Nick’s steel grip forced Jason down, down into the seat next to Nick. Nick’s eyes blazed. Jason saw the sweat that gleamed on Nick’s forehead, the scratches and insect bites that marred his skin, the blood that flushed the eyewhites.
“You sit,” Nick said. “You sit right here.” His voice was fierce in its intensity.
“You’re kidnapping me! You can’t do this!”
“Just sit!” Nick leaned closer to Jason and hissed, “I’m not gonna die for you!”
The words froze Jason to his seat. A chill ran up his spine. His mother was dead, he knew, because of his ignorance, because he didn’t know how to operate the boat and save her. So maybe he didn’t know anything about this situation, maybe Nick knew better than he did what was safe and what wasn’t.
He stopped struggling, turned away. Felt despair clutch at his throat. What did it matter if Nick was crazy? It was only what Jason deserved. “I don’t care,” he managed to say. “Do what you want.”
Nick held onto his wrist for another few burning seconds, and then Jason felt the grip relax.
The wind whirled through Jason’s hair as the river sped faster. He didn’t care. Let Nick be in charge, if that’s what he wanted.
Flotsam ground against the boat’s hull. Nick pulled the electric motor out of the water to keep it from being wrecked in a collision. Knifelike roots threatened, then were swept away. The bridges’ broken spans, piled on the bottom of the river, had attracted other debris. There were now islands beneath the spans, brandishing roots and branches and covered with foam, and the river had been compressed into thundering narrow streams, rapids almost.
And then a shadow passed overhead, and Jason’s heart lurched. He looked up to see that they were already passing beneath the three bridges, and moving on a current of white foam. For a moment of paralyzing terror he looked up at a dangling set of railroad tracks, at a boxcar hanging from a stalled train as if about to launch itself down the tracks into Jason’s lap. BURLINGTON NORTHERN, he read on the car, and then it was gone.
Jason sat up with a jerk. The boat bounced in the chop. Spray splashed Jason’s face. Nick stood up behind the useless steering wheel, the pole in his hand.
Another shadow flashed overhead, and then the bridges were behind them. To Jason’s surprise the speed and the chop only increased. The boat slewed sideways, and a lot of water came aboard. Nick poled frantically to get the boat pointed downstream again.
“Could use a little help here, Jason,” he said.
Fuck you, Jason thought, but he stood anyway and looked for a piece of lumber to help steer. Then he looked ahead and felt his heart lurch to a stop.
Ahead was a vista of white water and fire-blackened iron.
The Harbor of Memphis was the second-largest inland port in America, after New Orleans. More than ten million tons of cargo moved through its facilities every year. The terrain on which it was built was largely artificial, created when the Memphis Harbor Project built a causeway and dike connecting the mainland to the 32,000-acre Presidents Island just south of the old nineteenth-century Harahan Railroad Bridge. The slack water below the causeway became Memphis’s principal harbor, lined from one end to the other with the evidence of the city’s booming trade: Memphis Milling, Petroleum Fuel and Terminal Company, Archer-Daniels-Midland Grain Company and Riverport, Helm Fertilizer Company, Ashland Chemical, Marathon Oil, Memphis Marine, Chemtech Industries, Memphis Molasses, MAPCO Petroleum, Riceland Foods, Vulcan Chemicals. All the boats and barges that serviced all this commerce. And amid all this, under the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Navy’s Surface Warfare Center.
Ml swept through this collection of industry with an efficiency the Surface Warfare Center could only envy. The causeway was torn, the dike destroyed. The river poured through the wreckage, through the oil and gasoline pouring from torn tanks, through the chemical stew that spilled from terminal facilities and from capsized barges. Oceans of diesel fuel mixed with tons of spilled nitrate fertilizer, creating the explosive combination known to terrorist truck-bombers throughout the world.
Of course it caught fire. It was impossible that it would not. One spark, one little flame, one arc of electricity, one overheated exhaust pipe ... no human agency could have prevented the catastrophe that followed.
