“Thank God for the institute."
“Amen to that. They'll pick us up tomorrow afternoon in a special bus with a military escort and we should be in the air by eight o'clock that evening. They chartered an entire 747 for the staff and families. They also tried to schedule an early morning flight out, but Oracle and IBM have them solidly booked. Worse yet, people are starting to panic a bit, since the deep tremors started yesterday and I'm concerned about our bus making it to the airport."
“Deep tremors?"
“Yeah, we've been having a lot of deep micro-quakes and they've been building over that last five days and now they're happening almost every hour now. We can't feel the small ones, but the seismic station at Mount Umunhum, which is the closest monitoring station to our house, is going ballistic. I'm trying my best to keep everything on a positive note here, and so are your parents, but I've got to tell you, we're starting to crap our pants. I'm not going to sleep a wink tonight."
“Henry,” she pleaded. “You've got to try dear or you will not have energy for tomorrow. Even if you have to smoke a dozen cigarettes."
He suddenly slapped his head. “For the love of God! How could I forget to tell you? Honey, I think I may have some really good news. The doctors decided to pull out the stops and increase my chemo dosage and it seems to be working. It is too early to tell, but my cancer may be going into remission. Like I say, it is way too early to tell but the initial signs look good."
“Oh Henry,” she sighed. “I'm so glad to hear that,” she said as happy tears began to stream down her cheeks. “We're going to make it honey. All of us.” She pounded her fists on the bed. “I just know it!"
“And by the grace of God and the skin of our teeth,” he added thoughtfully as Svetlana reentered the room.
“It's my turn to talk to mommy,” she blurted out. Tanya and Henry laughed together.
“Talk about timing,” Henry quipped. “OK princess, up on my knee. It's your turn with mommy."
The child gleefully scampered up upon her father's knee and started right in. “Guess what mommy, daddy and I sent you a secret surprise this morning, but I'm not supposed to tell you what it is because it's a secret, you know."
Tanya smiled warmly. “Well, we wouldn't want to spoil a secret now, would we?"
* * *
Nibiru in Opposition
HENRY HAD SMOKED two more cannabis cigarettes after his conversation with Tanya the night before, to relax as she suggested and to control his persistent nausea. However, what brought him the most relief were the live seismic activity feeds on the USGS web site. Much to his relief, the San Andreas Fault line had mysteriously settled down to the usual scribble of colored lines. As he studied the readouts, he wondered if he hadn't been too pessimistic, after all, about Nibiru's flyby. Things were obviously settling down, and it would still be another three days before Nibiru would be in perfect opposition with the Earth. “Maybe I was a bit harsh on those NASA experts,” he thought aloud to himself.
Tanya's parents had returned home to their spacious ocean view cottage at the base of Seacliff beach to pack for the move to Las Vegas. Tanya's father was unimpressed with the prognostications of doomsayers; he had purchased the property for an excellent price and had just finished redecorating the home. He often remarked that living so close to the ocean had been the best thing he'd ever done to enjoy his sleep.
Henry's in-laws had packed through the night, arguing over this and that piece of memorabilia or artwork. The Monterey Institute had set very clear weight and size limitations for luggage, and Tanya's parents wanted to use every ounce of it to pack their most precious things. Clothes, they reasoned, they could buy in Las Vegas; the immediate concern was to take as much as they could with the fear that looters would ransack their home.
One of Charlene's kittens had passed away the night before, so Henry and Svetlana had taken the visibly tense Persian and her remaining three kittens to the rescue that morning. Svetlana had cried bitterly, but taking Charlene and her kittens with them to Las Vegas was simply not possible.
It would still be several hours before the bus would arrive at their predetermined pickup point in Soquel, so rather than fret around the house, checking and rechecking his packed bags, he decided to take Svetlana for a short drive to his in-laws’ house on the beach.
Henry helped his daughter into their minivan as the captain of the oil tanker Exxon Ayala walked out of the ship's control center, onto the port wing of his flying bridge.
