dutch cemetery and spilled their grisly contents into the bay. It wiped five thousand people off the face of the earth.
Like a demon claiming its prize, the receding wave seized nearly all evidence that the town had ever existed and dragged it into the sea. All except the Berouw. The little gunboat was left stranded two miles from shore along the bank of a river.
Because there was no hope of survivors in town, Captain Lindemann decided his duty lay in returning to Anjer so he could report the calamity. The ship plodded out of Lampong Bay, cutting through a carpet of ash, torn trees, the remnants of huts and thousands of mutilated corpses.
The eruption had whipped the winds to a hurricane pitch, and the ashfall became so severe that Lindemann ordered the soldiers and their prisoners to the deck to help keep the Loudon from foundering under its weight. A miserable rain soon started to fall, mixing with the ash so that large clots of mud pummeled the ship. Soon strings of gray ooze hung from the rigging and drooled from the scuppers. The Loudon resembled a ghost ship adorned with tattered funeral shrouds.
When the first bolt of lightning struck, it jumped across the rigging as it sought ground, splitting into fingers of blue fire that blew mud from the ship like shrapnel. The native prisoners screamed in terror as a ball of St. Elmo’s fire danced over their heads. The felons were still chained in groups of ten. An arc of electricity coursed through the shackles of one group, killing two men outright and burning the other eight so severely that none would survive the hour.
By ten thirty in the morning, daylight was gone and the deck was buried under two feet of muddy soot despite the best efforts of the passengers and crew. They worked under the driving rain while dodging chunks of pumice that continued to shoot from the sky.
At noon, the sea was too rough for work. Lindemann ordered everyone belowdecks and the hatches secured. He would have to risk capsizing under the load of ash. He had himself lashed to the ship’s wheel and the chief engineer secured to his station.
The Loudon slowly emerged from Lampong Bay like an icebreaker cleaving pack ice. At the head of the bay, the crust of ash was seven feet thick, too much for the ship’s overworked boiler. She could barely make headway and the captain feared she’d sink if she stopped.
They retreated west around Sebesi Island to circle far around the still-erupting volcano. And for the next eighteen hours, the plucky steamer fought the waves and wind, the rippling tsunamis that continued to radiate from the epicenter, and the ash that didn’t so much as fall from the sky but seemed launched directly at the ship.
The sun remained hidden by a pall of soot. The darkness was more complete than any night, darker than any cave. It was as if Monday, August 27, 1883, never came to the Sunda Strait.
Six more times the ship was struck by lightning, and once more she would battle a killer wave as Krakatoa erupted the last time. That final collapse of the calde
ra was the weakened rock at the rim of the volcano plummeting into the half-mile-deep crater, finally sealing the aperture into the earth’s heart.
The day before it had taken the Loudon four hours to travel from Anjer to Telok Betong. The return trip took twenty. Approaching the Java coast south of Anjer, the steamer ran parallel to the shore amid a sea of flotsam — ash, ripped-up trees and more bodies than anyone could count. The coast, once verdant jungle and productive plantations, resembled a desert. The scattering of villages had all been wiped away and those few survivors had yet to return from the hills where they’d fled.
If anything the damage to Java was worse than what they had witnessed on Sumatra. The city of Anjer, home to ten thousand people, was gone.
Han wrote furiously in his journal as the ship plowed through the morass. Wherever he looked, bodies poked through the undulating blanket of ash, most stripped naked by the tsunami, some burned horribly by the near-molten pumice.
The only thing keeping him from being driven mad was the physical act of writing. His quill flew across the pages as if the speed of his hand would allow the image to flow from his eyes to the page and not seep into his memory. Yet when he closed his eyes the glistening wall of water hovered in his consciousness, poised to overwhelm him.
Han had never seen the oracle himself — that honor was reserved for the high priests — so he didn’t know how such an accurate prediction as this could have been made. Some of the retired watchers said the oracle was a woman rumored to be two hundred years old. Others speculated that the oracle was an intricate machine that could detect the earth’s faintest tremble. Priests somehow interpreted this information to foretell the future. Still others believed it was a gift of prophecy bestowed on a succession of children, like the reincarnated spirit of a lama.
Han didn’t care to know the truth. He had witnessed the oracle’s precision and would never do so again. He understood human nature enough to know that even if he had warned the inhabitants of the Sunda Strait only a handful of people would have been able to save themselves. Still, the burden of seeing the death and destruction was too much. He would let some other watcher complete the journal he carried.
It was titled Pacific Basin 1850–1910. Understanding that the oracle foretold this cataclysm thirty-plus years ago sent a chill through Han’s body worse than the deepest frost of winter. He prayed this was an aberration, that the oracle had been right just this one time. It had just been his bad luck. That was all. The next prophecy would doubtless be wrong. It had to be. Nothing could predict calamity.
In the front of the ledger were a series of letters sealed in wax. Nine of the ten envelopes had been opened; he had opened the latest one when he left for Batavia four months ago. That meant there was one more great disaster coming in the next twenty-three years.
He was prohibited from breaking the wax seals that hid the time and location of the next disaster. Watchers only opened the envelopes for the events they themselves were to witness. The last envelope was to be opened on January 1, 1906, which would presumably give a future watcher enough time to reach his destination. With a jerk Han snapped the wax seal and read the yellowed text.
