Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “What extreme danger?” she asked, looking alarmed.

  “The effects of the construction activity on Cascadia Island. We’ve been monitoring it carefully.”

  Her shoulders fell slightly. “Oh. That again.”

  “Yes, that again. Honey, I’m not going to argue with you about whether the resort should have been built. I know how you and your dad feel. But the reality is that, if my theory is right, there really is a heightened danger of a major quake.”

  “Can’t you just get Sanjay to go take a look?” she asked, defeat already in her voice.

  “No, Jen, I’ve got to run over to the lab myself. If it’s nothing big, I can be back here in—”

  “Doug,” she interrupted, her eyes on his, a faded smile on her lips. “It’s okay. Go do what you have to do as quickly as you can do it.” She tossed her head and forced a smile, raising her wine glass in a mock toast. “Here’s to the Richter Scale.”

  He hesitated, debating whether to correct her as she caught his eyes. “I know, I know,” she said, recognizing his professorial need to set the technical record straight. “The Richter Scale is only good in California quakes and…”

  “Saturates at…”

  “Right… above 6.4.”

  “A little higher.”

  “Go!”

  He finished extricating himself from the chair and moved to her side, cupping her face gently to kiss her with an intensity that once again messed with her resolve.

  “I love you, Jennifer,” he said when he pulled back.

  “I love you, too, damnit.”

  “Damnit?” he chuckled. “That’s the strangest expression of everlasting love I’ve ever heard.”

  “Sometimes I don’t want to love you,” she said softly, still smiling.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but apparently you’ve drugged me or hypnotized me or used something irresistible.”

  He laughed as he straightened up and looked at her. “I’ll never tell. But I will hurry. Maybe thirty minutes.”

  “Call me as soon as you’re on the way back, okay? I think I’ll probably go on to the hotel and wait for you there.”

  He nodded and walked quickly out of the restaurant. As his fit, athletic form receded, Jennifer watched appreciatively, relaxed in a glow of renewed hope.

  She decided to tarry for a while and ordered coffee. Meanwhile the lights of Seattle continued to pass dreamily around her, the restaurant turning almost a hundred and eighty degrees as she waited, trying to sort through a jumble of emotions as she replayed the conversation in her memory.

  Doug’s call came while she was still physically at the top of the Space Needle, but mentally far away.

  “Jennifer, I hate this, but I have to stay here for at least a few hours.”

  “Oh, no. Why? Is there some immediate danger?”

  “No, but there’s a puzzle I need to work out.”

  “Can’t you do it tomorrow?”

  “No, Jen. I’ve got to stay a while. But I can join you later at the Breakwater, maybe around midnight?”

  She paused, her thoughts cascading as she tried to suppress the flash of irritation at his escape back to the lab.

  “No earlier than that?” she managed. “Doug, is it really so important that you just have to… to let it interfere?”

  “Yes. I’ve got some calculations to make and a bunch of small hypocenters to analyze.”

  “Hypo-who?”

  “Remember? The actual location of an earthquake within the earth is the hypocenter. The point on the surface directly over the hypocenter is the epicenter.”

  “I’m kidding. I know what a hypocenter is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call me first. If it’s too late, I may not stay.”

  As soon as she closed her flip phone, it rang again with his number on the screen.

  “Jennifer, one more thing. I know you’ve got that Cascadia Resort inaugural tomorrow, and I really don’t think you ought to go.”

  She could feel her stomach tightening and the muscles in the back of her neck twisting up. They’d had this discussion before.

  “Why not?”

  “Jen, I’ve explained this a hundred times… my paper and the theory of Resonant Amplification were on this very point. The whole island is a potential death zone.”

  “I think you’re more concerned that Alex Jamison’s going to be there. You think I’m going to take up with him again?”

  “Of course not. I know Jamison hurt you badly. I’m really worried about you being on that rock, and… I’ve received some important new information which apparently validates all my suspicions about the place.”

  “What information?”

  “An anonymous e-mail from someone saying he has a pile of seismic refraction data that proves I’m right, and that the island is very dangerous. But I’m having a hell of a time unmasking the sender or getting back in touch with him, and yet I absolutely have to. Quickly.”

  “Oh, come on, Doug. An anonymous e-mail and seismic data you haven’t even seen? How do you know it’s got any validity, if it even exists?”

  “I don’t, but I have a very bad feeling about this weekend, and about your being out there. Among other things, there’s apparently a major fault right under all the buildings.”

  “Doug, they wouldn’t have built over a known fault.”

  “Point is, according to whoever sent the e-mail, the engineering firm missed it. In any event, I’ve got to find out who sent it. The return address was garbled, and I’m wondering if that was on purpose, or if someone else intercepted it and monkeyed with it. For that matter it could be one of my detractors down in Menlo Park trying to bait me with tantalizing, made-up evidence just to get a reaction he can use to embarrass me.”

  “Honey, you’re sounding paranoid. You know that?”

  “I’m not paranoid. I’m just very worried. My paper generated a lot of enemies.”

  “Doug, look. Have there been any earthquakes below Cascadia Island?”

  “Not yet, as far as I can validate.”