A mile off his bow was the 4,200-foot long suspension span of the Golden Gate Bridge that spanned the mile wide entrance into the San Francisco Bay. Inhaling the fresh morning breeze, he watched the San Francisco Bay harbor boat come alongside his ship.
He noticed a shark swimming near the surface a hundred yards beyond the harbor boat. It was a 20-foot Great White shark swimming towards the Golden Gate in search of calorie-rich seals around Seal Rock, near San Francisco's Western shoreline.
The Exxon Ayala tanker had been named in honor of San Juan Manuel de Ayala, who first sailed through the Golden Gate and into the San Francisco Bay in 1775. The fine ship was the pride of the oil company's fleet. A thousand feet long, she could carry 1.4 million barrels of crude from the marine terminal in Valdez, Alaska to the marine terminal in Richmond, California, at the Northeast corner of the San Francisco Bay, in less time than any other vessel her size. Featuring an advanced double-hull design, the naval architects who designed her bragged that while it could carry as much crude oil as the ill-fated Exxon Valdez could, the Ayala was four times stronger.
As the harbor pilot walked up the gangway, the captain noticed the rapid pace of wide body jets taking off from the San Francisco International airport. The heavily loaded 747 jumbo jets were taking off to the West as other waiting in queue to land from the East.
These jets were not loaded with the usual tourists and businessmen jockeying for a window seat. They were loaded with the best and brightest of Silicon Valley software and hardware engineers and their families. The push was on now to move the much-needed Silicon Valley talent to the new technology center in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The top managers and the brightest engineers and designers had been flown in first and given the best rooms available. The next wave would be the middle managers, staff engineers and engineering support staffers, such as technical writers and quality assurance testers. These were the people in the jumbo jets the Captain of the Exxon Ayala watched taking off from the San Francisco Airport that morning, slowly climbing into a gentle banking turn that would put them on course for Las Vegas.
The last wave of those bound for Las Vegas would be the junior engineers and administrative personnel who were responsible for packing manufacturing gear and computers into shipping containers bound for the rail yards in Oakland.
The captain of the Exxon Ayala thought about his niece, a security officer at the Oracle Corporation Redwood Shores campus. South of San Francisco, the campus hugged the Western shoreline of the San Francisco Bay. Each time his ship made port he'd call her and offer to take her to diner at a fine restaurant, and seldom did she refuse. He looked at his watch; she'd be at work by now. He was in the mood for prime rib that morning; that was her favorite. He smiled to himself and decided to give her a little more time to settle into her day before ringing her up on the satellite phone.
As the captain's niece clocked in at the Oracle security office, the first hints of danger flashed their way from the USGS seismographic station at Mount Umunhum, South of San Francisco, and from the Stanford Telescope, San Bruno Mountain and Hamilton Field stations to the South. As the needles of the drum recorders began swaying back and forth with large, abrupt races across the paper, the seismologist on duty knew it meant only one thing—a superquake was about to happen!
* * * *
THE MINIVAN FINALLY coasted to a stop behind the home of his in-laws, having been forced to weave through rocks and tree branches that had fallen down on the private drive leading to
their home from the cliff face above.
Henry looked up at the homes above, perched on the edge of the cliff. Several had already been damaged by the small quakes of the previous few days, and he could see where the foundations of some now jutted out into thin air.
Tanya's mother met them at the door and told them they'd be ready in a less than an hour. They'd argued a great deal through the night and she was visibly exhausted. Henry decided to fetch up a beach blanket and to sit out on the sand and wait for them with Svetlana who took a small red plastic bucket with her.
As he laid out the blanket on the beach, Svetlana began playing in the sand. Moments later, Tanya's mother walked out from the beach with two large mugs filled with steaming hot tea and a plate piled high with freshly baked piroshki, filled with various tasty homemade fruit compotes. He asked her to join them, but she said she had to return to the house to help her husband finish the packing.
