Dead Reckoning (3 page)

“We will meet here again at midnight. I want a report on the status of preparations from each operational area. Let’s get to work.”

Myriad conversations broke out around the room. As I rose to leave, Commander Blaine put his hand on my shoulder.

“You have my direct number. Call me if anything changes. This really worries me. I keep thinking about Wake. We’re no more above sea level than they were.”

“I will be sure to let you know the minute I know anything, sir.”

“You just couldn’t hold this off until after the change of command in July, huh?” he asked, smiling. “I’d be hunting and fishing back in Missouri by then.”

7:15 PM – BASE HOUSING, KWAJALEIN

I decided to check on my quarters before heading back out to the weather station to pull what would likely be an all-nighter. The sun had set, and the showers and thunderstorms had moved on, but just as I rounded the bend onto the road toward home, the siren cut through the air like a knife—three short bursts followed by a long burst. The siren normally sounded the “all clear,” which consisted of one long blast, every day at six p.m., except Sundays. Other than the all clear signals, the siren had been silent for our entire stay on the island up to that point. Given the unusual signal, hundreds of people were likely scrambling to find the section of their telephone books that would remind them what it meant.

The thought reminded me of Kate. She had a photographic memory and certainly would have known what the siren meant without having to look it up. To most people, her memory was just a novelty—people loved testing her with trivial questions—but it also was a big part of her success as a lawyer. She could recite any case she had ever read, remember every legal technicality, and she never forgot a name, face, or a statement anybody made. In addition, she
was also a great debater—a nearly insurmountable combination in a courtroom. But just because you are good at something, doesn’t mean you enjoy it.

I met Kate on a dare in a bar two weeks before I graduated from college. My friends knew she was out of my league and bet me that I couldn’t get her number. With little money, no job, and no prospects, I marched over to her table in order to get it over with—so we could all have a good laugh about how pathetic I was and get back to drinking. My plan to win the bet was simple: I just told her about it. She told me that she admired honesty most, and that she’d play along and give me her number if I promised to actually call her. I realized at that moment that I had stumbled onto a great pickup strate
gy, but I never needed it again—I kept my end of the bargain by calling her, and we’ve been together ever since. And I won the bet.

We dated for two years as I worked as a weekend meteorologist on a small local television station. On a whim, I applied for a job at RTS and got it. It was twice the money I was making on TV, and it was a chance to live in paradise. On another whim I proposed to Kate and asked her to come with me. Had she said no to either question, I would have refused the job offer—I already knew what I had in
her.

I nearly fell over when she said yes to both questions.

I may be the only man in the history of the world who followed up an accepted marriage proposal from the woman of his dreams with the question: why? She made plenty of money, had lots of friends, was destined to be a superstar in her law firm, and I had never heard her utter a single complaint about her job. In retrospect, it was selfish of me to ask her to leave all that.

But she answered me with only four words: “I hate my job.” She retired from law at the ripe old age of twenty-seven and has been happily married to me and raising our children ever since.

I walked in the door and the first thing I did was call Kate. It went to voicemail, but it was after midnight on the west coast, so her not answering didn’t worry me. I didn’t leave a message; she’d see that I called and call me back in the morning.

As I wandered around our quarters, I marveled at the immaculate condition in which Kate kept it. I realized there was little I could do to protect anything. Either the storm was going to destroy our quarters, or it wasn’t. I raised some of the more expensive electronics a little f
arther off the floor and then turned and walked out.

12:00 AM, MONDAY, MAY 28
TH
– EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER (EOC), KWAJALEIN, MIDNIGHT BRIEFING

“Tropical Storm Ele has picked up speed and is now approximately 250 miles east-southeast of Kwaj,” I began my part of the briefing.

“At this rate, I believe typhoon conditions are imminent at Kwajalein Atoll, starting in approximately eighteen hours. While Ele is strengthening faster than expected, I am watching an upper level trough coming down from the northwest which will increase shear and should help to limit the growth of the storm, if it gets here in time. Onset of 35 knot winds now looks to be within 12 hours.”

All departments provided their status in turn, and preparations were moving along as expected. My mind, however, was focused on the doubt that I always lived with as a meteorologist. We got kicked around a lot, but most people understand how hard it is to predict the weather. The worst case scenario was that I was wrong, and Ele would continue her rapid intensification and explode into a killer that not only destroyed our paradise, but killed many people I knew. After all, the average elevation of our island was only eight feet, and there were no good places to hide.

I looked around the table and thought about the people sitting there. Some were my friends, but they all depended on my forecast that day, whether they
knew it or not. One woman tapped a pencil on her notepad as if annoyed by the whole thing. Another guy appeared to be preoccupied with something in his coffee cup. Most listened intently but without a sense of urgency. I wondered whether people appreciated the danger.

I had considered every piece of available data and provided the best forecast I could. And I tried to instill in people a sense of the worst case scenario. But there is always a fine line between covering your ass and crying wolf too often. I had been wrong before, and I could
be wrong now.

Sometimes I hated my profession because uncertainty was my constant companion. I doubted engineers worried much about whether the equations they used to build bridges were correct. X amount of concrete and Y amount of rebar will support Z amount of traffic, and everyone lives happily ever after. I never enjoyed such certitude in my job. The problem with my job was chaos theory.
The saying goes that a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and sets off a chain of unpredictable, chaotic events that leads to a typhoon in China two weeks later. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it illustrates a point: the weather is subject to so many interactions that range from chemical reactions on the atomic level (that cannot be adequately measured over the globe, much less modeled) to the physical forces of fluid dynamics acting over hundreds or thousands of miles, that a meteorological forecast is most accurately defined as little more than an educated guess. While forecasting continually improves through better methods of estimating that which we cannot explicitly model (we call this parameterization), given the unimaginable complexity of the system, we can still state virtually nothing with certainty. You might say meteorologists suffer from occupational confidence envy!

