Ark Storm (13 page)

“We’re testing it,” answered his guest with just a flicker of caution. Sheikh Ali, despite his approval, both explicit and implicit, always made him feel uncharacteristically hesitant, as if every question might be a trap.

“And?”

“We are perfecting it.”

“What you are trying to say is that it is not perfect yet. That you are not ready to push the button, as it were, yet.”

Hesitation. The trap. Truth the only way out. “Correct.”

“So what’s delaying you?”

A sudden and most unfortunate death, thought the man. He said, levelly: “I feel Zeus isn’t giving us all it could. It’s done well, but I think it could do so much more.”

“So rectify it.”

“I’m planning on that. I’m planning on drafting in our new recruit to assist.”

“Which new recruit?”

“A woman. A specialist in weather prediction. In storm prediction. She says that a Niño is coming, and with it might come a superstorm.”

Sheikh Ali’s eyes widened with interest. He leaned forward, popped a date into his mouth, chewed reflectively.

“An oracle.”

The man laughed. “You’re psychic! That’s the name of her model.”

Sheikh Ali waived off the compliment with a sweep of his arm. You didn’t need to be psychic when you had informants.

“Can we trust her?” he asked, the veneer of charm falling from his eyes, revealing a flash of what the other man knew to be there, just preferred not to see.

“Sure we can. She’s what it says on the label. Academic, loves surfing. Dead parents, killed in car crash in Peru. And it’s her subject. She’s a resource we’d be foolish not to use.”

“Fine. You trust her, so let’s use her. Let’s speed this thing up. I’m keen to get a return on my investment.”

The Sheikh waited until his guest had departed. He waited until he heard the roar of the helicopter blades, until the sound had dissipated over the limpid ocean. Then he moved from the stateroom into the privacy of the office that adjoined his bedroom. There, looking like the modern businessman he was, he made a call. Unlike many but not all modern businessmen, he used a cell phone with hardware and software encryption. He was sophisticated, he took no chances.

He used a Telsey encrypter, a Spanish system known to have no back door or remote access. The system used a rolling code algorithm, which made it very difficult to intercept. But not impossible. Certain top level decryptors used by various agencies in the US could on occasion break it, although breaking it once on a single conversation did not mean that they could break it again. Much depended on luck.

But the Sheikh believed it was secure. He did not tolerate mistakes. In himself. In others. The Telsey was his favored encrypter of the many he owned, protecting his conversation, he believed.

He dialed The Man’s encrypted phone, established the two-way encryption, then began to speak.

“The pretty meteorologist,” he murmured, “is about to be inducted into the inner sanctum. She may be trustworthy, she may not be. Power corrupts, but so do secrets. I want an insurance policy taken out on her, to ensure she knows when to stay silent, to ensure she plays by the rules. Find out who she cares about. Her parents are dead, but there must be someone she loves. Identify them in case we need to use them for purposes of encouragement.”

“Full Pattern of Life study?”

“You’re the security expert. Do what is necessary.”

The Man smiled his dazzling smile. He would enjoy this. “I’ll need four of your men; I’ll add in one or two women I use occasionally, for blending-in purposes. I’ll put together a full surveillance team, establish her exact routine, lifestyle, connections. I’ll run it for three weeks, give or take.”

“My men are yours. For as long as you need them. I have plenty well trained up onboard. We cannot afford any more mistakes. Another body might attract undue attention, might deflect us from the path.”

“Don’t worry. No one’s found the other body. We’re clean.”

No, thought Sheikh Ali, neither he nor the infidel circumstances forced him to use, would ever be clean. No amount of blood could ever wash away the old sins. Expiation was all he could hope for. A partial balancing of the scales.

29

EARLY TO MID FALL

In the Northern Hemisphere, the leaves had turned. They decorated the trees with their glorious array of red and russet and bronze and gold. From San Francisco to Hurricane Point and beyond, occasional mists drifted in on the morning air, hugging the contours of the parched land, which sucked up the moisture, dampening the golden soil to a dark terra-cotta. The air temperatures, usually at their warmest in September and October, were beginning to dip, but the sea temperatures lagged behind, holding onto the last heat of summer, only slowly, reluctantly giving it up.