And so the Harbor of Memphis burned long into the night, explosions flaring bright at the base of a towering 10,000-foot-high mushroom of black smoke. Grain silos flamed like broken rockets on shattered launch pads. Boats and barges were transformed into gutted hulks. Steel melted like wax in the heat. Aluminum burned like old newspaper. And through it all poured the Mississippi, spreading the flaming waters far downstream.
The fires were mostly out now, the fuel burned up. All that was left was wreckage, the blackened girders, broken concrete, shattered buildings, and razed boats caught on the black waterswept shore of the Island of the Dead.
Nick Ruford looked at the white water ahead of the boat, felt spray touch his face. His heart hammered against his ribs. “My God,” he muttered, and clutched the steering pole more tightly.
“Get a paddle!” he shouted, but Jason was already in motion, grabbing one of the broken-off pieces of lumber he’d propped in the cockpit. Jason crawled onto the foredeck, ready to fend off any of the fire-blackened structures that were pitching closer with each heave of the river. The air reeked of chemicals and burning.
Nick stroked with the pole, tried to keep the boat in mid-channel, but a current seized the boat regardless of his efforts and whirled it toward Presidents Island. He and Jason frantically beat at the water, trying to drive the boat away from obstructions. There was a grinding cry of metal as the boat dragged itself across a submerged obstacle, and the boat lurched, pivoting on whatever had caught it. Nick staggered, felt himself hang over the edge for a perilous instant, one arm windmilling for balance ... the boat lurched the other way, and Nick stumbled toward safety. The world spun giddily around him as the bass boat whirled in the current, and he sank to his knees on the afterdeck in a more stable position.
Jason was paddling furiously, trying to check the boat’s spin. Nick tried to assist, dipping the steering pole into the water as a brake. When the boat stabilized, it was heading stern-first down the channel, and Nick had to turn around to see what was coming.
The prow of a barge loomed up in their path, a wall of fire-blackened iron.
Nick gave a shout and raised his pole to fend the barge off like a knight raising his lance at a joust. The impact almost threw him back into the cockpit. The stern of Retired and Gone Fishin’ slammed into the barge with a clang of metal, and the boat swung broadside to the current, pinned against the iron wall of the barge. The blackened iron loomed over their heads. Whatever had burned the barge had burned hot, Nick saw; it had left melted steel droplets frozen on the hull like candle wax.
Spray filled the air. The boat was pinned against the barge, unable to move. White water surged close to the gunwale on the upstream side. Nick looked upstream, saw a tree whirling in the current, roots flashing in the air like steel blades. If it’s caught in the same current we are, Nick thought, it’ll come right at us and squash us against the barge like bugs.
“Jason! Do like this!” He pressed his hands to the barge’s bow, then pushed out with his legs, tried to prop himself like a bridge between the bass boat and the barge. “We walk it out!” he said. “See?”
Jason imitated him, sprawling against the barge wall to drive the boat back with his feet. The steel was still hot to the touch, and its rough surface tore Nick’s palms. He and Jason began walking the boat off the barge’s prow, the bass boat moving in lurches as their palms marched like unsteady feet across the flat bow of the barge. Nick looked over his shoulder, saw the tree swooping closer.
“Move!” he shouted. The boat shifted under him and he almost fell, almost pitched head-first into the foaming gap between the bass boat and the barge. He caught himself at the last instant, his heart like a fist in his throat.
The boat thrust its nose out in the current, and with a heave of his arms Nick flung the barge away from him. The bass boat pitched in sudden motion, and Nick staggered and dropped to one knee for balance. The blackened side of the barge swept past. Behind him, Nick heard thunder as the tree crashed like a battering ram into the bows of the barge.
Nick had no time to feel relief. A line of pipes loomed in front of him, and he reached for the pole to fend them off. “Left!” he shouted. “Turn us left!”
