146
STANFORD, ARK STORM OPS ROOM, 6:00 P.M.
The Ops Room was a mass of bodies, some bent over monitors, others on the phone, others dashing between terminals. Dan, Gwen, and Holdstone erupted into their midst, causing temporary paralysis.
Hendrix glared at them with disbelief. “Join the party, why don’tcha?”
Dan subsumed the urge to slam a fist into the man’s face. Riley ran up.
“Boudy! You’re blue.”
“Should have seen her ninety minutes ago,” murmured Dan. “I need a sofa, pillows, blankets, and intravenous hot, sweet tea. And some heavy-duty anti-inflams.”
Art, hovering in the background, spoke up; “Hey, Boudy. I’m on it. You with the muscles, follow me.”
Gwen slipped into an empty seat and smiled as Dan hurried off. He and Art returned a few minutes later carting a sofa covered with pillows and duvets. They placed it in an alcove at the back of the room.
Dan escorted Gwen to it, draped her with duvets while Art returned with the first of what would be an endless stream of sugary, milky teas.
Gwen lay back, still wearing her ski suit, and sipped the tea. Riley doled out two prescription-only anti-inflammatories she kept in her cupboard, the legacy of a broken toe. Then she raced back to check her screens and the feed from the webcams dotted around California. She had gone beyond manic and scurried back and forth, her heels replaced by running shoes.
Holdstone sat cross-legged on the floor beside Gwen’s sofa, refusing all Gwen’s offers to take a seat beside her.
“I’m fine here,” she said. She pulled out her cell, tried and failed to make a call. The networks were overwhelmed.
* * *
Above ground, FEMA and CalEMA orchestrated the evacuation. Those on the coast had fled, or been helped to flee in scores of army transport trucks. Those living in the line of mudslides were the next priority. Transporters took them north or south depending on which edge of the storm was closest. Over two hundred and fifty thousand people were mobilized already. More would follow in the days to come.
The atmospheric river just kept on coming; one thousand kilometers long, banked up with more than enough water to feed forty Mississippis, it wasn’t going to run out of ammunition anytime soon. Ominously for the state of California, once it approached the Sierra Nevada, it began to slow and stall.
The Sacramento, Colorado, and San Joaquin rivers were rising relentlessly. Many stretches of the Southern California coastline were already suffering erosion as ten-foot waves gouged away at cliff and dune.
* * *
Frank Del Russo watched the live feeds, biding his time. His attention flickered between the disaster unfolding on the screens to the players who, in their own way, had stood like a doomed Canute trying to hold back the waves, or in this case, the flood. He felt a tad queasy at the thought of the flood. The building he now found himself in was supposedly hurricane, flood, and earthquake proof, but they’d said the Titanic was unsinkable. On the screens before him, man’s hubris was playing out loud and clear as nature toyed with man and his creations with an unparalleled brutality.
Del Russo noticed the two women, one half dead, clearly in severe pain, the other pulsing with vitality. When he saw the man who had to be Dan Jacobsen blow out a breath, saw his shoulders drop about five inches, he approached.
“Jacobsen?” he asked, extending his hand. “Frank Del Russo. CTC. Have a bit of catching up to do.”
Dan shook the man’s hand, gave him a smile, half grim, half amused.
As the two men, nearly matched in height, bowed their heads and spoke softly, Hendrix bustled about, trying and failing to eavesdrop. He wore his complaints on his face. “Getting a tad crowded in here!” he would shout every ten minutes as he passed Gwen’s sofa or the bulk of Dan and Del Russo, deep in conversation. They ignored him utterly, only adding to his bubbling fury. Beneath her manic movement, Riley was strangely calm: the general in the heat of battle, utterly focused.
* * *
Dan finished briefing Del Russo.
“Need a landline,” said Del Russo to Art. “If I may.”
“Office back there. Private too,” said Art, leading Del Russo.
Dan waited until the CTC man had made his call, then he walked into the office and nodded at the phone.
Del Russo vacated the seat and the phone.
“Mind if I listen in?” he asked.
Dan shrugged. He rang Meade.
“Admiral, what’s up?”
“Down,” came the answer. “Every last one of the “’squitos.”
“Great. The yacht?”
“Still going.”
“What the—?”
“My thoughts. Politics. Wait out.”
“He’ll be close to the border by now. Must be. My guess is he’ll have a jet ready and waiting to fly out from there.”
“We’re checking on the jets.”
“Mexicans won’t cooperate in time. There’s no choice but to shoot that yacht out of the sea.”
Del Russo smiled. Jacobsen was everything he’d heard about, and more.
Dan asked Meade to keep him posted, then hung up.
Gwen had materialized silently in the doorway. She held onto the doorjamb.
“Will they do that, really? Shoot a yacht from the sea in US waters?” she asked.
Del Russo eyed her in alarm.
Dan turned to him. “She was the one who got the first intel on this. She knows everything,” he said. “Risked her life many times over.”
Del Russo gave a brief nod, but looked deeply uncomfortable. As a serving member of the intel community, he was restricted in a way that Jacobsen wasn’t, but he could hardly silence the man.
Dan turned to Gwen. “I think they will. I hope they will.”
“If I could get to the Zeus model, I could reverse the program, get the ionizers on the drones to reduce the rainfall,” said Gwen.
“The drones are no more,” said Dan. “And there’s no time to get anything off the yacht.”
He looked beyond the room, his eyes seeing the F-22s, hoping that even now they were closing in on Al Baharna and his super-yacht, the ship-killing Harpoons primed and ready.