The Illuminati (7 page)
Delta Flight 44 was approaching Tokyo Airport when the first big shock wave hit. The flight controller, Mira Akai, seeing the scope she was watching go blank, had the presence of mind to key her mike and shout, “Delta 44, abort approach and turn to a heading of 213 immediately!”
John Grey, the captain of the 797 Boeing fan jet, immediately applied power to go around. It seemed like an eternity as the big engines spooled up to takeoff power. Out of his window, he saw the runway buckle and bulge toward his aircraft. It all seemed to move in slow motion as a mountain of asphalt rose to meet the floundering aircraft.
“Roger, retract the gear!” Captain Grey shouted to his copilot. The many hours in the simulator now paid off as the copilot reacted instantly to the captain's command and pushed the landing gear control all the way in. The plane rose in response to the reduced drag and began to climb slowly.
“Max power!” Captain Grey ordered. “Firewall it!”
Again the copilot responded as directed and shoved the engine controls full forward to the emergency position.
The big turbo fan engines providing power to the descending aircraft had now spiked to 70 percent of their power curve and the plane wobbled skyward.
“Now if she'll just hang together,”Grey shouted over the whine of the engines as he rolled the aircraft to the right in an effort to escape the rising mountain of runway.
The plane just cleared the edge of the runway when the ground erupted into a shower of dirt and debris. The mammoth jet plane vibrated as it was struck by the erupting ground, but it continued to rise above the turmoil.
“Thank God we weren't hit by the pavement,” the captain said as the perspiration dripped off his forehead. “It would have been like flying through shrapnel.”He eased back on the wheel as the plane continued to climb, now well above the chaos below.
“Man, that's as close as I ever want to see an earthquake,” his copilot said as he flexed his hands. He had been gripping the controls so tightly that he had a difficult time moving his fingers.
“Yeah,” agreed Gray, “but think about those poor devils down there.” He pointed out the window to the ground below. It looked as if a huge plow had cut its path right through the center of the world's busiest airport.
Flying west over the city of Tokyo, the passengers and crew of Delta Flight 44 were witnesses to one of nature's most savage displays of raw power. Every structure in downtown Tokyo was swaying, and hundreds of older buildings had crumbled into piles of debris, surrounded by plumes of dust that obscured the skyline in some areas. Bridges connecting Tokyo with its lifeline of highways had collapsed, throwing hundreds of vehicles into the sea. The tunnel connecting the main island to the outer islands, built at a cost of nearly $12 billion, had broken open, creating a huge siphon as the sea water rushed in.
“Poor devils,”Captain Grey said again, despondently. “What an awful way to dieâtrapped in an undersea tunnel!”
The quake lasted seven minutes, reaching a peak at the epicenter of 8.6. In that seven minutes, three million people were killed in and around Tokyo, and several million more were injured. Virtually all power and communications were cut off from the world's financial center, causing chaos on the world's markets.
Aftershocks would continue to strike the island for the next five days, causing more damage and complicating the rescue process. But in that first seven minutes, nearly $4 trillion worth of property had been destroyed. Many of the world's largest and most sophisticated manufacturing plants dissolved into rubble.
Unknown at that time, an even greater disaster was developing under the Pacific Ocean. There had been earthquake-born waves before in history but never on the scale generated by the Tokyo quake. Historians reported a tsunami hitting the Philippine Islands in 1792 after the eruption of an underwater volcano in the Pacific Basin, north of the Philippine Trench. The wave was estimated to be three hundred feet high in the shallows of the China Sea and traveled at approximately two to three hundred miles an hour. Several ships at sea were lost and never heard from again, obviously victims of the huge wave. Only the sparse population in the Philippine Islands kept the death toll down to twenty thousand.
Two characteristics of the quake in Japan now combined to create disaster on the far side of the Pacific. First, the plate shift was so massive and violent that the underwater land mass displacement was estimated at six trillion cubic yards, or approximately equal to the size of the state of Georgia. That much mass shifting position pushed an incalculable amount of water ahead of it. Second, the land mass moved in exactly the plane Jeff's program predicted: an easterly direction from the Japanese islands, toward the western United States.
As the volume of water pushed its way beneath the ocean only a slight swell appeared on the surface, but beneath the surface a rip tide some two thousand feet deep and four hundred miles wide was sweeping across the Pacific at a speed of several hundred miles an hour. Even though media services picked up the accounts of the earthquake in Tokyo from airborne observers, such as Flight 44, no hint of the impending disaster approaching the U.S. mainland was reported. An Enterprise-class nuclear submarine traveling four hundred feet below the surface on maneuvers reported the underwater shock wave, but the transmission lasted only twelve seconds before the sub broke into pieces. Underwater sonar detectors used to track Pacific traffic recorded the sounds of the crumpled hulk sinking to the ocean bottom. They also picked up the sounds of two other nearby subs splitting apart like model toys.