The pipes swept past before he could make more than a few strokes with the pole. He had no idea whether the paddling helped or not. The air stank of diesel fuel. Ruptured metal tanks, flame-scorched, loomed above the port. Three towboats, burned to the water line, lay in the heaving water like corpses rolling in the tide. Another pipe swept past, its broken end gushing flame and a stain of black smoke.
The boat tried to swing broadside the current. Nick struck the water to keep the boat stern-foremost.
Then the boat began to whirl dizzily as it was caught in a sudden eddy, and Nick could only drop to hands and knees and try to hang on. There was a crash as the boat struck floating debris, and then Retired and Gone Fishin’ rebounded, spinning in the opposite direction— Nick’s stomach lurched— then there was a brassy metallic shriek as the boat struck its starboard side against a pier stanchion. The starboard side heaved up, and Nick clutched the gunwale as the boat tried to dump him out. Foaming water poured over the port gunwale, filling the cockpit and driving the port side farther into the water.
Nick looked at Jason huddled in the water at the bottom of the cockpit, the boy’s eyes wide as he gasped for air amid the foam. Jason’s weight was driving the port side farther into the water. In another moment the boat would capsize.
“Up!” Nick shouted. “Get on the high side!” His feet scrabbled on the deck as he tried to heave himself up the starboard side, where his weight would help to stabilize the craft. Jason stared at him from amid the flying foam, and then he stood and climbed up the nearly vertical deck, his feet bracing against the cockpit seats as he threw his weight onto the high side of the boat.
Nick pulled himself up over the gunwale— Jason scrambled beside him— and then Nick threw a leg over the side of the bass boat as he tried to shift his weight still further. Retired and Gone Fishin’ trembled for a long heartbeat on the brink of oblivion. And then the weight of its occupants told, and with a cry of metal the starboard side fell into the water and the boat spun free of the obstruction.
Nick had been ready for this, and threw himself back inboard as soon as he felt the boat shift under him. But Jason was unprepared— Nick heard a sudden cry— and he looked up to see Jason pitch almost head-first into the white water, and he reached out a hand and closed it around the boy’s flailing wrist.
Jason snapped back to the boat with a wrench that Nick could only hope had not dislocated the boy’s arm. Jason stared up at Nick in shock, his eyes dilated black with terror. Jason’s free hand clamped on the gunwale. The boat spun around Jason’s weight as if it were an anchor. Jason gave a heave, a wrench, and tried to haul himself inboard. Nick tried to get his free hand on the boy’s collar and failed. Jason strained, a gasp of pain fighting its way past his teeth, and then his hand slipped from the slick metal gunwale and he fell back into the water.
Nick sprawled across the afterdeck gasping for air, still hanging onto Jason by the one wrist. Do this right, he told himself. Do this right or die with the boy right now. It was you got him into this.
Nick rose to his knees, grabbed Jason under one armpit, then the other. The world spun around him. “Kick!” he commanded, and heaved. Jason gave a cry and flailed the water with his feet. Pain shot through Nick’s wounded arm as he tried to pull the boy aboard the boat by main strength.
Strength failed. Nick gasped in air as pain shrieked through his limbs, and then he let Jason fall back into the water.
He blinked foam from his eyes and tried to think. It wasn’t the right angle, he thought, he was pulling with the wrong muscles. Feet were stronger than arms. He needed to use his feet.
He looked up and saw a blackened metal pier swirling closer. Sharp driftwood daggers brandished in air. With cold horror Nick realized that if he didn’t get Jason back into Retired and Gone Fishin’ he would be impaled on the driftwood spines by the weight of the bass boat.
Nick gave a yell and lurched as he got his right foot under him. Then the left. “Now kick!” he screamed, and as Jason thrashed with his feet Nick lunged backward with every muscle in his body, and pulled Jason from the foaming water to land on top of him.
