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MONDAY. SEATTLE FEDERAL BUILDING. FEMA REGIONAL OFFICE:
“Listen up everybody,” Director Charles Simons hollers across the control room. “We’ve just received a report there has been a major seismic event on Vancouver Island. It hit Victoria the hardest, but the United States’ San Juan Islands also felt some seismic activity. Call your contacts and find out the extent of the damage so we can get the emergency response teams moving. Make it happen, people.”
Sharon Aniston, the USGS (United States Geological Survey) supervisor from the sixth floor steps out of the elevator and hurries across the room into Simon’s office. “It didn’t register as a major earthquake, Charlie.”
Simons stares up at her. “What do you mean?”
“We don’t know what it was. All we know is the ground suddenly rose up beneath Victoria. It was a small tremor that only affected that specific area.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Logically? Not a chance. We don’t have a clue how to explain what happened.”
“Do you think it’s a prelude to a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest?”
“I don’t want to speculate. We just don’t have enough information. I’ll tell you one thing, Charlie. If whatever caused that destruction in Victoria happens here, in Seattle, there won’t be anything left standing. There’s a helicopter on its way to pick me up on the roof. I’ll look at the damage and try to figure out where it started. I’ll call you when I have more information.”
Simons stands from behind his desk. “I’m going with you. I need to see the San Juan Islands to get a better idea what I’m dealing with.”
“It’s only a two-person helicopter, Charlie, but I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Simons sits back down. “Okay. Thanks, Sharon.”
***
Sharon leaves the elevator and climbs the stairs to the roof access door. When she looks at the digital thermostat mounted on the wall, the outside ambient temperature is close to eighty-nine-degrees Fahrenheit. It should be in the upper seventies, but global warming continues.
She steps out onto the roof, hurries across to the two-person Bell helicopter, and climbs in next to her pilot, Steve Bolton. A few moments later, they are flying north over the Puget Sound. The damage to the San Juan Islands appears to be minimal, so she asks Steve to drop lower for a closer view of the damage to Victoria.
She stares down through the smoke to see the devastation is far worse than she imagined. The beautiful castle built for a long ago Queen is now a pile of shattered marble, and large sections of the majestic hotels have collapsed into mounds of concrete and shattered glass. The mooring docks have been tossed around the harbor like rubber bands, and beautiful yachts lay smashed into tangled heaps of sunken wood, fiberglass, and sail masts. Dozens of emergency workers and dogs are searching through the rubble for survivors, and bodies are being stacked in long rows on what remains of the streets.
She can’t believe what she’s seeing. For registering as a minor tremor, the damage is horrific. What could have enough energy to do that much damage without registering as a major earthquake? And why did it only damage that specific section of the Pacific Northwest? None of it makes sense.
“I’ve seen enough, Steve. Take me back to the Federal Building.”
She leans back in her seat and stares out the front window as the helicopter turns south, back to Seattle. Steve sets the helicopter down on the roof of the Federal Building, and Sharon climbs out and hurries across to the single gray steel door to get out of the heat. She enters the building and goes down the stairs to the elevator. When the doors open, her geophysics expert, Patrick Chandler, is waiting inside.
She enters the elevator and looks at the thin stack of papers in his hand. “I hope you’ve figured out where this started, Patrick.”
Chandler shakes his head no. “We don’t have any idea, and the same thing just happened further south, hitting Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands. These are unlike any seismic disturbances we’ve dealt with before. What did it look like from the air?”
“I didn’t fly over those islands, but the damage in Victoria is extensive and very precise, as if planned to hit only that specific city. I need to find out if the CIA knows of any terrorist activity in the area.”
“You can’t be serious, Sharon. It was a seismic disturbance, not a bomb.”
Sharon sighs in exasperation and leans back against the wall. “You’re probably right. I’m just frustrated and searching for answers.”
The doors open and they step into the hallway of the USGS headquarters, and Chandler follows Sharon to the command center. It collects and analyzes all the seismic data for the western region of North America in this large room, and her team is trying to pinpoint the origin of the event using sophisticated software.