In unusually good appetite, Henry had already started on his second piroshki as emergency alert sirens began wailing all up and down the northern California coastline. He grabbed Svetlana close, and they heard a massive rumbling sound, like that of a hundred freight trains racing at them. He tried to scream to his in-laws to get out of their house, but the roar drowned him out. Before he could get to his feet, the impact of the quake struck so hard that he could barely continue to hold on to Svetlana, who now clung to him, screaming hysterically with fear.
The whole length of the beach began to ripple like the waves on the ocean. He watched with horror as the land under the cliff homes above gave way and a huge, blue colored four-plex slid down the collapsing cliff face, landing directly atop his in-laws’ cottage and crushing everything in its path. “Oh God,” he screamed, “No! No! No!"
* * * *
THE SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area harbor pilot had just walked onto the bridge of the Exxon Ayala when all hands on board the ship first heard the wail of sirens in the distance. Then, an odd sight caught the captain's attention. The old WWII gun emplacements of Fort Funston, high up on Marin Mountain overlooking the North end of the Golden Gate, began crumbling to large pieces of reinforced concrete debris and began falling into the sea below.
The impact had come shortly after the captain's niece had reported for work at the Oracle headquarters at Redwood Shores, next to the San Francisco Bay. She too noticed a sound of huge freight trains, just as Henry did even though they were separated by the Santa Cruz mountain range.
Trained to handle quakes, she grabbed a large flashlight and a radio from the charging cradles and rolled down beside an old, massive metal desk, just a split second before the shock wave hit.
It was her great fortune that the founder of Oracle had spared no expense in designing his buildings. Each floor sat on its own quake rollers, and any of the main buildings on the Redwood Shores campus could withstand a 9.0 quake. Workers in the other buildings surrounding the Oracle campus were not as fortunate as floors collapsed one upon another, crushing the hapless office workers into human pancakes.
Worse yet, the quake was not only intense—it was lengthy and it was flattening every bridge and highway overpass within a hundred-mile area, crushing thousands of helpless people in their cars under tons of reinforced concrete. In less than two minutes, the ability of people to freely drive about the San Francisco Bay had become a distant memory as highways, roads and bridges were torn asunder.
The violent shaking stopped, and Henry slowly rose to look at the in-laws’ cottage. It was almost completely buried in dirt and debris from the cliff behind it, which eliminated any hope that Tanya's parents could have survived. Their home wasn't the only one destroyed in this manner, and the devastation ran the length of the beach. He'd have to wait for the aftershocks to pass before risking the effort to hike out, given that all the roads and trails leading to the beach had been destroyed.
He comforted Svetlana who was still crying and terribly distraught at the death of her grandparents, and his thoughts turned towards Tanya.
He unclipped his cell phone and pressed the auto dial for the Hotel Lombardy in Washington. At least he could leave a message if nothing else. The phone bleeped and displayed a “no service” message. He switched it to mesh mode hoping it could connect via the slower but reasonably good peer-to-peer mesh network. That too, returned a no service message.
Holding the handheld videophone in front of his face, he thought aloud, “Sitchin was right. Every time mankind gets to thinking that he is the king of the universe, this miserable planet comes back and slams us back into another Stone Age.” Disgusted, he threw the now-useless phone into the sand. He knew it would be months and perhaps even years before a minimal level of service could be restored and it would take days before he could get a message to her through the Red Cross. “At least,” he tried to comfort himself; “Tanya will get the FedEx package we sent her with the video."
Then the unimaginable happened. The shelf just off the coast of Central California, from Monterey in the South to Bodega Bay in the North, collapsed by more than fifty feet in some places, while rising twice that much in others, as the Pacific Plate suddenly and violently subducted under the North American Plate.
This immense Earth change dropped the waters of the San Francisco Bay by 25 feet in just under a minute as Henry watched the waters of Monterey Bay rush out to sea, revealing a sandy bottom strewn with sunken fishing boats and other man-made litter. It was nature's way of announcing that it was about to unleash a 150 foot tall tsunami on the West Coast of California.
