THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  Help wound down inside. Pickings looked down at the stormy sea below, the thrashing waves, the flash of moonlight on the water. For a moment he thought he saw something on the distant rocks, something moving. But it was only his imagination.

  Chapter 4

  Thursday, January 27 – 6:30 PM

  Woods Hole, Massachusetts

  Emily Swenson stood on the stage within the darkened auditorium, gilded by the halo of a lectern light. First-year students from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute packed the auditorium, kids who had yet to settle on a specialty. She could hear them coughing and fidgeting about in the dark. Swenson’s lectures were always well attended. She was famous in certain academic circles for her presentations, their drama, her state-of-the-art graphics and California good looks. Someone had once posted a snapshot of her on the Internet – sunbathing topless on a sun-drenched beach, with a backdrop of palm trees and the glittering sea – and she would never live it down. She still got fan mail from deranged admirers whom she had never met. They forgot she came from South Dakota.

  It was strange to be back in Massachusetts, to see such scenes of normalcy after all that grizzly devastation in Sri Lanka. Swenson ran through her presentation with precision, describing the events leading up to, during, and after the tsunami. It all seemed so unreal now. The slides helped to bracket the memories, to frame each experience in light and – perhaps more importantly – to block out the unwanted. She no longer smelled the distinctive stench of rotting human flesh when she awoke each morning.

  “It was the morning of December Twenty-sixth,” she began. “A month ago, almost to the day. The ‘Queen of the Sea’ train had left Colombo – Sri Lanka’s capital – two minutes late, and had just pulled up at the tiny station of Telwatte just shy of 9:30 AM. The platform and cars were jammed with passengers, over a thousand, since December Twenty-sixth was a ‘full moon day’ – a local Buddhist holiday. Telwatte is generally a momentary stop. The conductor was waiting for the signal to turn green but – due to reports of water on the tracks down the coast – the signal never changed. This was the only harbinger of what was soon to come. Everything seemed ordinary. But deep beneath the earth,” she added, “two and a half hours earlier and over a thousand miles away off the coast of Sumatra, enormous forces had strained the underlying rock. In the space of minutes, this pent-up energy was released as a 9.0 magnitude earthquake along a subduction zone in which the India plate is being thrust beneath the Burma plate. A section of the seafloor lurched upwards – as much as fifteen feet, in some places – lifting the normally flat sea surface in response.

  “One of the passengers – a man named Vidu, who lost his leg in the ensuing tsunami – later described what happened on that fateful day.”

  She displayed a slide of Vidu. He lay in a hospital bed. His stump was wrapped with bandages. His right arm in a sling. His face was bruised and battered, lined with cuts.

  “As the train idled at the station,” she said, “Vidu heard a rumble, like that of a low-flying jet. A few minutes later, he saw a wall of water rushing toward the train, like a huge river. After the first wave hit, instead of climbing off the train, the water drew more people to the cars, including those who had been waiting on the platform. The water was waist high and the train seemed solid. People scrambled aboard, some handing their children up to the passengers hanging out the windows. Others climbed up onto the roofs of the various cars. For some reason, Vidu decided to leave the train; to this day, he can’t say why. He picked up his two young daughters and carried them to a slab of concrete over a nearby latrine. Ten minutes or so after the first wave struck, he watched in horror as a second wave – more like a swell – rushed in from the sea and inundated the station and the train. The train, including the eighty-ton engine, was hit with such force that it was bulldozed off the tracks. The cars twisted and turned, filling with water. And Vidu and his two daughters were swept away into a nearby swamp. There, he hung in the trees, unconscious. When he awoke, he had already been attacked by saltwater crocodiles. His right leg had been ripped off just below the knee. His two daughters – six and nine years old – were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, no trace of them was ever found.”

  She displayed a photograph of Vidu trapped in the branches, flesh hanging in strips from his pulverized knee, crabs nibbling, the bloodstained crocodiles beneath. The audience gasped.

  “He was bleeding profusely,” she continued, “but he was too exhausted to move. He could barely look around. Other bodies were crucified all about him. Body parts dangled from the trees, like overripe fruit. Crabs and ravens and crocodiles crept through the underbrush, feasting on human flesh. Then he fainted once again. Were it not for the arrival of a rescue party, he would have died on the spot.

  “Other villagers were not so lucky,” she continued. Swenson displayed a quick series of slides of the station where the tsunami had struck the train. The first revealed the village prior to the earthquake. People were standing about beside the rust-red cars. They were smiling. They were waving. The small village of Telwatte was clearly visible nearby. It was a bright and sunny day.

  The next photograph was taken from exactly the same spot, the same angle even, although – at first – it was difficult to tell. In this slide, the station of Telwatte had been obliterated. Little remained. And the railroad cars lay twisted and scattered about in great heaps.

  “Like Vidu,” she continued, “some of the passengers and local villagers were swept across the jungle. Many were battered to death by debris. The trees were bejeweled with sheets of corrugated iron.” A series of three slides displayed the coastline. Trees were flattened, as if by a nuclear explosion.