The date was meaningless. Just a day, a month, and a year. April 18, 1906. The coordinates meant nothing either. More numbers. But some resourceful cartographer had written in the name of the town that stood at the epicenter of what would be one of the worst earthquakes in history: a city called San Francisco, California.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA THE PRESENT
Mercer woke with one thought on his mind. Seven uninterrupted days. He’d been working without a break for six and a half weeks. And in the past seven months he’d managed just one four-day weekend and a few stray days to himself. This was going to be his first real vacation in over a year. His second thought was that when it was over, he’d be returning to the Canadian Arctic, where he’d spent the past month and a half. He was facing at least another four weeks at an isolated mining camp thirteen hundred miles north of Montana. De Beers was looking to invest a further half billion dollars in the newly discovered diamond fields and was waiting for Mercer’s final test results and geologic report.
He’d been able to wrangle the time away because the rotary blast drill used for boring test holes had been so damaged by the brutal cold that Ingersoll-Rand was sending a team of mechanics to repair it. The hard reality of working in the Arctic was that while men could be insulated from the weather, steel became as brittle as glass. They’d been lucky no one had been injured when a main bearing detonated like a grenade.
It wasn’t unusual for Mercer to be away from home for months at a time, trotting around the globe prospecting, assaying, and troubleshooting for different mining companies. His expertise in geology had made him wealthy, although the price was very little time to enjoy it. So when he could string together enough consecutive days for a vacation, he liked to maximize every moment. Still, he procrastinated for another half hour under a feather duvet before swinging his legs out of bed.
The tan he enjoyed from a scuba-diving weekend in the Bahamas had long since faded. His lean body was as pale as a marble statue, the result of the Arctic’s twenty-two-hour nights and the exhaustion of continuous fifteen-hour work shifts. The only color came from his hands and forearms, which were darkened by ingrained dirt that wouldn’t wash out, and a dense bruise on his shoulder where a twenty-foot length of drill string had caught him.
Mercer’s home was a three-story brick rowhouse in one of the few sections of Arlington not yet turned into high-rise office buildings. He’d bought the building years ago and converted the six apartments it once contained into one home; it was difficult to see the extent of the remodeling from the outside because he’d left the original facade untouched. His bedroom was located on the third floor and overlooked an atrium that took up the front third of the house. On the second floor were two guest bedrooms, the family room, which was actually a bar modeled after an English gentlemen’s club, and an open space he used as a library. On the ground floor was a little-used kitchen, the dining room, where he kept a billiard table, and his home office. A spiral staircase restored by an architectural salvage firm in Connecticut connected the three levels.
The town house’s eclectic style and decoration reflected its owner, and because of his travel schedule Mercer had made certain it had become the anchor his life needed. He considered it one of his only real indulgences.
He’d arrived home from Canada at four in the morning and had been asleep for ten straight hours. Afternoon light spilled through the skylight above his bed and drifted over the balcony at the edge of the mezzanine. Mercer threw on a clean pair of jeans and an old Colorado School of Mines sweatshirt. His luggage lay stacked at the foot of his bed.
He’d remembered to set the automatic coffeemaker behind the bar before collapsing but had planned on waking at noon. The two-hour-old brew was as thick as tar. Perfect.
Since he rarely used the kitchen, he kept some groceries in the cabinets under the back bar and set about making a bowl of cereal. He didn’t think about the expiration date on the milk until the first cottage-cheese-thick curd landed in the bowl. Gagging at the smell, he poured the mess down the bar sink and cursed his house sitter. The orange juice in the rebuilt lock-lever refrigerator he stocked with beer and mixers was just as old.
Harry White, Mercer’s eighty-year-old best friend and the man who Mercer was convinced put the crotch in crotchety, knew he’d be home today and was supposed to have done the shopping. Harry tended to treat Mercer’s town house as his own, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He had the domestic skills of a rabid wolverine. In the trash can were a dozen empty Jack Daniel’s bottles and about ten cartons’ worth of cigarette butts.
Mercer had been gone six weeks and felt it could have been worse. At least Harry had gotten his mail and had taken his phone calls. There was only one message on the answering machine. He hit the PLAY button. “Dr. Mercer, this is Cindy from Dr. Cryan’s
office.” Mercer’s dentist. “I’m just calling to remind you of your cleaning appointment Wednesday at ten.”
He ran his tongue around his mouth and decided his teeth weren’t in immediate danger of falling out. He’d reschedule for when he got back from Canada next month.
Sipping his coffee and thumbing through the stacks of mail, Mercer was grateful that Harry hadn’t repeated last year’s trick of putting him on a handful of pornographic mailing lists. He hadn’t been able to look his mailman in the eye until that mess had been straightened out. Delving deeper into his pile, he realized Harry’s distorted sense of humor had been in full swing after all.
Not only had he brought over junk mail from a half dozen of his cronies, he’d meticulously shuffled Mercer’s important stuff in with wads of credit-card solicitations and other garbage. The trade magazines were hidden inside catalogues for companies Mercer had never heard of. It would take an hour just to separate out his own stuff.
The phone rang. “Hello.”
“Hey, Mercer. You’re finally out of bed.” Harry’s voice, the result of sixty years of chain-smoking and hard drinking, grated like a diesel engine on a cold morning.
“Yeah, I didn’t get home until four. Wait, how’d you know I was asleep? Where the hell are you?”
“I came by a couple hours ago when you were sacked out,” Harry breezed, a lungful of smoke hissing past his lips. “I came back a little after noon. I’m downstairs in your office on line two.”
Mercer checked his phone and saw the light for the fax line was on. “I should call the cops and have you arrested as a Peeping Tom. Why didn’t you get milk, you bastard? You knew I was coming home today.”
