Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  This time she awoke to darkness and the confusing smell of dust and dampness, apparently delivered from one nightmare to another. She straightened up, remembering she’d been sitting on the floor just inside the door of her room when the whole building had begun gyrating in the latest tremor. But this one had been different, and her memory ended there.

  Her head hurt, and she felt around, finding a growing, bleeding lump on the back of her skull. She inventoried her extremities and realized something was partially resting on her right leg. She moved whatever it was aside as her eyes focused on a wall of tangled beams and walls just inside what had been her room. Standing gingerly, she moved toward the interior of the room, catching enough light from somewhere outside to realize the interior—including the bed—had been crushed by a collapsing ceiling.

  Somehow the door to the corridor had opened, but the confused mass of collapsed debris beyond was daunting, and she stood in what had been the only safe alcove wondering what to do. Sven’s room was four doors down…

  Dad!

  A sudden cold fear gripped her as she tried to see something, anything, through the destroyed corridor. There were voices in the distance, but she could see no direct lights and the pathway, if there was one, had to be filled with sharp objects ready to make things worse for any survivor trying to flee.

  Okay, she told herself. There’s no fire, I’m not trapped or drowning, and the last thing I need is a broken leg or deep cut.

  But her father was down there somewhere.

  There was a flashlight in her flight kit, and she’d left it in the partially collapsed alcove to her room. A quick search found the bag wedged beneath debris. She hauled at it, finally pulling it free, fishing around in the crushed case until the flashlight’s cold metal housing lay undamaged in her hand. She switched it on and its powerful beam obediently lit up the destruction all around her.

  Jennifer shuddered as her eyes adjusted. She played the beam around, confirming how close she’d come to being in the wrong place at the wrong moment. The thought of Doug’s betrayal now seemed a lifetime away, but she remembered sliding down the wall and sitting there in emotional agony, and apparently what had seemed an act of ultimate feminine surrender to the tyranny of her emotions had saved her life. If she’d gone to bed…

  Using the flashlight for illumination and physical leverage, Jennifer began poking her way through the debris to get down the corridor, climbing over fallen masonry and timbers, moving around a huge block of twisted metal that looked like a destroyed air-conditioning unit, and working carefully to avoid ripping her hands and arms on the countless protruding nails and sharp edges.

  The only voices she could hear were very distant and still indistinct, unresponsive to her periodic calls. There was nothing audible but the drip of liquids and the occasional groan of something big adjusting itself in the wreckage to the force of gravity.

  No, she decided. I hear the wind, too. We’re open to the outside.

  She pushed another panel of broken drywall aside and stopped to figure out her position, aware that it was the mission driving her on that had instilled a calm, even in the face of her father’s unknown fate. Having a mission always did that, she thought. Her training as a nurse and a pilot had molded her reactions. Handle it now, break down and cry later, if crying was required.

  One more door, she concluded. The numbers on several of the rooms had been ripped away from the wall, but the one just before her father’s was readable. She could see his partially collapsed door. It had buckled in half, but not fully jackknifed, and she checked to see what it was holding up before pushing it aside and moving quickly into the remains of the room.

  “Dad! Dad, are you in here? It’s Jennifer.”

  Cold fear threatened to engulf her again but she fought it down and concentrated on pushing further into the wreckage. Just as her room had been partially crushed by a collapsing ceiling and floors above, the space beyond the entry alcove was a solid mass of twisted construction materials, and she had to push and haul against them, using a broken two-by-four to force her way in.

  The bathroom was empty, and she moved to the collapsed bed, her hand shaking as she felt around the top of it. If he had been on the bed, the immense weight of what had fallen from the floor above would probably not have been survivable, but she forced herself to keep hoping as she snaked her hand around heavy objects, feeling for any trace of him.

  But he wasn’t there, and the flashlight beam poking through the gaps in the debris showed no one on the floor beyond.

  After fifteen minutes of careful, frightened exploring, she regained the destroyed corridor, relieved and scared at the same time. He wasn’t here. He hadn’t died here. But he was somewhere, and how much of Mick Walker’s complex had collapsed she had no way of knowing.

  And for some reason the thought of her father’s anger at losing their investment in the Cascadia project took momentary center stage, her mind so hungry for a mundane diversion that it seemed almost comical.

  There were voices now moving toward her in the debris, calling for survivors, their flashlights showing as glimmers in the distance.

  “Over here!” Jennifer yelled. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes!” someone bellowed back. “Are you injured?”

  “No,” she yelled. “But I can’t find anyone else.”

  “Hang in there! We’re clearing a path.”

  A hundred yards away in the east parking lot of the hotel, Mick Walker stood in the wind and steady drizzle holding his walkie-talkie and watching the growing rescue effort. The fire department he’d created had brought every piece of equipment they had, including the ladder truck that had cost him over two hundred thousand dollars, but the enormous scale of the damage was going to require a fleet of bulldozers and cranes and other heavy equipment they didn’t have.