He realized what was now happening, and that they would not survive it. He kissed his daughter tenderly and said, “Honey, I want you to hold on to me real tight and close your eyes. You and I are going to Heaven with Grandma and Grandpa today."
“I'm so afraid, Daddy,” she cried.
“Hush, my darling, it will all be over soon and then everything will be OK."
As the boiling waters of the Pacific rushed out to sea, they pulled the Exxon Ayala along with it as though it was a child's toy in a bathtub. The captain ordered the tanker's engines to full speed, but before the ship's huge screws could begin to turn, a massive vortex of spiraling, angry water formed ahead of the tanker's bow.
Caught in a vortex several times the size of the Exxon Ayala itself, the bow of the hapless vessel was sucked forward, down into the funnel of boiling water as the stern of the ship whipped around in a circle, as though it were a spinning top.
Holding on for their lives, the captain and pilot glanced at each other and could see their fate in each other's eyes seconds before the bow of the ship slammed itself into the seabed floor.
With the ship half sunk and the other half surrounded by a funnel of angry water, the bow struck bottom with a crashing thud as hull plates and bulkheads crumpled and collapsed. The impact was so great that the ship's bridge was torn away and the last thing both men would see was the watery ocean floor rushing up to meet them.
With a fury that could only be called hell, the ocean heaved once again and formed a 150 foot tall tsunami wave that stretched across the Central California coastline. The center of that horrific wave faced the Golden Gate that spanned the entrance to the San Francisco Bay.
Crude oil was already pouring out of the mortally wounded ship as the frenzied tsunami wave picked it back up off the seabed like a child snatching a toy and hurled it eastward, toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
Carried along like a log in a slough, the Exxon Ayala rolled side-over-side as it was pushed along by the wave. In the boiling waters around it, several lifeless bodies of the ship's crew swirled around the ship along with the wrecked and lifeless remains of the harbor boat and several other small craft.
* * * *
AS THE TSUNAMI wave slammed into the Golden Gate Bridge, it slammed the mortally wounded Exxon Ayala sideways into the majestic north tower of the bridge. Other ships would have certainly split apart long ago, but even the massive pilings that supported the bridge's north tower could not break
the Exxon Ayala in two. Caught amidships, the doomed oil tanker wrapped itself around the north tower until the massive steel structure finally buckled and failed.
The suddenly freed suspension cables up on the bridge itself snapped the bridge in half, throwing down onto the pavement those who had not already been swept off the bridge. With the combined fury of the sea plus the stranded mass of the oil tanker, the bridge's suspension span between the towers began to sway drunkenly as the large steel cables that supported the upper structure began snapping and whipping about.
Finally, the north tower of the bridge collapsed in towards the bay, freeing the trapped Exxon Ayala, which was once again carried eastward by the raging waters straight towards the old prison on Alcatraz Island in the center of the bay. There, what remained of its battered and twisted hull ran aground, never to move again.
As the tsunami wave pulled out, what was left of the 1.4 million barrels of crude oil in the holds of the Exxon Ayala, along with the Great White Shark that the Captain of the ship had spotted that morning near the harbor boat, were now being carried towards the Horizon's Restaurant in Sausalito, with its unobstructed view of San Francisco from across the San Francisco Bay.
A pricey, but favorite restaurant catering to tourists, the Horizon's restaurant featured a large outdoor patio overlooking the bay, plus immense picture windows for the diners inside.
The morning crew had just arrived to open the restaurant when the superquake first hit, and they had huddled together on the outdoor patio hoping to avoid being cut by glass. Thinking they had survived the worst of it, they were stunned to see the bay rise up in front of their picture windows.
As the boiling water smashed through the windows, the Great White Shark now coated in oil, sailed through as well. The last thing the bartender would see would be a wall of black, oily water and the shark's gaping mouth heading straight for him. Even in its final moments of life, the shark remained faithful to its instincts and tore the bartender in half with a single massive bite as his co-workers screamed out their last breaths of air before drowning.
Godschild Covenant: Return of Nibiru Page 9