I noticed some movement on the far side of the room. It looked like a cockroach crawling backward up the wall. Curious, I squinted my eyes to better focus on the object. Ants were carrying a dead cockroach up a wall toward a hole at the top. I wondered if they sensed the impending weather better than I did.

The cockroach was many times bigger than all the ants combined, so the fact that they could transport it up a wall was remarkable enough, but their organization was what truly impressed me.

Most of the ants were common laborers, but a couple of leaders scurried about communicating with the heavy lifters. When they got to the top, they spent a few minutes trying to get the bug turned into the hole. The leaders frantically circled the work party, shooting in and out of the hole and planning out each move, and communicated the plan to the workers. What they could not see was that the roach was too big to be turned into the hole. It had to go in straight, which would have required it to float in midair, a feat that even they could not engineer.

I was so fascinated by the spectacle that I didn’t hear another word of the briefing.  When the meeting ended, I stood and walked over to the wall. How had they carried the roach up the wall? It seemed to me like the equivalent of a football team carrying a school bus up the side of the Empire State Building.

Guilt overcame me and I pushed the roach into the hole myself. The ants scurried about frantically and then stopped in unison—as if to pay tribute to the invisible, incomprehensible, and apparently benevolent force
—and then carried on through the hole. I imagined the day that God reached out and helped them bring home the grand feast as going down in ant lore, the story retold many generations later around little ant campfires.

7:00 AM, KWAJALEIN

After years on the island, I had developed a number of ways to gauge the wind without instruments: the sound it made in the palm trees, the amount of work required to ride my bike into the office, the violence with which the flags over the memorials flapped as I passed. All my senses told me the wind had increased overnight, but when I rounded the turn at the southeast end of the island and found the wind sock standing erect, I knew; it took twenty-five knots of wind to fully inflate it. The uncharacteristically dark sky to the east threatened rain, and with the rising sun obscured behind a gray overcast, the normally turquoise ocean churned black.

Before jumping into the frying pan that would almost certainly cook me until the conclusion of this disaster, I decided to stop and clear my mind at my favorite place on the island: a little turnout nea
r the edge of the golf course at the east end of the runway.

The crumbling, overgrown old landscape reminded me of an ancient ruin. The entrance to the turnout was overgrown with
plumeria, pandanus, and breadfruit trees, which during the rainy season, flooded the area with a sweet fragrance. A rock wall gently curved from the entrance toward the back with dense plumeria completing the enclosure on the opposite side. Other than some scattered trash and a fire pit near the rock wall, there was hardly any indication that anyone ever visited the place.

Towering
coconut palms normally cast shadows that seemed to converge somehow at the center of the expanse like an ancient time dial. The rest of the area, including the rock wall where I liked to sit, was well shaded from the relentless tropical sun that normally baked the island. Given my Scandinavian heritage and low tolerance for the heat and humidity, shade was a luxury I did not take for granted. But this morning was comfortably cool and cloudy.

The Pacific Ocean rumbled on the reef just behind the rock wall. Seas were
a little higher than normal, five to seven feet or so. Even small waves like that packed a lot of energy, and they pounded the reef relentlessly, as they had done for millennia, and sent perceptible vibrations through the ground.

As I climbed awkwardly to the top of the wall, a palm frond dislodged from a tree and crashed to the pavement behind me giving me a start. The wind had picked up. From atop the rock wall I could feel the vastness of the ocean. On Kwaj in general, and in that spot in particular, one’s own insignificance was
palpable. I am but a tiny, insignificant organism on an immense, water-covered world.

As I had on so many other mornings, I sat and stared out over the ocean, my mind adrift. In summers past, I sa
t in that exact spot and took comfort in the fact that this very body of water extended uninterrupted to where Kate and the kids were on Whidbey Island, WA, north of Seattle. I took comfort in that fact again that morning.

I was surprised
Kate hadn’t returned my call. She liked to talk and called me nearly every day whether she had anything to say or not. I had watched about ten minutes of news before I left. Deaths from The Red Plague continued to rise at an alarming rate, according to the news anyway. I continued to think it was all just hyperbole.

Charlie had not wanted to leave on vacation at all, which was weird; normally he was bouncing off the walls weeks before going to Grandpa’s house. But he told me about a nightmare he had the night before they left. He couldn’t remember the specifics—people rarely
can—but it scared him stiff. And then I remembered the nightmare I had before the last time I spoke to Kate.

I wondered if our nightmares had been prescient. Of course, we
sometimes have dreams that are bizarre and not necessarily reflective of anything that has ever happened or ever will. But I rarely ignore dreams, since I believe that they are often instances where we tap into what I call “the stream,” or the unconscious, sub-atomic current of intelligence that I believe is present everywhere and connects all things. The stream, I believe, is what nudges a person into consciousness just before she steps in front of a bus, cautions one not to accept a ride from
that guy
, and tells you that she is the one.

I had awakened from many dreams where I felt as if I had actually interacted with other people. I came to believe that sometimes during dreams (whether we are asleep or not) we literally cross streams with other real people having
similar dreams at the same moment. We interact on a subconscious level that is as real as if we’d bumped shoulders on the street. I believe this to be true whether it is simply thinking of a person you know just before they call, or a dreamed interaction with a complete stranger.