A young woman runs up and hands Sharon a sheet of paper and they stop walking while she reads the information. She gives it to Chandler. “This day just keeps getting worse by the hour. The tsunami warning detectors in the northern Bering Sea activated at the same time as the seismic event in Victoria.”
Sharon looks at the young woman. “We need to find out if there was any seismic activity in that area. Put it up on screen number three, please.”
Sharon turns and moves across the room to study the information displayed on the large video screens mounted on the walls.
Chandler stops while he reads the report, then catches up to her. “This is very bad, Sharon. If this is happening along the entire northwest coast, it means there is some major tectonic activity along the Pacific Rim. I’m just surprised we haven’t noticed an increase in volcanic activity.”
“Did you call Wesley Patterson about this? He must be monitoring the volcanos here in the Pacific Northwest.”
“Three times, but he didn’t answer.”
“After the Mount Saint Helens incident, can you blame him?”
Chandler looks down at the floor for a moment as he remembers the devastation caused by the eruption, then stares up at the monitor. “I guess not. Even so, he must have noticed what happened.”
They stop in front of a large display showing all the seismic detectors in Western North America. The only flashing red dot is the one in Victoria. The tsunami sensors in the Bering Sea show a ten-foot surge radiating south toward the Pacific Ocean, with nearly no surge past the Aleutian Islands.
“That’s a bit of luck,” states Chandler. “It seems the islands broke up the surge before it reached the Pacific.”
Sharon folds her arms across her chest and continues to stare at the screen. “I don’t think luck plays any part in all this. If it wasn’t an earthquake that created the surge, what did?”
Chandler stares at the screen. “None of this makes any sense.”
***
MOUNT BAKER, WASHINGTON STATE:
Wesley Patterson ignores the messages from the USGS, but his seismic detector on Mount Baker registers a significant disturbance deep beneath his sleeping volcano.
His personal seismic activity center is his workshop, near the Mount Baker National Forest and State Park, where he lives in his cabin and has studied the volcano for the past ten years. He knows most seismic activity on Baker is caused by a normal rise in elevation, but this activity is coming from several thousand-feet beneath the surface, and that can only occur if the sleeping giant is awakening because of new tectonic activity.
He studies the picture on a thirty-two inch flat screen television sitting on a beat up wooden desk. It displays the seismometer reading recorded during both seismic events. What’s puzzling is no seismic activity deep below the surface, so why is it affecting his mountain?
He rewinds the recording back to the time of the event in Victoria and moves the cursor to an area just past the end of the sensor needle. He clicks the mouse to zoom in on the black line, and when he sees the magnified view, he leans back in his chair and releases a long, slow sigh of astonishment. “What the hell is going on?”
***
BOZEMAN MONTANA:
Alex throws a yellow tennis ball for his dog to chase, grabs the ringing phone from his front pocket, and recognizes the caller ID from the USGS headquarters in Washington. He walks up onto the back porch and sits in one of the green plastic chairs. “This is Alex Cave.”
“Hello, Mister Cave. I’m Sharon Aniston, from the USGS in Seattle. Sorry to bother you, but we’ve had a major seismic event in this area. It did significant damage to Victoria earlier today and we’ve just had another event in the San Juan Islands. This may sound impossible, but they did not register as major earthquakes. None of our people know what caused them and we’re worried it could be a prelude to a major event in the Pacific Northwest.”
“I live in Montana, so I’m not sure what I can do to help.”
“We have a mutual friend in Yellowstone National Park. Jerry Mercer spoke highly of you. He said you were the one person he could count on when all other ideas fail. I was hoping you could help me with this problem.”
“Jerry is exaggerating, but I’ll make some calls and try to figure out what happened.”
“Thanks, Mister Cave.”
Alex turns off his phone, his dark brows bunching together in thought. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and there is very little seismic activity. Still, the amount of energy required to destroy an entire city could only be on a tectonic level. So, why didn’t it register as an earthquake?
He tries to remember the name of a man he met at a conference in Iceland three months ago. He lives in Washington State, and his particular field is volcanism, the study of volcanos. He is currently studying the volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest.