Wave (20 page)

BethAnn was certain she would not have heard about the wave; the woman did not own a television set. (For the life of her, BethAnn simply could not understand this—she had no problem watching TV all day long now. It would be nearly impossible not to when you were old and infirm and there was very little else you could do.) When she walked to her car on workdays, she would see Mrs. Foster’s smiling face by the window near her door. She’d been in Mrs. Foster’s trailer just once and remembered there was an easy chair over there. Alongside it was one of those lamp/magazine rack combos, and it was stuffed to the gills. She didn’t notice what magazines they were, but she made an educated guess that they were typical “old-woman stuff”—
Reader’s Digest
and all that AARP crap. Whatever the case, she had not seen a TV set anywhere.

So now, BethAnn suddenly found herself in conflict. First of all, she knew—knew—what the correct moral choice was. She knew damn well what she should do—she should make the effort. Regardless of what comes from it, she’d have done the Right Thing.

But there were problems with this, and they zoomed through her frantic mind in a blur. For one, their trailers were deep in the park—almost in the farthest corner, in fact. Furthermore, getting Mrs. Foster into the car might not be so easy. She probably had dozens of sentimental items she’d want to drag along. It would be bad enough losing time having to explain the situation to her—and there was no guarantee she’d even believe it—and then to have to lug boxes of carnival glass and tarnished silver jewelry, or whatever…. There was also the possibility she wouldn’t even want to go—she might adopt that dramatic “I’m too old, it’s time for me to die anyhow” attitude. Was risking your life just to hear that crap really worth it?

Something else occurred to her—she wasn’t the only goddamn person who lived over here. There were dozens of others. Surely someone else would check on her….

Of course someone will, she told herself. She’ll be fine.

The final factor was this—she’d heard that the police were making a sweep of the area for anyone who hadn’t gotten the word.
That’s it
, BethAnn’s mind-voice said sharply.
One of LBI’s finest will throw her in the back seat whether she wants to go or not.

And the best part of all is that nobody will ever know you had any of these thoughts in the first place.

A chill came over her like a winter breeze, and she got the car moving again. She felt another layer of self-hate settle over the existing quantity like a fresh bedsheet settles over a mattress. Then she gathered all the evidence of this peculiar self-conversation and buried it four thousand leagues down in her mind, in a holding area that was growing ever closer to full capacity.

Sarah Collins and Dave Dolan had managed to record every notable reading from every instrument even though the damn phone had been ringing almost nonstop for the last hour.

One of the callers had been the public relations director from Rutgers, who instructed them not to speak to members of the media. Collins couldn’t imagine that they’d even know where to call but, sure enough, not more than ten minutes later someone from NBC was on the line asking for an update. She told the reporter he had the wrong number because she couldn’t think of anything better to say. She was amazed he had managed to zero in on her so quickly.

As she set the phone back into its cradle, she pondered the career possibilities this experience might bring. She certainly would become something of a minor celebrity in the oceanographic community, as the person who spotted and then charted the first North Atlantic tsunami in decades. Would it help her take the next step, whatever that was? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. It might be considered little more than a novelty. Perhaps she could write a book about it.

She got back into her chair. Dolan lingered nearby with his clipboard as Collins trained her eyes on the main monitor. She sipped a Diet Coke and waited. When the numbers hiccupped again, she almost choked.

“Christ!”

Dolan turned and saw the numbers briefly before they switched back to a more normal reading.

“That wasn’t what I thought it was,” he said dully.

“Let me make sure,” Collins said, leaning forward and running a quick diagnostic. As she feared, the instruments were fine—the tide gauge really had picked up an open-sea rise of almost six feet.

And that was just the first wave in the group.

“My God,” she said. “This thing’s a monster. Oh…my…God!”

“Holy shit,” was all Dolan could add.

“I’ve got to call Trenton,” she said, getting back up. There was the slightest quaver in her voice. “This is unbelievable.”

The
president of the United States sat with his National Security Advisor, Kathryn Moore, and followed the story on FOX News. The vice president had been with them briefly, then left for a meeting at the Pentagon. The secretary of state was currently in New York, at the UN.

On the left half of the TV screen, field reporter Rob Little, on only his fourth assignment for the network, stood on the shoulder of Route 72, on the eastbound side. Behind him were three long lines of traffic, heading out. They were moving, but not at any great speed. Red and blue police lights swirled at various points in the distance. On the other half of the screen, anchor Steve Shephard sat behind the news desk in the FOX offices in New York, dealing questions and nodding at the answers. And in the lower left corner, perhaps in bad taste but there nevertheless, was a digital clock with “Time Until Tsunami Strikes” printed underneath it. Minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second were represented, the latter a decision by the producer to heighten the tension. The two digits were moving so swiftly they were indistinguishable, the last one little more than a blur.

“I would have expected FOX to show more class,” the president said, nodding toward it.

“They all have one now,” Moore said. The president shook his head.

“With less than an hour to go,” Shephard was saying, “do the authorities in the area now believe they’ll be able to get everyone off the island?”

“They aren’t saying, Steve,” Little replied. “We’ve learned that Long Beach Island, or ‘LBI,’ as the locals call it, is home to approximately eleven thousand people. One of our math wizards worked up some numbers for us—” he consulted a handful of papers that had previously been out of view, “and we determined that roughly fifty people would have to pass this spot where I’m standing every minute in order for six thousand to go by and still maintain a reasonable safety margin. In the half hour since we got here, with the crew helping to count, we have yet to see more than forty in any given minute.”

