Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

Passing over the main buildings ablaze with light, they slowed steadily as Jennifer had done a half dozen times earlier in the day. The winds were kicking them around even with the added weight of the heavy Bell 412, the twin-engine civilian equivalent of the venerable Huey helicopter, and she was almost fighting the controls at times to keep on a safe approach path.

  One other helicopter was lashed to the deck of the heliport, also one of theirs, the crew presumably already checked into the hotel.

  Two ground crewmen were waiting, shielding their eyes against the serious glare of the landing lights, the 412’s blades kicking up an additional miniature hurricane as they supported the ship’s weight in a momentary hover as she descended straight down. Jennifer all but slammed the skids in place on the concrete pad to preclude any more up-and-down or sideways gyrations, and flashed a thumbs-up to the two men as they ran forward to attach tiedown chains to her skids.

  “Nice job,” Sven beamed. “Now let’s go do some serious celebrating.”

  He opened the door and swung his leg over the side just as the helicopter and the island it was sitting on lurched to the right. Jennifer looked over but Sven was gone from view and she heard a dull thud as he fell the relatively short distance to the ramp on his side.

  “Damnit!” could be heard quite clearly over the wind. In a second he popped up in the doorway, brushing himself off and looking angry.

  “Something on that goddamned doorsill caught my foot.”

  “Dad…”

  “You need to have maintenance check it out when we get back. Damn thing’s dangerous.”

  It was easier to agree at moments like this and she nodded and changed the subject. “Did you feel that tremor?”

  “When?”

  “Just when you were tumbling out.”

  “No.”

  “That’s one of those that Doug’s been…” She paused, alarmed at how easily his name had slipped out.

  “Doug’s been what?”

  “The ones he’s been warning about. What we discussed earlier.”

  “Oh, that. We’re always having little quakes up here. Trust a seismologist to get excited each time a heavy truck rumbles by.”

  Jennifer stepped to the ramp, feeling a deep, distant rumbling every few seconds and a faint noise on the wind she’d never heard before.

  “What is that, Dad? That sound?”

  He stopped and listened, pointing to the west. “Whatever it is, it’s coming from over there. Some sort of heavy shuddering. Feels like really heavy surf.”

  Chapter 18

  CASCADIA ISLAND HOTEL 6:00 P.M.

  Right on schedule, Lindy O’Brien acquired her carefully planned migraine.

  Her acting out of the onset of the pain and the reported visual disruptions were dramatic enough for an Academy Award nomination and it instantly won her the right to be left alone in her room all evening.

  Governor Frank O’Brien was used to his daughter’s histrionics, and sometimes secretly proud of her masterful levels of manipulation, even when he had to be openly disapproving. What neither he nor her mother had any use for were what he called her “hooker costumes,” some of which she loved to bring secretly in a slightly oversize purse, arriving at some official function with the first family conservatively attired only to emerge from the ladies’ room in mid-reception looking like a slutty teenage rock star in a tit tube and a leather micromini over a thong. The fact that it embarrassed her parents was clearly understood to be her goal, but despite the first family’s attempts to ignore such stunts, she kept on pulling them—to the delight of the media.

  But tonight she had planned a good escape to be with friends who had convinced their parents to let them come along.

  One of the state troopers accompanied the governor and his wife when Mick Walker appeared at the door of the suite to escort them downstairs. The other trooper was issued strict instructions to guard the door and keep the first tart—as the troopers privately called her—safely inside.

  “For tonight, young lady,” Mrs. O’Brien said, “consider this room to be a nunnery.”

  “Whatever, Mom,” she’d said, eyes closed in mock pain beneath a hot towel. “I’m in no shape to party, anyway.”

