Like a sprinter leaving the starting blocks Caulkins was over the brow and down the gangway, his footsteps resounding on the wooden slats as he pounded onto the pier, an incongruous and somehow sinister figure in scorched underpants, with his left arm in plaster cast and sling, his right hand clutching a pistol. Had anybody been there to see him, he would have laughed, until he saw the look of murderous rage in Caulkins’ eye.
Caulkins was some distance from the ship, searching the grounds in ever-widening circles, when the explosion came. It was as if an atomic bomb detonated, in a mammoth, long, slow-motion eruption that would envelop the world. The jolt knocked Caulkins off his feet. When he sat up and shook the dust out of his ears, he was surprised to find the Texas still afloat at its moorings. If the Texas hadn’t exploded, what the hell had?
Aboard ship, the shock wave popped open the doors of the big galley ovens. From one of them tumbled Gwillam Forte, who, curled into a ball, rolled halfway to the door before coming to rest, unconscious.
7 JULY 1998:11:22 a.m.
After it deposited Gwillam Forte on the Texas pier, the argus-eyed Fubar lifted off and lumbered after the Russian fleet. At two thousand feet, its panoramic, fish-eye, and zoom lenses captured and transmitted in a steady stream to the Houston Herald’s channel 16 the varied images of the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet proceeding majestically up-channel to anchor. As they reached their anchorage, the ships let go their anchors and swung to a standstill like soldiers at drill. Within seconds their motor launches and whaleboats were swung over the side, loaded to the gunwales with white-clad sailors ready to assemble ashore for the big parade. The small boats made their short run, disgorged their cargoes and sped back for more.
Through a medium-magnification lens, the picture on the number-3 monitor was a study in speed, meticulous organization, and nautical splendor. Sky Crew Chief Producer Ken Clover, in Fubar’s rear compartment, which served as the aerial studio, had to admit it, even though his brother and a nephew had been incinerated the day before by these same precision-parading barbarians.
The Russian ships were dressed in holiday bunting running from the bow to foremast to mainmast to stern, twenty-three rainbows of brilliant colors resplendent in the morning sun. The colors complimented the long low lines of the men-of-war, all of them painted an arctic white, and the long still columns of men waiting at parade rest at the gangways to take their turn in the small boats scurrying to shore. Seen from above it was hard to associate these peaceful ships and their orderly crews with the massacre of the day before. Yesterday’s horror was too vivid in Clover’s mind ever to be washed away, yet the placid scene below was lapping at the edges of his recollection, and he had to keep jerking his mind back to the reality that these particular men in white were doctors of death, and America’s mortal enemy. He wished that some miracle would happen, that the earth would open beneath them and-
The shock wave struck the helicopter and sent it reeling across the sky. Clover was flung into the monitors, badly bruising his head and shoulder. He slid to the floor groggily as the pilot wrestled the helicopter back on even keel. For a moment, he thought the Russians had lobbed an antiaircraft shell at the Fubar, then realized that a shock that severe would have been accompanied by enough shrapnel to riddle the cabin.
Clover got shakily to his feet and resumed his seat before the bank of small screens, this time buckling his seat harness. Whatever happened, he realized, would have been recorded on tape. He rewound the videotape and played it back.
Far down the channel, some ten miles away it seemed, the waterway had suddenly erupted with the force of a volcano blowing its top. In fact, the playback he viewed looked like a volcano. A gigantic discharge of fiery stones and rubble mixed with thousands of tons of channel mud and water, which vaporized in a cloud of superheated steam, seemed to have issued from the depths of the Earth right in midchannel. As the enormous mass of mud and earth hung in the sky, for a moment the channel bed ripped open by the explosion of thousands of tons of high explosive, packed in nine tunnels, was desert dry. During the space of several seconds, there was nothing but a huge, raw transverse ditch, dry and wide enough for Moses to have marched the children of Israel across from bank to bank, if they stepped smartly. Then with an earthshaking rumble, the parted waters, hurrying to fill the vacuity, met in tremendous collision. Another wall, this one of water, shot heavenward. The wall of water was taller than a redwood and stretched across the width of the channel.
