had been loose in the wider world beyond the laboratory. During that
time, the destruction of the natural order had progressed almost as
lazily as big fluffy snowflakes drifting out of a windless winter sky,
but I suspected that at last the blizzard was at hand, the avalanche.
The hangar rises like a temple to some alien god with a wrathful
disposition, surrounded on three sides by smaller service buildings that
could pass for the humble dwellings of monks and novitiates. It is as
long and wide as a football field, seven stories high, with no windows
other than a line of narrow clerestory panes just below the spring line
of the arched Quonset-style roof.
Bobby parked in front of a pair of doors at one end of the building,
switching off the engine and headlights.
Each door is twenty feet wide and forty high. Set in upper and lower
tracks, they were motor-driven, but the power to operate them was
disconnected long ago.
The daunting mass of the building and the enormous steel doors make the
place as forbidding as the fortress that might stand at the gap between
this world and Hell to keep the demons from getting out.
Taking a flashlight from under his seat, Bobby said, “This place is the
egg room? ”
“Under this place.”
“I don’t like the look of it.”
“I’m not asking you to move in and set up housekeeping.” Getting out of
the Jeep, he said, “Are we near the airfield? ” Fort Wyvern, which was
established as both a training and a support facility, boasts runways
that can accommodate large jets and those giant C-13 transports that are
capable of carrying trucks, assault vehicles, and tanks.
“Airfield’s half a mile that way, ” I said, pointing. “They didn’t
service aircraft here. Unless maybe choppers, but I don’t think that’s
what this place was about, either.”
“What was it about? ”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s where they held bingo games.” In spite of the negative aura
around the building, in spite of the fact that we had perhaps been
induced here by persons unknown and possibly hostile, I didn’t feel as
though we were in imminent danger.
Anyway, Bobby’s shotgun would stop any assailant a lot faster than my
9-millimeter. Leaving the Glock holstered, carrying only the flashlight,
I led the way to a man-size door set in one of the larger portals.
“Big surf coming, ” Bobby said.
“Guess or fact? ”
“Fact.” Bobby earns a living by analyzing weather-satellite data and
other information to predict surf conditions worldwide, with a high
degree of accuracy. His enterprise, Surf cast, provides information daily
to tens of thousands of surfers through subscriptions to a bulletin sent
by fax or E-mail, and through a 900 number that draws more than eight
hundred thousand calls a year.
Because his lifestyle is simple and his corporate offices are funky, no
one in Moonlight Bay realizes that he is a multimillionaire and the
richest man in town. If they knew, it would matter more to them than it
does to Bobby. To him, wealth is having every day free to surf,
everything else that money can buy is no more than an extra spoon of
salsa on the enchilada.
“Gonna be minimum ten-foot corduroy to the horizon, ” Bobby promised.
“Some sets of twelve, pumping all day and night, every board head’s
dream.”
“Don’t like this onshore flow, ” I said, raising a hand in the breeze.
“I’m talking the day after tomorrow. Strictly offshore by then.
Gonna be waves so scooped out, you’ll feel like the last pickle in the
barrel.” The hollow channel in a breaking wave, scooped to the max by a
perfect offshore wind, is called a barrel, and surfers live to ride
these tubes all the way through and out the collapsing end before being
clamshelled.
You don’t get them every day. They are a gift, sacred, and when they
come, you ride them until you’re surfed out, until your legs are rubber
and you can’t stop the muscles in your stomach from fluttering, and then
you flop on the sand and wait to see if you’ll expire like a beached
fish or, instead, go scarf down two burritos and a bowl of corn chips.