  The entire eastern half of the hotel had partially collapsed, the top two floors crashing into the floors below, but leaving the front part only partially compressed while the back half appeared to be flattened.

  A stunned group of employees was standing at his side, paying no attention to Doug Lam and Diane Lacombe as they stood slightly apart. Doug had collared the assistant manager who brought the initial news to Walker’s office pressing him for Jennifer’s room number, and the man had somehow responded, easing his near panic with the news that she’d been housed in the western end of the hotel, which was still intact. He still needed to find her, but it could wait for the more urgent matter at hand.

  Doug wiped the raindrops from his hair and caught Walker’s attention.

  “Mick, I’m terribly sorry.”

  Mick nodded, his stunned expression unchanged. “We’re going to lose people in this.”

  “I know it,” Doug replied.

  “The Presidential Suite was on the tip of the east wing, and O’Brien and his family were there.”

  “The governor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, over there?”

  “Yes. The worst hit.”

  “Which floor?”

  “Top floor. It’s gone.”

  Doug followed his gaze, recalling the utter refusal of the state’s chief executive to even consider his pleas. If he had been in that corner suite, he was probably dead.

  Doug took a deep breath and mentally squared his shoulders.

  “Mick, you have to immediately evacuate this island.”

  Mick turned to him, the first flash of anger moving like a fast cloud across his face.

  “You just can’t wait, can you, Lam? If you mean evacuate the injured, that’s fine. But if you think I’m abandoning this resort—”

  “Mick, I mean the whole island! That last quake split you in half. You built right across a surficial fault and it’s now active, for crying out loud. That’s what I… we… were coming to tell you when it hit.”

  “I’m not abandoning this island. I’ll rebuild.”

  “Mick, that’s not the point. Your hotel’s uninha
bitable, there’s no other place to stay, we still could have the big subduction quake any moment with a tsunami that will finish off all of us, and there’s no time to lose.”

  Walker turned to Doug. “You know what? Fuck you, Lam. Just fuck you for enjoying this.”

  “Enjoying this? You’ve got to be kidding! Hey, get this straight, Walker. I’m horrified, and I also happen to be standing here in harm’s way, and I’ve got a lover in there somewhere I’m worried about, too.”

  “Even if I wanted to evacuate, would you kindly tell me how we’re going to do it? My ferry’s out of service, the dock is toast, the wind’s too high for helicopter operations, and here we are! So, genius, how do we evacuate?”

  Doug exhaled sharply, knowing he’d been cornered. “I don’t know. But there’s always a way.”

  “Yeah, thank you Mary Sunshine.”

  Someone was tugging on Doug’s sleeve and he turned to find the ashen-faced assistant manager.

  “Dr. Lam, I… made a mistake earlier.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Ms. Lindstrom was in 214, not 240.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I thought you needed to know.”

  Doug stared at the man, his level of panic rising once again, Jennifer’s face in his mind.

  “Which wing? Still the west wing?”

  “No, sir. East, I’m afraid. The east wing.”

  Diane Lacombe tried unsuccessfully to catch his arm as he bolted for the wreckage of the hotel, but he was too fast, and she stood in confusion for a second before turning to Mick Walker.

  “Mick—”

  “I’m sorry you’re with Chadwick and Noble, Diane.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “They’ve done this to me. Some bastard failed to do the job and missed that fault.”

  She swallowed hard, all her suspicions about who had invaded her apartment and who was looking for her suddenly seeming moot.

  “Is… is Mr. Nelms still back at your office?”

  “I think so,” he said, noting that she was looking around as if worried she might be overheard. “Why, Diane? Do you know something I should know?”

  Her words were anything but planned.

  “There are a lot of things you should have known, and a lot of great things you’ve missed.”

  “You’re… referring to ancient history?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. That’s pretty insulting.”

  “I don’t mean it to be. It’s just that we agreed—”

  “You agreed. I was forced to listen.” She composed herself, throttling her emotions and returning to the mission. “I also happen to know who that bastard is you’re referring to.”

  His eyebrows furrowed in a strange look, more worried than shocked.

  “You do? Who?”

  “Me.”

  “What?” He shook his head once as if to toss off whatever had garbled her words. “No, I mean, who did it? Who screwed up the seismic survey?”

  She sighed, dropping her gaze to her shoes before looking back at him. There was anger and pain and fury there, she knew, and all of it moments away from becoming shock.

  “I personally came out and led the team that did the survey. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No. You were here?”

  “Yes. Others crunched the numbers and interpreted the data, but I got the data, and it showed the fault.”

  “Good God, Diane! You knew?” he asked incredulously, a look of betrayal already spreading across his features. “You knew and you didn’t report it to me? Why would you…”

  “How would I know? I’m not a seismologist. No, I just gathered the raw data. And until I crunched it myself much, much later, I didn’t know Dr. Lam was right. By then you’d already built about half the island.”

  “I’m totally confused! You said you got the data and it showed the fault, and you later found out it also validated Lam’s theories about this being a very seismically sensitive location?”

  She was nodding.