As it collapsed, it generated two mighty tsunamis.
They weren’t ordinary tsunamis, of the type that roll across the Pacific from undersea earthquakes and depopulate beaches and sometimes whole islands with thundering force. Not only were these two larger than had even been seen by man who lived to tell about it, they were sheathed in fire, for the combination of gasoline and aluminum soaps with which the tunnels had been charged formed jellied gasoline-napalm- which ignited with the blast of the detonating incendiary explosives.
The fiery waves fled from each other, one downstream toward the sea, the other inland toward the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas fleet riding placidly at anchor. The burning waves, some eighty-five meters high, swamped and seared everything in their paths.
Huge coal barges tied up at wharves were upended like cardboard boxes, their flaming cargo sown across a square mile, bursting like shrapnel and impaling whomever it hit with its fire-tipped, needlelike shards. Smaller craft rolled like dice and disappeared promptly from view, or else were tossed, bits of blazing firewood, hundreds of feet inland. One proud seventy-six foot yacht landed a mass of pulped steel and wood atop a distillation tower of a nearby refinery, a moment later exploding and ripping the tower apart. Those in small boats out in the channel heard the first premonitory thunder, and scrambled frantically for shore as they saw the wave bearing down upon them. But, at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the wave was too fast for the fleetest craft, and it engulfed all with democratic impartiality.
The wave that boiled downstream toward the sea found little to oppose its passage. The attack of the day before had killed almost every mortal being on the channel, leaving only charred specters floating dead in the water. Like a great cleansing hand, the wave scoured both banks, leaving behind a solid sheet of fire to burn them anew. So great was the force of the water that it uprooted buildings and flung them end over end into the depths of the channel. As it surged silently seaward, the wave and its fiery tongue gradually lost height and fury, for the channel steadily widened toward its estuary. Still lofty enough to inundate and set fire to low-lying Alexander Island and Jennings Island, by the time it reached Galveston Bay, its force had largely been spent, the napalm nearly all burned out. Ten miles down the coast the wave aged and withered, the flame in its eye grown dim; it was now scarcely a meter high, a threat only to children’s sand castles along the beach.
Upstream, the situation was reversed. The channel progressively narrowed as it approached the Buffalo Bayou Basin. Instead of subsiding, pressure of the constricting banks caused the upstream wave to mount ever higher. Sluicing over the shallower portions of the banks, it swept people, cars, houses, trees-even the streets-into its fiery maw. It was as if some monstrous bulldozer with a white-hot blade had made a single untidy pass, leaving behind a scorched wasteland.
Three minutes and fifty-five seconds after the upstream wave reared into the air and rumbled off on its destructive course, it reached the Russian fleet at anchor.
Sonarmen registered the explosion-they would have heard it clearly even without their earphones-and immediately signaled the bridge. Simultaneously, Russian radarmen reported the sudden appearance of an enormous unidentified flying object bearing down on the fleet. It had, they reported in panic, a wingspan that filled their scopes, yet was flying at an altitude of less than one hundred meters. Their commanding officers on the bridges of a dozen ships heard the report with incredulity, notwithstanding which they immediately sounded General Quarters and Recall of the parade parties.
All hands were running to their battle stations when the great red wave struck the last ship in line, the missile cruiser Suslov.
The Suslov had set bow anchors to port and starboard. The muddy bottom furnished small purchase to the anchor flukes; little was needed, for the flow of the channel this far upstream was so slow as to be scarcely perceptible. Still, when the wave smashed into the stern of the ship, pooping her, the leverage of anchors and chains held the bow just long enough for the wave to swing the stern broadside. Broadside it rose up to the crest of the wave with roller-coaster speed, hung there for a sickening instant with the flames climbing her sides, then cartwheeled into the trough as the wave passed. Trapped air brought her stern briefly to the surface half a minute later, before it dissipated in a burst of huge gurgling bubbles and the ship sank slowly out of sight in the midnight-dark waters.