  “Okay, then I’m having a hard time appreciating this, because obviously there’s no immediate danger, and I’m scheduled to fly more than half of our charter flights between here and Cascadia Island tomorrow. Dad and I are invited guests for the evening. We’re investors, as you well know.”

  “And I’d rather not lose you to a collapsing island or collapsing buildings if the worst occurs. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “So do the other scientists who’ve discounted your theory,” she said quietly. “Remember the old rule? For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD? Honey, I respect the seriousness of your work and your incredible confidence that you’re right about this, but I have a job to do tomorrow and even your own employer told you to get off that hobby horse. Doug, I love you, but on this one, I have official support in concluding that your head is full of squirrels.”

  She could hear the exasperation in his voice. “Jen, even if the Resonant Amplification effect turns out to be garbage, you agree that we could have that great subduction quake at any moment, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure, but…”

  “Okay, and you know it’s been proven before I came along that the whole coastline will drop one to two meters when that occurs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And… you’re aware that we have thousands of years of evidence that every time a huge subduction zone quake has hit this region, the coast gets hit with a huge tsunami. Right? You know none of that is controversial.”

  “Yes. I know all that, Doug. Being there is an assumed risk.”

  “Well, if it hits while you and Sven are there, long before you could start up and lift off, the whole island will be washed clean of people and buildings by a thirty-foot-high tsunami, and I do not want my potential future wife in danger!”

  The words hung there for a few heartbeats before she could deal with them.

  “Potential future wife? Is t
hat the strangest quasi-proposal on record, or are you tantalizing me?”

  There was a chuckle on the other end, as if he’d succeeded in diverting her irritation. “Let’s call it a sincere statement of intent. But about staying away from there, I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I. This subject has been a rift zone between us for the last two years. You’ve been a sworn enemy of the Cascadia Resort project from the first, and—”

  “Jen—”

  “Let me finish! Some of the things you’ve pulled to stop that project I still can’t believe. So this is not a balanced, rational request from an unbiased man without an agenda.”

  “Jennifer…”

  “Doug, please get back to work so you can come to me sometime tonight… before I start searching for a new potential husband.”

  She refolded her phone with an unexpected grin on her face, and looked down, confused. An intricately folded napkin lay on the empty dessert plate before her.

  When did I do that? she wondered, having no recollection of it. But it was refolded the way she always left linen napkins in restaurants: neat, crisp, and looking like a form of origami. As a young girl she’d developed the habit, fantasizing that the waiters would all be whispering about her talent. She was almost ten the night she was leaving a restaurant with her family and glanced back in time to see a busboy throw her creation into a slop tray without a second glance. It had hurt her feelings and registered as a small loss of innocence, but it hadn’t dissuaded her from continuing the habit.

  She was feeling better now, more optimistic. Maybe his unguarded blurt about being his potential wife was enough of a commitment, and a change of heart. At least she’d finally had the courage to engage him on the subject of her growing discontent.

  But what had he been ready to tell her?

  Jennifer drained the last of her third cup of coffee and took the elevator to the ground level to hail a cab for the short ride to the Breakwater. She tipped the cabby—despite his jerky driving and a near collision with the waterfront trolley—and made a mental note to visit a cash machine sooner rather than later as she breezed past the front desk and then turned back to order a masseuse to her room. Indulgence, she decided, was probably going to be the ticket to enjoying the solo time until he arrived. A great massage in the beauty of the suite, and maybe some chocolate. After all, that constituted what she most needed: control.

  Control and chocolate, she chuckled to herself. The next best thing to sex and commitment.

  The masseuse had been late and finished by 10:30 P.M. There had been no call from Doug, and Jennifer found herself unsure whether to leave or stay. The suite felt barren without him, and worse, it felt wrong, as if there were some unwritten rule that she shouldn’t occupy the locus of such a sacred memory by herself.

  She dressed suddenly and stood for the longest time at the window in deep thought, watching a small motor yacht sail off toward Bremerton, its wake catching the silver light of the full moon. It was a tragedy to share this only with herself, she thought. No, it was a travesty, and try as she might, there was no way to view his absence but as a seized opportunity to run from her questioning. She wasn’t just disappointed, she was angry with him. It made it easier.

  But they were so good together, she thought. There was a deep joy in just being with each other, and laughing and loving, traveling and even sparring at times over deep subjects. Their intellects and joy of life and libidos were equally matched, and for two strong, controlling personalities to be so sympathetically meshed was amazing.

  Only Deborah’s hovering presence had marred the idyllic nature of the relationship. Deborah was an acid she couldn’t neutralize, and he was hiding from that reality as it ate away at her trust.

  What was he about to tell me?

  She should have been completely relaxed by now, Jennifer thought, but she was pacing and agitated and unsettled and acutely aware that her resolve was wavering. Jennifer the little girl wanted to run to him and apologize again for pressuring him and be hugged. Jennifer the woman wanted answers and commitment.

  Or had she angered him by getting too close to the truth about wanting kids and a ring?

  The real essence of who she believed herself to be stood rooted in the middle, dithering in near-paralytic confusion.

  The room was now completely intolerable without him. She picked up the phone to retrieve the car that she had prepositioned at the hotel earlier in the day and began packing the things she’d brought for the evening. She knew what the lack of contact meant. When he went nose-down into his seismographs on a technical problem, he entered a different time continuum as disconnected from the rest of the world as it was from her, and it was painfully obvious he wasn’t coming.

  Chapter 6

  DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, 10:55 P.M.

  Apparently the stop sign wasn’t going to change.

  Jennifer smiled ruefully at the depth of her distraction and accelerated into the empty intersection, aware she’d been driving aimlessly in the ten minutes since leaving the Breakwater Hotel.

  Downtown Seattle was never really quiet at night anymore. The regional lifeline—Interstate 5—now flowed with vehicles twenty-four hours a day, and even at midnight the heart of the city pulsed with enough solitary energy to be quietly vibrant: cars and lone pedestrians appearing through the steam wafting from the occasional grate, as if the entire place was a carefully manicured movie set.

  Habit guided a turn onto Interstate 5 before she realized she was automatically heading for her office at Boeing Field. She had a duty to get rested for the heavy schedule of charter flights in the morning, but neither her condo nor Doug’s floating home beckoned. Instead, she decided to crawl into one of the crew bunks in the medevac section of her company.

  Her thoughts drifted to the series of events which had so drastically altered her career path. She loved nursing, but she loved flying, too, and was continually incensed that she couldn’t do both at the same time. But she had voluntarily fled nursing for the presumed Valhalla of running her dad’s company and flying, convincing herself that her nursing skills would still be valuable. Perhaps, she’d thought, she could appoint herself chief flight nurse as well as serve as one of the line pilots. Sven had made it clear that she didn’t have enough experience to be chief pilot, and the rest of the seasoned pros he’d brought in to build Nightingale quickly vetoed the chief nurse idea, especially after they’d attended her first briefing as president of the medevac division.

  Eric Emery was the veteran and slightly crusty chief pilot, and his wife, Anita, had been the company’s original chief flight nurse. They’d both followed her back to her office after that first briefing to administer a reality check.

  “You not only can’t be chief flight nurse and president, your attitude’s going to have to change to fly my helicopters,” Eric had said with the force of someone who knew resignation might be the price of failing to convince her.

  Your helicopters? she thought, resisting the impulse to pull rank. It was good he thought of the fleet as his, she reminded herself.

  “What’s wrong with my attitude, Eric?”

  “You’re still mission oriented. You’re still the savior determined to pull off the rescue, and that’s how we crash machines and kill people.”

  It had been a disappointment that he was right. Her balloon of enthusiasm for running the two companies and flying constantly hadn’t entirely burst, but it was leaking badly. She was used to being in the “angel of mercy” role, and it seemed hollow somehow to discover that medical evacuation helicopter operations were now even more clinical than her past life at Olympic Hospital. She’d thanked them, reassured them, and worked hard over the past few years to gain Eric’s confidence—which he’d finally given her, even though somewhat grudgingly.

  Jennifer pulled into her own marked parking place in time to witness the unwelcome spectacle of Tim Paretsky, the duty medevac alert pilot, being loaded into an ambulance with his flight nurse and sister Sara
h Paretsky in tow. Sarah spotted the boss and shouted an explanation before the ambulance doors closed her in.

  “Tim had an accident in the hangar. We’re going to Olympic.”

  In the communications room the duty dispatcher completed the description of the large, metal case which had suddenly dislodged from the upper storage self Tim had been tugging at. He’d been in a brief freefall backward, and a concrete hangar floor had broken the fall.

  “He’s got at least a concussion, and he cut the hell out of himself grabbing for a handhold on the way down.”

  “I’d better follow them over.”

  “Jen, if you’re legal, could you take a flight?”

  She hesitated, thoroughly unprepared for the request. “We have a callout?”

  “We’re on standby as of three minutes ago. I expect the call momentarily. A head-on collision on the west side of Stevens Pass with two dead at the scene, and two injured.”

  “Do we have nurses, with Sarah gone?”

  “Sarah was off duty. Gretchen and Karen are on alert, and they’re ready.”

  Jennifer sighed, inwardly glad to have something besides Doug to seize her focus for an hour or so.

  “I’ll get into my flight suit. And for the record, I had nothing alcoholic tonight.”

  Snow in the Cascade Mountains during any November was normal, but the flurries that had started around Stevens Pass just before midnight had been a surprise to the forecasters as well as motorists speeding along the two-lane section of the roadway. The collision had closed both lanes of the highway and left a small army of State Patrol troopers holding back the tide while the emergency medtechs triaged the horror. The call for Nightingale’s services followed.

  Jennifer had the EC-135 Eurocopter airborne and headed for the accident site well within the required seven minutes response time. She’d done a personal systems check and come up with the conclusion that she was safe to fly, but there was no avoiding the fact that she was emotionally tired. It wasn’t like the crushing fatigue of the countless nights she’d spent working doubles on the hospital floor, nor the disorienting weight of flying the last leg home from a long medevac sequence, but she was tired, and she was less than one hundred percent, and that meant she’d have to cut wider margins around any tight situations to stay safe.