  “At least sixty people lost limbs to gangrene, or to the feral dogs and crocodiles that descended on the helpless victims. It was difficult to arrive at an accurate death count, but at least one thousand of the train passengers were killed. Less than one hundred survived. A total of six waves struck the train and village – one, as high as twenty feet. Of the few local inhabitants who knew about tsunamis, most found themselves incapable of fleeing from the coast. There was simply no place to go.”

  The lights in the auditorium grew brighter. Swenson could see the faces of the students clearly now. They looked horrified. Good, she thought. Most scribbled furiously in their notebooks. The scraping of pencils and pens, the chatter of keyboards: These were the most satisfying of sounds, for they marked the capture of her audience. Her tactics were working. While she hated to exploit the suffering of Vidu and the other villagers whom she had come to know and love, she realized it was necessary. She needed these students to feel if they were going to respond. Her discipline was desperate for additional researchers, for scientists who might one day prevent another tragedy like this one from ever happening again.

  A spotlight shone upon her head and Swenson took a breath. “To understand tsunamis,” she continued, “you must first distinguish them from wind-generated waves or tides. Breezes blowing across the ocean crinkle the surface into relatively short waves that create currents restricted to a rather shallow layer. While gales, hurricanes and typhoons can whip up waves of thirty meters or even higher in the open ocean, they do not move deep water. Tsunamis are never generated by the gravitational forces of the sun or moon. They’re produced by earthquakes – such as in Sumatra – or, much less frequently, by volcanic eruptions, landslides, or the impact of meteors or comets.”

  She moved from the lectern and a QuickTime sequence filled the movie screen behind her. Blue animated waves began to heave, replaced by a 3-D cutaway of the water column down to the ocean floor. It was impressive animation, colorful and distracting. But most of the audience remained focused on Swenson.

  Dressed in an off-white midi lab coat over a dark plaid skirt, she had spent a long time pinning up her hair into a kind of frumpy bun to prevent it from shimmering distractedly. She wore a pair of tortoise-shell glasses. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. But all of these well-planned counte
r-measures only seemed to make her more alluring.

  To be intelligent and to look like this? It was a fucking outrage. This is what they were thinking. No one deserved such fortune, no matter what their previous life. Most people believed that if you were good-looking and smart, you must have some hidden failing, deep inside. And even if you didn’t, not really, it meant they had to look for one, which was – in and of itself – a bit of a nuisance. And they always discovered one, even if they had to make it up. It was all about finding balance, some kind of order in their world when confronted with something that was clearly out of sync, unnatural, perhaps a genetic aberration, most certainly a statistical anomaly. Swenson saw the same thing in nature all the time. To be so fortunate meant you were already doomed. What were discrete blessings, individual gifts, together proved too much for most. Sometimes her face and figure helped; usually they were just annoying distractions. As her mother used to say, “We each carry our own cross.” Research was a great place to hide.

  “Tsunamis,” she continued, “can attain speeds of up to 700 kilometers per hour in the central reaches of the oceans. But, despite their speed, tsunamis are generally not particularly dangerous in deep water. Most waves are less than a few meters high, although their lengths can exceed hundreds of kilometers.”

  Another screen popped to life, displaying a view of the Pacific Ocean from space. This morphed into an animation, charting the movement of the wave below. Then the POV collapsed, as if the satellite were falling from the sky, plummeting to the earth like Icarus, only to slow and hover a few feet from the downward side of the tsunami, revealing its low roll.

  “This creates a sea-surface slope so gentle that tsunamis usually pass unnoticed in deep water. Indeed,” she said, “the Japanese word tsu-nami translates literally as ‘harbor wave,’ perhaps because a tsunami can travel undetected across oceans, then rise up unexpectedly within shallow coastal waters.”

  The first screen glowed with a map of the Indian Ocean. “Regardless of their origin,” she said, “tsunamis evolve through three overlapping but quite separate physical processes: generation, by any force that disturbs the water column; propagation, from deeper water near the source, to shallow coastal areas; and, finally, inundation, as the waves sweep up onto dry land. Of these, the propagation phase is the best understood. Generation and inundation are much more difficult to model.

  “Generation,” she explained, “is the process through which a seafloor disturbance – such as a movement along a fault – reshapes the surface of the sea. When nearly all of an earthquake's energy is released in a thrust motion, as in the Sumatra quake, a large tsunami is generated. In contrast, strike-slip earthquakes, such as the one in San Francisco in 1906, are not efficient tsunami generators.

  “The location of the 2004 Sumatra centroid,” she continued, “defined as the location of the center of energy release, was near the Sunda trench, in relatively deep water. This generally results in an initial tsunami with larger potential energy than a tsunami whose centroid is closer to shore. Researchers use an idealized model of a quake since only the orientation of the assumed fault plane and the quake’s location, magnitude and depth can be interpreted from seismic data. Other parameters, including the amount of slip, and its length and width, must be estimated. That’s why initial simulations frequently underestimate inundation, sometimes by a factor of five or ten.”

  The second screen sparkled with numbers, spinning formulae and colorful input fields; the third with animated models of tsunamis based on the various data feeds.