The NOAA predicted it would be a bumper year for hurricanes. They advised residents of the US Hurricane Belt to lay in supplies: plywood to board over their windows, bottled water and canned goods, and to confer with vulnerable neighbors, ensuring they too had supplies.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the sea temperatures rose, slavishly following the air, absorbing the heat that pounded from the equatorial sun. The incipient Niño sucked in its fuel. The sea levels dropped in the west, rose in the east. Warm surface water surged eastward along the equator. The growing Niño prepared to go supercharged. The children on the Pacific coast of South America felt it first, as always, playing in the warming water, but it wouldn’t be long before the whole world would feel it too. Then it would bring not innocent pleasure, but devastation. High in the air, two and a half kilometers up, flowed the atmospheric rivers. The Pineapple Express, racing up from Hawaii, began to fatten as water evaporated from the warming ocean. Like a fire hose, the water raced north, toward California.

And the humans, even those living below the fire hoses, remained largely oblivious to the movements of the fates above them. They skirted round one another, some resisting falling in love, some hurtling into it, some just luxuriating in lust; they plotted fifty new ways to enrich themselves; they plotted wars; they plotted murder and the silencing of threats, and they plotted jihad and ancient revenge for the centuries-old sins of the Crusaders. They all played on, getting nearer every day to the intersection point, some aware, some unaware, none wholly conscious of what they would unleash, and where it would leave them.

30

THE LAB, MONDAY MORNING

Gwen flicked through the paper. She paused as she recognized the byline. Curious, she leaned back, sipped her coffee, and read.

THE SAN FRANCISCO REPORTER

A Different Kind of Shake Out?

BY DAN JACOBSEN

Would you rather die under tons of falling rubble or be washed to your death by a ten-foot wall of water? Not a question any one of us wishes to entertain, yet here in California you are about as likely to be hit by an ARk Storm as by the “shakeout quake.” Yet few of us have ever heard of an ARk Storm. It is the big quake that is the stuff of our nightmares, but now we have a new nightmare scenario lurking on the horizon.

What is an ARk Storm?

An ARk Storm is a kind of supercharged West Coast Winter Storm caused by Atmospheric Rivers dumping huge rainfall as they make landfall. Every winter season several ARk Storms make landfall and dump heavy rains.
The
ARk Storm 1000 is the big one that threatens to hit every one to two hundred years or so.

A team of 117 scientists, engineers, public policy and insurance experts under the umbrella of The Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project have worked for two years to create the hypothetical scenario of what such a storm could be, and what damage it would wreak across the State of California.

ARk Storms take their name from what’s known by researchers as “Atmospheric Rivers,” a term coined as a result of last-generation satellite imagery that shows these bands of moisture flowing several kilometers above the earth. ARs are giant ribbons of moist air, at least 2000 kilometers long and several hundred kilometers wide. They flow in the lower troposphere, normally about ten kilometers up, where winds with speeds in excess of 12.5 meters per second can carry as much water as the Amazon River.

Most people looking up on a clear day would never think that just a few miles above their heads a huge river of moisture hundreds of miles wide could be coursing through the atmosphere.

In an ARk Storm 1000 scenario, this river, described by the head of the ARk Storm Unit as “like Forty Mississippis,” races from the tropics toward the west coast of the US, then hits, and keeps on hitting. The Storm Door opens and fails to close. The rains start and a biblical scenario plays out.

The
ARk Storm 1000 would be predicted to come ashore at 125 mph in Los Angeles County. This is a storm so intense it has been described as “like Hurricane Katrina pushed through a keyhole.” It would cause widespread flooding in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Fifty levees could be breached. Some one and a half million residents in inland and delta regions would be forced to evacuate. The model estimates that up to one quarter of all homes in California would have flood damage to the tune of 400 billion dollars. Because the flood depths in some areas could realistically be of the order of ten to twenty feet, without effective evacuation of up to one and half million people there could be substantial loss of life. High winds would cause further damage of around five billion dollars. Huge waves would damage coastal property. Landslides would be extensive, causing around one billion dollars worth of damage. The overall cost, adding in economic disruption to the State of California, is estimated to be in the region of one trillion dollars. That is four times as much as the shakeout earthquake. And only around 12 percent of California property is insured.

Has such a storm happened before?

Major ARk Storms have hit California on a regular basis. The last huge one was in 1861–62 when it rained continuously for forty-five consecutive days. Witnesses describe a “flying river” washing away livestock and humans. That storm caused flooding of biblical proportions, turning the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys—a region around three and a half million acres, incidentally—into a lake. That storm bankrupted the state. And it gets worse.… The geological record shows six megastorms more severe than 1861–62 hit in California in the last 1,800 years. There is no reason to believe such events will not recur.

What caused the 1861–62 ARk Storm?

The atmospheric mechanisms behind the storms of 1861–62 are unknown; however, the storms were likely the result of an intense atmospheric river, or a series of atmospheric rivers, striking the U.S. West Coast. With the right preconditions, just one intense atmospheric river hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range east of Sacramento could bring devastation to California.

Can we predict an ARk Storm?

The Hazards team’s answer is: “
to some extent.”
Unlike for earthquakes, forecasters have the capability to partially predict key aspects of the geophysical phenomena that would create changes in the days before an ARk Storm struck. They concede though that “enhancing the accuracy, lead time, and the particular measures that these systems can estimate is a great challenge scientifically and practically.”

So what can we do to prepare?

The whole ARk Storm Project has been undertaken to enable the State of California to prepare an emergency response plan. We can only hope that it gives us notice.

When might it hit?

The most senior scientist for the Hazards Project notes the coincidence that California’s last big ARk Storm occurred in 1861–62, very close to the last big Southern San Andreas big earthquake in 1857. It appears that both events occur with a frequency of about two hundred years. Which begs the question: Which one will go next?

Gwen finished her coffee, folded her paper thoughtfully. Yeah, hell of a way to go, drowning in earth, or drowning in water. Involuntarily, she shuddered.

31

THE LEE OF THE SIERRA NEVADA, CALIFORNIA

Gwen brewed up a second cappuccino from the machine. She spun in her chair and gazed pensively at the clear blue sky. She wheeled round as approaching footsteps rapped out. Gabriel Messenger strode into her office with the Monday morning enthusiasm of the workaholic. Gwen took a bolstering slug of cappuccino.

“Dr. Messenger. Good weekend?”

“Won a tennis tournament at Pebble Beach, so yes, I did. Get your bag.”

“Why?”

“We’re going on a trip.”

“Where to? And, forgive me being repetitive, but why?”

Messenger handed her a sheet of paper.

“You want me to read the
weather
forecast?” asked Gwen.

Messenger nodded.

“Sun. Zero chance of rain. Light breeze. Are we going on a picnic?” Gwen asked as Peter Weiss joined them with a nod and a smile.

“You ask a lot of questions, Dr. Gwen.”

“I’m a querulous academic.”

*   *   *

A helicopter flew in. Gwen, Messenger, and Weiss scurried under the blades, hopped in. Gwen gazed out, curiosity bubbling. No one spoke, so she just sat back and enjoyed the ride.

Soon they were flying over the rolling brown and green hills of the Diablo Range. Weiss ignored the scenery. He spent the entire trip busily tapping away on his laptop. Gwen had never seen him this intense. She tried to angle a look at the screen to see what he was up to, but he seemed to be shielding his laptop so she saw nothing save a haze of light.

They flew over what Gwen reckoned was Fresno, then approached the Sierra Nevada. Gwen was surprised to see a large, dense gray, mid-level altocumulus hovering over the valley in the lee of the mountains. Where had that come from? she wondered, thinking of the zero chance of rain forecast.