Once the underwater wave hit the shelf near the west coast of California, the water backed up and began to force its way to the surface. Billions of tons of water, propelled at more than four hundred miles an hour, became a full-fledged tsunami by the time the wave was three hundred miles from the coast.
In the weather radar tower at Point Magoo, California, Frances Akins was taking her hourly check of the Pacific weather conditions, prior to transmitting the marine report. The sky showed no appreciable accumulation of cumulonimbus, or thunder boomers, as Bill Frank, the local TV weather man, insisted on calling them.
I wonder why they always seem to pick the buffoon types to do the weather on TV
, Frances thought to herself as she checked weather scopes.
I'm sure he flunked the third grade twice
. Then, as she viewed the radar sweep one more time, something began to appear on her scope.
“What the . . . ?” she exclaimed as the image on the screen began to develop into what looked like a mountain to the west.
“What's the trouble, Frances?” Andy Maury, the station supervisor, asked. Andy had taken over operation of the Magoo weather station after the Navy decided to shut the facility down as part of an economy move during the Kilborne administration. He had thirty years of forecasting experience, including his twenty-three-year stint with the navy, mostly aboard the big carriers. Not only was he the director, but he was also part owner of the now-private forecasting station, which sold information to the local television stations as well as various marine groups.
“You'd better look at this, Andy,” Frances said as she thumped the screen in a characteristic reaction left over from the days of CRT monitors. With LCD displays, thumping did little but serve to relieve frustrations. Refraining from a second thump, Frances said, “I think the Doppler must be conking out. It shows the ocean is growing a mountain.” Even as she spoke the image grew larger; it looked like Mount Rushmore had been transplanted to the Pacific and was headed toward the California coast.
“Well, I'll be . . .” Andy Maury said. “What do we have here?” As he spoke his mind signaled an alarm. He had seen a similar image somewhere in his past. “Have you recalibrated the scope image lately?” he asked, knowing that Frances would have done so earlier.
“Of course!” she answered indignantly. “I do it before every scan.”
“I knew you had, Frances, but I still had to ask,” Andy said. He knew she was a competent meteorologist and was more than slightly sensitive about being the only woman in a crew of ten men.
“I know, Andy,” she said in a more contrite tone. “But everything was fine when I started the noon sweep.”
In addition to the normal array of meteorological radar gear, the Magoo station had the newest laser equipment, dubbed the Weather Wizard. Although still relatively new equipment, a trained operator, which Frances was, could track a Pacific storm to within a few feet as it approached the mainland. It was this equipment to which they now turned.
“Crank up the laser and point it at the mountain,”Maury suggested. “It's probably just a false echo, but I'd like to be sure.”
Inside, the station director wasn't nearly as calm as he appeared outside.
I know I've seen this before
, he thought as his mind raced, seeking the answer.
Come on, bring it up
, he chastened his struggling memory.
I know this pattern from somewhere
. . . Secretly he was praying it was just a simple equipment failure, but deep inside he felt uneasy.
Frances quickly cycled the laser “Weather Wizard” through its self-tests. The system was designed to verify squalls and other weather conditions containing solid or liquid particles, such as rain and hail. Its use in tracking rain storms, thunder clouds, tornadoes, and the like was unparalleled in meteorology.
“It's calibrated and ready to go,” Frances announced as she flipped the scan indicator to long range.
Suddenly the display screen was filled with the same image that was showing on the Doppler. The automatic alarm on the laser system screeched out its warbling sound, indicating a major obstruction in a scanning field that should have been clear.
“It's a tsunami!” Maury shouted as his mind clicked with the image that was now being displayed on both screens. “I saw one like this in the navy when an earthquake struck mainland China. Look at the size of that thing! It must be nearly three hundred feet high.”
“A tsunami!” Frances repeated as she tried to decipher what that meant. “How could a tsunami just appear from nowhere?”
“It's from the earthquake in Japan,”Maury shouted as he reached for the phone. “I'll call Los Angeles International and see what they have.” Even as he spoke, he punched the auto-dialer to ring the head of the National Weather Service station at LAX.
The calm greeting from the L.A. tower told Maury they were oblivious to the potential disaster.
“L.A.Weather. Robert Atkins here.”
“Bob, this is Andy at Point Magoo. Do you guys have anything on your long-range radar at about 210?”
“Yeah we do, Andy. But we thought we were having an echo blip on the system so we dropped back to the seventy-five mile range. Why do you ask?”
“Because what you saw is not an echo!” Maury screamed into the phone. “It's a tsunami heading toward the mainland.”
“A tsunami? That's impossible,” Bob replied. “This thing just popped up on our screen a few minutes ago. It's got to be an echo.”
“I'm telling you it's for real, Bob. It's from that quake in Japan, I think. Probably surged underwater until it hit the shallows. That thing is going to hit the area in less than an hour. You need to get all the planes you can in the air!”