Jason gasped for breath, his arms floundering. “Hang on,” Nick told him, and then there was a wrenching crash as the boat piled into the pier, as wooden spears came lunging over the boat.
And then the boat bounded away from the pier, whirling into safer water. Nick rolled Jason off him and clutched for something to steer with.
The nightmare journey had only begun.
It took half an hour to clear the five-mile-long port channel. There was no time for Jason or Nick to absorb the colossal scope of the damage— there was scarcely time to react at all as the river tried to run them against piers or pipes, burned-out towboats, or whole rafts of barges tangled in steel cable. Nick fended off one obstacle after another, lunging with his stick, sobbing with weariness. All he could see of the port were glimpses caught in the moments between frantic activity: the silhouette of a broken grain tower against the horizon; a blackened crater, half-filled with water, that marked an explosion. In the back of his throat lodged the reek of burning, the reek of chemicals, the reek of hot metal. He hoped that none of it was the reek of burned flesh.
Nick lunged, pushed off, poled, paddled. Water foamed over the jagged steel that lined the waterway. When they passed the port and entered the Tennessee Chute that dumped them back into the main channel, they gave up trying to control their direction and just hung on for dear life. Waves poured over them as they clutched the gunwale of their spinning boat.
They never noticed, as the white water lessened and they found themselves on the calmer surface of the Mississippi, that they had just passed the broken, burned, flooded, and abandoned remains of the Memphis District headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the organization entrusted with the control of water for this part of the Mississippi.
*
You had to say one thing for the man, Jessica thought: he was tough. Just a few moments after one of the paramedics had set his broken collarbone, given him some aspirin, equipped him with a sling made from a dish towel, and handed him a breakfast MRE, a Meal Ready to Eat, Larry Hallock was back at the helipad with some of his crew, ready to be flown back to Poinsett Landing to make a proper survey of the damage to the nuclear power station. He was flying in a big Sikorsky, with an amphibious hull that could float him anywhere he needed to go.
All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on the way to his own family, so Jessica didn’t even have to detail one of her own.
“Good luck,” she said, there being little else she could offer.
A crewman took Larry’s good arm and helped him into the chopper. Jessica stepped back and waved as the Sikorsky lifted from the grassy pad.
Her office, minus walls and her collection of diplomas, had been recreated in one corner of the headquarters tent. The scent of old canvas and fresh grass was invigorating. The tent’s sides were rolled up for light and ventilation, and from Jessica’s corner she had an excellent view of the bustling techs setting up her state-of-the-art satellite communications rig.
Sometimes, working for an organization with the resources of the Defense Department was beyond awesome.
“Jess?” It was Pat, with the portable computer in hand. “I’ve got a selection of those photos from NASA and NOAA.”
“Set the ’puter down here.”
Once Jessica saw the pictures, she knew why she hadn’t heard from Memphis or St. Louis.
The rubble that was St. Louis was practically an island, the Missouri flooding toward it from the north and west, the Mississippi from the east. Much of Memphis was covered by a cloud of smoke, and what she could see through the cloud looked like rubble. She looked at the photos from the Harbor of Memphis, and she heard her breath hiss from between her teeth.
“God damn,” she whispered to herself. “I was afraid of this.”
Natural disasters do not just have a single result. There was a whole chain of consequences: earthquakes cause fires, fires cause deaths, broken levees cause floods, floods cause evacuations.
And industry, destroyed by earthquake, flood, or fire, had levels of consequence all its own.
Jessica feared she was going to have to call the President soon and advise him to do something she knew very well he would not want to do. She didn’t want to have to give him that advice: powerful people had been known in the past to execute the messengers who told them about problems they didn’t want to know about.
What Jessica badly wanted was a choice. She had a feeling the situation wasn’t going to give her one.
But she would give it all the opportunity she could. She would lay on a helicopter flight for tomorrow morning, and do the research with her own eyes and mind. And then, if necessary, she would call the President and give him his orders.
*