  “The second process,” she continued, “propagation, transports seismic energy away from the earthquake through undulations of the water. Waves slow down as they travel over decreasing water depth, so that they eventually overtake one another, narrowing the distance between them in a process called shoaling.”

  All three screens began to display clips of different tsunami landfalls, crashing through villages and towns, in color and black-and-white, rushing up rivers and canals, sweeping the world away.

  “Inundation,” she concluded, “the third and final stage, is the most difficult to model. The wave height is now so large that initial linear theory fails to describe the complicated interaction between the water and the shoreline. Vertical run-up can reach tens of meters, but it typically takes only two to three meters to cause significant damage. The Indian Ocean tsunami was responsible for killing more than two hundred thousand people worldwide – from Sumatra to Somalia – although some speculate the death toll may climb higher, to as many as a quarter of a million souls.”

  Scenes of devastation flickered behind her: flooded fields and leveled homes; the one-legged silhouette of Vidu.

  “The U.S. Geological Survey has identified sand and gravel deposits carried inland a great distance by inundation . . . ”

  As Swenson lectured, she drifted, thinking about her own past. Once, she too had been as fresh-faced and scrubbed and open to the world as these young students, when she’d first heard Dr. White speak at that lecture in Los Angeles. She had been at USC then, after her escape from South Dakota.

  Born in a small town called Chance to Eric Swenson, a geologist, and Dolly Aalborg, part-time clerk, Emily had been precociously intelligent from the very start, skipping two grades by the time she was but ten. At twelve, she had lost her mother to lung cancer. Soon, she was working after school in the same tourist shop her mother used to manage, selling turquoise and fake Native American nick-knacks to tourists on their way to and from the Badlands. Only her swimming had kept her sane. She’d been captain of the local high school swim team, and an accomplished diver, winning a state championship at sixteen. The following year she had been accepted to USC on a scholarship where she had majored in oceanography, with a minor in geology – just like her father, with whom she was still close. On the weekends she’d worked at a local dive shop, and this too became a lifelong passion. But, even then, her beauty had worked against her.

  Tall, voluptuous and blond, with robin-egg-blue eyes, few could believe she was the same person they got to know online, through her papers or academic correspondence. She looked more like a movie star. Most men were too intimidated to even ask her out, assuming, falsely, that she was destined to be busy; to the point, ironically, where she spent nearly every weekend on her own, linked to the world exclusively through her computer, forever working.

  Her professors always discounted her because of her good looks. The women generally felt threatened. And the men either assumed she was a dumb blonde, or they fell in love with her. Even when it was Platonic, many ended up playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza. That’s why she’d left USC, after a brief affair with one of her professors – the infamous E.J. Dubinsky, author of This Primal Earth, for a few brief months a best-seller on The New York Times non-fiction list.

  She had broken it off only a week or so before a scheduled expedition – 150 kilometers east of Atlantic City – designed to study some mysterious craters suspected of being formed by gas eruptions. Despite the recent terminus of the affair, they had descended together anyway, in a three-man Deep Submergence Vehicle called the Alvin, and at one point, out of nowhere, Dubinsky had tried to kiss her. Then, something went wrong. They had lost power and the DSV had drifted out of control. It was only after forty-five excruciating seconds that they had finally found a fix. But not before Swenson had panicked, not before she had screamed hysterically and accused Dubinsky of disabling the craft intentionally. That had really been the end of the affair. Soon after that, she had transferred to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to work with Dr. James L. White, one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on tsunamis. She rarely thought about E.J. anymore. And, since that episode aboard the Alvin, she had never stepped foot inside a DSV again.

  “Excuse me?” someone said. Swenson looked up. A tanned, dark-haired student in the back waved his hand above his head.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think it would be possible to precipitate a
tsunami, by planting explosives, say, along a fault line?”

  The student had a thick accent. He sounded Indian or Pakistani. It was amazing how cosmopolitan the Institute had become. “I don’t believe so,” she replied. “Some geologists have tried to stimulate seismic activity. You know – for oil and gas exploration. That sort of thing. But none has succeeded. At least, not to my knowledge. But you might want to ask Dr. White about that one. I know he has some pretty controversial theories on vulcan stimulation.” Then she turned and looked about the crowd. They were starting to pack up. No one else had raised a hand. “Alright then,” she concluded. “I notice we’ve reached the end of our allotted time. I’ll see you all next week. Thanks for coming out so late tonight.”

  The students burst into applause. It had been a lecture disguised as a video game. It spoke to them in their own language, with lightning cuts, and contemporary colors and design. It pulsed and moved. And it tore at both their heads and hearts.

  Swenson descended from the stage, shimmied through the usual crowd of well wishers, sycophants and Lotharios who always seemed to gather at these affairs, and made her way across the Quad to Dr. White’s administrative office in the Bigelow Laboratory. She had been working there on her paper about the Indian Ocean tsunami because it was quieter than in her own shared quarters, and because – though small – the office had a spectacular view of the bay. Suddenly, someone shuffled by the door. The handle turned and Swenson was startled to see Dr. White materialize like a ghost within the brightened doorway. White had been out of the office for months, on leave, tending to his wife who was bed-ridden with cancer.