  Precisely twenty minutes later an unexpected room service order arrived, delivered by a crisply dressed young waiter who almost looked too young to be working at a casino hotel. The trooper, being an experienced cop, considered checking the young man’s ID, but this was, after all, an opening night, and he decided to let it ride. The governor was not fond of disruptions, and arresting an underage kid would cause a large one. He carefully checked the contents of the cart and frisked the young waiter before knocking on the door to confirm Lindy had ordered the meal. Her muffled voice swore at him, directing the waiter to set the table, and the young man hurriedly pushed his service cart inside and started transferring everything to the large banquet table in the sitting room of the suite. Satisfied all was safe, the trooper resumed his post in the hallway, leaving the door open and watching carefully as the waiter pushed the empty cart past him a few minutes later on his way to the service elevator. The trooper resecured the door and resumed his post, unaware of the extra effort it was taking for the waiter to push the cart down the corridor.

  Once in the elevator with the doors closed, the young man let out a small victory whoop and the tablecloth started giggling. Lindy O’Brien yanked the linen covering aside with a large grin and pulled herself out with his help as the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, as planned.

  “Everyone’s there, Lindy,” he told her. She threw her arms around him and gave him a quick, probing kiss he hadn’t expected. “You were really great, Davie! Thanks. This is gonna be a way cool evening.”

  Behind her on the sixth floor, the door to her room was closed, the requisite pillows subbing for her body were under the covers, but she knew it wasn’t needed. Her parents knew her moods, and she knew theirs. The likelihood of their even entering the room after an evening of partying was minuscule.

  CASCADIA CONVENTION CENTER

  Doug pulled up the collar of his overcoat against the twenty-five-knot winds and glanced around to make sure no one was following. Slipping away from the employee Walker had apparently assigned to keep him at bay had been a relatively simple process of heading for the men’s room and turning through a side door unobserved. But he hadn’t been fully prepared for the long walk in forty-degree temperatures and the resulting windchill.

  The printed program he’d seen pegged the opening VIP dinner at 7 in the convention center, and the prideful maps of the island posted everywhere had made that building easy to find. But for the location of a major event in a half hour, the place was strangely quiet, with only a couple of service cars parked in front and two men wandering around the lobby area.

  There was a small building with a convenient overhang at one end of the convention center plaza, and Doug molded himself into the lee of an alcove to answer an incoming call. Sanjay was on the other end.

  “Doug, Terry is back in position already, on his own, and the data he’s transmitting is frightening. There are microquakes now that you won’t feel there and the frequency is becoming almost predictable.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s going to break, Doug. Either that part of the subduction zone or the whole thing. We can’t be more than a few hours away.”

  “Anything from Menlo Park?”

  “No. I’ve sent them everything. They’re thinking and they’re worried, but we’re told to stand pat and wait. Have you gotten to the governor yet?”

  “No. I’m still trying. Have you heard from Harper?”

  “No.”

  “You have his cell phone number?”

  Sanjay passed the digits and Doug forced them into his short-term memory.

  “Okay. I’ll call you back.”

  He punched in the number, expecting nothing, but Bill Harper’s voice responded, low and tense.

  “Bill,
Doug Lam. Thank God. Where are you?”

  “Waiting for the ferry to Cascadia Island. I’m headed over to find the governor. You still in the lab?”

  “No, I’m already on the island trying to do the same thing. Mick Walker is trying to keep me away from himself and the governor. When will you be over here?”

  “I don’t know. The ferry is here and the crew had one hell of a time landing it. The first officer briefed everyone a minute ago that we’ll all have to stay seated on the passage, and the captain walked by looking ashen, so I’m not even sure I can get there.”

  “Bill, please listen. I just got a briefing from the lab. With or without O’Brien, you’re the emergency services director, and you can issue an alert.”

  “Doug, we’ve been over this—”

  “Listen, man! This is deadly serious.” He passed the latest information on the progression of the microquakes and the progressive change in frequency and magnitude. “Remember the sequence we went over much earlier? It’s following the blueprint. Like labor pains, they’re coming faster now and delivery is imminent. Our guy Terry even suspects there may have been some subsidence on the coast already.”

  “What?”

  “He says he saw waves hitting above where they should be on his tide tables, just thirty minutes ago. Bill, please! I… must not overstate what my superiors in Menlo Park are going to do, but they are strongly, at this moment, considering issuing a prediction and warning. But we can’t wait!”

  There was a long silence from Harper’s side.

  “You know what scares me, Doug, maybe even more than the possibility of the main subduction quake?”

  “What?”

  “You saying that it could set off a host of the surface faults we’ve found all over the Northwest. I agree any of them could be devastating, and especially that one right through downtown Seattle.”

  “That’s where Bellingham came from, Bill.”

  “I think you’re probably right.”

  “Bill, be brave. Issue something. Save a few thousand lives. You’ll sleep better.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Doug refolded the cell phone and stepped out of the alcove, setting his sights on the convention center lobby. Usually he loved any sort of field work away from the lab, but this was shaping up to be perhaps the strangest night of his career, and he was angry with himself over the lack of a precise plan to follow.

  The two men he’d noticed in the lobby were looking at something on the floor, and Doug’s curiosity took over, momentarily subverting his anxiety over Bill Harper’s decision. He stepped onto the walkway and headed toward them, figuring they wouldn’t have been briefed on keeping a lone, wandering guest at bay.

  CASCADIA ISLAND HOTEL

  Jennifer replaced the house phone in frustration. Sven had already headed for his suite and she was clutching the key card for her room with the intention to get there as quickly as possible and change. But the need to confront Doug was too acute to wait, and now he wasn’t answering.

  The banquet was to begin in an hour and the location, they’d been told by the desk clerk, had been changed to the casino, which somehow seemed odd. But her thoughts were centered on Doug, and he would undoubtedly be there—although precisely what he was doing on the island to begin with was puzzling. He’d told her dispatcher he’d been invited by Walker himself, but she wondered about that explanation. Even though Doug’s carefully ordered approach to things wasn’t the hallmark of someone who could change directions and plans quickly, he was capable of thinking on his feet, and the excuse he’d given her pilot could have been a lie. He probably intended to confront Mick Walker about the earthquakes, but whatever his reason, it took a distant second place to her determination to hear how a week of lies while he was cruising with his estranged wife could spell anything but the end of their relationship.

  Or maybe she just wanted to scream at him from pent-up frustration over his reluctance to commit to her. Letting events control her had been a lifelong phobia. Logic dictated caution, but her emotions were holding logic hostage, and the only certainty she could fish from the whirlpool of her thoughts was that finding and confronting him would somehow be a means of regaining control of her future. Either they were going to be committed lovers eternally honest with each other, or they were going to be history.

  He’ll be at the banquet, she concluded, and there was just enough time to get dressed and meet the shuttle at the hotel entrance. Her mission refined and targeted, she hurried to the elevators.

  EASTERN END OF CASCADIA ISLAND

  Lester Brown motioned his two compatriots out of the shadows where they’d been crouching and waiting for his signal. Jimmy, his twenty-three-year-old cousin, was strong as an ox but more than a bit dense, and Bull, his longtime friend, was keeping Jimmy under tight control.

  Jimmy and Bull ran across the service road and slid into place behind the small concrete structure which Lester had been examining.

  “Is this the right one?” Bull asked.

  “I think so,” Lester replied. “It’s in the right place, but we’ve got to get inside to be sure.”

  Jimmy started to move and Bull pulled him down. “Not yet. Lester is running this.”

  Jimmy looked embarrassed, the contrite expression visible even in the poorly reflected light of a distant street lamp. “Sorry, guys.” He pulled out his package of chewing tobacco and cut off a disgustingly large slice, a habit Lester detested. But now was not the time for a debate on the merits of tobacco, Lester thought, and if the kid needed his comforts to stay calm, so much the better.

  “All right,” Lester said. “First, we make sure this is the right thing. I’ll need that crowbar to break the lock.”

  Bull handed it over, knowing he’d eventually end up having Jimmy do most of the work if it didn’t pop off quickly.

  “How about alarms, Lester?” Bull asked. “Any chance this thing has burglar alarms?”

