The Illuminati (8 page)

Atkins sat at his desk without responding for several seconds. Was Maury kidding him? He had never heard him say or do anything that was nonprofessional. But a tsunami? “Look, Andy, I appreciate the call, but you must be wrong. How could a tsunami make it across the Pacific without us knowing it? Besides, we would have been warned well in advance.”

“Bob, you've got to believe me! It's a tsunami! The biggest I've ever heard of, and it's going to hit your area in forty-seven minutes at its present speed. The kid from Cal Tech was right. The earthquakes, the tsunami . . . we're staring at the result.”

“That was just some wild theory, Andy. Our guys in Washington said to forget it. We're looking at some sort of computer snafu.”

“Look . . . cycle your radar over to long range and start tracking this thing and you'll believe it! You need to get every plane in the air and then try to get your people out of there!”

“Yeah, well, thanks a lot for the tip, Andy. I'll see what I can do,” Atkins said as he leaned back in his chair.
I can just see the inquisition in Washington if I empty L.A. International on a tip that a tidal wave might hit
, he thought as he sipped his coffee.
No way I'm going to do that with three years left to retirement
. His thoughts drifted to the home he and his wife, Sara, had just bought down in San Diego.
Not on the beach, he reflected, but close enough to walk on it anytime we want to
.

“Wait, Bob!”Maury shouted as the phone went dead. He knew his counterpart at the airport weather station was not going to listen. He hung up the phone and tried to decide what to do.

The next twenty minutes were pure frustration as Andy Maury attempted to call everyone he knew at the Weather Bureau in Washington. All he got was a lot of “I'll tell him you called when he returns, Mr. Maury.”No amount of pleading or cursing could get even one of the secretaries to alter her normal routine. His shouting about a tsunami might just as well have been a casual warning about an impending rain storm. Nothing he said had impressed them.
Naturally
, he thought.
They live three thousand miles from the Pacific
.

Maury was not the only person trying to alert the nation. At the office of the president in Washington, D.C., the phone rang. Clarence Barrett, the president's appointment secretary, answered it: “President Kilborne's office.”

“Clarence, this is Andrew. I need to talk to him right now!” Secretary of Defense Andrew Singer, a no-nonsense ex-chairman of the joint chiefs, had been chosen by Kilborne to restore some discipline in the demoralized ranks of the military, which had been decimated by budget cuts. Recently he had been trying to ferret out what appeared to be a secret society among some of his most influential military leaders. General Gorman, chairman of the joint chiefs, had reported that several top ranking officers were engaged in secret meetings outside the normal service protocol. If he didn't know it was the top brass of the United States military, he might have thought it was the beginnings of a military coup, he had told the president earlier. But that was not the subject of this call. He had just gotten word that one of his boomers had gone down in the Pacific. And even more frightening was the report of missile subs lost by the Russians and Chinese, who had probably been shadowing his sub.

“What's it about, Andrew? He's in conference with some Senate group.”

“You need to get him out! One of our boomers is down and so are two other subs—one Russian and one Chinese.”

“I'll get him!” Barrett said immediately.
What now?
he puzzled. He trembled even as he considered it. World tensions were at an all-time high since the depression hit. He punched the interrupt code reserved for messages of the highest priority.

President Kilborne leaned over to his interoffice phone, glad to get a short respite from the verbal lashing he had been receiving from the Senate leaders because he had ignored Bob Lowe's earthquake warnings. It still hurt as he remembered how Lowe had shafted him. “Yes, Clarence, what is it?”

“Mr. President, Andrew Singer is on the hot line. I think you need to talk with him. It's urgent.”

The president pressed the mute switch as he turned back to the senators, “I'm sorry, gentlemen, you'll have to excuse me for a few minutes.” Even as he spoke, Barrett, who had opened the office door, was directing the irritated senators out of the Oval Office.

“I'll be back, Mr. President,” the senator from Ohio said very curtly. “You still have some explaining to do if you want my support.”

Kilborne sighed as he punched the talk button.
Maybe I don't want your support
, he thought.
Maybe I don't want this job anymore
.

“What's up, Andrew?” the president asked as he mentally braced himself for more bad news.
Maybe I won't have to worry about the next election
, he contemplated.
One more disaster like that press conference, and the Democrats will probably lynch me
.