  “Go on,” he said, his voice distinctly cold and precise, his attention riveted on her even as the island’s remaining ambulance screamed up and stopped yards away.

  She moved closer. “I had to find Dr. Lam to make sure of what I was seeing before I brought it to you. After all, I had no clue until after all your main construction was finished. He confirmed what I thought I saw—and more—and we were coming to warn you that there was this massive surficial fault splitting the island.”

  Mick Walker seemed staggered. “You mean… ten minutes before all this happened?” He gestured to the partially collapsed hotel.

  “Yes. Lam confirmed it, and we headed off to find you immediately. To warn you that the reason the convention hall collapsed was that it ended up being built right across the hidden break in the island. The fault line. But, there’s more.”

  “Go on.”

  “Doug Lam was going to tell you, because I can’t give you all the reasons, but he thinks your wave machine is feeding these earthquakes.”

  Once more his expression turned dark and angry. “It’s doing what?”

  She explained the theory as best she could, her confidence sinking again as he rolled his eyes. “Diane, Doug Lam would say anything to shut me down.”

  “But, I heard one of his other seismologists on the phone confirming what he called resonant echoes, especially after the power generation machine was turned on.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Mick—”

  “Look! I know this guy, Honey. Okay? He’s hated this project from the beginning. He says it’s because of the earthquake threat, but I know the guy’s a closet environmentalist who’s outraged because I pushed some smelly seabirds off their filthy perch and cleaned it up.”

  “He confirmed the fault line and he was right.”

  “Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean he’s right about a larger earthquake, let alone our causing it. Besides, I’ve heard that drivel before when he opposed us in the shoreline construction permit hearings.”

  “You did?”

  “Hell, yes! Lam was in there saying that if we used pile drivers or explosives we’d set off the subduction zone. No one agreed with him. It was junk science at best.”

  “So, you used pile drivers and dynamite, right?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “And now the subduction zone is coming apart, right?” She let the statement sit there like a poisonous snake, watching his mouth come open and close as that part of the argument sank in. “All he’s saying, Mick, is that if there’s any chance his theory is correct, maybe we should stop banging away on an already fragile situation. And I… I happen to agree. Why take the chance?”

  He stared at her before shaking his head, slowly at first, then vigorously side to side.

  “No! Absolutely not! Sorry, Diane. I’m not turning off my WaveRam. I spent tens of millions on it and it’s working perfectly, and thanks to someone running around blowing up our generators and main power line from the peninsula, we need the electricity. I won’t turn it off. There’s no way in hell it could cause a major earthquake. That’s like saying a gnat could cause a stampede of elephants.”

  “And what if you’re wrong?”

  Chapter 29

  CASCADIA ISLAND HELIPORT 11:00 P.M.

  The scene that spread out below the approaching Chinook was confusing. The pilot could see a mass of flashing red lights on one side of the complex and what appeared to be a darkened building, but not until he slowed overhead, trying to hold the big twin-rotor craft steady in the thirty-knot wind, could he see that part of it had collapsed.

  The heliport itself should have been lighted, but only the rotating beacon heralded its location. It took the powerful landing lights to find the concrete pad where a Dauphin was tied down.

  He set the big machine onto the concrete and unloaded the blades, keeping the cyclic into the wind as the crew chief scrambled out, looking in all directions for signs of a car or any
other trace of the governor’s party.

  “I see nothing out here!” he reported into his headset intercom.

  “Did they give us a phone number for their command post?” the pilot asked.

  A third crewman passed up a cell phone and a notepad with the area code and number, and the pilot shoved the earpiece of the phone under his helmet after dialing.

  “Is this Cascadia Control Center?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Guard Helicopter Bravo Sierra Two Six, here to pick up the governor’s party. Do you know where he is?”

  There was a hesitation on the other end.

  “We’ve had a bad earthquake and part of the hotel collapsed.”

  “Yeah, we saw it a minute ago while we were landing.”

  “We think Governor O’Brien and his wife and daughter were in the collapsed section. We can’t raise them, and we can’t raise their two state troopers.”

  “Damn! You need us to fly over and use our light or anything?”

  “Yes. Stand by while I check with our fire chief and see if I can patch you two together on some common frequency.”

  The man was off the line for less than thirty seconds.

  “Do you have VHF aviation frequencies?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s got a handheld. Come up on 121.5, and just hover as close as practical to the collapsed east wing and light up anything you can.”

  “We’re on the way,” the pilot said, punching the interphone to bring the crew chief aboard and brief his crew before pulling them into the air again.

  CASCADIA ISLAND HOTEL

  The dangling debris still threatening to fall into the crushed room was almost as much of a danger as the tangle of wreckage across the floor. Lindy, however, braved it as she moved to the edge of the ripped-open building, waving her arms and yelling until someone played a flashlight in her direction. Several men in yellow slickers moved immediately toward her, calling from several stories below to hang on and asking how many were there.

  “Five of us!” she bellowed, knowing one of her friends was beyond help. “Two need immediate medical help!”