  Lester grinned. “That’s why having nearly a hundred members of our tribe employed over here helped a lot. One of the guys who built this thing is married to my sister. Took me a bottle of tequila, but he confirmed there are no alarms.”

  Only Lester had handled explosives before, and while Bull was nervous, Jimmy was both terrified and excited. That made him dangerous. Bull had strict instructions on when to pull Jimmy a safe distance away while Lester finished the first of the jobs they were there to conclude, but he was already worried about the wisdom of bringing him.

  PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA

  “Ralph? She’s headed to Washington state. I don’t know why, but I had a friend in Portland watch her on arrival, and she did a very professional job of ditching him. He found her trail later on, however. She rented a car and he got a tracking device on it before she got across the bridge. She’s near Centralia headed north on I-5.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “Yes. You want me to keep on this? I assume you do?”

  “Yes, Bill. I’ll handle any expenses.”

  “You kidding, man? What you did for me in ’81 pays for this, okay?”

  “You were wrongly accused, Bill.”

  “Yeah, but mister hotshot lawyer was too softhearted to send the poor traumatized spook a bill for saving his career.”

  “I never believed you were working for the KGB.”

  “I wasn’t. Their pay was far too lousy.”

  Chapter 19

  QUAALATCH LANDING, OLYMPIC PENINSULA 6:21 P.M.

  Reilly Shelton polished off another Diet Coke and crumpled the can. He tossed it into the wastebasket as he stood and shook himself, loosening up, like a prizefighter preparing to enter the ring.

  He gave the castoff order and went through his checklist to make sure all doors were showing green and watertight, then waited for the all-clear from each station before pulling the engines to idle and taking the transmissions to neutral, then reverse. With only one wheelhouse on one end of the boat, nosing in and backing out from each slip
was standard, and he slipped the levers into reverse now and throttled up, feeling the boat respond as the stern poked deeper into the turbulent waves on the other side of the breakwater. Already rolling and yawing, he pulled back a tenth of a mile before putting the engines in forward and powering around toward the island, knowing the wind would be trying to blow him back toward the peninsula slip.

  The channel was even more brutal than before and he kept the engines at full throttle to minimize the time the passengers had to be subjected to such stomach-roiling gyrations, yet it seemed to take forever before the island slip was just ahead of him.

  “How’re you going to do this one?” his first officer asked.

  Reilly glanced at him, too worried to toss off any sharp retorts or play the all-knowing captain.

  “I’m… going to power us in as fast as possible and then full-reverse her once we’re in the more protected area of the lead-in pilings.”

  “Okay.”

  The drift angles were alarming, he thought, the wind so stiff from the southwest that he was having to steer almost west to move northwest.

  The two lines of lead-in pilings sat like a welcoming Y leading into the more narrow set of pilings firmed up by concrete stanchions that led to the actual snug-harbor protection of the slot into which the bow of the MV Quaalatch was designed to fit. His mistake the last time in had been to undercorrect for the wind and drift too far to the right. Each time, with Mick Walker and everyone presumably watching, he’d had to back the ferry up and start again, making it on the third try. This time he was going to nail it on the first try.

  “A bit fast, aren’t we?” the first mate, Dennis, asked as the GPS screen showed them moving at twelve knots within the hundred-yard arc of the dock.

  “I’m not worried about wake,” Reilly said, not understanding the cautionary question.

  Okay, steer more left, point her right at the concrete stanchion, and at the last second I’ll come twenty degrees right and go into full reverse.

  It was working. This time the rows of pilings and the ultimate destination were remaining right where he wanted them to stay in the perspective of the bridge windows, even if the boat was rolling fifteen degrees left and right with every major wave. The howling of the twenty-five-knot, or better, steady wind and the shudder of an occasional thirty-five-knot gust had long since rattled him and become expected complications, but there was a new sound now, and he recognized the rhythmic banging as a louder form of what he’d been hearing back at the dock and even earlier in the day.