The president shook his head again. “My God. Are the choppers and boats on their way?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“How many?”

Moore consulted her own paperwork. “There are sixty-four helicopters and twenty-seven speedboats within range that can reach the island before the deadline. Coast Guard, National Guard, Army, Navy…everything.”

“What about private craft? Have they been deputized?”

“Yes. We don’t have exact numbers on those, though. It’s a catch-as-catch-can situation. We simply don’t know who has what, or where the owners are.”

“And no chance of landing a big plane on the island’s main road? We could get a hundred or so people out in one go.”

“No, sir. There would barely be enough room to land, let alone take off again. And that would presume the roads were clear, which they won’t be.” She paused, frowned, then added the caveat that couldn’t be avoided. “Even at the end.”

The leader of the free world leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his hands together as if in prayer. He raised them until the tips of his fingers were touching his lips.

“My God, Kathryn, there must be something more we can do.”

Moore wanted to wave a magic wand and come up with the perfect answer. But she didn’t have a magic wand, and, as with so many other problems of this magnitude, there was no perfect answer.

Elsewhere around the nation, interest in the crisis was continuing to grow. In Manhattan, a bar called Lenny’s put a handwritten sign in the window notifying passersby that they could come in and try a new drink called the “Long Beach Wave Rider” for only one dollar while following the story’s latest developments on five screens, each featuring a different news channel.

In Grand Bank, Newfoundland, where the last tidal wave had struck the Eastern Seaboard in 1929, the Methodist Church held an impromptu prayer service. Forty-three people attended, including two survivors of the ’29 strike. The minister based his sermon on Exodus 14:21–22, where Moses and his followers escaped Egypt by parting the Red Sea.

Back at the Rutgers Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, the two scientists who first detected the tsunami had began loading their personal items into their respective vehicles. Sarah Collins, who drove an old Chevy pickup, also loaded as much of the Rutgers equipment as possible. She knew the big wheels over there would appreciate it, and brownie points were brownie points, after all. Dave Dolan, her assistant, continued to monitor the wave between trips to his car, scribbling as many notes as his aching hand would permit, hoping to record as much data on this once-in-a-lifetime event as possible.

Regina Thomas, New Jersey’s Secretary of the Department of State, had called Tuckerton twice for updates and would certainly call again. Like her boss, she was fishing around for something positive, something encouraging. Perhaps the tsunami would somehow die down, lose steam—at least one expert had scoffed at the notion of a tidal wave reaching the Jersey shore given the relatively shallow depth of the water over the continental shelf. Collins said that was not a theory she could support given the readings. The secretary asked if it might “change course.” Collins patiently explained that a tsunami wasn’t like a hurricane, one force traveling in one direction. In simplest terms, it was a series of concentric, expanding circles, like those that radiate outward after you throw a rock into a pond. As far as their instruments could tell, several waves were on course and on schedule.

Thomas also asked if radiation from the dirty bomb posed a threat to the health of coastal residents, or the local fishing industry. Collins said she doubted it, as it would be so widely dispersed, but hurried to add that this wasn’t her area of expertise. She urged the secretary to pursue the issue with the EPA.

On LBI, at the Undertoe Service Center in Beach Haven, twenty-three cars formed a line down the shoulder of Long Beach Boulevard. The drivers honked incessantly, shouting that no more than a buck or two for gas was necessary. But there was always some idiot who wanted just a bit more or didn’t have cash and had to pay by credit card. At one point a guy in a light blue minivan asked for a full tank, and when the attendant—a tall, sleepy-looking Middle Eastern kid—refused, a heated argument ensued. That prompted another man to get out of his car and tell the van driver the kid was right. That descended into a fistfight, the van driver’s horrified wife and kids watching through the windows as their father rolled around on the gum-spotted cement with some bulky stranger. A cop who had been directing traffic nearby came over and issued a general order on the spot (which he was not technically allowed to do, but he doubted anyone would bother to stop by town hall and check the books at the moment)—each vehicle would be allowed three dollars’ worth of gas. No one had to pay, but the attendants would keep a running tab and the station would be later reimbursed by the town. The idea was received so well that the officer reported it to his chief, and within minutes it became an islandwide decree. He returned to his post half proud of himself and half begging God that three bucks would be enough and that no one would run dry halfway over the bridge.

In Loveladies a kid named Freddie Palmer was having a field day. Palmer was a high school dropout who had learned the art of theft before he reached his teens, and had a police record a mile long by the time he was twenty-one. He’d been in and out of a handful of juvenile detention centers and once spent two months in the county slammer for stealing a car, driving it into the middle of the Pine Barrens, putting a cinder block on the gas pedal, and ramming it into a tree. He walked around in filthy clothes with his hair unkempt and a crooked smile on his face, purposely making eye contact with people just to make them uncomfortable. The cops hated his guts and fantasized about the day when they could nail him doing something really hefty and put him away for good. Since so many homes had been abandoned in haste, many of them were unlocked, so he decided to try every door on every house. He had no intention of sticking around any longer than necessary; he just wanted to gather up a little booty before he made his escape. It would be all but impossible for anyone to prove his guilt, and opportunities like this didn’t come along that often.

Back in Brighton Beach, sixty-four-year-old Alma Wattley wanted desperately to jump into her ’98 Ford Crown Victoria and get the hell out of town, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Known affectionately among her neighbors as “The Cat Lady,” she had taken in hundreds of strays over the years, had cared for and loved each and every one of them. At this point in her life she had only twelve, and at this particular moment, just eleven of them had been located.