“We've lost a missile sub in the Pacific, Mr. President. And the Russians and Chinese have lost the attack subs that were trailing her.”

Kilborne sat up straighter. “Did we have an exchange?”

“No, sir. None that we know of, and the monitors on the radiation satellites show no signs of nuclear detonation.”

“Thank God,” Kilborne said with obvious relief. “Then what happened?”

“We don't know, sir,” the ex-general, nearly twice the age of the president, replied. “As well as I can determine, we had a distress call from our boomer saying they were caught in a subsurface current of some kind. The next thing we heard was the sub breaking up. The Russians reported much the same thing. The Chinese aren't saying anything at present, as normal. They just lost one-third of their total sub force, so they'll be hot. We've already sent them assurances, through channels, that we didn't sink their sub.”

Thank God, it wasn't an exchange
, Kilborne thought as he tried to piece together what this might mean. Just then his secretary broke in over the intercom again.

“Mr. President, Dr. Patrick Holmes is on line two. He says it's most urgent. I told him you were talking with General Singer and he says it's related.”

Dr. Holmes, head of the U.S. Oceanographic Committee, which coordinated all the industrial nations to manage the oceans, was the most knowledgeable government official on international use of oceans. His office managed hundreds of surveillance satellites and underwater pollution detectors to see who was dumping their wastes in the oceans and harvesting more fish than allocated. The committee operated much like an ocean cartel, controlling the use of the common seas. He also had the best communications with the various scientific groups from each country.

“This is the president,” Kilborne said slowly and deliberately as he transferred over to line two of his private phone.

“Mr. President, I just received word from our monitoring station in the Eastern Pacific that a three-hundred-foot tsunami is headed toward the California coast. It will hit in less than thirty minutes.”

“What! Are you sure, Patrick?” the president shouted, in spite of himself.

“Very sure, Mr. President,” the young oceanographer said. “The wave traveled across the Pacific in the trenches until it hit the shallows. Now it's bunching up. The surface wave is traveling at over three hundred miles an hour.”

“Just what Wells' program predicted!” Kilborne shouted in anger. A chill ran down his neck when his mind moved from political strategy to the impending natural disaster. He leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “What do you suggest, Patrick?”

“Nothing. There's nothing we can do now.”

4

P
ANIC

“I want every radio and television station in Southern California to go to emergency broadcast,” President Kilborne instructed his civil defense director, Craig Newball, over the phone.

“Why,Mr. President?” the startled Newball questioned as his feet fell off the desktop and hit the floor.

“A tsunami will strike the California coast just above Los Angeles in less than twenty minutes,” Kilborne snapped impatiently. “Notify everyone who can do so to head inland. And Craig . . .”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the elder member of the civil defense team replied breathlessly.

“I want a full contingent of civil defense people mobilized in California immediately. Call Crow and have the National Guard brought out. If he gives you any static, tell him I'll nationalize them if I have to.”

They really did a job on Crow, too
, Kilborne thought.
Whoever they are
. . . .

For ten minutes some radio and television stations in Southern California blared out an emergency alarm, but nearly three-fourths of the stations wouldn't interrupt normal programming to carry the message. A few disc jockeys assumed it was some elaborate practical joke and simply ignored it, and many of the listeners thought it was just another test of the emergency broadcast system. It didn't really matter because the Californians who did believe the broadcasts were scarcely into their cars when the gigantic wave struck.

The unbelievable force of the wave as it hit the shore, bringing with it tons of debris from the sea, shook mountains as far inland as San Bernardino. The
Queen Mary
and
Queen Elizabeth II
, anchored at the Los Angeles harbor as floating casinos, were swept up in the wave and flung miles inland, along with thousands of other vessels. The sound of the wave was bone chilling. Everything in its path was swept before it. Buildings and houses alike collapsed under billions of tons of water crashing inland at nearly three hundred miles an hour.

The wave penetrated nearly three miles inland before the fury of the tide beat itself out on the hills and valleys surrounding the greater Los Angeles area. Farther to the south, in the less-populated communities along the coast, scarcely a person survived the roaring torrent of salt water. As the water rushed back to the ocean, it carried with it homes, cars, and people; few would ever be recovered from the depths of the Pacific.