140

 

THE SUPER-YACHT, ZEPHYR, 3:15 P.M.

Unseen from the ground, hundreds of meters up in the sky, the army of drones flew on. “They followed their programmed flight paths, circles at first and then figures of eight, starting each time at a different point of the initial circle so that they could cover all the area inside it, sucking out more rain from the clouds, harvesting the storm. Many had been smashed from the air, but many flew on. They had fuel for another ten hours. They were grouped in teams of five, and in an example of serendipity, or diabolical luck, they roughly spanned the area that the atmospheric river was due to hit.

Peter Weiss, Hassan, monitored their progress, phlegmatic when another of their number was smashed from orbit by the weather. Suddenly all his screens went blank.

“Fuck it!” He fiddled with the controls, finally turning them on and off, trying to reboot. Nothing. The drones had stopped transmitting their positions.

Sheikh Ali frowned at the dark screens.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Coms’re down,” replied Hassan. “Satellites obviously are not affected by the weather, but maybe the relay station on the ground’s been hit.”

“What does it mean for Zeus?” asked the Sheikh.

“Nothing. The coordinates are programed into the drones. They should keep on flying in their preordained orbits. All it means is we can’t monitor them.”

The Sheikh shrugged. “We can see their harvest, can we not, on the television screens?” He nodded to the scenes of mayhem unfolding before them. The screens had flickered, gone blank for a minute, but were now flickering back to life.

“We can.”

The Sheikh smiled. “They declared an ARk Storm 1000 nearly two hours ago. It worked! Zeus worked.” He placed his hand on Hassan’s shoulder, kept it there. The weight of it was a blessing, a benediction. Vindication.

Hassan smiled, warmed to his core, magnanimous in victory. “Maybe the storm would have come anyway, made it to ARk Storm without us?”

“You are too modest. We shall never know. It was in God’s hands, at the end of the day. But we have our wish, Hassan. We have delivered California the ARk Storm of their nightmares. Or Allah has.” He smiled. “And like Noah, we shall escape it.”

The Sheikh stopped smiling. He raised his fingers to his temples, frowning. He shook his head as if to clear it of some kind of fugue.

Hassan watched him, puzzled, then he suddenly felt a pain in his head, a kind of searing headache. Worse than any he had felt before, and he had suffered some blinders. He winced, sucked in a breath, wondered insanely if it was his old Nazarene God smiting him for desertion and dereliction, avenging the atrocity that was unfolding, arguably at his hands.

*   *   *

Two minutes later, Captain Shaffer burst in. His façade of control seemed to be slipping. His tie was askew and his face was red.

“A bunch of my systems has been punched out!” he announced, running his fingers under his loosened collar. “No GPS, no radar, no ship to shore. TV’s recovered, everything else is dead as Elvis. Engine’s working, thank God.”

“Something weird happened here too,” said Hassan, forcing his words out through the miasma of pain. He tried his iPad, shook his head.

He used the pads of his fingers to massage his temples. It didn’t help. The pain just radiated from his skull. He thought he might be sick.

“So captain, are you telling me we are now lost at sea?” asked the Sheikh, pain chiseling his voice.

The captain seemed to swallow back a curse. “No. We are not lost at sea,” he replied in a staccato voice, face reddening further. “Fortunately I do not rely exclusively on the electronic tools. I always plot the course on the map. I have our most recent GPS position, as of two minutes ago, plotted. Now we shall sail by dead reckoning.”

“Dead reckoning?” queried the Sheikh, his mouth curling down.

“Yes. It’s the old school way of doing things; compass, speed, tidal drift, landmarks on the coast. If the skies were clear and it was night I could use celestial navigation. As they are not, I shall have to motor in closer to the coast so I can see landmarks. Visibility’s appalling, so I’ll need to go in fairly close.”

The Sheikh gave way to a full blown juhayman frown. “We need to get out of this as fast as possible, get to Tijuana.”

“I am as keen as you are, Sheikh Ali, to escape this storm. But if we wish to arrive at Tijuana, as opposed to getting lost in the middle of the sea or floundering on rocks, we need to move closer to shore and we need to slow down.” Shaffer delivered his monologue with his eyes fixed on the Sheikh as if daring his boss to challenge him.

Sheikh Ali glanced at the roof of the control room as if seeking an answer in the sky. Then he looked back at the captain.

“Do what you have to.”

The captain nodded, turned, and hurried to the door, anxious to return to his post on the foredeck.

“What caused the burnout anyway, if I can call it that?” asked the Sheikh.

The captain paused, swiveled, shook his head. “Beats me. Never seen anything like it.”

Ten miles away, the Chinook was flying with their answer back to its Nellis Air Force Base landing pad.