Ark Storm (50 page)

“Rebuild my house. Honor the spirit of the naturists who built the original. Maybe even thrill their ghosts.” She turned to Dan and winked.

E
PILOGUE

It rained for thirty days straight in California. Three million acres of the Central Valley were flooded. The total damage was estimated to be $870 billion. Four hundred billion dollars of flood-related damage was done to real estate, much of it uninsured. One quarter of all homes in California were flooded, many washed away. Over one million people were left temporarily homeless. Cars were washed out to sea. Boats sailed down streets. The wind itself did another five billion dollars’ worth of damage. Landslides added another billion dollars to California’s bill. Tens of thousands of animals drowned. Many of their carcasses, drifting on the swollen waters covering the flood plains of the Central Valley, entered the water supply, contaminating it. The share prices of the real estate casualty insurance companies fell by over fifty percent. The interruption to business in the worlds’ eighth largest economy was in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It would take the State of California years to recover.

And the human cost … Nearly four thousand people lost their lives. More would have been lost were it not for the efforts of the ARk Storm team and the warnings they had received from Gwen Boudain and Dan Jacobsen.

In the wake of the ARk Storm, as the flood waters began very slowly to recede, rumors abounded. There were reports of F-22s in the air, of UAVs being shot from the sky. The Air Force made no comment, taking the line that to do so would only add oxygen to the wild stories proliferating. Some of those stories said that the ARk Storm had been created deliberately. The weather service did not dignify that one with a comment.

*   *   *

Dan Jacobsen never did write the promised article for his editor. Some stories never can be told.

INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY NOTE

The History

I have long been fascinated by the weather. Some years ago, I lived in Peru. Every so often I would escape the mayhem of Lima for Punta Sal, a little fishing village on the border with Ecuador. Hemingway used to fish there for marlin. Framed photographs of him grinning beside his huge catches adorn the walls of the ramshackle bars.

I went not to fish but to swim in the sea, bodysurfing the huge Pacific rollers. Normally you could only stay in for ten or fifteen minutes without a wetsuit because the Humboldt Current kept the waters cold, but one Christmas the waters were balmy! I stayed in for two hours, marveling at the difference, emerging nut brown and slaked in salt. El Niño had come, bringing with it warm waters. That’s where it is first felt, in the seas off that remote and underpopulated border. Typically, the Niño phenomenon is felt around Christmastime and hence acquired its name—El Niño—the Christ Child.

The fishermen’s children, playing in the unusually warm waters, knew El Niño had come. As did I. But none of the world’s media seemed to have picked up this event and did not do so for months.

It made me think: What if you had a weather-prediction system superior to the competition’s? You could make out like a bandit using weather derivatives.…

One gruesome note that bears witness to the devastation weather can bring and mankind’s brutal response: Two thousand years ago, the Moche civilization of Peru, master potters who lived along the northern coast of the Punta Sal area, sacrificed hundreds of their own people to assuage the weather gods during El Niño years. Massed skeletons were found at the bottom of cliffs in the surrounding areas. Archaeologists studied the depictions on the pottery and dated the skeletons and analyzed the soil and rock and pieced together the story of the Niño sacrifices. The warm waters that El Niño brings devastate the fish supplies and often produce heavy rains that wash away harvests. El Niño meant starvation for the coastal dwellers.

And human sacrifice.

Seeing the pottery of the Moche, swimming in their seas and walking their cliffs, brought home to me the power of the weather and its role in shaping human history. I’ve been fascinated by weather ever since … the roots of
Ark Storm
went down many years ago.

The Science

It’s a leap from prediction to manipulation of the weather. We’re familiar with cloud seeding, but the ionization technology in this book is a much more powerful tool/weapon than seeding. Making it rain, breaking all records, in the deserts of Arabia has a doomsday biblical slant to it. The science/technology is already here—just google rainstorms in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, in July and August 2010 (i.e., when rain is nigh on impossible) to see its power. And this technology has moved on some since then.

ARk Storm 1000 is a real and much-feared scenario. Personnel from multiple agencies in diverse locations would play key and active roles in the forecasting and emergency management of the scenario as it hits California, and for simplicity’s sake I have gathered the key players together and given them a fictional HQ at Stanford University. Otherwise, the facts, subject to the limits of my brainpower and comprehension, are as I state them.

—L. D., Suffolk, 2013

P
ROLOGUE

2:58 P.M. LATE OCTOBER. THE LAST DAY OF RAMADAN.

I know it’s all going horribly wrong when I see two gunboats approaching at speed. They are bristling with men wielding Kalashnikovs.

Before they’ve even slowed to a stop in a giant wash of salty waters, armed men leap onto our boat. They are shouting and screaming and gesticulating with their weapons. Anything could happen. By design or accident. They are young, they are frightened and they are excited. They are out of control. I can smell their sweat.

Multiple thoughts race through my head:
This cannot be happening
 …
they haven’t put out fenders and the hulls of our boats are grinding together
 …
they are stomping all over my lovely deck in their heavy boots … I really, really hope they have got their safeties on
. There is an air of malevolent unpredictability. This could go wrong very fast.

I glance at Rupert, my husband, and at Brad, our Captain. Rupert looks stunned. Brad looks scared. By mutual accord we all go still and quiet. I try to veil my fear. This is an animal situation. Showing terror or panic or provoking them in any way could push one of these volatile young men over the edge.

I covered up as soon as I saw the boats approaching, but I’m still only wearing a bikini covered with a sarong. These men are in control of our boat. We are at their mercy. We have been boarded, an act of piratical aggression from time immemorial. It rarely ends well.

We are two men and one woman far from home. No witnesses save the seagulls diving and wheeling above us, their afternoon slumber disturbed by the roar of the gunboats.

I know what language these men are screaming at me in. It is Farsi. They are from the Islamic Republic of Iran. The
Evil Empire,
according to popular demonology. We are British. We are their sworn enemies. We are their hostages.

1

Preparation

On a bright sunny day I was kidnapped at sea. You don’t expect bad things to happen on beautiful days, but they do. It’s a long story. It also happens to be true.

This all took place some time ago. Long enough for the anaesthetic of time and distance to allow me to write this story with a measure of equanimity. It’s fair to say I’ve actively avoided thinking about it over the years, but now it’s time to cast back my mind and summon the memories.…

*   *   *

Autumn is the perfect time of year in the Middle East. The summer ferocity of the desert sun is muted to a rich warmth. The days are golden, the nights like indigo velvet. It’s the time of year when all expats in Dubai thank their Gods that they are here and not back in rainy London, or urban New York or grey Frankfurt or damp Amsterdam. We feel smug, like we got the game of chance right, like our Gods are smiling on us. First mistake.

It’s Friday, the beginning of the Middle Eastern weekend. It’s the last day of Ramadan, the Holy Month where practising Muslims fast during daylight hours. They break their fast when dusk falls, as defined by the impossibility of divining the colour of a thread. They are tired from the late nights when they stay up eating, weary of rising early for a predawn snack, enervated after days without food and water. The atmosphere is always febrile at the end of Ramadan. The roads become dangerous places. The incidence of fatal car crashes rises alarmingly.

My husband and I are off on a journey but not by car. It’s 8:00
A.M.
and the sun is already well up and the warmth of the day is upon us. We are in the Dubai International Marine Club. We are standing on the deck of a brand-new thirty-eight-foot catamaran we have named Sinbad. We are thinking how lucky we are to own such a beautiful boat.

We are not sailors. We are fantasists, we are adventurers, we are adrenaline junkies (note to self: be careful what you wish for). We have very little sailing experience. But we have with us someone who does. We have a ship’s captain, an Australian whom I shall call Brad. Who we don’t have with us,
Thank God,
is our three children.

Hugh, aged seven; Tom. aged four; and Lara, aged one are all back in our home in Um Suqeim, a palm-treed oasis of villas and frangipani and carbon-guzzling lawns. They are being cared for by our Nanny, an Australian I shall call Harriet. We don’t want to take the children out sailing until we have tested the boat and gained more experience. Besides, this is going to be a two-day sail. Out to an island in the middle of the shipping lanes, mooring up overnight and back to Dubai the next day. When we do plan to take the children out we will go on very short voyages just for an hour or so. This is to be a grown-up adventure.

We are all organised. We have a massive lasagna defrosting in the fridge and a full bottle of Glenfiddich nestling in the icebox. We have multiple bottles of mineral water. I have told my good friend, Sarah Turner, a fellow British expat, that we are going sailing and that we will be back by 5:00
P.M.
on Saturday. Just as an insurance policy, I told her that if I do not ring her by 5:00
P.M.
then she is to push the emergency button.

2

Setting Sail

The sun is shining as we manoeuvre away from the dock, past the gleaming super yachts. It is a still, becalmed day. The flags in the harbour hang limply. There is not enough wind to hoist the sails. Motoring along is a bit disappointing but it is still a hell of an experience. The maiden voyage on our new boat.

We have two powerful engines and we cut along at about seven knots. We soon leave the futuristic skyline and the deserts of Dubai behind. We are now in a different world. The timeless passage of water that separates Dubai from Iran. A sea that was for many decades called
the Persian Gulf
but which is now known as the
Arabian Gulf
. Persian Gulf sounds so much more romantic to me. It conjures the wonders of antiquity, of a Thousand and One Nights, of Scheherazade weaving her tales before a beturbaned tyrant.

Sinbad dances over the dazzling wavelets. We lose sight of shore. It is a strangely liberating experience for the landlocked. I know nothing about sailing. At this stage there is nothing useful I can do. I am totally in the hands of our captain.

I have had a busy week with my three young children and my writing. I have recently started a new book, a whole new genre for me. Young adult fiction. I am writing a book called
Sea Djinn.
It is about three children’s enthralling and terrifying adventures on land and at sea. They do battle with an ancient Evil Empire. But today the threads of storytelling float away from my mind as I begin to relax.

My husband stands at the bow of the yacht gazing out to sea. A handsome male figurehead scanning for lost islands and hidden treasures. A Boy’s Own adventure. I am lying on the trapeze, a large square of rope netting suspended between the two forward floats of the catamaran. It is hot so I am wearing my bikini and my skin is soon tattooed with a latticework as if I’m waiting for a game of noughts and crosses to be played on my body.

I lie on my stomach gazing down at the brilliant clear blue seas sluicing by beneath me. I think how beautiful it all is.

Where are we going? Well to give you a bit of background, the Persian Gulf is a major shipping lane. Thirty five per cent of all seaborne traded oil flows through this waterway and out via the narrow Straits of Hormuz (where the shipping lane is just six miles wide). Mooring up overnight in this passage of water would be like pitching a tent in the middle of the motorway. So we have chosen an island. There aren’t many to choose from. There are the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. They are reasonably well known in the region as the subject of an ongoing punch-up between the United Arab Emirates and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Best avoided. But there’s another island marked on the map. Marked with the symbol recognised by yachtsman the world over: the international Mark of Safe Harbour. An island called Abu Musa. What none of us knows is that it is also subject to the same punch-up.